Catching up with some old friends, some twenty-five years later, I was hit by a fair question. “How did you become so obsessed with porn?”
While I wouldn’t use the word obsession to describe my approach to pornography, porn has indeed been my life and my passion for close to twenty years. I can relate to my friend’s surprise. I wasn’t exactly a porn superfan.
I rarely viewed porn back then. My passions surrounded gaming, new technology, computer science, and mathematics. And I even had a negative concept of porn, a carryover from growing up in a rather repressed and, dare I say, oppressive swath of America.
But then I saw Aria by Andrew Blake. It was a sort of pornography that I had never heard of before. Imagine a feature-film length cross between a music video, an art film, and erotica.
It featured sexual vignettes with the likes of Kelle Marie, Layton Lane, Adriana Sage, and the legendary Aria Giovanni. Aria was primarily a solo and girl/girl film, but it also featured a spectacular slow-fuck and facial with Ms. Sage and Vince Voyeur.
I had never seen anything like it. This did not conform to my concept of “smut” or “dirty movies.” No, this was unquestionably art. Cinematic, beautiful, and remarkably tasteful. I did not know porn could be like that.
Such fascinating work was paradigm-shifting. Was there more to porn than I had been told? I had to find out and promptly went on a pornographic journey. Keep in mind that this was well before high-speed internet and streaming media were a thing.
The good folks at 21 And Up, my local adult boutique, came to know me as a regular. Week by week, I bought out their collection of Andrew Blake films, exploring films like Justine, The Villa, and Dita von Teese’s Pin-Ups 2. Much to my surprise, they were all magnificent, easily holding up against the artfully inspired Aria.
More than just an art, something “clicked.” Porn was making a lot of sense. Beyond cinema, the sexual performances stood out as well. Up to that point, it wasn’t clear to me that this was a performance art, that these pornstars were remarkably talented and unique artists in their own right.
Seeing pornstars as artists opened my mind to other possibilities. Strangely, I hadn’t been viewing porn so much for the sex, but then, everything changed. With careful study, porn became a competitive sport.
Every porn performer has their own style and technique that they bring to bear. It’s endemic to who they are and how they make love. And it’s often colored by the pornstars they’ve been inspired by. There’s a whole lineage of sexual inspiration in each pornography.
Any given pornography offers a lot to unpack, and it’s that richness that drew me to this industry and captivates me to this day. Porn opened my eyes to its creativity and beauty and unlocked a nearly two-decade-long career appreciating and contributing to this art. And it all began with an erotic art film starring Aria Giovanni.
