Tuesday 12 June 2012

Louis Theroux on Porn


There is something of the vicar up the Zambezi about Louis Theroux traipsing across the San Fernando Valley documenting the crisis in porn. Because if he'd made conversation such as 'Well I really liked This Is A Big Butt Stick Up but rather think  Pull My Hair and F**k Me Till I  Scream was....' the whole thing would be less unfortunate, it would at least show he's dipped his toe in the water (so to speak) and he'd come over a whole lot less unfortunately voyeuristic on the business of voyeurism. AA Gill, for instance, does it much better in When DD met AA in the book AA Gill is Away.
It would also be much better if Theroux (or the BBC and the whole bunch of hamsters who produced this lamentable program) were prepared to see the crisis in porn in SFV as the equivalent of say, the crisis in shipbuilding on the Clyde, just one for our speeded up consumer driven technological times. To hear porn folks lamenting the good old days way back in 2005 and the sudden demise of the professional porn actor was interesting not because they do porn for a living, but because it was apparently GREAT only seven years ago, and because a whole industry is now going to the dogs.
It is a typical example of supply, demand, and means of delivery. Marx would have had an easy time with it.
The product, jacking off, would seem to be fairly invariable over the centuries, with various scruples getting in the way of course, but the same none the less. If you make all the worlds invariable material for jacking off suddenly free and have the technology to recycle the shit interminably you don't need any more of it except in the case of supplying very particular emerging markets. Hence if you have a fetish for shoving your iphone up your ass, no doubt this will soon be available, but it is niche.
Historians are going to have a fine time going over our speeded up times. It used to be you could describe a decade with difficulty, now you'll have to get forensic over six monthly intervals. Not good. The middle ages will be back in no time.


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