The woman is white, with long legs, and dark hair. The three men that she's simultaneously servicing are muscular and black. For an extra dash of the exotic, she wears black stockings and a cabin attendant's hat from some fictional airline. I don't recall the source of the clip, but I do remember how, at the time, I began to wonder when creative pornography would run out of erotic permutations.
Permutations are, of course, what the mainstream of pornography is all about. It's mix'n'match, gender and genitals, men and women in every possible combination, and, under special circumstances, the occasional domestic animal. Now and then a work of porn will attempt a story arc, even a plot, but, for the most part, the old Howard Stern joke holds good. "What's the point of a plot in a porn film when you only watch three minutes at a time?"
Adult entertainment is rarely accused of being over-creative, and the mainstream often seems to be merely keeping the customers satisfied by recycling variations on a standard formula. Some might claim, since the sum total of possible pornographic scenarios are far from infinite, the bulk of the material being currently marketed is nothing more than standard set-pieces with different faces, new bodies, and the odd fanciful touch like the aforementioned airline cap or Lucite shoes; essentially the same cake with different icing. Lately, however, I've become aware of areas where this doesn't seem to be the case.
Perhaps I watch too many downloads from the fringes of porn. Aside from any personal preferences, these are the places where some true originality can be found. (Although, this being the world of porn, creativity can be too easily dismissed as nothing more than clever kink.) The directors and performers who labor in the niche areas are definitely going where no porn has gone before. The purveyors of elaborate rope bondage, mechanized dildos, weird stuff involving electricity or water (hopefully not at the same time), or Eastern European operations like Lupus Pictures, that specialize in scripted BDSM costume epics in fictional gulags and girls schools, seem compelled to break new ground. I suspect the primary reason is that, in their market, they have succeed by keeping at least a couple of jumps ahead of the customer's imagination, and leaving him or her wondering how they came up with that idea.
And, in so doing, they steer oddly close to experimental films, and, at times, start to take on a weird cultural significance. The new subdivision of Kink.com called Public Disgrace has a definite resemblance to both cutting-edge filmmaking and performance art. In one clip they feature a woman leading her manacled female companion down a busy city street, while passersby either turn and stare, or surprisingly ignore the perverse intrusion. In another Public Disgrace offering, multiple sex acts are performed in broad daylight on a ramp to a pedestrian underpass, another shows a gangbang performed in a Starbucks-style coffee house, while, in third, multiple penetrations are achieved on a busy city bus. (Identifying the city hosting all this erotic action is not easy. It looks American, but probably isn't.) Although Public Disgrace is marketed as porn, it's a very long way from the conventional mainstream.
Whether the individuals behind Public Disgrace know it or not, they are fulfilling the wildest dreams of guerrilla performance artists of the 20th century. They may not have the same mass impact as the naked crowd pictures of photographer/artist Spencer Tunick, but they are definitely in the same ballpark, and would probably be the envy of performance artist Karen Finley, who scandalized New York in during the Reagan 1980s by staging shows in which she introduced fruit, vegetables and other produce into various body cavities.
Art and porn have always performed an uneasy dance in which one claimed to be creative and the other strictly commercial. These new developments, however, make me wonder if a major change is waiting just over the horizon, and we are going to see some radical new directions in erotica as the moral clamps of the Bush era are relaxed.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
This article originally appeared in the February issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
