Oh yeah, following up on an earlier post about the way YouPorn.com and other free are undercutting industrial pornographers, here’s a fascinating example of the kind of high-quality non-traditional amateur/art pornography.
What’s interesting about it is that it’s light-hearted, pretty clearly non-coerced, mockingly aware of the tropes of industrial porn including risk, exploitation, and misogyny, and also its seemingly endless obsession with “facials.” And yet it’s definitely pornography with nudity, fellatio, and what might or might not be actual ejaculations and intercourse.
I found the film short thanks to Violet Blue of tiny nibbles who first saw it at Seattle’s amateur porn competition HUMP, about which she said
t was really interesting to see such an open call for porn, by the people, for the people, under the guarantee of anonymity, and see the results. The ideas and interpretations of porn were all over the place — beautiful and arty, way too arty like a Calvin Klein commercial, scary swinger Renfaire in the tract home come fetish porn, full-on scripted shorts, animated shorts, montages of stills set to music — some of these things were shockingly well done. Like the second place winner, which blew my mind: Getting a Leg Up In Porn is a laugh-out-loud hilarious black and white homage to 16mm documentary/short instructional/industrial films, where the female protagonist is warned about the pitfalls of a career in porn in order to be successful. It’s crazy-funny watching her practice for facials with a squirt gun and mayonnaise packets… among many other super-smart satirical scenarios based on porn’s S&P’s.
One other subtle jab at industrial porn is the format itself. At least if you’ve had entry-level, say, food-handling, fishing, or shipping jobs in Washington State then chances are you’ve been subjected to Washington State Department of Labor and Industries films just like the one parodied in this video. The irony that a similar safety film for entry-level industrial porn performers wouldn’t really be that far fetched should not be lost on anyone.
Anyway, one of the hallmarks of the original YouTube is that over time it’s evolved from a site that simply hosted rehashed commercial programming and do-it-yourself stupid pet tricks to a genuinely startling, often better than real television resource for everything from freely-generated first-aid education to breaking-news, on-the-scene muckraking. Amateur entries like “Getting a Leg Up in Porn” represent the sort of creativity that might be unleashed when people finally give up on the vast industrial wasteland that is contemporary DVD-based short-format porn.
Submitted by 1691 (not verified) on Fri, 2007-10-19 22:02.
That's awesome. It's not really porn in that I don't think you could use it for serious heavy-duty arousal or masturbation, but it's sexually explicit and it's awesome and that's awesome.
[Agreed that you couldn't get off on that one, but the way it vividly breaks the mold of porn, in so many ways, while actually *still being porn* suggests that way more creative erotic possibilities might be available outside the commercial enterprise of porn. Thanks, Holly. --fl]