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The Bad
It was years and years ago now, but I still remember the first time I watched “meta-porn.” As a dumb youngster, I was still cruising tube sites for decent gonzo clips. And as a dumb youngster, I settled on some stepdaughter/stepdad video that must have clocked in at all of twelve minutes. The setup was unworthy of an ESL 11-year-old. Mom and dad had big plans at a fancy restaurant, but daughter just had her heart broken by some boy. Mother consoles daughter as she cries and texts her friends about her wound. Mom must stay with her baby to provide comfort, but dad is mad that this has interrupted the evening he’d envisioned. “It took me months to get these reservations!” he exclaims. Mom and daughter banter about getting even by posting the ex’s (skinny) dick pics to the Internet and what have you. Dad is still mad. Then, a revelation. Daughter and dad (both with a “step” prefix, of course) could fuck! It’d be a conciliation prize for him and his ruined night on the town, and the orgasm would make her feel a lot better. He makes the suggestion out of the blue, and she loves the idea, asking, “Can I, mom?” with considerable excitement. And wouldn’t ya know it, mom relents! The fucking and sucking begin. Like with a lot of these set-ups, since mother and daughter can’t fuck each other (as that would be real incest), mom acts mostly as a cheerleader. She compliments her daughter’s ability to take a cock, rubs her husband’s nuts a few times, is proud of her progeny’s bust, etc. It is what it is.
What caught my attention was the pop shot. When dad pulls out and aims at his (step)daughter’s face, mom grabs her little girl by the chin to better position her and (I guess?) brace her for impact. Dad shoots his load and mom cheers, further noting her daughter’s impressive ability to fuck like a mature woman. Yes, we’ve all seen this before. But then the video cuts to a different camera and we see the very tip of the camera that just shot the facial. Mom turns to this new camera and asks, “Have you cut? Yeah? Okay!” And with that, she starts lapping up those strands of cum off of her daughter’s face and the two cum-swap a few times, the way it would happen in a regular threesome. That part was hot, but I don’t care. What’s fascinating is the quasi-breaking of the fourth wall. When it was mother and daughter, there could be no kissing, much less cum-swapping—again, that would be real incest (which is illegal). But, if we all just take a breather, cut from Camera A to Camera B, assert that Camera A is out of the picture, well, then, poof! Mom, dad, and daughter are all gone; now it’s just three pornstars fucking. Except…nothing has changed. One, maybe two, seconds have gone by. The cum is the exact cum that was ejaculated during the faux-incest scenario. This isn’t exactly “behind the scenes” or “special features,” it’s a literal continuation of the sex. It’s such a continuation that recording had not been stopped—just one camera out of at least two. The guys holding the lights and booms certainly didn’t go anywhere.
No analogous situation in non-porn is imaginable. You’re watching a TV show and at the end of the episode, the protagonist looks into Camera B, says, “We’ve cut? Yeah?” and then does something that the viewers want to see, and that’s befitting of the prior scene, but yet is somehow outside the narrative arch of the thing? That makes no sense. So why does it work in porn? Why can porn pivot like that? Unfortunately, it works because literally everyone knows that it’s all bullshit and we don’t care in the slightest. Not one person watching that scene ever thought for a millisecond that what they were watching was real. What’s more, the people who made it never expected anything different. And since we know, and since they know that we know, they can actually give us what we want: mother and daughter fucking—without the “step” prefix. Since we never believed they were family, we can keep believing they’re family, even after the fourth wall is broken and the “scenario” has ended. You can have your cake and eat it, too, so long as your cake is of such low quality that there is no tangible difference between eating and having. Our porn is so bad, that it’s that cake: so bad, you can’t discern if it’s in the fridge or in your gut.
The Good
Meta-porn is better when it’s the type that incorporates porn within porn. Brazzers does this sometimes, but like with (just about) everything that studio puts out, it’s not worth mentioning. A solid example comes, unsurprisingly, from Pure Taboo. In the opening act of “The Anal Virgin,” we get to know a pair of step-siblings (Kendra Spade and Small Hands). It’s a slow-burn, but she discovers that he’s jerking off to some pretty nasty stuff, so she starts digging into the same stash. In time, she seduces him. In her hunt, she uses the most stereotypical porno-language imaginable:
“Don’t you want to fuck my tight asshole?”
“I want your big cock deep inside my virgin ass.”
“I know you want it.”
Stuff like that. We’ve all heard it a million times and it’s all garbage. Nobody talks like that, and worse still, it’s impossible to even imagine anybody speaking that way. The one exception, of course, would be if someone had been watching way too much porn. Should you saturate your mind with the Internet’s inferno of anal this and anal that, you might end up talking like them, especially if that’s all you knew about sex. Well…that’s actually what’s happened in “The Anal Virgin.” This otherwise innocent girl went poking around and got all the wrong data. Now, all she knows is the hammed one-liners of bottom-shelf gonzo. In this way, a porno can make sense by making itself a reference point of porno that does not make sense. Isn’t that something?
This is more meta than looking up “dictionary” in a dictionary. When Jim Powers makes a babysitter movie, the scenario is something like:
Dad: You smell nice.
Teen: Oh, thanks!
Dad: Liking the job?
Teen: Oh yeah, your kids are great!
Dad: You know, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you’re really hot, you remind me of my wife when I first met her. Can I ask if you have a boyfriend?
Teen: Oh, you’re so nice. No, I don’t have a boyfriend.
Dad: Crazy! Well, I can teach you some stuff boys like, if you want.
Teen: Really? That’d be great!
Dad: *whips out cock* Just take this man meat all the way down your throat.
Teen: Yes, sir! I hope you’ll put it deep in my tight, pink, virgin pussy afterwards!
That’s irredeemably retarded. But what if you made a movie in which a teen had watched a ton of those movies and “learned” from them? Well, then the language makes sense. So it goes in “The Anal Virgin.” It’s the only porno with the industry’s signature jargon that I can stand. And I know this is a niche category, but it is meta-porn done right.
Richard Power is the author of Letters from a Heartbroken Pervert, available from Terror House Press.