|
Hollywood Interrupted
A New York Times and Amazon.com Bestseller
Hardcover published February, 2004
SWING KIDS
By Andrew John Ignatius Vontz
(This piece appeared in an abbreviated form on pages 149-151in the New York Times Bestseller Hollywood Interrupted by Mark Ebner and Andrew Breitbart. The book hit #1 on Amazon.com on February 27th and reached #15 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.)
PORNOTAINMENT WONDERLAND
In an era when capitalism and conservatism are the grounding principles of an American culture that ideologically supports an Attorney General that clothes nude statues and aggressively prosecute pornographers, the orgiastic excesses of Mr. Chan’s LA brothel might seem categorically divorced from the prurient pulse of the average American’s sexual proclivities.
But they’re not, and the marketplace proves it.
The geographical protuberance of the Hollywood Hills will always divide the mainstream film industry from its baser hardcore porno analogue in the San Fernando Valley. But ideologically, culturally, and in praxis, the barriers between these seemingly divergent worlds are evaporating and a new breed of highly profitable, hyper-pornographic mainstream products are popping up to feed the urges of a sex-crazed nation that is aggressively stepping out of the prude closet and throwing down huge chunks of their discretionary income to feed urges that would have sent pervious generations sprinting for the nearest available confessional. Thanks to the creative minds at some of Hollywood’s biggest entertainment and marketing conglomerates, consumers no longer have to face the embarrassment of standing in front of a cute girl at the counter at the local Video Mart with a copy of Deep Cheeks 8 in hand. Instead, they can simply log online, turn on the TV, pick up some of the most popular magazines in America, head to the local sporting goods store, kick back in the comfort of a hotel room, or cruise down to the local art house or Cineplex.
While Ann Coulter bests Hillary Clinton on bestseller lists and a generation of women turns to the anachronistic Rules for romantic guidance, pornotainment has proven a winning multi-billion dollar formula in the marketplace. Pornotainment shamelessly merges hardcore pornography with everyday, banal entertainment products aimed at everyone from children to senior citizens. Whether you’re a child, tween, teen, adult, or Metamucil-chugging senior citizen that hasn’t had an erection since the Carter administration, the Hollywood pornotainment machine has got you covered.
It’s a brave new pornotainment world out there, a world where Hollywood’s marketing and branding power ensures that no child will be left behind. You want your kids to be ready to navigate the rapidly changing cultural currents they’re sure to face in life. Luckily, Hollywood is ready to help. So why not start them off with an anatomically correct action figure of hardcore porno superstar Jenna Jameson replete with a ‘heartbreaker’ tattoo on her ass for a mere $24.95? What? Junior doesn’t like blondes? That’s a shame, because he’ll also have to pass on the figurine of gangbang queen Houston who once bedded more than 500 men in a single sitting. Why not turn his displeasure into a multicultural learning experience by giving him an action figure of African American porno seductress Midori instead?
Once they’ve completed their pornotainment boot camp in the sandbox, little Suzie and Bobby can move on to Vince McMahon’s hugely popular WWF and WWE television wrestling programs and pay-per-view events where they can watch silicone-injected superwomen that look and act like porn stars wrestle in platform shoes, tear each others’ clothes off, and allude to every sexual act under the sun. If they don’t have time to catch Major Gunns, Miss Kitty, Trish Stratus, or April Hunter in the ring, they can always pick up superstar wrestler Chyna’s photo spread in Playboy or load up on sex advice and photos of half-naked women in the most popular men’s magazine in America, Maxim, or any of its innumerable imitators.
When snow is falling and it’s time to hit the slopes, why not set the whole family up on Sims Fader snowboards featuring images of Vivid video porno stars Kobe Tai, Briana, Chasey Lain, and Kody? Available at specialty shops and major sporting goods chains across the nation, Fader boards will keep you riding a little higher in your soft-backed boots because you’ll know you have the strength of the pornotainment industry beneath your feet.
Thanks to Ascent Entertainment, a property of mainstream cable magnate John Malone valued at $755 million, lonely travelers in major hotel chains across America can soothe themselves with in-room hardcore pornography for ten bucks a pop at the push of a button.
Nowhere is the convergence of porno and Hollywood more evident than on the marquees of the local art house and Cineplex. Mainstream films like Boogie Nights gave porno a patina of cool, mainstream palatability, and box office cachet that opened the floodgate for porno-related Hollywood flicks wide enough that even shoe-gazing, cred-obsessed indie directors have jumped on the pornotainment train. In director Katherine Breillat's Romance X, Italian porno stallion Rocco Siffredi penetrates his costar Caroline Ducey for the camera in a sex scene that’s nearly as graphic as Siffredi’s XXX work in films such as Ass Collector and Dirty Anal Kelly In Rome. French director Gaspar Noe literally drove the audience at Cannes to nausea in 2003 with the fifteen-minute long anal rape of starlet Monica Bellucci that opens his film Irreversible while critically-acclaimed actor and director Vincent Gallo elected to cap off his sophomore effort Brown Bunny with hipster-turned-star Chloe Sevigny slobbering on his knob for fifteen minutes. Porno, penetration, oral sex, rape, and sexual extremism of all sorts are now run-of-the-mill narrative tropes, then, that directors of all stripes deploy in their quest to shock, awe, and connect with mainstream audiences.
Strangers used to meet prospective dates through friends and at bars and parties. But affordable digital cameras, high-speed internet connections, and increasingly liberal social mores have made online dating a widely accepted phenomenon. Using services such as Nerve.com, Match.com, Friendster.com, and Yahoo personals, millions of strangers across America are hooking up to date, mate, and live out their pornotainment fantasies.
No amount of skin peels, evasive surgical maneuvers, or Atkins dieting can turn a middle-aged man into an 18-year-old. But thanks to modern chemistry, any man can have an erection like an 18-year-old at the pop of a little blue pill. And thanks to easily accessible online pharmaceutical sales operations, this modern marvel is only a mouse click away.
Whether the moral majority likes it or not, we’re living in an ever more open, sexually charged, and salacious pornotainment world. While our President asks the nation to pray for him, sexual lifestyle tourism, deviance, and wholesale experimentation have become the norm across the fruited plains, from sea to shining sea, one nation under satellite television, indivisible, with liberty, justice, and pornotainment for all.
Instead of praying for the President, maybe we should be praying for ourselves, for we have sinned. Big time. In an era when Americans loudly profess their support of moral conservatism, our checkbooks are writing an altogether different, far more scandalous story. While we run our mouths, Hollywood has shifted the moral landscape beneath our feet and a sexual geography that would make Caligula blush has emerged.
Nowhere is this change more apparent than in Los Angeles’ tawdry Swing Kids subculture.
SWING KIDS
Thanks to documentaries like The Lifestyle, HBO’s Real Sex series and embellished America Undercover visits to Nevada bordellos that depict out of shape middle aged men swigging Coors Light while their partners fornicate with strangers in hot tubs and sex slings, most Americans regard swingers as a geriatric, anomalous, and repulsive anachronism resigned to Holiday Inn convention centers and the back rows of seedy RV parks.
While conventional thought posits that swinging is a throwback to the ‘70s that died around the same time that Plato's Retreat was shuttered, Three’s Company went off the air and everyone’s parents quit smoking, a new generation of adventurous, educated, and professionally successful twenty-somethings is embracing the partner swapping lifestyle to its fullest in homes, illegal clubs, and private parties in venues across the country and around Los Angeles, the physical, philosophical, and corporate locus of the pornotaiment industry.
Spitting in the face of federally mandated abstinence-based sex education and the legislation of a socially conservative agenda, Hollywood swing kids wholeheartedly embrace partner swapping, orgiastic excess, sexual deviance, and the opportunity to effortlessly score with really good looking strangers.
For an inside look at what was going down in the Hollywood Swing Kids scene, I needed a Virgil. And it had to be a woman, because as I would quickly learn, if you don’t come to the Swing Kids table with a dish for everyone to share, you won’t be dining at all. I found my Virgil in Vanessa, a hot 26-year old whose father is a prominent Los Angles attorney. Vanessa had a refined fashion sensibility, the latest drum’n’bass tunes spinning on her stereo, a good job in the film industry, and more than enough game to score a ride on any given weekend night. Vanessa had never had sex with a woman before a friend took her to her first Hollywood swing party a year and a half ago, but within minutes of walking through the door she found herself summarily engaged in wild sexual gymnastics as she perched on the faux-marble lip of a hot tub. Since then, Vanessa has had sex with more than twenty women including Playboy Playmates and a Hustler centerfold and has traveled as far as Amsterdam for hot, anonymous sex with strangers.
She agreed to show me the way and so a week later I found myself pulling into the parking lot of a warehouse in an industrial district of downtown Los Angeles a stone’s throw from Skid Row. Given the decidedly trashy image of swinging I’d seen portrayed in the popular media, I was stunned to find row after row of Escalade’s, Navigator’s, and six-figure German automobiles riding on dubs crowding the lot nearly to capacity. I maneuvered my ’94 Taurus GL into one of the few available spaces, took a deep breath, and headed inside.
Licensing a sex club in Los Angeles is a complicated, legally challenging affair and doing so is sure to draw the scrutiny of the vice squad. To make an end run around these hurdles, the prominent ‘lifestyle’ club that sponsored the weekly partner swapping party that I was on my way to attend allegedly didn’t charge an entry fee to their establishment. During the week the club’s promoters hired out the more than twenty themed rooms in the warehouse for porno shoots and claimed on their web site that the weekend events were ‘casting’ mixers where couples curious about having sex for money in front of the camera could mingle, enjoy an open bar and a fully functional night club with four stripper poles on the dance floor, and if they so opted, ‘audition’ to appear in future porno productions in a room equipped for taping.
When Vanessa and I got to the door, the club’s manager demanded eighty bucks and the ruse was up. It was pay to play all the way, but there was no turning back now and so we made our way down a long hallway covered in porno photos and bad erotic art until we arrived in the night club area where dozens of young hotties sipped drinks and gawked at the naked bodies gyrating on the dance floor. There were a few remnants of the swing scene of yesteryear, but for the most part these guys and gals were good looking, fit, and judging from the cars in the parking lot, rolling in dough.
After grabbing a beer at the open bar, Vanessa and I made our way through the meet and greet area adjacent to the dance club which closely resembled your average chain restaurant dining room and cruised into the back area where the real action was going down. The musty smell, radiant heat, and primal sound of no-holds-barred sex smacked us with the force of a steroid-fueled homerun stroke the moment we stepped into the gateway to the sex area, a room festooned with several variations on the classic sex sling that I’d seen in so many swingers documentaries. From our vantage point we could peer through windows into another room where a group of bodies were bent into contortions of flesh that only seemed possible in the 23-dimesnion universe of string theory posited by particle physicists. The kama sutra clearly contained nothing that this crew hadn’t already mastered and moved far beyond. A naked middle-aged man with a ring of white hair around his balding crown and sweat pouring down his face jackhammered away on an implant-enhanced blonde bent over at the waist and grasping a ledge to steady herself against his forceful and no doubt Viagra-enhanced blows.
Thanks to modern chemistry an erection is now possible at the drop of a pill—even in high-pressure situations such as orgies with complete strangers, which may be one reason more young men are swinging.
“Everybody has performance problems, even porn stars” says Swing Kids scenester Dave who estimates that up to 95% of the men he meets who swing take Viagra, himself included. “If you’re at a club, there’s no privacy. You should expect that. If you’re in a group of people, they’re watching you. You’re performing.”
What we were watching was definitely a pornotainment performance, but its sheer entertainment value was negligible; it was disturbing more than anything else. Between thrusts the man kept glancing our way, a grimace of total sexual focus on his face. He knew he was being watched, and clearly he liked it. Maybe a little too much. I was getting the distinct feeling that his glances were an invitation, an invitation that we wouldn’t be accepting, and so we moved on.
Farther back in the space, we explored room after room of naked revelers enjoying each other and performing for the crowds of nude and fully clothed couples sitting on the floor and in chairs to catch a look at the action. There was a simulated doctor’s office, a room with a small tent-like structure with holes cut into it for anonymous oral play, a maze-like crawl space, an Arabian nights-themed room, a fully functioning locker room, a large room filled with mattresses where dozens of nude bodies coupled singly and in groups, and a—you guessed it—hot tub room. Upstairs, we wandered into a fully equipped dungeon that was oddly deserted. A cat-o-nine tails, paddles, whips, leather restraints, and a wooden table with stirrups seemed oddly inert, banal, and devoid of meaning as they sat in silence waiting to be used. Baskets of lube and condoms were within arms reach of every surface suitable for play and on platforms throughout the hallways as well.
There were hot young couples galore, the kind of people that you might see in the break room at the office, lifting weights and pounding the treadmill at Crunch, or hoisting a Grey Goose martini next to you at the hot/right now hipster watering hole of the week. These were normal, everyday people who drove nice cars, dressed well (when they weren’t nude cavorting with strangers), and were productive members of society.
What we were witnessing were the effects of pornotainment consumption writ large in living, breathing flesh and similar scenes of youthful excess are unfolding with increasing frequency across America every weekend. Indeed, veteran old school swingers marvel at the influx of nubile young Swing Kids on the once stagnant partner-swapping scene during the past two years. “I’d say a good 25-30% attending these events are under thirty,” says Tony Lanzaratta, 53, executive director of the national swinging organization NASCA. Swinging has gone so overground that a recent episode of the Fox sitcom Keen Eddie focused on hot young couples at a swing club and Jon Bon Jovi is set to star in One Wild Night, a wife-swapping flick for Universal.
In New York, erotic event promoters Grego and Palagia are throwing high-end parties geared exclusively to young, attractive, successful couples and single females that have grown so popular they’re virtually impossible to get into. In Texas, The Velvet Curtain club throws similar parties and there’s been a sharp increase in the number of young couples among the thousands of people who attend the Lifestyles Conventions swinging summits held annually in Vegas, Miami, and Acapulco. A swinger I met who acts as a host for the organization that throws the party I was attending estimates that the proportion of hot young couples at swing parties has grown to 80% of the total patrons during the past year.
Unlike the swingers of yore who embraced partner-swapping as a life-long commitment and guiding philosophical principle, the new school of swingers is young, sexually adventurous and open to dabbling in tantalizing erotic experiences just for the fun of it. “It’s brought an extra element of surprise and vitality to our relationship,” says Lance, 28, a corporate drone by day and a swinger by night with his long-term girlfriend, Jen. Bi-curious women like Vanessa, sexual tourists, and young couples simply looking to spice up their sex lives are new variations on the old school committed couples swingers paradigm that have sprung up in the Swing Kids community.
“The parties that I’ve been going to lately have a mix of gay, straight, lesbian, bi, transgendered—it’s all over the board,” says Tristan Taormino, 32, a partner-swapping veteran, Village Voice sex columnist, and author of Down and Dirty Sex Secrets. “Everything and anything is going on and you can barely figure out who is doing what to whom.”
Everything and anything was just what Vanessa and I witnessed as we wandered through the sexual romper rooms at the back of the club and soon we’d seen enough. Visiting hours were over and it was time for Vanessa to roll up her sleeves, pop the hood, and get to work. Back at the bar area, she quickly fixed her gaze on a waifish goth in a sheer black dress and knee-high PVC boots with blunt cut bangs and an angelic face that told me she couldn’t have been many years past twenty.
“She’s hot,” Vanessa said.
“Then why don’t you go talk to her?” I said.
“I’m kind of shy,” she said pausing to take a pull from her water bottle.
I found this to be a bit hard to believe, but then I wasn’t the one who was about to have sex with strangers—at least I didn’t think I was. A twelve stepper who left the program shortly before she became a girl gone wild, Vanessa said it was her sexual curiosity that drew her to the Swing Kids game. But later, after I had met dozens of Swing Kids and their historical antecedents, I would learn that she wasn’t the only former drug or alcohol addict who had abandoned the bottle, pills, smack, or coke only to be drawn into a scene where sexual addiction seemed to be a completely accepted norm.
Vanessa approached the young woman, Margaret, and she and her boyfriend, Jake, joined us at our table. After a brief, awkward conversation, Vanessa cut to the chase.
“So do you guys want to play or what?” she said.
They did want to play, and after Vanessa explained that she was only interested in Margaret—she doesn’t do men—the four of us headed back to a large, open room where nine other couples were blasting away. As Vanessa disrobed and went to work on the now nude Margaret, Jake unzipped and began pulling the rip cord on his engine over and over while keeping the rest of his clothes on. For my part, I sat there fully clothed, not sure what I was supposed to do. Soon Margaret, Jake, and Vanessa were all united in a flesh equation and I was the odd integer out. While they moaned and groaned and ran their hands and tongues over each other, I stepped out of the room to grab some fresh air. I hadn’t been solo for more than a minute when the club’s manager approached from out of nowhere and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, startling me.
“Hey pal, where’s your girl at?”
“She’s back there,” I said, pointing vaguely towards the big room beyond the dance floor where a blonde in red platform shoes hung upside down twirling around the stripper pole.
“We’re a very couples-oriented establishment here pal,” he said giving me a fatherly pat on the back. “We can’t really have single guys cruising around solo. It freaks people out. So why don’t you scoot on back there and get to work.”
It was clear that if I didn’t follow his edict he would put his substantial biceps to work and drag me out on the street or worse.
“You got it,” I said.
I was willing to go to the mat to see what this Swing Kids subculture was all about, but I wasn’t willing to get my ass kicked and I definitely wasn’t ready to tear my clothes off and jump into a tangle of naked bodies piled on lube-soaked sheets where God knows what genetic matter and microbes had been dumped earlier in the evening. My operational pause was over and so I took a seat next to Vanessa and waited until she and Margaret and Jake were finished with their fun.
Afterwards, Jake and Margaret disappeared into the night with nary a word and Vanessa headed into the locker room to clean up. Remembering the manager’s admonition to stay with my girl, I did just that and thought about what had just transpired. I’d never seen anything like it. It should have been shocking. But it wasn’t. It was almost boring because clearly Vanessa, Jake, Margaret, and everyone else at the club regarded their sexual escapades as transactions no more complicated, involved, or intimate than making a withdrawal at an ATM inside the local Quik-E-Mart.
It was 4 a.m. The night was over and it was time to take Vanessa home. As I drove on the 101 freeway back towards my apartment in Los Feliz, I pulled off the 101 and looked up at the Hollywood sign where it jutted out from the Hollywood Hills above. Its bold white capital letters popped out against the backdrop of darkness that was the night sky beckoning the masses around the globe to temporarily suspend their disbelief and participate in the dream factory of Hollywood, the machine that spawned the pornotainment culture and everything it comprises and that America has enthusiastically fueled with its discretionary income.
Soon the sun would rise and another day would begin. I could only imagine what madness it would visit upon our pornotainment world.
|
