”It’s all porn,” a colleague said. He was reacting to the Patricia Lewis skande. ”It doesn’t really make a difference if it’s hard or soft.” We’d seen the morning headlines, and this time the news was huge.
This was not just a catfight with market rival Amor Vittone. Nor just news that she was pregnant and capable of breeding, just like a human. It was bigger even than her hair. Our Patricia had been in a ”porn” flick.
For South Africans, the news is made even bigger by the smallness of our own porn movie industry — which is so tiny that when Private, a top United States hard-porn production company, came to South Africa looking to cast its feature Cape Town, it couldn’t find any qualified South African porn stars, and was forced to hire imports. Perhaps we were too sensible to agree to get our kit off in the south-easter, or too shy.
So it was thrilling to learn that Patricia — or so the story went — has done porn for real.
There’s nothing more delightful for everyone than the media moment when the closely guarded secret of a famous person comes to light. And Patricia’s been sitting on this one for a while. The film in question, a German masterpiece artistically titled Dark Desires: The Other Side of the Moon, was shot in 1996.
No, I have not seen it yet. But I can pretty much guess what happens. This erotic ”thriller” almost certainly features the following: a bath scene, during which woman is surprised by man entering (sic), fake masturbation (possibly in bath), ”lesbians” kissing (with fondling of breasts), and simulated hetero sex.
I’ve seen snatches of many similar films on e.tv and can tell you one thing for sure: Patricia’s movie qualifies as porn in that it probably doesn’t have much artistic value. But my colleague is wrong that soft- and hardcore porn are the same ball game.
Hardcore porn is not different because it shows everything, often in such detail that if you watch it in a cinema you’ll forever be haunted by images of hairless 6m vaginas and 8m penises making 1m bubbles.
It is not just about different job descriptions, although it’s true that on the lurid video boxes the stars are often referred to as ”models”. (If they’re modelling anything, it’s a special category of fashion that could loosely be called ”innerwear”.)
Hardcore is not different because the plot is missing. It’s often missing from soft porn, or from many genuine art films in which ”actors” spend the majority of their time getting naked. Yes, Peter Greenaway, that’s you, bro.
It’s simple, actually. The real difference between hardcore and soft porn is right there in their names. The word ”soft” refers to specifics, such as the penis. Because the dry and flaccid parts are never shown, it’s suitable for TV — or at least for e.tv.
And hardcore? Well, penetration is what makes it hardcore. It doesn’t matter whether penetration takes place with a finger, a tongue, a dildo or a penis bolstered by the efforts of eight male fluffers backstage. But penetration is impossible with a soft tool. Hence the term ”hard”-core porn.
What would Patricia say? Because she was actually in a movie, at least according to the ever-reliable words of my favourite tabloid, which ran the hard-news headline ”Dit is Patricia se boobs” together with some topless stills.
I mailed her website asking what she thought the difference was between hardcore and soft porn. Her webmaster, Mark Whitfield, replied that ”contrary to recent media reports, Patricia has been involved in neither and therefore does not know what is required of the participants in this type of media”.
Perhaps Patricia has a point. Do bad acting, terrible hair, screechingly bright make-up and lousy taste in music make you a proper porn star? In real, hardcore porn, actual people take off their clothes and have full sex, in front of cameras for movies that real people will watch years later, risking Aids and their reputations for our pleasure and their profit.
It appears all Patricia may actually have done is make an erotic B-grade movie.