Erotic Notion #7: Porn Star and the Choir Boy
By Hapax Legomenon

A well-known porn star visited my college campus to participate in a public debate about pornography. Of course, pornography isn't easy to discuss in public (though raging hormones ensured the undivided attention from students). The woman was well-spoken and smartly-dressed. She made utterances about subjects not even the most liberal among us would mention in mixed company. The anti-porn sociologist countered her points cogently and politely, but the crowd's sympathies surely rested with the beautiful emissary of lust who twirled sociological arguments as deftly as a stripper waving discarded lingerie in the air.

Such debates quickly turn into shouting matches; and indeed, this debate, like a porn film, was more of a histrionic exhibition than an honest meeting of minds. One side raised the gruesome specter of rape, incest and bestiality; the other portrayed a future society governed by fundamentalist wackos, full of censorship and suppression of liberty. One panelist suggested that her films portrayed sexual coercion as satisfying. That remark made her indignant. "It's fantasy!" she said. "Obviously it's not extolling rape." To prove her point, she asked every woman who had ever fantasized about being raped to stand up. No one did. The porn star laughed, reminding the crowd that rape fantasies were among the most common for women. This stunt, though quite irrelevant to the point at hand, had the effect of silencing an audience and turning a crowd of feminists into a bunch of lying hypocrites.

This erotic notion is not about the woman but her trip to the hotel afterwards. University speakers typically are picked up at the airport and driven to campus by student association members. In her case, two male students were her escorts (or that's what they say). One was someone I vaguely knew; a respected honor student who sang in the church choir. I have no idea what really happened, but erotic possibilities fill my mind. The porn star, far from home and looking for a quick thrill, would have viewed the boy as an easy lay. The college student, though honest and respectable, must have felt a secret thrill at being so close to a sexually open woman. Her boredom combined with his curiosity must have ensured a strange and exhilarating tension during the trip to the hotel.

To be fair, there is no reason to think this woman as promiscuous in real life as in the movies. Perhaps to her the thought of a one night stand was as fatiguing as the thought of bringing home extra work. And although the boy sang in the church choir, did he have to be a saint? His weekends could very well be filled with sexual dalliances and partying. Perhaps this woman, who was at least ten years older and already showing signs of age, just didn't seem attractive to him (especially when compared to the girls he dated). All this I know, but why do I continue to pair these two figures erotically in my mind? The imagination – especially the erotic imagination – prefers dealing with types to individuals, prefers making humans reducible to a few elemental drives. I recognize this simplifying and stereotyping tendency, but am unable to resist its allure. The imagination revels in alleged details: the panties over the chair, the playful straddling, the bold invitations, the descending kisses, the tongue's first taste of sex, the nervous laughter, the fumbles, the strokes, the thrusts, the pauses, the smoothness and the hairiness, the face that changes from self-absorption to tranquility in an instant, the limbs that cling long after passion has been spent. In my mind, the porn star and the choir boy keep joining together, each finding the other irresistible.

Written, 1994