>But what is largely being consumed? The
>mass pap or the SPFF?
Of course the former, just as in consumption of agricultural produce, what is largely consumed is factory farms' produce rather than lovingly-tended organic farms'. This will be so as long as capitalism continues. Artisanal or cooperative labor -- be it in farming or movie-making -- can only exist on the margins of capitalist market. Porn is just like any other product & should be treated as such.
>Tell me, what is not political about the fact that mass-marketed
>porn movies seem to privilege a man coming on a woman's face? Or about
>the extraordinary prevalence of anal sex ("great wailing walls of glossy
>video" devoted to it, as Hitchens puts it in his Harper's review of
>Podhoretz's book)?
Perhaps, ostensibly heterosexual porn is a medium through which self-identified straight men can furtively seek the pleasure of being anally penetrated. In most allegedly heterosexual porn, male bodies & appendages tend to be used merely as props, interchangeable with dildos & other sexual toys. The camera, when it focuses on faces registering pleasures, focuses on women. The viewer, therefore, often has no choice but identify with women receiving sexual service & experiencing orgasms. The same goes for anal sex scenes. The male viewer has to identify primarily with anally penetrated women and only secondarily with men penetrating them (since male bodies & faces -- vehicles of identification -- are often left out of the visual texts). These little "transgressions" in the end help to maintain the institution of sexism & heterosexism, in that reproduction of the "straight male identity" has come to depend on occasional & pleasurable disruptions of it. Think _Scary Movie_ & how central the enjoyment of homophobic _& homoerotic_ jokes is to the enjoyment of the movie. No disruption of the "straight male identity," no reproduction of it (since "identity" can only be defined negatively). No creative destruction, no capitalism either. Limits are (re)defined only by constant transgressions.
>Still, I am not for forbidding it. But I am against it.
There are far more reactionary media than mass produced porn, and the worst is news programs, educational programs, etc. Like CNN, the New York Times, etc.
Remember "Operation Desert Storm" was sold as entertainment TV & then video.
Yoshie