In Praise of Hardcore - Revisited.

There's a great essay by the late great essayist and secret spanker Kenneth Tynan called "In Praise Of Hardcore". It was written in the 1970s and is an unabashed paen to hard core p0rnography.

Of course, Tynan was writing about erotica in the 1970s, before AIDS tainted desire with fear, before Andrea Dworkin and Gail Dines demonised male sexuality and before 99% of video p0rn became paralytically self-important. Tynan was writing in a time of Oh! Calcutta!, Deep Throat and Behind The Green Door. To him, Gonzo P0rn would have been Hunter S. Thompson's 8mm home movies.

As a long time aficionado of the arts p0rnographic, I have a few thoughts on the subject.

Tynan points out that literature evokes emotion. He then questions why it's considered acceptable for, say, a horror novel to portray mutilation, evisceration, monstrously painful death and other subtler tortures, evoking dread in the audience or reader and yet a piece of literature that evokes sexual arousal, a pleasurable, life-affirming sensation, is vilified.

To put it another way, why is Hitchcock's Psycho okay but The Opening Of Misty Beethoven (a re-engineered witty X-Rated version of Pygmalion), not?

Modern p0rn is of course different. It is to classic 1970s p0rn what Master Chef is to old-school cooking shows. A joyless, characterless, plasticised, commercialised parody of the original.

Due to the effortless distribution methods of modern p0rn, it is accessible to children and younger teenagers. I'm no more in favour of that than I am of making booze or car keys available to kids. Unfortunately, I know how to trick that genie back into the bottle. Maybe if Sabu was still alive, he could.

In facetious moments, I lament the good old days when I was a teenager. Back then, it took real dedicated effort to get some p0rn. I had to take a train into Sydney and then walk up William Street to get a copy of The Kings Cross Whisper, Ribald or Bawdy or to visit an X-Rated cinema. Let's call it, conservatively, a thirty five kilometre trip each way.

But remember, that was a culturally long time ago. In those days, a Brazilian was someone who admired The Girl From Ipanema walking by and the only guys who denuded their chest hair worked at Les Girls.

So I am in favour of p0rn. I am not in favour of the exploitation of people to make it. Consenting amateur p0rn is a big market sector now. The megabucks that used to be available to producers and distributors are fast dwindling with the proliferation of free video web portals like P0rntube and Y0up0rn. (find your own links for those).

I am in favour of joyous erotica, where the participants are genuinely having a good time, have fondness for one another and don't have dollar signs in place of the pupils of their eyes.

Our enemy isn't erotica in its myriad forms, it's the people who exploit others to produce it.