Diary of a Baltic exile

  • 2004-01-29
The other night I was idly flicking through the 60 or so TV channels I receive, when I was struck by just how much sex there was going around. I'd sort of abstractly noticed it before but hadn't really paid much attention to it. A breast here, a grunt there, it all just blended into the abstract collage of imagery that is television. But there it was - channel after channel was at it.

The most surreal thing on show was on Latvian Television. It was an ultralow budget 70s flick, one of those fuzzy Pan-European productions, where everyone speaks in heavily accented English, and the dubbing is so out of time that the characters appear to be stealing each other's lines. It was surprisingly hardcore, with almost every scene resulting in intercourse between the Nazi guards and their female charges (although there was a wee blue triangle in the corner of the screen to ward off the young and sensitive).
On another channel there was some 80s soft porn, trying desperately to be glamorous. Ah, those were innocent days back then, when the average hairdo required a canister of hairspray to keep it in shape for the day, and the ozone was being riddled with holes by aspiring beauties the world over.
One German channel was showing a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of a "big budget" porn film called "Private Gladiator" (i.e. it had a script). I don't speak a word of German, but that was hardly an obstacle when it came to understanding Caesar's preferred contraceptual method of coitus interruptus.
The most atrocious thing I came across, however, was the British Adult Channel. It was so embarrassingly stupid that I thought I'd stumbled upon some sort of porno panto. ("He's behind you!") Occasionally one of the "actors" would glance over at the camera and give a nauseating wink and thumbs up. The "actresses," meanwhile, "oohed" and "aahed" so much that the whole scene was disturbingly reminiscent of a documentary about primates.
And there was more, much more. Sex beamed to me via Latvia, Russia, Germany, Britain, it doesn't really matter from where when it comes to the monoculture of pornography.
It's sad, really. For the first time in history porn has finally infiltrated the mainstream. But far from being a symbol of our liberated times, as many would have it, porn is in the desperate business of plugging (metaphysical) holes. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew a thing or two about sex, but you can be pretty sure they never did it "Private Gladiator" style.