Is The HBO series, Euphoria, Straight Up Porn?

Is it Porn Masquerading as Art?

HBO has a series running called Euphoria. It’s an unflinching look into this generation Z life of social media influences, drugs, sex, parenting styles and a finite look into the struggles for this culturally sensitive group. Euphoria is already being talked about for its frank depiction of underage sex in this context. Episode 2 was also groundbreaking in its depiction of displaying male genitalia in such abundance. Displaying male genitalia is not the norm in Hollywood unless you are doing porn. It was once reported on Entertainment Tonight that the reason you don’t get any depiction of the male genitalia is that Hollywood considers it a weapon. A gun is fine but a dick is something else.

Episode 3, appropriately titled Made You Look, gave us another look at male genitalia but this time it was perhaps the most graphic display for a mainstream media outlet. There was sexting going on involving male genitalia in abundance. Nate, played by Jacob Elordi, is enamored with a transsexual and is constantly texting Jules played by Hunter Schafer. Their texting escalates to the point where Nate starts to text a plethora of dick pics. Nate has a girlfriend, Maddy, played by Alexa Demie. Maddy gets suspicious of the number of text Nate gets while they are on a date. The text continues still while they are having sex. When Nate is in the shower, Maddy opens up Nate’s cellphone and finds the dick pics he has sent to Jules. And there are a lot of them. This, however, isn’t the depiction that crossed any lines. Last week’s episode had more dicks flopping around on screen than at a Liberace venue.

Kat, played by Barbie Ferriera, is a plus-sized individual who lost her virginity in Episode 1. The loss of virginity was memorialized on video and escaped out on the Internet much to her surprise. She successfully had it removed by applying some reverse psychology to her accusers and by threatening to have the parties arrested for distributing child pornography. Kat also has some self-esteem issues surrounding her weight. The thing is though, some people like fat girls. In reading a post surrounding her sex tape, some viewers liked it. She decides to become a cam-girl for the money. One of her admirers contacts her and they set up a video chat. This older guy wants her to be mean to him and he takes her verbal abuse and laughing when he stands up to display his micro-dick.

He gets off to the verbal confrontation where he gets aroused. He proceeds to masturbate while she watches and we watch. This is where the line may have crossed. It’s one thing to depict a person masturbating by panning the camera above the waistline while your arms of flailing but to display a guy actually masturbating is the point of no return.

Has it come to the point in mainstream media, like HBO, to actually show this type of activity? Have we, as a culture, want to see this type of behavior? The guy who was doing the masturbating was a fat guy. Does that make a difference? Would it have been more erotic and stimulating had it been a hot woman? Episode 1 had shown Eric Dane’s erect penis while he put on a condom before he had sex with the transsexual.

Strangely though, that wasn’t the thing that bothered me. It was the rampant use of drugs by the Rue character played by Zendaya. I wanted to choke her to her senses as she climbed further down the hole with the scheming and lying and skating by on the drug testing. That was by far the most egregious act in all of these episodes so far. Overall, nobody comes off as being likable. The little sister is the only one you have sympathy for because she is afraid of finding her sister dead one day. Everybody else needs to just ride in hell. There is not one person with a redeeming characteristic in this telling.

As for the porn label with the fat guy masturbating? Is it or is it not porn? United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, a hard-core pornography case, stated “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hardcore pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Perhaps masturbating is not hardcore. There have been mainstream movies that depict unsimulated sex for a while now. And it is safe to say that porn is readily available to anyone these days thanks to the Internet. Are we watching underage teens having sex and we don’t know it? Kat wears a mask to hide her identity and age. Oh, how thinner that wire has gotten as we walk that very precarious thing called life as we let another tower of common sense falter as we open up the doors to more extremes as we lay with dogs.