Last updated 05:00 27/09/2009
CULTURE WARS came to Auckland last week with the twin attractions of Fashion Week and Boobs on Bikes.
Auckland retail leader Cameron Brewer cringed at the conflict and sniffed that the latter would undermine all the good work of the former. It was good taste versus bad taste, and Brewer clearly favoured the Bolly brigade.
He is, of course, wrong. There was more of an audience for US porn star Chelsea Charms, and her lightly tethered zeppelins, than the combined crowds of every fashion show. Low taste may be poor taste, but it is taste nonetheless. That Fashion Week sought to portray amateur porn star Pamela Anderson as its pin-up girl only emphasised the magnitude of that victory.
I'm the first to admit that I don't get Fashion Week. But then, I'm a straight male. None of my gender nor sexuality remotely do. We don't understand the weird walks, the weirder clothes and the view that goodie bags are an end in themselves. But most of all, we don't understand the pretension. The cultish view that fashion is worthy of exclusive veneration, and that the more unwearable the garment then the more watchable it must be. In fact, the only bit we actually got were the size 16 models in the Carpenter's Daughter show, because that's exactly what our wives and girlfriends look like.
We also don't get the highbrow dismissal of Boobs on Bikes an absolutely harmless display of fantasy and fantastic proportions. Men like to look it is our instinctive nature. More car accidents have been caused by a crop-top than any cellphone will ever create. It is our culture.
But it was veteran columnist and commentator Jane Clifton who really set the scene in her tut-tut midweek review of the networks' current affairs shows. At what point did porn become mainstream, even respectable, she asked? With Chelsea Charms on TV1's Close Up and our own homegrown porn star Lisa Lewis on TV3's Campbell Live, what happened to serious TV?
There can be little doubt that porn has become mainstream over the past 20 years. More liberal classifications and the rise of the video and the DVD have seen to that. In addition, porn has made previously taboo or unusual sexual practices very much the norm.
Again, this upsets moralists and feminists alike. But the truth is that women are as ready a market for porn/erotica as men. It is a common couples stimulus, and upmarket sex shops like D'Vice cater almost exclusively for the female market. Then there is the rise of the suburban swinging scene an outlet for bored couples who can't quite bring themselves to clandestinely cheat.
Indeed, women are the more assertive daters these days. They have always been the mating gatekeeper, but now they're as apt to play poacher too. There is no more devastating a hunter as a woman on the pull.
And yet none of these things are remotely respectable. Women might gossip after the second gin about their favourite sex toy, but it's still not polite conversation at the dinner table. No man ever admits watching any internet porn other than by complete mistake. Likewise no one openly confesses to being a swinger, or to wishing a career in the adult entertainment industry upon their son or daughter.
In short, we remain this inherent mess of prude and prurient. Which is why Chelsea Charms is such a safe outlet. We can ogle, but it is the ogle of the freak show.
Fashion is the same. Pornography: respectable, but not.
It has the same kind of participants beautiful women, in the main, surrounded by the seedy and the snakes. It has the same drug-addled stars and the same disregard for convention and conformity. It even has the same regard for the freakishly proportioned and the fantasy that they provoke. It has the same offer of glamour and the same betrayal of dreams. Only the hard, and the hard-nosed, truly survive.
And what was the arty documentary on Vogue ice queen Anna Wintour if not an exploration of sex, fantasy and power? The only difference between Wintour and pornographer Steve Crow is that the former has way more money. And the latter, a lot more fun. Their product, and their intent, is the same. This is fine by me. I'm a moral libertarian and believe that what consenting adults do with and to each other in private, public or the parliamentary debating chamber is entirely their affair. But let's not get too prissy: one man's pornography is another woman's Robert Mapplethorpe. One woman's erotica is another man's bloody boring book.
And there's a lesson in the last week. Don't complain and people won't notice. Auckland has finally learned from its excessive upset that provocation is another's publicity, and that all publicity is good publicity. That said, the mainstream media still bit this year and as long as they carry on biting then the happier Steve Crow's creditors will be.
But spare us the rapt divinity of NZ Fashion Week: the excited twitter of kids, barely out of journalism school, trying to preach profound. It was entertainment and as divorced from the average wardrobe as Chelsea Charms is from your wife.
We would never be seen dead with either: the clothes or the porn actress. Jeans, a tight T-shirt and a sportive embrace from your lover. Does it get any better?
mlaws@radiolive.co.nz
