NASHUA, N.H. – Documentarian Kevin Singes says when he starts a project, it quickly blossoms into a full-blown obsession, overtaking everything else in his life until his work is done. The trait has made him a thorough, comprehensive filmmaker who digs deep into his subjects and leaves no stone unturned.
How appropriate, then, for Singes’ next subject to be compulsive porn-viewing, or “porn addiction” as it is generally referred to in common parlance.
“I first got interested in making a documentary about the potential detriments of excessive pornography viewing after watching an interview with a young man who said porn consumption was the cause of his chronic erectile dysfunction,” Singes said. “I’ve watched plenty of porn myself, and in my experience, its effect on the penis was rather the opposite of rendering it irretrievably flaccid. So naturally I was curious to learn at what point consuming porn caused an actual retreat of blood through the corpora cavernosa, as opposed to a decided rush toward the business end of the male member.”
Uncomfortable with the idea of using other people as “porn guinea pigs,” Singes said he instead decided to take the same approach employed by fellow documentarian Morgan Spurlock in the making of his 2004 film, Super Size Me.
“I know Morgan has been widely criticized and the results of his experiment have been questioned by people in the medical community, but I still think there’s something compelling about a filmmaker documenting a firsthand experience,” Singes said. “In my case, it actually can’t be done as a secondhand experience, because I’m not ambidextrous, meaning I can only masturbate with my right hand.”
Over a six-month period, Singes watched porn for a minimum of 16 hours a day, breaking from his erotic binging only to eat, sleep and grant interviews to journalists who have nothing better to do than write about some artsy-fartsy, beret-wearing, pseudointellectual PBS-type who’s spending six months with his eyes glued to porn tube sites.
The result of the experiment is the upcoming documentary Pornify Me: An Erotic Experiment, which promises to be Singes’ most explosive expose since his 2009 documentary series, The National Parks: Who Does A Guy Have to Blow Around Here to Get a Freakin’ Camping Permit?
While some of the side effects of excessive porn watching were precisely what Singes expected — rubbed-raw penis skin, bleary eyes, increasingly crusty fabric on certain portions of his bathrobe — other aspects of the experience defied his expectations.
“Given porn’s reputation for warping the minds of viewers and engendering misogyny therein, I’d really expected to hate my wife a lot more at the end of the experiment than I did at its start,” Singes said. “But so far as I can tell, the needle on the hate-ometer never moved past the same Deep Resentment level I’ve been stuck in since we got back from our honeymoon in Hawaii back in ‘92, let alone pressed forward into the Murderous Rage zone as I had anticipated.”
Singes said he also never experienced the desire to commit a sexual assault as a result of the experiment, although he did feel the “occasional urge to choke the shit out of male porn performers and/or directors who wouldn’t shut up.”
“Seriously, do these guys think the pleasure experienced by the viewer increases proportionately with the number of times they say ‘Oh baby,’ or call the female performer a ‘good little cock-whore?’” Singes asked. “Just shut up and do your job, which, by the way, is to do your orgasmic grimacing and buttock-flexing off-camera, ideally, while the rest of us occupy ourselves with something a little more appealing — you know, like watching the hot girl you’ve somehow managed to get paid to bang.”
Although near-constant porn viewing may not have turned Singes into a woman-hater or a sex criminal, the filmmaker said it did make him more likely to “drift off into sexual fantasy at any given moment.”
“Prior to conducting the experiment, I’d say I thought about sex no more than seven or eight times an hour,” Singes said. “Post experiment, this figure is up substantially. I’d be more precise about the increase, but I keep losing count of how many times I think about sex now, because every time I get to three, my brain starts picturing me in the middle of a B/G/G scene, sandwiched in between Cory Chase and Veronica Avluv.”
Singes said he expects Pornify Me to be released in theaters by Aug. 2, but added the date could slip due to “unforeseen circumstances, delays over licensing concerns, or… or… [unintelligible] Oh yes, Veronica, suck it suck it suck it, just like that.”
