Musings on porn and uncle terry

Apropos to my last post, (and this one) I’ve been thinking a lot about the pornography industry and Terry Richardson. Putting the sexual harassment allegations aside for a moment, a lot of his pictures are basically high brow porn. Now, I know others have made this comparison before, so I wonder, if not for the coercion and harassment accusations, would there be this much outrage over his pictures? I mean, porn in American culture is by no means this secret, taboo thing anymore.

I’m not saying porn is mainstream in the same way the “Gossip Girl” is, but it’s not far beneath the surface. Porn is only a click or two away on the Internet; mainstream TV shows talk about porn and often have their own soft, sexy romps. When I lived in Chicago, I was only a couple blocks away from an erotic toy/video store. Sex is everywhere already, in advertising, in fashion. You know, the “sex sells” business. So really, what’s the big deal with Richardson’s pictures?

I suspect it’s because he’s a powerful, mainstream photographer who has had work published in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and about every major magazine possible who also creates creepy and misogynistic pictures. Would it be better if he was aligned not with the likes of Anna Wintour, but with producers and directors in the adult entertainment industry that has created material just as bad, even worse, than a flower stuck in a vagina?

Consider, the Gonzo-style adult film. (Now, to any porn video connoisseurs out there, this may seriously date me. By. . . 12 years. I’m pulling this from an essay by the late David Foster Wallace (DFW) called “Big Red Son” (in his collection of essays called Consider the Lobster) about the 1998 Adult Video News awards– the Academy Awards for porn, basically.

Max Hardcore (of MAXWORLD production company) as been talking on (and on, ad nauseum) about his brainchild, the Gonzo-style adult film, which basically sounds like an even filthier version of Girls Gone Wild, but with anal sex that is sometimes performed by cajoling the civilian (non-porn star) women met on location. DFW notes this is one reason for Max Hardcore’s fame, that he could “perpetrate on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years go” (remember this is 1998).

Further, there’s the “Bizarro-Sleaze” genre (created by two different directors, Gregory Dark and Rob Black) where the star is asked in interviews “whether she thinks she’s a slut and whether she thinks she’s eventually going to go to hell for her insatiable sluttiness and how she felt about the sexual attentions of her piggish stepfather” and then she’s gang-banged “into a stupor” by four woodmen in bow-ties and snouts. (Lovely. You have to wonder who is watching those movies and why. Working out rage and misogyny or creating a misogynistic monster?)

Throughout the essay, we see man after man after man that’s in charge, either as producer and/or director. And women painted up in hyper-feminine get-ups, foot-destroying 4”heels, pants that required Vaseline to get into, extravagant hair-do’s that have fried all the hair, “zeppelinesque” breasts and even one young woman whose boob job included a valve so she could inflate and deflate her breasts at will. Jesus.

Max Hardcore, this sexist turd, is one of these men in charge. He refers to his stars as “little girls” and makes a show of taking care of one of “his” women by herding a small group of men and women into the elevator down to the hotel’s dining area, stuffing a wad of money into the waiter’s hanky-pocket and loudly announcing that he “want[s] to take care of his little girl’s damages in advance.” Also, he tucks the napkin into this “little girl’s” lap.

So. What we have going on with adult films and a lot of Terry Richardson’s pictures. Neither are created for women to express their sexuality, they’re for men’s sexuality. These films and photos are created and controlled by men for the needs of men (often gross, fucked up needs). Sure, a lot of Uncle Terry’s work goes into fashion magazines (which, arguably, are more for women), but when you have a man who so often inserts himself into pictures with naked ladies, it’s obvious that this man’s primary concern is his ego. And his penis. Also remember, Uncle Terry frequently uses little girls, young women who quite possibly are not 18, to pose for his pictures.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that porn is inherently bad, or that sex is bad, or that the women in these films are horrible sluts or dunces or whatever. I’m not trying to assign motives to any star or model, in fact, it’s none one anyone’s damn business. And I’m not saying that the adult film stars or models don’t enjoy what they do. But what I am saying is regardless of whether or not a woman freely chooses to make an adult video or pose in one of Uncle Terry’s porny pictures, we still have an industry who’s power structure is built and controlled by male definitions of female sexuality.

That is the problem. But the adult entertainment industry seems one up on Uncle Terry because the women that star in adult films are being paid specifically to perform in a sexual way. With Terry Richardson, however, it’s a lot more dubious.

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