If porn was a person it would definitely be a man. A man who had had a really fucked up childhood, was bullied by his mother and didn't learn about healthy co-existence with a female until it was far too late. A man who cannot get a date and is laughed at by strong independent women. Porn would be a man who rarely leaves the house and dreams up scenarios in which 9/11 was something he brought about with his mind.
I wrote a show about porn last year for the Edinburgh Festival and now I will be performing it at the Soho Theatre 3-8 March. It is called Brett Goldstein Contains Scenes Of An Adult Nature.
The show takes place in a world in which sexual imagery is everywhere and used to sell everything, and where sex has lost the one thing it was supposed to be for: reproduction. Or connection. Or something. (It's been so long, I can't remember what it's for.)
It's like the movie Her - a film set in a 'futuristic' world where people spend more time looking at their phone than they do looking into each other's eyes. (Incidentally, when I watched Her, people checked their phones all through the screening, which either says a lot about the films prescience. Or the film's pace.)
When I first started the show I was terrified to say it out loud. But the truth was most people I think could relate to what I was saying. Because it is an epidemic in the world. People watch porn. Men and women. Women make up 33% of that audience. Or so I was told by some porno I once watched. We are in the Wild West phase of the Internet where we haven't quite worked out how to control it or what it is for. Yes there is mass communication and unfettered access to political wrongdoing and people's thoughts and lives... But there is also a shit load of porn, that anyone with a mouse and a working concept of how to press a button that says "over 21" can get to. And what does it mean?
It is true that we have always wanted to see pictures of people having sex. I once went on a walking tour of Roman ruins (bragging) and the tour guide showed us a cement tile that had a crude drawing of people having bum sex on. The guide said, "See, people have always liked looking at people being naughty." And he was right. But the Romans couldn't instantly click a button that would make that tile flip and change into another picture and another awful picture until the pictures starting moving and doing even more terrible things to each other until they were just staring blindly into the void going, "Why am I still looking at this tile??!!"
Oh it's a comedy show. Did I mention that? It sounds like a moody old lecture doesn't it? Well, imagine a moody old lecture with loads of jokes that disguise the fact that it sort of might be a moody old lecture. With a happy ending.
Porn is no longer my friend. We don't hang out at all, and I have defriended him on Facebook. And now the internet has become a place where you have to sign petitions that you are not sure are just chain letters and watch videos of people being nice to each other, or busking and no one noticing that they are Yehudi Menuhin or drunk people dancing with policeman or whatever. I'm not saying it's better, it's definitely lonely, but I no longer watch women being brutalized on a regular basis and that has to be a good thing. Now I see clearly and I cannot understand what I saw in any of it. I am free at last. I mean here's the truth of it. Porn, well, internet porn at least, is overwhelmingly misogynist. For all the arguments you may wish to make for it, why are there such relentless videos with the word 'abuse' in them? And how the hell did we get so used to that? How did that become normalized? And why is no one talking about it?
But with jokes...
It's like Ghandi once said, if you can stop just one man wanking to porn...
See Brett Goldstein Contains Scenes of An Adult Nature at the Soho Theatre until 8th March. For tickets, visit sohotheatre.com