Watching Porn in Public

The first time I watched porn with other people, it was five years ago. My partner and I threw this party… Wait, that’s a lie. The first time I watched porn with another person was years before that. My best friend and I found a small box of porn films and we watched them together. This story doesn’t go anywhere dirty (unless you count me running off to masturbate, alone, in the bathroom to be dirty). I remember being somewhat perplexed. The actor’s penis seemed to be so huge that I questioned whether or not it was even real. I remember pointing out a continuity error: The actor unbuttoned his pants in one shot; in the next one, his pants were completely off, and then his pants magically reappeared halfway up his thighs. But again, this story isn’t about that time.

This story’s about the time that my partner and I threw a porno party. We had rented Deep Throat and were shocked to find that the film was, of all things, really fucking hilarious. Really, genuinely funny. Seriously, who knew that the plot actually involved a woman who discovered that her clitoris was in her throat!? (Okay, maybe everyone did, but my boyfriend and I were both born long after the film was released and had more or less disappeared from pop culture.) After watching it, after laughing our asses off at the plot, the jokes, the hair cuts, we decided that we had to throw a party, and we had to show Deep Throat.

So, we threw a party:

The actual e-vite I designed for our Deep Throat party in 2006

Everyone had a great time, save for the conservative girlfriend that had been brought to our party without being told what theme of the party was. This was before SEX+STL, before “Johnny Murdoc” even existed as an identity. This was me pushing boundaries among friends, pulling them together to watch something that most people watch in private, or with that special someone.

That night, I learned that there’s something especially freeing about watching porn in public. There’s camaraderie to be found in experiencing anything visceral together, and porn tends to be one our more visceral media experiences. Films (and books and comics and images) that touch us at our erotic core, a place that is both incredibly personal and amazingly universal, can bring everyone to a level playing field. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at the occasional awkwardness of human sexuality (not to mention period-specific hairstyles), but there’s something freeing about taking something so private and dragging it out in front of friends and strangers. (Only with their consent, of course!)

Since that party, I’ve been invited to show porn at several other parties. I’ve sat in crowds at the Tivoli and watched porn in 3D, sitting right next to couple who were clearly in their seventies, and clearly enjoying the film and the experience as much as my partner and I were. This is why I’m excited to see what comes of next week’s Friday Film Fetish party at the Stable. Bringing people together and hauling out the dirty, the erotic, the entertaining, and seeing how people from all walks of life react to it. If you’ve never done it before, never watched porn with friends and strangers, I promise you that you’ll get something out of it. You’ll learn something about your fellow viewers, something about your friends, something about sex and porn.