Wednesday, July 18, 2012

'Sex in the City' is Shadow Porn

After the release of the second 'Sex in the City' movie last year, I don't think we'll be seeing a third, and that's probably all for the good. The significance of the 'Sex in the City' franchise is solid: it restored New York's proper place in the American imagination...it made America fall in love with New York again, after a mean-spirited suburban culture engaged in trashing New York for three whole decades. Gays helped rebuild New York, and that's where Sex in the City comes in: it's pretty obvious that the franchise is about 4 gay men played by female actresses. It couldn't have sold with 4 gay men, despite the success of 'Queer As Folk' (safely set in a cultural backwater of its own making), the nation and world weren't ready for 4 queens making New York their own oyster. That would have been too scary for cable television executives, much less the American public. But if the talented writers of 'Sex in the City' imagined the four main characters as gay men and then cast women to play them, that's more to their credit. They made it happen, and it changed the nation's perception of big, bad, decayed, immoral, scary New York. It was the influential gaywriter Ethan Mordden who posited that the gay population could be classified into 6 types of queens and the six designations elude me at the moment. I checked my library of Mordden books and cannot find the passage where he puts it down. I checked the internet but the key words are too vague. If somebody out there knows, please respond to me. There are 6 types of queens, he wrote, and four of those types can be applied to the Sex in the City girls. Miranda is obviously the 'business queen,' and Charlotte the 'tearful queen.' Samantha the 'dangerous queen,' and Carrie, well what (?), she embodied characteristics of more than one, I think, which made her role the glue that held the sequences together. Where am I going with this? I don't know if you agree with me, but maybe it's time for our great porn producers to re-engage the storyline concept to porn, that was pursued by the truly greats of porndom...Christopher Rage, Arch Brown and Al Parker and some other guys even I've forgotten...the revolutionary porn of the 80's. Porn with a beginning, middle and end, not gonzo porn or loops with good production values. It could even be a series in the 'Sex in the City' model. A porn soap opera would be fine by me. Let's take it one step beyond the thematic, which is where the best pornographers of the day are right now. We're waiting and we'll have to wait a little longer, maybe...but here's a fact: bareback porn is in a rut right now. The tops and bottoms of porn are as good as they ever were, but the element of fantasy is missing. Just a hint of a story would be enough to bring us back. When we're checking xtube before checking the pornstudio websites, that's not a good sign. It's time to make the shadow real.

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