No Man’s Blog

In one of the episodes in the fourth season of friends, Joey and Chandler notice they get a free porn channel and unsurprisingly, through the whole episode they’re stuck to the TV and never turn it off in fear it will go away. At some point Rachel enters the room and says:

Rachel: Y’know who doesn’t even like dirty movies? My new boyfriend Joshua.

Joey: Yeah right.

Rachel: No, he told me. He prefers to leave certain things to the imagination.

Chandler:Oh-oh, yeah, and did he also say that ah, some of the dialogue was corny and that he actually found it was funnyand not sexy?

Rachel: Yes!

Joey: Yeah, he likes porn...

I don’t want to be sound like self-righteous puritan elitist asshole but I honestly don’t consume porn (ok, in the past year I entered a porn website twice). And I’m 100% positive that there are quite a lot of us out there that do not consume porn, not because of any puritan reasons whatsoever. We do not watch porn movies simply because it sucks. It is offending to watch, first and foremost aesthetically. Every porn movie I’ve ever seen was one big cliché that looks like a really bad parody of porn movies. All these low-quality style clichés, genital close-ups, slapdash sets, and, yes, the dialogues are at best just dim-witted chauvinists and at worst appalling. Excuse my elitism on this one but mainstream porn is a low-quality, ludicrous and corny cultural artifact.

And I find it quite surprising that although in every aspect of our culture and consumerism (music, fashion, films, brands, entertainment, food, literature – you name it!) there are not only endless choices but, more importantly, dynamic hierarchy of quality, value and worth. There is high-end for everything we consume, that is determined either by its price or by other institutionalized practices that establishes classes and elitism, like the art world. In every aspect, apart from porn, which, although become a multi-billion industry and is more mainstream than ever, still produces mostly close-ups on penetrations. (Surely in a £billion industry there are the goods and the bads, but the differences are for the most part aesthetic due to higher/lower production costs).

Now don’t get me wrong; sure, if I’ll sit in front of the telly and watch some porn, even the lowest of the low, no doubt I will be turned on….unfortunately (?), when it comes to porn, physiology precedes culture and cognition – I’m not a bit less monkey than the average porn consumer. But I choose not to watch it because I don’t like to consume content and entertainment that confronts me with my monkeyness.

But there’s a sense of change in the air, or more specifically, in the web. I recently spotted few interesting ‘enterprises’ that hopefully mark a new trend: quality erotica. First, from the blogsphere, there is Violet Blue and her sexblog – tiny nibbles. I only discovered it recently and it seems unlike any piece of ‘sex communication’ I’ve seen or read before – high quality sex education.

And now there’s Blue Artichoke Films, a new start-up in Amsterdam that aspires to “make erotic films that are fascinating, engaging, energizing, and most of all sexy. We want to create erotic films that evoke far more than merely a vague sense of being turned on”. Halleluiah! I’d put my money on them; If they manage to do that they have one huge golden goose. The first brand that will dare to produce a kick-us piece of quality porn as branded content will be a big winner. Imagin Agent Provocateur coming up with a series of (BMW-like) short films – it will be the most downloaded viral in history. And finally, a very cool website – beautiful agony – where you can see…well get inside and you’ll see – I don’t want to spoil the surprise.