Settimana scorsa il Financial Times ha recensito insieme tre nuove uscite: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale di Jenna Jameson, XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits di Timothy Greenfield-Sanders e Pornoland del fotografo Stefano De Luigi. L’articolo non lo avevo segnalato perchè, come per altri quotidiani, l’archivio dopo qualche giorno richiede la registrazione o diventa a pagamento.

Poi venerdì ho visto che il Corriere e News2000 hanno ripreso la recensione (il libro è uscito in Agosto). Così ho provato e stranamente Google ha ancora in cache l’articolo inglese di John Sutherland… un’invito a ripubblicarlo nella prosecuzione del post. Vediamo quanto hanno l’occhio lungo su nella brumosa Londra… Intanto Elastico e Sexblo.gs segnalano la prima recensione dell’ultimo libro uscito sul porno, una storia dell’industria del cinema per adulti raccontata dai protagonisti.

There’s a nice joke in the otherwise bland 2003 movie Duplex. At a Manhattan cocktail party, the host points out a Mafia hitman to the hero and his wife. The couple duly shudder at the thought of rubbing shoulders with him. “Don’t worry,” they are reassured, “He has a respectable front - he’s a pornographer.”

Pornography is nowadays increasingly respectable. Money always has the capacity to launder itself. And the “adult entertainment industry”, based in southern California, is very big business. The San Fernando Valley, “Porn Gulch”, grosses - in every sense - more than Hollywood (films) or Burbank (TV).

The extent to which porn has become mainstream was evidenced by Operation Landslide, the 2002 FBI sting in which the bureau took over a child-porn distribution site, to see what - as merchandisers - they could turn up. What the FBI (and, later, Scotland Yard) hauled in, among the tens of thousands of small fish, were many ostensible pillars of the community: judges, policemen, probation officers, teachers, politicians and the odd pop star. Ibsen would have chuckled.

Paedophile pornography is a despicable fringe activity, and has the relationship to the mainstream product that crack cocaine does to tobacco. The porn mainstream is now broad and uncontroversial, encompassing whole segments of middle-class America. A vignette from a new film, Sideways, shows the hero, a teacher, buying cigarettes after being stood up on a date. He goes on to ask for a copy of Barely Legal, the “arousal” magazine. “No, not that one,” he says, “the latest issue, if you don’t mind.” The scene is not pointed up as anything special. He just needs some adult entertainment that evening.

The history of decensorship in the US can be pictured as long periods of rock-hard repression fractured by volcanic eruptions, followed by a lava flow of previously prohibited materials above ground - materials that gradually cool into “no big deal”. The Mount St Helens of recent eruptions were the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trials, in 1959, which in effect ruled that materials such as D.H. Lawrence’s novel, hitherto classified as obscene (and still conceivably obscene, but possessed of “redeeming social merit”) were both saleable and mailable.

It was Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who hit on the ruse of using the US mail as the instrument of countrywide suppression. “Mailability” was the means by which standards of decency could be enforced. If you could print materials, but not legally distribute them, they were in effect banned and conveniently lined up as targets for prosecution.

After some Supreme Court fudge, the US, post-Chatterley, deemed “local community standards”, not mailability, as the criterion of what was permissible. The responsibility was passed down the line. Schoolboards, city councils, neighbourhood pressure groups were henceforth kings of their own castles.

Complications arose with supra-regional systems of cultural delivery: notably network TV, radio and the internet. Schoolboards can, and often do, prevent students from reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but they can’t stop them googling “hot babes”, listening to Howard Stern’s radio show or watching Desperate Housewives.

The tension generated by the pull of small-town standards and metropolitan libertinism was evident in the recent Saving Private Ryan fiasco, in which several ABC network affiliates reneged on programming commitments to show Steven Spielberg’s film on Veterans Day last November, because of the “raw” language used by the soldiers. (The fact that soldiers routinely talk that way was borne out by an NBC videotape later that month, in which a cursing marine was shown executing an Iraqi in a Falluja mosque.) The American Family Association laboriously counted “at least” 20 “f” words and 12 “s” words in the film, and argued on those grounds for its suppression. ABC, like other national networks, was nervous after the Federal Communications Commission had fined CBS $550,000 for the unscheduled, and ostensibly accidental, display of Janet Jackson’s right breast during a Super Bowl half-time show. And Fox had been hit with a fine twice as large for raunchiness on one of its reality shows. In numerous locations, including big cities, Saving Private Ryan was pulled at the last moment. Cable-connected viewers, disappointed at not seeing the advertised movie, could have consoled themselves at a touch of the remote with a range of pay-per-view “adult” sites of triple-X hardness. Doubtless some did.

Historically, pornography, like Puritanism, thrives on repression. As Robert Darnton argued in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, pornography, in alliance with political dissidence, can change history. It was dirty books, as much as the tomes of the philosophes, Darnton plausibly suggests, which brought down the ancien regime.

Without repression - or the threat of it - pornography is, like the white of an egg, a thing “without salt or savour”. This is the theme of Martin Amis’s commentary in Pornoland: “Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: banish porno, and you banish all of the world.” But without “banishment”, paradoxically, pornography ceases to be pornography.

There is an interesting consonance on the subject between Amis and his father, Kingsley. Writing in Pornography: The Longford Report, in 1972 - now a sadly comic document - the older Amis argued, along with Lord Longford (or “Lord Porn”, as the tabloids cruelly called him), for the restoration of the censoriousness that Roy Jenkins’ Obscene Publications Act had lifted. Amis’s argument for retaining legally enforced pre-1960 standards of linguistic decency was perverse, but elegant. Without the capacity to offend, literature would be made lame. Inoffensive fiction was a contradiction in terms.

The fact that Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale has, since publication in August, been riding high in The New York Times, Barnes Noble and Amazon bestseller lists, would seem to demonstrate that “adult entertainment” is no longer XXX, but R-rated. It has become mainstream. Offence, no longer banned or banished, has modulated into permissible titillation.

Jameson has a fan club and half-a-dozen “official” websites. She is described as the “Queen of Porn”, a superstar and a “pornography entrepreneur”. Interviewed on CNN or showing off her Spanish-style mansion (adorned with Old Masters) to The New York Times, she talks confidently about “my profession” and “the adult industry”. In other contexts, one might say she talks shamelessly. “All I know,” she says, “is that when I lay my head down at night, I feel comfortable.”

Jameson’s “cautionary tale” takes its place, for literary historians, in a long line of “whore’s autobiographies”, both fictional and non-fictional. The genre can be followed back through Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl (2001), Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (1999), Inside Linda Lovelace (1974), Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker (1972), John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1749) and, at the bottom of the pile, arguably the best of them all, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). All narrate how a resourceful young woman can thrive and rise to the top of the scummy pool of sexual exploitation. It is perhaps significant that some of the above are written by men. Jameson, whose verbal talents do not - on the basis of her interviews - seem impressive, was “assisted” by Neil Strauss, former music writer for The New York Times.

It is ironic that Jameson’s book is published by HarperCollins and has been promoted on the co-owned TV outlet, Fox News, by such custodians of rightwing morality as Bill O’Reilly and Rita Cosby. The left hand of Fox pounds what presidential strategist Karl Rove, during the election, called “coarse culture”, while the right hand of HarperCollins rakes in profit from books such as Jameson’s and the Vivid Girls’ How to Have a XXX Sex Life.

Jameson’s story is Moll Flanders updated for 2004. Jenna Massoli was born into a broken home. She was raped as a child and pimped out by a cheating partner. She became hooked on methamphetamine. Taking her nom de guerre from a bottle (”whiskey was rock ‘n’ roll”), she stripped, pole-danced, modelled and graduated into “adult” movies. She then cleaned up and learned how to merchandise herself. In 1996 she took home the XRCO Best New Starlet, the FOXE Video Vixen and the AVN Best New Starlet awards. Every director wanted her (as, palpably, did most of the male population of the US). Jameson claims, plausibly, to be the most “downloaded” person in history. As she neared 40 she branched into management.

Jameson wants more than healthy profits from her entrepreneurship. She casts herself as a political crusader. “I try my hardest,” she says, “to push the point that I am a feminist.” The flavour of her book, however, is less tract than celebrity gossip. She goes into heavy anatomical detail about her affair with Tommy Lee (famous for his internet bootlegged bouts with erstwhile wife Pamela Anderson). Lee returns the compliment in his tell-all autobiography, Tommyland, which is also in the bestseller lists.

What is most assertive in Jameson’s book is its Horatio Alger, Log-Cabin-to-White-House optimism: “The job of porn star is not a calling - or even an option - for most women. However, if you make the right decisions and set the right boundaries for yourself, it can be a great living, because you’ll make a lot of money while doing very little work. And you’ll get more experience in front of the camera than any Hollywood actress. Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it’s one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual being.”

These grand optimisms apart, the male reader will most likely be struck by Jameson’s revelations, in passing, about the wear and tear of pole dancing on the artist’s body. “Almost every dancer,” she records, “has bunions, corns, and bone spurs on their heels. And they all learn to live with constant sprained ankles. I’ve seen girls rupture their implants from hitting the pole wrong.”

One of the catch questions for US sports fans is “Which sport has the highest rate of injury?” Most answer, naturally enough, football or boxing. In fact, it is cheerleading. Those young things, who cavort and acrobat so prettily on the edge of the pitch, sustain much greater damage (frequently crippling) than the gorillas on the 30-yard line, or the pugilists in the ring. So it is with the pole dancer.

The “cautionary” grittiness of Jameson’s book - its depiction of sweat, strain and the physical danger of stripping, dancing and doing sex for the camera -runs counter to the high-voyeuristic aestheticism of XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits. The book accompanies an exhibition by the fashionable photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders at the Mary Boone gallery in New York. Artistically posed pictures (including one of Jameson) are framed by textual commentary from Gore Vidal, John Malkovich, A.M. Homes, John Waters, Salman Rushdie and Lou Reed. Greenfield-Sanders’ work is priced at $35,000 a pair. His is the male artist’s, the male writer’s (and, one suspects, the average male consumer’s) consoling view of the porn star. The truth, as Jameson attests, is less beautiful - more ruptured silicone implant than Venus de Milo. As Keats said, finding the equation between truth and beauty is never easy. And making sense out of pornography less so.

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