Image from the upcoming ASHLEY & KISHA

I don’t know why it’s happened, but in the last week Comstock Films has risen to the second page of google for the search string “real sex”, and as a result “real sex” has been our number one search string for the last week. (That space is usually occupied by “Comstock Films”.)

I remember, I was in the shower when it came to me, fully formed:

Comstock Films: Real People, Real Life, Real Sex

Real people, meaning folks who seem whole and authentic; real life, meaning a point of view about sex that sees it as a part of the greater human experience, and one of its great joys; and real sex, meaning depicting sex in a way that is at least about the mutual pleasure of the subjects as it is about indulging the voyeuristic fancies of the audience (and the filmmaker!). It’s a tagline that would suppose to differenciate what we do from what is more commonly available to people who go looking for a film about sex with the very specific intent of watching it and getting turned on.

But lately I’ve been thinking the problem with porn isn’t that it’s not real enough, but that it’s too real. Too much of the time porn looks exactly like what it is (people having sex on camera for money), and not enough like what we wish it was (people having sex on camera because it makes them feel good). Instead of emotional, porn feels transactional; alien instead of fantastic.

That doesn’t mean we’ll be changing our tagline anytime soon. A lot of people who say they want something different say that what their looking for is something that feels “more real”, and a lot of those people find what they’re looking for in the films we make. But our tagline not withstanding, more and more I’m thinking the Comstock Films difference isn’t between “real sex” and “fake sex”, it’s between real intimacy and real alienation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 7:39 am and is filed under Intimacy, Real Sex, sex films. 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.