Pop culture's unquestioning embrace of porn leaves Adam Carey searching for answers.
The latest issue of Sydney-based hipster/fashion mag Oyster features a long interview and several lavish photos of Faye Reagan, a pretty, freckle-faced young woman who is also one of the It Girls of American porn.

In one highly cinematic still, Reagan stands gazing out the window in a creased Mickey Mouse tee, cradling a vintage telephone in one hand and juggling the mouthpiece and a cigarette in the other, looking as though Clyde Barrow (or at a pinch, Jean-Paul Belmondo) might be whispering sweet, existential nothings on the other end of the line.

It would be a perfectly ordinary style-mag shot, were it not for the fact that Reagan isn't wearing any pants, a stark reminder of her day job.

In the accompanying interview, Reagan (who does appear to have her feet surprisingly well planted on the ground) is lauded as "wise for her years, and very, very cool".



So is porn cool now, so much so that even ever-sniffy cool hunters have tuned their tortoiseshell antennae to it? Is it just more stuff white people like? And if so, should we blame Terry Richardson, the A-list, high-end fashion snapper notorious for inserting his scrawny, bespectacled, middle-aged self into his hyper-saturated photos of naked, barely legal women? 

And what of French fashion publishing maven Oliver Zahm, of Purple fame, whose explanation for the countless sexed-up photos of obliging young women he posts on his Purple Diary blog reads like a dispatch from the Age of Aquarius, complete with "free love" guff: "To me love and sex is the most beautiful thing on earth, you know. It's more beautiful than a landscape, so I love to keep pictures of the girls in these private moments because they are giving you the most beautiful side of themselves." 

How did these chaps succeed in getting the beautiful people to act as props as they went public with their porn-lite sexual fantasies? Since when did dirty old men stop being a bit scuzzy? 

It would be all too easy if we could just wag our fingers at sleazy old men, but what are we to make of it when women get in on the act, too?



The latest issue of Acclaim, a Melbourne-based street culture mag with a dude-ish affinity for tattoos and graffiti art, mines the same porny Zeitgeist as Oyster. Its cover story is a series of photos by "erotic photographer" Ellen Stagg that, at first glance, looks like soft porn in its most gauche form, yet its mixed signals make it somewhat trickier to decode.

Stagg's subjects are, again, American porn actresses (Justine Joli and Ryan Keely), in a series of ludicrously girly action shots wearing very little; painting each other's nails while lolling around on a pink bedspread, playing hula hoop, sucking suggestively on phallic icy poles.

It looks like something from the mind of a man so unevolved he truly believes that women get together to have pillow fights in their negligees. Yet the message is tricked up by the knowledge that the images were shot by a woman who worked in close collaboration with the models.

"In terms of the aesthetic, I mean I focus more on their face than their 'pink parts', but I also focus on them as women, as people, as someone with a personality, over just a woman with a face and body," Stagg tells her interviewer. 

So maybe porn is the new black, and we should all wear it. There is another view, of course, one far from happy to be seduced by all that nubile, fashionably unattired flesh.

Academic Gail Dines argues forcefully in her new book, Pornland, that porn is simultaneously more scuzzy and more pervasive than ever, and that it's doing profound psychological damage to both men and women. In Dines's view, the aesthetics of pornography have become so dominant they've crowded out other representations of women in popular culture:

"What is different about today is not only the hypersexualisation of mass-produced images but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female," she writes.
"Today's tidal wave of soft-core porn images has normalised the porn star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim and downright boring."

Yet the so-called "porn star look" can be difficult to pin down in today's voguish style mags, even as their pages bulge with a flesh parade of models striking carnal poses. It's all slightly pervy, sure, but arty enough not to be a brown paper bag proposition.
But then the modern-day proliferation of pornish pics of barely post-pubescent girls hardly qualify as "art" either. Just check out any number of American Apparel's many sexed-up ads. The label is quite partial to using porn stars as models too. In the end, sex sells. But only for as long as we're all buying.
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/ ... 20101026-171x0.html

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Generation XXX ... Acclaim magazine featuring porn actresses Ryan Keely and Justine Joli.

[ Last edited by  atomic3d at 27-10-2010 08:01 ]