I spent most of last summer reading Porn Studies, a collection of scholarly work on pornography edited by Linda Williams of University of California-Berkley. Ms. Williams is the shit, y'all. I seriously respect pro-porn feminists for muddying up the sisterhood's party line, but I seriously respect pro-porn academics more. During the great board invasion of 2006, one of the accusations thrown my way by the academics was that I "apologize for liking 'low art' by intellectualizing my critique on 'low art'". It's difficult to get any lower than porn, but the presence of people like Williams and the critics included in her book pretty much cements the idea that pornography is as valid a subject of study as any legitimate film. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, "Mouth," you fucking asshole. But what I find even more intriguing is that the very presence of such a program could effectively demolish the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity as lacking "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." If the academics are studying pornography, then it can't really be obscene as the very act of even considering it worthy of study establishes its "serious artistic" value. If pornography is not obscene, then is anything obscene? It annoys and irritates me, on a very base primitive level, that I can't rent hardcore porn like I can rent any other movie. This is living in Utah, I know, but even in less "family-oriented" states, the collections are limited to the top 40 hits. You have to be enrolled in a film studies program to get a feel for the breadth and depth of the genre. That information has never been properly democratized.

But with that said, I wonder how much of the academic appeal of hardcore pornography comes from its outlaw status. Largely because I usually can't see this sort of thing without going whole hog, so to speak, and actually purchasing a copy (give Chansey67 some props for burning and mailing me this one), Pirates is the first actual hardcore porn film I've seen. This isn't Caligula, this isn't Destricted, this isn't Catherine Breillat, this isn't an "art film" with hardcore sex scenes in it. It's pornography. It doesn't have any pretenses of being anything other than pornography. The film seems to want to be the one to finally cross over into the mainstream after Deep Throat, but if it is accepted it wants to be accepted as pornography.

The catch-22, of course, is that to the degree it is recognized by the mainstream (of which, having never actually seen an according-to-Hoyle hardcore porno, I belong to), it is as a novelty. By most reports, that's ultimately all that ever came from Deep Throat (no entendre intended). People went to see it because they thought it would be a gas to go see a hardcore porno movie, an attitude that effectively kept porno at the kid's table for another thirty years. But novelty counts, not for a lot, but for something, and while Pirates is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, it's not bad enough to significantly overwhelm the novelty factor.

I read this great thing while Googling the title looking for reviews. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh last year, one of the student organizations sponsored a screening of the film for the student body using activity funds! There was a great deal of outrage, as some students didn't like the idea that the activity fees they are forced to pay were going toward sponsoring pornography. Such protests appeared to be in the minority, however. Three showings of the film, serving over a thousand people each, were sold out. I have to admit that I'm a little jealous. Something similar happened at Utah Valley State College a little while ago, except people were upset that Michael Moore (?!) was being paid to speak using activity funds. WTF, right? You can only imagine the stick we have up our ass. Anyway, I heard about the story on the CBS affiliate KDKA's website. The news segment includes a video of the crowds, which contain a handful of young men dressed up in pirate costumes. They look like they're having fun, more with the idea of their college showing their film than with the film itself, granted, but no matter how you want to qualify it, fun is fun. If you're going to see Pirates, you'll want to see it at Carnegie Mellon University with a thousand other people, at least a few of which are dressed like pirates. It isn't as good as Snakes on a Plane, which itself wasn't that good, but it's roughly in the same ballpark. Pirates isn't a film as much as an event, designed to fade in the memory as something you had to be there to "get."

Let me take a minute to explain why exactly Pirates isn't a very good movie, or perhaps just why it doesn't survive comparison with a good movie. First of all, Jesse Jane is a terrible actress. This goes beyond the threshold of normal bad acting; she's so bad that whenever she is in a scene with dialogue you can't concentrate on anything except her bad acting. Her performance consists of little more than simply reciting her written dialogue on cue. Aside from a modest Valley Girl patois, there is barely a hint of inflection. She seems to be sleepwalking throughout the whole film. It goes without saying that Jesse Jane's performance isn't convincing and prevents us from suspending our disbelief and forgetting that we are watching a movie. But the bigger problem is that she significantly sabotages the film's potential eroticism. I confess to not finding Jane or her persona terribly attractive. My personal taste leans more to fresh and virginal than skank and slutty. Different strokes for different folks, as the saying goes. However, I feel pretty safe in saying that boredom is always a turn-off regardless of how you're wired. Her performance in the sex scenes seems like it would be adequate if seen out of context. Combined with the dialogue scenes, however, she always looks like her mind is on her next paycheck regardless of how many dicks are pushed down her gullet.

It doesn't help that the dialogue she is forced to recite is painfully overwritten. At one point in the story Jane goes back to an ex-boyfriend who she dumped because she couldn't stay tied down to just one man. He is still deeply in love with her and is still angry that she left him. "Stop with your false tragedy!" she barks at him. "Stop?! Did my eyes stop crying when you left me? Did my stomach stop aching with the loss of your touch? Did my pain ever stop?" Is it safe to say that if this character wasn't in a porno movie he'd never get laid? Still, he wants her to stay. Jane lays down her conditions: "Can we live in this moment, and this moment alone? Time begins and ends here." Ugh! Most of the movie sounds like that. It's kind of faux poetic in a half-assed way; there is a dearth of conviction that keeps it from working either legitimately or as camp.

I said in my review of Caligula that I don't like hardcore as much as softcore and I think that hardcore pornography in general evinces a fear of sexuality, an attitude that sees it as basically a filthy act. In not showing ejaculation or penetration, I don't think that softcore is embarrassed about it. It's just saying that the psychological aspects of sex are more important than actually seeing it enacted. Basically, penetration isn't nearly as important as seeing the face interpreting and reacting to the physical sensations. I don't find hardcore very erotic, but I'm growing more reluctant in describing it as stemming from an unhealthy attitude toward sex. People aren't exactly wrong in saying that Mel Gibson is a psychopath, but watching his recent film Apocalypto it occurred to me that it's a good thing that the film has all that gore. Pauline Kael said this great thing about how middlebrow audiences "hissed" whenever they saw blood on-screen as though "they didn't have it in their own bodies." Hey, human beings have blood, guts and lots of other juices, and loving them means you love the human body and think the human body is a beautiful thing. Human men ejaculate, semen is a human juice, and since human beings are beautiful and their juices are beautiful, semen is a beautiful thing. That's life, man.

When I said that hardcore was derisive about sex, I think that I was informed largely by how decidedly "un-filmic" it seemed. Filmmaking is still, by and large, the focal goal of softcore, but with hardcore I think that it tends to take the back seat to the sex scenes. Beauty is not necessarily truth, but it is synonymous with positive regard. If you shoot your sex scenes in an ugly utilitarian fashion, you are saying that you have negative feelings toward sex. It isn't hardcore pornography itself that has an unhealthy attitude toward sex, it's the lack of filmmaking excitement that is unhealthy. Mel Gibson is one of the great visual artists of recent years (if you don't take my word for it, how about maybe Armond White's?), and I assure you that if he were to make a hardcore porno movie it would be quite awesome.

I say that with Pirates being the only hardcore porno film I've seen all the way through, but I can tell you that Joone's work on this film has not saved hardcore pornography from shitty filmmaking. I may still be judging this through a softcore-centric perspective. He cuts off the heads when framing some of the scenes and that strikes me as the wrong thing to do as I want to see the female in the couple reacting to what is happening to her. But Joone certainly does little in terms of utilizing the tools of his craft. By and large, Pirates is merely competently shot and edited. There is little that is very interesting about stylistically.

There is one segment in particular that embodies Joone's prioritization of sex over filmmaking. He tries to put together this funny little montage where Jane's captain (Evan Stone) is puzzled as to why his crew are so tired. He notes that Jane spends many hours with the men, apparently working on their oral skills and studying the Bible with them as he hears many of them undulating "Oh God!" As he speaks in voiceover we see that Jane is engaged in a buffet of fellatio, ending with a full-bodied sex scene! Though it's a pretty dumb joke, Joone nearly sells it until the full-bodied sex scene. He makes it into this whole number, effectively throwing off the timing of the montage and killing the joke. Near the end of the film, there is a battle between the heroes and a gang of skeletons, apparently in homage to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The skeletons are obviously computer-generated, but even so they didn't look quite that low-rent. It looks convincing enough when they're being cut up. This battle isn't really that electric, though. In one shot the character utters a coy one-liner and then in the matching shot we see the skeleton being destroyed. This is repeated two more times and the primitive monotony of the editing neutralizes any potential excitement.

Linda Williams says that the legitimate genre pornography is closest to is the musical, an idea that only strengthens my resolve that the filmmaking can be and needs to be better. Still, the detachment between narrative and sexual setpiece is often genuinely and positively funny. The villain (Tommy Gunn) expresses doubt that his first mate (Janine) has retained her hard edge and if she ever goes soft on him, he'll no longer have any use for her. Severely pissed off at this, she goes into his cabin and forcibly coerces him at knifepoint to pleasure her. Sex in this movie tends to follow a distinct pattern. First, the male typically performs oral sex on his partner. Then she performs it on him. Then they have intercourse, usually in a wide variety of ways, and the scene ends with the male ejaculating on his partner's face. These two go through the pattern and soon after she has had a full facial she barks at him to never doubt her again. That's some 180! Going from showering in the guy's semen to bossing him around. Even goofier, Stone and Jane are tied up in a burning barn and a prostitute who had been crushing on Stone offers to let them both go provided that he has sex with her right there and then. He agrees and in the next scene he's untied and they're going through the whole deal while everything is burning around them! They're taking their time too; I would think that it would take a couple of hours to accomplish everything that we see in this scene. As soon as they finish, Stone still panting asks her, "Okay, can we untie her and go?!" When she freed him for sex he could have subdued her, untied Jane, and gotten the hell out of there in less than a quarter of the time it took to please his captor.

As you can probably tell from these descriptions, money shots in the face aside, the sexual couplings in this film tend to be female-dominant. Pirates was produced by Adam and Eve Pictures, which DVD Talk informs me is a frontrunner in couples-oriented erotica. Possibly knowing that this film is likely to reach a wider audience than usual, the filmmakers seem to be intent on putting forth the very best face of hardcore. Honestly, you would have to be Catherine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin to really object to much of this. Granted, most of the women in the film are blonde and big-breasted and they are always put in roles of the faithful wife, the prostitute, or the first mate and never the captain. And yes, I would never pretend that being ejaculated on in the face isn't inherently degrading. But if the genre is predominantly patriarchal by design, Pirates significantly mitigates the sexism by giving its female characters a great deal of power within the sexual encounters.

Pretty much all the sex in the film is initiated by women; oftentimes, as in the examples I described above, quite forcibly. Even in a scene where Stone is taken upstairs by two prostitutes, they coerce him into going up by promising that they have information about the pirates they are hunting. The women are predominantly interested in their own sexual pleasure and they use the men to achieve it. Two scenes in particular really border on rape. The first is the one I described between Janine and Gunn. Janine actually is going "soft." After participating in the murder of a priest, she has decided that she has seen enough bloodshed and wants to change her wicked ways. But she is still incredibly angry that he has the balls to call her on it. If she goes soft, he'll no longer have any use for her? Fuck that, she'll be the one to say when she no longer has any use for HIM! I think that old feminist slogan "Rape isn't about sex, it's about power" is overly simplistic, but I understand the spirit in which it's said. When Janine coerces Gunn into having sex, she is doing it for her own pleasure, sure, but a major other reason is to humiliate him and show him who wears the pants in this relationship. His very first task is to lick her.

In the second scene, blushing bride Carmen Luvana is kidnapped by pirates and forced to perform in a sex show. She very much resists, but once they get started she begins to really enjoy it. This seems to legitimize the rape myth that all women secretly want to be assaulted, right? Well, the mitigating factor here is that her rapist is another woman. And this other woman is acting of her own free agency, she loves lesbian sex, and she's very kind and gentle because she wants Luvana to love her first lesbian encounter too. The scene has an icky, modestly immoral heat to it because all these filthy pirates are watching her and she is kind of being humiliated. But the lesbianism and the warmth behind her aggressor's attitude really do manage to dull the edge. Plus the pirates show their appreciation for the show by giving her a few barrels of much-needed gunpowder, a gesture that significantly neutralizes her humiliation. I mean, they can't be that empowered by watching her; they were downright grateful that she did that for them.

In some key ways, porn (straight porn, that is) by its very nature favors women over men. Since men are the primary market for pornography the industry lives or dies by fresh female faces. In an interview with The Onion AV Club, Ron Jeremy says that the industry is pretty much closed to men and their best shot is pairing up with a female friend and entering as a couple. It's not only that, I think that because the female orgasm is so physiologically different from the male's there is a tilted ratio of men to women. Women are simply wired to perform more often than men. Practically speaking, the male fantasy of a hot and ready harem is very difficult to realize. Pirates is a very star-driven film and the stars are predominantly the women. I don't think you even need to see the DVD cover to realize that, you can feel it in the movie; the women seem to have this air of authority to them as if to say that this is their movie.

Consider also that the male-dominant missionary position is nearly absent from Pirates and, I would think, from most porn, for the very practical reason that it is not very photogenic. Doggystyle is a favorite position, but it is hardly any more ubiquitous than the female dominant position or (relatively) sideways egalitarian sex. There is a lot of oral sex in Pirates, but it's pretty much equally divided between cunnilingus and fellatio. Oftentimes, it takes place in the form of foreplay, and the female pretty much always gets hers first. The sex in the film reminded me of fictional stud Dirk Diggler's statement that his films aren't about getting a porn star off, but about getting your wife off. Pirates seems indirectly informed by that same moral attitude telling couples that you have to heat the oven up before you put your meat in, that missionary is hardly the only sexual position, and reminding of the importance of the female orgasm.

If the film is socially damaging to any extent it is likely toward the male ego. I remember a "News of the Weird" story about teenagers in the Netherlands who were incredibly insecure about their penis size and lack of prowess after being brainwashed by too much porn! The film seems to suggest that well-hung sexually proficient men grow on trees and so you better be packing something extra special if you are to compete in the sexual marketplace. The humor is a little on the misandristic side. Stone's performance is one of the few that actually works, and it is basically a winking parody of square-jawed comic book heroes in the Zapp Brannigan mold. This isn't an incredibly original conceit, but Stone is excellent in the role and the character is very funny. Though she isn't exactly underappreciated and Joone doesn't press the point too strongly, his first mate Jesse Jane seems to do most of the real investigative work. The message seems to be to show how the relevance of masculinity to heroism has been grossly inflated. Classic melodrama conventions are also lightly subverted by having Luvana's husband be the one that the malevolent Tommy Gunn kidnaps in the beginning of the film and making Luvana the hero that must rescue him. Racial caricature shows its face through a sputtering Chinese cook, but even this is interesting in that they utilized an ethnic stereotype renowned for being sexually unthreatening.

Still, Pirates never really feels particularly abrasive or militant. This could be attributed either to the fact that the genre really is inherently and profoundly demeaning to women and could then sustain a large degree of subversion, or to the fact that the filmmakers genuinely value and respect their starlets and are sensitive to unnecessarily robbing them of power. While the film deflates male egoism it doesn't argue for female superiority; the attitude is actually closest to one of egalitarianism. This could be preachy and moralistic, but Pirates is saved by a light and carefree tone. It's really not a very dirty movie, it's actually quite sweet and kind of fun along those lines. If all you are looking for are a couple of easy shits and giggles, I reckon that you could do worse.