The other day, my wife came home just after I'd started watching Between the Sheets. We finished watching it together (well, she half-watched it while reading the last Twilight book), and then we headed out to dinner. On the way, I mentioned that the plot device (the sex scenes were "romps throughout time" tied together by the fact that they all happened on the same bed) was a fairly common one. It had popped up in - off the top of my head - On White Satin and Pandora's Mirror, the latter of which featured Veronica Hart who was also in Between the Sheets.... And on. And on. After that, I realized that over time I had accumulated a bunch completely useless knowledge about a specific era of pornography.
And what better way to show off useless knowledge than by starting a blog?
Thus began Pornonomy.
What it's actually going to be all about remains to be seen. One thing I do know, though, is that a lot of the films and performers discussed will be from the late '70s and early '80s. My fondness for that era isn't a mystery: those films were the one in my old man's closet when I was in my early teens. My porn timeline is roughly as follows (also see figure 1.1):
1988-1991: Discovered Playboy's in the garage; too young to find them more than fascinating curiosities.
1991-1994: Moved into adolescence so those garage mags were a lot more fascinating; that was short lived, though, because I discovered a much more useful stack of VHS tapes in my dad's closet.
1995-1997: Friends' older brothers were now old enough to buy pornography, so we were able to build our own collections, although those collections were limited to magazines because older brothers' extortion prices were too high to consider movies.
1997-1999: Old enough to buy own porn (Club, Club International, and Club Confidential were, for some reason, mags of choice); went to college so hiding the stash was suddenly a non-issue; subscribed to Playboy only to realize that it was better in the late '70s and early '80s; technically had access to an adult bookstore, but too chicken to go - downtown, no thanks, off the interstate's more my speed - luckily some dorm floormates were not too chicken; regular access to the internet (pro); no computer in dorm room (con).
1999-2002: Living off-campus with internet access and semi-private computer; a period of shying away from "moving image" porn began in 1997 and, by now, was in full swing - dial-up internet made surfing pictures enough of a pain....
2003-2004: On my own, a workin' man, discovered Fleshbot, rediscovering my love of porn flicks and cultivating a new interest in the immerging alt-porn scene; Fleshbot's coverage of the production of Art School Sluts inspired me to get an online porn rental subscription; while Art School Sluts was in the first round of rentals (along with other early cracks at movies like The Masseuse, Stuntgirl, Marie and Jack: A Love Story, and Kill Girl Kill), it was rewatching the films of my adolescence - Filthy Rich and Stiff Competition - and discovering others from the same era - Barbara Broadcast and Sex World - that picqued my interest.
2004-Present: Along with the alt-porn scene, subscriptions to Suicide Girls and Burning Angel came and went; my "Porno Netflix" queue - while still, periodically, including current titles (the Chemistry series or Debbie Loves Dallas - which, of all the new movies I've seen, has elements of what I like about the Golden Era) becomes populated with films from '76 to '85.
And there you have it. At this stage of my Pornography Odyssey, I'm consuming a fair amount of Golden Era porn. Watching the films has led me to read some books on the subject that run the gamut from fairly interesting but poorly written (Luke Ford's A History of X) to really interesting and very well written (Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne, and Peter Pavia's The Other Hollywood) to those in between (Robert Stoller and Ira Levine's Coming Attractions and Jerry Butler's autobiography, Raw Talent).
Now that the introduction's taken care of, I think my next post will be a review of Between the Sheets. After all, were it not for that picture, I might not have started this blog anyway.
figure 1.1Lisa Sohm, April 1977 Playmate of the Month; Lisa DeLeeuw in "The Filthy Rich"; Jenna Jameson; Vanessa Gleason, September 1998 Playmate of the Month; Kylee Kross; Seka in "Love Goddesses"; note: 2000-2002 didn't have enough of a "porn focus seismic shift" large enough to chronicle....
