On a rather lonely night I decided to have some naked strangers keep me company. Yes, I watched some porn. But, like any other time I've searched for virtual vignettes of sins of the flesh, I had trouble finding something suitable--it was only this time, though, that I understood why.
Porn is just so damn contrived. Even the supposedly amateur work is premeditated and artificial. I understand that full-length pornos with "plots" don't have anything to hide: they're fake and they aren't shy about it. But somehow the fantastical twist in feature-lengths (rather, spectacular-lengths) has seeped into thirty-second clips on YouPorn. The pleasure is so forced. The people on screen knowingly put on a performance, with a director behind the camera to obtain the biggest spectacle, so their video can get the most hits or downloads.
You might ask, what's the big deal? People don't watch porn for sincerity; they watch it for entertainment. What happens, though, is that people start to buy into what they see on screen. They'll believe that that's how a girl fingerslays her two-lip; that that's how a 155cm Asian with double-Ds rides a black guy; that the amount of women who like a dildo in their asshole is ASTONISHGINLY higher than one would think. Especially for the unexperienced, such videos/pictures present a very skewed view of how sweet play ought to be done. Once people assimilate porno performaces, the reality portrayed in the pornos becomes one's own. They try to recreate what they've seen in their own experiences. The result: unreality becomes reality. And if unreality becomes reality, then reality is, really, unreality.
Chuck Klosterman talks about the same thing in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, albeit in relation to non-pornographic media. He says the same thing about love that I've said about sweet play: television and film present an idea of love that most people buy into, to some extent, and inspire to achieve. When people believe they've found true love, all they've found is the idea of love that they were told to find; they've found fake love.
The problem is, how does one escape the influence of unreality? Is it possible? Does it matter if it isn't? People seem pretty content trying to emulate Goslings' love for McAdams, or clothing themsleves like the gangstas they see in music videos, or even aspiring to be like the heroes they see on the news. Perhaps unreality is just far more entertaining than reality.
For anyone who consumes mass media, the influence of unreality is impossible to avoid. In fact, mass media seems to be the authority on reality. What's presented to the public ends up becoming reality for a lot of people. Though the creation of mass media is largely ingenuine and fabricated, its acceptance by the public validates it, MAKES it genuine. It's twisted, but it's true. Anyone who has seen the film Network (and if you haven't, you NEED to) will know exactly what I'm talking about.
It seems quite obvious where that leaves us. I'm not saying I like it, but it's a vicious circle that seems difficult to cease, and impossible to escape.
There is no reality.
