Sperm Count: Naked in Toledo

A lot of people are just bored and can find nothing more thrilling to do than pull down their pants There's a thrill to watching porn when you’re in a listless mood, but it’s even more exciting to make it and anyone can do it. Those who are exhibitionistically inclined need no longer confine their activities to undressing in front of their dorm or bedroom windows. All you need is the capacity to record yourself and you're off to one of those sites where you'll have your moment of fame. Imagine that you're just sitting listlessly in the one room you rent in Toledo, with the peeling paint on the wall, the kind of apartment that David Lynch might have used in one of his movies.There's nothing but the local Irish bar with the red faced guys sitting cross legged on stools with their veiny bulbous noses, the kinds of barflies who  have nothing better to do than to look indignant as you walk in to drink by yourself. But now just unzip your fly or let that skirt drop to the floor, click your heels three times chanting “there is no place worse than this prison”and you're on your way to a new life in which you can freely show your body to like minded individuals. A lot of people feel daunted when they think of the giants of adult cinema like Ron Jeremy, John Holmes, Sasha Grey or La Cicciolina, but you have to start somewhere and there’s no better place than in front of your own Airbook. Who knows how many people will eventually see your dick or pussy? We live in a new D.I.Y. universe where everyone has their 15 minutes of fame. You no longer have to be Steven Spielberg to run a studio. Twitter, Facebook have created promotional opportunities for everyone. Put one foot in front of the other and take it a day at a time and before you know it, you'll have more "friends" than you know what to do with and you'll never be bored.

Yet Another Shade of Grey

Artists like to get attention and what better way to get it than to drop their drawers. Confessional works which reveal demons hidden in the closet say like Susan Cheever’s memoir, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction about her sexuality are, of course, attention getters. Marina Abramovic the performance artist has done many works where she has either been naked or invited audience members to attack her body. In one piece the actual performance art was to become a prostitute and accept money for sex. Hannah Wilke used both her naked body and her death as the subject of her art. Annie Sprinkle and the Italian porn star La Cicciolina both started in the world of pornography and went on to have careers respectively in performance art and politics. Sasha Grey is the latest example of a porn actress who went on to build a career as a serious artist. Grey is not a fly-by-night porn actress. She took her porn seriously. The scenes she performed were extreme and alternately acrobatic, aerobic and always punishing, with gagging and anal penetration being two specialities de la maison. She then retired from pornography and has appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, HBO’s Entourage and other independent films. She’s also played in the band Telecine. In her book Neu Sex she made herself the auteur of her own filmic experience, using her camera to record herself becoming the object of her audience’s fantasies. Grey has always been interested in French New Wave cinema (she'd toyed with adopting the name of one of Godard's early actresses Anna Karina, according to Wikipedia, and could easily have been a character in Vivre Sa Vie--Godard's film about a prostitute). Watching Sasha Grey's pornography can be harrowing, as she invites suffocation and abuse, and yet she ironically falls into that category of artist whose life threatening brushes with reality become the substance of their life’s work. Despite her fascination with film, can we look at her as a female Hemingway, egging on her male counterparts, the way Hemingway incited his readers to run with the bulls at Pamplona?