My boyfriend was away, and we were fighting. Several nights in a row I came home too drunk and such to sleep, but also too effed to work, and in the indecent hours Tumblr is only interesting for so long (~12 minutes). So, porn.
I’ve never been that into it, if I have to be honest (and usually I do). In that narcissistic/ normal way I want the girls to look sort of like me, to have tanlines and a little softness and nothing injected. That’s hard to find, if you don’t spend a lot of time looking. Someone told me years ago to watch vintage porn, but I thought it was not only too hairy, but too camp to be believed. Ironic sex is like a virgin cocktail: just, eww. And I like a fantasy I can cling to. (“Sorry my porn isn’t directed by the Coen Brothers,” you might say, but that’s you.)
Then I found this one of ’70s “Girl Scouts” having a threesome with some bearded strangers. You want some milk with cookies? That kind of thing. Except, after it was funny, it was kind of dirty-sweet. The girls looked like I might have looked if I’d been 19 (god I hope they were 19) then. Fake nostalgia beats fake tits, at least.
I started watching more of it, sucked in by Beauty Angel Fucks and Francois Papillon in Head Games and A Stroke at Midnight and other titles I looove. (Can you tell I am terrible at buying wine?) There’s an innocence or initial reluctance in my new favorites that make them so much hotter, because what is sex without waiting for it, and plus the girls have incredible bodies and even less credible hair. Also, better clothes. Way better lighting. Generally worse music, but that’s what mute is for; anyway, you can’t hear sweat. Back then there really was sweat, which is one of my favorite things about sex, to the point where I can hardly type right now.
Anyway. What I’ve realized about contemporary porn—and I’m making huge, hard generalizations here—is that after I finish the video’s usually still playing (I work quickly) and I’m watching it thinking they don’t want to be doing this at all, and neither do I. It’s a slightly cold, slightly sick feeling, like when you sober up halfway through real-life sex. I don’t mean that porn stars don’t want to be doing what they’re doing it, only that so many of them don’t look like it, anymore.
I’m definitely at least the millionth person to complain that porn today doesn’t have a story, and although that’s changing with alternative forms of adult what-have-you, there’s so little that compares to past-decade escapades. I mean: think about a girl in pink leopard-print, furiously smoking Marlboros and complaining to her friend’s husband about her own. “He’s such a bastard,” she says. “Do you think I’m sexy, Tony? He must be some kind of [uh, redacted; I didn't say everything was great then]. I’m a young girl, Tony. I need sex a lot. Every time I see a man, I check out his crotch… with my eyes.” This is something I can sort of laugh it, but moreso just feel.
I’ve said before, or everyone’s said before, that stories are what keep us alive, or just human, and sex is the most human thing. I don’t know exactly why in the propagandization of sex we’ve lost the storytelling touch; maybe it’s laziness, or too much availability. Sometimes I just want it now, yeah. But the best times are when I watch old porn with old stories, and it makes me feel natural and woman-y and totally like I want to have sex in real life, which is so beautiful, and which I always thought was the point.
This article by Sarah Nicole Prickett originally appeared on Thought Catalog. You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.
