Lucking Out - James Wolcott [92]
As with punk, my formal introduction into the porn funnel had begun with a Village Voice assignment. I was doing an essay on the eroticization and exploitation of young girls that puddle-jumped from Lewis Carroll’s photographs to Lolita to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver to Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby to wherever the last station stop in the piece ended up being. I needed to check out rumors that illegal underage porn was being openly sold in Times Square adult video stores and started scouting the aisles. It didn’t take much scouting. The jailbait items for sale jumped out at you. It was there for peep-show viewing (peep-show booths, those Dr. Who telephone boxes for the sexually dispossessed), the footage imported from Denmark and other countries that didn’t seem to care, vignettes involving young teens in student uniforms or Girl Guide outfits; likewise, bestiality films, also imported, judging by the peasant attire of the human participants on the packaging, the dirndls. I didn’t want to imagine the sort of man who would linger too long at this county fair, because only a man would. Only a man would stage these things, film these things, watch these things. I was a man too, maybe not much of one yet, but enough of one to feel complicit simply knowing such things existed, maggot colonies of them.
I filed the piece, a responsible-toned cultural-reporting essay that avoided tabloid sensationalism and easy moralizing (it was not a subject suited for flippancies, that I knew going in). But after the article was printed I continued dropping in to Times Square (and by “dropping” I mean just happening to be in the slummy vicinity after making a trip expressly for that very purpose), making the irregular rounds of the theaters enough to be as up on the latest trends in smut as a racetrack tipster. Caution in my case being the better part of cowardice, I never had sex with a prostitute or ventured into the sicky-poo Krafft-Ebing side alleys of voyeurdom, priding myself on my vanilla tastes, pride being the better part of self-conceit. I intermittently haunted Times Square and it haunted me, the place exerting a pull even as it deadened the nerves, nerve deadening being part of the pull. Porn has all the attributes of junk, wrote Norman Mailer, and I interpreted his use of “junk” not simply as a synonym for trash but as a slang term for heroin and any other hook-sinking hijacker of body and soul. Porn was an addictive fix—masturbation as self-medication—and porn addiction doesn’t carry the cautionary-tale romance of penthouse highs and gutter lows, just a sputtering stop-start series of catch-and-release buildups and let-gos that offered none of the humpbacked redemptive arcs of other addiction narratives. Porn hobbyists and rapid rejaculators with dark circles under their eyes and dull hair never reap the benefits of the dramatic gutter romance of alcohol or drug addiction, the binges and blackouts and bleary dawns in strange beds, the Christly withdrawal convulsions of the racked flesh and the beatific predawns that lead to the resurrection of recovery, reentry into society. For a porn addict, the blinds are always lowered and time inches sideways, other narcotics at least allowing one to forget oneself for a longer, self-losing spell, a deeper erasure. Kicking cocaine can be a conquering feat; kicking porn barely merits a back-pat and a discount coupon at Wendy’s—the man with the flailing palm can’t compete with the Man with the Golden Arm. I was once a guest at an AA meeting in which one of the regulars received a customary round of applause for saying how long he’d been sober, another round for how long he’d been nicotine-free, yet another for having given up caffeine, but when he topped it off by announcing it had been three months since he had masturbated to porn or images in his head, I was the only one who began to clap, stopping my hands in midair. Even for this receptive audience, he had pushed it a little too far, went for too many