The Prostitute, The Comedian -- And Me
by Tracy Quan(Page 7)
TQ: Or "baby porn".
CP: Baby porn, yes. Caravaggio, half his work is kiddy porn. I told a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner, "What is all this talk about snuff films? I want to see a snuff film." People went crazy. But I don't want to see a real woman being killed! When we go to a mystery movie, we want to see an actress pretending to be dead. Same thing. A truly avant garde film maker today would make a snuff film. A truly avant garde film maker will find the taboo. Where's the taboo? It's in snuff films? Then make a snuff film!TQ: Candida Royalle and other feminists have contended that we need to see more "real women" in porn, not just the "nineteen-year-old blonde, busty female."
CP: I also am tired of a certain kind of California look which has been done to death, but it's not because they're nineteen and busty. I prefer European-type bodies which are kind of fleshy. The flesh is flowing. I think languor is more sensual than, "Hey! Let's get this stuff out of the way and I'll take on sex with you and then go out and do my aerobics." The American cheerleader thing -- there's a dead element. In earlier porn, the untoned bodies were lewder, more lascivious. This new, hard Amazonian look -- I'm not sure I like it. As for being busty and nineteen years old. Why not?
The whole point is to see something you can't see in ordinary life! Maybe we can enlarge the idea of what constitutes beauty, not to include ugliness or the ordinary, but to include fleshiness.
TQ: Leaving aside the concept of feminist porn, do you think women's porn is here to stay?
CP: Most women don't get a big charge off of voyeurism. It's not satisfying to them. Okay, in the suburbs women go to the video store and choose the porn to watch with their men. But they're still buying it to enjoy in a couple. It's not pure porn. The way an individual male will go out and get a heap of things, and take it back to his apartment and look at it by himself? There are hardly any examples of women doing this. I do, but I'm unusual. The phenomenon of John Hinckley -- a solitary person in a room agitating himself erotically and mentally -- that's male behavior. Feminists, in their approach to art history, believe that men are taught to stare at women and make objects of them. But men are staring because it's biological. There's an aggression thing involving the eye in male sexuality. It's related to hunting. That's why there's an enormous porn industry for men and hardly anything for women. It will never be comparable.
TQ: I was advised by one of Candida Royalle's staff to stop calling their product "porn." It's aimed at women, so they call it "erotica."
CP: Oh, I hate that. This idea of trying to revise what we're doing by calling it "erotica". I reject that. I'm not saying, "I like erotica." I'm saying, "Michelangelo is a pornographer." We have to understand that the Pieta with the nude Christ -- that's pornography. Michelangelo is slobbering over that body. If you can understand the sacredness of the Pieta and simultaneously understand its pornographic elements, then we're very far along the road here, okay?
