It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of pornography from the “Golden Age of Porn,” which took place during the 1970s and 1980s. When I talk to people about liking porn, we aren’t on the same page at all. Sure, I dabbled on reddit, watching amateur sexual content and even, when I was younger, the higher budget stuff. But that is not what I am talking about when I talk about liking porn. How could I communicate to someone who hasn’t seen this art what I am talking about? This post endeavors to do just that.
What is it? What makes Golden Age Porn unique?
While I was in law school, I learned about all of these “obscenity” cases that came to define First Amendment rights. Cases that decide that, if it’s “obscene,” it’s not the “free speech” that the First Amendment protects. These cases perplex most law students, including me at the time. What was going on here? Why was an “adult movie theater” challenging a zoning law?
These cases were how the courts made porn a fringe interest. How porn was removed from the mainstream. They were a big fucking deal at the time, because during the 70s and 80s it was normal to watch porn. When box office numbers hit, movies with and without pornography were reported alongside one another. For example, Gerard Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones just missed Variety’s top-ten highest grossing films of the year, “rack[ing] up box office receipts of $7.7 million for the year, coming in just below the James Bond-franchise entry Live and Let Die, and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon. Deep Throat grossed $4.6 million for the year, placing it ahead of the prestige picture Sleuth, which featured Oscar-nominated performances by Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine.” Can you imagine?
During this time, although some people may have had their qualms, porn was mainstream. Today, I’d guess similar percentages of people are watching porn, but they are doing so alone, at home, and in secret. The art today reflects these changes. Mostly clips, the vast majority of today’s porn is action-packed, intended to get you off quickly, before your wife or kids walk in and you have to admit you are a pervert for doing something everyone does. If you like blowjobs, you search for it and voila. If you like gang-bangs, same deal. Rarely will you have to sit through something that you didn’t search for specifically. Things were totally differently when porn producers were making movies. Like movies today, these films had a genre (action, horror, comedy) and therefore a target audience, but still had an incentive to include something for everybody.
These movies, created during the Golden Era, are not 100% sex scenes. They have plots. They have dialogue. They have jokes and sets and the directors cared about lighting and sound and the score. And because they were longer, and appealing to less of a niche audience, they typically demonstrated diversity: diversities of bodies, of fantasies, of sex positions and sexual experiences. Imagine sitting through a threesome or anal scene not because you searched for it specifically (and therefore had to face the fact of this interest in yourself) but because it was part of the movie! Sometimes, we all need plausible deniability to open our minds. And often, as basic contact theory has long demonstrated, when we are exposed to something we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves, we grow in tolerance for it. We may even like it.
Mind-Opening Concept #1: All bodies can be sexy (and anyone can be a porn star)
Young, old, skinny, chubby, oversized areolas, lopsided labia, crooked teeth, beer bellies, rock hard abs–you name it, you will see it in Golden Age porn. The diversity of bodies is inspiring. I spent so much time pulling apart my inner lips, wondering if they were normal or if someone would be too disgusted by my dangling labia minora to dive in. So much time weighing each breast in my hands, praying for them to be bigger and for my nipples to turn up toward the sky. How many times I thought myself untouchable because I hadn’t gotten a wax, meanwhile nearly everyone in these films has a bush. If I had been shown these films, I would not have worried so much. I would have known that all sorts of pussies and titties and bodies exist, and they are all sexy.
Watching Golden Age porn made me realize how absurd, unfair, and unrealistic beauty standards are today. Even if you think you know this, watching these films will make it even more clear. The bodies we are exposed to and told are sexy today all look basically the same. These films, made before plastic surgery was widely available, demonstrate how small the Overton Window of acceptable bodies has become. It’s worth watching just to see the variety of noses people used to have.
These films show, as we know from real life, that there is a lot more that goes into eroticism than our bodies. We fall for characters, for the whole person, who cares if they have braces, or small tits? People who watch porn today can grow to have such extreme, unrealistic preferences for who they find attractive that they find no success in the real world. Golden Age porn does the opposite: it makes us realize, by demonstrating again and again, that we could be into a lot of people.
I know now that vulvas, breasts, areolas, noses, and faces come in all shapes and sizes. It makes me more loving of what I have, less self-conscious. And it makes me more open to experiencing what other people have too.
Mind-Opening Concept #2: All fantasies have merit
What is the length of your favorite porno? Mine was a gif, a few seconds on loop. Because I was choosing, I chose what I could rely on to turn me on, fast. Rarely did I venture. Why would do that? I was watching this to masturbate.
The purpose of Golden Age films, unlike modern porn, was not to get you off. It was to entertain you. In fact, they did not want you to get too over-the-top aroused because they didn’t want you to leave the movie theater. For this reason, the sex scenes in Golden Age films are more casual, both shorter and longer than what you might see today. The sex scenes often start slow and build, only to cut when you think you’ll start touching yourself. It all feels more real and more natural than the florescent-lit rough fucking you often see in professionally produced porn today.
Because they wanted to have broad appeal, and they had 90 minutes to kill, Golden Age films also show many more instances of sex than you’d see today. In a single film you might see a threesome, a rape fantasy, a girl-girl scene and sex in public (Joy by Harley Mansfield features these things). Or you might be exposed to a ffffffm seven-some, a mfm (“devil’s threesome”) and an act of voyeurism (Sexboat by David I. Frazer). In Shaun Costello’s Dracula Exotica, there is a gang-bang, sex with a corpse, an incest fantasy and a rape fantasy, all in 100 minutes. It is normalizing to see this array of sexual fantasies. You can see you aren’t so weird after all. Or the people you might judge for having these fantasies aren’t as nutty as you thought. And you can experience a fantasy you’d never be into and maybe by the end of the scene you understand it better or even like it and are open to it. You’ll see that all fantasies have merit, not just the ones society says are okay.
Being exposed to so many ideas I may call repulsive and then watch myself warm to is humbling. It reminds me that I don’t know everything about myself, not to judge things I don’t yet understand, and not to yuck someone’s yum. It shows me, and any viewer I think, how much exposure matters when it comes to our unfolding fantasies and inner-most desires.
Mind-Opening Concept #3: Serious filmmaking and pornography are not mutually exclusive
Although some films are campy, some films have limited sets, and others were clearly shot in one day, I can’t stress enough that these are movies. They have real plots, sets, and costumes, and directors who had voice and something to say. Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy has all the elements of an Alice in Wonderland film, plus an original score sung by the actors. Expectations and 8 to 4 have some of the best lighting I’ve seen in any film. Brief Affair has one of the most memorable monologues of all time while Kate and The Indians is slap-yo-mama funny. The films are creative, immersive, and unpredictable: people were trying new things. The big-name actors of the era*–Desiree West, Nicole Black, Lisa De Leeuw, Loni Sanders, Annette Haven, Kay Parker, Hyapatia Lee, Mai Lin, Paul Thomas, Jon Martin, Mike Horner, John Leslie, Ray Wells, Herschel Savage, Mike Ranger–can all actually act! They should be considered for the same prestige awards given to actors who only fuck off camera.
This reality, that there can be good, feature films with sex in them, flies in the face of recent trends. Indeed, “there is almost 40% less sexual content in major films than there was at the start of the millennium.” Films today not only avoid sexually explicit content, they desexualize otherwise sexy actors and avoid sex altogether. Blame China, blame audiences, blame the Church, but whatever it is, it is not a matter of impossibility that films could not be both high quality and sexual. Not only that, but these films show sex and pornography should be fun. Pornography has no business being relegated to clips or small screens.
Q: If you could go back to before you were in the industry, would you do it all again knowing what you know now?
A: Absolutely. I don’t have any regrets about that. I truly believe that in the days of film — film, not video — we were doing a service for the American public. I think audiences learned a lot about their sexuality from what they were watching on screen. I think we helped people have better sex. So no, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Jon Martin, The Rialto Report
Mind-Opening Element #4: How Much and How Little Things Have Changed in 50 years
Finally, just entering the time period for the duration of the film is mind-opening: it’s like time-traveling. You’ll be reminded of pay phones and telephone operators. You’ll see parts of major cities you still recognize today. You’ll wonder when pantyhose and garter belts fell out of fashion. You’ll see leading men in clothes only gay men would wear today. You’ll realize how much time used to be spent bored, doing nothing, without a phone to bury your face into. In addition to the diverse array of faces and bodies that used to exist, you’ll see the adult movie theaters I’ve mentioned, the style cars used to have, and the trendy cocktails of the era. You’ll see how much has changed in 50 years, and how much has not. It’s inspiring. It’s relatable. It’s a mind fuck!
It is my deepest hope that one day, films like this will return. With loving gratitude to all who made it possible, may this art carry on!
*It feels almost cruel to only list a few of the stars from the era. Please forgive my brevity. So, so much inspiring talent goes without mention in this post.
😘😘Honey
