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> A Year in the Merde > Excerpt 3
 A
Year in the Merde
Book Review - Excerpt 3
Continued from page 3
French TV porn
"Then there was the porn.
"Of course, I'd hired the odd film in my time, and during my
lonelier moments I'd surfed for free home movies on the Web. But everything was
so much less furtive in France. Porn mags were advertised openly in newsagents'
windows. Obscenely graphic comic books were on sale in every bookshop. And
hard-core, penetrative, ejaculative porn was on mainstream TV, on one of the six
basic terrestrial channels, pretty much every week. Marie had a whole collection
of videos that she'd recorded off the TV. These included the 'news' program just
before the movie, which was usually about who was making which new film or which
new porn starlet had made her screen debut.
"....One Saturday at midnight, we switched on to find a group
interview with al the usual actors and the word 'Liberté!'
flashing on the screen. The actors were all naked, and their spokesman hardly
seemed at all distracted by the fact that he was getting a blow job as he read
from his autocue. About a dozen French porn stars were lounging about on an
immense four-poster bed. The girls were showing us their most intimate
piercings, and the guys who weren't speaking had the tools of their trade draped
casually across their thighs or pointing up toward their belly buttons. The
spokesman's voice droned on monotously (he was much more gifted at public
copulation than public speaking), and it emerged that the actors were going on
strike for two weeks because French TV's governing body had announced that it
might ban porn from mainstream channels.
"....The spokesman declared that
this ban on televised porn might mean the end of France's liberté
d'expression. The woman whose faced was attached to his lower body nodded in
agreement. For obvious reasons, she wasn't free to express herself verbally."
- A Year in the Merde, by Stephen Clarke
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Book Review: A Year in the Merde
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