Famous amateur porn is dead. Long live obscure amateur porn
My friends: I’m sure you all know that I’ve gathered you together to commemorate a sad occasion. To wit, early this month it came to light that a sex tape existed featuring former Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, a beauty queen and prominent bearer of both anti-gay conservative values and artificial breasts.
And yet, I have absolutely no desire to seek out and watch this tape. Neither the voyeuristic pleasure of the private made public, nor the schadenfreude of family-values hypocrisy, nor even simple curiosity can compel me to care that Vivid Entertainment apparently has the tape and hopes to release it. Prejean claims that what she is doing in the video is “not having sex,” and, sadly, I have no ambition to “not have sex” while watching it.
And so it is official. The celebrity sex tape is dead. After a long struggle, it has succumbed to overexposure. Like a Shakepearean protagonist, the driving force of its success bore the seeds of its destruction.
Friends, perverts, countrymen: I come to bury the celebrity sex tape, and to praise it. Let us, for a moment, speak of the gifts the celebrity sex tape has given us. Let us remember happier times.
Clearly I recall the day in 1998 when I purchased (yes kids, we used to pay for porn) a VHS videocassette (those are what we used to watch movies on) at my local convenience store (which is where we used to get our porn) of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s stolen honeymoon tape. I was never a fan of Baywatch — nor of Mötley Crüe — and had no particular interest in seeing either of the performers naked. In fact, I had not previously taken the widely available opportunity to gaze on Pamela Anderson’s surgically enhanced and airbrushed naked form in Playboy magazine. But this was different.
Here we had these celebrities, with such carefully constructed public personas, exposed. Not just physically, but personally. In the video, they were performing, yes, but performing for each other and no one else. So we caught a glimpse of how they behaved when the paparazzi cameras were far away, and only their personal camera was running.
But moreover, and maybe more importantly, it was in much the same way a groundbreaking glimpse into the sex lives of other people, full stop. Unlike studio-produced porn, we saw here a couple behaving as they behaved when they were alone, having sex in the way they did. The shaky camera work, the longish, boringish bits of dialogue, the less-than-perfect angles — they all underscored this effect, and blazed a trail in voyeuristic technique. For generations — millennia — one had to actually have sex with a person to know what they looked like when they were having sex (really having sex, not following directions from some pornographer), yet suddenly this previously inaccessible information — about huge celebrities, no less — was available far and wide.
What is voyeurism, after all, if not the compulsion to look into the authentic unguarded moments of others? In this case, mixed with the thrill of the forbidden, the celebrity glamour and the hardcore sexual element that is the attraction of all porn, it was riveting.
Other celebrities followed, and in cases such as Paris Hilton’s, their celebrity grew as a direct result of their sexual intimacies being made public, and for a while our appetite for celebrity skin only grew. But as the parade of names grew longer and the wattage of the celebrities involved dimmed — no one needed to see Screech from Saved by the Bell exposed, thank you; and who the hell is Kim Kardashian anyway? — the dirty-sexy-guilty-curious thrill began to wear off. It suffered from its ubiquity. And, finally, Carrie Prejean killed it.
But — but! — the celebrity sex tape’s spirit lives on, for the aesthetic it gave us, and the philosophy of self-involvement behind it, live on. Far from the world of celebrity, the sex tape is now the domain of the common people. The same technology that democratized the sex lives of celebrities (allowing them to be recorded and distributed easily) democratized the concept of celebrity itself (allowing everyone access to a wide audience). While this eventually rendered the celebrity video impotent, it also allowed the twin impulses driving the phenomenon to be fruitful and multiply: the vain desire of one party to record the mundane and intimate details of their own lives, and the voyeuristic desire of another party to observe those recordings.
And so, on Voyeurweb and YouPorn and Pornotube and Xvideos and a million other websites, we can post and see the legacy of the celebrity sex tape in hundreds of thousands of recordings and photographs by regular folks that pay homage to the uncontrived intimacy — the piles of laundry in the background, the periodic giggling, the terrible lighting — pioneered by the famous. Sex tapes are no longer only for the chosen few, they are now for everyone.
This is the gift the celebrity sex tape has given us. It lives on in the exhibitionist impulses of us all. Its sacrifice is the gain of perverts everywhere. May the celebrity sex tape rest in peace, and long may the amateur sex tape live on.