Update: The Fleshbot exclusive gallery is up! Check it out.
No, it’s not the Naked Ambition anthology I had a nonfiction essay published in, but a whole other book about the porn industry with the same title — Michael Grecco’s Naked Ambition is a big fancy photo book of mainstream porn peeps. The mens’ mag styled text and porn glam is missable, but the images are compelling and often raw, despite the Pornywood sheen. And it’s the topic of this week’s column, plus I interview the photographer, who is apparently catching flak for not retouching the images… Interesting stuff.
We’ll have an exclusive gallery at Fleshbot shortly *now live*. Here’s a snip from my column:
(…) “Naked Ambition” captures all the bright pink everything, Lucite heels, trashy stripperwear, het stereotypes and big-boobed blondes that seem fresh from a trip through a 1990s frat-boy time machine. It’s DVD culture (far, far from Internet culture) and dated sexuality, preserved like a pornified Twinkie in its format and distribution channels. Glimmers of event horizon seep through in the text: Vivid Video’s Steve Hirsch smartly remarks, “If you are a producer and the majority of your income comes from DVD sales, you are in trouble.”
Yet unlike every other mainstream depiction of porn, in “Naked Ambition” you won’t find a sex-negative attitude that presents porn people as “damaged” or “sleazy.” There’s no judgment or underlying apology for the topic. It just is.
Refreshingly, we’re allowed to look at every angry pimple and crepelike fold on surgified breasts, while also clearly seeing the unmade, natural beauty of women like Dana DeArmond (myspace.com/littledana) and Michelle Aston (michelle-aston.com), and decide for ourselves. Grecco doesn’t avoid any challenges with his lens, and it’s the book’s explicit inclusivity — like showing a voluptuous trans performer shaved and naked, breasts and biological genitalia intact — that I think would ensure this book a NC-17 instead of an R.
The event at which Grecco shot this book is actually not very fun to attend, unless you have friends with you. It’s rather freaky (in the not-sexy way). There are security guards posted at the entrances to all women’s restrooms. After an hour squeezing through men packed together (the fans) and the performers’ exaggeration of femininity and sexuality all bottled up in one place, it’s difficult to tell if it feels homoerotic or suffocatingly heterosexual. The awards are long and boring — just like the Oscars they’re modeled after. They seem more made up and less relevant every Internet minute. And we wish the best for porn stars, really, but I’m pretty sure their bright, glued-on turquoise and gold Barbie dresses are not part of those wishes. (…)
Link.
