tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post5104970049199510479..comments2024-03-27T13:13:25.164-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: Times Square Red by Samuel R. Delanyjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-65859456714638752802009-06-04T17:12:26.960-04:002009-06-04T17:12:26.960-04:00"Times Square Red; Times Square Blue" by..."Times Square Red; Times Square Blue" by Samuel R. Delany; Science Fiction writer, Professor of Comparative Literature.<br /><br />New York University Press, 1999.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-68649554135340674822009-06-04T17:05:03.977-04:002009-06-04T17:05:03.977-04:00Times Square Blue
One of the truths the makers of...Times Square Blue<br /><br />One of the truths the makers of these early (pornographic) films got hold of and were able to exploit until cheap video obliterated the film market was that, paradoxical as it seems, most straight do not fantasize about sex with women so much as they fantasize about sex wih secretaries, nurses, waitresses, prostitutes, women doctors, women's magazine editors, schoolgirls, movie actresses seen on the screen, houswives and business women passed in the street.<br /><br />Once, when WAP (Women Against Pornography) was leading its tours through the area in the early eighties, I did an informal tabulaton of six randonm commercial porn films in the Forty-second street area and six random legit movies playing around the corner in the same area in the same week. <br /><br />I counted the number of major female characters portrayed as having a profession in each: the six legit films racked up seven (one had three, one had zero). The six porn films racked up eleven. On the same films I took tabs on how many friendships between women were represented, lesbian or otherwise, in the plot. The six legit films came out with zero; the six porn films came out with nine. Also: How many of each ended up with the women getting what they wanted? Five for the porn. Two for the legit.<br /><br />Was commercial film pornography sexist? Certainly. Was it anywhere near as sexist as the legit films playing accross the nation's screens in the same year? Not unless you simply took sexist and sexy as synonyms...<br /><br />Generally, I suspect, pornography improved our vision of sex all over the country, making it friendlier, more relaxed, and more playful- qualities of sex that, til then, had often been reserved to a distressingly limited section of the better read and more imaginative members of the mercantile middle classes.<br /><br />For the first year or two the theatres operated, the entire working-class audience would break out laughing at everything save male-superior fucking. ( I mean, that's what sex is, isn't it?) At the fellatio, at the cunnilingus even more, and at the final kiss, among the groans and chuckles you'd always hear a couple of "Yuucchs" and "Uhgggs". By the seventies' end, though, only a few chuckles sounded out now- at the cunnilingus passages. And in the first year or two of the eighties, even those had stopped. (No, that's what sex is: a four part act, oral, genital, where everybody gets a chance to be on top. Anything else was what was weird). Indeed, I think, under the pressure of those films, many guys simply found themselves changing what turned them on. And if one part or another didn't happen to be your thing, you still saw it enough times to realize maybe you were the strange one, and it behooved you to sit it out politely and put up with it, unless you wanted people to think you were strange..johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com