According to his own journal entry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most revered figures in American literary history, was so devastated by the death of his young wife, Ellen, that, shortly after her burial, he went out to the cemetery one night and dug up her corpse, though he didn’t mention exactly what he did with it.
One of the most popular episodes of the police TV show, Homicide: Life On the Street, was about the investigation of an old lonely widower, a mortician, who used to party with the corpses, setting them around a table as if they were alive. The police investigated him because he shot a neighbor who knew about this practice, and then sat in the garden and waited for the cops. But again, the mortician’s relationship with those corpses may have been purely platonic.
Let us now eavesdrop on the dialogue of a few participants in an Internet support group, Necrophiliacs Anonymous:
“Obviously, neither a corpse nor a four-year-old can provide consent, but if you leave permission in your will for your lonesome spouse or significant other to have one last fling with your mortal coil, shouldn’t the state of California respect your wishes?”
“I still think that organ donation is a better cause. It’s just that I believe the only offense here is really violation of private property. I wonder if someone gives their partner, in a will, the right to have sex with their body after their death, will it be legal?”
“Or, even without that permission, if you are an only heir of somebody, doesn’t it mean their body belongs to you? It sounds gross, but isn’t it an issue of private rights in the United States of America, that likes so much the idea of individualism and is ready to exploit people and the environment in the name of that ideal?”
“I never understood why people think that having sex with a dead body is worse than raping a living person. To me, that’s the worst kind, and then raping poor helpless animals. I really couldn’t care less about my own dead body.”
Conversely, the late evangelist turned comedian, Sam Kinison, had a great routine about necrophilia: “Well, that’s it, man—I’m dead. Nothing else bad can happen to me now. Wait a minute—what’s that? What’s this guy doing? What’s going on here? [Screams] Oh oh oh oh oh OH OH OH OH OH OOOOOOHHHHHH NOOOOOOOW Live in Hell!!!”
The majority of cannibalistic serial killers are motivated by a kind of necrophilia—it’s usually a highly sexually arousing experience for them when they eat their victims. Here, from my “Great Moments in Necrophila” file, is a dispatch from the Associated Press:
“The prosecution in the insanity trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer rested its case. Dahmer has confessed to killing and dismembering 17 young males since 1978. A jury must decide if he will be sent to prison or a mental institution. The final prosecution witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist, testified that Dahmer wore condoms when having sex with his dead victims, showing that he could control his urge to have intercourse with corpses.”
I smell a public service announcement there: “If Jeffrey Dahmer is sane enough to have safe sex, what about you?”
PORN PROVIDES PRODUCT PLACEMENT
PORN PROVIDES PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Of course it’s tragic when anybody gets AIDS, but in the porn industry, when a couple of actors tested positive for HIV—then it was four, then it was six—various producers actually had to stop production while all their actors were getting tested. What you probably didn’t know, though, is that in order to make up for the funds, which were lost during the delay, they decided that when they started producing again, their new features would garner extra income by including product placement.
“If it’s good enough for American Idol,” said one porn producer, referring to the mandatory drinking of Coca-Cola by the three judges on that show, “then it’s good enough for us.”
“How do you know that was product placement?” his partner asked. “You’re just cynical. You probably think that Bob Dole got paid by the Paper Mate Pen company for always holding that pen in his crippled hand.”
“No, I’m not that cynical,” replied the first producer. “Dole fought in World War II, and a rocket launcher embedded that pen in his hand.”
In any case, these producers became the first in the business to experiment with product placement for extra revenue.
A beautiful young woman is masturbating with a clearly labeled Hitachi Magic Wand.
“This vibrator is not just for my clit,” she says to the camera between moans. “It can stimulate erogenous zones I didn’t even know I had.”
Thus was the ice broken. Another entrepreneur presented a muscular man using a feather duster to cover his cock and balls and asshole with edible honey dust powder. When his girlfriend gives him a combination blow job and rim job, the viewer can’t help but notice a close-up of the popular Kama Sutra logo.
The CEO of NextMedium, which has launched a product placement marketplace called Embed, states that, “To date, product placement has been opportunistic and Rolodex based. Our goal is to establish brand integration as an ad category.” To meet that goal, a product could be written—that is, entrenched— into a story line.
Along those lines, in order to give a particular scene a certain organic feel, where product placement must be integral to the plot, a porn director arranged for a couple to use a sex machine built for two, with the male playing the role of an activist salesman.
“This is the Televibe 8100,” he explains to her as they proceed to undress. “It can be operated remotely either by telephone or over the Internet.”
She asks, “How does it work?”
“Well, you just hook it right into the phone, and it’s controlled by this keypad, no matter how far away from each other we are. We could be anywhere in the world. For now, I’ll simply go into the other room. Here, I’ll show you.”
He puts a Foxy Lady vibrating pussy sleeve on his erect penis and goes into the other room. However, it doesn’t work because the necessary four triple-A batteries were not included. They both have a hearty laugh over his mistake and then they just get in bed to fuck like mad in the good old-fashioned way.
A similar theme was developed in the porn equivalent of a Tupperware Party. A pair of lesbians have a go at it with the Penthouse Snap-On Strap-On. Then a group of women take turns dirty dancing on the Johnny Lonely stripper pole.
Indeed, another porn movie also manages to slip in a bit of educational dialogue. The girl is waiting in her home for the proverbial pizza delivery boy.
“Hi, honey,” he says, “I know that you’re at the height of fertility, so I brought your favorite Trojan, the one that has ribbing and a French tickler on the reservoir tip.”
“Oh,” she responds, “that’s so thoughtful of you. But, you know, just to avoid any irritation, I have this bottle of Astro-glide lubricant.”
And then, he says, “Listen, I’m going out of town for a week, but I also brought this Clone-a-Willy kit, so we can make an exact vibrating rubber copy of my dick for you to use while I’m away.”
“Wow,” she exclaims, stroking the real thing to nice, solid hardness. “This is really a very romantic gesture.”
So, this pom producer asks his partner, “You think we can make a product placement deal with Rolex for our next fisting flick?”
“Nah, because it wouldn’t be visible.”
“It’s visible if you wear it above your elbow.”
ADDICTED TO PORN
ADDICTED TO PORN
In the same issue of Rolling Stone that rap star Kanye West posed on the cover as Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns circling his head, he admitted inside the magazine that he’s addicted to pornography. Now, what would Jesus do? It gives new meaning to the Second Coming. In Hooked, a documentary by Todd Ahlberg, a gay interviewee says, “The Internet is the drive-through for sex.... A guy starts going online out of curiosity. Then he realizes how easy it is and then before long...” He goes on to describe his deep fear of being addicted to online sex.
Oprah Winfrey stated on her daytime TV prog
ram that “Pornography is the number one addiction” in the United States. She proceeded to warn her virtually all-female audience with a rhetorical question: “Could this be your husband?” Kirk Franklin, a Grammy-winning gospel singer and recovering porn addict, was a guest on that show. Oh, yes, and he also had a new album to promote. Another guest was Robert Weiss, a self-styled expert on addiction to pornography. He claimed that ten percent of the forty million online porn users are addicts.
Which exasperated sex writer Susie Bright, who ranted on her website, susiebright.com:
“When will these people stop lying through their teeth? What an old phony Rob Weiss is! He’s the original snake oil salesman. This hustler has made the rounds of TV talk shows for years, ranting about sex addiction. What about those figures he quotes about how many people ‘watch’ Internet porn, and how many are addicts? He makes them up! There’s not a citation in the world to support him.
“He doesn’t represent legitimate psychology in the slightest. In fact, every shrink I know recoils at his name. Weiss feeds off of all these hip new Christian fundamentalist churches. They ‘use’ porn to recruit. Without it, they’re dead in the water. They play on people’s sexual feelings to get them excited, and then shame the shit out of them. It is so cruel to lead them on and make them think they are dealing with a pathology that requires spending thousands of dollars to be cured by ‘Doctor’ Weiss.”
Weiss is aided and abetted by Dear Abby and her fellow mainstream advice givers. Whenever they publish a column with a letter from an anxious wife or girlfriend who has discovered porn on her husband’s or boyfriend’s computer, the answer always assumes it’s another case of addiction to porn and recommends that the poor fellow needs to seek professional help or else their marriage or their relationship will be doomed. It’s not porn’s fault, though.
An article in the Los Angeles Times stated: “If there is one psychological element that unites them, clinicians who work with these addicts say, it is a basic way to cope with depression or anxiety that rules the rest of their lives. Web porn becomes a kind of self-administered shock therapy.” Fortunately, there are several support groups available, porn equivalents of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Let’s look in on a typical meeting at Porn Anonymous:
“Hi, I’m Tom.”
Everybody: “Hi, Tom.”
“I’m here because I’m addicted to porn. Or at least my wife thinks I am. She caught me masturbating to my computer and she went berserk. She insisted that I attend Porn Anonymous, so here I am. But it’s all her fault. She won’t allow me to come on her face. I tried it once, and I’ll never forget her scream: ‘Do not ever ejaculate on my face again!’ Well, if I couldn’t do it, at least I could watch somebody else doing it to get myself aroused. But the porn stars always look like they’re really enjoying it, so I just assumed my wife would too....”
“Hi, my name is Dick.”
“Hi, Dick.”
“I’m a porn addict. It’s no big deal to me. Porn, you know, I can take it or leave it. But I’d rather take it. That simple. But my girlfriend is jealous of my computer screen. She says, ‘What, I’m not enough for you? Just because one time I said no, I was too tired.’ I tell her, ‘Look, it has nothing to do with you. I like to whack off and not worry about getting you off.’ And we got into a big fight. She’s yelling, ‘Worry! You worry about getting me off? It’s supposed to give you goddam pleasure!’ Anyway, I promised her I would come here. I’m not ready to break off with her yet....”
“Hey, I’m Harry.”
“Hey, Harry.”
“Nobody had to tell me to come here. I know I’m a porn addict. Well, not exactly. I’m a porn-addict addict. I come here because the stories that porn addicts tell get me fuckin’ horny. Then I go home and jerk off....”
THE GOVERNOR, THE HOOKER AND THE PORN STAR
THE GOVERNOR, THE HOOKER AND THE PORN STAR
If former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had only indulged in an affair with that woman, “Karen,” he would not have been charged with a crime. However, in a bizarre spin of capitalist theory, the fact that he actually paid for her services—whether it was $50 or $5,000 makes no difference—he could conceivably be sent to prison, not for fucking her, but rather for paying his debt to her.
Had it been a romantic date rather than a business transaction, it would have been perfectly legal for him to present her with a costly piece of jewelry, take her out to a gourmet dinner, followed by a high priced Broadway play on opening night, and then when he proceeded to fuck her, he would not have been busted for committing the victimless crime of renting a female body for the evening.
Usually, it has been the chintzy street whore or the expensive
call girl who gets arrested, not her client, but this was quite an unusual case. In the same hotel room in Washington D.C. that Spitzer would be spritzing around with Karen, he had just written, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post about the sub-prime loan tragedy: “Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”
In fact, the reason Spitzer had flown to Washington was to launch a campaign to attack the arrogant Bush cabal and the arrogant corporations that empower them. He wrote, “When history tells the story of the sub-prime lending crisis and recounts the devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent home-owners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.” Thus, the real motivation for Spitzer’s arrest.
But let us flash back to 1974. My friend Margo St. James— who once masturbated me in a porn theater while wearing a nun’s costume—organized the first Hookers Ball, which became an annual event. She founded the legendary prostitutes’ rights organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), the purpose of which has evolved into the celebration a few months ago of International Sex Worker Rights Day, an unofficial holiday that originated in 2001 when over 25,000 sex workers gathered in India for such a festival.
Because critics of the porn industry have equated the actresses in adult movies with prostitutes because they both get paid for having sex, I thought it would be appropriate now to seek Margo’s take on that particular phenomenon. She was,
after all, a pioneer activist in the field of sex workers.
“The Internet porn industry seems to be made up of amateurs,” she told me, “but the topic serves well as advertising for the real thing. Porn was legalized by case law. Although it fits the description of sex work, it is usually operated by third parties, mostly men. This seemed okay, because there isn’t sex between two parties for money. Though there are many people having sex together for the cameras, the porn actors are paid by a third party.
“Legalization of sex work in the de facto way our culture has developed it—under the heading of ‘massage,’ ‘escort,’ and so forth—keeps the illusion alive that women aren’t doing it for the money directly. So when we discussed the issue at our conventions, we felt that actual legalization would simply make the government the pimp. Decriminalization, on the other hand, would respect the nature of sex, that of a cottage industry, leaving the money in the hands of the provider.
“The prostitution prohibition criminalizes women for the money, not the sex. The law is clear that adults in private can have all the sex they think they want as long as no consideration is offered or accepted. This is the foundation for keeping women’s bodies firmly in the control of the government as far as their sexuality and right to choose to have children. As long as this stigma is placed on women, Roe vs. Wade is on shaky ground. This is the bottom line for women’s rights, and repeal is imperative for full equality.”
I have always thought that prostitutes were on the front lines of the women’s movement. For, as long as the police can harass a woman on the street because she merely looks like a hooker, they can hassle any woman on the street. Ultima
tely, because of what Margo St. James refers to as “prostitution prohibition,” Eliot Spitzer has most likely lost forever his ambition of becoming president of the United States. As for his one-night stand, Karen, she will probably get her own talk show on HBO, or maybe even the Oxygen channel.
A LETTER TO “JUDGE PORN
A LETTER TO “JUDGE PORN
Dear Judge Porn,
I know your name is actually Alex Kozinski, but I couldn’t resist asking this rhetorical question: Should Judge Porn judge porn? Specifically, in your capacity as chief justice of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, you were given the case of Ira Isaacs, a producer and distributor of pornography. His defense is that the movies he sells are works of art and are therefore protected by the First Amendment.
As you must know, the U.S. Department of Justice Obscenity Task Force, which was formed in 2005 after Christian conservative groups pressured the Bush administration to crack down on porn, is “dedicated exclusively to the protection of America’s children and families through enforcement of obscenity laws.” The task force has won convictions in more than a dozen cases—five in Texas alone—and they’ve won mostly on the basis of plea bargains. But, rather than go after the makers of plain vanilla porn, these prosecutors focus on fetishes because a jury is more likely to find guilty a defendant who is responsible for porn flicks that feature defecation and sex with animals. Which of course brings up another rhetorical question: “Who’s to say what art is?”
And so, Judge Porn, when jury selection began, you urged potential jurors to be open about their opinions. In the first hour, you dismissed 26 men and women who acknowledged that they could not be fair to defendant Isaacs because they were so repulsed by the subject matter of his products. At the end of the first day, from a panel of 100, half were excused. Isaacs himself admitted, “I think I’d freak out if I had to watch six hours of the stuff.” And then the god of Irony descended upon you. On a section of your own website that you mistakenly considered to be private, a Beverly Hills attorney—in the midst of a dispute with you about another matter—was able to find questionable material and download it on a CD, including:
In Praise of Indecency Page 9
