I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Things to Come: Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn

1 5 9 Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn Things to Come recently, while websurfing in search of xtreme kink (a carnival-midway activity that the sexpert Susie Bright calls “pornographic rubbernecking”), I stumbled on the Neck Brace Appreciation Klub, a “small but dedicated group of regular folks” who just happen to be into “recreational & artistic neck and back bracing.” (Love those ironic quotes!) From there,I meandered over to the unintentionally hilarious Big-Gulp to savor the tongue-in-cheek pleasures of homemade porn in which anonymous models and celebrities, from Madonna to Lou “Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno, gobble up wriggling Lilliputians. Imagine an X-rated Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, remade by Dino De Laurentiis from a script by R. Crumb. Imagine a hard-core version of The Amazing Colossal Man, starring gay superstud Zak Spears as the bald, bediapered Brobdingnagian. Imagine— oh, hell, just visit the damn thing yourself.1 Is this stuff for real, the lovingly crafted, sweetly shy fantasies of a love that, until recently, dared not speak its name? Or is it winkingly ironic, a deadpan put-on aimed at the porn rubberneckers who snapped up Katharine Gates’s tour guide to the polymorphously perverse Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex? Or is it both, the knowingly over-the-top product of pomosexual fetishists who insist on having their irony and eating it, too? Whatever the case, Big-Gulp and sites like it are part of the hothouse profusion of fetish sites, a porn-industry development that parallels the much-noted fragmentation of mainstream consumer T H I N G S T O C O M E 1 6 0 culture into a million niche demographics. “The technological and censor-free breakthrough of the Internet has spawned a fetish market that literally has to be seen to be believed,” Bright told Wired magazine . “The Internet has opened Pandora’s box; fetish is king.”2 Web porn devoted to midgets, fetishists who thrill to mummylike swaddling in Cling-Wrap,“furverts”who make it with plush toys (or,better yet,as plush toys),and similarly far-flung fetishes attract audiences far beyond their core fandoms. That said, I’m not convinced we’re witnessing a runaway proliferation of alternative sexualities; the truth, I suspect, is that the interconnected nature of the link-driven Web, together with the frenzy of online advertising, has simply made visible what was once kept far from public view, under plain brown wrappers or behind the locked boudoir doors of adventuresome sybarites. Today, anyone with a Net connection is only a click away from a parallel universe of sexual solar systems whose porn sites, toy shops, networking sites, and support groups orbit around obscure obsessions. The Web not only connects geographically far-flung devotees into close-knit communities , it also assaults unsuspecting “normals” with porn spam and X-rated search results for sites and products that cater to every imaginable (and unimaginable) proclivity. As a result, even a Websurfer who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night has probably been spammed with a come-on from a sexual subculture whose deviant desires would have given Freud anaphylactic shock. Poking around the Web’s darker corners, fetishists, pornographic rubberneckers, and sexologists can find sexual proclivities and pornographic subgenres De Sade never dreamed of: amputee worship, armpit fetishism, clown porn, and sneeze freaks, who rejoice at the thought of a nice, juicy honk, with plenty of spritz. Lactating transsexuals ? Been there. Scrotal inflation? Done that. Chicks with dicks and men with cunts? So last year, already. Erotic illustrations of Japanese schoolgirls in traction? Check. Breast-expansion fantasies about mammaries that balloon up to Goodyear blimp proportions? Check. Models made, through digital trickery, to sprout multiple, massive 1 6 1 T H I N G S T O C O M E breasts, like some freakish cross between silicone-injected porn stars and pre-Christian fertility goddesses? Check. The heightened profile of fetishism is also due to what I call the Escalation of Subcultural Hostilities—the ever-greater extremes required of would-be Rebels without a Cause in the age of Jackass, Extreme Makeover, and the pierced whatever. Time was when all a brooding young boho had to do to épater le bourgeoisie was carve a swastika in his forehead and cop a witchy, Dylan Klebold stare. But how do you certify your cred as a Menace to...