Pornosophy: A Survivor Recounts His Experience of a Radical Craniectomy

                                                 NBC Television

“It was like quartering an apple. My skull simply fell into pieces on the operating table. I was totally awake during the procedure and I was able to see my brain ooze right out into the open.  Being able to perceive the very thing that is doing your perceiving is an experience no one should miss. I’d been addicted to pornography and I’d embarked upon the craniectomy in the hope of getting involved in a loving and committed relationship. In fact after my doctor informed me about the specifics of the operation and I responded ‘that sounds like brainwashing,’ his response was, ‘your brain needs to be washed.’ I’d told him about the porn sites I went to. Some were really dirty. So his rub a dub dub approach was spot on. I had to nip my addiction in the bud, before I did any further harm to myself or others and I needed a real hands-on approach. I was tired of the softer and easier path of talk therapy which produced little results. No pain, no gain. A craniectomy is not something that can be done arthroscopically, in the way that orthopedists treat a torn meniscus, since you have to remove the whole crown of the skull which means that the recovery period is going to be much longer. I had tickets for the Bosox game the day after the scheduled surgery and I was sorely disappointed when I was told that I couldn’t simply be put together like Humpty Dumpty and then head up to Yankee Stadium on the 4. I was going to have to rest and it would be a while before it was possible to tell if the operation had been a success and the dirty thoughts abolished. If not they could always open me back up and start all over again. Luckily the operation was a total success. I had completely cleaned up my act and before long I returned to school and became an egghead. Not surprisingly neuroscience was my field of interest and I was appointed a tenured professor at a small liberal arts college. I got the wife and kids and a little house with a white picket fence. The scars eventually healed and my hair grew back. Looking at me you’d never suspect that a troubled mind had once inhabited my skull.”

Lady Gag Order

It used to be that spanking was a playful S&M activity, a holdover from the world that Steven Marcus described in The Other Victorians. Regressive childhood associations were reinforced when the naughty boy or girl, having had his or her pants pulled down, got a red bottom after being bent over someone’s knee. It was all fairly mild stuff that played upon notions of good and bad. But the ante is going up when it comes to the sexually explicit material that can be found on the Internet. Gone are the fake squeals of pain and pleasure that used to accompany old-fashioned videos, with their nurses or police uniforms, depending on the side of the dominance/submission divide a porn actor or actress was portraying. What seems to be selling now are real tears. The fourth wall has broken down and many online sexual sites specialize in producing scenarios in which the “actors” fall apart on camera. For all the viewer knows this could be part of the script, in much the same way that the Stage Manager addresses the audience in Our Town. Or it could be real. If an actress has had enough of being whipped, gang raped, gagged, facialized, asphyxiated, golden showered or expectorated on and she has a nervous breakdown on camera, all the better. The metteurs-en-scène, rather than feeling irritated by the divagation, seem to revel in it in the same way that credit card companies enjoy making more money when their customers fail to fulfill their obligations. Why do people enjoy seeing sex that appears to be a violation? Why do car drivers slow down to ogle horrible accidents? Why is this trend in pornography more prevalent today than it was in the past? Who knows? 

Talk Dirty to Me

John Leslie, the porn star and director who some considered to be a successor to the legendary John Holmes, died last week. He became famous for his work on Talk Dirty to Me I and II, and he belonged to an era when plot was still an integral to pornography. Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas exemplify the era of ‘70s and ‘80s porn, in which ever-more explicit sexuality was presented in the context of a script. Many of these films played in seedy inner-city theaters into which desperately lonely men wandered at all hours of the night, blasted out of their minds and seeking the companionship of prostitutes, who often worked the aisles. The use of plot was significant in the way it established artifice and the notion of delayed gratification, even for those whose ultimate aim was to get their rocks off. Porn has changed a great deal since the heyday of John Holmes and John Leslie. Firstly, the old triple-X theaters are gone, with pornography turned from a communal into a totally private experience to be indulged via the Internet. In addition, scripts have given way to scenes that get right to the point. There is no longer any magic, mystique or denouement when you go on a site like Red Tube or Naked On the Streets, and the videos no longer have exotic names like Emmanuelle or Midnight Plowboy. What you see is what you get, and the so-called loops go by names like MILF Likes It Hard, Facial, or Gang Bang, and when they refer to Deep Throat, they are not creating a medical fantasy about a girl with a clitoris in her larynx, but simply the shot of a man or woman with the talent and capacity to introduce the penis into the esophageal canal.