Here, right here, in front of the display case with trinitite, the film starts. Here I can write.
In 1997, too old now for connect-the-dots, I’m stretched out in the witches’ dorm after practice with the metal band, watching German late-night television in secret. Every weekend they show soft-core porn films. I’ve been watching them for years already. I know the narrative style, the scenarios, the boundaries, the humour. My favourite scenes in these films are the ones where people are having sex but then can’t pull apart, the so-called penis captivus, when the vagina’s muscles are clamped around the penis with such power that it’s stuck. Penis captivus is as good as nonexistent in reality, but a frequent feature in the world of soft-core porn. One such scene: a group of nuns encounter a couple who are making love. The ensuing panic causes penis captivus.
Soft-core porn presents these scenes as comical, but the humour is founded on the relationship between sex and sin. Porn’s existence is founded on sin. It’s no accident that a group of nuns is the catalyst for the penis’s plight. The soft-core world presents as a Catholic confession, duly followed by penance. Young novices enjoying themselves with candles after bedtime, church servants and priests coveted by old mother superiors, and the men of the church wreaking havoc on young girls in their congregation and in the convent. There’s an entire subgenre called nunsploitation. It’s easy to comprehend and easy to construct a plot about how sex is illegal and suppressed and therefore particularly exiting and blasphemous. As a result, conditions like penis captivus occur, as if God himself intervened and punished the naughty application of genitalia. Sex consistently results in unwanted, humorous and degrading consequences.
But in these scenes of penis captivus, there’s something else afoot, something beyond guilt: a fusion of the atoms between penis and vagina, a Tsar Bomba, or perhaps something more: an addition, a creative line, a join-the-dots, a usually invisible and impossible bond between people, perhaps Siamese, perhaps radioactive and perhaps magical. Subtitles emerge for me, when I watch soft-core porn, a map of the infinite possible relations between an infinite number of people.
Contemporary hard-core porn is different: Puritan, American, evangelical. It reflects Protestantism. Following the golden era of the ’70s, hard-core porn becomes increasingly commercialised, smooth and tight. The oversized penises are only displayed erect. It’s efficient and low-budget, with clean canvases; the plotting is minimal and offers fewer consequences. The guilt isn’t in the desire or in the story; it’s transferred to the object, presented in the form of close-ups of female genitalia and other orifices. It gives the impression of being a documentary, with every scene concluding in a money shot where the penis pulls out of the hole so that I, the audience, can see the cum and confirm that the plot is real. There are no muscles in any orifices, no fuckability, holding it back. The penis is not in captivus, it’s independent and strong, like a mushroom cloud or a skyscraper rising toward the horizon. At the same time, it’s cleansed of bonds, connections, viruses and magic.
Outside the school library, the girls from Jesus Revolution are discussing the moment when something becomes sex. I’m seated behind the glass wall reading, but end up listening. The girls try to define exactly where the boundary is; exactly when to stop. When does God come into the picture, when does God cum, when does something become sex? Is it the moment your boyfriend’s tongue slips in between your lips and you’re making out? I can’t hear too much through the glass wall, but I think they conclude that the tongue isn’t allowed because it’s a physical metaphor for penetration. Other girls talk less; for them, metaphors don’t count, and sixteen-year-olds have oral and anal sex (magical sex), because it’s not sex as long as it doesn’t touch the sacred hymen, the proof of innocence, the righteousness of woman, the veil that God’s eye sees right through, the connection between heaven and hell.
The hard-core porn aesthetic resembles the imagery in the evangelical worldview. Desire, taboo and guilt (the holy Trinity) are all incorporated into the fetish objects. No one desires another person in hard-core porn: only objects are desirable. The person fucking, usually a man, is just an innocent victim of something sinful and fuckable. It can be reduced to a protestant maths equation: desire equals guilt, and it has to be distributed at the bottom of the hierarchical chain. The guilt is pushed down on the object, the body that’s being penetrated. The resulting hard-core porn is the proof of the equation. The protestant equation is in this way so relentless that it becomes pornographic itself. True protestant love.
Think about it: in my language, the word LOVE, kjærlighet, contains the entire word TRUST, ærlighet. Norwegian love is 80 per cent honesty, 80 per cent confession, bowing your head to the powers of definition, naked in the face of God, truth and honesty, love and honour, the money shot. Is love, in Norwegian, hard-core? Is it cleansed of bonds and magic?
But even the hard core contains a residue, 20 per cent mysticism and hope of transgression. If we forget submission and fetish and sin, there’s always something else. If you look closely enough, there’s always a clit in the throat, or a strange way of chewing gum, or a camera reflected in an eye, or an eye that looks like an egg. Even for the Jesus girls there’s always a handkerchief gone astray, a bare neck under the ponytail, a glass window flashing a rainbow into their mouths or along their zippers. There’s always an escape route from structure and rhetoric.
There has to be room for them, too, these escape routes. I don’t just write to analyse; analysis can so easily
