I am publishing the first episode of my new podcast today, Hot Bread for the New Planet. The purpose of this podcast is to discuss a wide variety of topics with exceptional educators, visionaries, and unique thinkers of all stripes.
Today we speak with Noah Levine, Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, as well as author of notable books “Dharma Punx” and “Against the Stream.”
I recently had the pleasure to study with Noah for one month at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute. Always an engaging and articulate lecturer, Noah often used the word “Dharma” in his lectures to speak of a concept of “truth.” Our discussions ranged from suffering to compassion - but did not often touch upon sex or sexuality for a prolonged period. I wondered aloud to him whether there existed in the teachings of the Buddha a “Dharma of Sex” - which is to say, a system of thought that spoke to the lack of honesty and self-examination that seems to abound in this area of life.
What follows is our short discussion. Enjoy.
In my previous post, I referenced an article that I wrote for SexIs magazine, “Shoot: The Education and Evolution of A Pornographer“ which was subsequently picked up by Alternet.org, whom, to my mild dismay, chose the more literal, ham-fisted title “Why I Had to Stop Making Hardcore Porn.”
Anyway, I’m inspired to comment, if only because the slant of the article was, for a lack of a better term, a bit bleeding-heart. Which is entirely my fault; after all, I wrote it. In fact, I do feel a bit bleeding-heart about porn - sometimes.
Essentially, “Shoot” disparages heterosexual porn, particularly the gonzo brand, which can often appear predicated on the destruction of its female objects. It lauds gay porn for the lack of misogyny and aggression. All true stuff.
But I’m on the fence about my own piece of writing, simply because I don’t feel the same way, consistently, about hetero porn. The slant of my book, after all, is largely humorous. There’s pathos in there, and some tragic shit, to be sure - but it’s more of a coming-of-age story than a cautionary tale.
Porn is so many things: it is trashy. It is tragic. It is literally disgusting. And yet, it is hilarious. Upon the publication of this article, I got an wildly positive response from anti-pornography readers, applauding me for the bias I implied in my article. Alternet is a politically-leftist site: they asked me to do more writing for them. I felt like doors were opening for me - and yet, if these people knew the “real me,” would they love me, still?
The truth of the matter is that I am inconsistent. Disconcertingly so. I think racist jokes are funny. I just do. My cartoons on this site are proudly foul. I have a gross sense of humor. And perhaps that makes me a weak person. I’m not sure. While I decry rough sex and the degradation of women on video, I can’t say that I haven’t participated in scenes of profound grossness in my life. Does it make me a liar: a hypocrite. I suppose that I am. Possibly, I am not worthy of being lauded by a leftist agenda. This is my confession.
I’ve always had a bit of a difficult time with the “sex-positive” community, in fact, even though I openly admit their practices are spiritually superior to the run-of-the-mill L.A. San Fernando hate-fuck punch-you-in-the-eye porn. Ever since I discovered Good Vibrations and the San Francisco-sex community during the early 2000’s, when I was attempting to make my own alternative brand of pornography, I felt a distinct love-hate with the sex-positives.
I was in one of their films, Slide Bi Me, and I had a splendid time performing. They paid me right, even promised me a slice of the profits; I got treated like a real person, instead of a piece of meat, and it was beautiful. But at the same time, in some ways, I felt the dirty, scummy honesty of the Los Angeles porn world - for all it’s backwardness - suited me better. It just spoke of a truer reality. It embraced, instead of denied, the colossal bummer of trauma that brings so many to sex work, and there was a kind of magic in that, too . . .
I’m not trying to stick up for sleaze, or bleak, hateful porn. I’m just saying that there’s a troubling pressure in today’s world (and in the practice of editorial journalism) to have an clear opinion, to stick to it like glue. But for me, believing and even embodying both sides of the debate feels more appropriate. Owning up to the depths of my own inconsistency has hurt me in the past - but dammit, it’s just real . . .
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When I was in my early 20s, I made my living as a pornographer. For more than five years, my working life revolved around framing acts of public copulation. I’ve pushed cameras and microphones into dwellings no machines should ever go. I’ve been granted a front-row seat to scenes of startling intimacy. I’ve helped pick up thousands of used baby-wipes. Somewhere along the line, I gained a financial stability that, in light of the rather limited artistic scope of the movies I helped produce, I probably didn’t deserve.
But after half a decade of the sex grind, I decided to call it quits. For despite having entered the smut leagues with the very best of intentions, the vast majority of the porn I ended up shooting was not “sex-positive” in character. Instead, the sex I found myself videotaping was of the Gonzo variety: the kind of scenes that are harshly lit, reek of a basement in the San Fernando Valley, and inevitably wind up devoured and forgotten in 15 minutes. If my “career” as a director is notable in any way, it’s that I’ve played for both sides—which is to say, while I’ve shot hundreds of hetero scenes, I’ve shot almost as many in gay porn.
We Have to Give Them What They Want
Though gay and straight porn may appear distinct from one another mostly due to the various orifices which receive the majority of the camera’s gaze, for me, the most important difference was that they felt governed by subtly different moral tenets.
Let’s begin with straight porn; for that’s where I began. I got into porn as a horny 23-year-old Jewish kid, hoping to stare at and hopefully score with curvy women who didn’t see a roll in the hay as too absurd a way to make their rent. Perhaps I was blessed with an excessively literal mind, but I quite simply imagined that the best way for me to live out my sexual fantasies was to, well, join the sex industry itself. It was not to be so simple, I soon discovered: many a man had shared my same dream. A good job was hard to come by, but after months of crushing disappointments, I finally landed a mildly lucrative gig shooting camera for a website. Understandably, I was psyched.
But in due time, I came to learn that within the context of the heterosexual L.A. industry, while my overt task at hand was to make sure that the girls got naked, my true responsibility as director was to make sure the girls got punished. Scenes that stuck out, and hence made more money, were those in which the female “targets” were verbally degraded and sometimes physically humiliated.
None of it was written in my contract, of course; it was more of a contextual thing. Like: Everyone’s doing it . . . thus, so shall we. My various superiors across the years saw the issue from a businessman’s perspective, reminding me quite openly of the need to keep up with our competition. Anabolic’s getting nasty? Then we need to be nastier. Another one of their gambits was “We owe it our viewers.” We have to give them what they want! (And what do “they” want? Scenes of degradation, of course. Gloryholes and gang-bangs. The facial cumshot became de riguer sometime in the 1980s, but by the 2000s, you literally had to do it in every scene or risk not collecting your paycheck.)
What surprised me most though, was the fact that I found within myself a happy willingness to be violent, a willingness to degrade. Though my bosses may have ordered me to organize and record the scenes of degradation, I followed their orders, and not without pleasure. Something cowardly within me, an internal space, suffused with a weak kind of anger, felt satisfied when I saw a woman “take her punishment.” I clung to the sense of temporary empowerment I found through the bullying. Lust-colored aggression and the satisfaction of making “good money” guided me through scene after scene.
Of course, all participants in porno are complicit, both the bottoms and tops. Both genders willingly participate in heterosexual porn, and to some extent, both are marginalized: I was literally ordered not to film men above the waist if I could help it. And while men do make up the majority of porn’s audience, women watch heterosexual porn, too—quite a few likely doing so with major outrage or dissatisfaction. Still, though, straight porn unarguably continues to be the untrammeled domain of male fantasy.
But none of this is too enlightening. After all, we’ve all seen “bad” porn, hateful porn, and I think most have a basic sense of where it comes from. Men get bummed when they can’t get sex. They feel ashamed when they turn to porn for release. Hate and disappointment is released along with their libidos. Disappointment and disrespect washes over the sex workers. It infects the camera crew.
The point at which this treatise becomes useful, however, is when we take a closer look at gay porn—which is precisely what I had to do, midway through my journey through porn.
The Zen of Gay Porn
After three years of shooting, I’d disowned the Gonzo world. I had just seen too much. It had taken a toll on me, in the form of broken relationships, guilt, and regrettable behavior. I concluded that my life would be a hell of a lot sunnier if I could stop collecting money for videotaping women getting crushed before my eyes, and I simply removed myself from the arena. I applied to graduate school and eventually got in. I studied, talked a lot in class, and loved it. But I was poor. I was really, really poor.
So I called my last boss up, rather shamefacedly, and asked him for my job back. “I don’t have it anymore,” he said, “but we’re starting a new site. Would you be okay with shooting gay?”
For a moment I considered. I had never seen two guys go at it before, and at first the idea didn’t appeal to me. Though I thought of myself as very open-minded, for some reason the idea of filming male sex ad infinitum, from a first-row seat, depressed me. Perhaps I still envisioned my foray into porn as a type of sexual wish-fulfillment: with nothing to gain in terms of conquest, these scenes may have lost a bit of their luster. Or maybe it’s more honest to say that I was simply scared.
In the end, it didn’t matter: my desire for the easy paycheck won out, and I took the job. And rather quickly, I came to feel happy that I had—morally, it was another world entirely. The scenarios were still contrived, I admit, and the orgasms were half-hearted, if they came at all. I employed plenty of guys who were there for the money, make no mistake about it; and without exception, the production values stayed amateur. But the shame, rage, and sexual violence that I had come to associate with porn was almost completely absent. That meant something.
Gay porn, in fact, was so goddamn simple that it approached a type of Zen beauty. I mean, this was guys taking on guys, in every shape and form imaginable, for the most part in good humor and absent-minded lust. They may have stuck to roles of “tops” and “bottoms,” but in the dressing room, we all seemed equals, on the same team. Everyone laughed at me for being a straight guy shooting gay porn. Some tried to entice me to jump in front of the camera for kicks. But we all laughed about it. We all seemed like friends. The sadness and the degradation I had come to associate with my job, with videotaped sex for money, was suddenly absent.
But I’m saddened to think that the only path to the absence of hostility and anger in porn is to remove women from the equation. It doesn’t bode well, especially for a world in which men and women must continue to co-exist. In the first half of my porn-life, I lived inside of a world where it almost seemed like an entire gender was being denigrated, like that was the whole point—where very young women were choked and slapped and written-on with lipstick, simply for the crime, it seemed, of being a woman. You should have slept with me, seemed to be the unspoken message. Now see what I have to do to you.
Choosing the Photograph
The semiotician Susan Sontag writes that, “Photography is essentially an act of non-intervention.” She references the famous photograph of a Vietnamese child, running down a road, her back burned from napalm: “Part of the horror of such journalistic coups of contemporary photojournalism . . . comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and life, to choose the photograph.” Every day, I saw people in pain. And yet, I always chose the photograph.
Even so, I don’t regret my decision to work in porn. I regret how I acted within it, and wish that I had been driven more frequently by compassion than instinctive cruelty. But on its most basic level, pornography is neither evil nor noble. It is a sexual means to a solitary end, and for most, porn simply represents a harmless way to spend a half-hour: a bit of lust-inspired drivel that, done right, can serve a very practical purpose.
Moreover, within the world of heterosexual pornography, it’s clear that not every scene is degrading. Some are directed by women, others by alt-porn types who fancy a pink mohawk and maybe a bit of plot more so than your average everyday, run-of-the-mill gangbang; many films, happily, are simply produced by people who don’t seem propelled by anger. Some are just plain damn sexy.
At its worst, though, porn can represent with shocking clarity the inability of a modern society to empathize. We are living in an increasingly individualistic, over-privatized, fragmented society, and it’s not going to get any better any time soon. Perhaps the character of our generation will be judged in how we react to the images that run before us on our screens: do we wish for the objects of our desire to be punished, humiliated? Or treated with respect? The answer is in our collective consciousness. It is up to us.
SAN FRANCISCO – Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the company’s much-anticipated iPad tablet computer Wednesday, calling it a new third category of mobile device: neither smart phone nor laptop, but something in between.
Jobs said the device would be useful for reading books, playing games or watching video, describing it as “so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smart phone.” But the gadget’s most unique capability, says Jobs, one which will set it apart from the pack, is the computer’s ability to double as a sanitary napkin.
The tampon part of the operation “was the biggest surprise,” says Vice President of Design Operations, Bill Zachary. “Most tampons are relatively inexpensive masses of cotton or rayon,” whereas the half-inch-thick iPad comes with 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes of flash memory storage, and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity built in.
“We knew Apple was set on creating a dock with a built-in keyboard,” said Zachary, “which would also easily display pictures and video files. What we didn’t count on was using the iPad as a dam for a hemorrhaging pussy.”
When stuffed up a bleeding vagina, the multi-purpose mobile device will absorb some of the coppery liquid via its LCD screen, admittedly blurring the 1024-by-768 pixel screen resolution with rust-colored pussy juice, Zachary says.
“It functions the way any large piece of blunt metal, stuffed into a bloody human vagina, would.”
But can women be convinced to walk around with lithium-polymer batteries, not to mention fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating, wrenched between their legs? Jobs says yes.
“Because it uses a display technology called IPS (in-plane switching), the iPad has a wide, 178° viewing angle. So you can hold it almost any way you want and still get a brilliant picture, with excellent color and contrast.”
“Plus,” remarked Jobs, sitting on stage in a cozy leather chair and playing showman as only he knows how, “We’re going to coat a few of our experimental models with cardboard applicator tubes.”
How soon small pieces of string will be available for the iPad is not yet known.
Read More | No CommentsSoaked in Sex, a 99-minute semi-hardcore porno released in December of 2007 by Playgirl TV, is an oddity from start to finish– not for the sex contained therein (for the most part, it’s pretty predictable stuff), but for the hazy concept of audience that Playgirl’s going for.
But first let’s talk about sex. I’ve been popped in the past for my “reviews” not actually, well, talking at all about the nuts and bolts of what goes on in the movie, so I’ll try to tackle the prurient interest first (if briefly).
1st scene: Jasmine Byrne gets it on with her landscaper, Kris Knight. This typically dumb porn scenario leads to seven minutes (seriously!) of making out, and then the clothes start to fall off. I believe in foreplay, but this is a bit much. An unrealistic, passionless cunnilingus episode goes nowhere fast; then, they go straight for the sex, only later getting into a boring, cut-laden blowjob scene with none of the original sounds kept in. Bad electronic music runs rampant through your mind. Then it’s back to the same position(!), and Kris Knight immediately cums on Byrne’s shapely leg. Not a keeper.
Jasmine Byrne and Kris Knight
2nd scene: Dani Woodward and Jack Lawrence are waiters. Dani’s sexy, and Jack Lawrence is a waxen-chested boring rod of a penis. Sparks fly, and they end up having one-position sex, too, but not before they make out for like ten minutes, also. Look. If I wanted to see people who didn’t really love one another kiss, I’d go over to my friend Rich’s house and watch him and his wife tongue-wrestle on their couch. But this ain’t what I need from a porno. Anyhow. A sad twenty minutes later, Jack ejaculates on Dani’s pretty stomach.
Dani Woodward and Jack Lawrence
Hey, I think you get the basic picture: this is a pretty useless porno. In terms of sexual cinema, this movie is well-nigh unwatchable, and it’s bad for all the reasons that porns are usually bad: the music is consistently offensive, the sex is utterly without passion for 75% of the scenes, and the thespian-styled touches that come with the film - i.e, the “scenarios” and the narrative voice-overs - are poorly executed and jarringly intrusive. The saving grace? These actors, both male and female, are very attractive.
Attractive people like to have sex
But that attractiveness is implicated in the problem that plagues Soaked in Sex. For maybe I’m just super-dense, but it took me literally the entire movie to figure out who this film was marketed for - and to be honest, I’m still sort of confused.
Let me explain: I’m a heterosexual male who’s watched roughly six million porn movies in my time. Left to my own devices, I’m nearly always going to choose a gonzo film, hopefully one that features a pretty girl (or several) who’ll do disgusting things. I always want to see real sex - where you can feel the vibe, and hear the asides, listen to the mistakes, and basically just feel like people are honestly fucking. I don’t need a mansion as a backdrop. Give me a starkly lit, non-pretty setting, and I’m happy. When it comes to dudes, I like my porn to be orchestrated by a team of working-class kind of guys with big dicks, who have a sense of humor and, if at all possible, a rudimentary sense of the absurd. That’s my ideal porn world.
Now, I admit, when it comes to male talent, I do prefer seeing “hot” guys to guys who are old/fat/look like they smell sort of bad. Good-looking guys are fun for me to watch in a scene. Maybe it’s because I want to pretend that I’m hot like they are. Maybe I just enjoy looking at beautiful bodies, no matter the gender. I’m not sure, but I do know that I’ll happily take Billy Glide over Ron Jeremy any day of the week.
Billy Glide in “Milf’s Like it Big.”
“Soaked in Sex” features Dani Woodward, Gia Paloma, and Taryn Thomas as the female eye candy. There’s not a bad-looking girl in the movie, actually - and the only pair of enhanced breastices we get are on Gia Paloma and Audrey Hollander, and neither woman sports giant, weird mammaries. All in all, they look good. But as hot as the girls are, the guys are even hotter. And they have even less hair on their bodies. Marco Duato, Kris Knight, Jean Val Jean and Eric Masterson are the notable beefcake.
Jean Val Jean in “Soaked In Sex.”
Now, I’d wack off to that, wouldn’t you? He doesn’t even look like a man. He looks like a blond Horse.
Nevertheless, the question remains: Who is Playgirl intending their audience to be? At first glance, I thought this was a couple’s movie. But when I watched it, I felt no man in the world could deal with the stuff they were serving up. I mean, literally, three of the five scenes have only one position. There are zero facial cumshots. There’s no original sound in the entire movie - just really bad music coupled with really bad voiceovers. So, that means that they were marketing to women, right?
Maybe not; because when I looked up “Soaked in Sex” on Google, my first hit was for DVD Climax, a gay video sex site. Also, there’s a bonus segment on this film that featured a “solo” - ie, just a dude stroking his cock. I don’t know many women who like to sit at home in front of their VCR’s and watch buff gay guys stroke their own cocks and come on their tanned stomachs. I just don’t.
Kris Knight in “Soaked in Sex.”
Fine then: it’s a gay movie, for gay men, who like to watch hetero sex, or at least who will tolerate it, if that means they get to watch hot gay guys fuck, and pretend to be straight - or hot straight guys fuck, and pretend to be gay. (Confusing, isn’t it? Kris Knight is a gay porn star - it took me 2.2 seconds to find a picture on the Net of him barebacking a li’l twink - but here he’ll bone a woman, with the objective being that a gay guy can watch him and imagine that Knight’s straight.) The main point being, the male body is on display here. And while the women do get naked and show some passion, it seems that they’re not there to be lusted after, so much as they are present to simply complete the equation.
Let’s face it, the movie has an identity issue. Playgirl in general has an identity issue, I think.
Playgirl has always mystified me. The magazine was supposedly meant to appeal to women, but did you ever see copies of Playgirl magazine littering the floor of your favorite bachelorette’s apartment? For that matter, have you even heard the absurd word “bachelorette” since the Dating Game? No and no. Instead, the magazine had to have reaped most of its profits from gay men who bought the magazine. Michele Zipp, the editor-in-chief in 2003, said that the gay readership was “30%.”
Suuuuure. Why didn’t Playgirl just come on out and say, “we’re a gay magazine?” A few reasons spring immediately to mind: one, it never would have made the grade in 1980’s Evangelical Christian heterosexist America. Hell, just getting Playboy to go over in 7-Eleven was a minor miracle in those days. Not to mention, the magazine was started as a supposed feminist reaction to Playboy magazine, and admitting it was designed for gay men would have blown their cover.
Playgirl was never designed for women; it’s not interested in women’s minds, not in any real way. The dumb fantasies introduced in these films as much as prove it. Boned by a landscaper. Boned in a bowling alley. Boned in the kitchen. There’s no “seduction” here - more, a series of perfunctory nods to the concept that women like their minds engaged, without the work done to really accomplish that task.
So we’re back to men - but Playgirl could never be up front with the fact that they were a magazine for gay guys. After all, gay guys might not have liked it as much. If they wanted straight-up gay, they could go and get a Bear Monthly. Buying Playgirl his had an air of appropriation to it, a cultural “winking” that, in the end, promised more fun.
The same may be true for Soaked In Sex. Forget the fact that this movie doesn’t feature any honestly hot sex, and that it’s musical directors have obviously studied at the Vivid Video School for Casio Synthesizer Surround-Sound Sex. If you are a person who can’t get enough beef in your cake, and prefers to watch hot men up against the backdrop of a pretty woman, instead of a different hot man, then this could be the movie for you. From Playgirl: the magazine for Men.
 DVD by Playgirl TV
Stars: Eric Masterson, Joey Ray, Alexis Malone, Dani Woodward
Genre: Couples / All Sex / Straight |
Like everyone else at Staples Center, I had a little extra hop in my step Saturday night. LeBron was in the house.
I skipped the second half of a live NFL playoff game for him.
I shaved and dressed up a little. For me, anyway.
I showed up early. Seven o’clock. Gotta watch the warm-ups. Gotta see everything.
You do these things when LeBron passes through town. Hey, we see celebrities all the time in Los Angeles. We walk by them on the street, pull up next to them at intersections, sit near them in restaurants. There’s something of a code in place. You don’t stare at celebs. You don’t approach them. You don’t stand two feet away and snap cell phone pictures. You show them respect. You leave them alone. Along with the weather and the lifestyle, that’s the biggest reason stars like living here. They aren’t treated like lions in the zoo.
So when a basketball player gets thousands of NBA fans to geek out 25 minutes before a game, especially here, he has to be special. In my newest book, I wrote about how Michael Jordan’s competitiveness separated him from everyone else, but so did his force of personality. He had a knack for pulling every eyeball in the room his way … even a room with 18,000 people in it. Referees and opponents fawned over him. Teammates followed his instructions like drones. If he made an unusually splendid play and glanced into the stands for approval, entire sections would swoon. Command of the room. That’s what Jordan had. Kobe doesn’t have it, and he never had it. That will always be the difference between them.
LeBron? He’s getting there. I saw it with my own eyes Saturday. The Cavs emerged for warm-ups and I heard that same familiar squeal from MJ’s prime. Urgent. Pleading. Desperate.
LeBron! LEBRON! LAAAAAAA-BRONNNNNNNNNN!
I saw the same flashbulbs clicking, thousands of fans taking photos so they could tell people some day that, yes, they saw LeBron James play basketball. I saw the same people crammed around one half of the court, everyone standing — standing! — to watch 12 guys in warm-up suits halfheartedly shoot jump shots and get loose. I saw hundreds of fans inexplicably holding out pens and papers, screaming LeBron’s name and praying for the miraculous chance that he’d hop out of a layup line, jump into the crowd and start signing. I saw the same look on LeBron’s face that Jordan once had — a Tupacian “All Eyez on Me” smirk, an expression that happens when everyone stares at you no matter what you do, even if you’re scratching your balls or rubbing your head, and once you come to grips with that fact, it’s a little bit liberating.
LeBron gets a kick out of it. To say the least. He’s the most charismatic athlete of his generation, only you wouldn’t fully know it until you studied him in person. Command of the room. He might dunk in the layup lines. He might try to make a one-handed half-court shot. He might call for an alley-oop and soar above his incredulous teammates just for the hell of it. Simply saying “bursting with energy” wouldn’t do him justice. It’s like watching a super-coordinated, mutant 4-year-old dealing with a severe sugar rush.
I’m gonna go block Delonte’s shot from behind! HAH! He didn’t see me coming! Wait, I’m in the mood for an alley-oop. I need me some oop. Mo, throw me an oop. Ah, yes … it’s in the air … I’m jumping … DUNK! What now? I want to try a one-handed shot from the corner. Jamario, come play with me. Hold on, I just saw Baron Davis! Hey Baron! What up, dog! Watch this, I’m gonna make a half-court shot with my eyes closed … DAMN! Just missed it. You know what I really feel like doing? Jumping on Shaq’s back. Look out, Big Fella, eeeeeeeeeeee-yah!!!!!!!
Jordan saved his legs before games, using that time to stretch, practice specific shots and butter up referees. LeBron can’t pace himself. Even when he walks from Point A to Point B, there’s no loping or strolling. He prances. He hops up and down. And if all these people are staring at him anyway, why not rile them up with a couple ridiculous dunks? You never forget he’s on the court. Not for a second. Even his teammates are enamored with him; they jockey for his attention like Octomom’s kids. Jordan’s supporting cast interacted with him warily, like lower-level executives tiptoeing around their CEO. You were always aware of the pecking order. With LeBron, it’s a team in the truest sense. Everyone takes part in every joke. Nobody is excluded. They feed off him. Of all the superstars we have seen, there can’t be a better or more beloved teammate. There just can’t.
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Copyright 2010, Sam Benjamin
