Only a few more Brandon postings - I don’t want to belabor the point here.

Hell, I love the man, warts and all. He might not be the best representative for sex-positive rough sex, but he’s honest, and I think that’s more than I can say for that crowd, too. He’s honest to a fault.

I received an interesting message from Brandon, recently - he’s spending more time in Canada and more time at home, reevaluating some of his life decisions. I wish him luck in any direction he goes.

And that pretty much takes care of the rough sex discussion over these parts - it’s not, like, the only interest I have. By chance, Edenfantasys sent me that DVD of Taormino’s to review, and that sent me on a whole new tailspin - but, I repeat, I do have other aspects to my sexual life that I’m interested to explore, both in writing and in action. I think the next thing EF is sending me to review is something like “Music to Make Love To” - which should be crucial. Cuh-ruh-shul.

Heading to San Francisco this weekend! Super excited to get there. A good friend of mine from when we were kids is flying me out. There are advantages of having your buddies strike it rich! It’s like, Love Parade, or Love Weekend, or something like that . . . turns out I’ll miss the SF Decom by only a week, but no biggie . . . there’s something about that Burning Man afterparty that’s a little depressing. Except for that one year, 2003, when I took e and hung out with Gypsy, this incredible stripper from LA’s Jumbo’s Clown Room . . . I can’t remember exactly what we did together . . . nothing physical . . . but we were touching hearts, it was clear. My aunt had just died, I was in Northern California to go to her funeral . . . on the way back down, I impulsively passed through the city, and met up with friends, who basically pushed this pill on me . . . you just take it and a half an hour later you’ve forgotten you’ve even swallowed anything . . . until like fifteen minutes after that, when a warm feeling swells across your chest and the people wearing furry nonsense on their heads start to look, well, cosmic . . .

None of that for me anymore.

Speaking of childhood friends, another buddy of mine from the Hebrew School days started a site recently for “Cool married guys and the guys who love them and the women who love the guys who love cool married guys.” (I made that up).  I’m going to be writing for the site every now and then, so definitely check it out: Cool Married Guy.

And after I get back from San Francisco, I’m actually going to have to get a real job, great lord almighty . . . As far as I can tell, my goal is to make enough cash to move back to Los Angeles . . . I’m in the deep south now, for the love of God . . . nearly completely broke . . . now, as to what I’ll eventually do in Los Angeles, you tell me. Maybe I can make a living working on mainstream sets there, doing production work - who the hell knows. Maybe I’ll write a screenplay - Diablo Cody did.

What I definitely don’t want to do is get sucked into working on porn sets. I have no problem writing about the industry, thinking about it, reporting on it, interviewing members of it. But I can’t film anymore. That period is over, and it would be a terrifically irresponsible decision to begin peeling off the scab.

Okay, one more Slap Happy: just ’cause I can.

Well, goddamn: I seem to have lucked into a great gig. EdenFantasys wants me to review movies for them. And in return, they will send me free porn. Sounds about right to me; so let’s go.

Today I’m talking about “Rough Sex,” a movie directed by well-known sex-positive innovator Tristan Taormino. Mostly, I don’t know much about Tristan’s work - all I know is that she used to be affiliated with Good Vibrations, I believe as the editor of “On Our Backs” magazine. And apparently she’s Thomas Pynchon’s niece. Great. I do know a bit about Rough Sex in porno, though, my bases of comparison being Brandon Iron’s Slap Happy, Khan Tusion’s Rough Sex, Rough Sex 2, and his Meatholes project, and Max Hardcore’s Max Factor, Planet Max, and whatever other depraved fascinating hateful molesto-garbage he churns out with a knife and a blunt fork.

I have plenty of good things to say about Taormino’s Rough Sex, so let’s begin there. It’s easy to watch, for one: it’s brilliantly shot. My first non-gonzo Rough Sex feature! I’m so used to seeing people get raw in Khan Tusion’s gnarly basement on a piss-stained rug, get their heads slammed into a wall on a soundstage. Taormino’s bounteous sets and locations were lovely in comparison; for a while, my brain couldn’t even compute the higher production values. (I don’t know if I had eroticized filth - it’s certainly possible, by associative modes . . . after all, for a time there, I had eroticized giant fake breastices . . and clear heels . . . and that’s not natural . . )

Taormino also made sure that we got good-looking, smart performers (handsome men, too, which, believe it or not, some heterosexual guys also enjoy) who probably got paid a fair wage and were apparently allowed to request their partners. More, there was great sound; nice costumes; and overall, the scenarios used were fairly creative and well-written.

I liked her interview concept as well: before each scene, the performers would speak articulately about what they thought about rough sex, and how it composed part of their sexual natures. Sasha Grey in particular made a lot of sense, and was quite honest, too. “I’m a pain slut,” she admitted. There was no shame in her voice at all. “Verbal degradation, both giving it and getting it, is a major turn-on.” I was impressed by Grey’s candor and her honesty. She’s a special performer, and she’s not dumb. Adrianna Nicole was cool to listen to, as was Satine Phoenix. The interviews were the best part. They always are.

I was also impressed by the fact that in one scene, the dominant was a woman, and the submissive a man. (Francesca Le and Christian, in the most exciting scene of the movie). In another scenario, they attempted to perform a “switch,” where both performers took turns alternating between dominant and submissive modes. (Sasha Grey and Danny Wylde). In the end, it didn’t come off too realistically, but it was a creative idea. Tip of the hat to Taormino there, for underlining the overall concept that rough sex can go both ways. A smart, sex-positive move.

But for all of the film’s attributes, I didn’t use it to beat off. Didn’t even get close to doing that. The film was entertaining, and I think it was edifying: like, I know a bit more about rough sex now, and it gave me some ideas I might try to use, were I to find a partner - but there wasn’t a single “sexy” moment for me. Maybe that’s because the material shown didn’t coincide with my rather tightly inscribed sexual preferences. (We’ve all become such specific wankers, haven’t we? It’s the tubes that killed us, you know. I used to be able to jam to any scene that basically had tits in it. Now I go to Tube8, or Cliphunter, and type in “skinny teen double blowjob”  and in two-tenths of a second I get “California Teen Cuties Double Blowjob” and “Skinny Teen Gets Anal Banged in the Garage,” and I’m set for the night. The tubes will ruin us all.)

But I think there’s more to it than just not being given my drug of choice. After all, Sasha Grey was in this film, and you gotta be able to wank to Sasha Grey - right? But there’s something terribly sanitized about sex-positivity. I don’t know whether its the intellectuality of the whole enterprise, or the do-gooder, Boy Scout protocol; or maybe I’m reacting against the sense that one can have his cake and eat it too. The marriage of porno and sex-positivity, which sounds so wonderful on paper, just isn’t always the most ideal bond - particularly, I would argue, when we get into the arena of rough sex.

The thing that always struck me about rough sex videos were that they were basically a naughty pleasure. And I enjoyed them for precisely that reason. I remember getting Brandon Iron’s Slap Happy in the mail in the spring of 2002, popping it into the VCR, and being fucking flabbergasted at what I saw. Like, I couldn’t believe my eyes. If you check out the video clips I’ve been posting of Brandon recently, you’ll understand precisely what went on in those scenes - vomiting happened in about half of them - but let it suffice to say that one dominant male was in charge, and the term “consensuality” was probably taken a bit loosely. This is not to say that the girls didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they stepped into a room with Brandon. Quite the contrary, in fact: they were informed. But when you evaluate both on terms of consensuality, I just don’t think Slap Happy could match up to Tristain Taormino’s Rough Sex.

Tristain’s performers are all adults, for one thing. These were all grown-ass women and men. The girls in Slap Happy, and for that matter in Khan Tusion’s Meatholes and Max Hardcore’s movies just plain aren’t, half the time. I mean, they’re all over 18, yes, but they seem so less at peace with what they’re doing: there’s a certain vulnerability and a certain brokenness to these scenes. The majority of the women who did the Slap Happy/Max/Khan thing were at shitty points in their lives, and the scenarios within the movies are essentially built to showcase that. Brokenness was on center stage, for both submissive and dominant. And in a fucked-up way, that was what was hot about them.

I would never want be a Meatholes submissive performer. Not for a million bucks. Meatholes scenes went on three times a week in the hellish basement off of Winnetka Avenue, and they were filled with verbal degradation, physical humiliation, and piss-filled bathtubs. Those were the tools of the day. Grungy big-dicked oldsters like Dirty Harry and avowed Parisian misogynists with an ax to grind, like Steven French, were pulled in to bait the girls, to let them taste the bungholes, to thoroughly gross them out. Throughout it all, Khan Tusion chewed a cigar and whacked tits and stood on people’s heads and pussies with his dirty old man tennis shoes.

For his part, Max Hardcore built a career out of recreating molestation fantasies (and I don’t necessarily say that to diss the guy - for people who get hot around those scenarios, there’s nothing better than a nice crazed Max speculum encounter). If you were 93 lbs and could still put your hair in pigtails, he might let you feed the fish in his aquarium when your throat was finished being explored. These movies were emotional and physical challenges for their performers, all-out endurance battles that, while tickling the fancies of a few women who got off being treated in precisely that way, promised little more than the temporary satisfaction of a greenback paycheck. Lasting enjoyment? Therapeutic understanding? You better step the fuck off, because these films weren’t out to empower the submissives, either on camera or off; and here, all the submissives were women. No one would have it any other way.

It wasn’t the kind of poison you wanted to take on too regularly. Watch too much of that shit, and even your dog starts to hate you. Talking to real women in the street an hour after jacking off to Max Hardcore for a solid hour and half feels mildly hallucinatory. Driving without sneering is a mild challenge, and hugging your mother goodnight becomes a hellish guilt-hole. But no one will  deny that it makes for good cinema.

It sounds horrible to say, I know; and I guess that while the conscience inside of me hates the idea of someone getting destroyed and hate-fucked, the dick inside of me thinks it’s hot; and the brain inside of me thinks it’s interesting. Taormino’s film, in the end, is none of these but interesting. At the end of the day, it’s an educational videotape, but it’s not porn, at least the way that I’ve come to think of porn.

Real porno is characterized by a documentary function - in the end, that’s what makes porn valuable. Informal, cheap, wrong-headed gonzo productions allow you to watch an event take place, in a specific time, inside of specific people’s lives. Their lack of rigor when it comes to script-writing or inventive editing, or even rudimentary ideas of establishing a narrative, means reality takes the place of fiction, by default. I watched real live molestation take place in Brandon’s and Max’s films, traumas re-enacted all over the place, and not much sympathy for any performer or director in the mix. (And not much edification for the viewer either, who took part as a functionary of the slimy group.)

It was a cold masturbatory experience to watch Kelsey get the shit kicked out of her by Mickey G and Jon Dough in Rough Sex #2 (a title that got pulled from the shelves, incidentally), but it was thrilling. Trainwrecks were going down; hate was going down; witchcraft and cutting and bulimia and vomit and beatings . . . it was all implicated. It was all implied. How many Slap Happy scenes were done for drug money? How many. You think half?

That kind of crap will make your eyes bleed and coat you in a great-cloak of energetic befoulment - but as historical documents, and evidence in a sociological case-study, they made a sick kind of sense. After all, on your darker days, you might start to ask yourself - just what the hell is porno, anyway? Why do people get into it?  The answers are complex, but here are few that roll of the tip of my tongue: Lack. Emotional abandonment. Economic distress. Molestation. A talent for fulfilling short-term needs on a daily basis.

Vile gonzo abortions such as Meatholes, where the weak got preyed upon and a collective male erection was achieved by seeing female self-concepts trampled underfoot - pretty women besmirched and denigrated endlessly, called whores without any threat of retribution nor possibility for restitution was like having the underbelly of the porn industry and your own secret desires thrown right in your face like a hot soup. Honesty burns; it has its own kind of fetishistic pleasure.

Sooner or later, though, the guilt sets in - and a man’s got to turn to a palliative. And in the case of porn, nothing feels better than the sex-positive burn creme. You might not find the movies helpful to masturbate to, but they will make you feel like a better person. More respectful, and likely a smarter partner. More ready to listen to what your lover’s got to say, to try out some consensual techniques together. Like I said, Taormino’s film is essentially an education tape. And for the record, I think it’s a good one, one of the best I’ve ever seen.

Is it true porn? Is it gonzo-sick, cinematically strange? No. But maybe that’s a good thing. They sent Max to jail, you know. Khan’s in ruins. Produce the shit at your own risk; watch it in secret corners of your bedroom. Try to scrub its dead essence from your skin.

$22.99Tristan Taormino’s Rough Sex DVD by Vivid Stars: Derrick Pierce, Julius Ceazher, Adrianna Nicole, Sasha Grey Director: Tristan Taormino Buy from EdenFantasys

It’s been an interesting day over here, watching a lot of old game tape and trying to wrap my head around some pretty crucial issues, among them rough sex, my own self-image, Michael Jordan’s bizarre Hall of Fame rant, international vengeance, raging narcissism, the process of aging . . .

People ask me why porn is important, and the answer is so much more than wacking off, or getting to watch people have sex. When you come across individuals who are willing to “go there,” into the land of hurt and pure, animal desire, and more, come back with reflections, then you are getting to the point of the matter . . . you are understanding why a man would want to point a camera at these people, subject himself to these energetically-bleak situations. It was always much more than a paycheck for me . . . I was always drawn to the emotional and psychic nakedness of the  situation. Drawn to people for whom boundaries and societal mores are more like suggestions than concrete rules.

“You never feel so alive as when you’re having sex with a beautiful woman who you don’t even feel would give you the time of day on the street.”- Brandon Iron