In comments to an earlier post Tony Comstock said

The models, the styling, the photography, and all the other production elements in porn are never up to the alllussions to glamour that porn is forever making. Playboy? Sure, they’ve got bucks (at least the magazine does) but they don’t show pink. Penthouse? Back in the day, when they had real advertisers to pay the bills. But the rest? Third tier lingerie catalog looks better.

Bug when you take the Abby Winters/GND approach, suddenly the one precious thing you do have, a beautiful woman with her legs open, gets a chance to actually be seen. She’s not being made to look foolish by failing so far short of the ideals of a Victoria’s secret model in a production that falls short too. You can just see her for what she is, beautiful and naked.

First of all I agree that one good rule of pornography should be that you only ask the model to do what he or she would be willing to do for free, though perhaps not so publically.

But secondly, the observation about Playboy vs. “girls next door” reminded me of a study conducted a few years ago that said as men age their “feminine ideal” changes as well. I don’t remember the details (and a quick Google didn’t turn up an answer) but the gist was that (at the time of the survey) very young men were most attracted to examples of extreme femininity such as Pamela Anderson while in their twenties (or thirties?) they were drifting towards more a more nuanced though still vivid ideal along the lines of (I think Demi Moore) and then in their thirties (or forties?) they preferred girl-next-door types like (I think) Sandra Bullock.

If that’s so (I can’t find a citation so I could be mistaken) then it may be incorrect to simply state that industrial porn could be “fixed” by focusing more on ordinary people. Instead that fix would affect only consumers in my particular demographic. (Also if this is true then we have to be careful not to simply brand as “crap” that which simply doesn’t appeal to us.)

If the research is correct then we have to think about a couple of things

1) For different age groups what is the “meaning” sought in the imagery. Thinking back to my own teenage years answers could range from “didn’t know any better” to “seeking idealized stereotypes at the tail-end of identity formation” and all the way to “incest-avoidance reflex steering me away from women too similar to people I actually knew.” Oh yeah, and there’s always “since girls my age tended to go for men who were older, and since younger girls weren’t old enough to fool around, and since I was a fairly typical ungrounded pimply-faced youth I had no actual contact with women and thus wasn’t able to form a basis in reality.” :-)

2) For different age groups assess whether the one-size-fits-all approach of industrial pornographers is effective and whether better category segmentation might lead to better overall satisfaction. Similarly it might be helpful to examine older demographics to see whether any tendency to prefer extreme acts and imagery (multiple penetration, extreme surgical enhancement, violence or non-consensual degradation) in older men might be the result of misplaced focus. In other words if the same old Barbie look isn’t working maybe the answer is to seek a different form of pornography rather than more extreme versions of the form that no longer works.

3) For pornographers the challenge might involve finding suitable subjects. Generally speaking, for instance, older and more established men are less likely to join the military so recruiters tend to focus on just-out-of-school types. Similarly, older and more established women may be less inclined to pick up a few hundred bucks for an afternoon photo shoot, or a few thousand bucks for a multi-day video production. Industrial pornographers may thus be limited by the availability models and actresses, whether they’re aware of the Lee->Moore->Bullock spectrum of preference or not.

Thus the grammar of porn may require the employment of models that are best suited only to entry-level (“hardbody”) and much older (girl-next-door) customers, leaving big gaps in between to be filled by weird substitutions.

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I’m not saying I’m right, end of story here. I do think something along these lines is going on and I need help clarifying it. The point is that, fetish outliers not withstanding, there are large, probably age-related demograpic preferences that might not be finding suitable types of porn and are compensating by substituting less fulfilling and thus less “normal” alternatives. The benefit of clarifying the categories, I think, might be a reduction in the outlandish/extreme requirements that are sometimes placed on models, actors, and actresses.

Comments are more than welcome!