This weekend, I invited three bate buddies over to screen Spunk. It was a fascinating, mind- and crotch-expanding exercise. We watched, mostly in silence with a few comments throughout, and then we all gradually got our dicks out and got off together. It was a fantastic session with beautiful penises, great energy and four intense orgasms.

Afterward, I asked, “So, how did you like the movie?”

None of my guests were previously familiar with Antonio da Silva’s work and the general sense was that we all really liked it, and specifically called out various scenes and moments as favorites… but we didn’t really know where to place it in our understanding of what erotica is. We all agreed that while intensely sexual and full of what anyone would objectively call “pornography,” none of us would classify the movie as “porn.” The consensus was “erotic art film.”

I then showed them a couple of the Colby Does America installments, and we again were in agreement: these works are intensely erotic and far more completely realized film art than porn. I personally love that these guys are making good film in an erotic vein and really pushing filmmaking into a new way of thinking about explicitly sexual subject matter.

I think our sense that the film is not “porn” comes from our collective, learned impression over time that porn is specifically made to manipulate and stimulate sexual excitement and inspire sexual activity. “Porn,” as we have come to understand it, is made to make you hard, make you masturbate or have sex with others and triggers orgasms.

Da Silva’s work is more complex and layered. It is not single-mindedly urging the viewer to orgasm, but engaging our minds and feelings—along with our libidos—with a playful, humorous, even absurd angle throughout. For that reason, viewers may not know how to categorize it. It may confuse or disorient audience members—especially those conditioned to seeking the manipulative porn we all know and love and stockpile in our spank banks—since we like to know what we’re looking at. At the same time, there are a lot of moviegoers who love having our genres mixed in a holistic way. I think da Silva has arrived there. I think Keller is getting there.

(Note that Keller’s work is crowdfunded. We all get to be patrons of his work and if you like the direction he is taking with Colby Does America, you should consider throwing him a little love as I have done.)

I’m not going to give a stroke-by-stroke accounting of the movie, just to encourage you to abandon any preformed porn expectations. Don’t plan on it making you want to stroke or fuck or cum—although it could easily do that and certainly did for us—but expect a uniquely thoughtful erotic experience that is much more subtle in it’s way to your cock. It goes in via your thinking brain.

All that said, I will point out that we all were hugely turned on and had fantastic sex immediately following the movie. The last third of the film definitely inspired us (no spoilers here—sorry and you’re welcome) so it’s not totally without specific dick inspiration. It just makes you engage with your mind rather than disengage and it makes you see through an artistic lens to get there.

I enthusiastically recommend Spunk, just watch it with an open mind and be ready to either get off afterward… or not. In any case, this film does what my favorite art films does. It crawled into my brain and sparked lots of new thoughts and ideas in the hours and days that followed.