First, and at the risk of being snarky: If you think there are only a handful of ways for people to have sex, then I feel sorry for your partners. There is quite a bit more variety available in sex than a few standard variations on fucking and sucking. Read any good general sex guide, like The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex or The Guide to Getting It On, and you’ll get a sense of the tip of the iceberg. Or take a look at the entertainingly long list of adult movie genres available for rent at Bluedoor.com. (Admittedly, many of these genres refer to technical formatting and plot devices and whatnot… but there are more than enough sexual options to keep an enterprising couple busy for a good long time.)
But second, and far more importantly:
What makes porn interesting isn’t that it comes up with some new and different sex act, or some new combination of previously known sex acts.
What makes porn interesting is that it comes up with new ways to look at sex.
To find out more about what I think makes good porn interesting — and why porn is no more likely to be repetitive than writing/ film/ art about any other topic — read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!
Hi, Greta,
I enjoyed this piece (and I frequent your blog and usually enjoy your writing– keep up the great work! :>).
I want to add my vote agreeing with you: porno is often the same-old, but that’s only because any kind of movie is. Just take a look at popular movies over the last thirty years: a few bright spots, but those are /not/ the norm.
I have been watching a lot of porn from the so-called Golden Age lately, and although I do get the appeal of gonzo and sometimes really like it and enjoy its intensity, there is a lot to be said for the days when blue films had a budget and a script.
To be frank, people who attack pornography as repetitious probably either haven’t seen enough kinds of it or are really attacking it for some other reason. Maybe they need to see a Rinse Dream movie. Maybe the zombiecore flick they saw didn’t turn them on, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t different. Everyone has different fantasies, and every porn director with an idea does try to do something different within the commercial constraints available to them, just like a director of any other sort of movie– they also have to make a living, and really interesting ideas are just not going to sell or appeal to everybody.