forget them, but when it's notand it's certainly not in pornographythe awkwardness is very extreme, because it's not two people who are attuned to each other. When it's not passionate, sex is pretty funny and funny not usually in the way that people want it to be.
In your article you talk about the experience of going to porn shops. Have you ever considered bringing Pat [Patricia O'Connor, MacDonald's wife], or somebody, to a porn shop?
No.
How would you feel if she were there?
Embarrassed.
Really?
When I wrote my article, I was trying to understand the experience for myself. It's embarrassing to realize what you're paying to look at. I certainly can't speak for all men, but I'd guess most men are embarrassed to know that there's actually something in these places, and in this imagery, that does turn them on, even briefly. Part of my embarrassment has to do with how porn shops must look to women. If I were a woman, I'm sure I'd feel that the imagery men see there is really horrible for women and must create images in the male psyche that feed into their real sex lives in debilitating ways. And yet, on another level, as a sometime experiencer of that material, I feel that there's more involved.
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When I was first in love with Pat, totally passionately involved, and we were having lovely, exciting sex all the time, I went to these places more often than at any other time in my life. And all the time I went, I thought, this is really creepy, why am I here? I don't know why. But I know Pat would be grossed out by those places; it would hurt our sex life.
Wouldn't you bring her into it for some kind of erotic purpose? How long have you been together now?
Thirteen years.
Thirteen years! Oh, my God, that is a long time. That means you've gone through a lot of stages. It's funny because I've been to porn places with a guy that I was seeing, and there was a weird feeling about the experience. It was interesting to be a female there because nobody quite knew what to do. The men wouldn't look at me. And I had a hard time looking at the women. The women who perform live tried to bring me in in order to get more money out of the guy I was with. So there was that. But it was odd; I couldn't figure out what attitude to have in there. I was too curious. I felt like
looking at the women making these gestures and taking poses and doing these sexual things that are clearly right out of magazines. The women in
would
do those things. They would
dress like that or act like that. They would never be like the so-called bad girls in the sex shops, where it's all about something else. Then again, the women in the sex shops don't get touched (although they may do prostitution on the side). Or if they do get touched, it's just through windows. For the most part, they're guarded. The sex shop performance is all about women using their bodies as lures, which is the same thing as stripping. Women often feel a great sense of power seeing all those men panting away.
Men would prefer to be seen exploiting women because that gives the men the power. If you show the opposite, the men freak out. Men freak out in
and in anything else that shows them not to have absolute power. In
there's no clear control one way or the other, but it's clear that the men are not simply the controllers.
For me, part of the power of
was in exposing men in a way that women are usually exposed. We hear men's sounds and see how
act in these situations. There were places in the film where I had to watch with my hands over my face, and the only place I do that is in horror films.
Really?
It was terrifying to see that sexual acts, kinds of sexual interchange I had thought were individual,
are not only
peculiar to me but are boringly automatic, cliches, with their own terminology!
Actually, I find it quite pathetic that a house and a prostitute could satisfy a man. He must be
sexually starved for any kind of real
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