industrial porn

"What's the Appeal of the 'Money Shot?'" Opinonz I Haz Them

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2012-01-19 21:38

Photo by Flickr user Universal Pops. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user Universal Pops. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So for their regular weekly Wise Guys feature Em & Lo asked for answers to a reader's question: "What’s the appeal of the “money shot?" Although I'm one of their Wise Guy contributors the question didn't pop up in my rotation. But I did leave a comment. Em & Lo were then nice enough to make it their comment of the week this week.

So once again the question was "What’s the appeal of the “money shot?" Here's what I said.

I’m not even stepping into the whole “facial” business. I’ll just point out Charlie Glickman’s thoughts from a post that arrived in my newsreader moments before this one.

Instead I’ll just say I think the “money shot” is a seriously stupid dual artifact of porn. First, in the production of porn it’s just way more convenient to towel semen off skin than out of bodily orifices and therefore it’s more cost effective. This is why, at least early on, it was the low-budget porn shops that did money shots rather than the well-heeled ones. Second, for decades, anyway, porn was primarily an aid for male masturbation and so, I think, money shots are a way to help watchers identify with male actors.

I really think the masturbation element is key. Yes, you’ll occasionally see men’s parters “finishing” them off, but for the vast, vast, vast majority of cases the man essentially stops interacting physically with his partner, steps back a ways, and basically jacks off.

Again, fine if you’re at home alone. But seems to me sort of the whole point of sex with a partner is to have sex with them… not just on them.

Now, that said, don’t get me wrong. If you’re both into it (and increasing numbers of both men and women seem to be) and it’s all good clean fun for both of you then great. Lots of great things about “sex” don’t actually involve sex.

Also, that said, another name for “money shots” is “the withdrawal method.” And while nothing in life is certain, when ejaculation occurs outside a partner’s body it at best reduces the odds of pregnancy and STI transmission and even at worst it evens them out between the semen donor and semen receiver. So that’s ok too.

But at the end of the day, for me, the physical pleasure reduction of orgasm via masturbation rather than with a partner isn’t worth whatever symbolic enjoyment it seems to bring other people.

So, again for me, thanks but no thanks.

Source: Em & Lo

Note: I shared the comment-of-the-week slot with fellow Wise Guy pinch-hitter Mark Luczak, who seems to share my assessment.

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Sports Equipment Word to the Wise, Plus a Possible Sign that We've Reached Peak Porn

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-08-28 12:18

Photo by Flickr user Photoraphy_Gal. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user Photography_Gal. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Don't ask me why I would know such a thing but sex on a trampoline isn't as much fun as it sounds.

Actually that's not quite true. It's lovely to be outdoors, if you get a thrill out of the possibility of being seen or perhaps caught it can be fun, and hey, it's a nice relatively flat surface. And since trampolines are a great form of exercise and sex after mild physical exertion can be pretty great because of the increased circulation, oxygenation, muscle activation, and body warmth.

So let me rephrase my original sentence: "don't ask me why I would know such a thing but vigorous woman- or man-on-top PIV intercourse on a trampoline isn't as much fun as it sounds.

Yes, of the 100,000 or so trampoline-related emergency room visits sprained penises, bruised hips and pubic bones, and other pelvis-related injuries rank pretty low. But...

Oh wait, I said don't ask why I would know such a thing... :-)

I'll just say that it was years ago.

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Incidentally, at least according to Google, while Rule #34 ("if you can imagine it there's porn of it") appears to be conserved thanks to a few relatively random uploads to sites like YouPorn, there do not appear to be any dedicated trampoline porn sites.

This, incidentally, could be more significant than some people might think. A few years ago I predicted that the flood of amateur photography made possible by stigma relaxation plus affordable home recording equipment plus ordinary network effects would have strong negative consequences in the market for paid porn. After all, 5 megapixel cameras on dumb cellphones are now par for the course so if even one tenth of one percent of the billion or so people with digital capability choose to upload images they've taken for their own enjoyment that's 100,000 new actors and models competing with paid performers and producers.

I'm confident there will always be specialty sites, particularly for the kinds of things far more people want to consume than are willing to produce for their own recreation (cough kink.com) but to invert William Gibson's famous quip, the future may not yet be evenly distributed but it's here.

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Note: I don't object to commercial porn in principle, and the total market for professionals will never be completely replaced any more than affordable home equipment has replaced ordinary professional photographers. But the influx of volunteers both in front of and behind cameras has reduced the previously high opportunities for arbitraging the ability to make money by depicting fairly ordinary people engaging in what at the end of the day are fairly ordinary sexual activities.

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Kink.com: Sacrificing Whatever Integrity it Thought it Had by "Sacrificing Nicki Blue's Innocence"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2011-01-12 18:44

Sex blogger Miss Maggie Mayhem calls bullshit on "progressive" industrial porn site Kink.com's "sex positive" reputation. The backstory is about a woman who's stage name is Nicki Blue. Kink.com is paying her to "lose" her virginity on camera. Mayhem is very suitably unimpressed, not only at the casual requirement that only penises can "take" virginity, but also with the ugly judgmental bullshit Kink uses to promote the event.

Here's Mayhem's indictment (emphasis mine.)

To decide that you want to engage in any particular sex act for the first time in a way that you will find really enjoyable is sex positive. There is no inherent exploitation involved in filming it and for some of us that just adds to the experience. When I read, “We strive each and every day to bring the best possible content to our customers and sacrificing Nikki’s innocence is in perfect alignment with what our fans expect and deserve,” I feel that the sex positive message is lost. That same sentence also reminds us that commercial value is of a much higher importance than sex positivity. For most porn sites that comes as no surprise.

Source: Miss Maggie Mayhem

I mean, in what moronic sex-negative universe is it innocent to conceive, propose, negotiate, and then arrive at a workplace with the intention of having sex... but a "sacrifice" of that innocence to complete the work you not only agreed to but proposed to do?  That would be the moronic sex-negative universe of Kink.com.

Whatever other flatulent nonsense Kink's press release might contain, that one line rings solid, crystal truth: "sacrificing Nikki’s innocence" really is "in perfect alignment" with Kink.com's fans expect.

And that's the core of my extreme irritation with the company.

Yes, yes, they're famously (and correctly) diligent about protecting their employee's safety and dignity.  Yes, yes, they're famously community minded, opening the doors of their giant Landmark-Heritage building for community performance and homeless shelters alike. Woo-hoo!  They've probably got Mother Theresa's ashes somewhere around there too.

But it doesn't change the fact that for all the genuinely good work they do, the vast, vast majority of their customers are the kind of asshats who believe virginity is something that's "sacrificed."  Who believe innocence is something that's "lost" with one push of a penis.

Customers who, I'm pretty confident, will be pretty disappointed if, when the moment comes, it doesn't look like it hurts.  It'll probably be a giant hit in progressive enclaves like southeast Utah and Saudi Arabia.

What a bunch of trolls.  Making money promoting rather than dispelling the "mystery" of negative, dangerous, and very, very old notions of sex and sexuality.

And once again I feel stupid having to say it but I'm in 100% agreement with Mayhem on the following points:

I cannot say it enough: I support Nicki Blue in what she wants to do. It is 100% her choice to make and no one has the right to say that she should or shouldn’t do go forward with her plan. I do not think poorly of any of the other performers on the set, either, because it is an honor to have someone request your presence at their first time doing anything. A request like that indicates trust and comfort and it is an honor when someone entrusts you to be a part of something that you’ve never done before. I am not worried about Nicki Blue. I know that she is in very good and capable hands on set. It’s the rest of us that I’m worried about when the packaging of the shoot includes blatant misinformation.

That about how I feel too.

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Labiaplasty: Another Stupid Consequence of Porn Production Shortcuts Spilling Over in to Viewer's Imaginations

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2010-10-14 19:37

While I occasionally appear in Em & Lo’s popular “Wise Guys” feature I didn’t participate in this week’s version. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion. First of all here’s the question

“What is the general consensus on women with big labia, or longer inner labia, or dark labia? Does it really matter? With the rise in labiaplasty surgery and all the adult men’s mags only showing only “neat and tidy” vulvas, it’s hard to figure out if this is just some manufactured porn ideal or a vast preference among men…?”

See how this week’s real wise guys answered here.

First let’s talk about labia since that’s the main question: I think it’s a good idea to think of labia the same way you think of, say, ears, scrotums, tongues, or elbows — maybe in isolation you could say some are super-duper cute and others are unsightly. But a lot like elbows or scrotums how they look doesn’t really really matter because who sees them in isolation? In the context of a whole person and what everyone’s generally doing when they’re visible (during sex, sure, but also at the midwife’s or OB/Gyn’s, with other nude people in a locker room or at a nude beach, etc.) they’re not what someone else is going to notice first… or stop to think about for very long when they do.

Now let’s talk about labia in porn, since that’s the context of the question. At the end of the day a heck of a lot that happens in porn has at least as much to do with production and distribution as it does with what’s actually erotic.

The sometimes grotesque positions would be one: there has to be a clear line of sight for the camera. “Money shots” would be another big one: wiping semen off skin takes a 10th the time it takes to squeeze it out of one’s orifices. Which takes us to the next oddity: while you’ll see plenty of semen (and, even more commonly, fake semen) you almost never see natural lubrication. People in porn evidently go through a lot of towels, in part, because the alternative is paying a lot more for laundry, upholstery cleaner, and rental damage deposits. (How erotic is that?!?!?)

Tiny labia are another possible fallout: biggest “soft-core” porn companies pay a lot of attention to markets like hotel pay-per-view, and nations or states that are willing to tolerate porn as long as it doesn’t go “too far.” And one big measure — best exemplified by Australia’s domineering Classification Board — is “discreet genital detail.” By which they mean little or no visible labia minora.

With a result that, for instance, visible labia are Photoshopped over or even right out of existence. Or, even better, unaroused models with very small labia are preferentially hired, and therefore are preferentially viewed.

See, for instance, Kirsten Drysdale’s extremely interesting post “Healing It to a Single Crease“ in Australia’s Hungry Beast who says that even though virtually all women have externally visible labia minora you’ll never see them in Australian porn. Here’s why

...it’s not because they’ve chosen to only photograph women with ‘innies’. Many of those models actually have outies in real life, which have been ‘healed to a single crease’ (that’s the charming term used in the magazine industry) with the aid of image editing software. Think of it as ‘digital labiaplasty’.

It’s important to be clear that this is not something magazines do to suit the taste of their readership. Although mainstream pornography is hardly known (or appreciated) for a commitment to realism, in this particular case it’s a different issue. They’re not removing lady bits because people don’t want to see them, in the same way they smooth out cellulite or remove blemishes. They’re removing them because as far as the Classification Board is concerned, the labia minora are too rude for soft porn. It’s as though the censors think you could only possibly see it by spreading your legs or pulling your flaps apart.

If you still don’t believe me – go and pick up a copy of the ‘Unrestricted Category’ (M15+) Penthouse and compare it with Penthouse Max (the ‘Category 1’ R18+ version of the mag). I did this at the recommendation of the Classification Board, and found it a very enlightening little exercise. You’ll see exactly the same girls, from exactly the same photoshoot – and in some cases, exactly the same photographs – which will illustrate very clearly how they’ve been ‘tidied up’ in the softer version.

And they don’t even have to be very ‘messy’ to begin with…

It’s straight-up reporting although the (necessary) illustrations are NSFW. She said it here.

I rest my case.

The problem with these shortcuts, time-savers, and censorship avoiding techniques is that without countervailing real-world sex education a lot of viewers end up believing that’s not just what people are supposed to do (money shots? seriously?) but also how they’re supposed to look (tiny labia? seriously?)

Anyway, even though they’re there for really stupid and almost entirely non-erotic reasons porn shortcuts like these end up having very real consequences. They create absolutely daft impressions about how bodies ought to look and what people should do during that don’t have anything to do with what actually happens and, especially, what actually feels really, really good!

It’s definitely worth pushing back on these kinds of porn-induced cliches: It doesn’t feel as good when real men ejaculate outside their partner’s bodies. I’m pretty sure “reverse jackhammer” positions don’t feel good for anybody in real life. And, especially, real women get aroused during sex and for crying out loud real women don’t have airbrushed labia!

=-=-=-=

Finally, this is just so not a call to eliminate, reduce, censor, or otherwise tinker with porn. They’re welcome to continue to grind out cheap-assed unrealistic wank material all day long for the same reason Warner Brothers is welcome to continue to grind out crap Saturday morning cartoons about animals with grave speech impediments and gravity-contingent coyotes. Porn is to sex as The Roadrunner is to physics. The problem is that we get our ideas about physics somewhere other than cartoons. We should be getting our ideas about sex somewhere other than porn.

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Destigmatization Killing the Porn Industry? Good Riddance

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-01-15 14:04

Via of Viviane’s Sex Carnival says

A few Tweeters pointed me to Richard Abowitz’s article on why porn-for-profit is dying:

“Every January, the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas is the biggest annual gathering of the adult film industry. But the biggest is suddenly a lot smaller. The 2010 AEE convention, which ran Thursday through Sunday, had shrunk from packing two floors of the Venetian’s Sands Expo Center last year down to one floor (and that one with lots of empty space).”

Read the quote and follow the links to original sources here.

Following Viviane’s link to Abowitz’s article at Daily Beast the reasons he gives for porn’s decline are the kind of reasons we’d probably like to see.

The first one I’m going to mention is a bit of a wash, seems to be #5 Porn-star prostitutes. These are sex-workers who, rather than put up with the Johnny-Knoxville-ization of porn (double penetrations, etc.), knock off a couple of porn videos mainly so they can put “porn star” on their escort sites in order to impress the mostly-very-vanilla customers with whom they negotiate over social media.

Item #4 doesn’t sound that intuitive, but online games like Halo or 2nd Life are evidently more long-term engaging entertainment. Abowitz doesn’t make the connection directly but this seems to go with Reason #2: video on demand. the average porn consumer spends 4-7 minutes looking at porn while masturbating. They then spend the rest of their spare time playing Halo or 2nd Life or what have you.

The remaining two reasons start getting a little more interesting.

Abowitz labels item #3, “The Taboo Is Gone.” With stigma collapsing there are more aspiring porn stars than there is demand from people who might hire them. And yes, I’m aware that for some people this is a sign of complete moral decay.

If so fine, be that way. But if you consider that just a couple of decades ago it was often the case that most people who appeared in porn had to be either desperate or outright coerced due to stigmatization that’s not a bad thing at all.

Which brings us to item #1, piracy. Abowitz says “According to porn star Dana DeArmond: ‘If people don’t realize it is stealing and start paying for their porn then performers are going to stop performing.’”

I’m not sure exactly how this is a bad thing overall. As a strong proponent of appearing in erotica if and only if one actually wants to appear in erotica it seems like if you wouldn’t do it unless someone paid you then you probably… well… shouldn’t do it.

There are more than enough people who would, will, and do make their own erotica and post it free of charge. And as there’s less and less stigma attached to doing so the social cost of any individual expressing him or herself approaches the social enjoyment she or he may derive from doing so.

I’m sure this is a disappointing position to people who both enjoy appearing in erotica and would like to be paid to do so. Including people I know and like who really do enjoy the work and would like to make their income from it. For which I apologize.

But by and large I’m pretty sure we’d be better off encouraging enough amateurs to get involved that it becomes impossible for anyone to directly profit from it. Indirectly, yes, as with, say, the equivalent of Google AdWords on Blogger or Tumblr pages. But in the grand scheme of things that’s very small change compared to the money that’s been sloshing around in porn.

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"Does He Like It, Baby, Does He Like It?" Is Porn Ever Bad For Men's Sex Lives?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-11-29 21:18

Summary: Given the vast empty space between squeamish (or non-existent) sex education and industrial porn it’s not surprising that some people might get… funny ideas about how to be sexy in bed.

Via someone or other on Twitter, Ashley Lindstrom of Zelda Lily takes a tip from Mary Elizabeth Williams (at Salon.com) and the magic question: Is Porn Making Men Bad at Sex?

[Williams] suggests that “the goal-oriented, money-shot, male-centric perspective of most porn (hint: Women don’t need to see that much fellatio) have changed us.” The ubiquity of this porn has put new pressure on women (and men; we’ll get there): Shaved pussies are expected. Pole-dancing skills don’t hurt either.

Men have new standards for themselves, too, regarding size and performance time – things that they perceive women wanting. (Which is a little funny, given the first sentence of the last paragraph; these poor dudes are doing it to themselves.) That’s where Williams comes in: “...thinking you can learn to make love to a woman from watching porn is like thinking you can learn to drive from watching The Fast and the Furious.”

Read the quote in context here.

That sounds about right. There’s all this debate about whether porn is bad because it does, or doesn’t, hurt the women who perform it. There’s all this debate about whether porn is bad, or isn’t, because it sets up expectations that porn-consumers partners have to be even more Cosmo-style performers.

But there’s not a lot of talk about how porn might be bad for the men (and it’s still primarily men) who are consuming it.

And I don’t mean “bad for men” in the sense that it makes them complicit in the (much-debated) degradation of pornography’s subjects. Or in the secualr sense that it makes them immoral and/or unfaithful. Nor in the even more narrowly secular sense that it makes them masturbate. Nor in the sense that it makes them judgmental or insensitive to their partners. Those have been debated, and settled to everyone’s satisfaction (ok, different settlements but still satisfying to their diverse adherents.)

What’s not debated so much is how porn might be bad for men’s sex lives.

I’ve talked about it before but Salon’s Williams nails it with

He’d been jackhammering away for what felt like hours. “You like that, baby? You like that?” he asked, though he didn’t notice I wasn’t answering. And then, somewhere around the 18th time he said it, it hit me — I wasn’t just having bad sex. I was having bad porn sex.

She said it here.

Thing is, based on my own experience, jackhammering away hoping your partner “likes that, baby, likes that” isn’t as good as it gets for men either.

—-

Obligatory disclaimer: Obviously not all porn demonstrates bad sexual technique. Just the 90% of it that, according to Sturgeon’s Law, is crap.

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Problem Being That "Anti-Anti" is Not a Double Negative

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-08-19 20:11

Megan of Jezebel, in her “Crappy Hour” feature with IM buddy and political pundit Spencer Ackerman, raises a point that I think might explain some of the nature, and bitterness arising out of, for instance, the “blowjob wars.” The snippet below involves speculation about who John McCain might select as a Vice Presidential running mate.


MEGAN: ...At what point in the race do you think Lieberman would start undermining McCain the way he did Al Gore?

SPENCER: Not even SLIGHTLY and here’s why. Lieberman is animated by the classic neoconservative grievance of rejection by his first love, the Democratic Party. Jacob Heilbrunn’s book goes into this pathology in detail. And honestly, I have to admit I understand it, given my inability to let go of this whole TNR shit. [Note: Ackerman was fired from The New Republic for failing to drink kool-aid with neocons. —fl] That’s why Lieberman has been such an eager attack dog for the right ever since he lost his primary in 2006 — he wants, and wants badly, to redress what the left did to him. He’s not actually rightwing. He’s anti-anti-left, and ferociously so.

MEGAN: Well, you know, if you want to be a hawk, don’t expect a bunch of doves to come flocking to you.

SPENCER: He’s obsessed with his own transcendent righteousness.
They said it here.

The problem with transcendent righteousness, in any debate, is that, like Leiberman, one can wind up doing damage to one’s own cause at the expense of respect or influence in either camp.

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Saving It For the Sideshow

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-06-19 21:12


Photo by Flickr user SpacePotato. Used under a Creative Commons license.

[This is more of me being a curmudgeon about critic’s, and producer’s narrow-minded and occasionally pig-headed definitions of pornography. (Sheesh, and people say John McCain’s cranky! :-)) —fl]

When I was a kid growing up trying to listen to rock and roll under the shadow of Nashville, Tennessee, I’d get really sick and tired of the attitude of one of the local stations proclaiming “we play both kinds of music, country and western.” It wasn’t that I didn’t like country music I just like other kinds too. So just to let you know, wherever else this post seems to ramble it’s all about that same point: I like other kinds too.

Tony Comstock, an independent pornographer and author of The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films has been having a bit of a flame war with Australian art critic Alison Croggon over why, on the one hand, she and other Aussies are protesting a photographer accused of child porn when she and some of the exact same people stood by when Australian police broke up a showing of his (self-proclamed) porn film Damon and Hunter at the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Documentary Film Festival in 2006 and then having his Ashley and Kisha ordered removed from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2007.

Part of the problem, explains Croggon, is that while Comstock might not like it

“...the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice…”

Read the quote and Comstocks’ response in context here.

I don’t like it either. In fact, can I just hold my hand up and say that’s the stupidest excellent explanation I’ve ever heard? I’ll have more to say about this in a moment but first…

See… I’m just such a curmudgeon about porn. On the one hand I really want to enjoy it, and do enjoy some of it, but on the other hand so much of it just seems… achievement oriented, which is fine for professional sports, or maybe the Olympics, or even Johnny Knoxville, but it’s like those Qigong demonstrations where martial artists pull buses with 100 people on it with their penises. Amazing, yes, and stuff you do with your sex organs too. But, sort of like pole vaulting or shot put it always sounds way more erotic than it turns out to be. Crab, grouse, gripe, mope, that’s me.

Anyway, TBK of The Beautiful Kind, who unlike me is just so not a prude gets in the spirit of Teh Nastiness of porn with a brilliant new, even nastier-than-ass-to-mouth porn idea.

You know how they have A2M (ass to mouth) porn? It’s not really my thing, but I suppose the allure there is that the person is doing something sooo dirty.

That got me to thinking about other dirty things. I’ve heard that the kitchen sink is one of the filthiest places in a house, way more so than the toilet. So I want to come up with my own porn niche – KS – Kitchen Sink Porn.

Here’s a typical scene: a woman is standing there washing dishes in an ass-flattering dress, or maybe just panties and a bra, and a guy comes up behind her and grabs her roughly. She drops the plate she’s washing and it smashes dramatically. He rubs his crotch lewdly on her, and then he forces her head down and makes her lick the sink counter top. And then all around the metal. It will culminate with him bending her over and fucking her from behind, but she’ll have the kitchen sponge stuffed in her mouth. Ewww! And then he will cum on the counter and make her lick it up.

People will totally get off on that nasty shit.

Read the quote in context here.

By Croggon’s definition kitchen-sink porn, since it’s even less hygenic not to mention even more stereotypically lay-shit-on-hetero-women-but-not-hetero-men than ass-to-mouth porn aficionados ought to like it even more.

It’s a hypothesis I’d dread to test, by the way. Because there’s bound to be someone out there somewhere who’s just dead sure that there’s nothing wrong with (only women) sucking the juice out of cellulose sponges and that I should just lighten up.

If so then duely noted. But just to be clear I’m not objecting to people doing stuff like that (certainly not) or even getting their rocks off on it since none of us get to choose our (genuine, non-rubbernecker) kinks.

What does bug me though? The fact that so many producers seem to agree with anti-porn activists as to what constitutes “pornography!” That anyone out there actually making the stuff that “the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice!”

I dunno. I guess that if that’s going to be everybody’s definition of “pornography” (I get the very strong impression this is indeed the definition some critics like, say, Robert Jensen uses) then I guess I’m against it too: since most people including lawmakers and law enforcers aren’t as clued in to those subtle differences. And so they confuse salacious photos of naked people fucking, sucking, licking, masturbating, caressing softly or sharply, stroking, undressing, fondling, expressing, teaming up, going solo, inserting, rubbing, gasping, shuddering, quivering, jiggling, moaning, dripping, seeping, humping, drooling, and coming individually, in pairs, and in groups of all sizes, shapes, and persuasions without making anyone else feel bad with Jensen’s and Croggon’s (and “Max Hardcore’s” by the way) definition. Which kind of sucks for the rest of us.

Clue: Tony Comstock makes porn. Red Shoe Diaries is porn. “Soft porn” is porn. “Erotica” is porn. Suicide Girls is porn. Fleshbot is porn. And, sorry, even romance novels are porn. Meanwhile, ironically, by the time you get to what Croggon and Max Hardcore are talking about? Even if the sideshow carnies are touching each other’s pee-pees while they bit the heads of of chickens, if that’s porn at all it’s a tiny, tiny slice of it, not the whole shebang. Therefore claiming you like, or hate, “both kind of porn, sick and disgusting” just doesn’t cut it. M’kay?

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The Debased Language of Porn

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-06-19 19:28


Photo by Flickr user notcub. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The other day in Tampa, Florida, Federal prosecutors got a huge obscenity conviction against Paul Little, a.k.a. “Max Hardcore,” an industrial pornographer who lives in and, evidently, works only in California. The man in question may never have been to Tampa himself but prosecutors charged him there instead of California because, they say, his web hosting company had servers that physically resided in a Tampa-area data center. Oh, and also because “community standards” in Tampa are much, much more conducive to an obscenity conviction than anywhere they might have brought charges in California.

The specific convictions evidently weren’t for producing videos containing representations of violent sexual assault that evidently included either him peeing on his fellow actors but jamming his fists into their mouths till they vomited. (Reverse Cowgirl has kept up with the story.) Instead the convictions were for “10 federal counts of distributing obscene materials over the Internet and through the mail.” (Again, via ReverseCowgirl.)

Maybe I’m just feeling curmudgenly here but my contempt for that kind of scurrilous venue-picking by prosecutors is exceeded only by… Paul Little’s conceit that his stupid little niche-market novelty acts could be considered “hard-core” pornography in any real sense. Beyond, perhaps, the “x-tremely” narrow sense of “still able to offend somebody’s sensibilities somewhere even if they look at lot of porn.” And the even narrower sense that, as one of his collaborators (in the constructive sense of the word), Ashley Blue of Emotional Audience, put it “some adults partake in consensual piss-guzzling, ass-fucking* and vomiting.” Sure, and some adults partake in blowing up and sitting on balloons (mildly nsfw) but nobody calls that “extreme,” or “outrageous,” or, especially “hard-core.”

So… incredibly narrow niche fetish for violence and vomit? “Hard core!” Equally niche-market balloon porn or clown porn? Evidently not “hard core,” but why not?

Gee, you’d think “hard core” had gone from being a euphemism for keeping the camera focused on the genitals during penetration or engulfment to a synonym for “transgressive violence.” Against women, right? (Rhetorical question: what are the odds Paul Little gets consensually ass fucked, drinks anyone’s pee or vomits while geting his mouth fisted in any of his movies?) And transgressive violence, when you think about it, is indistinguishable from the attitudes of the feebs, dweebs and morons who dreamed up and cheered on… the obscenity trial against “Max Hardcore.”

Fine. Whatever. Seems like a stupid misappropriation of a great word though.

So. Just to be clear as a prudish libertine I think it’s inexcusable for prosecutors to bring to trial, let alone a jury to convict, somebody for making what amounts to slightly more tasteless episodes of the original version of Fear Factor. I’m sorry it happened and I hope his convictions are either overturned or his sentences are reduced to time served. But as a libertine prude I think it’s equally inexcusable to call what he was convicted for “porn,” let alone “hard core” porn.

[* And by the way don’t you have to be at least a little bit mainstream to lump anal sex together with urolagnia and vomerophilia? Even on a Tampa jury? Or was Ashley Blue misquoted?

And an update: Lynn Gazzis-Sax, who’s post takes up the issue of “free speech” vs “workplace safety” makes a point that vomiting as opposed to anal sex differ in terms of worker-safety: “Terri Schiavo didn’t wind up in a coma by having butt sex; she wound up in a coma by having bulimia, and vomiting her electrolytes out of balance. Big difference between something that’s just a (rather large) minority sexual taste, and something that’s actually unsafe.” Interesting. Again it’s not knocking people with a vomiting fetish, and definitely not excusing anyone in Florida which isn’t exactly workplace friendly anyway. It’s just pointing the amusingly prim conflation of very different acts. —fl]

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The public closet: hiding one's desires in plain sight

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2007-10-29 13:45

Have you ever noticed how much homophobia hurts straight people?

Susie Bright succinctly nails the elephant in the bluestocking/purity/abstinence/“anti-sex” school of conservatism.

...[t]he painful closet cases who hide behind “purity pledges” and the threat of “porn addiction” as a way to keep anyone from seeing that they’re queer, and as horny, as any other human being.

Read the quote in context here.

The list of crimes committed when conservatives finally crack, from fairly humorous wide stances to starkly tragic sexual abuse of custodial minors, is well known and much discussed. And perpetual charges of hypocrisy leveled against the stands taken, especially, by the most egregious transgressors are a (sadly when you think about it) provoke familiar streams of progressive punditry.

Less frequently discussed are the benefits such sanctimony brings to people who would otherwise be excluded: the closeted gay men and lesbians of conservative faith to name only one. How much easier to crusade against sex in general when the sex you might otherwise be expected/allowed to have turns your stomach anyway?

We can continue keeping people trapped in their closets and miserable about their sexual desires (or lack thereof — asexuality is also a much-maligned orientation) such that they use anti-sex social levers to make everyone miserable. Or…

Look, those of us who are straight but not narrow sometimes forget that homophobia doesn’t just affect non-heterosexuals: when driven there by others who are less tolerant, some may head for the closet, and some may head for the coasts, but some too head for pulpits, lecterns, legislatures, and courts to take it out on the rest of us. In other words homophobia isn’t not just someone else’s problem that we can opt in or opt out of as time permits.

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