T H E S A L O N I N T E R V I E W | S U S I E B R I G H T P A G E 2
How about the porn film industry -- are there any bright artistic spots there these days? Well, you have two types of porn movies that are popular right now. One is the type of cable movie you might see in hotel rooms, sort of beautiful lingerie catalog videos, where the makeup and hair are as good as anything on "Melrose Place." And the actors look like they're filthy rich and have very sleek, sensuous sex. I think those movies serve as a kind of reassurance that you can be successful, well-to-do, and still do the nasty things. That those two things are compatible. For many viewers, it's just a relief not to have to see ugliness, the ugliness of porn bothers many viewers. But these films are very formulaic, and to me they're like Muzak in an elevator. After the first two movies of that type, I can't watch anymore. The more interesting aspect of porn these days is the other end of the budget spectrum, the so-called amateur tapes, where you have this kind of porno memoir going on. There's no attempt to create a fantasy or an illusion. It's more like, "Hi, here I am with my camera in the bedroom, here's my crazy life and my crazy wife, now let's get it on." Are those amateur movies sold in video stores, or are they just swapped at swingers conventions? Oh yes, I'll say they're sold in stores. It's like the dime-store auteur school of filmmaking, because people's personalities definitely come across. They're not formulaic because they're so homespun. They make no bones about showing particular tastes and interests. Also, there's a lot more passion about showing female arousal and orgasm in these movies. Many of them are devoted to "Let's see women get out of control." That will often take precedence over the male "money shot," so to speak. Another interesting thing about these amateur films, some of the more famous ones like the Seymour Butts series, Seymour and Shane, they are anti-titillation. There is no teasing involved, that sort of teasing buildup we associate with American sexual history, which is very much built on the wink and the burlesque -- I'll show you a little and then I'll hold out and then I'll show you a little more. That sort of thing is entirely absent in these amateur productions. When I talk to people in the porn business, they refer to this as "Gen-X porno" -- because younger people don't have the patience for titillation, they are into the frankness of "Well, here we all are, why don't we fuck?" A cut-to-the-chase kind of nonchalance. Who are the big names in amateur filmmaking, other than Seymour Butts? Max Hardcore, and Shane, who used to be with Seymour but is now doing her own thing. And Dirty Dave, the Bogus Brothers. And of course the godfather of them all, Mark Arnold. Aside from Shane, there are still not a lot of women involved, except as performers, where women are a lot bolder and more aggressive than they used to be. But there are very few women behind the camera, running the show. There's been a lot of hue and cry about sexual content on the Internet. Do you think the Net really has opened up sexual communication -- or is it mostly hype? Well, yes it has. Just look at what you're doing with Salon, not that people go to Salon to download photos. (Laughs) But the discussion of sexuality in Salon and other Web site magazines is much more uncensored than in print magazines. There's not this sense that, "Oh, we couldn't possibly discuss this with Susie Bright, the sky might fall." There isn't that kind of apprehension. Like the time you recall in your book when a radio interviewer slipped you a piece of paper, saying, "Don't use the word clitoris!" Right. Now of course you have these large corporate sites like AOL and Prodigy and Pathfinder that are kind of limping along with these rules that they've inherited from older technology. They're acting as if, "We're not sure if we're going to be regulated by the FCC, so we better watch it." But even with them, that mentality is breaking down. I just did an interview on the Pathfinder site, which is owned, of course, by Time Warner. And they were very concerned with my language and they didn't want any risqué photos of me on their site. But then they were taking live questions from the audience, and somebody wrote in and asked, "How do you feel about the word 'cunt'?" And I said to the Pathfinder moderator, "Did you just see that word?" And they said, "Yes, it's a first for Pathfinder -- well you didn't bring it up, a reader did, so go ahead and answer it." So I answered that I liked the word very much and I gave a little history of the word "cunt." And it went on the site. It was a live interview in their Romance Connection department, or some cheesy name like that, some place where they bring sex and relationship experts, everybody from me to the Rules Girls to Dr. Laura. In general, I think the people who are involved creatively on the Internet feel very uncomfortable trying to follow the censorship rules of radio and TV. It doesn't seem suitable. It's a very democratic environment and I thrive on it. What do you say to those baby-boom parents and conservative critics who blame people like you for breaking down society's sexual taboos and opening the doors to sexual crime and predators? Well, I think we're seeing a sex panic in society, and it's just as bad as the Cold War or Red Menace or Yellow Peril were. Where people imagine that there's this army of scary pedophiles on the march out there, and you're alone with your traditional family values trying to fend them off. This terror campaign has been aimed primarily at women and children, who are instructed to stay indoors and not take any chances and be ignorant, and maybe you'll be saved if you're sexually dumb and you don't expose yourself to the world. Along with that, a kind of giant guilt trip is imposed on men -- "Come on, you know you're a monster inside, admit it." Only by constantly purging yourself, can you save yourself -- like Bill Clinton, with his kind of Baptist way of repenting: "OK, here I go underwater again, I promise I'll go really deep this time." I don't think sexual crime has in fact risen in the past couple decades. What we've found, unfortunately, is that so much of the abuse and sexual crime happens within the family, or with people we're very close to. That's what's so interesting about this JonBenet Ramsey case to me. Even without knowing anything definite about the girl's murder yet, this is one of the first publicized cases I know about where instead of everyone thinking from the beginning that it was a stranger, many people said, "Well, unfortunately, statistically this is likely to be a family member." And as awful as the incident is, it was refreshing to me that finally people are beginning to pay a nod to reality here and not just imagine, "Oh, it's this awful Bogeyman." In the end, it might indeed turn out to be the work of a terrible stranger, but that would be unusual. Jeffrey Dahmer really is unusual, he does not sit next to you at every bus stop. One of the other major sources of sexual conservatism is the women's movement. Do you feel excluded from the sisterhood because of your sexual politics?
Oh yeah, all the time. When the Larry Flynt movie came out and Gloria
Steinem went on her editorial tirade, it was like going into some horrible
feminist time machine, because she was spouting these classic,
panic-stricken, anti-porn positions that people like me have tried to
deconstruct for more than 10 years. And here she was again, the leader of the feminist establishment, just beating that horse one more time, even though the corpse stinks at this point. It's so frustrating because it's
people like Steinem who are the feminist archetypes in the public's eyes,
and no matter how many Susie Brights or Betty Dodsons or Joani Blanks there are, we are always seen as not quite feminist. But as long as feminism
means being militantly against sexism and being pro-women's power and
status, how can I give it up?
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