The Masturbated Elephant
I’ve been running into porn references constantly lately. Not in a fun way—just everywhere, and it’s gotten weird enough that I keep thinking about it.
My brother’s friend made a short film about customers buying porn in video rental stores, categorizing them by type. The nervous one shuffling through like a criminal—probably should just order online where it’s cheaper. The guy who creeps past all the regular sections before bolting to the restricted aisle when he thinks no one’s looking. The businessman with zero shame, just grabbing it like milk. It’s actually funny. I watched it twice.
Last week I’m at a café in Marktoberdorf with a friend, nice weather, we’re sitting outside, and a bus passes. We wave at the older guys inside like we’re twelve. They wave back, cool enough, until they get off at the next stop and walk past us with this look. They were French. Hours later my sister shows me photos on her camera—blurry shots of a TV screen. Turns out the Frenchmen grabbed her camera thinking it was theirs and took pictures of what they were watching. On a bus. She figured out it was them from the license plate. The idea of accidentally swapping cameras and finding that is genuinely one of the funniest things I can imagine.
Then there’s this documentary that aired called The Masturbated Elephant.
The title confused me enough to watch. It’s actually about conservation—they collect semen from an elephant named Jackson through prostate massage for breeding purposes. Standard wildlife footage, but somebody decided the title should lead with the masturbation. The whole film’s about species preservation, not the biomechanics of it, but apparently that’s what the marketing wanted to emphasize.
You can’t really watch evening television without running into this kind of content anymore. It’s mostly women, which is its own thing. There’s something absurdly direct about how much explicit material just bleeds into regular programming now, treated like it’s not worth hiding. The Frenchmen casually filming themselves on a bus, the documentary’s weirdly aggressive honesty, the whole thing has this deadpan comedy that makes you wonder what conversations happened in offices to make these exact moments exist.