>>the four most overrated things are lobster, champaigne, anal sex, and
>>picnics. Or so I heard.
>
>So you heard.... You aren't going to speak from experience?
Well, I'm no shirker! I've had three of these, Yoshie. That's just the devil-may-care, have-a-go, damn-the-torpedoes sorta guy I am. Lobster is more than nice enough to make it worth catching, but is not worth buying at the price. Champagne is shite, but it is efficient at getting those nervous silences out of the way quickly. And picnics are crap unless you have sex at 'em.
As for all this porn talk, well, I've seen some, and, yeah, the female's anus seems to be all the rage these days (never was when I first, er, came across this stuff in the seventies). Guess they'd so bombarded us with genitalia they just had to find a new taboo (it'll be smoking next). But I reckon you're overstepping the mark with that identification stuff, Yoshie. There's a long tradition of trying to impute homoerotic impulses to straight fellas and their 'consumption' of porn. And it just doesn't convince (yeah, yeah ... I'm in denial, I know). The fella is out of the picture because he'd get in the way, I reckon. It's mainly fellas watching, and fellas generally wanna watch the chicks without big hairy blokes getting in the way. This gives the whole thing a mechanical, by-the-numbers look, I admit, but I reckon most of we straights identify more readily with an almost absent organic-dildo-at-attention than we would with a woman in the throes. Mebbe there's something sadly wrong with that, but homoerotic it ain't.
As for pulling out for the 'money shot', well, that wasn't around in my youth either. That seems to get in the way of identification altogether, at least for sheltered sweeties like me, as I find it hard to believe it could be particularly desirable (especially if it gets in someone's eyes) and 1960s and 70s pornographers apparently didn't think it was either. It all strikes me much as gangster rap did - when you manage to mainstream the former taboos, you have to get dirtier, nastier etc etc to keep your markets at the edges.
Then you get stuff called 'art' - what with piss-submersed crucifixes, dead cows, and soiled sheets and such, and this is defended because it shocks, and that's a good thing (even this philistine could've come up with better arguments in their favour, but I doubt I'd really have meant them). Shocking people's not hard (just go take a crap on the gallery floor during a showing - mebbe in New York, you'd get away with it if you quickly defended yourself on the grounds that you were 'making the every-day strange' or summat, but you wouldn't fool real people for a minute - they'd know the crap's perfectly ordinary and that it is the modern art gallery that is strange). Like pornographers and gangster rappers, these galleries are just commodifying novelty in the name of dead values for bored people.
Porn, gangster rap and art are much of a muchness, I reckon. When someone shoots a naked woman in a police helmet dead on the gallery floor and sells the videos, you'll have the culmination of our society in a nutshell. The cultural logic of late capitalism and that of Imperial Rome have much in common, I reckon.
Cheers, Rob.