GREEN VALLEY, Ariz. – Staring intently at his large, flat-screen television, Waylan Barnsparger furrows his brow and looks hopelessly perplexed. After taking a sip from his ever-present tallboy Coors can, Barnsparger breaks his silence with a question to his great-granddaughter, who sits nearby reading the latest young adult fiction hit, Dietrich von Hunkmeister: The Werewolf Whisperer.
“Carly honey, lemme ask you something,” Barnsparger says. “Is this ‘Molly Serious’ girl a porn star, some kinda pop singer, or what?”
Without looking up, Carly corrects him on the pronunciation of “Miley Cyrus,” then briefly explains the former Disney star’s role in current pop culture.
“Just because a gal goes around half-naked all the time and can’t keep her tongue in her mouth no more don’t make her a porn star, Gramps,” Carly says. “Miley’s just doing her thing — and these days her thing is looking and acting like a skank over music somebody made on Dr. Dre’s laptop.”
Barnsparger snorts, mutters something inaudible and chugs the rest of his beer.
“Buncha goddamn nonsense, entertainment these days,” he mutters as he makes his way to the fridge to grab another Coors.
Lowering himself back into his chair, Barnsparger bemoans the ambiguity of modern entertainment and the increasingly blurry, very gray line separating mild titillation from “proper filth,” as he calls it.
“Time was when I was watching a porn movie, I knew I was watching a porn movie,” Barnsparger says. “Nowadays, when a girl comes on the screen wearing nothing but a couple Band-Aids on her tits and some dental floss between her legs, for all I know she might be the anchorperson on the local news.”
Barnsparger says his confusion actually started many years ago with a music video decidedly older than the Miley Cyrus promo currently troubling him.
“All I remember is Sonny Bono’s wife wearing lingerie, dancing around with a bunch of goddamn sailors, singing about how she wished she had a time machine or something,” Barnsparger says. “I had just started complaining to my wife about a military-themed gangbang movie being aired at 2 p.m. on a weekday when the song faded out and I noticed the VH-1 logo in the lower right corner of the screen. Part of me still wondered, though: Had Larry Flynt bought up VH-1 without anybody saying nothing?”
Elliot Barnsparger, Waylan’s grandson, says he has tried to alleviate the confusion by introducing his grandfather to free adult tube sites, but this seems only to have made matters worse.
“Naturally, the first time he went to SmutNucleus, they were in the middle of promoting one of their lame little pornographic Christmas carols, so instead of seeing actual hardcore porn, Gramps is stuck watching some porn star caterwaul about sitting in Santa’s lap,” Elliot says. “Not only didn’t this help with the confusion, but dad ended up wasting six hours on the site, clicking around through some really nasty videos, trying in vain to find one with Bing Crosby doing ‘White Christmas’ backed by the Ken Darby Singers.”
Dr. Matthew Locke, a geriatrician based in nearby Sierra Vista, says Barnspurger’s confusion is far from unique among viewers of his generation.
“What people have to appreciate is that back when Waylan was a young man, sex generally wasn’t depicted in movies at all,” Locke explains. “When a couple was about to ‘get it on,’ the screen would simply fade to black, leaving all actual sex strictly implied. To someone accustomed to this cinematic approach, extreme close-ups of a penis penetrating an anus, for example, can be a truly frightening experience. It might remind them of the trauma of birth — or for veterans of trench warfare, it could recall the horrors of combat.”
Barnsparger dismisses Locke’s theory, however, noting that when he fought in World War II, he “never once saw a facial cumshot, fisting or any kind of watersports.”
“Besides, I ain’t no shrinking violet,” Barnsparger complains. “The sight of a gaped butthole don’t send me running for cover.”
“The problem ain’t between me and porn,” Barnsparger concludes. “The problem is with Hollywood. Maybe it slipped on down into the valley during the last earthquake or something, because they seem to be the ones who aren’t sure if they’re making a porn flick, a show about the lawless days of the Old West, the 163rd Taylor Swift video about breaking up with her boyfriend, or an ad for Cialis.”
Taking another sip from his beer, Barnsparger raises his eyebrows and offers a final possibility: “Shit, maybe they’re trying to do ’em all at the same time.”
