Five Guilty Pleasures

NRC Handelsblad, one of the biggest newspapers in the Netherlands, ran an article today about porn and about Wild Card: “Five Guilty Pleasures.” Five journalists were invited to write about a guilty film pleasure of their own. And one chose Wild Card!

We’re honored to have yet another mainstream publication talk about our films openly!

And in the online edition, the main photo of Wild Card is huge…plus there’s another quite-racy one as well.

Thanks to NRC and to journalist André Waardenburg for making this possible.

English translation of “Five Guilty Pleasures”

I take the term “guilty pleasure” very literally.  Here I take it to mean a guilty pleasure instead of a secret pleasure: Porn.  Almost everyone watches it, but talking about it openly happens very little. Even though I shook off my Protestant upbringing decades ago, there is still a slight sense of guilt after watching porn.

Over the years my interest has shifted enormously. I hardly watch American porn anymore. While there are undoubtedly exceptions, it’s mostly rubbish. With no sense of eroticism, not to mention all those depilated bodies full of tattoos, pumped breasts and the fake panting and moaning on the tape. It was different before the advent of video and digital cameras, as many films from the Golden Age of Porn (1969-1984) show. Until recently, much of it could be seen in lousy copies, but some have since been restored thanks to distributors like Vinegar Syndrome.

In recent years, there has been an interesting counter-movement against porn as a loveless product, with its clichés (the pizza delivery boy or handyman) and curious genres (such as incest porn). To distinguish this female-friendly variant is also called porna or ethical porn: the actors do nothing against their will, they have a say  in the process, and they do not need to have a perfect body. More importantly, they visibly have fun, and this is contagious. Porna is diverse both sexually and in terms of ethnicity, so it comes in all shapes and sizes, from Wild Card by Jennifer Lyon Bell, who lives in the Netherlands, to Erika Lust’s XConfessions – based on erotic fantasies put forward by her fans. Most of all I watch the videos of production company SexArt, which is sometimes just a bit too slick but also always cinematographically interesting. Although that again sounds like a lame excuse from a man who reads Playboy for the interviews …

– André Waardenburg