Lucking Out - James Wolcott [93]
Yet it wasn’t necessarily all psychologically corrosive, the puppy stage of being a porn hound. It did have its vitamin side. It is standard operating procedure to decry the objectification of porn, its privileging of the Male Gaze (those mythical ray-beams that take colonial possession of the phantom of desire and pin it to the trophy wall), but there’s something to be said for porn’s de-subjectifying powers. At least there was back then, in the days when the printed word had a stronger muscle grip on our overstoked imaginations. For someone like myself, a bookworm with bulging lobes who drew most of his vainglorious ideas about sex, conquest, and the mercurial enigma of Woman from novels written by men who really knew how to grill up a hot paragraph, the actual act itself loomed like a parachute drop into existential night, where the chute might not open. The exalted glory of two bodies fusing into one and bursting into forked flame set the bar a little high for those of us fairly new to pole-vaulting. Each encounter seemed a test, a trial, pitting you against yourself and your grandiose expectations against whatever expectations she—She—brought to the encounter, your sexual pride and reputation riding on the line, at least in the amphitheater of your own mind. In his long story “The Time of Her Time,” Mailer made the yeoman task of bringing a woman to orgasm into a symphonic clash of the titans, as if his stud alter ego were taking Omaha Beach against spirited resistance from one smart bohemian ball-busting recalcitrant, the aurora borealis of orgasm awaiting just over the shadowed ridge at the head of the bed. Mailer at least was super-vivid in his play-by-play description of this mattress prizefight, as was Henry Miller whenever he got goaty under the slanted roof shingles of Paris. Half the time I didn’t know what was going on in a D. H. Lawrence sex scene, only that man and woman had joined lava streams, which was of limited utility.
For us unfrocked English majors it was difficult navigating sex with this library of crescendos lodged upstairs—Lawrence coined the phrase “sex in the head,” but who warehoused more sex in the attic than he did?—while having only the haziest idea of what we were doing and hoping word didn’t get around. After several unsatisfactory off-Broadway tryouts in the sack with my first real girlfriend in New York, I horse-whispered to myself that I was Norman Mailer before the Ravel Boléro lovemaking soundtrack started, putting my hips into command mode and getting a pretty good locomotive head of steam going, indeed began feeling so devilish that I thought I might sprout a pair of warlock horns and a swishing tail, but then a strand of her hair got caught in my wristband and extricating it brought me back to reality, where I was at a distinct disadvantage. Also, I needed to rest a little more weight on my elbows, because (as she diplomatically put it) “I was kinda crushing her.” Perhaps if I had read more sex-spiked novels by women, I would have gotten a better training manual to put into application, but the ones popular and prevalent then were of the bitter-blow-job roman à clef variety, in which the heroine would go down on a guy to get rid of him faster. I already knew plenty of girls who were quite happy to get rid of a guy without a lovely parting gift, so such fictions weren’t much help, whatever their other merits as indictments of callous creeps by the women who debased themselves before them, practically throwing away their college educations.
Porn was all verbs and no adjectives. It got into your face mask. Despite liberal use of Vaseline on the lens for Elvira Madigan soft-focus lyricism, it couldn’t keep up pretenses to pictorialism for long, innocent gambols requiring meadows and such. It developed its own bordello mise-en-scène. Old-school seventies porn is preferred by old-school porn enthusiasts because there were actual, if modest, production values,