Kayden Kross Muses on the State of Modern Porn
How often do you see a porn movie that you would characterize as truly creative and innovative? Probably not as much as you’d like. Porn tends to follow trends, and while the resulting movies are typically quite good, they don’t usually reinvent the form. Veteran star/director/writer Kayden Kross has chimed in on the state of contemporary porn in a new interview from McSweeneys, saying that porn doesn’t always realize its maximum potential.
In part, this has to do with the nature of the themes and genres of porn movies, according to Kross. This prevents a purposeful exploration of new — and possibly dark — ideas and means that innovation is often just stumbled upon. “We are the industry of puns, spoofs, knock offs, rip offs, unauthorized accounts, and parodies as a dominant category of story,” Kross told interviewer Lucy Corin. “We don’t explore so much as take a great lot of dark guesses about what the remaining untapped audiences might want to explore while trying to couple it with known traffic-driving search terms.”
“Because of the nature of how quickly the new and never before seen is expected to be turned out, it’s rare to find the project that is really turning over the recesses within some creator or having it out with a wild imagination,” Kross continued.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t meant that porn isn’t able to make interesting discoveries at times. “We are often as surprised as our audience is when we collectively discover a new thing to explore, and as tired as our audience is when we finally retire it,” Kross noted. “We don’t ask the big questions about any of it.”
The balance of the interview finds Kross discussing a wide variety of subjects, including some of her favorite books (Kross is a fan of William Faulkner and Vladimir Nabakov) and even more obscure subjects like the peculiarities of warning labels. It’s a fascinating read and just goes to show that the stereotypical image of pornstars as unintelligent and uneducated is often way off the mark.
Read the full interview here.
