Old Porn was Better

The suburban soccer mom no longer has to get dirty to get dirty. If she has any need to participate in the wonderful world of erotica, she can go to one of those save sex toy stores, with a convenient location in Sherwood Park or Saint Albert and buy dildos in the shape of whales and paddles that will fit in with her decor. After this naughty shopping trip, she can rest on her almond coloured sectional, turn on the television and have any number of programs to teach her. There is Kink on Showcase, Eros on Womens Television Network, or Sex TV on Access, a program which gave birth to a network.
If her son goes to the University of Alberta this year and joined the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, he could sell tickets to a Fetish Party at Pure, where if he bought a ticket he could see the same thing as his mother did watching television. A series of fairly attractive people beat each other while dressing in expensive outfits. They can both pick up the latest hollywood blockbuster, and a gang bang video at the same place. There is nothing exciting about it anymore, everything is talked about, each orgasm deconstructed.
Sex used to be dangerous or at least fun, leather was connected to motorcycles and cops, as opposed to fashion. Look at The Wild One, directed by Sam Peckinpah, and starring Marlon Brando as queen bee who commands his fellow gang members to swarm a small southern California town. He had the leathers, the cap, and his thighs were straddling 1200 pounds of iron. He looked like he could do damage, forty years later the people who buy hogs ride them when they aren't working as Certified Public Accountants.
On that Motorcycle theme, queer porn has moved from Tom of Finland's butch Gods with cocks like tree trunks, using their leathers as aphrodisiac. Now its all shaved pubes and gym bought pecs. Or Betty Page and the other eroticism of the early '50s, where there is something dangerous happening, genuine damage could be done to these people lives and it showed, their was risk which gave the representation a certain amount of seriousness. Now there pneumatic , surgically enhanced tits are making billions of dollars a year.
The other advantage to erotica being dangerous was the people making them made risks about the look of the work. There was plot and there was people who knew how to shoot film, they verged on art, or at least had pretensions. There was a time where pornography was shown in legitimate theatres , and people actually went to it-and if it wasn't porn it was X Rated art films that had enough cock or cunt to satisfy. Most of them were European Exports, and most of them were much less angry. Even Jackie Onassis managed a matinee of the classic I am Curious, yellow- whose scenes include naked prancing around a new moon.
There was a genuine exploration here, in works meant for audiences popular(The Wild Bunch) and Artistic(Behind the Green Door), and a joy about fucking-it was not considered a lifestyle hobby, like knitting or republican fundraisers or a tool to achieve orgasm when you are too lazy to fantasize. With the new openness, we assume that we are more progressive then a generation previous. The problem is that we have managed to be cynical, ironic and commercial about sexuality, and those three things take the exploratory nature of post war sexual representation and pummel them into submission.