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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A "Frontline" report on one of the biggest businesses in the U.S. is an exposé that offers its audience a chance to cover up, to divorce itself from its own sexual tastes.
Feb 11, 2002 | Most mainstream reporting on pornography makes me cringe. For too long, reporters and broadcasters have seized on porn as a chance to display predictable shock, to treat the porn world as if it's the modern equivalent of those ancient stories of girls being sold into the "white slave trade," to describe porn in terms usually reserved for disease, a scourge creeping unchecked into our nice, clean suburban communities. Frank Rich's piece on porn that ran in the New York Times Magazine last year was a notable exception; and Rich took to task writers like Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace for using it to score some easy moral indignation.
The PBS "Frontline" documentary "American Porn" (which aired in many cities Thursday night), produced and directed by Michael Kirk, and written by Kirk and Peter J. Boyer, didn't exactly fall into the usual porn-exposé clichés, and it even contained some real information on what the state of porn prosecution might be under a new conservative Republican administration. It made distinctions between the softcore porn of Internet entrepreneur Danni Ashe, the upscale "couples" porn produced by Vivid Video and the no-taboos-unviolated porn produced at Extreme Associates by Rob Black and his wife, Lizzie Borden. Just the fact that Kirk and Boyer made those distinctions is unusual compared with most media coverage of porn, but it wasn't enough to stop the show from being earnest and dull.
PBS has always prided itself, has always sold itself, as being separate from American culture, as being the best shot Americans have at becoming Europeans. The most priceless PBS moment ever came in the summer of 1976 when the network covered Queen Elizabeth's visit to the White House for a state dinner. The camera showed the Queen and President Ford in the receiving line while the anchors did their best to explain who Her Majesty was greeting. Last in line were a young woman and her escort and Robert MacNeil said, "Finally, a young couple meeting the queen, looking very thrilled indeed." Except that the young woman was Dorothy Hamill, who had taken the Olympic gold medal in figure skating a few months before and become America's latest sweetheart. Here was a woman whom millions of Americans had watched in Innsbruck, Austria, just a few months before, whose haircut young girls were aping all over the country, and PBS's news anchor had no idea who she was.
"American Porn" was squarely (in every sense of the word) in that tradition, with an arm's-length disdain passing for objectivity. They did a good job of explaining how porn has entered the mainstream, with the usual recitation of industry grosses, and they detailed how companies like GM (through its ownership of Direct TV, which offers porn channels) and AT&T (whose Broadband TV service offers the Hot Network) profit from porn. But "American Porn" steadfastly refused to consider what the mainstream acceptance of porn might say about America's sexual habits or its changing attitude toward censorship.
Kirk and Boyer simply took the Proper Journalistic Attitude of treating porn as a sociological phenomenon, just not one that is part of any culture that they -- or by implication any cultured PBS viewers -- feel part of. Vivid videos or peeking at Danni Ashe (the most delightful pinup model since Bettie Page) or even a bukkake tape might be for some people, the show seemed to say, but not those who enjoy settling down to watch Russell Baker introduce a Nancy Mitford adaptation on "Masterpiece Theatre." Did it never occur to Kirk and Boyer that a lot of people might enjoy a dramatization of an English novel and porn?
The unanswered question raised by most mainstream porn reporting is, "Who is this news to?" The porn industry's yearly grosses are in the billions; Frank Rich's Times article offered figures that the industry makes more than several professional sports leagues. So if porn is mainstream -- something you can buy at Tower Records, order in your hotel room or on your cable or Internet service -- how can the media still affect the charade that most Americans need to be told about this stuff?
The answer lies in the gap between what Americans do or watch and what they will acknowledge they do or watch. Even those of us who watch porn might still be embarrassed if we were to see someone we know when we're buying a porn magazine or renting a video. But "American Porn" implicitly allowed its audience the comfort of not probing that shame. At times it even fell into the "creeping scourge" syndrome, referring to porn being "swept into our living rooms" or, speaking of cable porn, "This is how it's channeled into millions of American homes," or that VCRs "allowed porn to come right into the home." This is the passive language that people adopt to talk about books or movies or broadcasts they don't like. It's the language of Little Nells subjected against their will to the cruelties of a caddish world: "I tried locking the doors, Margaret, but them gol-durn pornographers threw them dirty movies in through the transom!" Porn isn't swept or channeled into anybody's home unless they choose to bring it there. It wasn't VCRs that allowed porn to come "right into the home"; it was people deciding to rent or buy porn videos. As a video box shown in the program says, "If you like anal sex, take this tape home." And if you don't, don't.
