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Nasty

For a good deal of people, perhaps most, all porn is inherently nasty. To porn users, straight sex without kink is just "vanila."

Waves of nastiness roll into porn at irregular intervals. During the 1990s, the genre became increasingly hateful. Still, the nastiest porn came in the 1970s.

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 that overflow with 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)

Without evidence to the contrary, every person who worked in the entertainment industry - X-rated and mainstream - during the 1970s and early '80s should be assumed to have extensively used drugs.

Creativity and artistry in porno reached their high point during these years as well as their moral low point. The proliferation of sexual violence as well as child pornography set the stage for a backlash against the sex industry during the Reagan - Bush era.

The nastiest of all nasty porno is the snuff film which films an actual murder. Despite wild rumors, not one snuff film has ever been shown to exist.

The origin of this myth dates to 1973 when the president of an anti-pornography group Citizens for Decency through Law, Raymond Gauer, claimed porno fims which climaxed with a woman being murdered were in circulation.

"I've never seen one," Gauer told Adam magazine, but "my undercover guy, though he's never seen one, has talked to enough people to be convinced they exist. Another source is convinced they exist in quantity, and that they've been screened in the very 'In' circles in Hollywood."

Gauer's remarks illustrate the greatest problem with snuff films - nobody has ever seen one but many know of somebody else's claim to have seen one.

The allegations played well with the media. Tabloid newspapers like the Post and the Daily News ran stories of the ongoing investigations by law enforcement with banner headlines like "Snuff Porn - The Actress Is Actually Killed."

As rumors ran wild, an enterprising film producer, Allen Shackleton, decided it was time to lay it on thick. He acquired the rights to a 1970 low budget film called The Slaughter, made by Michael and Roberta Findlay. The film was so bad it was never released, but it was perfect for Shackleton's purpose since it was filmed in Argentina. The tabloids said that snuff films came from South America.

The Findlay's film begins with two biker chicks pursuing another woman who has stolen their drugs. They catch her and place her in stocks. A bearded guru named Satan harangues the captured girl about the decadence of the rich in Montevideo - thus giving the film redeeming social value. Satan and his biker chicks plan a ritual slaughter of their quarry to avenge the sufferings of the poor. The parallel between Satan's girl followers and the Manson "family" is obvious. Their target is a beautiful blonde pregnant woman made up to look like Sharon Tate. She is married to a film director. Satan and the biker chicks shoot the director and stab to death the blonde.

Shackleton added ten minutes of "reality" footage and retitled the film Snuff.

The extra few minutes shows a woman on the crew telling the director how much she got turned on by the stabbing scene. So the director stabs her, slices off her fingers, cuts off her legs, rips open her abdomen, pulls out her intestines and holds them over his head.

The film appears to run out as the screen goes black and a voice says, "Did you get it all?" "Yeah, we got it. Let's get out of here." No credits roll.

Shackleton never claimed that the snuff was real but allowed viewers to speculate. The New York City District Attorney investigated the circumstances surrounding the making of the film and interviewed the actress who was supposedly murdered in the final segment.

Snuff had a short run and few people remember it, but the idea that snuff films circulate still haunts the public imagination.

In 1994, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Rider McDowell, spent six months trying to find a snuff film and failed.

The snuff film myth is particularly popular among feminists. "In these films, women actually were maimed, sliced to pieces, f---ed and killed," writes Andrea Dworkin.

In her 1993 book Only Words, Catherine MacKinnon describes men who masturbate while watching women "mutilated, dismembered, bound, gagged, tortured and killed" and snuff as "sexual murder of the process of being committed. Doing the murder is sex for those who do it. The climax is the moment of death." Neither MacKinnon or Dworkin can cite any examples of snuff films.

"The readiness to give credence to the snuff film legend," writes Dr. Joseph Slade in his essay "Violence in the Hard-Core Pornographic Film," "suggests a more sinister popular assumption: that sex and violence are inextricably linked. If that assumption is widespread, then the myth reveals more about our culture than about pornographic films." (Journal of Communication, Summer of 1984, p. 149)

Though hardcore films have been essentially illegal until modern times (1970s -80s), hardcore pornographers have long shunned the use of violence in their pictures. By contrast, mainstream shooter, rigorously censored from depicting explicit sex, frequently use metaphorical violence to represent passion. The pornographer, notes Dr. Slade, does not need such symbols.

Dr. Slade writes that in 1333 examples of stag films ranging from 1915-1972, themes of rape occur five percent of the time. Bestiality less than one percent. Filmed copulation with dogs, snakes, ducks, pigs, horses, etc...usually has co-starred females, from South American prostitutes in the 1930s to Linda Lovelace in the 1970s. Scatology is rare, usually just urination.

Underage females appear in a handful of stags, most famously Juanita Slusher aka Candy Barr who starred in 1951's Smart Alec. In the early 1970s about three dozen films of Vietnamese children in embrace with other children or with U.S. serviceman sold wordlwide. But when American children began appearing in hardcore loops, public outrage drove the industry underground.

British porners created spanking heavy loops during the 1960s, including Her Maid Raped (1965), Her Daughter Raped (1965), Dirty Perverts (1967), and Flogged and Raped (1969). "The best stags [during the 1960s] were more coarse than malicious," writes Dr. Slade, "more abrasive than brutal; the worst were scurrilous. Even in the conspicuously less seamy American examples, formulas degenerated and humor vanished."

In 1973, more than 2000 porno features and loops were made. Few were violent. Exceptions largely came from New York's Avon Films and from Germany. The year 1975 produced 120 features, but only 45 appeared in 1984 as videotape took over.

With money from the Mafia channeled through producer Stu Segall, Sam Weston aka Anthony Spinelli directed 1975's feature Defiance - "a sexually more frightening film (and much more explicit) than Straw Dogs, or The Snake Pit or even Behind The Green Door," writes critic 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? (X-Rated Videotape Guide, p.77)

David Fleetwood's A Dirty Western appeared in 1975. After seven years in prison, three convicts escape. Jim, a rancher near the prison, leaves for a cattle drive while his wife Sarah plans 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?" (Bob Rimmer)

UCLA Psychiatrist Michael Goldstein says that "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" promises Bob Rimmer. "Jamie 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." (X-Rated Videotape Guide, 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." (Bob Rimmer, 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 on your face."

Meanwhile, various students are talking about "the cave." The last girl taken there had talked to the police. She 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 breast. 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 laughs 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 persons 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.

In 1966, England was shocked by the Moors Murders by a 27-year old store clerk and his 23-year old girlfriend. The two committed the murders for no other reason, according to author Pamela Hansford Johnson, than their own pleasure. They acted out fantasies about which they had read in works by the Marquis de Sade... They tortured and sexually abused children, photographed them in pornographic poses and tape-recorded their screams for mercy before murdering and burying them. The relationship between the murderers' porn collection and the murders led Johnson to discuss our "Affectless Society," her term for a society in which boredom sparks the search for gratification in sex and violence, in which sadomasochistic adventures lead not just to the loss of moral sensibility but also to the triumph of evil. At the Moors trial, Johnson cited a passage from de Sade's Juliette upon which one of the murderers used to brood: "Destruction is nature's method of progress, and she prompts the murderer to destruction, so that his action shall be the same as plague or famine....In a word, murder is a horror, but a horror often necessary, never criminal, and essential to tolerate in a republic."

Mass murderer Charles Manson manipulated sex to attract and keep his followers. He admired Nietzsche and Hitler.

De Sade and violent pornography also fascinated mass murderer Ted Bundy.

"I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving Christian parents," Ted Bundy told Dr. James Dobsen shortly before the serial murderer was executed. "As a young boy I encountered softcore pornography at the local drug stores... My friends and I explored the back roads...and from time to time we'd come across pornographic books of a harder nature... and detective magazines....

"The most damaging kinds of pornography are those that involve violence and sexual violence...[which] brings about in some people behavior that is too terrible to describe. I'm not blaming pornography for what I've done... The issue is how this kind of literature contributed...to violent behavior.

"I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something harder, harder. Something which gives you a greater sense of excitement. Until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far. You reach that jumping-off point where you wonder if actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it.

"I don't want to infer that I was some helpless victim. And yet, we're talking about an influence which was an indispensable link in the chain of behavior, the chain of events that led to the assaults, murders...

"Alcohol...with the use of pornography reduced my inhibitions...

"Some people would say that, 'I've seen that stuff and it doesn't do anything to me.' I understand that. Virtually everyone can be exposed to pornography and not go out and do anything wrong.

"People need to realize that those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media - in particular pornographic violence - are not inherent monsters. We are your sons and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house. It snatched me out of my home 20, 30 years ago...

"I'm no social scientist and I haven't done a survey. But I've lived in prison for a long time. And I've met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography... The FBI's own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornography. [True]
 
 
 

"What scares and appalls me, Dr. Dobsen, is when I see what's on cable TV, some of the movies, some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today was stuff that they wouldn't show in X-rated adult theaters 30 years ago.

"...As it gets into the home to the children who may be unattended or unaware that they may be a Ted Bundy who has that vulnerability to that predisposition to be influenced by that kind of behavior, by that kind of movie, by that kind of violence.

"What I hope will come of our discussion is that society deserves to be protected from itself... People will condemn behavior of a Ted Bundy, while they're walking past a magazine rack full of the kinds of things that send young kids down the road to be Ted Bundys."

Thomas Schiro, who was convicted of the rape and murder of a 28-year old woman, unsuccessfully raised the "pornography" made me do it" defense. After getting thrown out of a coin-operated peepshow for exposing himself to a clerk, Schiro raped Laura Jane Luebbehusen three times before deciding to bludgeon her to death. He then raped her corpse and chewed on several parts of her body.

According to a psychologist who testified at the trial, Schiro had been exposed to hardcore porn depicting rape and simulated murder since he was six years old. Another 'expert' testified that continual exposure to hardcore creates "a erson who no longer distinguishes between violence and rape, or violence and sex."

A 1988 FBI study found that 81% of violent sexual offenders regularly read or viewed violent pornography. What undercuts the credibility of this finding is that there are almost no videos available in the United States that show both violence and explicit sex. X-rated videos are consistently less violent than G-rated ones.

In 1990, a brutal genital mutilation occurred identical in detail to a mutilation described in a Hustler magazine article which described how to mutilate genitalia after removing the victim's eye without severing the optic nerve so that the victim could view his own torture.

A Michigan State Police study found that porn was viewed just before or during 41% of 48,000 sexual crimes committed over 20 years. "Violent pornography is like a how-to manual for rapists and child abusers," the study concluded. And an FBI study on serial homicide concluded that the most common interest among serial killers is pornography.

Bill Marshall, a psychology professor at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario saw a made in America video that showed a man having sex with a four year old girl.The girl keeps looking past the camera at someone - perhaps a parent or other relative. "She is frightened," says Marshall, "and she is looking to this person for help." The ugly images reveal the effect that the experience had on the child. But what effect does such pornography have on the viewer? Marshall believes that in some cases porn can play a role in sex crimes.

As director of a sexual behavior clinic in Kingston between 1980 and 1985, he interviewed 120 men who'd raped women or molested children. He concluded that in 25% of cases, porn appeared to be a significant factor in the chain of events leading to the sin.

An expert on criminal personality profiling, John Douglas says that he doesn't believe that pornography causes men to commit sex crimes. "Our research does show that certain types of sado-masochistic and bondage-oriented material can fuel the fantasies of those already leaning in that direction."

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)

Joseph Slade: "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, Illinois, 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.

Stoller's ideas run against Judeo-Christian and Feminist notions that love occur 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 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, then there is little sex, including heterosexual marital sex, that does not have a touch of the perverse. Perversion is defined down. The honest person realizes 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. 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)

Bob Rimmer: "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." (X-Rated Videotape Guide, p.34)

"No one can prove that films with graphic sex or violence have a harmful effect on viewers," says Arthur Lennig, "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."

"I must confess I am perplexed that women agree to this ass-to-mouth business," writes Dithering on RAME, "which strikes me as a hepatitis accident waiting to happen; yet are squeamish about ingesting semen. Or, for an actress to allow another actress to urinate in her face (a la Cumback Pussy 6) and pass it off as squirting.

"I enjoy most porn as long as it's not gross," writes the Internet Gadfly. "Anal sex and pissing don't do anything for me. It amazes me that there are men who are apparently aroused watching a woman lick semen out of another woman's asshole, but it> takes all types to make a porn viewer."

"It is not my place to question what another person finds erotic," writes Dithering, "but activities that other species inherently know are dangerous don't arouse me. That is why I am so confused on the appeal of this ass-to-mouth business that so many posters enjoy. The gastro-intestinal tract is infested with bacteria that help humans digest food. In that sense, they are life-sustaining and symbiotic. They can't live without us and we can't live without them. But, for whatever reason, if they get out and then get reintroduced into our system, they can be exceedingly unhealthy. Feces are swarming with these bacteria. So why would anyone want to see a woman ingest fecal matter which is the implicit theme in the ass-to-mouth maneuver? Is this erotic? Why would anyone want to see these bacteria get into a woman's vagina via these ass-to-pussy requests? I thought I hit rock-bottom watching that scene with Nicki Brantz in"The GangBang Girl" 16 or 17 or 18 where internally-deposited semen was farted (queefed?) out of one woman's anus into another woman's mouth. Bloody hell. But then along came Mila with her double-anal stunts and pushing internally-deposited semen out of her anus into a cup and then ingesting the fluid. But somehow I can't get my fetish satisfied for simple cum-shots directly into the mouth that are swallowed. Damn, I guess I am too uptight. Maybe I belong in a nunnery."

TwoFisted replied that he had no problem separating fantasy from reality. "I enjoy watching Max Hardcore and Rocco tapes, but I am an unfailingly gentle and considerate partner in real life. And I enjoy watching gangbangs, A2M, etc., but I am serially monogamous (shortest affair was two years) and borderline fanatical about personal hygiene. Would I kiss a girl who just did A2M? Hell, I won't even use salsa or dip at a party if other people are using the same bowl. Which is why I am into porn - it is a safe and sanitary way to get the sexual variety I like.

"Why do I love A2M [ass to mouth]? I don't know and don't care. I like big (natural) boobs, some guys like small ones. I like muscular calves, some guys like thin legs. I like pubic hair and shaved armpits, some guys like the opposite. Some guys can't understand why A2M is sexy, I can't understand why jerking off onto a girl's shoe is sexy."