Confessions of A Failed Slut

by Kathy Shaidle

  The “Dr. Phil rape tweet” saga having finally petered out, some desperate web writer, likely digging for click bait on a slow news day, unearthed a once-obscure sub-genre of self-published ladyporn over at Amazon.com.

  These “books” – actually just glorified short stories in Kindle-friendly format – have titles like Taken By T-Rex and Running from the Raptor, and superfluous “covers” depicting 21st century bikini models crudely cut-and-pasted into dinosaur dioramas.

  The plots, such as they are (along with most of the verbs, adverbs and adjectives) will be familiar to anyone who’s dipped into some Barbara Cartland or The Pearl. The only difference is that the heroine is ravished, not by some beastly man, but by a beast, period – one of the prehistoric variety.

  Behold a representative excerpt:

  A reptilian tongue, stiff and hot, dashed out to lick at the tender, naked flesh so suddenly exposed. Azog gasped at the touch, then gradually relaxed as her body warmed to the intoxicating sensation of the beast’s flesh against her own.

  She wasn’t sure if her sudden arousal was because of her earlier thwarted climax in the cool stream, or if she was just desperate for one last pleasant sensation before being torn limb from limb by the great, scaly beast. Either way, Azog relished the rasp of its tongue, hot and rough, on her sensitive skin.

  The Huffington Post and its ilk were pretty eager to trumpet “monster sex” as the latest “shocking” trend – 50 Shades of Green? – but I remain unconvinced of the mass appeal of “monster sex.”

  Not that it’s an entirely novel idea. The Japanese (who else?) dreamed up “tentacle porn” almost two hundred years ago. That said, the genre hasn’t exactly spawned a class of mainstream magazines and movies with titles like Octopi My Pussy.

  If the average woman really fantasized about getting it on with a blob of living calamari, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife starring Sharon Stone, Jennifer Aniston (or, even better, Nastassja Kinski) would’ve hit megaplexes long ago.

  “Monster sex” briefly rears its ugly head every decade or so, never leaving more than the faintest footprint behind. The Creature From the Black Lagoon couldn’t even seal the deal, poor sucker. (Look, I’m a raging hetero, but have you seen Julie Adams in that white maillot?) Decades later though, Roger Corman’s (actually pretty reptilian) Humanoids of the Deep pulled it off, as it were.

  Oh, and in the 1981 Eurotrash flick Possession, Isabelle Adjani is, as BadAssDigest put it, “secretly fucking a tentacled monster in a dirty old apartment in Berlin.”

  If “monster sex” porn truly is some hot, happening trend a la 50 Shades…, then it’s one that’s moving at a glacial pace and not leaving behind much fossil evidence.

  Frankly, I’d be thrilled if dino-porn finally rendered extinct all that “sexy vampire” crud that’s been clogging our pop cultural arteries since the 1980s. (Damn you to hell, Anne Rice.)

  I can’t help but wonder how many of this genre’s serious fans are adolescent “young earth” creationists who suddenly find themselves too old for The Flintstones? Think about it: they can rationalize their forbidden “dirty” reading on the grounds that these are the only books on the market that depict humans and dinosaurs living side by side (not to mention in other positions.)

  As for me, the fragments of “monster sex” erotica I read left me cold. If I wanted to daydream about boinking a creature with teeny-weeny T-Rex arms, I’d just muse about picking up (as it were) a midget. In the mood to bone a fossil, I’d be more inclined to fantasize about some elderly rock star than a triceratops.

  It’s always tempting to construct a fearsome “moral panic” colossus out of bits and pieces of pop culture detritus like this and dub the thing Itscometothisasaurus. And in many cases, we’re right to be alarmed.

  But a few books about getting it on with a mastodon? I don’t know what killed the dinosaurs, but I’m pretty sure dinosaur porn isn’t going to kill us. At least, not before traditional porn renders our species extinct.

  That porn could warp young men’s sexual expectations was a commonplace talking point during the feminist “porn wars” of the Eighties. The notion was roundly dismissed, but now it looks like the “anti-s” were onto something. Again and again, we hear about – or, alas, meet – guys who claim they can’t perform unless their partner looks and acts like Alexis Texas or Asa Akira.

  Weirder yet, reports are coming in that millions of men (and women) in Japan – where what we Westerners would deem borderline “kiddie porn” is openly displayed on the subways — have decided that real, physical sex is just too much trouble. I’ve even heard tell of equally indifferent American college boys who now prefer to collect nude photos of young women they meet, rather than their phone numbers. Forget “pics or it didn’t happen.” These guys just want the “pics.” Who can be bothered with “it”?

  Despite – or perhaps because of – the ubiquity of porn, not all of it manages to make money.

  When Penthouse went bankrupt last year, the overwhelming reaction was, “Penthouse was still around?”

  For those too young to remember, Penthouse was part of the unholy trinity of mainstream porn magazines of the 1960s and 70s. In the liquor cabinet of lust, Playboy aspired to be the single malt scotch. Hustler was most definitely a can of Coors. Penthouse, then, was a rosè: like that lowbrow alcoholic afterthought, it was soft focus, pastel — some Sammy Glick’s idea of “classy.”

  The magazine’s founder, Bob Guccione, was one such striver, a failed painter whose early ambitions, fortunately, were focused on pussy rather than Poland. Penthouse arrived on American newsstands in 1969, sixteen years after Playboy, and mimicked its popular predecessor’s “tasteful” nude spreads, as well as its pretentions to serious journalism and its espousal of liberal causes.

  Penthouse was the first to cross the Pubicon, though, daring to leave furry vulvas unretouched, thereby risking obscenity charges. When none materialized, Playboy entered the muff race, and the “Pubic Wars” – as Hugh Hefner dubbed them – were on. (And this being the hirsute Seventies, boy, were they ever.)

  But all the short and curlies in the world couldn’t help Penthouse overtake Playboy’s long head start and ingenious “bunny” branding. Attempts to turn Guccione into a celebrity icon – with his trademark tight leather pants, and that gold medallion (barely) peeking out from beneath jungles of chest hair – succeeded merely in making the gauche, twitchy Hefner look like a veritable Cary Grant.

  In pre-internet America, though, Playboy‘s sloppy seconds still totaled tens of millions in revenue, and Guccione, as one of his own friends put it, “went directly to the last act of Citizen Kane.”

  In the introduction to Guccione’s unpublished autobiography, penned some time during the 1970s at the height of his fame, we’re informed that he’s not just one of the richest men in America, who owns the largest private home in New York City and an enviable art collection.

  “His other enterprises include real estate, television, motion pictures, hi-tech cattle breeding with a herd of 5,000 premium cattle, a fleet of block-long, ocean-going tugboats on long-term leases, and a company which manufactures powdered milk for third world countries.”

  Two spectacularly idiotic investments sucked up most of Guccione’s fortune: an Atlantic City casino, and a “cold fusion” venture. Perhaps the same scientists behind the latter had a hand in Guccione’s infamous Caligula, too – a movie that brings together Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren, naked, yet radiates all the eroticism of a Three Stooges short.

  The only folks who didn’t see any Penthouse money, it seems, was the IRS. The magazine first declared bankruptcy in 2003, and was snapped up by FriendFinder, which owns a comically diverse portfolio of online dating sites, from the Christian-oriented BigChurch.com to the less high-minded Nostringsattached.com.

  Then FriendFinder filed for Chapter 11, too, dragging what was left of Penthouse down with it.

  I suppose the phrase
is so anachronistic, so “slut shaming,” that nobody at FriendFinder was familiar with that hoary old saying about complimentary milk and remaindered cows. Sex sells, all right – everything but sex itself, that is; nobody pays for porn anymore, and the lonely and horny can arrange frictionless hook-ups using mobile apps like Tinder and Grindr.

  Susannah Breslin, who works the “vice beat” at Forbes.com, explains that the futility of trying to “compete with free” is compounded by the reluctance of major credit card companies to partner with adult-oriented merchants. Morality has nothing to do with it, either. Too many costly “wanker’s remorse” chargebacks, for one thing.

  Guccione died broke in 2010. His Kane-like mountains of stuff were shoved into storage lockers. That’s where Jeremy Frommer discovered a stash of Penthouse detritus – slides, personal letters – which he grabbed for a few thousand bucks at auction. Intrigued, he eventually bought what remained of the Guccione estate from a Phoenix creditor.

  With apt grandiosity, Frommer and his business partner Rick Schwartz call their haul “The Guccione Collection.” So far, they’ve squeezed a documentary out of it: Filthy Gorgeous presents Guccione as a brave, eccentric progressive visionary.

  But of course it does. Guccione is only the latest retro porn king to undergo rediscovery. The People vs. Larry Flynt was an Oscar-winning hit that cemented Hustler‘s hustler-in-chief’s reputation as a fun, far-out First Amendment champion. Meanwhile, Gen-X libertarians embrace Hugh Hefner as – in the words of the laudatory 2009 documentary’s subtitle – a “playboy, activist and rebel.” It helps that 1997′s beloved Boogie Nights portrayed 1970s porn production as a halcyon, more innocent era, like American Graffiti with money shots.

  Yet these exercises in what I’ll call “post-algia” – nostalgia for those too young to have experienced whatever it was the first time around – are just as likely to bomb. Despite the casting of A-listers James Franco and Amanda Seyfried, the 2013 movie Lovelace came and went. I may be one of the few individuals who saw Rated X, the 2000 flick about the Mitchell Brothers (two more porn “pioneers,” they were the guys behind Behind the Green Door.) And we’ll be waiting a while for the rehabilitation of Screw‘s Al Goldstein, who makes Larry Flynt look like the Duke of Windsor.

  Frommer and Schwartz are candid about their ambition: to build a new empire upon the ruins of Guccione’s extinct one. But is the public really clamoring to gaze at thousands of sepia-toned, tan-lined, feathered haired ladies who — when you think about it for longer than a couple of seconds — are probably somebody’s grandma by now, if they’re lucky?

  When Penthouse was in its heyday, few would have guessed that it would be outlived by, of all things, Mad Magazine. Yet while Guccione’s dynasty is now an Ozymandian rubble of tits and ass, Alfred E. Newman can still be seen leering out from magazine racks, a smirking, silent rebuke to all the supposedly smart sophisticates he’s seen come and go.

  True to form, Mad wasted no time mocking Penthouse‘s ignoble demise:

  “Dear Lenders and Creditors,” Mad‘s fake letter began, “I never thought I’d be writing to you…”

  All of which proves that the future is harder to predict than we’d like.

  Jean Harlow’s final, deliciously pre-Code exchange with matronly Marie Dressler in 1934′s Dinner at Eight endures as one of cinema’s choicest comedy morsels.

  Harlow’s Kitty, a ditzy platinum blonde gold digger, fairly knocks Dressler’s Carlotta off her feet when she pipes up:

  Kitty: I was reading a book the other day.

  Carlotta: Reading a book?!?

  Kitty: Yes. It’s all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?

  Carlotta: [Looks Kitty up and down] Oh, my dear, that’s something you need never worry about.

  It’s funny cuz it’s true — but for how much longer?

  In their paper “Robots, men and sex tourism,” two New Zealand professors predict that in the near future, robot prostitutes will offer “a range of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features.”

  Of course, high tech hookers are a standard issue science fiction trope. In meatspace, though, would more than a few curious or desperate men hire one? Yes, I know: guys don’t pay prostitutes for sex, they pay them to leave; no doubt that mission-critical function will be one of the first to be programmed into bimbo-bots (which will also possess another transhuman advantage right off the assembly line: no gag reflex.)

  Assuming these automatons were also sufficiently visually and tactilely appealing, they’d probably satisfy the basic male desire for variety, which has been know to trump even beauty as a boinkability benchmark. (Google “Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Hurley and Divine Brown” for visual evidence.)

  Although if calls to the London Fire Brigade are any indication, some fellows won’t be bothered if robot prostitutes don’t look sufficiently human. The department has taken to warning gentlemen not to abuse emergency services — and their most sensitive bits — by sticking their dicks into vacuums and even toasters.

  So those are some features, but here’s one bug: Many men also engage prostitutes (and toss money at strippers) as a power move, the chance to play puppet master. Can the resulting frisson be replicated when the object of one’s objectifications is an actual puppet with no capacity for humiliation or refusal?

  As futuristic prognostications go, ones about Westworld-type tarts are pretty, well, predictable. So are most predictions made by professional futurists, as a matter of fact. These highly paid consultants are mostly just glorified carnival cold-readers, oh-so-boldly declaring that one day we’ll all live to be really, really old and no one will have or need a boring job — presuming, that is, we all survive whatever Y2K of weather is currently in vogue.

  The only thing notable about these present-day predictions about the future is how closely they resemble the ones we’ve heard all through the past.

  I’m not the first to make the unfashionable observation that – all those jabbering Nostrodamii to the contrary — our lives really haven’t changed that much in the last fifty or sixty years.

  Here’s Mark Steyn’s contrarian take:

  I was at a college graduation in Vermont a few weeks ago, and the big shot speaker who had flown in from New York told these 21-year-olds, “You are living in such a fast-moving world.” I thought this was ridiculous. In the book [America Alone] I used the example of an HG Wells type time traveler. If you put him on the old time travel machine in 1890 and propelled him forward to 1950, he would be astonished, and he would be in his 1890 kitchen, 60 years later everything would be different.

  He’d be amazed by the refrigerator, he’d be amazed by the full sound of an orchestra coming from a little box on the countertop. He’d be amazed by the station wagon pulling into the drive. Man conquered night with the electric light bulb, conquered distance with the invention of the internal combustion engine. He would be amazed by the telephone, he would be amazed that you could book an aeroplane flight to Los Angeles or to London or to Sydney.

  We propel him on another 60 years to our time, from 1950 to our time, and actually the kitchen looks pretty much the same. The fridge is a little less bulky and it may have an ice water thing in it, but there’s really no difference, the phone has got buttons instead of a dial, again, basically not really different. Long distance travel takes actually longer in many ways than it did back in the 1950s, and we are supposed to be impressed because Steve Jobs at Apple has invented a slightly smaller gizmo on which you can download Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber.

  I don’t think that’s enough, yet people do, people say it’s fantastic, have you seen the new iBox7, it used to be an inch and a quarter for downloading Justin Bieber on, but now it’s an inch and an eighth. Big deal, I don’t think that’s enough.

  Let’s face it: the
only new standard-issue kitchen appliance is the dishwasher.

  No, that sticky white rectangle gathering dust on your countertop doesn’t really count. How often do you use yours, really? A cute running gag on Canada’s Murdoch Mysteries sees the Victorian detectives pondering how the wild “new” discoveries they learn about in each episode – radiation, telegraphy – will be domesticated by generations to come. But like most every era’s proposed “futuristic” contraptions, especially those conceived before miniaturization became feasible, the detectives’ imagined devices are ever so slightly “off” – some existing object, but with added dollops of hideous, superfluous bulk. After learning about the discovery of electromagnetic radiation, Officer Crabtree is roundly mocked for proposing that one day, every household will have its very own “potato cooking room” – that is, a microwave oven.

  And anyhow, all these appliances and more are still powered by electricity generated by the same old boring sources instead of solar or wind or tiny nuclear power plants in your basement. We continue to talk on phones and type on keyboards, endure painful, bloody surgery and (most annoying to many, from the sounds of it) drive earth-bound automobiles.

  Ah, yes: “Where’s my flying car?” jokes every barstool bore ever. We already have “flying cars,” moron. They’re called “helicopters.” Personal aviation technology isn’t what’s lagging — it’s the infrastructure of chopper-friendly landing pads and fuelling stations (and reams of new legislation, regulation and insurance underwriting) that would make them feasible automobile substitutes.

  We continue to use so many old fashioned devices because they work. That doesn’t seem to deter even supposedly clever people from screwing up a reliable, successful invention.

  Let’s look at the Japanese again.

  The folks who brought us the rape of Nanking and Hello Kitty are clearly cuckoo, but we can all agree they’re damn clever, too. Right?