A while ago, porn star Ron Jeremy talked some smack about videogames during a debate at the CES show in Vegas. So there was some uproar about that.
Now Kotaku hosts a short guest editorial from Jeremy, in which he says, “I am not trying to knock the the video game industry, I am just standing up for the porn industry.”
That would be fine, Ron, if it weren’t for the fact that you’re knocking the videogame industry, which despite some optimist claims is struggling for creative freedom around the world, while the porn industry is entrenched, safe, and requires no defense.
Let’s start at the beginning, something some readers may not actually realize:
There has never been a single shred of real-world, longitudinal evidence that videogame experiences have any impact whatsoever on human minds.
The key words there are “real-world” and “longitudinal.” Sure, some studies have shown that people – in a lab – will push a button harder after playing a violent videogame. But no one has examined how hard they push the button in a week; so it’s not longitudinal. Moreover, the strength with which we push buttons has little to do with actual violent tendencies; so it’s not real-world. My brand new car, picked up yesterday, has push-button start. I push the button gently, almost reverently, because it’s weird and cool to me that a button can start a car. I play violent videogames nearly every day. Still, it’s probably the most important button in my life and I don’t jab it in a rage.
I am pro-porn. I have no problem with porn. I do have a problem with people throwing my medium under the bus to protect their own, though. And Jeremy’s grammatical wasteland of an editorial doesn’t convince me otherwise.
The fact is, neither industry should be catering all wares to kids. Porn is kid-unfriendly no matter what, while games have plenty of kid-friendly content but parents must understand and respect the excellent ratings systems in place throughout the world. Might it be healthier for kids to see sex, as Jeremy claims? I guess so, but not in the context of modern porn, which is degrading and aggressive. The internet has allowed every possible kink to come anonymously to the surface, so even the most apparently normal day-to-day people can get off at night by watching porn that involves crushing mice or crapping on cakes. Actual sex, between individuals of any gender who want physical proximity, yes, that’s beautiful. Porn does not portray it. Nor does the medium of the videogame, by the way – though at least we’re seeing some honest-if-hamhanded attempts.
Perhaps the most telling condemnation of Ron Jeremy’s behavior comes from one of the commenters on his Kotaku post: Jeremy said sex is natural and beautiful. And someone responded thusly:
It’s worth pointing out that all the sex scenes I’ve seen involving Ron Jeremy have been neither beautiful nor natural. Sometimes the chick is pretty beautiful, and I guess Ron Jeremy is “natural” but the chick is usually not very natural, and Ron Jeremy is far from beautiful.
Ahahaha, funny quote there.
Also, daymn, that’s RJ right there and I really can not feel any kind of negativity for the man. I mean he taught me so much about life that I’d be a bigot to pretend I’m above him in any way, you know.
But of course, he’s using a completely flawed argument in his editorial. Porn does not equal sex. Porn is about spectacle (of sex or… other things), not about sex. Much of the porn I watch doesn’t really involve sex, it’s about spectacle and power and roles in the human society, but mostly about spectacle. Baudrillard once defined porn as a media where you see genitals bigger than you would ever see them in real life. Because porn is about augmenation and hyperbole.
So are games. Neither are natural. Neither want to show us normal people doing normal things. We wouldn’t want them any other way.
Exactly! And we wouldn’t want to watch normal people doing normal things!
That’s WHY we play games… to be extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. Violence is inconsequential.
Or at least not not natural. Super Mario Bros. has it stylised down to cutesy jumps on your enemies’ heads. Shadow of the Colossus has it turned into a pornographic spectacle of giant killing. GTA turns it into a videogame aping life aping videogame.
Violence is deeply connected to games (of any kind) for reasons I think obvious, but NATURALISTIC violence is absent from videogames most of the time. Games that make it look naturalistic, like Manhunt are games that shock us. Games that make it easy and quick, like Call of Duty do not shock us. Therefore, Vivid is Call of Duty of porn while Devicebondage or Public Disgrace is Manhunt and GTA of porn. It’s really all about being staged, unnatural, overexposed and heavily stylised in either of these cases.
Perhaps the answer lye’s in combining the two. Mario Porn anyone? (oh thats probably already been done 🙁 )
Oh boy what a surreal article to read at 7:38 am 🙂
Probably? Surely you have seen this: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2007/02/ron-jeremy-mario.jpg
Ahahaha no but I have now! Cover your eyes children, cover your eyes!!
“Jeremy said sex is natural and beautiful.”
While that can be true. I have seen enough porn in my day to know that a LOT of the sex in that, uh, genre is neither “natural” nor “beautiful”. It’s often just incredibly degrading.
While I agree with the simpler premise that, particularly in the US, the disparity between how much violence is deemed acceptable compared to how much nudity is deemed acceptable is incredibly out of whack and patently ridiculous, I don’t think trying to elevate porn over video games is the best way to go about expressing it.
Erm, I think a very important distinction should be made here: porn involves real people doing very real things to each other, games do not.
Now I’m no prude but the sex in porn is usually as cosmetically distorted, unreal and oftentimes as grotesque as the violence featured in many games but the former will always be more affecting because it’s real, in the same way as a snuff movie would be more affecting than the many brutal deaths in say, Manhunt or Postal. There are a lot of perceptual and subjective variables here but I’d wager that virtual reality will always be overshadowed by reality.
Also, what sort of porn do you watch Meho?? Roles in human society?!! There’s me thinking it was just pounds of processed meat slamming into each other…
I’ve always been hesitant to ask Meho that question, for fear that he might tell me. Or worse, show me.
Many anti-gamers state that gaming is “worse” because it’s interactive, while a passive activity like watching porn or violence is not. Of course, in my view, passive voyeurism is far worse than active involvement because you’re sitting there doing nothing. What’s worse, a violent video game or one of those Hostel films? For me, at least, it’s the latter.
I haven’t seen the Hostel films, not least because they’re apparently shit, but mainly because, er, torture doesn’t agree with me, naturally. I know it’s not real but obviously when my suspension of disbelief is tight and all I can do is watch I can find it really unsettling, as a sort of bystander.
Conversely, however, I do think by taking control of a virtual character you’re sort of, by default, disconnected from the virtual realness of their situation. Even as videogames become verisimilarly better, short of having a brain plug or something, I don’t believe they will really ever get to the primal core of violence while an interface is distancing you from it. Context and representation will be the key until then.
Lewis will confirm this, but when we were younger we spent a good half an hour once in the original Half-Life, with a crowbar and a wounded but invincible Barney, splattering as much blood on the walls in that particular area as humanely possible. We thought it was fun back then, sort of like painting by numbers, only without paint. Or numbers. I wish we had the screenshot. Anyway, we knew it wasn’t real so it didn’t matter in the slightest.
Stomping corpses to a pulp in Dead Space is way healthier than watching Ron Jeremy porn. Come to think of it, I would reverse their labels and call Dead Space “explicit adult content” and Ron Jeremy porn flicks would get the “survival horror” rating.
@Xtal, oh how I laughed 🙂 very good mon frère, very good 🙂
How is porn not interactive? The idea that because in a videogame you choose to act violently within the context of the game, rather than passively identifying with a character on the screen acting violently, is ridiculous, because it goes both ways. Sure, you’re free to enact whatever scenarios you wish, but you can also choose not to maim or kill in situations where the game itself allows you or even encourages you to do just that (porn v. the Fallout series, maybe?). But the idea that porn itself is less interactive, and less about choices, than videogames are is just nonsensical.