“A good fuck is like liquid gold.” The phrase is heard in the film of oral sex (1994), by Chus Gutiérrez, and the director herself takes it as a reference and guide for an essay halfway between autobiography and cinematographic analysis about the difficulties of turning passion into an image, pleasure into sequence, desire into experience shared. And in the dark. Under the title I have a dream: tell the true power of sex, the director recovers her memory of the first time, while still a film student, she filmed a bed scene that could easily pass for porn; he reviews the difficulties he has encountered throughout his career as a filmmaker every time a naked actor has placed himself in front of his camera, and, between memories and reflections, he manages to confess what at first glance could well pass for a secret revealed: “As a director, shooting sex sequences has been a slow learner, just like learning how to have sex in real life.”
The text, which is also a short story, is one of the articles, essays or simple thoughts that make up The white book of adult cinema where the writer Ayanta Barilli, the critic Jordi Costa or the sexologist Francisco Cabello Santamaría also collaborate. Edited by Apeoga, the Association of Producers and Publishers of the sector, the publication wants to be both a wake-up call, a study of the situation and a demand to the competent authorities for the necessary regulation of what today is nothing more than a jungle. «The very multinationals that monopolize the market are in favor of deregulation because their interest is none other than user data. People, especially minors, are not his client but his product,” he reflects. Antonio Marcos, president of the association as well as dean producer. «I always say that only Alfonso XIII and Jaime Chávarri overtook me. The first are his shorts commissioned to the Count of Romanones and the second with Birthday gift (1988), the first porn production with all the laws of Spanish cinema”, says Marcos by way of introduction.
The data is graphic enough to surprise and worry in equal parts. Two completely opaque multinational companies based in tax havens, MindGeek y WGCZ, they control the lion’s share of the world market. In the United States alone, the business would move, according to various reports, around 97,000 million euros. That is, half that of Netflix and Hollywood. In Spain, 18 million users consume porn on a daily basis and they do so at a rate of almost 10 pages out of every 100 consulted. Only Google and YouTube are ahead. Between 16 and 29 years of age, 86.9% of the boys and 54.8% of the women state that they have seen pornography in the last five years. And one more piece of information: Spanish production has fallen from 180 films in 2007, the last year with accurate data, to barely two the previous season. And so.
“It is not about prohibiting anything, much less preaching to anyone. On the contrary, it is about enjoying the pleasure of pornographic cinema without bothering anyone, without swindling anyone and without attacking anyone. We must separate adult cinema designed to be enjoyed by an adult and responsible audience from vulture pornography », affirms Marcos just after exposing his particular decalogue and offering the Vivex.tv website as a model in access control against minors. «I had to build pornography in Spain for pleasure. Now my duty is to deconstruct it out of obligation», he concludes. A good powder is liquid gold… and it’s okay for it to flow.