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Pornography

In pornography there is a minimum of personality. The heroine is a nurse, the hero is a doctor or a patient or first a patient and then a doctor or perhaps two doctors... There are firemen, faux schoolgirls, and a bare hint of a story.
‘Hello, lady, I saw smoke, is there a fire in the building?’
‘I don’t know. I was feeling a little heat just now, perhaps…’
‘Where is the heat coming from miss?’ etc.
These are the preliminaries and I am sometimes amused into watching them, but mostly I fast forward, skipping over the striptease which does not interest me, skimming across the vanilla, the mundane until I find something meaty, ripe with scent and juices, something perverse and shocking, something made for masturbation, which is what I am doing as I watch. I am not interested in nuance, or in plot, subplot or character development. I like my pornography in short intense scenes. I like a climax, but more than that I like the rare moments when the actors drop the act. There are signs of tiredness, moments of true humour- an uncontrolled laugh or a torturous bending towards flaccidity. I am ashamed to admit that I like the winces of pain, particularly when there is good reason for it.
I remember a scene, one of the staples that I replay behind closed eyelids in the middle of some impassioned encounter. In this scene he is buried inside her up to the elbow and he is telling her to relax, just an inch more. She is lying over an anonymous man. Another man has his arm buried in her arse and because of the pained stillness of the scene, the anonymous man’s penis slips limply out of her with a wet sound. She barely notices. She is intent on baring it.
I am not proud to be enjoying such a violent moment. I never tell the men I am labouring over about the little slideshow skipping across the back of my eyelids. I am a strong woman who reveres strong women. This secret enjoyment is a kind of betrayal. So when I write my pornographic memoir it will be a shameful thing. An audience will see me naked, as I have never been. A leap-frogging from one betrayal to another, no plot or character development to soften the hard edged secrets. They will not understand that fantasy and reality are distant cousins. My woman struggling against the invasion on an entire limb is emasculated by its place in my fantasies. But it is real. I saw it on video. The camera cannot lie. Or can it?
We take my image apart step by step. I remember the raised arse, the spread cheeks, the elbow and the body of this man, protruding from a stretched and gaping orifice. How does he fit so much of his arm up there? The physical idea of it is shocking, enough to make one pause, rewind the tape, imprint the image in memory. But we have not seen the insertion of the fingers, knuckles, wrist, the slow progress of the forearm. Why has such a miraculous invasion been edited out of the video? Such a scene would b e money in the pornographer’s bank.
“Perhaps,” says the man whose arm has vanished into wielding flesh, “perhaps reality and fantasy have more in common than we at first thought.”
He steps back, our anal intruder, and holds his amputated stump up with a flourish. There is lubricant glistening on the puckered flesh, perhaps a hint of faecal matter. It still must be quite a stretch to fit the width of it inside. Perhaps the wincing was indeed a true moment snatched up by the camera. Some moke, some mirrors and a sprinkling of sweat. There is a true story in there somewhere. If you get into the rhythm of the thing you may reach a place of satisfaction.
My memoir is equally inclined towards the theatrical. This was a wild time in my life and I am prepared to share it. I stand naked before the reader and I hold my rubber cock in my fist and I tell you “this is my cock,” with such conviction that you may believe that rubber has become flesh.
Perhaps I didn’t wield this cock on my second date with Michael. Perhaps his name is not even Michael. Maybe all my lovers will raise their hands to catch the limelight claiming to be the real Michael. Perhaps there was no Michael, or, more likely, there were many Michaels one after the other in such fast succession that their images have blurred together into the one composite Michael. Pornography is about the stimulation of fantasy. A pornographic memoir is a stimulant for a reader’s own masturbatory pleasure.

To assure you that this memoir has its feet firmly set in the reality of my history may be a form of titillation in itself. Where is the line then? Where are the diamonds of truth amongst all the glass, or are the diamonds just zircons, a pretty fantasy. Is the truth just the top and tail, bad acting leading you into and out of the simulated sex – “so, miss? Did my big fire-hose bring you some relief from that smouldering heat?”

Truth or fiction, the next bit is just chatter to lead you into more fucking. Feel free to fast-forward to the man with his arm inserted into my upturned arse. Feel free to look away when he waves the stump of his amputated arm in the air.