The Prostitute, The Comedian -- And Me
by Tracy Quan(Page 6)
For the upper class in Athens, for the people who spent their leisure time exercising and watching the beautiful boys, a small penis may have been a sign of beauty. But the people who were building the Parthenon -- they probably wanted a big penis. Today, in the upper class, you never see obese people. It's socially unacceptable. But in the shopping malls, and in working class life in America, you see lots of obese people. There's no social pressure against it. In the same way, people speaking about us in the future will say, "Well, thin was in. Looking at all the ads from the period, thin was in." Yet, the working class was fat as ever. Same thing here. For a brief moment among the upper class in Athens, a small penis was considered philosophical. It meant you were not driven by animal appetite. It may have had no impact whatever on what was going down on the dock in Piraeus: a big penis was just as in as it has ever been.
TQ: So, the animal appetites were suppressed only among the very effete...
CP: At the same time that you had these great sculptures of the Greek boys with the small penises -- and later in the Hellenistic period -- you also had pottery featuring these satyrs with huge penises. Wild, hilarious scenes! Satyrs, with a half-goat body and a giant penis, chasing down a hermaphrodite or woman or a boy. And they're raping him! You can see clearly that a large penis was animalistic to them. A lot of my ideas about rape are coming from that, the fact that men find rape fun and erotic. It seems so obvious if you look at the whole history of art.
TQ: Candida Royalle, who was an X-rated star in the Seventies, is now producing sex videos with a feminist orientation. I've heard her say that a lot of porn is unrealistic or demeaning to women. How do you feel about feminist porn?
CP: Feminist porn means you remove all the things you don't like. You censor porn to make it subscribe or conform to a prefab ideology. It's diluted. You remove all the lust from it. This idea that porn has to conform to the ethics we live in real life is ridiculous. You can look at things you would not tolerate in real life. You can watch people being whipped or beaten or abused in porn, and you tolerate it because it's in the realm of imagination, of art. Porn gets its charge from taking a taboo and violating it. Porn should be grotesque and coarse, it should do everything possible to offend and humiliate. When people say, "That's irresponsible, we don't want to see that," I say, "Why not?" I want to see everything: the most horrible, the most unimaginable. I want to see it and get a charge off it. Feminist porn's absurd. I'm totally against it. I like regular porn.
TQ: When do real life ethics become a concern in porn?
CP: A lot of people say, "I'm for erotica but I'm against kiddy porn," or "I'm against violent porn." I can understand why people would be concerned about using live children in porn. But I would support kiddy porn drawings and paintings. I mean those Cupids we use on Valentine cards -- that's kiddy porn.
