Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN On the Track of Porn Baffled by how to deal with the flowering of pornography, I have taken to brooding about it. Now, I think I know what pornography is when I see...
...In any case, my broodings have moved me lately along four paths that I have invested with fancy titles-the esthetic, the social, the human, and the censorial...
...Now, I think I know what pornography is when I see it, but it is not all that easy, in pursuit of a coherent argument, to distinguish pornographic from nonpornographic works that deal with the erotic...
...The nation has risen, in proper indignation, against invasions of privacy by wiretaps and official surveillance...
...Though these scenes may involve a woman and a man or a man and a man or a woman and a woman or a woman and four men or a man and six women or 12 people of assorted genders or animals or usefully shaped fruits and vegetables, they all end up like Carnegie Tech training films on The Hardworking Piston...
...Yet although they were assuredly more healthful than the shows my children grew up with on television, in that nobody committed violence on anybody, they were not edifying about the human condition...
...It was all just kidding around, and we accepted and appreciated the joke...
...for porn, it is a disadvantage...
...In its most popular manifestations, which lack the style of Fanny Hill, the intelligence of Sade, the exuberance of Miller, nothing matters but the coupling...
...Many films may benefit from erotic elements...
...The reality is this-our society has now found that it has inflicted pornography upon itself, like it or not...
...The Devil in Miss Jones had several passable looking people in it, but once this critical stage arrived, I could see little of them but their organs, which might have belonged to any of God's creatures and to many machines...
...the impressarios of porn defer to their audiences' modest attention span...
...I mean simply what happens to a section of an American city that becomes a center for X-rated movies...
...Perhaps I was just too impatient, too horny to appreciate the elaborate variations on foreplay...
...Dante wouldn't have spared a spot in hell for my man in his shades...
...the excitement dampened as those damned pistons went to work...
...For the addict, we know, must continually get an increased dosage of the preferred material in order to maintain the level of the high...
...Many people don't like it at all, yet sufficient numbers do to invite the commercially minded to produce the stuff and exhibit it...
...At any rate, that is what I have been trying to get at in these meandering paragraphs...
...After finishing up one set in mid-afternoon, I resisted an invitation to a rabbi's home for dinner, pleading exhaustion, waited until that good man was out of sight and hastened into a nearby movie house where, I had noticed earlier, Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones were on a double bill for the bargain price of $3...
...There are, after all, only so many tools of the craft, and only so many orifices...
...Let me confess at once that my experience with the current crop of porn is not extensive...
...but even if it were better, the actors would be obliged to practice their craft within a very narrow frame of emotions-from a pose of expectation to a facsimile of ecstasy...
...For literature, a switch of this kind might hold interesting possibilities...
...The extraneous qualities that are the joy of honest novelists just get in their way...
...My enjoyment of the higher pornography had to wait until I was in college and a friend brought me from, honest, Paris, The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn, in jackets featuring a lesser known novel of Jane Austen...
...The Censorship Track One further thought...
...One can, if so disposed, create an entire philosophy around the premise that men and women are essentially, fundamentally, centrally creatures of sex-driven by it, in thrall to it, sometimes managing to triumph over it, but only at a frightful cost...
...Pornography exploits the most intimate- if that word retains any meaning- relations women and men are capable of...
...Fans of the form know how closely sex is tied to bondage in porn...
...Our porno flicks have no reason for existing, except to lead up to or get down to the orgasm...
...the purposefully hard-core flick, rather like the man who is bent upon "success" in his sexual relationships, bent upon proving himself at all costs, can scarcely escape disaster...
...There is build-up, buildup, build-up then the climactic scenes...
...Forty-Second Streets needs urban renewal, not the scratching out of rude words and lewd photos...
...His shoes are glossed, his hair is slick, he is ready for the day...
...Porn cannot deal with human beings, except when they cease being fully human...
...And the director, however ingenious, is sorely circumscribed by having to conclude every big scene in a fountain of sperm...
...Permit me, at the risk of seeming pretentious, to call it the human approach...
...The plot had to do with this door-to-door salesman, camouflaged behind a thick mustache, bushy eyebrows and a lumpish nose, who comes to demonstrate some kind of instrument to a housewife...
...In Deep Throat there are bits of humor...
...Here were books full of good elements-verve, humor, a fine madness-yet when it came down to the hard core, not all the fireworks of the writing could save it for me...
...As luck would have it, my present occupation takes me west on 42nd Street almost every morning of the week, in time to observe the openings of some of the porno houses...
...Complexity is not wanted here...
...This fellow has come to personify for me the street on which he makes his living: a street of smarmy men in doorways, of hookers along the avenues and their fancily got-up pimps nearby, of solicitous young fellows who urge me to check out the goods upstairs, of petty hustlers trying to peddle watches they pretend have been stolen but merely don't work, of futureless kids with transisters plugging up their ears, of frenzied, desperate-looking types talking to themselves or yelling at everyone else or at the heavens...
...Censorship...
...They had a marvelous time and we, devouring the stuff over one another's shoulders, shared it with them...
...It was not until 1970 or so that I was made to appreciate the sexist implications of that convention...
...in The Devil in Miss Jones at moments an erotic sensibility oozes through the syrupy music and syrupy color-but neither has much stamina...
...These little works abjured adornment or elaboration...
...It is an area that ought to be inviting, a place of enjoyment, full of restaurants and shops and hotels, of tables to sit at and windows to browse...
...There were Popeye and Jiggs and Andy Gump, all invested with formidable equipment, enjoying Olive Oil and Maggie and anyone else who happened onto the page...
...Because of the larger society's attitudes toward public sex-and a very confusing set of attitudes it is-the game, the trade, the streets are left to the subculture...
...The atmosphere manages to corrupt even healthy vice...
...The problem seems to be that the sex act, while it admits of a fair number of variations, comes down to pretty much one thing at the end...
...He wears dark glasses no matter what the sun is doing, and though I have never seen his eyes, I know them to be half closed against light of any sort...
...I base my thoughts mainly on a double feature I saw in Philadelphia some months ago, in-between two sets of interviews on the subject of "The Jewish Condition in America Today...
...I remember thinking at the time how nice it was that the housewife, though no beauty, was at any rate not disguised and after a bit of fooling around appeared in the altogether, whereas the salesman never removed his socks...
...Yet we are speaking of the New York City theater district, a major attraction of urban life we are told and tell others...
...But there's no browsing in the West 40s...
...whatever erotic qualities had been established were dissipated...
...People come to the theater, watch the show and get out of the area as fast as the traffic permits...
...The poor addict may be compelled, in his craving, to find a sex partner of his own in the real world, a small puppy perhaps or an egg box...
...A central section of the city has been given over to our society's misfits and enemies, and the porn industry must take a share of the credit for this unwholesome condition...
...The Human Track My third approach to the pornographic arts intersects at times with the esthetic and social approaches...
...porno films give pretty much all they have within the first five minutes, and after that, no matter that the bodies and the setting may change, the shot will be the same...
...it might even be interpreted as a kind of mastery...
...And even more than other specialty trades, the purveyors find it advantageous to flock together...
...Goodbye esthetics...
...I suppose there are readers who may share my remembrances of those little takeoffs or put-ons of comic-strip characters that served as my generation's introduction to pornographic literature...
...Perhaps it would not matter- one does not have to walk along those streets, after all, unless one happens to work in the neighborhood or is an innocent or guilty tourist...
...it is not at all easy to make judgments about socially redeeming or artistically redeeming qualities...
...But such a voluntary abasement would not be abasement at all...
...There, then, goes the failure of porn on count number one...
...I don't know...
...It would have required a more fevered brain than even we adolescents possessed to make a connection between the sport of Jiggs or the appliance salesman and real life involving real people...
...The achievement of the pomographer is to bring his characters not simply to their knees, which happens often enough, but to an elemental state where it no longer matters who is doing what with or to whom...
...But I'm pretty sure it's not my problem...
...It is a street where everything is synthetic...
...I am assured by aficionados that these are by no means the sorriest specimens of the art, yet it did not take much watching to appreciate the fundamental weakness of the dirty movie, even in its upper reaches...
...it's pornography's problem...
...The Social Track By my second approach to pornography, the social approach, I do not mean to get into the fall of Rome...
...all the on-screen writhing and moaning and grunting and bad language are merely a way of working up to an ejaculation...
...The addict is bound to run into troubles of his or her own...
...I could, I swear, think of nothing but my brother-in-law the engineer...
...the streets belong to their occupiers, and they look dangerous even when they are quite harmless...
...they went directly to the heart, if that is the place they went to, of things...
...So I found myself just sporadically interested in both films-up until the point where the serious screwing or mouthing began...
...But I found myself rushing through the passages leading up to the hero's frequent bouts of banging to get to the real thing, as though it were merely Maggie and Jiggs again-only now I felt something was amiss...
...they offer nothing else...
...And that has been even more true of most of the pornography I have encountered since...
...Restaurants have closed, hotels have shut down or been transformed to suit the needs of the prostitute and the destitute...
...As for the antihuman aspects, censors have never shown themselves notably sympathetic to humanistic concerns...
...Further, it is only natural that they will attract other, related industries, from peddlers of drugs to retailers of women's underwear decorated with hands, and that a community will thus be formed that battens upon the desire or need for dubious merchandise, particularly sex merchandise...
...No, the merchandisers of 42nd Street couldn't care less about humanity in all its contrariness...
...Suddenly, the humor was gone...
...But, one may rightly ask, can porn be blamed for that...
...Of course, one could write a story about a subject who was voluntarily all of these things, ready to oblige at no matter what pain or humiliation to herself...
...The attraction of this, I suppose, has to do with the possibilities opened up to the sexual tastes of the protagonists by the presence of an unusually desirable, utterly unresisting, absolutely available, entirely accommodating subject...
...Such streets are not new to our cities, and their denizens have to congregate somewhere...
...Well, it's not a matter of blame exactly...
...The camera, in its craving for authenticity, got so close that it quite lost the human quality of the encounter...
...Well, all of this was good dirty fun, and none of us took it as anything else...
...Isn't some sense of privacy being assaulted by those who turn our private acts into public spectacles...
...Herself, naturally-the pornmeisters are usually men, the central subjects usually women...
...That, I think, explains something about both the inherent tedium of it all and its antihuman qualities...
...But even if one believes that pornography may be harmful both to the individual who consumes it and to the society which endures it, what then...
...The next stage in my pornographic education, I believe, came with a film that a friend rented or stole and that a bunch of us watched in his kitchen one afternoon while his mother was out shopping...
...Although we were all slightly sex-mad, I don't think that these excursions into smut had any lasting harmful effects, for we recognized it as smut and felt no compulsion to invest with redeeming social value what Popeye kept doing to Olive Oil...
...We watched it quite a number of times, in fact...
...Perhaps if I had not grown up in so sexually unliberated a period as the 1930s, in so sex-obsessed a place as the Bronx, I would have been able to take pornography at a more leisurely pace...
...It is not really an evil street-that is much too powerful a word...
...Perhaps the fault was mine...
...For the nonaddicted viewer, the result must in time be fatigue...
...Perhaps, then, the porn explosion ought to be an occasion not for repression or for hand-wringing, but for trying to figure out what exactly it is that upsets us, and how much, and why...
...The acting, if that is what it is, is not of a high quality...
...A man who opens one of them-I have seen him unlocking the doors, sweeping the sidewalk, just leaning there and looking out expression-lessly-is a portly figure with a pock-marked face and a sports jacket to match...
...I was immediately convinced that these books were seminal works of American literature...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 19
