“Everyone is 18, right?” All the students nod.
“Yay!” says one of the moderators. “Just like a normal porn site we barely checked.”
A greasy brunette is frozen behind the two men, her mouth centimeters away from a small, purple vagina. Actually, the vagina is pretty big, because it’s a video projected onto the screen of a second floor classroom in Kresge. There’s a piercing somewhere, but the clip goes by in a flash.
“You can tell when the girls are straight,” says a moderator, “because they generally lick each others’ stomachs, where there’s no sensation, instead of getting in there like they should.”
With one exception, I have withheld the names of the 20 or so Rainbow Alliance members who gathered last Thursday to watch and discuss pornography. The Internet, as they say, is for Employer Background Searches.
After several minutes of fumbling through small group discussion, our moderators have whipped out the P-O-R-N and hit play. Some turn from the tan, moaning twenty-somethings writhing on the couch. I can’t look away. Almost a decade of masturbation and this is the first lesbian porn I’ve ever seen.
These two, they can’t be faking it, I think.
The video introduces gay-for-pay sites, where allegedly straight men and women suck dicks and lick lips (respectively) for cash. We watch a scene from baitbus.com, where a man, a van and $4,000 come together for miles of anal roadfuck.
A student in my group has written a class paper on the topic. “There are forums where people talk about this stuff, to make sure they get their money’s worth,” he says. “They’ll say, like, ‘Oh, you know he’s gay because he has pierced nipples.’”
One of the two girls in our group (the turnout is almost all male) asks if we talk about porn with friends. No, and we also don’t blow each other in back-lit amphitheaters for thousands of guys with their pants down. Porn is for you, maybe your boyfriend and definitely not a room full of strangers you might bump into at Starbucks.
Except, as the moderators click through shegods.com to blacksonblondes.com, and somebody turns the lights off, nobody seems too shy. “Now it’s just gays in the dark watching porn,” a student says. Everyone laughs.
The videos from blacksonblondes.com, a DogFart Network production, thrusts the group into a debate over whether porn is voyeurism or role-play. A quick poll reveals that half mainly peep while the others imagine themselves participating. A good number say they do both.
Eager to keep the discussion analytic, we turn to cinematography. The words “interracial nirvana” fly onto the screen. Most of the shots are waist-level, close-ups of “black cock sluts” attempting to swallow “overwhelming” black cock (some SEO auteur bolded the words six times in the video description).
“It’s easier to imagine that your penis is their penis than your face is their face,” one student says. When we navigate to a site advertising authentic lesbian, dyke, trans and queer porn, the same man admits, “There was one time, in high school, when I got turned on by lesbian porn.”
“You’re, like, one percent straight!” another chirps.
This last site is anything but. “And what do you want me to do with that dildo?” asks an actresses as she licks her way up her co-star’s arm. Whether or not the three-minute exchange counts as plot is debatable, but at least they’re talking. We skip to another video, where one woman shoves her spiky shock of hair deep between another woman’s legs. Suddenly I understand what “eating out” really means. The pussy licking from half an hour earlier seems laughably inauthentic — the difference between a high five and a hug.
As the scene ends, our hour is up. I ask one of the moderators, a Medill sophomore named Chris, how he thought the meeting went. He’s disappointed they hadn’t addressed their final topic, LGBT hook-up sites, but considers the event a success. “This stuff needs to be talked about,” he says.
The windows are fogged, and nobody seems eager to head out into the cold night. Most mill about, chatting. For at least a few more minutes, we can discuss in here what nobody will out there.