Oruba Reveals What's Behind The Green Door

I never figured myself as one who'd take the untimely death of a pretty righteous woman as an opportunity to watch 70's porn. The journey of life is about finding new things about yourself.

The reason for my interest in Behind the Green Door is that I knew nothing about it. My ignorance had been bugging me for a week before I finally succumbed to my curiosity. Why didn't I know about one of the two main movies behind the Golden Age of Porn?

I'm well aware of Deep Throat despite never having seen it. The movie about the woman who's clitoris is in the back of her throat? Who doesn't know the premise behind that movie? That's a name that brought down a president. But what is behind the Green Door?

It took a week because I had to overcome my unease with watching a dead woman have sex, but I'm glad I gave in. Quite a pleasurable experience I must say.

What is behind the Green Door? A fantasy world constructed to sate your carnal appetite. If I may apply the bullshitting skills I acquired in Film Studies 101, I would say that the Mitchell Brothers, obvious students of Hitchcock, use the color green to the same effect as Hitchcock, to symbolize desire. The door of course is a portal from the Real World to the World of the Watched. Behind the Green Door, like Hitchcock's own Rear Window is commentary, meta-commentary even, equating movie viewing with voyeurism.

All bullshitting aside, I was surprised at the overall production. It seemed not far from a low budget, non-sex movie of the period. I think Linda Lovelace was onto something believing that pornography would merge with mainstream movies. More on that later.

I patiently waited almost 20 minutes for the sexing to start and watched everything straight through. This is a rarity. I skip through porn. Under normal circumstances it would've taken 15 minutes to watch all of Behind the Green Door. The difference was the way the sex was staged. Porn has settled into a formula long ago. Foreplay (if any), Oral, Position 1, Position 2, Position 3, Cum Shot. The End. This was different. Organic. As if what we are watching is the process, the actual lovemaking, rather than the outcome.

Maybe this will make me take back my previous statement. Maybe porn can be art. There's a theory of art, conceived by R.G. Collingwood that states art is process focused. His thinking is that if you're outcome focused, what you're making is classified as a craft. Like making a table, or a basket, or a poster advertising something or other. You could make the case that contemporary porn for the most part is like cabinent making. Art is a process by which the artist attempts to make real an intangible idea, feeling, or impulse. The physical outcome is never in his head, only the Platonic Form he is trying to represent. I don't completely buy Mr. Collingwood's theory, but Behind the Green Door does fit quite nicely into this description.

A few particular things I like:

• The first Boy/Girl doesn't end with a cumshot, but with her orgasm. That's mind blowing! That would be pioneering shit even if it happened today, nearly forty years later.
• The cumshots that are shown last seven minutes and given an avant garde feel.
• That has to be the classiest gangbang I've ever seen. Guys in tights with the crotches cut out; Trapezes; A Greek chorus of sucking, licking, caressing women in the periphery dressed in black; a beautiful woman in the center of it all who sincerely looks like she's enjoying herself and not in pain or in some cracked out frenzy, or reliving some heart wrenching childhood experience.

As I watched Behind the Green Door I marvel how different it is from today's porn. I wonder what happened. How did we get to where we are? Was it Reagan pushing it underground? Was it the advent of VHS and the camcorder? Was it the subsequent decline in production values and the capitalistic need to push out a mass produced product?

I couldn't help thinking of Brave New World. The people of that world go to what are called "feelies," porn movies shown in theatres where all the attendees feel the sensations of the actors onscreen. The stories behind the "feelies" are abysmal. It's the communal aspect of the feelies that got me thinking. Many people saw Behind the Green Door in the theatres. With other people. Packed houses, I am told. I think at that point we reached a juncture in human history and went one way instead of the other. Perhaps there's a split in the space-time continuum, and an alternate universe exists where Linda Lovelace's prophecy did come true. Where Porn and Mainstream movies did merge. Where porn theatres weren't only populated with perverts and cruisers. Maybe AIDS doesn't exist in this world. Maybe women are our complete equals there. Maybe Jerry Falwell choked on a sandwhich when he was 12. Maybe it was Ronald Reagan who was snitched on to HUAC and blacklisted from Hollywood, running for governer California an insane pipe dream for him much less president. Maybe the people of that world look back at Behind the Green Door as the harbinger of a Golden Age.

I do have one gripe, not a huge one. Why does the first black dude I see look like a Zulu warrior? Well at least Marilyn didn't tell him to fuck her with that nigger dick.

Sigh

Porn Star Haiku: Shannon Kelly

Good Things do come in
Small packages, with red hair,
And enormous boobs.

Dreaming of Leighlani Red

I had a weird dream about Leighlani Red last night.

We were in the middle of a scene. I went in for a kiss. She hesitated. I asked her if anything was wrong.

Then the lights and the cameras disappeared. The crew faded from view. It seemed like the world around us darkened. It was just the two of us sharing an intimate moment on an oft cummed-on couch.

She said in a tender yet professional tone that she would rather not. She just doesn't like kissing the men she films with.

But you've given me the girlfriend treatment before, I said.

Yes, because I like you and I enjoy kissing you but not in this setting. Besides you're a nice guy; I know you'll respect my wishes.

I did. I completely understood.

The rest of the room returned from the Netherworld: the lights, the cameras, the wiring snaking the floor, the derivative Abstract Expressionist painting above the couch, the crew, the directer watching the monitor, the other performers waiting on the wings, the table with the Wet Naps.

We went back to fucking like nothing happened. Minutes later I pulled out and blew a load that went splat against her pretty, pockmarked face, thinking maybe after this is over I'll ask her out.

Weird, huh?

The Post-Modern Condition Becomes Easier to Define

Found a word on Urban Dictionary that could have only come into being in the last decade:

PORNXIETY	11 up, 1 down
	The brief but intense bout of anxiety and nausea one experiences when one finds someone remarkably similar looking to one's ex/ current girlfriend and believe it is her for the briefest of seconds while viewing pornography. It is followed by an odd, shameful sense of disappointment. "My ex looked so much like Alyssa Milano that when I first saw Embrace of the Vampire I had a Pornxiety attack."

I wonder how long before it makes it into a paper based, legit dictionary.

Pornxiety isn't a condition I personally suffer from but I am afflicted with a related ailment: Pornstalgia.

False Impressions and Defending the Dead

I told myself I wasn't going to write about Marilyn Chambers. I didn't really know her. I've never seen any of her sex flicks and I vaguely remember seeing her in some Skinamax movie when I was 13, but I could never be sure who were in those many crappy movies I saw at two in the morning. Maybe.

Either way, I felt being that she was a generation or two before my time, anything I would've written would lack that familiar personal connection of someone who actually dug her and got off on her. You'll find better coverage here and here.

What am I doing now, you ask?

I was at the post office. The line was unbearably long. There's only one person at the window so it's moving at a snail pace. I've got no patience and like a schmuck I forgot to bring a book. Luckily there's a copy of the local paper sitting on a nearby counter. Read through the police blotter. Then flipped to an article about Marilyn.

I got to tell you, I was highly annoyed while reading it. Halfway through I was set to rush home and bang out a scathing critique on this, my soapbox for all things porn. I reread the article while firing up the laptop. And what do you know? It read like a completely different piece. Looks like being wet (it's been raining something heavy) and peeved about waiting in line affected the way I perceived the article. Once I was dry, warm, and not in a state of perpetual waiting, all the flip remarks and snide comments disappeared. Gone too was the amateur feel to the article (although it still is far from winning a Pulitzer) and the condescending tone.

The only thing left to complain about is this double whammy of a backhand compliment:

"Given her sexual proclivities, amazingly she never got HIV or AIDS, although even she could not avoid the curse of excessive carbohydrates."

What the fuck is that? Check it out for yourself here.

Ectasy and Agony: Upon Viewing Candy Monroe

Do you like tattooed girls doing porn? Of course you do. You're like me. Suicide Girls was like a present from God for our patience. After a while, like me, just seeing them naked wasn't enough. You needed hardcore action. And Joanna Angel and the girls over at Burning Angel became the new gift from the skies. But soon that wasn't enough. They don't put out videos fast enough for you. You indulge yourself upon the new scene then it's a waiting game for the next one. And there are other sites and other movies but you still can't get enough. Are you like me, friend? Do you feel Candy Monroe is God's punishment for asking for too much?

Have you seen Ms. Monroe? She's everything I could want in a tattooed lady. She's cute as button. The hair, the clothes the tattoos are all bright, over the top affairs. And I didn't know this till a few years ago, but apparently throat tattoos drive me wild. Then everything goes downhill from there because this absolutely delicious specimen of a woman does exclusively IR. And not just any IR. She's into Cuckold
Porn. And it's worse than that. In fact it'll turn your stomach.

I've addressed my problems with IR elsewhere. What worries me about Ms. Monroe is that she is obviously following in Spring Thomas' footsteps. I have yet to hear her drop the N-Bomb during sex, but she still nevertheless puts me in awkward positions as a black man. Case in point, just yesterday I was about near the end of one of her scenes when I realized she was wearing a Confederate Army cap, complete with the rebel flag. What am I to do, stop out of indignation? I hate IR.

Cuckold porn sometimes make me uneasy. If it's something like Please Bang My Wife or XXX Proposal where the guy either just watches or joins in for a BJ from his wife, I don't have problem with it. But if the husband's on the couch masturbating, it's a bit distracting and uncomfortable. And if the guy is an obvious twink like the dudes Candy has on, shit, it's downright disturbing. To top it off, she'll humiliate the dude before the scene. Make him wear her clothing and stuff. So basically you're watching a video where there are quite a few shots of a twink in bra and panties masturbating. That is interjected into what is ostensibly straight porn.

But it gets worse. I told you it gets worse. If you've seen a Candy Monroe video before you know exactly what I'm talking about. And no doubt you're as traumatized as I am. For the uninitiated, consider yourselves lucky. I wish I had someone tell me about the shit that was about to go down. Listen closely and prepare accordingly. After the money shot, Candy calls the twink over and makes him LICK IT OFF HER. The first time I saw that, I had to keep my lunch down so I don't throw up all over my computer. Had I still been going when that happened I would've been ruined for life.

The general subject of the cumshot I've written about as well, so I won't rehash it here. But the whole scene had me thinking about just why I found that disgusting. I mean, at this stage of the game I've seen women do unimaginable things with cum. I see cumshots routinely, as a matter of course, just about every single day. Faces, breasts, butt, back, belly, feet. Seen it? Hell I've done it myself numerous times. I've seen girls drink cum out of spoons, coffee mugs, beer bongs, and champagne flutes; out of the mouths, assholes, and pussies of other girls. I've seen girls dip their faces into bowls filled with cum. I've seen dudes line up 100 guys deep and cum on a girls face one after another. I have even seen a girl roll up a twenty and snort a line of cum like it was cocaine. But not a single one of those filled me with nearly as much revulsion as seeing a man do it.

I know I've been inculcated to believe that cumming in woman's face is a normal part of lovemaking, but seeing it done to a guy seems so inherently wrong. If you think you're up to watching that then by all means. But if you're like me, just hit the pause button before it's too late.

Dammit Dammit Dammit!

LOL!

Use Of 'N-Word' May End Porn Star's Career

Italian Porn Disagrees With Me and I With It

A word about Italian porn. I had a random memory the other day and it still fills me horror and disgust. Truly, truly Ugly Girl Porn. In a bad way.

I was in Italy a few years ago and picked up a local skin mag because this is how I connect with the international community. Mistake.

The girls, oh the girls. How can I explain the girls? The only way I would ever have sex with any of the women in this particular magazine is if I was already infected with every STD known to man, didn't have any feeling in my penis or most of my body for that matter, and I was guaranteed to have no recollection of what went down right after it was all over.

Skank is not a word I throw around lightly. These girls were beyond skank. I mean very bottom of the an old scum-coated barrel. Every woman in this magazine looked like they were straight out of the 80's: big hair, cheap chunky jewelry, Vanessa Del Rio pumps. That entire section from the bellybutton down to the knees looked to be under attack from some rare strain of jungle rash. Ragged pussy lips abound. Almost everyone looked like they needed a penicillin shot or twelve.

The worst part is that I'm already in a bathroom with my pants around my ankles when I make this discovery. I can't be bother with getting back up and looking for a new magazine, so I make an effort to find at least one acceptable girl. With some effort I find her. Boy-Girl scene. Semi-attractive. Looks relatively clean. Promising. I manage to get a decent stroke going.

I'm flipping through the pages and something doesn't look right. I count. One. Two. That can't be right. I count again. One. Two. Yup. There are two sets of testicles. And there's another penis right there. I didn't know this was a DP. Where's the other guy?

Oh...Dear...God!

Never again. No Italian porn. I even swore off Rocco Siffredi videos just to be on the safe side.

I've asked around and many of my friends have had the same experience.

There's something to be said when the most attractive woman in your magazine is a man. And who mixes tranny and straight porn anyway?

I Love Love Love Charlotte

I haven't watched anything from Net Video Girls in years. Are they still putting out new content? I have blissful memories of the girls I've found on there. Not the least of which were Eve Lawrence and August Knight.

But the one who really captured my heart was Charlotte. Need I say it? I love love love Charlotte. She looks exactly like the type of girl I'd date.

[A Blogger's Note: I've been rereading my posts and it has come to my attention that saying X “is a girl I'd date” is something I seem to be doing a lot. I foresee this phrase popping up more in the future and annoying the hell out of everyone. For this reason I've decided to let the power of the ACRONYM (A Clever Re-Organization Nudges Your Memory) speak for me. So instead hitting you over the head every time I talk about wanting to date So and So, I'll just label her WIWTD (Woman I would Totally Date) and leave it at that.]

I suppose the Girl Next Door thing is a cliché for a reason. I never believe the stories weaved in “reality” porn videos but there was something about her that made you think maybe she really was the ingénue she claimed to be. I haven't seen her anywhere else so maybe it's true. Note: if you have seen Charlotte do porn elsewhere or just know for a fact that she's a pro, please don't ruin it for me. I want to live this fantasy.

It's been a few days since I'd written the four paragraphs above and there's already a threat to my fantasy world. I fucked up and did some light research. Some are saying that Charlotte and Alicia Avery, a girl who is is very much not the Girl Next Door cliché and is totally not WIWTD, are one and the same. I respond to this by plugging my ears, closing my eyes and humming “My Girl” as loud a I can.”

Remembering Scramble Porn

We have a generation and a half, perhaps two whole generations, of young males in this country who have come of age masturbating to squiggly lines. When you put it like that it sounds like madness, right?

Check it out: In the 50's, 60's, and 70's if you were a kid in need of visual stimuli there were always the issues of Playboy or whatever in your father's sock drawer, as the cliché goes. Magazines were the main medium. A little later, other options included sneaking into peep shows, porn theaters, and nudie bars, but for the most part, if you're a horny 13 year old boy in search of the hard stuff (a few steps above the bra section in the Sears catalog), you're getting hold of a magazine one way or another.

Things changed in the 80's as VHS cassettes and players became affordable. The medium changed but the images conveyed were the same. If they filmed a pretty brunette having sex with a man, that's what the viewer saw.

In the 90's, maybe a little earlier, pay-per-view porn showed up on cable. But once again if you're a 13 year old with no resources, getting a hold of a magazine or tape is doable, but paying for cable porn with a credit card or having it show up on your parents bill, was not an option. Luckily, even if you didn't have ultra-liberal parents who order Spice Network or Playboy, you could still watch it in a manner of speaking. And thank God for Scramble Porn, something I believe was more than an oversight.

I think I first discovered Scramble Porn in the early 90's when I was about 11 or 12. And in those days I would spend hours in front of the television in hopes of catching a blow job or some girl getting it doggy style. Like most people who try to control random occurrences, I picked up a lot of strange superstitions. I believed the TV's position, where I sat, what clothes I wore, the time of day, the position and operational status of other nearby electrical appliances, all affected the reception. Strangest of all was my belief, over time, that if I tried hard enough I could descramble it with my brain.

Now I realize that an eighteen year old reader might have no idea what I'm talking about. Let me explain. Watching Scramble Porn is like watching a negative of a movie. Everything is inverted. Brunettes have light hair. Blondes are dark. Everyone's teeth is black. White people have dark skin, and since Sean Michael was the only black guy you ever saw on Spice back then he was white. The picture would be inverted and unsquiggly about 25% of the time. If you were really lucky it would be consecutive. Once I saw an entire sex scene unsquiggled. The best day of my life. Usually though, you're getting a few seconds at a time. A boob here, back of her head during a blow job there. On bad days I caught what I assumed to be dialogue and plot development. My Holy Grail back then was catching at least two minutes of straight (non-inverted, minimally squiggly) black and white reception with spotty sound during a sex scene. That would happen on average, with near daily viewing, about once every few weeks, but when it did the goal was to masturbate as fast as I could.

Thinking about it has made me think two things:

1) When held up against the frightening ease of acquiring porn today, Squiggly Porn is my generation's equivalent of walking ten miles to school everyday in the snow. Just yesterday I watched more clear footage of porn than I could ever have hope do in the year I was 13. We're talking about a half hour.

The second thing is the long term effects. As with all cultural phenomenon, especially underground ones, the person participating at the time doesn't know how widespread that phenomenon is. At no time in my youth was I going to advertise what I was doing in my room for hours on end. And I'm sure that was the same for other boys. It wasn't till later, maybe when I was about 19, 20, that I found out how many guys did the same exact thing. I think just about every guy I've met within 5 years of my age, has spent a significant, if not appalling amount of his adolescence watching Scramble Porn, superstitious habits and all. If you didn't have cable you went over a friend's house. So, for the first time in the 100,000 years of human existence, in the 10,000 years of human civilization, you have a large population of young males who have been weaned sexually on images of googlygook. There has to be effects to our zeitgeist that we haven't found out about yet. Personally, I feel mild arousal when I walk through a modern art museum. Eating spaghetti has always made me feel awkward. When I'm with a woman, I need her to buzz and jiggle before I can get where I need to be. I'm joking about some of that. My point is has anyone looked into this yet? I'm sure we'll find something worth knowing.

All this reminiscing about Scramble Porn for me is about something else, something specific. Since coming of age, I found myself trying to acquire copies of the movies I used to watch, if for no other reason than to hear what they were saying. So far I've been successful. In fact so much so that I've pushed myself towards harder to get stuff.

Now, on the Spice Channel what I really loved were the commercials, the ones for phone sex (does anyone call phone sex lines anymore?). They were short, to the point, and more likely to be clear than the features. What they showed, along with the hot chick asking you to call, were vignettes, I assume from movies. And the one I used to obsess over involved a woman—she could have been a cop, but meter maid is a possibility—having sex with with a guy in what I think is a parking lot. She had short curly dark hair and was gorgeous. If you watch enough Scramble Porn, you could tell who's hot even if black is white and everything is jumbled.

I can't tell you how hard it is to find that, Holy Grail hard. If you google “cop porn” you'll get a bunch of things you really really really don't want to see. I've waded through hundreds of pictures and clips but no luck.

I've changed strategies recently and decided the best thing is to get a hold of someone who taped the movies straight off Spice, like a few dudes I knew in high school, in hopes that maybe they taped the commercials as well. So far that hasn't turned up anything either.

Some day though, I'm optimistic that I'll get what I was looking for and be happy, for about five minutes, then go obsessing about something else. Sigh.

Porn Star Haiku: Jessica Lynn

Looks like my ex; same

White girl ass. Stop watching Jess
And give R_____ a call.

Is Porn Art?

A few days ago, in a conversation with my good friend Lyndsey, a question surfaced: Can porn be art?

My answer, at the time not as articulate as the argument you have before you, was basically thus: When porn becomes art, it is no longer porn.

My answer was the result of a recent encounter with a definition of pornography that made a whole lot of sense. According to David Wong, pornography is anything you lose interest in after you climax. In one sense this is a definition as vague as Justice Potter Stewart's “I know it when I see it.” But in another sense it it perfectly describes my, and perhaps your, relationship to porn. Most importantly, it underlines its patently utilitarian nature.

Now, I am a man who very much wants porn to be art. As a fifteen year old I gravitated toward those movies with plots and elaborate sets and big budgets and loads of clever, though often butchered, dialogue. I harbored a wish to write fresh, original screenplays for sex flicks that could stand on their own without the sex. I liked the idea of erotic films that weren't simply about sex so much that it took me a long time to admit that I wouldn't like them so much without the sex.

I was enamored by the works of Michael Ninn. But lets face it, Latex and Shock aren't Chinatown or Apocalypse Now. Yes, they're pretty but you'll be hard press to find anyone who'll pop them into a DVD player for any reason other than getting off. I can tell you, as much as I praise the man, I've never watched a Michael Ninn movie straight through. For me, it's skip to my favorite scene. Get my rocks off. Take a nap.

Oscar Wilde said, “All art is utterly useless.” It stands and exists only for itself. Porn, by definition exists to tend to our prurient interests. It has a purpose, some many say a noble one. But until it ceases to serve that purpose it cannot be declared art.

Thousands of years from from now, our civilization will go the way of the Egyptians and the Maya. Our ways of life will be analyzed by people far different from us. I envision them being the epitome of sexual liberation. Their utter lack of repression will mean that the idea of pornography and the pleasure derived from it being verboten will be alien to these people. And these people will excavate the ruins of 21st century civilization and find porn by the boatloads and will be puzzled by it. They will lack the frame of reference to appreciate it for what it is: a masturbation tool. They will wonder, was this part of 21st century religion? Was this art?

A few thousand years ago, before pipes brought water into homes, before wine was corked in bottles, water and wine were ported in jars and vases. And people painted these jars and vases because that's what we human do. No one, not a single one of these vase painters, beamed with pride knowing that their “masterpiece” will be on display at the British Museum. They were just painting a water jug. The same way that guy from the graphics department designs a box cover for the latest Cougar DVD.