What the Porn Set Chalkboard Tells Us About Ourselves

Earlier in our lives together, I wrote about things we associate with 70s porn. The conclusion was that people really looked that way then, making all our memories from that era vaguely porny. Women (and men!) had bushes and men wore moustaches. Perms were common to both dominant genders. While I’ll never know why Faye Dunaway was popular, that is not a story for this site.

Today we talk about a porn trope that persists even though any real-world manifestation of it is gone save, I imagine, in the bush of Australia where dingoes carry off babies and one can still rent videotapes. (Also for another site: Why isn’t aboriginal powerhouse David Gulpilil more popular than Faye Dunaway?)

Most places at which cheapie porn movies are shot have several customizable rooms. There’s the jail cell/dungeon, the bedroom, the doctor’s office (which can double as a regular office once the crew removes the hanging skeleton and poster from Gray’s Anatomy), and the classroom.

If you have been inside a classroom in the past 20 years, you’ll still see a chalkboard but it is hardly ever used. There’s a projector, there’s assignments on Google Classroom to tackle with Chromebooks, and there’s endless Youtube videos the teacher looks up on the fly when there’s more time to kill. Most teachers can’t remember the last time they used chalk.

Yet here we are, in a world in which fully-matured women above the age of eighteen are still required to dress in school uniforms (this did not happen when I took that floral design class at Glendale Community College) and the writing on the chalkboard is entirely a response to that FOMO feeling of, “We have this chalkboard; shouldn’t we write something on it?”

So, rather than reflecting the real world or a groovy vision of the future, porn in this case is propagating a sluttier version of the past, albeit with tattoos.

In the late Roy Karch’s “Hot for Teacher,” Kapri Styles poses in front of a chalkboard whose contents leave no doubt that our nation’s schools are leading students into lives of interracial pornography.

Sweetheart of Aquinnah Nica Noelle took took pride in her classroom sets. This still of Raylene in one of “The Teacher” sequels has a typically overwrought blackboard display which draws attention away from the performance.

This photo was taken the last week of October in 2008 on the Canoga Park set of “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? Adventures of a Hockey MILF.”

Someone at Hustler got the great idea to do a Sarah Palin porn parody and shot it and released it in under a week, just in time for the election. DVDs at video stores and everything. Here, Sindee Jennings plays young “Serra Paylin” and Evan Stone, who likely voted for the real Sarah Palin, plays her professor. I think this chalkboard is the best of our examples—it has useful information on it and isn’t self-conscious. It’s also in a scene that is a flashback, so it makes sense, you know, pedagogically.