Let's Get Real: America's Ready for High-Def Sex

Our nation's pornographers are letting us down, and I for one am disappointed in them. Time was, it was precisely those who made coin making and distributing images of people fornicating and copulating led us down the path of acceptance to some of our most beloved technologies -- hand held-video cameras, VCRs, digital cameras, even the Internet.

But now our adult-film brethren are letting vanity get the better of them. Frightened by the heightened realism of high-definition television -- which shows in fine-grained detail every sweat droplet, augmentation scar, or slightly flabby posterior -- pornographers are braying that we should perhaps cling to low-resolution television somewhat longer.

Of course, there's not much of a choice, for them or for us. One year from this past Sunday, federal government mandate has it that every analog television in the U.S. of A. will need to be replaced by one capable of handling a digital signal. (The bad news: Washington hasn't done much to educate the American public on the DT switch. But there are two pieces of good news: (1) the change only affects you if you watch TV via antennas, and (2) if you want to hang on to your existing TV set, Uncle Sam will give you a coupon for nearly the full price of a digital-to-analog converter box).

The adult-film industry is concerned that Americans don't have a taste for watching every belly jiggle and flesh ripple that naturally occurs when two or more people have intimate relations. And yeah, HDTV is not kind to the surgically-enhanced among us. Scars look like railroad tracks, and body parts that don't seem to move in standard-definition really seem frozen in place at 10 times the pixels.

But can we be adult here for a minute? We've been experiencing sex in high-definition for many a moon now – though, of course, it's most often as an active participant, rather than an observer. People seem to like sex that way all right. In fact, the very perpetuation of our species depends on it, so there's probably some merit to the idea that we can handle and even prefer a non-fantasy version of human sexual pas de deux (ou trios…)

Of course, adult entertainment might not be your cup of tea. That's cool. With HDTV, not only can we newly appreciate the cinematic nuances of the Jenna Jameson oeuvre, we viewers are now equipped to see a wide range of other subtleties that in the standard-def era we could only experience in real life.

Watch Lost in high-def, and catch Kate's quick glance from Sawyer to Jack and back to Sawyer; suddenly we more deeply appreciate what drives her character (as well as Evangeline Lilly's acting chops.) In standard-def, that David Tyree catch in Superbowl XLII is merely spectacular. In high-def, it's an education in athletic prowess.

You've probably seen a widely circulated list of which actors fare well in high-definition (Halle Berry, Scarlett Johansson, John Travolta) and which thespians are better off in a less pixel-intense medium. That's no doubt a tough pill to swallow for those entertainers in the second batch. But the thing about HDTV -- and what it separates it from so much of the entertainment universe -- is that it's not a distortion of reality. It's actually a step closer to the real world.

And in the real world, we Americans have proven that we can handle body parts that wiggle and flop during sexual intercourse, and that sometimes people get old and wrinkly. We manage to still look at and even enjoy each other a great deal without the benefit of Vaselined lenses and soft lighting. We're ready for high-definition. We're ready for "reality television" to mean something more than the latest episode of "The Salt-n-Pepa show." Bring it on.