The Me Decade
Defiance
A Dirty Western
Kindergarten Teachers
Story of Joanna
Jamie Gillis
Waterpower
Chained, Whipped
Texas Hacksaw
My Pumpkin
No Mo' Hoes
Little Orphan
Dusty
The Taming of Rebecca
Forgive Me - I Have Sinned
Clarity
Dr Robert Stoller
Sin & Perversion
1970s - A Lack of Empathy
The spirit of the 1960s lasted into the first half of the next decade when its idealism ran thin and left people preoccupied with themselves. The 1970s was the "Me Decade" and this lack of empathy comes across in the vicious films of the time, overflowing with violence, rape, drugs, and sadism. Nasty flicks lasted until the start of the Reagan administration in 1981 which helped build a new national mood.
Drug use soared during the 1970s and it became particularly hip to snort cocaine. The secular most of all devoted themselves to pleasing themselves, to getting ahead and to getting head. The desire to be a winner frequently overwhelms concern for others, notes Dennis Prager. Solipsism reigned - "the philosophical theory that the self is the only knowable, or the only existent, thing." (The Oxford American Dictionary)
Defiance
Armand Weston directed 1975's Defiance - "a sexually more frightening film (and much more explicit one) than Straw Dogs, or The Snake Pit or even Behind The Green Door," writes Bob Rimmer. "Caught sniffing dope by her religious mother, Kathy is first sent to the psychiatric ward of a hospital where she is raped by the inmates and an attendant in a most brutally believable rape scene. "Rescued" by a doctor who is a follower of the Marquis de Sade, she is tortured until horrifyingly, in the Journey of O tradition, she begins to enjoy her pain, debasement and degradation. Worth owning to test your own reactions. Should the Marquis' writings be censored or do we dare to expose the insanity of his theories by openly showing tapes or movies like this? And whatever happened to Jean Jennings, who is a good actress?" (Guide #1, p.77)
Bill Margold had a different reaction to Defiance. "A pubescent piece currently attempting to expand zippers is blonde Jeane Jennings, star and primary orifice of Defiance. She has that "my clit is sugar-coated and if you lick it, you'll get cavities" look about her. "Defiance has that "I've seen most of this before and better" look, and while Jean gives an earnest performance, her writhings are wasted as the story sinks into sublit sexual depravity with synched in sighs and slurps. There is also a sextet-de-sucking scene as smiling Jean takes on a host of holes a la Green Door.
"Defiance is only a painful experience to those viewers who have been waiting to see some stylish flogging and stomping for the torture is minimal at best."
A Dirty Western, directed by David Fleetwood, also appeared in 1975. "This is the most believable sexvid, with perhaps the best acting and cinematography you've seen in any of them. It is also the most frightening. The time frame is the 1890s. After seven years in prison, three convicts escape. Jim, a rancher near the prison, is leaving for a cattle drive, and his wife, Sarah, is planning the wedding of one of her favorite daughters. A tender love scene sets the prelude for the horror to come. "The film raises an inevitable question: Why do violence, murder and rape make more sexually exciting films than stories dealing with normal emotions?" (Guide p.79)
UCLA Psychiatrist Michael Goldstein has a different perspective. "Average males don't find real rape pornography exciting. They don't show a reaction to it physiologically or psychologically. If there's real harm being done, even in a simulated way - beating up, force, no excitement show [by the woman] and so forth, it is not sexually exciting to the average person."
Story of Joanna (1975) "Recommended as the best film example for a walk on the dark side of porn...an absolute must for those frustrated fetish freaks who are never satisfied in their search for kinky sadomasochism or bondage and discipline. Story of Joanna is one of only five films I would recommend for kink fans. All of the others are either too silly, too lame or contain too little of the kinky stuff.
"The only challenge to John Leslie as the best actor in the history of porn is Jamie Gillis when he wants to be. Here, he wants to be in the role of Jason, a possessive misogynist who first charms women, then lures them to the depths of personal humiliation and abuse. It is perhaps the best role in Jamie's long career.
"The leading lady, Terri Hall, formerly a dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet, is one of the treasures of the X-industry. Her nude dance sequence is the finest in the field. The 'face of the moon' scene with Zebedy Colt is on the all-time classic sex scene list.
"Be advised that the theme is not something that everyone can deal with, but be further advised that you will not find better treatment of it elsewhere. Joanna shows up a nonexplicit effort like The Story of O for the watered down, nonerotic crap it is.
"One brief moment that should interest the female viewers is the oral sex scene between Colt and Gillis. Zebedy goes down on his master for nearly a minute for the turnabout-is-fair-play people. "For a period piece with costumes and kink, I don't think you will find a better sex film." (Holliday in AVN 12/92)
Bill Margold: "The plot can be summed up by saying that the Marquis de Sade has met his match. The film features the humiliations of a beautiful woman (Terri Hall) by a mysterious man (Jamie Gillis) and an even more mysterious butler (Zebedy Colt).
"Terri Hall cries out, "Every hole I have has been used," and, thanks to Damiano's direction, the viewer will feel as if he's violated each of Hall's orifices."
Bisexual Jamie Gillis excelled in nasty roles such as that of the enema bandit in Gerard Damiano's 1975 Waterpower. "He'll scare you to death in this one, in which he plays a sex pervert - an enema bandit who accosts women in their apartments, ties them up and before he rapes them gives them an enema (supposedly based on a true incident). Thinking about his first victim, an airline stewardess whom he has watched screwing through a telescope in his apartment, he says: "She's dirty. Just a toilet. If I cleaned her out she would be clean again. She'd thank me. She'd be glad I cleaned her out." Damiano gives this sexvid a long, scary buildup with Jamie discovering that he is orgasmic when he watches an enema being given to a woman in a sex palace called Garden of Eden, which specializes in B&D, S&M, infantilism, cross dressing, French and Greek cultures and high colonic irrigations. Suspected by a policewoman, C.J. Laing, he captures her and tortures her in a long frightening sequence. The agony of the enemas is written on his victims' faces. Whatever your shock feeling may be, you'll watch this from beginning to end, and you'll have to admit that both the acting and cinematography are great. Worth owning - if only to initiate discussions on whether a film like this should ever be made." (Bob Rimmer, X-Rated VideotapeGuide, p. 237)
Little Orphan Dusty appeared in 1976. Bob Chinn directed John Holmes and Rhonda Jo Petty who won Best Actress at the 1977 Erotic Film Awards. Orphan won Best Film and also placed in Screw's 1977 top ten list. "If you are male and wish to test your sexual arousal to rape scenes, this sexvid provides you with three separate sequences - one with a motorcycle gang that takes on Rhonda Jo Petty. They later try again with her and two other women. John Holmes finally tells Rhonda he loves her even though she's pregnant by the rapists." (Guide p.101)
The Taming of Rebecca, 1981, features kidnapping, rape and Sharon Mitchell. The 1986 Meese Commission Report describes the film in detail:
After her father beats her and forces her to have sex with him, Rebecca goes to a school for sexually abused children. She tells Ms. Zorda what happened: Masturbating himself while sitting on the toilet, Rebecca's father called for Rebecca and told her to perform fellatio on him. When Rebecca did as she was asked, he said, "That's it, bitch, suck on it hard. That's why your mommy and I made you - to make daddy feel good." He makes her sit on his penis while her play with her nipples. Rebecca complains that he's hurting her, but he won't stop.
He says: "All right, bitch, I want to taste a little bit of your cunt." When he finishes going down on her, he commands her to bend over the tub. He spanks her and screws her from the rear. He makes her suck him off again and then do what he likes best - urinate on his penis. Ms. Zorda advises Rebecca to stay at the school, and she introduces her to the other students and staff members, including Mr. Minindao, the "Dean of Discipline" and his secretary Linda. Later in their office, Minidao and Linda discuss what a difficult job they have, and Linda sucks his cock. Minindao goes down on her and then they have intercourse. He asks her, "You want my cum? Say 'Please, Daddy,' beg me to cum in your face."
Meanwhile, various students are talking about "the cave." The last girl who had been taken there and talked to the police had disappeared afterward. One boy says he wants some "serious action" and students begin to strip and masturbate, perform fellatio and cunnilingus, and have intercourse. One boy puts his fist in a girl's vagina.
The dean calls Rebecca into his office and scolds her for participating in an orgy; he orders her to raise her skirt and bend over. When Rebecca refuses, he tells her that he beat one girl until she threw up and then made her eat her vomit. He beats Rebecca and has intercourse with her from the rear. He makes her suck his cock.
The dean calls in two other students, a boy John and a girl. He commands John to undress the girl and stick a pin in her brest. John says no, but complies when the dean threatens to do it to him if he doesn't. John pushes the point through her nipple as she struggles; blood runs down her breast; the girl urinates. Feigning sympathy, the secretary takes her to the cave. Once there, the secretary tells her that she will give her more "pain and pleasure" and makes her perform cunnilingus. The secretary threatens to turn the pin in her nipple if she refuses. The secretary turns the pin, the girl screams. The dean comes in and makes the girl perform fellatio on his "black rod" because she "pissed" on his floor. The secretary removes the pin from her swollen breast. The dean says if she's good he'll put his fist up her ass. He f---s her and the girls says, "I won't ever do it again, Daddy D. Oh, please f--- me."
Rebecca tells Ms. Zorda what is going on, and they enter the cave. The dean leaughs when he sees them, but Ms. Zorda points a gun at the dean. He laughs again. The sound of a shot is heard.
The Meese Commission also described in detail Forgive Me - I Have Sinned:
The confessor mails letters to three person whom he summons for confession. As they discuss their sins, he is enveloped by smoke behind a cross-stripped screen. Ingrid, a young girl who, while sleeping on a camping trip, was undressed and fondled by an oriental girl, Serena, in the sleeping bag next to her. Ingrid woke and asked Serena what she was doing. Serena plays with Ingrid's nipples, then performs cunnilingus. They kiss and perform cunnilingus on each other. Ingrid, dressed in a school uniform, tells the confessor that she couldn't help herself.
Curious about the size of his sister's tits, Brad peeks at her while she undresses. Becoming excited, Brad masturbates. His sister Maria catches him. She commands him to do as she says, then handcuffs him, hits him, makes him crawl, forces him to perform cunnilingus and call her "mistress."
Brad tells the confessor that he's "an animal." Vicki Jones, from the secretarial pool, goes to Jason Burke's office. Jason thinks that she's a "primp-faced iceberg who needs a good f---ing." Burke threatens her job and forces her to take dictation with his penis as the pen. He tells her, "You girls are all the same. You act like you don't like it but you really do. You want a good stiff dick right in your mouth. Oh, suck on it, suck."
Jason pulls her by the hair and makes her suck his cock. She cries and his cock falls out of her mouth. He orders her to open her mouth and then shoves her mouth on his dick. He rips off her panties and penetrates her vagina with his erection. She cries, "Let me go. Please, let me go." He replies, "Say, 'I like it', say it, say it." She yells, "I like it. You're hurting my pussy, ow. Don't, don't."
The confessor moves away from the screen, has her lie down, and straps her wrists. "Now you must be touched and cleansed by me, your confessor. Now you must taste the rod," he tells Vicki. He masturbates, and Vicki licks his penis. "Be cleansed, sinner," the confessor says. Vicki sucks his cock; the confessor masturbates; the confessor penetrates her but withdraws to ejaculate on her buttocks. He tells her that she will be forgiven.
After the confessor's separate encounters with Ingrid, Brad, and Vicki, he assures them that they are not the guilty parties - that Serena, Maria, and Jason are guilty - and that Ingrid, Brad and Vicki will get their revenge by bringing the guilty ones with them Saturday night.
In preparation for Saturday's cleansing, the confessor fills six glasses with wine, and puts a powder in the three intended for the guilty ones. After the six people arrive, Serena, Maria, and Jason are given the wine with power; they pass out. When they wake, Jason's hands are tied and Vicki is over him; Maria is in a stock; the confessor holds Serena by the neck while masturbating himself. Jason, Maria and Serena are in reverse positions from their previous experiences with Vicki, Brad and Ingrid. Vicki forces Jason to do her will; Brad forces Maria to do his will; the confessor forces Serena to "suck the rod" while yelling, "You like sucking on little young tits." As Vicki makes Jason perform cunnilingus on her and Brad paddles Maria, the confessor commands Serena to perform fellatio. Serena asks Ingrid to let her perform cunnilingus on her, but Ingrid says she belongs to the confessor. The confessor has intercourse with Ingrid from the rear and says to Serena, "My holy fluid from the rod that baptizes you will cleanse thee."
The confessor masturbates and ejaculates on Serena's breast. Before the film ends, Ingrid is performing cunnilingus with Serena, Vicki is performing fellatio on Jason, and Brad is having intercourse from his sister's rear while she is still in the stock.
Porn's Walk On The Wild Side
Porn’s walk on the wild side takes us into a thorny thicket. Certainly movies like those detailed above do not elevate, but do they harm? And what do they reveal about human nature?
First we need clarity. Point one. What people want to watch and what they want to act out are frequently different. Many persons including myself find pornos with vanilla sex boring and Max Hardcore arousing even though our personal tastes are usually gentle.
Two, arousal is largely in the eye and the groin of the viewer. What arouses one man may not arouse another, let alone a woman. In Psychiatrist Robert Stoller's 1970 essay "Pornography and Perversion", he argues that porn - the erotic daydream translated into words or pictures - is "the highly condensed story of [the perverse subject's] perversion: it's historical origins in reality, its elaborations in fantasy, its manifest content which disguises and reveals the latent content."
What makes the use of pornography technically perverse for the Freudian Stoller is that it indicates a persistent "preference for a genitally stimulating exciting act [anal sex?] which is not heterosexual intercourse."
At the heart of all perversions, including pornography, is "a fantasied act of revenge which condenses a life history - memory and fantasies, traumas, frustrations and joys. The perversion of pornography, which provides restitution for men, comes in different genres, each created for a specific perverse need by exact attention to detail and each defining an area of excitement that will have no effect on a different man."
According to Stoller, an essential quality of both perversion and pornography is sadism, or revenge for a passively experienced trauma. Thus, for example, the fantasy or act of "poisoning or humiliating one's partner with ejaculate" or of causing physical damage to someone by one's phallic onslaught functions to convert sexual trauma into triumph. Stoller speculates that the patterns of sexual excitement of nonperverse people may contain mechanisms converting sexual trauma to triumph not unlike those purportedly at work in perversions such as transvestism. (Arthur J. Mielke, Christians, Feminists, And The Culture Of Pornography.)
In his essay,"Transvestites' Women", Stoller examines the connection between the erotic interests of many male transvestites in representations of phallic or cruelly beautiful women and these men's perceptions that the women in their lives who are sexually important possess all the power. These women - the mothers, sisters, girl friends and wives - have in common the "fear of and need to ruin masculinity."
The feminists are right, says Stoller, that male heterosexual porn insults women. But it insults men too, showing their need to be cruel and marking their failure to relate better to live females. Men abuse women because they are uncertain, fearful, angry and envious. "Erotic daydreams in pornography represent fantasies of revenge in which the consumer imagines he is degrading women. Men fetishize - dehumanize - women to be erotically stimulated.
"Although sexual excitement is experienced as an automatic, uncomplicated, natural (with implications both of biology and theology) phenomenon, it is dense with meanings at all levels of awareness." (Dr. Robert Stoller)
Dr. Joseph Slade writes: "Like happiness, eroticism is at best measured in moments. Buried deep, or carried near the surface of the psyche, our particular fantasies are colored by respect for certain powerful taboos, against which we calibrate those moments. While we ordinarily violate these taboos mentally, in secret, as expressions of our personal sexuality, some of these forbidden longings we share with others. Formulaic patterns fix, compress, and intensify such fantasies: they become models for erotic moments....People respond to certain patterns of behavior more readily than to others.... Members of the raincoat brigade sit through hours of trash in search for a formula that especially gratifies them. Behind the hokum and hackwork, they may find moments of eroticism authentic for them, some set that fits, or they may not; but hope would seem to spring eternal, for they return again and again." (Joseph Slade, Movie Artifacts, 1982, Nelson Hall Publishers, 111 N. Canal Street, Chicago, IIlinois, 60606.)
Dr. Robert Stoller agreed with feminists that in porn "there is always a victim, no matter how disguised: no victim, no pornography." The scripts of men's pornography as well as women's (which Stoller identifies as romance novels) contain themes of hostility. "For most people most of the time, a touch of cruelty may be a trace element in erotic fantasy." Women are not exempt from his claim that "humans are not a very loving species and this is especially so when they make love."
Porn creates an arena where someone dominates and someone submits. Authors as diverse as Normal Mailer and Gael Greene, Henry Miller and Erica Jong, remind us that this is the essence of eroticism. In a letter to Club magazine, an avid viewer of pornos wrote: "It's reflected glory... When I see pictures of John Holmes' superb 12" dick in full erection I feel proud of my sex; it's like my team winning at football."
"Fear is the other side of domination," writes Slade. "it sharpens the tension which shapes the pornographic response.
"Female sexuality endangers male order. As with football, as with high-noon showdowns in Laredo, as with primitive rites, there must be rules, formulas and codes and cliches, to circumscribe and contain potential anarchy."
Dr. Robert Stoller believed in significant differences in the way men and women become aroused. Men, heterosexual and gay, focus on body parts and make them into fetishes while women, heterosexual and lesbian, look more at personality. They are more psychic than anatomical. These dramatic differences in male and female arousal appear to Stoller to be "insoluble. Maybe if the need for orgasm, once excitement is instilled, were always as driven in females as in males or as bearable in males as in females, the two sexes would understand each other better."
No wonder then, that whenever society does not actively discourage homosexuality and push men into heterosexual marriage, males tend to become bi-sexual. (See Dennis Prager's essay on "Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization".) It doubles your chances of getting laid.
In Both Ways, 1975, a woman discovers her husband is in love with another man. It's a rare mainstream porno to explicitly show homosexuality. Prentice Hall published in 1980 a book called Barry and Alice about a true-life situation similar to the theme of Both Ways. The themes outlined above run against Judeo-Christian and Feminist notions that love be amongst equals, and that one person's pleasure should not come at the expense of another. No sex masters and no sex slaves.
Gloria Steinem claims that erotica, as distinct from pornography, "doesn't require us to identify with a conqueror or a victim." The Kensington Ladies Erotica Society insists that its members not portray women characters as victims.
Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, by Dr. Stoller, includes a chapter entitled "Sex as Sin." The late psychiatrist suggests that "just as every human group has its myth, perhaps for every person there is the sexual fantasy (perversion?)." Pornography becomes "the communicated sexual fantasy of a dynamically related group of people."
Defining sin as the desire to harm others, Stoller suggests that feeling sinful about sex comes in part from the awareness "that some of sexual excitement depends on the desire to harm others," and this awareness that one is sinning often increases sexual excitement. All sins are not equal. A rape fantasy is not an act of palpable violence, "and the transvestite's unconscious fantasy of revenge leads to nothing more violent than his masturbating into a lady's hat."
Stoller acknowledges that destroying the human in our sexual objects diminishes our capacity to love and that "unchecked sexuality dehumanizes erotic life and this thwarts love." If hostility plays a major part in sexual arousal, this suggests that there is little sex, including heterosexual marital sex, that does not have a touch of the perverse. This defines perversion down - We're all perverts with our own perversions. All alike are sinners, though not all are sinners alike. Like sex, comedy also relies on hostility. Both mediums reveal that humans are not a loving species, especially when they make love or laugh or are at their most human. The most visceral entertainment - both amusing and erotic - frequently exhibits hostility.
"Some humor is painful," writes Dr. Stoller, "some gentle, some malicious, some warm, some mocking,some insightful. But there is no humor without victims and victors, implied or manifest. One person's joke is another's insult. Both people have been touched by the hostile theme, but the one who has laughs has gained an insight the other had to reject. Hostility...is a sine qua non [for humor and sex], whether it is scarcely there or thickly larded in." (Observing the Erotic Imagination)
Author and porn critic Bob Rimmer writes: "After ten years, patrons of adult theaters who have seen hundreds of pornos are either jaded or desensitized to normal sexual experience on the screen. To compensate, many sexvids offer bondage or discipline sequences or entire tapes in which the participants get sexually aroused by tying each other up or whipping each other while they wear leather clothing. There are sexvids that offer enemas, golden showers and probably even Marquis deSade defecation and the eating thereof (although I have never seen any that show coprophagia). Most adult film reviewers rate the films on their ability to produce a hard-on. Continually seeking after novelty, producers and directors of even the best sexvids offer kinky sexual behavior that often borders on cruelty or sadism. These sexvids degrade not only the participants, but human sexuality in general." (Guide #1, p.34)
Arthur Lennig concludes his essay on censorship with the following thought: "No one can prove that films with graphic sex or violence have a harmful effect on viewers, but there seems to be little doubt that films do have some effect on society and that all of us live with such effects... The question of how society will function when all checks that a few thousand years of civilization have imposed have disappeared...has yet to be answered."
