Crossposted from your friendly neighborhood Junkbuzzed.
I don’t really know when it started. Like matter, anti-matter, and Catholic guilt, it’s just always been there. I am speaking of course about porn – and I don’t just mean pornography in the traditional late-70s/early-80s glossing over of the more arcane (and dare I say, ‘nether’) of the girl-parts; I am talking about porn in the abstract: specifically, the art of transmogrifying the mundane into the pornographic when there are no other options.
It sounds hard, I know. But stick with me – all you need is a penis, a television, and a little imagination. And a dad.
Back in the 70s, there weren’t a great many TV stations from which to choose. You had your Big 3 networks, cranking out the hits since time immemorial:
- ABC: home of Wonder Woman, Isis, and Three’s Company
- CBS: home of The Incredible Hulk and The Jeffersons
- and NBC, home to a googillion spanking fantasies, thanks to the whippin’-a-week antics of the gang at Little House on the Prairie (if you’ve never done a naughty Nellie Oleson/angry Nells Oleson getting the belt sort of scene, you don’t know what you’re missing.)
Then there was PBS, which existed solely to make children not want to watch television, thanks in large part to Mark Russell and a weird fetish for stiff British melodrama which continues to this day. Mark Russell, it should be noted, is one of the primary reasons why the children of the late 70s and early 80s STILL PLAYED OUTSIDE. (With no video game consoles to console ourselves, we needed some means of escape. And that’s precisely what today’s kids need: less mind-altering pharmaceuticals, and more Mark Russell, singing those goddamned insipid political song-parodies of his. Yeah; he was the Jon Stewart of the day. You see now why Gen-X is still so fucked up?)
And, depending on the quality/malleability of your rabbit-ears, you might have had a UHF channel or two. These channels of the obscure served to fill the federal government’s quota of no less than 14 hours per day of Woody Woodpecker, 3 Stooges shorts, and a whole lot of Streets of San Francisco.
But the really weird shit came out of Canada. I grew up near the border in New York, and as such was entertained/stupefied by such televised delights as child-talent competitions (if you too as a child living in or near or border town were similarly forced to watch Tiny Talent Time, please email me – I’m setting up a support group), SCTV, and hours on end of staring at a barely-in-focus maple leaf.
Early morning however was my dad’s favorite TV-viewing time. Canada, it seemed, was really serious about physical fitness in those days. So serious in fact that they cock-blocked any and all morning cartoons in favor of a two-hour block of exercise programs. Tightly spandexed Canadian girls with really large feathered hairdos did slow-mo squats, thrust, and dips, all while yelling, ‘how’s that workin’ fer yeh, eh?’ (Bear in mind that Canada was somewhat ahead of the curve with this one. It would be a few more years before a fledgling ESPN, desperate for content, began running their own exercise programs in five-hour blocks daily, thus giving the unemployed/sick renewed reason to just stay home and jack off.)
In my house, the daily rigmarole of getting ready for school was executed under a strict Don’t Go Into The Living Room edict. For the living room was where dad held court with the fitness beauties of eastern Ontario, clad only in his bathrobe and puffing on a cigar.
“Your father’s exercising,” mater would say as she served breakfast. I was never invited to exercise with the old man, and subsequently I began to suspect that this was an entirely new discipline in the Physical Fitness arts.
Also, though I was but a wee and therefore moronic young Misanthrope, I understood one basic principle of exercising – which is that if you’re doing it right, you’re probably not smoking a pipe during. This continued until I was old enough to get it, at which point my father promptly bought a second TV for his bedroom.
By 1980, Family TV Time was a regular Saturday night activity, also known as Special Family Torture Time. Disco was dying, but its bad hair, clothes, and expensive coke habits weren’t. And thus, as it was far too early to banish me to the clutches of bed, I found myself privy to the old man’s latest TV obsession. There were two shows that my father liked to watch on Saturday nights. No – there were two shows that he insisted upon watching each and every Saturday night.
The first of these programs was Hee Haw.
Now we were not a country music sort of family – My Mother the Filthy Hippy raised me on a steady diet of Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, and a touch of Neil Diamond – because even fist-pounding rebellion needs an occasional feel-good moment. As such, I would stage elaborate protests, complete with signage, body makeup, and protest songs (“ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Hee Haw farm no more”; “Old MacDonald had a farm, until he saw Hee Haw and died of a massive aneurysm”; and “Haw no, we won’t Hee”). These demonstrations were met with the icy glare of a dad who really needed to see some titty. Which in retrospect was a far kinder sort of quashing than how Nixon might’ve responded.
Regardless, each Saturday night at 7:00PM, we were welcomed back to the Joke Fence/Grassy Knoll by the porcine visage of Roy Clark. If you never saw Hee Haw, please allow me to sum up a few of its running features:
- all goings-on took place in Kornfield Kounty. They were rather skittish about disclosing fully the name of the actual town, at least in proper order with the county: Kerfuffle.
- moonshine was used as the premise of many a skit, because as we all know, rural alcoholism is a hoot.
- banjos. They really liked banjos.
- whenever they felt that the audience wasn’t being completely pandered to, they resorted to singing gospel songs. With banjos.
But the real reason that my old man (and the rest of America) really watched was because of the Hee Haw Honeys. These were the sirens of the cornfield (excuse me – Kornfield), always outfitted in the traditional ethnic garb of farmer’s daughters – i.e., cutoff denim short-shorts, and a red-and-white checkered napkin tied around their chests. All I remember from these segments are tits and “y’all”. Which I’m pretty sure is exactly what the old man was going for.
After Hee Haw, Special Family TV Torture Time then segued from the cornfields to intergalactic space-tranny dancing. No; it wasn’t Dance Fever (Adrian Zmed was many things to many people, but he was always All Man.) Of course I am referring to Solid Gold. If you don’t remember Solid Gold, allow me to defrag your memory. Solid Gold, like Law & Order and all its subsequent spinoffs, was predicated on two separate but equal facets of the musical-television genre:
1. The hosts: Marilyn McCoo, Dionne Warwick, and Rick Dees. Yeah – the chick from The Fifth Dimension, the Psychic Friends lady, and the “Disco Duck” guy.
2. The Solid Gold Dancers, who were actually Pod People hatched from mold spores found on the outer hull of the Apollo 11.
The show’s format was pretty straightforward. After all, there wasn’t much need for smoke and mirrors (well, not the mirrors, anyway – I do remember a lot of smoke machines in play) – these were the last days of television as we knew it before MTV. Back then, a singer with a face made for radio could still score a hit single. And this is where Solid Gold came in. Dionne or Marilyn would babble a bit (if we were really lucky, we’d be treated to a little Andy Gibb in this segment as well), and then introduce the week’s Top Ten singles.
The Top Ten was the exclusive domain of the Solid Gold Dancers. Imagine an ensemble of dancers so garishly awful they couldn’t even break into the chorus lines in Las Vegas, but had just enough pride left to keep themselves from doing hardcore porn. On Solid Gold, these dancers found their bespangled Shangri-La. It was a happy, coke-fueled median of sorts, where the music and the fog machines were always set to high. And so were dreams!
Here, in their natural habitat, they performed really bad sexually-suggestive dance interpretations of the day’s top songs. So if you ever wanted to see a troupe of so-tightly-spandexed-I-can-see-your-uterus dancers dry-humping the sky to Christopher Cross’ “Sailing”, then Solid Gold was the show for you. Which means that in those waning days of the family Betamax, every dad in the USA was watching.
I was 8 when I was first subjected to the Solid Gold Dancers. And to me they looked like cut-scene space-transvestites from Star Wars. Which might’ve been kinda cool if not for all those goddamned Olivia Newton-John songs. At the time, I just thought it was all part of my father’s ongoing campaign of domestic terrorism against me, the goal of which was to ruin my life. Though I suppose that this is the inadvertent goal of most fathers. Meanwhile, the old man watched Solid Gold every week with a steely, stoic expression. He never let on just how much he was enjoying himself. I guess I should just be grateful that there wasn’t an internet in 1980.
It took Air Supply to show me the way. With a little help from the Solid Gold Dancers.
One traumatic Saturday night, the Dancers pulled out all the stops in their spastic neon ballet set to Air Supply’s future classic “Making Love Out of Nothing At All”. Because if you’re gonna do interpretative dance to 80s songs, you might as well do it to a Jim Steinman composition. (If you don’t know who Jim Steinman is, you know his songs. He’s the flaming MC of all things Melodramatic and Douchelike, responsible for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”, the Sisters of Mercy’s “More”, and pretty much every godawful thing that Meatloaf ever recorded.)
It was a hot mess. The Solid Gold Dancers were inspired – they danced like they’d never danced before. They really were making love out of nothing at all. Well, it was nothing at all, unless you count all the dry-humping going on. Whoever washed the Solid Gold floors after each taping had quite a task.
And then I got it. That was the point of all this Special Family TV Torture Time. The old man was trying to teach me something. And really, it’s one of life’s most valuable lessons, if you’re a boy.
When there is no clear avenue to porn, you just make your own. A little visual stimuli, a glass (or 8) of wine, a penis, and a quick jack-it of the imagination. Boys don’t have a word for this process, but I believe that this is what women refer to as objectification.
My response? And how! Because porn is expensive – objectification is free. Actually, it’s better than free. It’s like arts and crafts for boys, without all that girly arts and crafts stuff.
It might not be the real thing. And I’m told on a near-daily basis that it most certainly is not love. But in a pinch it’ll do. Because there really are some things that you can make – by yourself and for yourself – and out of nothing at all.
Gosh, my kids are gonna be soooo fucked up.
I don’t often dream about sex. It may be that I get enough during my waking hours, or cover the possibilities during my fantasies. Either way, to dream of sexual dalliances, relations, meanderings and savourings is precious and memorable to me. Strangers all, my dream lovers - unforgettable and yet not a threat to those I love when my eyes are open. Sparkling brightly, my dream self comes together with them only once, before they move on to another setting, another dreaming desirer.
