The New Porn

Here's an article on porn in the NY Times Sunday Magazine today that approaches Pulitzer quality. I actually wanted to keep reading by the end, something I don't often get from Sunday Magazine articles.

...The porn business, in short, has a community standard of its own. What starts on the fringes works its way to the center. And this affects all of us since, more and more, the center of porn culture has converged with the fringes of popular culture. But Kink’s purchase of the armory represents a quirky quantum leap in the process Cambria describes: taking a real-life fetish traditionally relegated to underground clubs and the ethereal back channels of the Web and moving it directly into a brick-and-mortar landmark in the middle of a city — unabashedly, with the conviction that both it and porn can belong there.

For those who feel that B.D.S.M. porn, or any porn, is toxic and reprehensible, the fact that at least some of it is being produced by thoughtful, educated young people might only be more troubling — a sign of how deep into respectable society it has reached. Then Cambria’s point would be more terrifying still: as such material stitches itself more tightly into the mainstream, through both its consumers and its producers, it strengthens its own legality. It makes itself unobscene.

But Acworth, for his part, seems to find hope in some of the developments of the last decade, signs that some unfortunate misunderstandings are being righted. I asked him what he would think if one day he could walk into Wal-Mart and find racks of constrictive leather corsets. “I think it would be great,” he said. Though at that point, he added, in a world so awash with kinkiness: “I’ll probably stop making money. But I won’t mind that. A life goal will have been completed.”