Three Four Two: Pages

Does anyone know if actual porn novels are still published?

Long ago and far away, in my teens and in my undergraduate days, porn novels filled the spinner racks at all-night convenience stores and bus stations. There were other genres there-- mostly action-adventure series --but porn novels seemed to fill three-quarters of the spinner racks. I haven't seen porn novels sold new since sometime in the 1980s, and I've always assumed that videotape killed the porn novel. Reagan's attorney-general deliberately omitted porn novels from his anti-porn efforts because "who reads?" 

There are websites devoted to cover art from 1960s-80s porn novels, and the other evening I found a link to a Russian website that has the scanned texts of something like three or four hundred American porn novels from the 1970s and early 1980s. I suppose I'm glad the books at the site were all from American publishers. British porn is...depressing. British porn is at least as depressing and dreary as British girlie magazines. And I think I'd be afraid of Australian porn novels. There are limits. Yes there are.

Steven Marcus used the word "pornotopia" in his "The Other Victorians", and it does apply to 1970s-80s porn novels. In porn novels, everything turns on sex. Wealth or poverty exist only to provide excuses for sex scenes. All schools exist only as spaces for students and teachers to engage in breathless sex. All travel is from one site for exotic (or at least outdoor) sex to another. Everyone is either handsome/beautiful or, if gnarled and gnomish, at least shockingly well-hung. Any social interaction at all is an occasion for sex. And all sex-- hetero, gay, lesbian, bi, interspecies, incest --invariably produces multiple orgasms all around. Everyone is always ready for anything, and even if a character seems to be horrified or appalled, she (and it always she) is secretly excited and thrilled by what's happening. In porn novels, nothing exists that isn't an occasion for sex. No object exists that can't be used as a sex toy. No one is ever bored during sex, no one's disgust is ever other than feigned. 

The Russian website had a copy of a c. 1980 novel called "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" that was...hilarious and awful in equal parts. The writing was (of course) awful, but...not as bad as you'd think. So here we have a teen schoolgirl-- just turning sixteen --on a week-long summer field trip with a Future Farmers group. And...it shouldn't be hard to trace her story arc. In the course of the first couple of nights at a young farmers' convention, she loses her virginity while still on the bus...to her seat mate's well-trained dog. And some random, nameless boy who's been watching the girl and her seat mate with the dog. Young Denise (yes, she has a name) goes from Bronte-reading virgin to sex with boys, other girls, grizzled old bus drivers, dogs, donkeys, and a stallion. And of course with her own older brother. She also swears a public vow before a cheering crowd of other teens never to wear underwear again (I approve of that scene). By the end of the book, she and her brother are deeply in romantic love, and they're sleeping naked in one another's arms in a hayloft after he orchestrates her first time with a stallion.  

I'm not sure how you're supposed to respond to "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's all very light-hearted, and there's no post-Foucault focus on power structures. A random boy who sodomizes the heroine over a bus seat goes from shouting, "Take my jizz  you lezzie dog-slut!" to whispering in her ear that "your skin is like honeyed Asian silk". All I can imagine is the standard porn-writer trope of the Ivy League English Lit graduate paying his rent by writing porn. 

Porn novels in those days assumed that incest was commonplace, and that all suburban siblings were in and out of one another's beds. And of course there's an obvious meta-incest happening, too, since the authors of the novels manage to repeat one another's work and share character names. There's probably a bit of revenge going on as well-- Denise in "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl" is always described by her full name: Denise Chapman. I'm taking it for granted that Denise Chapman is the author's ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, or at least the Unobtainable Beauty of his own teen years.

Porn novels were at least honest. I'm thinking of a series called the DB Collection-- DB standing for "Dirty Books". The covers were all flat black with a white number and the title. And the titles were things like "DB 1 - Stuffed With Big Black Dick" or "DB 4 - Fucking Her Tender Teen Asshole". You paid for nasty porn, and you got nasty porn. There was no way you could tell someone that you'd bought a title from the DB Collection by accident. You couldn't say you'd been looking for one of Tolstoy's later novels and picked up a DB title by accident. 

There's a whole body of discussion about how porn and erotica are different. One key thing, I think, is that '70s and '80s porn novels were much more about doing sex than erotica would ever be. Yes, the novels said, you can do that with an Irish Setter or a polished ivory statue of a saint. Porn novels never questioned the idea of going farther, or trying the most unlikely positions or partners. What you can try, you must try. Erotica can be about finding oneself, about discovering that you're submissive or bi or poly. Porn is about the functional possibilities of the world. There's no magic in porn, but there is a lot of...industrial engineering.

I spent a lot of time in my lost youth reading Foucault and his contemporaries, and reading 1970s porn through a critical theory lens is a comic experience. But I suppose that's not the way to read "Donkey-Loving Schoolgirl". It's the only way I can read it, mind you, but that's always been the problem with my reading. I assume that the author was at least as devoted to irony as I am, and he's feeding me postmodernist set-ups for jokes. 

I will have to spend more time going through the scanned titles at the Russian website. And I will have to tell you, my friends and readers, about the things I learned from porn novels back in the last age.