You might have heard that porn starlet Sasha Grey is staring in a new, relatively-mainstream film. The Girlfriend Experience is directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Part-time sex blogger Ann Althouse links to an article about the film… and pulls out this great bit on “feminism”:

[Sasha] says she wouldn’t call herself “a crusader,” and she thinks the term “feminist” is useless. “Every woman is a feminist in her own right,” she says. “Whether you’re anti-porn or pro-porn or somewhere in between, feminism has become such a generalized, watered-down viewpoint. Someone can say, ‘I’m a feminist because I believe in sexually empowering women.’ That’s my view on feminism. Someone else’s opinion might be, ‘Having sex is just wrong no matter what.’ And both sides might call themselves feminists.”

And the post elicits all sorts of interesting comments.

It’s fascinating to read these comments and see how differently people view the porn world. There is one guy, “John”, who seems to be hell-bent on the notion that porn cannot be anything more than the most base and empty images of people fucking.

But porn has evolved from the seedy-theater films of the 1970s. Especially in the last few years. It’s not just pornstars fucking anymore. The newer stuff pushes boundaries and is much more real. Is Abby Winters just about people fucking? Is Sex and Submission? I could go on and on…

And there are people who can’t stand this! They want to hold onto their notion that porn is dirty… the fact that it might not be dirty, or that it might be more than dirty and have something worthwhile to offer the viewer, just doesn’t compute.

Violet Blue, for one, appreciates this. From her SF Gate column last week:

For me, Sasha Grey is “The Girlfriend Experience” (trailer) personified. A “girlfriend experience” (as shown in the film) is an expensive branch of sex work where a groomed, cultured, and pedigreed escort is the client’s companion: physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Yes, there is nudity in the film, but there is no hardcore or explicit sex, as many assumed would be when it was made known that Soderbergh cast an adult actress in the role of sex worker. This just glares the “girlfriend experience” Hollywood perception in the face — do you want to see Grey naked and having sex? You can. Go right ahead. Big f-ing deal. It’s as if Soderbergh and Grey are both saying now that that’s out of the way, let’s say something interesting about the so-called “girlfriend experience.”

Yup, the fucking is cheap. Pictures and video of that are available all over. But Soderbergh’s got something more interesting for ya’ if you want it… Do you want it? Or do images of non-naked porn people scare you?

No… Not really. I just wanted to get that in there. That, of course, is a line from yesterday’s episode of Breaking Bad.

Grabbing the latest Breaking Bad has been a regular Monday morning experience for me. I don’t own a TV so I download the episodes from iTunes… each new one is available online a few hours after it airs Sunday night.

It’s a really great show, don’t you think? I love the moral ambiguity. How contemptible is Walter White, if you think he is contemptible at all? I don’t think he’s a terrible man. He makes a drug that people buy of their own free will; the consequences of its use are not his responsibility. And he had to waste that Crazy Eight dude because of the “kill or be killed” situation. I think the lies he told to his wife and kid are the worst aspect of what he’s done. And he really owes poor Jesse Pinkman a lot for all that he put him through… $672K ought to cover that tho’.

Another reason I love the show is because of the fact that Science is always looming over the characters like some sort of Olympian god. Being a former science/math geek who has turned to a less “mainstream” career myself, I can identify with Walter White’s situation, and I can appreciate the character’s deep feeling for the power of science.

And it takes place in New Mexico! I did my post-doc at SFI right there! I can remember all the distinctive smells and the distinctive sights… and I remember it all being permeated with ideas of complex systems and chaos and Coyote and the javelinas and the fucking jackalope and Ten Thousand Waves and Fat Man and Little Boy and Georgia O’Keefe vagina paintings and working through all the volumes of Landau & Lifschitz and all the wonderment that goes along…

One of the best things about Santa Fe was the people. Within the complex systems crowd, you could talk about anything and it would be open for lively mindful discussion and possible action. Any crazy fucking idea that popped into your mind! Anything at all, no matter how nuts it seemed, was fair game…

Let me tell you how much of a math geek I am: Some people have memorized the first few digits of PI, but I can tell you first 20 of the Feigenbaum Number! (It was actually Professor Feigenbaum and his googley insane eyes that led me into the porn business, but that’s another story for another time…)

Time for a road trip to Santa Fe? No… Not now. Maybe in the fall. Besides… I’m getting ready to head back to Copenhagen at the end of the month. Gonna be in Denmark through the summer. My pal and business partner Ray Hoffman has finally got his international legal shit sorted out and is ready to shoot some porn… Why, exactly, we need to travel to Europe to shoot it when we both live in Southern California- the porn capital of the fucking world- is beyond me. But, eh, the pot there is good, and the summer days are long, and the air is fresh, and the girls are hot… So I’m not complaining.

Via The Legal Satyricon.

I’m going to order the DVD from Amazon today. While I’m there I’ll order a copy of Marty Klein’s new book, America’s War on Sex, which looks fascinating. Will review both in a future post.

I’m not a big fan of TV.

But Breaking Bad is something extraordinary. It’s the story of Walter White, an intelligent but conformist high school Chemistry teacher in Albuquerque. He’s got a teenage son with cerebral palsy and a second, unexpected baby on the way.

Mr. White collapses while at work. He’s taken to the hospital and learns that he has terminal lung cancer.

He is going to die.

So now Mr. White is confronted with an existential choice: How will he live the last year or so of his life? Will he continue his submissive, conformist lifestyle? Or will he step out into the real world where there are no true boundaries whatsoever?

He steps out. Mr. White starts cooking crystal meth with an accidental partner– an ex-student who is part slacker and part small-time drug dealer. He gets involved in the underworld. He buys a black hat.

Choices in life, however, are not black-and-white. He still retains his old self: his history, his family, his experience. Who he is cannot be pinned down, really. He is a personified version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Mr. White tells himself that he is cooking meth for the money; he needs to provide for his family after he is gone. But there is more to it. It seems like he really wants, for once in his life, to experience the dirt and grime that is reality. He wants to pursue an authentic existence in the real gray world so he “chooses life” just like Ewan McGregor did in Trainspotting; but that dude could look forward to living for decades, while Mr. White’s time is quickly running out.

This is the best thing I’ve seen on TV since The Sopranos. Stephen King says it’s the best-scripted TV show ever.

If you haven’t seen it yet, start with the seven episodes of Season 1. You can get them from iTunes or Amazon. I thought the first episode was a bit cliched. But I hung on and shortly I was seeing the remnants of dead gangster bodies dissolved in acid being flushed down the toilet, and with that my notion of this as cliched “normal” TV got flushed down too.

And now let’s meet fucking contestant number fucking two in the fucking bluster-battle to manage this clusterfuck… She’s a fucking beauty pageant queen with a fucking bee-hive hairdo and fucking librarian fucking glasses and she fucking shoots fucking moose, fears fucking God, and is fucking itchin’ to fucking Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Bomb-Bomb fucking Iran. Are you fucking serious?

But, my fucking friends, Ed Norton already got fucking there, five fucking years ago. And that fucking 25th Hour is what all you Wall Street fucking wankers should be watching right fucking now, because you gotta fucking come to terms with the fucking dawn! Bzzzzzz! That’s the fucking alarm clock, motherfuckers! It’s morning in America. And today we fucking report to fucking jail.

And that’s just the fucking warmup to what’s happened in the last five years. We are all Montgomery Brogan now. America had it all and threw it away…