Do you love porn?  Do you wish you could just enjoy the stilted acting, the panty-thin plot lines and the smarmy music without all that pesky sex?  Well wish no more, Pornketeers, writer/director James Gunn (Dawn of the Dead, Slither), along with his brothers Brian and Sean, has created just the thing to satisfy your porn craving without getting you off—PG Porn.

PG Porn pairs mainstream Hollywood actors like Nathan Fillion, Michael Rosenbaum and the Gunn brothers themselves with adult film stars like Aria Giovanni, Belladonna and Sasha Grey.  The first installment, Nailing Your Wife, starring Nathan Fillion and Aria Giovanni, was released last week.

If you haven’t already not gotten off to PG Porn, you should probably do so before reading any further as I am totally going to blow the ending in the coming paragraphs. 

You weren’t expecting that, right?  That nail gun to the head?  Yeah, me either.  But, personally, I found it hilarious.  Not hilarious because being accidentally nail-gunned in the head is particularly funny in and of itself, but because it was so absurd and awkward and unexpected and obviously tongue-in-cheek.  My sense of humor can be a little morbid (and yes, at times, sophomoric) so I tested it out on four of my closest girlfriends, and every one of them gasp-laughed just as hard as I had.

Now, I love gory horror films and tasteless John Waters-esque shock cinema, but I definitely understand why that’s not everyone’s bag.  So I wasn’t particularly surprised when I read Theresa Darklady Reed’s Huffington Post article PG Porn Says “No” to Nudity and “Yes” to Violence Against Women.

Darklady says:

“The Gunn brothers apparently consider violence against women to be not just acceptable but sexy, so long as nobody actually gets laid or engages in any wet spot to erogenous zone contact...

While the idea of explicit sex-free porn is nothing new -- within the industry it's called "soft core" -- the idea that a site featuring the accidental death of a sexually frustrated woman is an erotic improvement over sites featuring the intentional indulgence of carnal desires by sexually adventurous women seems more than a wee bit of a stretch.”

I have a real problem with the willy-nilly use of the phrase “violence against women”.  Forgive me if I’m splitting hairs, but I think there is a real difference between violence against women and violence that just happens to be directed at a woman.

You could argue that any violence whatsoever, wherever it’s being directed is deplorable, and you would have a very sound argument, one that that I don’t necessarily disagree with.  But that’s an argument of a different color..  “Violence against women” implies that the woman is being violated because she’s a woman.  So we have to ask, would that scene have been just as funny if Nathan Fillion had been accidentally nail-gunned while trying to get into Aria Giovanni’s panties?  I think the answer is yes, it totally would have. 

According to Brian Gunn’s response to Darklady’s post:

“...the joke here is that the MPAA will give PG ratings to movies that are hyper-violent, but slap anything sexually provocative with an R rating. What's more, there's simply zero evidence to support your claim that we consider Aria's death "sexy." It is portrayed as something thoroughly UN-sexy...”

If the violence in and of itself offends you, that’s perfectly valid.  Some people see entertainment value in violence and others don’t.   But making something that was clearly meant to be satire into a feminist issue is a little much for me.  I think that not being able to recognize the difference between an arguably tasteless joke and a true act of aggression only detracts from the seriousness of true violence against women such as domestic abuse, rape, etc. 

If Aria Giovanni’s death had been sexualized, if Nathan Fillion had dropped trou and started wanking it over her dead body then, yeah, I would have been disgusted and offended.  But her death was a total boner-shrinker.  It was absurd and awkward and a fucking joke.  I’m a big believer in being able to take a joke, and maybe that’s just because it’s pretty hard to offend me.  But the way I see it, how can you expect to be taken seriously if you can’t even take a joke?

But that’s just me.  Am I right on?  Am I way off base?  What are your thoughts?