Strangers in a Strange Land

When I was a kid, my family moved often. We moved so often, in fact, that somewhere along the way I lost track of the 21 places we lived before I graduated high school. That sort of nomadic existence teaches children two things: (1) how to mimic almost any regional dialect or accent with a great deal of accuracy and very little practice, and (2) “foreigner” is a terribly pejorative word.

In most dictionaries, the first definition given for foreigner is “someone who is a native of another country; an alien” (another pejorative term, considering the most common synonym for alien is “strange”). More broadly, though, foreigner (from the Middle English) means “an outsider; someone who is not a member of a particular group or community; someone who is excluded.”

Ouch. That definition resonates with me, because no matter how hard military brats of the Cold War era tried to fit in wherever our lots in life consigned us, we were doomed to remain foreigners. To this day, I have a hard time using the word to describe others, because I quite vividly remember how it felt to be foreign myself.

Thankfully, things have changed monumentally in the past 20 or so years. The military no longer shuffles personnel just because it can every time the wind changes direction, and the Web has taught many residents of the global village that there are more things uniting us than dividing us. We may not have a common language, common currency, common religion, or common culture, but increasingly we’re developing common frames of reference. Ways of life that used to seem terribly foreign to us now hardly seem strange at all.

Perhaps one of the most universal frames of human reference is sexuality. After all, almost everyone older than 18 at least thinks about sex, whether or not they care to (or are allowed to) participate in erotic activity. Sex, at least insofar as it relates to procreation, is a biological imperative, and with rare exceptions, all of us are prisoners of our genetic code. That man has elevated sexual activity to the level of recreation (or, in some cases, spectator sport) is one of the things that separate him from other animals.

It’s also one of the things that draw people together. Regardless of one’s language, currency, cultural, or religious framework, sex benefits from a universal language all its own. Very few would fail to recognize a sexual “come-on” regardless the nationality or language of the tease. A naked body posed suggestively or “caught in the act” seems to mean just about the same thing to everyone. That’s part of what gives the adult entertainment industry an edge when it comes to international commerce.

The experiences of adult entertainment producers worldwide really aren’t that different, either. Whether they’re in what Americans consider the sexually wide-open spaces of California or operating on the continent or in the Far East, porn producers face a surprisingly similar collection of restraints, challenges, and blessings. Adult-entertainment-specific laws — considered at best intrusive and at worst inane — impinge upon the professional and sometimes personal lives of producers around the globe, as do economic and social forces beyond their control.

Yet, they persevere in a field often viewed as foreign (if not much, much worse) by polite society, thereby bringing much joy, I’m sure, to the loins of grown-up boys and girls worldwide. What’s actually foreign (as in “alien” or “strange”) about that is how eager some foreigners (as in “not members of the adult entertainment group or community”) are to ostracize denizens of adult as though they were doing something completely foreign to the human experience. They’re not; however, the moment foreigners recognize their own (over)reactions to pornography are part of what makes the medium such a profitable pursuit probably will be the exact moment at which pornography’s market value plummets — so perhaps pornographic détente is not the best idea.

Nonetheless, a little diplomacy wouldn’t hurt.

—Kathee “Jubal Harshaw” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the June 2007 issue of AVN Online.)