This week, on a site I frequent called Adult DVD Talk, a porn company called 3rd Degree anounced the release of video featuring asian women which they cleverly entitled Slant Eye for the Straight Guy.

Porn has a long tradition of riffing on mainstream titles; things like On Golden Blonde, Forrest Hump, or Edward Penishands. These are gems of wit compared to the trend in contemporary gonzo titles, featuring catchy titles like Big Black Wet Asses, Cumfart Cocktails,or Teenage Anal Princesses. And these beauties are positively benign compared to countless titles that reflect a profound fear and hatred of women or sex or both; titles like Cum Dumpsters, Throat Gaggers or I Never Knew Kendra Jade was Such a Cock Up Her Ass Gang Bang Slut. (Doesn’t that just roll off your tongue?) It’s against this backdrop that there’s a now long running thread on ADT dicsussing whether or not Slant Eye for the Straight Guy is an offensive title.

The defense of the title goes something like this: it was an asian, female staffer that came up with the title; no offense was intended; and anyway, it’s just porn. Quoting Mike Quasar a director for Zero Tolerance, “I still can’t believe that this is still an issue. Do any of you have any clue as to how incredibly insignificant porn is in the grand scheme of things?” To me, Mike’s comment is a sad half-truth.

I think of porn as the collision of sex and the moving image, and no one could describe either sex or the moving image as insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet somehow, in this collision, both sex and the moving image emerge diminished. It is difficult to find good sex in porn, and near impossible to find good filmmaking. Instead, the universal human experience of sexual desire and the most important art and communication medium of our time are combined to produce work that rarely even rises to the level of mundane.

Yet in spite of this, if anything, porn seems to be overly significant in the grand scheme of things. It’s significant enough that a little over a year ago, and in the midst of a war, our Commander in Cheif saw fit to declare Protection from Pornography Week. It’s significant enough that the mainstream media routinely freebases the porn industry; no sweeps-week is complete with some sort of porn exclusive. (These come in two flavors, either Porn Is More Mainstream Than Ever! or The Real, Ugly Truth Behind the Flesh Trade!) For something so insignificant, porn sure gets a lot of press!

At any rate, it’s a school day, which gives me seven uninterupted hours to work on syncing Damon and Hunter’s scene, seven hours to match the images of sucking and fucking and loving to the slurping and smacking of lips and the firm gentle thud of bodies joyously colliding (there’s that word again.) Certainly there are folks who will be at least as offended by what I will do with Damon and Hunter as anyone is by Slant Eye for the Straight Guy. Hopefully I’ll have the good sense to say nothing. Hopefully the work will speak for itself. But if I can’t hold my tongue, one thing you can be sure I won’t say is, “It’s just porn.”

-T.C.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 6:20 am and is filed under gonzo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.