Rachel Rouge, a.k.a. Lucy Johnson

What is more fun than having sex? Talking about sex.

By far.

Thank Eros (the porn god) that we live in an age of discourse and technology, where folks from the middle classes can get their jollies amplified and fine-tuned into art.

The first exhibit in my argument for data-driven erotica is “Consent,” an art show curated by Lynsey G at Apexart in TriBeCa. The show itself consists of several video installations. Clips from movies interspersed with interviews with industry insiders run on several small, and a couple of large, screens. When I went on opening night I met a couple of the folks featured, including the writer/producer Daniel Reilly and his companion Sarah Scream, an opera singer, burlesque performer, and sister to famous porn entrepreneur Joanna Angel.

The conversation was fun: seeing industry folks projected onto the wall, engaged in acts that would make Santorum snuff it, while watching them sip wine and chat was certainly a trip. Daniel told some awesome stories about writing scripts for porn parodies. I thought those things died with the rise of the internet and “reality” porn, but no, they still exist. And I was not at all surprised to see overlap between porn – especially the indie kind – and burlesque.

The show aims to provide a behind-the-scenes, inside scoop on the “real” porn industry, because, as Lynsey G puts it in the press release, “pornography goes undiscussed, unlike its cousin art.” That is, the show seeks to fill the void (heh, heh) in the meta-discourse on porn. I appreciate the desire to talk about sex, and the need to talk about how we talk about sex, but I beg to differ on the subject of whether there is an adequate meta-discourse on sex in general or porn in particular. The Vagina Dialogues have been around for fifteen years, as has Boogie Nights, and Jenna Jameson’s tell-all has been in print since 2004 (and is still ranked fairly high on Amazon’s sales list). An SVA grad told me five years ago that making Art (capital “A”) out of porn has long been an art school cliché. So really, the problem isn’t that porn is repressed, and we – collectively, as a society – need to talk about it. Really, the problem is that the meta-discourse on porn has taken on the characteristics of porn itself: ubiquitous, titillating, and often tedious after five minutes.

Stills from "Consent" at Apexart

When folks debated the similarities between porn and art forty years ago, the lines were drawn between the power of visual stimulation to shock us out of cognitive complacency, and the numbing effect of overstimulation. The argument went that art is continually challenging perceptions, whereas porn only takes you to the money shot and leaves you bored but hungry for more. These days, however, bored and unsatisfied is the condition of popular culture writ large. Information (often referred to vulgarly as “data”) is chopped so fine, recycled so thoroughly, and churned so fast that the old way of understanding our reaction to porn is applicable to Kardashians, The Sitch, and LiLo. The 21st century problem isn’t that we’re socially repressed into hiding our sexuality; the problem these days is we’re socially repressed into expressing our sexuality – publicly. I submit as evidence any number of articles in the New York Times on the pressure young girls feel to give up their privacy to social media.

And yet, no matter how much you scratch, the itch never goes away. Perhaps that’s why Lucy Johnson’s show “Part Time Prostitute,” playing the 27th and 28th at The Red Room on West 4th street, is so interesting. Ms. Johnson (I’m not sure if that is her real name – probably not) is a New Zealander who worked for just over a year on weekends as a prostitute in a legal brothel in Wellington. She says she wrote the show “to give my own experience of working as a prostitute, a little bit of glamour, a little bit of vileness but on the whole just an interesting, sometimes boring, sometimes fun job.”

Clearly there is a meta-discourse at work in Ms. Johnson’s play. The stage lights come up on an object that looks like a bed, and the house lights go down on an audience fidgeting nervously. She opens by telling us what the rates are, and joking that we don’t get to see her in her all-in-all because this hour long show costs considerably less than her usual rate. Then she acts out some of the moves and procedures in her repertoire to explain what a session is like. But this isn’t just a meta-discourse, or maybe it’s a little bit more than a meta-discourse, because Ms. Johnson elevates her theatrical observations on her ancient and venerable profession to an anthropological analysis of homo emptor sexus.

Of course, no meta-discourse is complete without adding another layer, and here it is: “Part Time Prostitute” is not so much an ethnography of the Common John as it is demonstration of Anglo culture’s peculiar obsession with data. Ms. Johnson tells us that whereas the other ladies working in her brothel (and we may assume most other sex workers on Earth) were truly just doing their job, Ms. Johnson was taking copious notes and logging them in a journal that she kept by her bed/workstation. Her performance is punctuated with many clever and illuminating slides taken from this dataset, including pie charts and bar graphs. In short, she is like Robinson Crusoe, bringing cool analytical acumen to the “raw” and “real” world of the body’s intersection with the sexual mind. Though she censures pornography for giving men unrealistic ideas about what women like during sex, she has created a very entertaining and titillating set of data porn that every social science data freak can wank to.

Data porn is most definitely the new frontier of sex in the digital, “Big Data,” social media age. That is, until  so many layers of meta-discourse will have accreted onto it, that it becomes, like all true porn, provocatively banal.

Part Time Prostitute

March 27 and 28 at The Red Room

85 E. 4th St., NY, NY

Consent

From now until May 12, 2012 at Apexart

291 Church Street, NY, NY