'Shame' - Can we talk about our global porn addiction?

I can’t wait to see Shame. I’ve heard opposing reviews - it’s slow, arty, it’s about subject that we’ve become far too prudish about; it’s brilliant, brave, about a subject we’ve become too unhealthily obsessed about. 

It’s about sex addiction, and thank God someone has made a movie about it. I’ve seen movies about alcoholism, drug addiction, and even gambling addiction, but never legitimate sex addiction. It’s high time someone’s tackled it, brought it out into the open. I’d love for people to see this movie and maybe ask if they see parts of themselves staring back. 

I’ve heard a lot of talk about addiction - how to solve it, what causes it. What I keep hearing is this - you become more addicted when the supply is readily accessible and cheap.

Let’s talk about porn. When I was a teenager, my friends and I had to walk across town and find the one East Indian corner store that rented VHS porn. You had to pay real money to see porn. You brought it home; it was a big, square piece of hollow black plastic, and we had to keep it safe. You had to hide it someplace away from your parents. When you and your friends nervously watched the stuff, you had to keep your hand on the remote in case your mother wandered downstairs in her nightgown to see just what the hell you all were doing. And then, when you were done and it was the next day, you had to bring that tape back to the store. You had to rent, carry, hide, and then return pornography by a certain date. Porn was like a library book. Think on that for a moment. 

I can’t quite explain the pre-internet, corporeal nature of porn. You had to rent the stuff, or search around in your dad’s closet where he kept it in an old suitcase. Your dad’s porn was the strangest porn: glossy European magazines where skinny men with moustaches and black socks fucked dishwater blonde girls who never stopped smiling as though they were smelling strudel straight from the oven. My own dad had all those magazines locked away alongside something called The Anarchist’s Cookbook (19171), which taught you how to make bombs, grow marijauna, pick locks, and hack old payphones. Porn took trouble to acquire and keep, caused trouble when it was found, and was hard to find if you were underage. 

Then the internet arrived.  ASCII code could be converted into pictures. Porn was free, and for the first time, we found that freedom had nothing to do with cost. Porn was released, free to meet other porns and have pornlets. Porn had had it pretty rough before; it was once trapped in steaming, sticky theatres, forced into hardcore labor rooms where the doors were hung with seedy beads, kidnapped and held for ransom in the sun-baked California warehouses. 

Now it’s confusing. No one pays for porn, but yet the stuff is still being made. I can order it on my cable pay-per-view, but what would be the point of that? Porn is everywhere. It’s easy to find, to acquire, effortless to store in the limitless and Stygian depths of our computers. Yes, we all leave massive, day-glo, virtual computer porn trails like we were massive and horny slugs, and we would be fucked if a computer tech were to go over our hard drives. But what are the odds of a cyber CSI team confiscating our machines? There are billions of us!

Which leads me back to Shame, and what it might mean for us. One of our most potent drugs is free of both cost and risk; our kids are consuming it at twelve and younger. Porn is part and parcel of sex addiction.This movie could start a conversation.

I’m not anti-sex; I’m not going to be like Ted Bundy on the eve of his execution and conveniently blame everything on porn; I won’t suggest we start banning desires. But this movie could at least, much like the pro hockey discussion still in its infancy about concussion, start us talking about this massive and interconnected beehive of masturbation stations, and what it means for the brains of our future generations.