The bodies emerged from the crisis. Not all of them, of course. In the years previous to multimedia porn, the kids from the hood, before the Internet, looked around newsstands in the outskirts or took a bus to the centre to visit sex shops, skiving off the extracurricular music class to get those Primera Línea magazines with CDs that included pieces from Fisgón Club. That aristocracy, housewives turned dominatrices and pixels, excited us and made us laugh at the same time, and became part of our onanistic learning process of the elective affinities of Spanish porn.

In those years of audiovisual learning, some guy from school got some extra cash by assisting at an amateur shooting his cousin from Carabanchel, or maybe from Pan Bendito, was doing: he brought the towels, coffees, set the lighting, and sometimes, when the shooting was over, gave cigarettes to the actress and stayed there to have a chat with her, always at funny times. One couldn’t imagine, back then, that a porn film could be shot at 4PM, siesta time in the centre of Spain, or that the actress did the job to pay the fees of her Business Administration degree, which was what her granny from Palencia, a wise woman who gave sound advice, had told her she had to study so as not to end up scrubbing floors. Some of them even had civil-servant-to-be boyfriends, so when he went to the library to study she went to Carabanchel –at siesta time in the centre of Spain, as we said– to get some extra cash after the money shot. Back then, now that I think of it, we had just started using euros and we were all happy to pay porn tapes in Chinese shops with those shiny coins and silky notes. Outside Spain, Private shot those huge porn Peplums, perfect and detailed productions, historical revisitations with not much sperm and an impeccable interior design. They had their origin in the fantastic inheritance started by Jenna Jameson in tapes such as Satyr, that blond who started shaving her pubic hair in the shape of the Cadillac logo and ended up teaching self-help courses for entrepreneurs in the doldrums. Maybe it was the same thing. We, I must confess, preferred the closeness of the national actress, who had something of your local bakery girl: that nymphet in the making, beautiful and illiterate, that served us our factory-made pastries and everyday fantasies.

(In order to understand a country’s economy, a country’s intimate sociology, you have to carefully watch the porn it produces. That’s why when we discovered German porn, at the same time we became aware of the economic measures that would soon befallen us).

But as I was saying earlier, the bodies emerged from the crisis with all their imperfections. Right before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, that sort of totemic swan song entitled La orina y el relámpago was premiered. As if Spanish porn had wanted to make its own Marina d´Or. We were overwhelmed by tits maturity, half way between Chorizo de cantimpalo and a David Lynch in the doldrums. We’d also had our small super productions with the Lapiedras, starring a beginner and very inspired Nacho Vidal. Those films were our little Private, and thus while the real state erection kept on colonising coasts and bank accounts, the porn craft revved the engine and promised itself the golden mirage of the international market.

Soon after, when non-payments started, silence came. And a little later, bodies appeared. Fucking in flats damaged by mortgages, with an eye on the camera and the other on the imminent eviction.

Thanks to the Torbe scandal, much has been talked about Hermosa juventud, Rosales’s excellent film. It is said, by the way, that Torbe made freak porn, but quite on the contrary, what he did was the purest form of Spanish porn. However, audiovisual construction after the crisis has been much less talked about, the “greyness” that has little by little penetrated national porn, fed by new gestures, new stupor. The sparkling nymphets of the beginning of the millennium probably dreamt about becoming Sasha Grey, or, at worst, Rebeca Linares. They probably dreamt about being awarded an AVN prize and showing it to the boring old bags addicted to the confessional to prove that they had gone beyond, beyond the Lidl cashier, beyond their village parties. The girls after the economic bubble burst arrived at the set with badly dyed hair, nails roughly done and the embarrassed gaze of imminent misery. They wore Primark lingerie, very poor and used, with the elastics already wasted. The guys, the actors, were all of a sudden very young, and at the same time, strangely old. They smoked rolling tobacco in the first scenes, and in them one could sense –even if they faked a certain arousal, with little inspiration and unwillingly– a proverbial shame, the sum of their mistakes. The girls seemed to always be the same woman, the half-good-looking girl from class who read Federico Moccia novels, the one who ended up studying to become a hairdresser or a beauty consultant, the one who broke the condom with a toned bloke on a Lonsdale shirt and a Pastis y Buenri session in the background, and ended up completely abandoned and already wise in the family planning centre, covered in tears and Hacendado make-up. That same woman started appearing in Torbe’s videos, but also in his competitors’, always with that terribly bitter smile, so wise, so Spanish, when she told us, looking at camera: “Your cock is so big.”

Amarna Miller –who is, in essence, the intelligent and extraordinarily brilliant antithesis of the embarrassed women of Spanish crisis porn– knew she had to flee, work abroad, create her personal brand, making sex the branded content of a politically correct fantasy, without capitalist inhibitions. Under her, the legions of Spanish porn stars, which, through their Twitter accounts, have five thousand bought followers and offer their services via webcam. Some guys want to pay for their drinks in tweet form, and they answer with clumsy naiveté. They can post from sensual pics to motivating phrases, to a call for help with their tax declaration, a link to a sad YouTube video full of poor kids, or an invitation to go see them at a third rate porn fair.

What I mean is that new Spanish porn is inserted in life itself. It represents national putrefaction to the core. It’s contradictory, filthy, poor, amateur porn like the one practised by, for instance, Bruno y María, the great heirs of Torbe’s ephimeral empire. I don’t know whether you have seen any of their videos, but they’re true pieces of national social film. As if Ken Loach, or the Dardennes, went through Spanish geography making up stories of a scary visual and physical poverty, shooting the saddest and greyest shags in the world. Always off-screen, Bruno’s voice over storms with a heavy Galician accent. Bruno is the total mega narrator, the man who orders, the man who presents the late teenagers or mature women who fuck before the camera. He comments, with funny closeness and total political incorrectness, what happens, in case the viewer misses something. “You’re having fun, huh, kid?” And the kid, in general a twenty-something with erection problems and terrorised gaze, clumsily babbles a male chauvinistic, Spanish, very macho cliché.

New Spanish porn is shot in such poor sets that they don’t even have Ikea furniture. The beds, the badly upholstered sofas, the rough and yellowed sheets from more two decades ago… A lot of the time they fornicate with the telly on, with afternoon’s Sálvame Limón in the background –I swear–, and thus the clumsy gasps are mixed up with the imprecations, much more professional and passionate, no doubt, of talk show guests. In Sálvame they talk a lot about who shags who, and in Bruno y María they shag directly with no words spoken, since words would provide a narrative, a coherence –“You’re having fun, huh, kid?”– incompatible with that guy who dreamt about becoming Cristiano Ronaldo but was hooked to the neighbourhood’s imminent line. The laughs of the guys from the hood when I told them I was going to be a porn actor and how sad, what a terrible failure –think of the Spanish Armada– when I had to leave the set flaccid, crestfallen and without even cuming. Many of these national films are abruptly cut before the money shot to make clear there’s no narrative coherence, no closure. An open ending, pure David Lynch, I told you so.

The queen of suburbia falls from grace, dreams with being able to afford an iPhone 6S after two more lesbian numbers and heroically pulls up her underclass G-string, God bless her. She closes her eyes and although she swore to herself she would never do it, after anal penetration, she sighs. Suspiros de España.