Smut City with Café Flesh: exploring the erotic in porn together

Smut City made its debut last night at the New Movement theater in Austin, Texas with a screening of Café Flesh (1982), a post-apocalyptic science fiction porn film. Hosted by F*Bomb, Smut City avows to rescue the erotic in porn by encouraging people to come together to watch and discuss erotic sex films:

Without being able to openly discuss why we like certain porn or how it makes us feel, we lose our powers of critique and our taste becomes less discerning ... We believe that while sometimes it’s nice to watch porn all by your lonesome and do the deed, it’s also important to watch sexually explicit films in a public setting and have a dialogue with your peers about quality, aesthetic, taste, and meaning. 

 Anne G. Sabo (Photo: Cupido)

I applaud Smut City for its request that we "put down the cheap malt liquor and join [them] at the bar for a classy cocktail." As I've said before, journalists have labeled the porn I research as "gourmet" and "humanist;" metaphors that appeal to me. I don't care for crass porn; I appreciate porn that speaks to my senses and intellect, including new porn by women and some of the porn chic classics from the seventies when porn makers with artistic ambitions set out to make quality sex films. At the public Good porn? event I co-hosted and emceed at a downtown theater in Oslo, Norway, I showed clips from my "gourmet" porn to initiate debate about how to qualify quality in porn, presenting my personally developed criteria as a proposition for us to develop a more informed public language, so that our discussions about porn can become more critical and nuanced than the superficial and polarized debates that still dominate discussions about porn.

While I see no problems in me also watching porn "all by my lonesome," I do find F*Bomb's argument against solitary viewing intriguing:

The pornographic experience is almost always one of shame and isolation. Thanks to the Internet and adult video stores, pornography can be obtained and consumed with extremely minimal human interaction. The lonely loser can search for his particular fetish, feast his eyes upon the images, and then feel shame and disconnection after he is finished. There is no story, no plot, no art, no spark that connects with the user and makes them feel human ... Part of this blame can be laid on the porn industry, but the majority really rests on our own appetites ... The average consumer prefers their products, and porn, to be cheap, quick, and dirty so the art of titillation is quickly vanishing ...
The fact that most porn is consumed alone contributes greatly to its decline in quality. Imagine if all alcohol was consumed in private with the only goal being getting drunk as quickly as possible. No one went to bars or shared beers on their back porch, they just crept downstairs when their family was asleep and did shots until they were drunk. Would we be mixing cocktails and debating our favorite brands of vodka? No. We would be buying cheap swill from the convenience store in the middle of the night, desperately trying to avoid eye contact with the clerk

It's an interesting line of reasoning.

Smut City will follow up with another public screening next month. Part of a growing movement of independent sex film festivals that include the Feminist Porn Awards, Porn Film Festival, CineKink, Sexy International Film Festival, Good Vibrations Indie Erotic Film Festival, and more; Smut City can contribute to building a greater public awareness of alternative re-visioned porn and its potential as a tool to empower men and women alike in their sexual lives.