Hardcore, Hard-Wired: How the Prevalence of Porn Is Changing Our Everyday Lives
So, Sarah Ruhl’s play ‘In The Next Room’, commonly knows as ‘The Vibrator Play’, has finally arrived on these shores for its UK premiere. It has come from Broadway via Peru, Sydney and Nantucket, picking up three Tony nominations and polarising opinion along the way. It will be interesting to see what the genteel patrons of the Theatre Royal in Bath, where it opened a few weeks ago, make of what is essentially a play about the marvels of a good vibrator.
The opening of Ruhl’s play followed hot on the heels of the screening of Channel Four’s More Sex Please, We’re British, a prime-time, behind-the-scenes documentary at sex-toy firm Lovehoney (featuring, as The Sun so elegantly put it, Britain’s worst job - sniffing returned sex toys to see if they have been used). And now we hear that chart high-flyer Grimes, aka Claire Boucher, current darling of the indie-electronica scene, has just launched a range of “pussy rings” - essentially large plastic replications of female genitalia - to be worn loud and proud on any digit you choose.
But, of course, all this is nothing new. Explicit imagery has been seeping into the mainstream for years and this just happens to be a random sample of things that are going on this month. We’ve only just stopped talking about Tulisa’s sex tape, Rihanna’s X-rated crotch-slapping on Saturday Night Live (YouTube it) and the success of EL James’s erotic Fifty Shades… trilogy. Still, it seems the pace of the pornification of our pop culture has just stepped up a notch.