A week or so ago I watched one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s one of those that puts you so deeply in touch with its subject that you feel as if you’re looking through that subject’s eyes. The eyes in question were poet Charles Bukowski’s, and the film was Bukowski: Born Into This. I’d read Bukowski before but had always had some basic issues with his plain, unadorned style and brutal honesty. I’d caught glimmers of his genius, but reading his poetry sometimes made me weary, past the point of sadness, as if what he saw made him ache and would make me ache, too, if I read too long.
But as the videos of interviews and readings played on my screen beneath his surprisingly gentle voice reading poems, I was left speechless. This man was it. The real deal. His quiet wish for peace and freedom, and the constant crush of what the world could but would not be against that wish… It ached, but for the first time I felt that I understood the pain in him, and I welcomed the feeling myself. It was visceral.
His last wife, Linda Lee Bukowski, said in an interview after his death that, “He despised Mickey Mouse…. ’He’s a three-fingered son of a bitch who has no soul, for Christ’s sake! Mickey Mouse doesn’t have a fucking soul!’”
Through the awe I felt at the moment, something about that statement startled me into motion. I suddenly realized: That’s my problem with porn. That’s why I get flashes of guilt when I’m really tired, why I don’t use my real name on my porn writing projects, why I sometimes wake in terror that there is a moralistic God up there judging me for being involved, however peripherally, in an industry like this. It’s not that porn is bad. It’s not that God, or god, or whatever you call it, really cares. It’s not that I don’t believe in the polemics I write about how we all need to calm down about porn and sex. It’s not that any of it is really wrong. It’s just that, well, porn has no soul. Just like Mickey Mouse.
Both Mickey and twenty-first century porn offer visions of the world that are aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand, full of happy endings and blond women with big blue eyes and perfect figures. But they’re not real. They teach nothing, say nothing, do nothing but offer us entertainment, which is perfectly fine. But there’s a danger in internalizing this entertainment: too much of it, or too strong a belief in the validity of it, and you smash up against the flatness of it, the unreality. The two-dimensional idea that these things are flawless, and therefore desirable, and therefore, in a way, right. But perfection like the kind we see in singing mermaids and big-busted babes who always want sex—it’s emptiness. There’s nothing behind it, apart from generic music and artificial lighting, and a few people at the top banking on our desire to see these beautiful, contrived versions of the world that offer no hope because they deny the beauty in the world we live in. They make our reality less than it is.
It’s funny that the man who made me think about all this is one of the most controversial literary figures in history, renowned for his ill treatment of women and possible (or probable) misogyny. He was a drunk, a womanizer, a failed husband, a compulsive gambler, and a cheat. But you know, I bet you he hated pornography, for the same reason he hated Mickey Mouse: because he had a soul and he was trying damn hard to use it in the face of Walt Disney’s onslaught of cute, cleaned-up entertainment. As William Packard, publisher of the New York Quarterly, puts it in the documentary, only Bukowski was capable of the “de-Disneyfication of all of us.” We needed him, someone, anyone, to remind us that sparkles don’t equal magic, and that all that sparkly, hairless, silicone, and peroxide magic we were looking for probably wasn’t worth a damn anyway, because it was void of soul, of real humanity.
Porn thrives on masking humanity’s aesthetically unpleasing bits so everything looks symmetrical, like Mickey Mouse did when he turned fairy tales that started out spooky and bloody into cute, lovable song and dance routines. And porn is the Disneyfication of sex—it makes something real, raw, and powerful into something pretty. It sucks the soul out and replaces it with mass market appeal, or small niche fetish appeal, or what have you. I used to love Disney films as a kid. Actually, to be honest, I still do. I love the simplicity of it all: the pretty ladies in dresses, the evil arch nemeses, and the idea that at any moment we could break into a song and dance that would take away all my cares. I whistle while I work sometimes and hope the world will whistle with me.
But it never does. Especially when the work in question is viewing a creampie compilation starring double-D implants, supported by a cast of orange-tan skin, acrylic nails, and shaved genitals so cleaned up and airbrushed they look almost like Barbie doll parts. Sex rarely looks like that, or moves like that, or talks like that in real life, and watching a whole ton of porn can make one forget the beauty in real sex. The soul in it, the connection, the power of it. The humanity there can be in the intersection of bodies and minds…
Look, I don’t want to misrepresent myself here. You should know that I’m not one of those who think that sex is some divine mystery, or that it can only be shared between to people who love each other very, very much. I don’t think that sex is a sin. I don’t even believe in sin. Actually, I believe in the right of every person to have as much fun, responsible, enjoyable sex as he or she wants to, with whoever is willing, as often as possible. And I think porn can be a whole hell of a lot of fun and that people should watch it and use it as much as they want to. But the thing is that I’m a person who likes the idea that reality is beautiful. I like there to be a soul in the things I do and spend my time thinking about, and there’s no soul in Porn Valley, at least not collectively speaking. There are souls in the people involved—most of them anyway. And there’s sometimes meaning in the looks performers exchange when their bodies connect. There are even some companies out there making thoughtful movies based on the real chemistry and human connection inherent in good sex. But by and large, porn is just business, and it’s business made of human beings at their most vulnerable. But instead of vulnerability, here are these people tinted with electric lighting, slathered in makeup, strangled by silicone and fake tans. Here the sounds of human ecstasy are canned. The moment when the soul and the brain and the heart all touch inside, the orgasm, is close-up and grotesque on camera, all external. All superficial. All fake. There’s nothing wrong with faking it sometimes—it’s still fun, even if you’re not 100 percent into it. But it sure as hell is better when you’re into it. When it’s more than a mechanical, aggressive pounding; when things don’t go perfectly and there are awkward positions and moments and fumbling around and laughing at each other for not being flawless like they are in the movies; when you’re being human together. That’s when it’s good. And being so involved in an industry that makes images in which any of this rarely comes into play, I ache like Bukowski’s poems. Here I am, watching the soul leaking out of us, in so much bodily fluid.
Maybe the thing that Bukowski was really saying wasn’t that there’s no hope in reality, but rather that the parts of reality that we try to ignore because they are less perfect-looking are the ones most full of the magic we forget to see when we’re looking for magical sparkles like in Disney movies. The funny noises and the stray pubic hair and the hangnail, the giggling and the playing, the level of hotness that can spring up between two people doing something that doesn’t look very pretty but feels fantastic: these are things that have real humanity in them—souls. They’re sadly lacking in most high-budget mainstream porn films, and that lacking makes me feel like I’m watching robots going at it. It’s more a feat of engineering than of passion, and it feels sad sometimes.
Sad like looking through Bukowski’s eyes at two people whose surgically enhanced bodies are meeting intimately, but whose eyes never lock. Like that three-fingered son of a bitch had his way with both of them first, gave them gloves for hands and big black dilated pupils for eyes, and convinced us they were ideal. It makes me ache.