out of step (with the world)
So I don’t want to come off like some finger-wagging old lady but last night I watched Hot Girls Wanted on Netflix and it was sort of shocking. Not shocking that porn exists, we know that porn exists: there is EVER SO MUCH PORN. More just the ubiquity of this “amateur” stuff, the casual way the skeezy Miami dude discusses the “maximum shelf life of a girl,” and the way that 19-year-olds think that getting fucked on camera will be their ticket to…something.
I do not blame the 19-year-olds in the least, everyone is delusional about life at that age, and they SHOULD BE. It’s normal. It is just somewhat unfortunate that their delusional-about-life-ness is taking this particular format. Sweetie I know right now it seems amazing that you made $800 in a week, and that you live rent-free in Florida in a house full of burrito wrappers, lube, weed, and tattooed douchebags, but it’s really not. The whole documentary made me feel like such an uncool mom. Here’s what I want for sex workers: to be in charge of their lives, old enough to know what’s up, and not to have answered a goddamned Craigslist ad promising a free flight out of their shitty town in exchange for pretending to be excited about sex.
Also, I cannot get one stupid throwaway bit of the film out of my head. It is the beginning of one girl’s “scene” (because nobody bothers to make full porn movies anymore). But scenes have titles, did you know that? Because they have to be searchable! The content management of porn. The tags, the metadata. Etc.
The title of the scene is “Cum Fiesta.” The shot opens with this girl knocking on a door, and the male “talent” answers, and she says, “Hi, I heard about the Cum Fiesta?”
Well, wow. So creatively interweaving the title into the plot! I’m impressed. But I also wonder how she heard about it. One of those xeroxed signs on telephone poles, with tear-off tabs? Facebook? An Evite? A radio ad? The documentary did not show any more than that very opening bit, and I don’t personally want to see more—but if you search it out, and it has any stereotypical quasi-Mexican elements that merit the term “Fiesta,” let me know. Don’t DESCRIBE it to me in detail because that’s gross and I will block you. Just let me know if there are: sombreros, chihuahuas, big bandito mustaches, serapes, etc.
Now that I’m thinking about this I have an honest intellectual curiosity about the linguistic origin of the word “jism,” but I’m on my lunch break at work and I can’t Google that right now. Putting it in the notebook for later.
Anyway, fire up your streaming and watch this documentary. It’s more thought-provoking than depressing, I promise. And then let’s get drunk together and talk about porn some more.
—mimi smartypants will not attend the fiesta.