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[The following is an editorial column by contributor Carly Kocurek and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Austinist staff. --The Editors]
I don’t think I’m going overboard when I say most pornography is terrible. Even when the people on the production end of things manage to make something in a way that doesn’t exploit the people working for them, the aesthetics tend to be all wrong – bad lighting, bad acting, terrible sets. Surely, with all the people running amuck with film degrees and digital cameras, we, the American people, can produce smut of a higher caliber. This is why I propose a National Endowment for Pornography.
The NEP would operate in a fashion similar to the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its goal would be to further education about pornography while also helping to fund, through a variety of grants, top-notch organizations invested in producing the best pornography possible. NEP-funded projects would be smart, but not so smart as to be esoteric and unsexy. The organization’s primary goal would be to help produce material that is non-exploitative, inclusive (which is to say, not designed to alienate people based on race, class, gender or sexuality), and of high aesthetic quality from a cinematic and photographic standpoint (or from a literary one, if that's the case).
Of course, any National Endowment needs a board of directors. I would propose the following:
[As a heads up: not all of these links are 100% work-safe, assuming your work prefers that you not look at nipples on the clock.]
Steve Almond: Steve Almond is an established fiction writer known for writing that goes beyond the erotic to the downright hot. Also, he’s obsessed with candy.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer: Perhaps the original sex expert, Dr. Ruth has written more than 30 books, hosted multiple television programs and taught classes at Yale University.
Dr. Annie Sprinkle: The first porn star to earn a Ph.D., Annie Sprinkle is a sex-positive artist and activist. She has produced projects including Post-Porn Modernist and Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn.
Nguyen Tan Hoang: Academic and experimental filmmaker Nguyen Tan Hoang has produced films examining representations of Asian-American masculinity in porn. Much of his work uses montages of appropriated film to comment on queer issues.
Patty Brisben: Patty Brisben is the C.E.O. of Pure Romance, an in-home party company that distributes “heighteners, lubricants, and bedroom accessories,” often reaching women who would be uncomfortable purchasing these products in other settings.
I’d love to include Sue Johanson, but alas, she’s Canadian. I’m open to suggestions. The absence of a photographer is particularly glaring, but I just couldn’t come up with anyone who was quite right for the project.
Sadly, I’m sure no one will get behind the NEP. To do so would be political suicide, to put it mildly. Funding for the arts is getting cut left and right, and while I have this suspicion that more Americans consume pornography than go to art museums, it still doesn’t bode well for federal funding of the NEP. And, of course, there’s that whole line of argument that pornography is immoral. Still, it’s nice to dream.
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Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had a million dollars I could hook that up, cause chicks dig a dude with money.
I love random Office Space quotes!