I’m not sure why anyone bothers trying to write plots or stories for porn.
I don’t like porn much because it’s so silly and unrealistic, but like most guys, I have to admit I do like watching people do things I like doing (viz., bondage).
But the vast majority of bondage video I’ve ever enjoyed or collected is much like my favorite martial arts movies: The best ones don’t even try to come up with a coherent story; they’re just vignettes.
When Bruce Lee died he was partway done filming a movie titled Game of Death. In this movie, he had to fight his way to the top of a five-story pagoda for some reason, getting past a martial artist of a certain style on each floor to get to the next.
When Lee died, three of the five fight scenes had been completed: The fight against Filipino/Kempo master Dan Inosanto, Hapkido master Ji Han Jae, and basketball-fu master Kareem Abdul Jabbar (no, I’m not making this up).
And that’s it. The original script is out there somewhere, but I honestly don’t care why Lee had to fight to the top of the tower or what happened when he finished or anything else — you just get to enjoy vignettes of some awesome fight choreography without worrying about whether the plot makes any sense.
That’s why I like the kind of bondage videos done by, say, Kink.com — where they simply film a scene and interview the model before and after. It’s real; no pretense. It’s like watching UFC: There’s no story or plot. Two guys get paid to fight, and they fight.
I don’t mind the aforementioned vignette-style bondage video, either:
- Vignette 1: A hogtie and ballgag.
- Vignette 2: Chair bondage.
- Vignette 3: Spreadeagled on the bed with a vibrator.
None of that messy character development or story arcs or any of that nonsense.
There are only a few basic story lines in chopsocky kung fu flicks: A master has been humiliated or killed and his student must save his honor. An outsider with no training or lineage shows up and saves the day from some crisis. A master’s student turns evil and has to be stopped.
Martial arts filmmakers have managed to hang a lot of movies on those anorexic plots (hell; those three sentences just described the entire Star Wars franchise).
Porn has similarly threadbare plots: Bunch of girls in a dorm are out of cash, but offer to pay the pizza boy another way; a plumber plumbs his customers more than their plumbing; some women “blackmail” some poor, poor guy into hours of hot monkey lovin’, etc.
Despite Porky’s and Caddyshack,1 I just can’t see any of this stuff happening in real life.
But what’s much, much sillier is porn where they try to create an actual plot of some sort. Ever heard the old joke about guys protesting that they buy Playboy magazine just to read the articles?2
I have to wonder — does anyone who makes porn videos think people watch them for the writing or character development? (Much less watch them all the way to the end?) I mean, at least Playboy actually has articles.
I was looking at Kinky & Popular on FetLife a couple days ago and saw a video clip with the following “plot”:
A grade school teacher is having trouble controlling his students, so he visits a colleague who is more successful and asks her for tips.
So naturally, she pushes him down on her desk and pegs him, flips him over and pegs him again, then walks out with his clothes and leaves him hiding under the desk naked.3
Um — what’s the message? That being pegged a lot makes you a better teacher? Or that doing a lot of pegging makes you a better teacher? What’s he supposed to do with the “advice” — peg his students?
I’m not into anal, but is this really anyone’s fantasy? “Gee, I wish I was a mediocre teacher and somebody would repeatedly assrape me at work!”
(If that IS your fantasy, please get a job doing anything but teaching. Like feeding crocodiles by hand, maybe.)
When I was 11 or 12, there was a lot of buzz among the other guys in junior high about someone named Linda Lovelace and a movie titled Deep Throat.4 I asked a friend who seemed to know all about that stuff what the fuss was about.
Through the course of a long, incoherent explanation I finally (sort of) got the plot: Linda Lovelace’s clitoris was way, way down in her throat, poor girl, so the plot consisted of her trying to find a man whose bathyspheric boner could dive down there and bring home the bacon. Or at least flick the bean.
So why didn’t she just get a long-handled toothbrush? Or swallow some live goldfish? And if her clitoris was in her throat, what was in her vagina — tonsils?
Even though I was hiding in a treehouse with a few other guys, snickering and devouring porn magazines as we breathlessly — and wildly inaccurately — tried to begin to understand human sexuality, I knew. I knew something was wrong.
Maybe not wrong; just silly. Even for porn, it was silly. People just don’t run around fucking their plumbers and pizza boys. We don’t act like that in real life. Although I did once see someone try — and fail epically:
I was at a writer friend’s birthday party, and another writer friend brought an absinthe fountain.5 Things got sloshy and hallucinatory. My friend introduced me, a writer, to her friend, an agent, who had thoughtfully shown up at the party pre-squiffed before she even had four or five times her fair share of absinthe. We chatted for a while about various projects and she woozily decided she just had to get me her business card.
I followed her downstairs to the ubiquitous bed with all the coats and purses on it to get her card. She handed it to me and said, “Have you known [our mutual friend] a while?” I allowed we’d been acquaintances a number of years. Her eyebrows waggled and she said, “So I guess that means you know who you want in charge in bed.”
Wittily, I riposted: “Huh?”
“If you’ve known her that long I just know you like a woman to take charge in bed!” I belatedly realized she was between me and the door and was about to try to push me back on the bed.
I’d never exchanged anything more passionate than a hug with the aforementioned mutual friend, so I had no idea what my hammered agent friend was on about — but her inner porn script wasn’t having any rewrites.
So I told the drunk lady with the business card that yes, I sure did want someone to take charge in bed, but it was going to take both of them to handle me (PORN PLOT ALERT!) so why didn’t she just scamper up there and get our mutual friend while I got ready?
Her eyes lit up and she scampered (well, staggered) upstairs. And I did not — repeat not — get undressed or handcuff myself to the bed or anything else like that. Besides the fact that I valued my friendship with my writer friend, and that I’m not quite dumb enough to let a drunk person I don’t know tie me to a bed, who wants to have sex on a pile of other people’s coats and purses?6
Instead, I waited a minute, then snuck upstairs to find my friend, and told her our drunk acquaintance apparently wanted a threesome that would be nonconsensual on my part (I was less offended than I was worried that she might try to drive home).
She giggled and said “She’s already tried to rope in four or five other people, and I think she’s forgotten about you already.” (Ah, the slings and arrows of — I mean, whew).
I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered, hurt, disgusted or amused — she was so drunk and aggressive I can’t kid myself I did anything more arousing than breathing. She would have gone after the dogs, I think — I left soon after and wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Before she passed out, that is.
Aren’t you glad real life is nothing like porn? Every pool boy, maid and groundskeeper in the country would be a slave, except when they threw off their shackles, went down to Lowe’s and got better ones and kidnapped a rich heiress to take her to a secret island to brainwash her into kidnapping me and making me serve her in tight leather bondage, where we would all happily dance around Dana Delaney until Dan Aykroyd and Rose O’Donnell would show up and spoil the whole thing.
That’s silly, even for porn.