Porn: Classic or Dud?

Personal opinion: Nasty industry, dud.

Honey Glass is One of Us, also

Can't understand it myself: badly-drawn bald Buddha-boy in a dress? Rowr.

Ah, the things people will do to provide content for faithful site visitors...

x0x0

x0x0

Norman Fay

l3g0 Pro|\| !z

xoxo

That is all.

"undeniably compelling."

yep. youd think it wouldnt be seeing as it seems to be so easily available now, but it still is. i wonder if there will come a point when porn reaches saturation point and people start to internally revolt against it.

yeah at some point masturbation will have to lose it's 'cool' image.

I'll quit once I've d/l'ed a terabyte...

touchyschlongerMk2

Off topic, probably, but I just saw John Stagliano's Fashionistas the Show in Vegas and it was pretty amazingly great. The porno it's based on is the only one I own, but the live show was a real work of art, and sexy without even nudity.

I think porn's waiting for an even bigger crossover--a great porn actor who can also act, and directors who actually want actors to act--but it hasn't happened yet. (Though Belladonna could maybe learn some chops.) Still, the Vegas show was some kind of crossover: Into dance and Cirque territory, but really funny, too. And obvioiusly not on the national hipster radar at all...

OMG there is a stage show of Fashionistas? MUST SEE.

Though I don't know how they'd fill in things like Bella getting fucked, and other fucking and sex and etc.

Bullshit, porn isn't crossing over, it's colonizing everything else. It doesn't need to cross over to the mainstream; the mainstream is crossing over to it.

And I'm suprised you never had a night out with yer friends where the one guy brought a dirty movie. I thought that was a pretty much universal experience.

I had that experience with Poison Ivy 2 and three other dudes in 9th grade. It wasn't even a straight up porno, which was kind of disappointing, but things did get heated, and about 3/4 through one of the dudes said "Uh, I have to go to the bathroom" and started laughing really hard, and then was away for about 10 minutes. I wish someone would have instructed us that we should have been drinking Busch Light and trying to make jokes the whole time, because watching it in near silence was really strange.

Well sheeeit

Tracer with a before-its-time Wire reference. Nice.

So I've quit porn. Partly because a lot of it is gross and makes sex seem unappealing, partly because I felt it was kind of numbing my sex drive and my imagination, and partly as a kind of experiment to see if it would improve my relationship. In the week since I quit (and told my wife I was quitting), we've had some of the most honest talks we've ever had and begun working on a lot of things we'd been avoiding. Whether that's correlation or causation I don't know. Anyone else ever try quitting?

:'( I've always enjoyed your scenes.

ha

Was this provoked by yr wife at all? What are her feelings about porn? Does she partake?

In the week since I quit (and told my wife I was quitting), we've had some of the most honest talks we've ever had and begun working on a lot of things we'd been avoiding.

How much porn were you consuming?

Yr post makes it seem like loads! Not that that would be bad, of course. Just wondering.

one of my bros did because his wife haaaaated it.

The policy at my house is essentially don't ask, don't tell, and be sure to cover your tracks.

lol clear history

HAHA!

I hate porn, it's boring and gross. Of course I watch it but still.

Although my favorite was when I was ctrl-F'ing an ILX thread for "anal cunt," and then the next day my girlfriend said there was something she wanted to talk to me about.

anal cunt?

haha

hah! did you have to show her on the internet how its a band

my friend's brother saw me reading kenan's "flaccid penis but hard at root" thread and was all O_O

Ctrl F thing is hysterical

I wish I had remained in the dark regarding Kenan's flacid penis post. :-(

I texted my friend offering him a blowjob if he would lend me his VB reference. Went to my brother-in-law by accident.

My penis is very root with me. What should I do?

when you clear your history it is 934754 times more obvious what you've been up to!

Hello.

xp Yeah, there's more to it than that.

I'll quit once I've d/l'ed a terabyte...

-- snoball, Sunday, 18 November 2007 14:38 (6 months ago) Bookmark Link

I've actually exceeded that now. I still d/l, but the desire to do so is waning.

safari has a porn specific feature called private browsing

private browsing!

love it!

haha wow

as a 12-14 y/o i mastered the art of selective history cleansing

i don't know, i'm not gonna check my history normally, but it's obvious when it just disappears. also i don't care as long as it's not something really lame.

i believe many girls would think standard porn is 'really lame'

Stuff like 'redhead shemale' searches are just amusing.

http://images.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/11/15/townsend/story.jpg
"its for research purposes"

What pr0n did you ditch exactly, Hurting?

a) 60s/70s sweet innocent (and hairy) porn
b) 90s/00s (eg. nowadays) porn which is bling/hardcore/plastic surgery/emotionless
c) youporn/redtube and the likes: amateur porn

If it's b), I can understand, totally. It's gross and a waste of time. As for a) and sometimes c) as well, it's not gross at all to me, but can be fun/arousing/interesting, stimulating the imagination more than killing it. Not just for me alone, it can be an interesting topic of discussion with my girl.
Do the good talks you've had with your partner after your decision include porn itself? Did you talk about this with him/her? Or was it the abandonment of porn that spawned a somewhat 'purified' feeling? Question being: is it, or was it ever, debatable?

also i don't care as long as it's not something really lame.

i want to know what qualifies as really lame

http://www.avclub.com/content/files/images/savage_11.jpg

haha yes

that a/b/c breakdown is totally otm.

also Hurting I congratulate you on your honesty.

Le Bateau Ivre, you missed out 80's porn.

I guess I did, entirely!

What's that like? Pink stockings, hair bands and the likes? ;)

Big 80's hair, crappy video camera technology, vague attempts at plot, general feeling of dissatisfaction.

The clumsiness of it all sadly makes it slightly appealing to me. It's as bad as 80s hair metal isn't it?

I mean, anyone who feels nostalgic for the 80's should go and watch some random 80's pr0n, and in no time at all they'll be glad they live in the 21st century.

I think only the 80s could give us something as goofily awesome as "Sex Asylum 3: The Search For The Big Bamboo".

Do they end up finding it?

Yeah, but it got into mainstream acting and did the Ramboo films

(xxpost) I would like to refer readers to that "clown porn" thread from a few days ago...

80's softcore porn is the best. Playtime with Monique Parent is the masterpiece of the genre.

Play time is from 1994: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110846/

But kudoos for Monique Parent vividly posting on her own fanboard:

"The answer is no. We were not really masturbating. But yes, our hands WERE in our bikini bottoms, and yes, there really is nowhere else to put your hand once it's down inside a bikini bottom so in effect we were....but without intent, so we weren't. Does that make any sense"
http://www.uniquemonique.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

i guess really lame would be like...a paid burning angel membership

xp
Heheh - I'm shocked - it looks like the 80s! And has all this...

Big 80's hair, crappy video camera technology, vague attempts at plot, general feeling of dissatisfaction

It's also funny though.

It is! As his girlfriend I'd totally forgive Hurting for watching it every now and so ;)
Speaking of which... I'd like to see the brave man return to this thread!

I don't really understand getting overly upset about porn unless the guy is spending hours every single day watching it or is into something really bizarre and/or offensive.

xxxpost haha paid membership to any porn site = lame

yeah i'm fine with it as long as it's free.

yeh if you can't find good free porn but are still watching it you aren't trying hard enough

Someone is going to make a Gates mint one day figuring out how to make comedy porn that's actually funny.

"ironic porn purchase leads to unironic ejaculation"

ironic lil wayne cd purchase leads to unironic ejaculation

Well, I wasn't hiding it from my wife, and she tolerated it but wasn't really crazy about me looking at it, especially the more hardcore stuff. But my decision to stop was totally my own - just out of the blue one day said "Hey, I've decided to quit looking at porn." As far as how much I was looking at it - not enough to interfere with work or responsibilities or anything but enough that I felt like it was kind of dulling my sex drive and imagination. And something had also just become depressing and lifeless and compulsive about the experience itself - clicking through dozens of clips, looking for the exact right cumshot, etc. And in part I just wanted to try quitting as an experiment, and so far I like the effects, although it hasn't been that long.

(note, I made clear that this does not mean I'm quitting wanking)

GOOD ON YA

there are some sites that give hope (ifeelmyself etc), but then again , i only like that site after becoming boed with 80s / 90s hardcore stuff. as someone that grew up with magazines, i'm interested in how 80s kids think about their pron v. sex habits...?

I don't need porn. I just undress, arrange my games, guns and ammo on my bed and I take pictures while posing with them.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/06/at-least-16-previously-unpublicized-hiv-cases-in-porn-film-performers-public-health-officials-say.html

:/

'i used to have dialogue'

I have a really weird relationship with pron. On the one hand I totally defend anyone watching it and I also read about it, but watching it seems less interesting to me. I will once or twice watch a shitload of clips (per year) but after that I stop for a year or so. Overall though I am not really that fascinated by the pron itself, but I have a keen interest in the discussion.

Alson Joey Stefano=/ Joe Delassandro. Christ, I thought the former was Dellassandro so I picked up his bio. hahahahahahahahaha My fatigue resulted in reading about a gay porn star (who appeared in Madonna's Sex book!). Not that bad really. Well, the bio was, but still an interesting read somehow.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1293165/Nanny-30-died-sexual-arousal-watching-pornography.html

A 30-year-old woman's death as she used a sex toy while watching pornography was probably due to her state of sexual excitement, an inquest heard today.
Children's nanny Nichola Paginton was found dead in bed naked from the waist down last October with pornographic material running on her laptop. A sex toy was discovered next to her.
A Home Office pathologist told the inquest in Gloucester that Miss Paginton died from a sudden heart arrhythmia, probably brought on by her state of arousal.
Gloucestershire coroner Alan Crickmore agreed it was likely that 'her activity before death' contributed to the fatal arrhythmia.
The inquest heard that Miss Paginton, of Cirencester, was found dead in October last year.
Detective Sergeant Gavin Webb said police had been called by her employer Sarah Griffiths who had visited Miss Paginton's home when she failed to turn up for work.
When there was no reply at the door she enlisted the help of neighbour Michelle Grant and they saw Miss Paginton through the curtains, lying on her bed with her cat lying on her chest.
'After they broke in they realised Miss Paginton was dead,' said Sgt Webb. 'She had a computer on her lap and when they moved it and lifted the duvet, they found she was naked from the waist down and there was a vibrator in the bed.
'The laptop was still displaying pornographic material.'
Home office pathologist Dr Richard Jones from the University of Cardiff said: 'There is nothing to explain why she died in this way but I suspect sudden cardiac death.'
Returning a verdict of death from natural causes, Mr Crickmore said: 'I am satisfied Nichola Paginton died of a natural disease process - sudden cardiac arryhthmia.
'It is not always possible to determine an exact cause of death but it is likely that her activity before death contributed towards it.

'so sad, lets tell everyone'

"ironic porn purchase leads to unironic ejaculation"

― Jordan

Ironic ejaculation: your sperm looks less like a comma and more like a quotation mark

porn: classic or DEATH!

William Donaldson died the same way, except it seemed sort of awesome and appropriate in his case.

In Austin, in the mid 90's there were a lot of photographers trying to get porn (their own, original work) on discs to sell at a few shops in town. I worked ten hours a day at a place across from the train tracks on the east side of town, before it was gentrified, with one of the more successful pornographers. He did videos and photographs and operated an online website. I helped with scenery, costumes and set design for the videos and lighting and posing the more inexperienced models for photographs. It was really interesting job, sometimes. I was in my early 20's and was happy with the pay and that lunch and dinner was always provided and we could pick take-out from any place in town.

What sucked was how the actors and models were talked about when they came in. They were just bodies and their bodies were under heavy scrutiny all the time. A woman came in once and no matter what we did with the lighting or the angles there was always too much cellulite for my boss. He kept talking about her and her flaws as if she didn't exist. At one point he said she couldn't even pass for sexy in the amateur videos he would stage. I saw that she was ready to just cry and gave her a robe. All that criticism and then naked on a rug. My boss then said good idea, paid her for an hour and told her he couldn't use her. UGH! There were plenty of desperate men and women who were willing to do anything for not much money. I stuck with the job until my boss closed shop to move to California. It is hard to watch porn and not think of a set up like the one I worked at. It has served to ruin porn for me and I do notice the lighting and sets and the high thigh area where my boss would say shows a woman's age more than anything.

Lack of marketing acumen, imho. Rule 28 etc...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/13/free-trade-organic-porn-on-the-hunt-for-ethical-smut.html

i think in sweden the government subsidizes feminist porn. this seems like a good idea to me. there's no reason for sexists to dictate what our culture's erotica looks like.

There are some really smart women in porn - read some interviews with Taormino (Thomas Pynchon's niece!), Camille Crimson - but when the curtain is pulled on any sort of so-called "feminist" porn collectives time and again we hear the same stories of abuse and mistreatment. It's such a delicate line, I suppose, given what drives so many performers to porn in the first place. It takes a certain strength to go down that road, but a certain wounded weakness to set you on that path. I imagine that any female-run companies treat their female performers a lot better than the male equivalents, though of course a lot of the women on the business side of the business have seen the other side and are trying to counter their own experiences.

I wonder if I'm developing a porn addiction. I've been watching it more than ever – almost every day – and feel more compelled to do so. On the other hand, I feel more comfortable with it, and enjoy it, more than ever, versus the time when shame and self-criticism stopped me from it. I'm not, and have never been, in a relationship or having sex with anyone, but not out of a lack of serious desire for both of those things, so it's not getting in the way of my life, but I can't imagine this indefinite cycle of porn and compulsive masturbation is good for me (possibly including my ability to pursue intimate relationships with people).

I don't know why I'm writing this here, since I'm already seeing a sex therapist, but my health plan is nearly out of psychotherapy money, so maybe I just want to verbalize my problems. Anyways, tell me about all your borderline addictive porn habits.

you said you don't feel like it's getting in the way of your life, but you are worried it is impacting your ability to pursue intimacy & relationships? what's your therapists take on what you've been talking about w/ them?

EDB, if you have never been in a relationship or had sex at all, focusing on porn may be a cart-before-horse thing imo. It may be that fear or something else is stopping you from pursuing the relationships and porn is a crutch.

Especially if you've only come to feel addicted to porn recently but have avoided or not pursued intimate relationships for a longer time.

fwiw i think "addiction" is a fraught term when used to describe sexual behavior, there was a period in my life when i identified as a "sex addict" and felt like a 12-step/addiction model of approaching sex/porn was helpful for me but i really don't feel that way anymore. it took a number of years of therapy and hard work to figure out what healthy sexuality meant for me and i now feel like the addiction model is really damaging. i know a number of people who do find it helpful but i just don't think sexuality is the same as drugs or alcohol. growing up in a sexually repressed catholic family had a lot to do w/ shame i felt about various aspects of my sexuality and the addiction model was a convenient way of dealing with that shame but ultimately didn't work. i think there are a lot of conversations worth having about the effect of porn on our lives but really i dont see porn as a wholly negative thing. if you are enjoying it and feel like it is a healthy sexual expression for you then i'd be wary of describing yourself as an addict.

Good point. If I can expand on that? Addiction has a medical definition. It's also a useful word to grab for in order to name, and so make a start on tackling, various other types of problem, that are not addiction in the official medical sense. Especially if that problem resembles medical addiction in one or more ways. However, the things you'd do to beat an addiction might not help you with an 'addiction'.

I'm not, and have never been, in a relationship or having sex with anyone, but not out of a lack of serious desire for both of those things, so it's not getting in the way of my life, but I can't imagine this indefinite cycle of porn and compulsive masturbation is good for me (possibly including my ability to pursue intimate relationships with people).

^ Here I've struck out the bits of what you said that seemed less important, and left what seemed to be the key point (to my eyes). I have no pro qualification whatsoever and this is just my take on it, one person's.

how old are you, edb? i think marcos is kind of otm about addiction/sexual behavior. i think there are red flags, if it goes beyond jerking off and watching a lot of porn and you're getting into dangerous/compulsive behavior around it, like looking at illegal things or sinking money you can't afford into watching girls in eastern europe suck on stuff.

looking at porn is one of my earliest memories. i was about four years old and i can still remember pages of the magazine, the smell of my parents bedroom, the smell of the magazine, the light in the room. actually, lots of vivid memories of porn. i can still remember pages i cut out of magazines, folded up, put in my top drawer, the smell of the medicinal ointment i received for some skin condition on my ankles and that i used to beat off with. i can remember scenes downloaded from limewire over a decade ago. there were times when i'd spend maybe an hour looking at porn but it was... still okay, i think? the, like, worldview of the porn i was consuming was no worse, i think, than what you'd find in an updike novel or a z-ro album. still look at pornography maybe every day or every couple days, but it's become more utilitarian, find a video, thirty seconds, beat off, and maybe "academic," where i check xhamster 7 days most viewed/commented out of interest in the same way i keep up on literature or whatever by reading like the paris review blog. internet porn is a topic that i know a lot about. i've watched thousands of hours of pornography. i don't have any shame about it and i don't think it's fucked up my relationships with women, which have been kind of fucked up but always due to other things.

lol i remember reading some bob mould interview about his first experience using the internet, here i found it

Bob Mould

Do you remember your first time using the internet?

Yes

Where were you?

My office in Austin, Texas

How did you access it?

AOL 14.4K

What did you search for?

Porn

What was your first impression?

Slow

otm imo

http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9520-our-bandwidth-could-be-your-life/

i don't have a ton of pre-internet memories, though the ones i do have are super vivid definitely. i remember feeling like really nervous hanging out w/ a friend who had a bunch of playboys he took from his dad, and some matchbooks he had w/ nudes on them lol

i like the story about the guy getting obsessed with 19th century awls. and much respect to owen pallett for his serious old school cred.

my dad loved porn. loved loved loved. this was pre-internet, and in fact he could never get a computer to work right because the first thing he did when he got on the internet was look for pregnant rubber nuns and get his computer full of all kinds of viruses.

so he spent money on it, which i've only done once in my life (a friend came over with japan with some hentai, which was a novelty back then, so i bought one of those off him). i'm perversely proud of not spending money on porn, though i'm not sure exactly why i should be. he had all kinds of catalogs come to his house under assumed names, which kept going for years and years after he left. we would look through the catalogs and laugh at the bizarre stuff they had in there.

occasionally he would, either through guilt or just being sick of clutter, junk his porn. one of my brothers has a story about taking a trip to visit him and spending the whole trip throwing out his old pornography.

i wasn't sure what i would find when i went to visit the home he was staying at after he died, but he kept things pretty light. no porn. just a railway catalog, a couple bibles, and a copy of "spanish for dummies". he'd found jesus a couple months before, but one never knows what that means. i guess it's more that the circumstances he was living under didn't give him the opportunity for clutter.

i get nostalgic for porn of the past. i don't know, maybe i just like old shit, when i was young i was listening to all that classic rock so i guess it makes sense that i'd be into '70s porn. which actually reminds me that i did pay for porn one other time, i bought this giant box set of the old "something weird" porn loops. they came on dvd-rs and a bunch of them won't rip but i don't really watch them, or much of anything, anyway.

but i also get nostalgic for the old porn sites, the sort that were just set up by one or two weirdo entrepeneurial types and had 640x480 pictures. by today's standards they look like shit, but i can't relate to any of the kids today and their approach towards sex. i'm kind of sad that those things are all gone now. nobody has anything remotely like an archival approach to old porn like they do towards, like, aphex twin. i guess that's the future of all the present, when the curatorial instinct fades, just random unlabelled pictures popping up on tumblr or wherever.

what i miss most though is just being able to talk about sex, openly and honestly. maybe you still can and i've just become old and repressed, but being honest on the internet seems a lot more dangerous than it used to be. all the crap i said twenty years ago, nobody cares, nobody will care unless i somehow get mega-famous, which, spoiler alert, isn't going to happen.

When I was a teenager in the mid/late '90s, the sites with stills or short clips of movie nudity were mind-blowing. Showgirls and the movie where Neve Campbell and Denise Richards make out topless and etc.. The filthiest stuff I was exposed to was via Penthouse Forum, so the orgies and stuff were written rather visual and looking back relatively tame. I don't think I even saw filmed penetration until the Pamela/Tommy Lee video.

I can't imagine being a 14-year old boy in this environment.

"sinking money you can't afford into watching girls in eastern europe suck on stuff."

ha, that Wild Things scene is very much a generational touchstone, isn't it? I think you could also mention Anna Nicole Smith in Playboy to men my age and you'd definitely get a reaction.

I taught a few short stories last spring with some explicit sexual material in them, to 19 year olds. they seemed less impressed with this than I was...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/making-sense-of-modern-pornography

every time i read something like this i always come away feeling like for something which is undeniably a huge part of our contemporary lives (arguably a far bigger part than other forms of "culture" for which we have endless thinkpieces and trend spotting) there's comparatively little said about it--seemingly so little to be said about it. it's like the dark matter of culture, or the iceberg under the water line.

what a weird article. why was it written? felt like the writer got a very broad brief to write "about porn" and make it a certain number of words

I wonder a lot how much culture conditions boys to be obsessed with nudity vs how much of it is just "innate" or whatever. I mean I remember stealing the victoria's secret catalogs that came to my house when I was 11/12, even the National Geographics if they had topless women from some amazon tribe or something. I have a strong early adolescent memories is getting the measles on vacation and getting to stay in the hotel room and watch Lethal Weapon 2 (or maybe the original, that part I'm not sure of), and the excitement at just getting a few-second flash of breasts in a sex scene, and thinking that the breasts looked pointier than I expected.

I guess I mean that the level of obsession I had probably would not be brooked by a lack of internet porn, in fact maybe it would have been worse for longer.

i can't remember the entire argument, but there's a bit in Julian Jaynes' "Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (one of my favorite books but also possibly/likely 100% fanciful) where he theorizes that humans are the most sexually obsessed of all animals (which only seem to care about it during breeding periods) and that this obsession emerged at the same time as human consciousness. (this is a distinct idea from saying we fuck all the time, it's more that we think about it all the time...)

slightly less fancifully, you might look to Foucault's notion that sexuality as a kind of constant cultural obsession began much later. the idea being that the increased attention to sexuality was hand-in-hand with the emergence of modernity--and i guess you could say that the saturation of pornography is the culmination of that.

I guess I mean that the level of obsession I had probably would not be brooked by a lack of internet porn, in fact maybe it would have been worse for longer.

I have this vague idea that having to work harder to get hold of their porn (secret glimpses of playboy, sneaking into adult movie theatres etc) may have made teenage boys of yesteryear slightly less entitled when it came to real sex, but I don't know if there's anything in that.

new yorker article wasn't v good imo, apart from talking a little about mindgeek and the tube site near-monopoly it really could've been written in 2005? though i guess it was also a book review?

every time i read something like this i always come away feeling like for something which is undeniably a huge part of our contemporary lives (arguably a far bigger part than other forms of "culture" for which we have endless thinkpieces and trend spotting) there's comparatively little said about it--seemingly so little to be said about it. it's like the dark matter of culture, or the iceberg under the water line.

― ryan, Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:26 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but yea ryan i totally agree, it is kind of weird to see things with like 157,000,000 views on a tube site and it's one of many with view counts in the millions and yet porn isn't really talked about at all in casual conversation, i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about but the fact that it is core part of our media culture but not really outwardly acknowldged is weird

what a weird article. why was it written? felt like the writer got a very broad brief to write "about porn" and make it a certain number of words

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:52 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i mean it like talked about "we're not in the golden age anymore" "dozens of porn categories exist now" "amateur and amateur-style production has proliferated" "oh look there is some 'ethical' porn too like the organic food movement" but didn't really do much of anything as an article that hasn't been said in the past 10-15 years

also i don't really understand her saying "the porn industry is in decline" ... the industry is changing obv and it is a different industry than 70s-90s but ... there is a porn industry that has millions and millions of consumers ... it is not in decline

i don't really understand her saying "the porn industry is in decline" ... the industry is changing obv and it is a different industry than 70s-90s but ... there is a porn industry that has millions and millions of consumers ... it is not in decline

The industry is definitely in decline. If 90 percent of those millions and millions of consumers are getting the product for free, you're in trouble. And this isn't just trouble for the production companies; it's a problem for the performers, whose pay rates have gone down sharply. Getting your Twitter followers to buy you things from your Amazon wish list isn't gonna make up for that.

^ And the point about how they increasingly do other sex work to supplement the money they get from filming

^ And the point about how they increasingly do other sex work to supplement the money they get from filming

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Thursday, September 22, 2016 3:53 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hasn't that been the case for a long time though?

Could be? I got the impression from the article that there was a period like so -

The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors.

where they were full time doing porn, could be wrong tho

the piece doesn't mention it but one thing there's been a huge rise in, what with higher quality cameras and broadband etc, is 'cam' stuff. which is to say amateur (and some times pro) performers doing personalised scenes live on camera for $10 a pop or whatever. i mean i'm guessing that barely existed a decade ago. i'd imagine that's where a lot of this is all heading; people paying the performers direct for one-to-one stuff based specifically around what they want to see. it all seems pretty healthy and safe too. i mean comparatively.

yeah um I've heard from a friend that cam sites are popular these days

i've never gone to a cam site, they kind of weird me out tbh

i've never gone to a cam site, they kind of weird me out tbh

Agreed. (I've never been to a strip club either.)

ha me neither

Doing porn to drive your escorting fees is the new touring because Napster stole all your sales?

I used to buy a lot of magazines but I haven't bought anything in years. It's hard enough to keep up with the sample photo material and the constant flow of revelatory new models so I never feel like getting anything because I just don't have the time and I'm extremely wary of online payment methods for porn sites because there's always stories of fraud, sometimes even the porn sites not working or fulfilling their end. I'd like to buy magazines but the remaining ones have photography that I really dislike. I wish there more photo ebooks on amazon because I'd go for that.

A lot of models are going for webcam shows and custom clips so they've got more control and can do everything from home. Recently heard of some making their clips for streaming on the website only, to try fighting piracy and of course it's annoying buyers who want to keep the clips.

I find online porn browsing more depressing than ever because it's increasingly reflecting the worst part of the audience. Models constantly trying to defend themselves from trolls, arrogantly entitled thieves and stalkers (and you get to see it all unfold on forums, blogs, tumblr, twitter, instagram, youtube). In the custom clips there's a lot of racism and really cruel fantasies that a lot of those same models wouldn't be doing several years ago.
I think a decade ago there used to be a much better standard of conduct on forums and blogs. There may have been sexism but at least there were a lot more old guys who believed in acting like a gentleman.

Are most of these trolls younger guys?

nobody has anything remotely like an archival approach to old porn

I think it's safe to say the following things about porn aimed at straight men, which is to say most porn:

1. A comfortable majority of it is, to one degree or another, overtly misogynistic in what it depicts and how it depicts it.
2. Associating overtly misogynistic imagery with sexual pleasure probably has some kind of negative effect on the person who does it, especially when they start doing it at a young age.
3. Given that it produces a largely misogynistic product, it stands to reason that the porn industry is, to put it mildly, not generally kind to the women who work in it (and plenty of anecdotes bear this out).

In light of this, I think straight men (myself included) would do well to stay away from porn as much as possible.

the piece doesn't mention it but one thing there's been a huge rise in, what with higher quality cameras and broadband etc, is 'cam' stuff. which is to say amateur (and some times pro) performers doing personalised scenes live on camera for $10 a pop or whatever.

also a lot of customized and very niche stuff on sites like clips4sale.com . that seems to be the new angle

1. A comfortable majority of it is, to one degree or another, overtly misogynistic in what it depicts and how it depicts it.

Is there a compelling explanation for why this is so? Is it because it is so underground, like people feel guilty about their sexuality anyway so they end up associating guilt with eroticism and seeking out material that violates their sense of decency? Or is there some other reason? Maybe I don't want to know the answer to this question but ryan's right -- porn has a huge reach but it somehow evades the kind of critical scrutiny television and movies get.

think of how many porn movies devolve into the female receiving some form of punishment from a guy in a position of power and her just going along w/ it

those could also just be Eli Roth movies

one of the fastest rising genres even in the mainstream is female domination of men. there's an absolute ton of that stuff covering all manner of fetishes, all of it about humiliation and degradation. it may not be a 2 way street and hey i've no desire to get into MRA style 'but what about'-ery but it's certainly starting to cut both ways.

pegging to the oldies

I think it's safe to say the following things about porn aimed at straight men, which is to say most porn:

1. A comfortable majority of it is, to one degree or another, overtly misogynistic in what it depicts and how it depicts it.
2. Associating overtly misogynistic imagery with sexual pleasure probably has some kind of negative effect on the person who does it, especially when they start doing it at a young age.
3. Given that it produces a largely misogynistic product, it stands to reason that the porn industry is, to put it mildly, not generally kind to the women who work in it (and plenty of anecdotes bear this out).

In light of this, I think straight men (myself included) would do well to stay away from porn as much as possible.

― JRN, Friday, 23 September 2016 00:21 (twenty-two minutes ago) Permalink

this kind of argument is cart-before-the-horse and just replicates repression under a different moral code imo. male superiority / female inferiority is a default worldview that shapes every part of life. of course the compartmentalized little fantasy spaces we allow ourselves for sexual imagination are going to draw from that. it doesn't follow that we should cut off those spaces. the source of misogyny enters the picture way before this, and i don't buy that porn does a lot to reinforce it. i think if anything it tends to suggest possibilities that might lead away from misogyny, even though they're rarely explored by creators or consumers. but mainly i don't think porn is much of a force for anything, it's just a sedimentary layer.

a related thought about why it's discussed so little, it's kind of like talking shop about some industry or profession, maybe. there's nothing really to say about it except that it does what it does, there are different trends in the market, bla bla. there isn't some profound hidden effect, it changes with the culture, and it's just another topic to organize a professional convention around.

"the source of misogyny enters the picture way before this, and i don't buy that porn does a lot to reinforce it."

!!! For real?

I'm somewhere in between JRN and map on this. The problem with most articles on porn, and most analysis of porn, is that it focuses (unsurprisingly) on the largest porn industry, which is in the US, and takes that for the whole. Also, it takes the highest-profile stuff, and takes that for the whole, with some token nods to fetish material or "feminist" porn along the way, but always treating those like the exception that proves the rule.

(Note for those who don't know: I worked in the porn industry for five years, editing a magazine. That was over a decade ago, though, and a lot has changed, obviously. The magazine I worked for didn't even have a website.)

There is a lot of misogynist/verbally and physically abusive/rape-fantasy porn out there, and/but there is a lot of "male humiliation" porn these days too. The term "cuck," which is so popular in right-wing circles these days, comes from cuckolding porn, where (usually) a meek-looking white guy watches his white "wife" get railed by a black guy.

Sorry, forgot to make my other point, which is that I would really like to see a serious, in-depth analysis of porn from other countries - not just the UK and Europe and Japan but also other parts of the world. See how it compares to US porn in terms of trends, degrees of misogyny, etc., etc.

"the source of misogyny enters the picture way before this, and i don't buy that porn does a lot to reinforce it."

!!! For real?

― scott seward, Friday, 23 September 2016 01:29 (two hours ago) Permalink

this is probably where my experience as a gay man limits my pov, but there is a lot of misogyny in gay porn too, it's just coded differently. to be honest i'm just extrapolating from my experience of eventually finding patriarchy/misogyny in porn to be really boring. you have to keep escalating it over time and eventually it's just like you can't really go any further and maybe you realize it's a farce, there's nothing there, what you're really looking for isn't there. unless you're in a really charged and traumatic environment as far as gender is concerned that is constantly reinforcing your toxic beliefs all the time, then maybe you're always pushing it further, but i mean good luck you're already part of a deranged death cult at that point anyway, porn is just a symptom of your profound illness, you should cut off everyone you know, go to the desert and trip on ayahuasca.

anyway obviously this is all extremely subjective, but i do think misogyny is this unfortunate part of the water we swim in, and that porn is a way that we encounter it in a distilled form, play around with its ramifications and the desires it emanates from, and ultimately put it in its place and move on to different territory if we have enough of a positive and non-judgmental habitat to do so.

and i don't mean to disparage JRN's take or suggest it's wrong to steer clear of porn because of misogyny, that is probably right for a lot of people. this is just my experience as someone who has undoubtedly looked at way too much porn and become numb to what looks like painfully forced projections of erotic energy most of the time.

huh so cuck is a racist term too. the more u know.

map i'm generally sympathetic to yr claim that porn is much more symptom than cause and for that reason i find strong anti-porn sentiments (in the absence of other political analysis etc) quite suspect, but i do feel there's something reciprocal going on as well. perhaps especially with boys and young men - i recall the effects of media representations of women and sex on how i thought about women even in the much tamer times of my youth and can't help but unscientifically feel that this is operating at a higher level with all the fucked up shit 2day's kids have access to. i don't think those charged and traumatic environments you mention are really so hard to come by. lots of people are in a deranged death cult, and that deranged death cult is called heteronormative masculinity. #trenchant

Boom

sigh. now we're back to the place where we were in 1985 where people talk about bdsm as if bdsm desires had to represent a generalized gender-based hostility.

i guess i understand it. back in the '80s there were these "detective magazines" that ed meese was campaigning against, and i'm not a huge ed meese fan but those things were some sick shit, and cultural trends sort of suppressed that sort of thing for a while. and now i think there's a resurgence of the sort of thinking behind them, the sort of nastiness they represented.

but the impression that gives is that there's no such thing as a decent pervert, that the way male dominants think of women, as a gender, is qualitatively different from the way male submissives think of women, as a gender, which in my experience is not really true. no fetish is inherently empowering. having a fetish for dominant women isn't any different from having a fetish for asian women. fetishes are about sexual objectification, and people need to learn to deal with the fact that this is a thing that happens and doesn't make the person with the fetish a misogynist or a rapist.

the thing about talking about the damage potentially done by porn is that we try to impose our adult values on our childhood selves, and we do a terrible job of it.

fetishes come from somewhere, sure, but this sort of hierarchy we establish of sexual material doesn't necessarily hold up from a child's point of view. look at all the people who were sexually imprinted by the "disney afternoon".

i was just reading yesterday about earthbound, and about how the whole thing comes from a childhood trauma itoi experienced. he accidentally saw a japanese crime film as a child. you watch it today and it looks kind of hokey and lame, doesn't particularly code as "pornographic". doesn't matter. was enough to scar itoi for life.

i don't know if you're addressing anyone in particular but i for one wasn't referring to bdsm or other fetishes, and certainly not trying to suggest any crude and obvious causal psychologisation of sexual preferences from childhood experiences. i'm not sure what exactly i am getting at though as indeed i do find it quite hard to detach what i'm thinking about from '80s-style sex negativity and all of the reactionary tendencies that came along with that. i suppose my starting point is knowing that during my adolescence a pornographized if not even necessarily pornographic popular image of women had real and immediate effects on how me and my peer group viewed women and it took me well into adulthood to finally (maybe) shake off those viewpoints, and i'm not sure how to translate this perspective towards thinking about modern kids but it seems of some significance

and as i say, i'm sympathetic to the notion that porn is much more symptom of society's image of sex and gender than it is cause, but i do feel that there's at least some degree of reciprocity, though how to address it i don't know

I wrote about detective magazines last year; some of it was really pretty fucked up stuff, but in a different way than you might expect:

For all the tales of thrilling adventure, though, there was a prominent dark side to the world as depicted in men’s adventure magazines, and it seemed almost entirely made up of sexual anxiety. Articles with titles like “Is Your Wife A Secret Lesbian?”, “A Psychiatrist Tells: What To Do On Your Wedding Night,” “The Truth About Those Sex Fears,” “Love Survey: How Do You Rate?”, “Losing Your Manhood? Ten Ways To Keep It,” “The Sexually Aggressive Woman—Can You Cope With Her?”, “The American Male Is No Longer A Man, Says A Woman Psychologist,” and more played on male fears that societal trends toward equality would take their women away from them, while treating impotence like the worst thing that could possibly happen to a human being.

"i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about"

the reason that it's not talked about except furtively is that if you watch porn enough to talk about it with some authority, it follows that you have masturbated to it. Although this is a fundamental activity to humankind, no one or very few wants to acknowledge having done so.

Porn has been an enormous part of my life since I was 8: the one and only thing I have ever stolen was a Playboy at that time. Penthouse & Hustler were key to me through the '80s, renting V-tapes and DVDs was huge for me in the 90s and 00s (i"m moving this weekend and made sure my collection went ahead of eveything else… and my wife) and the preponderance of tubes is…troubling. I can find any scene I ever watched and liked or any scene I've wanted to see…it takes up too much of my time for sure. I absolutely would not have known what to do with myself (chortle) were I to be 12 now, but then 12 year old boys are probly desensitized as such. the experience of female and male performers entering the field now, 18-21 years old, when they never knew a time when you could not get porn immediately, is fairly amazing to me. female performers say they loved it as teenagers…this could be true, or it could be female performers knowing what to say to turn on men who masturbate to them.

last year I went to this convention in NJ where I got to talk porn gals that I'm fans of/have J/Oed to many times. I have to say that it was was very exciting and interesting…

the big thing now is fauxcest.

I also think that porn is both a symptom and a cause of misogyny. I think mass media in general both reflects and reinforces whatever ideas are put into it. Fox News is both a symptom and a cause of reactionary sentiment, for example. And my contention that straight men would generally do well to stay away from porn is just based on the belief that the media we consume and enjoy stands to have some effect on how we behave.

It does seem to be true that kids can be disturbed by material that seems pretty mild to adults. But if anything, that strikes me providing more reason to worry about kids being exposed to porn. By the same token, I think the fact that young kids can be traumatized by the death scene in Bambi only provides more reason to keep them away from Tarantino movies.

the belief that the media we consume and enjoy stands to have some effect on how we behave

What's this belief based on - direct observation, personal experience, simply a feeling? The variety of media, the subjects that consume it, the way they consume it, seem so varied (and so conditioned by individual psychology and circumstance) that any generalised 'theory' of media influence is practically useless, imho - and is too often used as an excuse to censor or prohibit.

"What's this belief based on - direct observation"

every day millions of men watch stuff that pretty commonly treats women like garbage. every day millions of men are not fighting for women's rights and a world where women do not have to be afraid of men.

that's my direct observation.

porn is status quo.

When people are talking about porn it often seems like they're really talking about straight hardcore porn, which is only a relatively small percentage of what is created or repurposed for sexual excitement (which can be a bewildering array of things that make a mockery of "you know porn when you see it").
There is far far more female models appearing naked or in bikinis than there is women having sex with men. There can be misogyny in the presentation, like the text that goes along with the images. The higher end of business porn effectively saying "here are the most beautiful women in the world, but they're still not pretty enough so we had to photoshop them and blandify them". Maybe the "slutty" make-up too (audiences wanting porn to look crass and vulgar? I've found that porn often has all the ugliest trends in pop music dress/make-up). Perhaps the poses and acting? But it's not difficult to avoid these things if you're making your own porn.
Although I was talking earlier about the prevalence of misogynist trolls in the porn community, I don't think misogyny is overwhelming in the actual material at all. Most of it is selfies.

But lots of female models don't call what they do "porn" because people will assume they are having sex with men on camera. In recent years I've seen efforts to file everything a model/performer does under "sex work" but many don't want to be called a sex worker because people strongly associate that with prostitution. I don't ever see that changing.

"i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about"

the reason that it's not talked about except furtively is that if you watch porn enough to talk about it with some authority, it follows that you have masturbated to it. Although this is a fundamental activity to humankind, no one or very few wants to acknowledge having done so.

― veronica moser, Friday, 23 September 2016 13:50

https://aeon.co/essays/the-body-as-amusement-park-a-history-of-masturbation

The masturbator is often seen as the pornography-consumer and sex addict enslaved by masturbation. The sociologist Steve Garlick has suggested that negative attitudes to masturbation have been reconstituted to ‘surreptitiously infect ideas about pornography’. Pornography has become masturbation’s metonym. Significantly, when the New Zealand politician Shane Jones was exposed for using his taxpayer-funded credit card to view pornographic movies, the unnamed shame was that his self-pleasuring activities were proclaimed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers – thus the jokes about ‘the matter in hand’ and not shaking hands with him at early morning meetings. It would have been less humiliating, one assumes, if he had used the public purse to finance the services of sex workers.

I like that last point, but I don't know if it's true.

"What's this belief based on - direct observation"

every day millions of men watch stuff that pretty commonly treats women like garbage. every day millions of men are not fighting for women's rights and a world where women do not have to be afraid of men.

that's my direct observation.

porn is status quo.

― scott seward, Friday, September 23, 2016 8:27 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

TBF, women's rights is not something most men have fought for in almost any society throughout history, and in relative global/historical terms, USA 2016 is not *that* bad for women's rights. Hardly seems like you need porn to reinforce misogyny when you consider sanctioned rape, honor killings, treatment of women as chattel, enfranchisement only 100 years ago, etc.

"Hardly seems like you need porn to reinforce misogyny..."

nobody needs porn. but it totally reinforces misogyny. and i WAS talking about straight hardcore porn above. and i confess i did not know that straight hardcore porn was "a relatively small percentage of what is created or repurposed for sexual excitement" as RAG says above.

and i'm not trying to be holier-than-thou. i am not an angel sent from above. but i do look at straight hardcore porn in the same way that i look at drugs. untold amounts of people have been hurt, damaged, and traumatized to make something that people don't need to live. it's always going to get made. it's just something to think about. and yes, you are right, most men have never fought for women's rights throughout history.

i don't think any porn or even just straight hardcore porn is necessarily misogynist, hurtful, damaging, or traumatizing even if it often can be, pornography is extremely diverse, even straight hardcore porn is extremely diverse. pretty sure we've had this debate before too but obv so called "ethical and/or feminist" porn can be exploitative (or not), traumatic (or not) for people creating or using it, sexuality is extremely complex. people create, use, and are affected by pornography in numerous complex ways

fetishes are about sexual objectification, and people need to learn to deal with the fact that this is a thing that happens and doesn't make the person with the fetish a misogynist or a rapist.

― a confederacy of lampreys (rushomancy), Friday, September 23, 2016 7:07 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i agree. also i think that some kind of objectification is an inherent part of sexuality, sexual attraction, eroticism, the physicality of sex entails objectification to some extent imo

Anecdotally, I generally feel better, relate to my wife better, and have better sex when I haven't watched any for at least a several days. So I do think there's something kind of psychically harmful about it. I'm not sure if it's so much misogyny as detachment that it produces in me.

On one hand, there is something to the notion that instant and relatively uncomplicated access to hardcore pornography probably desensitizes young men, and might cause them to need ever-increasing amounts of transgression to get the same libidinous thrill.

As a father of a 9-year-old girl, I do worry about what things will be like when she's navigating sexuality while surrounded by boys who've been able to see anal gangbangs ever since they knew how to spell "anal." This may sound heteronormative, but it's not an unreasonable concern. However her life goes, she'll inevitably be dealing with horny young straight men in some way.

I generally want to hope for good things to happen. Maybe those young men (who have been raised on a nuanced dialectic between virtual- and meatspace) will muster the ability to relate to young women as 3D individuals.

Maybe they will grow to view porn as simply a release valve - as a masturbation aid that helps them take care of Mr. Johnson quickly and efficiently, so that they can get on with their day. An orgasm accelerator.

Maybe they will view porn as a subset of fiction, or more specifically like science fiction/fantasy - a thing you find entertaining in an escapist way, but you don't impose its expectations on real people (any more than you expect to fight dragons or find the One Ring or defeat a video game boss level).

Both of those views instrumentalize porn's actual participants, and both absolve the industry, but both are extant points of view. Both also ignore that women and LGBTQI+ individuals have their own enthusiasms, to which they're totally welcome. I'm just speaking as a straight dude about the very prevalent uses and abuses of porn in a predominantly straight mainstream context.

For myself, I'm not anti-porn at all, and have often found it useful. But I think I've always been able to compartmentalize sufficiently - almost as hygienic as tooth-brushing - and not have it intrude on my relationships with actual people.

FWIW, like some posters upthread, I had a fairly typical 70s/80s childhood, where a glimpse of boobies was looked on as something shocking (in the best possible Phoebe-Catesian way). I am too culturally relativist to say that that was an incontrovertibly better way to experience titillation. I say this merely to report that that was the path I followed, and that my thinking is informed by that path.

As a father of a 9-year-old girl, I do worry about what things will be like when she's navigating sexuality while surrounded by boys who've been able to see anal gangbangs ever since they knew how to spell "anal." This may sound heteronormative, but it's not an unreasonable concern. However her life goes, she'll inevitably be dealing with horny young straight men in some way.

I have daughters and am def concerned about this.

incidentally, I think that's also connected to the fact that I've spent less and less time with porn over the last few years to the point that it's a pretty minimal/rare presence in my life

Answer to the thread title? Despite all the aforementioned horror and the overwhelming amount of bad photography, ugly clothes, excessive make-up and overall bad presentation, porn is completely classic to me. Although I have given a lot of crappy stuff more time than it deserves (written and drawn mostly), the good stuff (95% softcore naked women, solo or with other women) genuinely enriched my life and expanded my ideas of what a beautiful person can look like enormously. It completely blew my mind seeing all these types of faces and bodies that you rarely see in any other media.

Even if there was no prejudices and no body shaming, I think porn still develops your appreciation for different types past where it would go without.

I find it really weird that so many people who spend a huge amount of time in the online porn fan community seem to have such a low regard for porn. It's "just porn" to them. Not just that they are spending too much time on it or looking at depressing stuff but they don't seem to really value any of it.

Maybe they will grow to view porn as simply a release valve - as a masturbation aid that helps them take care of Mr. Johnson quickly and efficiently, so that they can get on with their day. An orgasm accelerator.

I don't think that's good either. Porn should be beautiful, not a banal disposable thing.

To ruminate further: right now it's a reasonable SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy) thing to be down on porn because it makes oversexed young men approach potentially vulnerable young women with oversexualized and unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, why stop at porn?

Orthodox religions have been policing sexuality and women's bodies for a long time - far longer than there have been SNAGs to suddenly up and say "hey wait" about online porn. Some of the same arguments can easily be used (and certainly HAVE been used) to say that being able to see women's ankles and legs and hair and such have trivialized those things.

On that view, If you've never seen your beloved's hair uncovered, then seeing her hair for the first time - presumably on your wedding night after a long courtship and betrothal - is incredibly erotically charged. Or so I hear.

Surely there is a middle ground, and I don't want to traffic in false equivalencies, but if you follow some anti-porn arguments to their logical conclusion, you might start overlapping uncomfortably with anti-bikini arguments.

I don't really see a continuum between erotic nude photography or even something like playboy -- even with all its chauvinism -- and mainstream hetero porn. Even if a lot of the actual material seems playful/harmless the sites are ridden with pop ups for material that seems a lot like hate speech. Add to that the fact that so many performers speak of their time in the industry in very negative terms... idk. I don't think its good for people to associate sex and degradation, especially people who have poor critical thinking skills either because they are in a formativr stage of life or just dumb.

Just seems bleak and sordid in a way that young guys drooling over Phoebe Cates isn't. I don't think that scene with the red bikini encouraged viewers to think less of Phoebe Cates in the same way a Bangbus scene does with the anonymous star. Again, there's nothing inherent about explicit depictions of sex that makes it this way but it seems to be how it works out. Porn stars are seen as taboo -- a "sex class" -- and the films themselves seem to internalize this value system rather than challenge it, in most cases. If that makes sense.

Maybe the answer is the full mainstreaming of porn. No longer taboo, it would then be beholden to certain ordinary standards of decency vis a vis embodying hateful perspectives. The fact that it is a form of media people consume privately, and that they don't feel a need to synthesize their consumption with an overall story of themselves that speaks to their values and whatever, is certainly part of the problem.

I don't think that scene with the red bikini encouraged viewers to think less of Phoebe Cates in the same way a Bangbus scene does with the anonymous star.

I think if you observed the way porn fans interact with porn stars IRL, when given the opportunity to do so, you'd change your mind. Lining up for hours, giggling nervously, digging toes into the carpet like schoolboys...the virulent misogyny may show up when typing comments into a little window, but when male porn enthusiasts are interacting face to face with female porn performers, they're totally respectful 99 percent of the time. Frankly, what people think about while they're jerking off is their business, and I don't think someone thinking "Yeah, punish that bitch!" with his dick in his hand on his couch at home is any worse than someone shouting "Yeah, fuck his ass up!" while on that same couch watching MMA. The level of dehumanization is exactly the same.

I think selfies are the mainstreaming of porn if anything is. Again, there is probably more selfies than any other type of photographic porn. Stigma isn't going away yet but it has to be less of a big deal than in the 90s.

It's odd but the anonymity (if you mean it in the sense of the audience not caring about the star) of models/performers varies with each genre. In some genres the models are seen as expendable and in other genres they are canonized for the ages and in regular circulation since the 40s and still have fans writing to them.
I just can't grasp the mindset of people who don't care about the model/performer. If they're worth looking at why wouldn't you want to know their name?

I don't really see a continuum between erotic nude photography or even something like playboy -- even with all its chauvinism -- and mainstream hetero porn.

― Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:26

In what aspect? There is some separation but there's lots of crossover too. It's not as separate as something like non-photographic porn. But it's only in recent years that I've seen much male/female hardcore (not that much), I avoided it easily for a long time.

There isn't really a lot of "punish that bitch" type language in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. It embodies a very different vision of sexuality than a tube site, taken in its totality, where you can't really avoid seeing ads or thumbnails for stuff that plays to a pretty harsh view of how men and women relate to one another sexually. You can say it's just fantasy -- I agree all sorts of fantasy can be fine -- but it's all so banal and commodified that it seems like it might be normalizing these attitudes.

I definitely think that if you want to analyze this you have to account for the fact that porn is this thing that happens within a certain roped-off space, and that humans compartmentalize, which is not to say things don't seep from one space into another, but there's a difference between "men fantasize hatefully about women in a sanctioned area" and "men hate women."

Treeship- Yeah, I never saw a lot of the horrifying stuff until the tube sites, tumblr and clips4sale. Even if you were watching lots of hardcore you could easily avoid all that junk. I miss a lot of things about the only slightly earlier days.

SI swimsuit edition is problematic in other ways, but there is a veneer of decency to it, idk. They don't depict themselves tricking the models into stripping down to bikinis and them dumping them off on the side of the road.

I just remembered that when we had AOL and porn images were findable but hard to come by, I got a huge thrill out of making the desktop image into a porn image on our Apple IIGS when my parents weren't home, and that once I accidentally left it up and got caught. I guess there was something erotic and subversive about putting a sexual image in a place where it didn't belong.

SI swimsuit edition is problematic in other ways, but there is a veneer of decency to it, idk. They don't depict themselves tricking the models into stripping down to bikinis and them dumping them off on the side of the road.

And yet they're both purchased and enjoyed by the same exact male population! Crazy, right? It's almost like people are multifaceted creatures!

Where did I say anything to the contrary?

I never said we should ban porn or that it destroys people or anything like that. At most I encouraged more critical consumption -- like thinking about porn the way we think of all other aspects of the media, as an entertainment product. No television show would get away with being as racist or misogynistic as a lot of porn.

I've never really looked at Swimsuit Illustrated, do they photoshop a lot?

The one positive thing about the tube sites is archiving things that are no longer commercially available. DailyMotion used to be great for this and it was so much more pleasant yet I have no idea why. I don't think it was just moderators cleaning up the place and a lack of nasty adverts.

Clips4sale is great but I hate seeing women I like doing the cruel and racist stuff.

I think more than any other site Tumblr connected models with their fan base and writing about their life and all their interests and opinions rather than just about their porn.
But it also has some really nasty communities and the piracy is unstoppable there.

idk i think certain kinds of pornography (plenty of which is on tube sites) can be far more body-positive, sex-positive, welcoming and diverse than the SI swimsuit issue, where models fit almost exclusively into just a few (at most) body types, ages and races

Yeah, it's problematic but for different reasons. The erotic charge doesn't come from hostility. Not to say that the latter is the case with all clips on tube sites -- far from it -- but it's an attitude that's prevalent enough that it's worth noting.

Yeah, I've always thought regular mainstream men's magazines were worse in many respects than the average porn magazine. Especially the photoshopping.

I don't look at a lot of solo men (not into men enough) but I can't stand the amount of men posing like "I'm a fucking badass". Do a lot of people find that sexy or is it the male equivalent of duckface?

for me it depends on the dude and if i want to see somebody posing like "a fucking badass" in the moment idk lol

the reason that it's not talked about except furtively is that if you watch porn enough to talk about it with some authority, it follows that you have masturbated to it. Although this is a fundamental activity to humankind, no one or very few wants to acknowledge having done so.

makes sense

Anyone else love porn and consider it important? And I mean anything from bikini stuff and art nudes to explicit stuff.

i think some porn is erotic, exciting, and enriches my own sense of self/sexuality/eroticism/beauty and some porn is repulsive and gross and some porn is banal and depressing

They don't depict themselves tricking the models into stripping down to bikinis and them dumping them off on the side of the road.

bikinis! good heavens. but um i've always thought that the internet 2016, even the tamer corridors, you come across really fucked up offensive shit and rape threats and racist slurs and whatever. in comparison... even the more foul tube sites are pretty soft! look at the http://xhamster.com/rankings/weekly-top-viewed.html -- the top 40 most viewed videos this week, read some comments: i mean, like the language is fucked up sometimes but lots of this shit like your bikini scenario, the viewer knows it as a stock scenario and they're familiar with how porn is shot and they recognize the female talent from a half dozen other films and they know that what's being depicted is basically, hopefully consenting adults putting on a show. just escaping from the narrow focus of "things people say on the internet," i think the average male jerking off to a tube site in 2016 is probably far more educated about sexual health, feminism, shit like that, than the dude jerking it to a vhs in 1996 or 1986, even if the content of what they're jerking it to is more "offensive."

which brings me to, if i had to pick a first problem to look at with porn, i think it's the treatment of talent more than whatever philosophy it supposedly represents. whatever the content is, softcore girl-on-girl stuff or the people out there having sex on film / doing related sex work are definitely being exploited and put in dangerous situations.

instant and relatively uncomplicated access to hardcore pornography probably desensitizes young men, and might cause them to need ever-increasing amounts of transgression to get the same libidinous thrill.

this is said a lot in contemporary porn criticisms ("men start off looking at softcore images, then hardcore videos, then anal, then on and on into various increasingly extreme and violent forms of pornography and ultimately into potentially illegal stuff") and it's a convenient narrative especially when advocating an addiction-based perspective ("it all started with weed and alcohol and then pills and then heroin") but i don't know how accurate it really is

i also want to say: i live in japan, where porn is everywhere, more mainstream than anywhere else in the west, i think, or at least more obvious and just fucking EVERYWHERE. regularly see dudes browsing porn on their phones on the train, still sell hardcore porno mags in the regular magazine rack at 7-11, porn stores still a thing, and also prostitution is something that's completely mainstream. it's also a place where women have far lower status, worse legal protection, fewer opportunities at work, and the big deal conversations are literally like: should women hold jobs after having children? i think i feel it more here that the pornography, which is far more insidiously and completely about degrading women is definitely a product of the larger culture.

I'll confess that I find the PG13 near-nudity of Maxim or GQ or Sports Illustrated kind of hypocritical.

A picture of Alyssa Milano (or whoever, feel free to update for the current century) where she's posed all faux-seductively, but her breasts happen to be covered by a wisp of gauzy fabric? I doubt that's in some different moral universe from a fully nude Penthouse-style nude who's permitting a more, ahem, gynecological view. It's just a matter of how much the viewer needs or wants to engage his (his!) imagination.

I don't fault these outlets for serving their audience, it's more that it highlights the very knife-edged nature of how people use sexualized images. Really, context is all. One can see extremely nude nymphs cavorting in a Baroque painting, and be primarily engaged with it in the context of art appreciation. The viewer of a fetching bikini model, or of artistic nude photography, can choose to do the same thing.

Obiously, there's a difference in degree between those images and AnalGangBang.com. Is it a difference in kind? Not sure.

dylannn -

Japanese porn still pixilates out penises, female pubic hair, and insertion shots, yes?

yes. a lot of uncensored domestic content is available online of course but it's not likely to feature your favorite starlets, and dvd/magazine sales + big studios + star system are still stronger here than anywhere else.

to be sure, pubic hair is mostly okay. buttholes are a grey area-- more liberal producers keep them uncensored until something is going in them or there's vaginal penetration or closeups on the vagina, usually.

"Anyone else love porn and consider it important?"

I do. It's important to me. I follow femaie performers, feel like many if not most that I like share something of their sexuality, and have certain practices that I find deeply hot that I like to masturbate to. There are many multitudes of musicians who have been taken advantage of and whose lives were ruined, yet they still shared something authentic about themselves and whose contributions are valuable…to me. I can cite multiple porn gals that have been fucked over, and I can cite many that have not…but they are valuable to me. I respect and care about them the same way I would about anybody who does something I care about and value. I do not wish to sound cavalier about this, understand that there are consequences, and do not expect for many reading this to approve.

I have never watch Rocco Sifredi or Max Hardcore because I understand that their shit is too hostile for me. Same would go for Bang Bus, I think. I would talk more specifically about this here if I thought there was interest, but I am slightly nervous in that its very easy to find out who I am.

and I want to make it clear that scat is not a fetish for me…me and my bandmates discovered my screenname-namesake in the late '90s; she is the scat queen of Germany. I found it completely fascinating, but not in a dick-hardening way, more a OHMIGAWD way… pursuant to Dylann's comments… I thought at one time that losing WWII did something really long-lasting and devastating to the sexual psyches of German and Japanese, but for all I know it's based on much more deep-seated truama.

Love too porn

I never said we should ban porn or that it destroys people or anything like that. At most I encouraged more critical consumption -- like thinking about porn the way we think of all other aspects of the media, as an entertainment product. No television show would get away with being as racist or misogynistic as a lot of porn.

― Treeship

look i don't know about you but when i look at porn i want to come

by which i mean that there is VALUE to turning off one's constant critical voice and simply experiencing something without having to get all meta-analytical about it

I do not wish to sound cavalier about this, understand that there are consequences, and do not expect for many reading this to approve.

― veronica moser, Friday, 23 September 2016 20:32

Approve of you valuing the female performers?

can i just say? CLASSIC. love too rush my mancy

to be sure, pubic hair is mostly okay. buttholes are a grey area

― dylannn

well maybe _yours_ is

been reading this thread off and on since it was bumped and the question i keep asking myself that may seem obvious to the rest of you is, is porn supposed to be supplanting actual sex? so people actually prefer it to sex? or is porn just an outlet because a person cannot have or get sex for whatever reason?

not judging, but i thought porn was good when i was a kid. as i got older i usually sought out sex, and if i couldn't get it, i'd just rub one out without watching a video or pictures. maybe there is something to be said for how busy i am for videos/pictures. i'll put in more effort if i'm getting the real thing

but anyway, i do feel porn is generally not the best solution. i kind of believe if you want sex, you should go through the process of trying to get it and without paying for it, because it teaches you a lot of valuable things -- some of which may not be so nice

there's also the idea that watching too much porn or going to too many strip clubs or having sex with too many prostitutes desensitizes you to sex and romantic relationships

in the end like ye mad puffin said, a lot of it is being able to compartmentalize and separate porn, sex, and relationships within their appropriate context, which i think is harder for people to do

look i don't know about you but when i look at porn i want to come

― a confederacy of lampreys (rushomancy), Friday, September 23, 2016 2:39 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is an important point because when it comes to men, there's a very big difference in just wanting to cum and enjoying the pleasure for a long time

(which i think seeps into personality types)

My gut instinct for men is that there are two major styles of porn fandom/viewership - transgressive fantasy and embodiment fantasy. The latter puts the viewer in the position of being the guy in the porn and this is less likely to become progressively more extreme because it's tied closely to real-life sexual desires and experiences. Transgressive fantasy - racist interracial stuff, particularly degrading acts and setups, etc. - gets more and more out there as one's kinks start to feel boring/normal.

milo, i like your categorization. for me transgression has never been founded in sexual activity. like watching somebody stick a fist up somebody else's ass, i don't think that's "transgressive". i'm less and less enamored with the culture of transgression as i've seen how it's evolved over my lifetime as well.

i'll admit that sometimes when i do go looking for porn- a pretty rare event these days- i will get sidetracked and i will find myself listening to weird music. because you have the tube sites sure but for me the internet has never seemed to be divided into "pornographic" and "non-pornographic" bits. you know what, the hell with it, i'll masturbate to james whitney's "yantra". it's more erotic than "bathman dal pianeta eros", more erotic than the vast majority than what passes for pornography these days.

and eventually one gets to the point where one starts making one's own pornography. i've had a couple friends who've written porn, and i do find myself impressed by it, if not especially aroused. that's the point where one should be thinking about the ethics of a thing, when one is creating, rather than when one is consuming. it's probably better that way. fucking money ruins everything.

I think hardly anyone prefers porn to sex, it's just extremely convenient and there are lots of fetishes that are unlikely or impossible in the real world.

Expansion to thread

i've always liked this quote from albee's zoo story:

"What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you’re a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you’re older. It’s that when you’re a kid you use the cards as a substitute for real experience, and when you’re older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy."

interesting dichotomy milo re: trangsgressive and embodiment, but does trangressive necessarily entail violence and/or degradation? i don't tihnk so, things can feel transgressive whatever our boundaries might be.

and embodiment doesn't always mean "putting yourself in the guy's position in (straight) porn..." i imagine many viewers might also imagine themselves in any given actor's position. i watch mostly straight but also some gay porn and embodiment fantasy might entail any of the actors involved. (same goes for music really.... there was a discussion on the fka twigs song about "what perspective do you take as a listener" while hearing a particularly sexual twigs song and i've thought about that question and have concluded that my perspective shifts throughout the song and eventually entails fantasizing about each of the perspectives)

also porn and other erotica isn't really a substitute "when i can't get sex", it's just one aspect of my own sexuality and eroticism that also entails physical sex, imagination, reading, masturbation, idk? this is prob more than i want to share on a message board but these are my thoughts on the subject

I should have clarified hetero guy - that's the only lens I personally have and tbh the only lens through which it's ever been discussed with friends.

I'm sure transgressive extends beyond the few things I mentioned (the extreme edge of offensive transgression), like the pseudo-incest stuff mentioned in the NYer article - (I assume a frisson of bad behavior as an enticement, then pretty standard p-in-v porn once the scenario is set up). The hordes watching that don't want to fuck their moms but the taboo makes it more exciting initially.

The dichotomy, though, seems apt in describing how porn develops and how porn viewing develops. 'Interracial' porn, from what I've read, is always black guy and non-black woman (usually white) and the setup is generally degrading to both performers (or all) - it's hard to see that as something not driven by taboo/transgression rather than the viewer identifying/empathizing with the male performer.

For sure it may not be a structure that stands up to analysis even limited to cis/hetero dudes, as I said it's just gut instinct about the way I've seen porn treated/how the porn sells itself.

'Interracial' porn, from what I've read, is always black guy and non-black woman (usually white)

Not true. There's plenty of black woman/multiple white guys porn, for example.

and the setup is generally degrading to both performers (or all)

This part I can't really argue with.

https://mediadiversified.org/2016/04/20/porn-our-colour-blind-spot-when-it-comes-to-racism/

Been horrified at the (increasing?) prevalence of this stuff, there's even a video site called Apetube. Too many dominatrix custom clips with the "racial humiliation" genre, like videos with a torrent of racist abuse for Asian viewers.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 11 August 2016 19:41

That's me posting on rolling race thread.

It's a shame, whenever I see stuff with black men and white women, it's too often labelled in a racist way and I wonder how often the scene is meant to be degrading in that way.
Only recently I noticed how rife it is Japanese cartoon porn to have a darker man with a pale woman and its sometimes difficult to tell if it's meant to be degrading for that reason.

F sharp infinity, for me it's definitely not either/or but both/and. I am married and like sex quite a lot, but I also value solo excursions that are (as marcos says) simply another aspect of sexuality.

Many xps. Treeship sez,

I don't really see a continuum between erotic nude photography or even something like playboy -- even with all its chauvinism -- and mainstream hetero porn.

Sometimes it's the same people under different names, worth mentioning?

Even if a lot of the actual material seems playful/harmless the sites are ridden with pop ups for material that seems a lot like hate speech. Add to that the fact that so many performers speak of their time in the industry in very negative terms... idk. I don't think its good for people to associate sex and degradation, especially people who have poor critical thinking skills either because they are in a formativr stage of life or just dumb.

In a discussion full of Unspeakable Things, one of the main ones is surely 'Some people shouldn't be looking at this stuff'. People who lack critical skills, people who lack life experience, people who for cultural reasons are going to see porn but not have actual sexual encounters until later ... whoever it is, if they look at it there'll be trouble. Cf the judge in the Lady Chatterly case - 'Would you let your wife or sevants read this?'

I'm not accusing treesh of saying this - I sort of think everyone sometimes thinks this, but we don't often talk about it because we don't want to look like that judge?

Idk man. Teenagers watching stuff like the kink video described in this article? https://nplusonemag.com/issue-16/essays/what-do-you-desire/ Seems fucked up, not to say we should "ban" it or whatever. We live in a misogynistic society as it is, and a lot of this material is eroticizing misogyny. Not just that, it is absorbed unconsciously/uncritically in many cases, I suspect

That's a complex/nuanced article btw, far more so than my posts. Didn't link to it bc i think witt would support my posts but bc it provides a good description of the kind of material that is now widely accessible

Yeah no, young teenagers (or people with equivalent lack of knowledge of how sex usually is for most people that have) watching that sort of stuff is a genuine concern - just really hard to come out and say that without claiming to be more sexually knowledgeable than a teenager which is not a claim I'm 100% willing to make

*that have it

I can't make a causal argument -- idk the effect of this stuff on people. It just seems like it is on the wrong side of the movement toward gender equality. But maybe by exaggerating misogyny it turns it into kitsch and defuses it or something i don't fucking know

this is all very difficult because it's hard to find the real line of distinction between sex as biological drive and the socially conditioned (let's say pavlovian) environment in which sexual desire is enacted/expressed. as everyone has already said there's a two-way street between spontaneous expressions of sexuality and the kind of conditioned responses that porn (arguably) trains us to have. in a positive sense, many have made the argument that porn leads people to have more varied and satisfying sex lives--and yet on the other hand its possible that porn normalizes a kind of sexual performance that most people cannot live up to. so it's equally possible to argue that porn both makes our actual non-masturbatory sex lives more and less satisfying.

add to this the further difficulty of distinguishing between sex as pure reproduction and sex as a way of relating to another person intimately (and let's not forget that the notion "intimacy" itself has its own extremely complicated social history) and you find yourself constantly facing a widening and indistinguishable gray zone.

one other point: there's a notion of "peak libido" from Bernard Stiegler that's interesting to consider in regard to porn, in which porn is merely part of a massive apparatus designed to control/re-direct/defuse desire. (it's also possibly worth considering here that old hoary question as to what extent something like "aggression" is connected to desire and how right/left biases about "human nature" play into how we feel about porn)

I will say this - I'm glad this thread has so many points of view on it. A lot of the discussion on the issue falls into a bit of a binary between praise and blame ... I mean I know this thread is in fact called 'porn: classic or dud' but that's been taken as a bit of a joke ...

and ryan otm.

Treeship getting his knowledge of pornography from n+1 articles is perfect

lol tom

otm

tom otm

N+1 should do a line of small-batch, artisanal porn.

Straight to Hi8, no copies made. Each porn video will be tailored to your needs.

I don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_sex

I just learned about this!

did not realize the kids and the ottoman were part of a japanese tube continuum

Didn't Japan have a game show where men competed to see who could last longer getting a handjob from a porn star?

Sounds true.

I first saw air sex competitions on a Jonathan Ross show in 2007.

Not who could last longer, but who can keep a tune and remember the words in a karaoke competition.

Lol amazing.

i think there's a difference between tone and content. it's not what you say, but how you say it. i also think there's a definite difference between humiliation as a fetish and humiliation as a worldview.

yup. argh been trying to formulate that one myself.

Jun Amaki has mastered cuteness. She's in a bikini but probably still NSFW.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BLeB8NEDKNt/

The actual fuck man

srsly

what were you two expecting upon clicking this thread?

its classic or dud, nhex, not search and destroy

ffs

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/vulgar-unsightly-adrian-nathan-wests-jaccuse-extremely-degrading-pornography/

holy shit looooooooooooooooooooooool xps

xp that's an interesting piece. i'm glad you post here ryan.

"Well, that was an interesting post, wasn't it?"

"But i'm a cute master! How come no one ever posts about me?"

"Now, Hopper, you'll just have to wait your turn like everyone else..."

🐰

saved by the basketshoes

ridiculous

robert I think I have been pretty porn-positive itt but come on dude

http://i.imgur.com/6Slc6GI.png

Thanks for posting that L.A. Review of Books article ryan.

I clicked on this thread because on my mobile device it looked like Pom: Classic or Dud? And I love Pom - a truly refreshing drink in a delightfully-shaped bottle.

smdh

ilx turning into just another gross messageboard where people drool over instagram fetish models would be a fitting end to this trash heap of a year

It's not that bad and context is a moveable feast that needn't be applied to everything bucko

ts: porn vs. marxist analyses of porn

I only wank to the latter.

treeship sweet sensitive boy

and lol at bump

and if ilx devolved into sa i hope something more interesting than instagram fetish models would be the catalyst.

sa = ?

That's the second time it's come up in a week

something awful i'm guessing

ah, I r dum, thanks

that LARB piece was good, but the funny thing to me about it (and to a much greater extent that terrible nyer piece from a couple weeks ago) is the tendency to treat porn as a monolith when a quick survey of the territory would tell you that the emergence of the internet as the main channel of consumption means it's anything but.

Book in that LARB piece seems the antithesis of that new book "Future Sex," which is getting a lot of coverage (including the New Yorker).

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/future-sex-adventures-in-an-erotic-wonderland

I put plenty of warning on about what it was (which is pretty light stuff, or was she playing with dangerous Samsung devices?) on a porn discussion thread (which has a NSFW warning itself), you don't have to click on it. It's not that unusual for people to post far more edgy content straight onto regular threads without warning or barrier, without anyone caring.
I don't recall anyone getting upset when Nakhchivan linked an image of a naked girl bending over with only her fingers covering her vagina+anus, with no real warning.
Or when actual porn has been linked.

idk if "exemplary examples of instagram boob videos" is an angle we'd explored but I guess now we know what happens when the thread goes there

I don't think any real harm was done. It was only funny because this is a thread about issues in porn, not for the enjoyment of porn, so it kinda came out of nowhere.

Porn: Classic or Dud?

So?

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 15 June 2001 01:00

Well sheeeit, I guess I'd better put up or shut up. This question was a bit of a 2-fold joke: first, how do people feel about having their rational discussion-space intruded upon by unavoidable pic of pudgy grayhairs 69ing each other? I say "classic" because a purely rational public sphere is a chimera, even (especially) the clean lines of the futureweb. Porn is a sometimes sickening reminder. At times I imagine the incredible proliferation of online porn a perverse desire to ruin the pretty face of computers, to wipe the smile off that eminently rational machine. Other times I think people just like to get off and it's free and easy. Anyway, 2nd part of joke is the same really - can one talk about porn in classic-or-dud critspeak?

Textual/visual descriptions of people having sex = undeniably compelling.

― Tracer Hand, Saturday, 16 June 2001 01:00

I'm not sure what I posted falls within Tracer's opening guidelines but I think I have proved porn is classic.

I don't think nakh - now you'll understand that I don't have appropriate context here just at present- was inviting us to masturbate

I'm not sure about that, I think he was impressed with her butt. I was mainly saying "look how ADORABOO this is!" (you could poll what the cutest thing she did was). Masturbate if you like.

ilx turning into just another gross messageboard where people drool over instagram fetish models would be a fitting end to this trash heap of a year

― Treeship, Tuesday, 18 October 2016 12:15

If we replaced threads about stuff like the Suicide Squad film, whatever Zack Snyder is doing and hatewatch material with more drooling threads (adding to 90s Hot and the time machine fuck wishlist) with pleasant conduct conduct (wouldn't have to be like those cesspool message boards), it would be a definite improvement.

Bah, written "conduct" twice

WD 2017

http://edinburghflipside.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/man-sitting-on-floor-with-head-in-hands.jpg

there are tonnes of "gravure idols" (pronounced goo-RAA-bee-ya i-do-roo in engirish) on instagram. they're ladies dressed in very revealing clothing, but never fully nude, that pose in lad's magazines in japan. having huge breasts in japan is a huge fetish of many men of all ages over there and they show up in anime and tv shows every so often

recently a dumb comedian turned dj released a song called "pen pineapple apple pen" (you can search for it as ppap). quintessential japanese pop culture -- it's not "supposed" to really mean anything but there are all sorts of theories about it. you know how it goes

Here's a think about porn. In California we have a state proposition to mandate use of condoms in porn films. Yes or no?

a 'think' i wrote. I meant a thing.

classic RAG

a lot of japanese people think it is weird too

very classic

Here's a think about porn. In California we have a state proposition to mandate use of condoms in porn films. Yes or no?

― akm

it's a pretty good idea if you're trying to go after the local porn industry, such as it is - big budget porn is already facing some pretty fierce challenges, and adding more restrictions would probably hurt their bottom line even more.

more drooling threads

No no no no no

ILX is for thinking and shouting

On a different note, it is sort of because of the way niche fetishes have become better known over the last couple of years that I've had my worst OCD troubles ever. I used to think I was unshockable and I read about all sorts of weird fetishes as mere curiosity but then I started seeing stuff on tumblr and clips4sale that was really disturbing, cruel and depressing. Then seeing those fetishes turn up with such regularity on those sites made me extremely paranoid.

The last year and a half has been ruined by worrying about how people get into the really sick and frightening stuff. I worry that it could have happened to me in a different life, I worry it could happen to me in the future, I worry about who it happens to and worry about how it seems a lot of victimised people get an additional punishment of fetishizing their traumas.

I climbed out of OCD worrying about it last spring but I fell back in a few months later. The web of frightening associations has grown so it's tougher to fight. Several months ago even reading a word like "evil" would make me paranoid.
I've had 2 of what might be panic attacks or anxiety attacks (same thing?) from thinking about these things.
I wonder how many people have had this Pure OCD experience from seeing the increase of scary porn. It has given me the most powerful feelings of fear and disgust I've ever had.

Obviously I can't tell most of my family about this.

that sounds...odd. I don't think that's widespread. what kind of scary porn are you speaking of?

xp Might be one of them cases where it wd be a good idea to steer clear of the stuff? (I know that's a crude, basic answer but in this particular case)

maybe best not to post about those things using your real name if you don't want your family to know either...although maybe that isn't your real name, and maybe your family doesn't know how to use a computer

there was sick fuck porn back in the '90s. i knew people who were into it. most of them seem to have turned out ok. i just don't think having disturbing sexual fantasies makes a person "evil".

Yeah and recognition of the fantasies as fantasies almost certainly stops them from getting, er, out of hand.

that sounds...odd. I don't think that's widespread. what kind of scary porn are you speaking of?

― akm, Tuesday, 18 October 2016 19:34

It's all sorts of stuff. Usually has some sort of ostentatiously cruel sadist or masochist element.

Most people with sexually orientated Pure OCD are
(a) worried they're attracted to a gender they're normally not attracted to (this is just for homophobes, there's often a worry that your normal attraction will be replaced entirely)
(b) worried they're attracted to children
(c) worried they've lost their attraction to someone or something they love

pure ocd is, at its base, an obsession with maintaining a constant state of obsession and recognizing that, in order to divorce it from whatever topic you think you're actually with, is step one. the actual thing you're ruminating about is completely irrelevant to the mental churn.

that LARB piece was good, but the funny thing to me about it (and to a much greater extent that terrible nyer piece from a couple weeks ago) is the tendency to treat porn as a monolith when a quick survey of the territory would tell you that the emergence of the internet as the main channel of consumption means it's anything but.
― call all destroyer, Tuesday, October 18, 2016 8:40 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think those pieces treat porn as a monolith. I think they focus on the most prominent aspects of the industry, and rightly so. It may be worthwhile to note some of the exceptions and complexities, but go too far in that direction and you start missing the forest for the trees.

i just don't think having disturbing sexual fantasies makes a person "evil".

― fat fingered algorithm (rushomancy), Tuesday, 18 October 2016 19:46

Me either but I question if people who fantasize about selling their family members into sexual slavery, torture and really fetishize the despair of situations like this should really be fantasizing about that.

(a) worried they're attracted to a gender they're normally not attracted to (this is just for homophobes, there's often a worry that your normal attraction will be replaced entirely)

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 18 October 2016 19:57

FUCK! I mean this ISN'T just for homophobes.

I can understand feeling some moral obligation but if the interest is rooted in pure ocd, then you know that thoughts about it are not rooted in the actual thing. At that point it's worth just saying "this is a thing I'm uncomfortable with" and putting it away, never to be investigated again.

xp to akm, i just read a piece with a woman talking about how that law impacts as a free speech issue
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/18/porn-tasha-reign-california-condom-law-proposition-60

Me either but I question if people who fantasize about selling their family members into sexual slavery, torture and really fetishize the despair of situations like this should really be fantasizing about that.

― Robert Adam Gilmour

people work with what they have. if a person suffers from severe depression, it's not inconceivable that they might fetishize despair.

Not an expert or serious studier of this stuff, but I have read of parallels between OCD and voyeurism.

Like, when the very same tableaux are arousing vs. not-arousing purely based on highly specific, utterly essential contextual information. Everything looks better through a keyhole, goes the saying. But yr serious addict strongly needs the context of "this information is obtained surreptitiously" to make it even remotely interesting; knowing the subject consented would ruin the illusion entirely. Compare seeing someone's underwear in public with seeing them in a bikini at the beach - context gives the same patches of skin completely different meanings and resonances.

I have heard this same OCD-esque similarity in wiring suggested about some of the darker -philias, as well, which I am not particularly keen on discussing.

One gathers that a stereotypical person with OCD issues might require certain arbitrary boxes to be checked to keep a situation from being horrifically anxiety-inducing. My thoughts go out to them. At the same time, one can see how a different twist on the same mechanism - certain arbitrary boxes must be checked to make a situation arousing or non-arousing - might operate in various fetishes, -manias, and -philias.

A long time ago I was involved with a woman who had some very specific and not especially polite fantasies. We had rather serious talks about the various moralities of having them vs. acting on them vs. letting it be know that she had them. It is a realm of mystery and I don't think I was ever comfortable with where the discussion got left.

fwiw and tmi, my sexual fantasies since preadolescence have consistently made kink.com look like the enterprise-d and if anything it has given me such guilt+churn over the concept of cruelty that in normal life i now feel debilitatedly empathetic (certainly can't enjoy e.g. violent movies in the strange innocence everyone else seems to)

for these reasons i don't rly watch porn and tho i dunno about ocd i do identify w RAG's depression/anxiety when thinking abt some of what's out there. however for me this is prob about fearing a one-dimensional bogeyman inside myself and projecting it onto the full personalities of unknown porn-watchers. (your "i worry it could happen to me" makes me wonder if there isn't something like this going on w you too but idk.) these days when it comes to popular manifestations of a fetishized will to power there are def things that worry and depress me more than porn.

suicide squad thread preferable to boobs are kawaii imo. important hashing-out of the defintion of "nerdlinger" in there.

to be honest with you the way certain prominent figures nonconsensually act out their sexual power fantasies has led me to, of late, find all sexuality sort of revolting. it's far from the only factor, but it definitely is a factor.

i did not feel that way until today's gif of trump and the little girl. in the span of 5-6 loops my laughter turned to a very uncomfortable revulsion

My problem is my desire for order and certainty of who I am or who I could potentially be.

http://www.dvdizzy.com/images/c/chinatown-04.jpg

ha

I've seen Chinatown but I can't remember that scene

it's pretty messed up, kinda twilight zone-ish, jake finds out he's been in a snuff film the whole time

RAG, I do wonder if (as I've had similar reactions to more extreme porn seemingly becoming more "mainstreamed") if it's just a product of getting older as well, as every decade or so it seems like pornography has gotten more extreme or explicit like some kind of arms race. OTOH some of the most regressive stuff I've seen came out of the '70s. Nowadays there always seems to be tacked-on intro/outro interviews to show the viewer, "ya see? they're totally cool with this heinous abuse".

Prop 60 is strange - I've seen arguments from porn stars that say it's largely an initiative funded by a single man who just wants to hurt the industry. Weirdest aspect is allowing citizens to sue porn productions for... misleading them on condom use leading to disease? I may not be understanding it correctly, but the whole proposition doesn't make much sense to me.

Most people with sexually orientated Pure OCD are
(b) worried they're attracted to children

what about stylized children with cartoonishly enormous boobs?

dude. for various reasons you are attracted to that which you are attracted; so it goes. i would suggest that whether or not you can speak to your family about such things, you need to find someone that is not this messageboard. and if ocd is driving your brain, someone with rather more expertise than this messageboard

therapy can work wonders!

what about stylized children with cartoonishly enormous boobs?

― mookieproof, Wednesday, 19 October 2016 01:57

That oppai loli stuff actually used to scare me when I found out they weren't supposed to be dwarves. There's no difference between the way a lot of cartoonists draw cute dwarves and children.

I got myself out of Pure OCD twice before but my longer standing OCD problems (rererererereading, locking doors, washing dishes, cleaning) may require extra help of professionals.

On the bright side.... That's a p employable skillset

I presume you mean washing dishes and cleaning, not throwing iphones onto your breasts

You presume undermuch

I am a cleaner but rather than help me it makes me work far too long because I'm worried I haven't done it right, I've worked many hours of unpaid overtime just to make sure I've cleaned it right. I check locks so much that I might break a doorhandle someday. Washing dishes takes 5 times longer than it should. Rererererereading only lets me read 2 or 3 pages an hour.

dwarves vs japanese lolitas, who will win

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/nov/19/pornography-sites-face-uk-block-under-enhanced-age-controls

I thought this crap had gone away but nope. I don't understand how this would work, there are just too many sites to ever be comprehensive with this.

OK, I don't see it posted upthread so I'll ask...what is with all the "step-" porn? Is this a fad or what?

Make it so you have to enter a credit card to watch it. Doesn't seem so bad. Maybe this is an uncool conservative belief but I hate the idea of young people seeing some of the stuff that's out there.

xp

i am pretty certain that my abuse of internet porn in the late 90's/early 2000s has had significant detrimental effects on my sex life. that's awfully personal but whatevs.

xxp incest porn that seems less taboo

Treeship- But there's lots of people who create stuff for free and lots of sample material from pay sites so people actually know what they're buying. Can't put "trust us, it's really hot".
And it's always been unclear how far these laws will extend. Apparently there's reason to believe it will go past sexual content.

it's impossible to enforce, there are too many sites, it won't have much an effect at all and sets an awful precedent for government control of content on the internet

Aren't they all aggregated in those few tube sites? Put some credit card block thing on those. Users can still upload content there.

Wd say best worst solution is what marcos says there + parents now have to have the porn discussion with their kids. Best worst, not good

Thanks, Mordy. I figured that, I meant why at this particular moment? Like I don't remember this being such a widespread thing

Something to do with people not being able to move out of their folk's house because of recession?

Gross

Yeah, happy conversations we're having here. Stuff like that existing does make me want to press a magic button that bans it.

The other problem with these bans, blocks, etc, is a lot of LGBT help and info material gets caught in the net

...And even for boring vanilla straight people, sweeping bans can also make it tougher for some young people to find accurate and nonhysterical info on sexuality, puberty, birth control, STDs, or sexual health generally. Babies and bathwater (if you'll pardon the uncomfortable closeness of the metaphor to the topic at hand).

The stock example (probably from decades ago) was a netnanny that blocked the searches that would have allowed a high school student to do research for a paper about breast cancer. Insert your own troubling likely consequence here.

ymp otm it is a terrible idea

I very much doubt the bans would be so sweeping. ILX would probably be safe.
I don't know if that opt-in idea has been abandoned (I hope so) that might have had the scary consequence of being surveilled if you didn't want the nanny block.

I think the best kind of opt-in is for everything that is unapologetically, deliberately p0rny to move to its own top-level domain voluntarily. Call it dot cum or dot xxx.

If all the tube sites, chat-streaming sites, studios, stars, and hot MILFs Who Want to Meet RIGHT NOW regarded the new domain as a better place to do bidness, that would make it a lot easier for people to use the rest of the web. The industry may see a voluntary move to a new TLD as good proactive PR (we moved so we wouldn't be forced to). Make it easy for amateurs to access it just as readily as pros, and you have a healthy ecosystem of kink.

Parents would find it a lot easier to block an entire domain than go URL by URL trying to decide if Junior was searching for something naughty or actually researching the tufted titmouse, or Civil War-era breastworks, or whatev.

Thanks, Mordy. I figured that, I meant why at this particular moment? Like I don't remember this being such a widespread thing

incest taboo obviously is a huge thing for human sexuality. why did they only just figure out that you can get the best of both worlds w/ step porn? presumably rise of fractured families - increase of step-siblings making it a normative fantasy. why like in the last few years when divorce/remarriage phenomenon has been going on for a while? idk.

i thought .xxx was happening

xxxpost

Treesh, what I mean is that every no-bullshit hardcore p0rn p0rveyor (Redtube, HotMILFsinSoiledGrannyPanties, p0rntube, UnclesWithBenefits, etc.) would phase out their .com sites and start operating exclusively on .xxx. It would be best if they did so voluntarily and more or less simultaneously, in a coordinated move of public-spirited self-policing.

Where the industry (to the extent there still IS an industry) goes, the hardcore audience might very well follow. There would still be people who want to post NSFWily in the .com and .net and .us worlds. But it might be a lot easier to identify and avoid those folks if they're no longer surrounded by FriskyFurries and TentacleHentai.

I recall people being hesitant about the xxx thing because they were worried what would be done to them after they put themselves in that category.
There's a lot of sites that would be tricky to categorize because they have very mixed content. Like art sites that allow hardcore but don't specialize in it.

ymp you crack me up

and yes rag otm what oh what about arty tumblr porn?????

Of course there are lots of grey areas and sites with a mix of stuff. But that's why a voluntary move, of only the hardest stuff, makes sense (to me, anyway). More sense, anyway, than a hard-and-fast ban with legal teeth (PHRASING!). A legal ban imposed from without would invite modern-day Tipper Gores to do the deciding.

And I wouldn't mind plenty of very racy stuff still coexisting in the .com space - I just think it'd be easier to be choosy if the web wasn't all one vast swamp of filth flarn filth.

As noted, I like filth! I just don't want to bathe in it all the time. It's more a dip-in, dip-out kind of thing.

A hard ban is a terrible idea for all the reasons already mentioned

This is gonna sound kinda hippy-dippy but the answer is to embrace better and more porn imo

OK, I don't see it posted upthread so I'll ask...what is with all the "step-" porn? Is this a fad or what?

― Iago Galdston

incest porn is more phenomenally popular than anybody could ever have imagined. for my part i want to know what's with the porn featuring naked ladies covered in eyes?

Male gaze manifest

what. is that really a thing? that's nightmare fuel.

yea i have never heard of that

Mordy- browse the categories at clips4sale and you'll be astonished at what exists.

I think all these adult sites should ideally have a content warning regardless of what page you first enter the site. Anything more could create problems. Maybe that should include really sexy instagram pages (which hosts a huge amount of porn without genitals, anuses or female nipples), but not sure about that.

If sexual content is made to seem more taboo or pushed more underground, porn might become more unpleasant overall. It's not good that the lightest softcore or nudity in general requires more warnings than extreme violence generally does.

If creators have to worry what kind of erotic things they put in their "normal" work or keep their wholly erotic work in a different adult site from the rest of their work, it can create the impression that it's of inherently less value.

===

As much as I like the trend of custom clips, I dislike seeing so many great models bringing to life the ugliest fantasies of their audience. Can't help but suspect this is another way in which the anti-feminists ruin the internet for everyone else.
It's depressing to see a favourite model do those "make fun of my inadequate girlfriend/wife" videos and all sorts of other shit where there needs to be a victim. I once seen a guy request his wife be called "an ugly loser". And a guy bragging that he deprives his own children so he can pay a woman to tell him how worthless he is.

It often seems that the ugliest stuff comes from America and Japan. People used to joke about Germany having nastier stuff but I've never actually seen anything to confirm that. I wonder what Africa, China, middle east and north Korea would do if they get their own industry and audience requests.

what is porn without genitals, anuses or female nipples?

Ahhh rhetoric

It's just a matter of not being allowed to show genitals, anuses or female nipples. It's a rule you see across all sorts of entertainment which is allowed to be sexy, but those types of nudity are the red line.

this is a stupid nonissue, marcos and others otm

If sexual content is made to seem more taboo or pushed more underground, porn might become more unpleasant overall.

Can it get any more unpleasant overall?

Like I know pornography, in the broadest sense, includes things like Renaissance pen-and-ink drawings and videos where women just talk about how empowered they feel, but this stuff isn't what appears when a kid googles 'porn' to see what the fuss is about.

I think it can get worse. I'd imagine there's both a lot more stuff full of sunshine/cheer and the hateful polar opposite than there was three decades ago but mostly the tone hasn't changed much. But it's difficult to say for sure.

I've never actually thought about what young people might search but I never imagined anyone would just type in "porn". I'd guess most people start with something more specific and then work from there. But that's a good point.

It might help if there could be successful lawsuits against the tube sites for copyright infringement because most of the really nasty stuff comes from pay sites and not amateurs.
I've heard that porn used to be good for the economy and maybe a lot less people paying for it will makes governments less tolerant of it?

It was several years into looking at online porn before I saw much hardcore stuff around.

the government right now sucks and is right wing and would see any kind of regulation as an excuse to enforce their own sexual agenda.

that sucks. for now i guess a laissez faire approach is the best worst option.

but that's all it is. this is like cigarette companies advertising on nickelodeon but worse. the internet is ubiquitous.

what is porn without genitals, anuses or female nipples?

― Mordy

fetish porn

what is porn without genitals, anuses or female nipples?

― Mordy

fetish porn

I remember having a conversation with a co-worker when I worked for a porn magazine during which he narrated this incredibly complicated fetish fantasy that basically involved him being placed into a latex suit that would effectively turn him into a dolphin in a tank. After a couple of minutes of him explaining all the details of the straps and buckles and breathing apparatus, I asked, "So at what point during all this does a penis enter a vagina?" and he gave me this blank stare like I'd addressed him in Welsh or something.

the only way a consumer-side ban works is if some censor authority either does a per-domain or URL filter (keyword, sub domain, whatever) block and all of those are garbage without human intervention. that's still going to have a lot of things banned that shouldn't be -- every public host or shared host could get wrongly blanket-banned

you might get in the way of a few people who search for "naked women having sex" though

which is the only search you sickos should be doing, wtf

btw yelling at dolphin people in welsh is actually quite common on the request site I frequent

my friend went on one of those 'request' porn sites and demanded that the model on the other end pleasure herself while yelling "EAT POOP". she complied.

this is where we get into the intersection with the "is this enjoyable" thread

now that you've done this thing, how do you feel about it?

Did your friend do that because it was his/her fantasy or just to be a dick to the model? If the latter, 😡

the former i would wager

Alright then it's ok

what if Neanderthal's friend's fetish is for being a dick to models though

I don't know man. Sometimes I wish I was never appointed universal moral arbiter

new board description

my friend went on one of those 'request' porn sites and demanded that the model on the other end pleasure herself while yelling "EAT POOP". she complied.

― Neanderthal

he's still a better human being than pewdiepie

Who's that? I'm afraid to search it.

dat's just my baby daddy

Someone once told me they knew a girl who sought out guys like Danny Dyer and got them to shout "awright geezer" during sex.

http://www.thestranger.com/feature/2016/06/08/24182705/the-audition

This is a truly fucked up story:

Bishop and Shearer are two of at least six women who say they've been solicited via Facebook by someone calling themselves Deja Stwalley. All six met online after one woman's account of her experience with Stwalley went viral on Facebook. Now, after sharing their stories with one another, they believe that the Deja Stwalley profile was fake.

Shearer and two others say they had sex with Stwalley's photographer because they thought they had to for a porn audition. In hindsight, they consider what happened to them sexual assault or fraud. But the justice system has a limited ability—or willingness—to prosecute cases where consent was obtained under false pretenses. Three of the women have gone to local police, but they don't feel they're being taken seriously.

Something I've noticed recently (say, the last few months): There's a new kind of lube that's being used in a lot of videos that's really disgusting. It's not clear - it's white, and extremely thick and slimy-looking. It's like something out of a sci-fi horror movie, and seeing it slopping out of women's orifices is frankly disturbing. Has anyone else noticed this, and am I the only one repulsed by it?

Someone told me about grool ("girl drool") fetishists a few years back. Maybe that's what you're seeing?

Which reminds me how much I hate the word "smut". It just sounds like something that oozes out of a disgusting person's pores. "Butler! Wipe off my smut!"
Or congealed filth at the bottom of bins or liquid excrement or some other gross liquidy thing.

I don't know why anyone calls their own work or their favourite stuff "smut".

Someone told me about grool ("girl drool") fetishists a few years back. Maybe that's what you're seeing?

No, it's definitely lube - in fact, it's sold under the brand name Spunk (don't worry; that link goes to Amazon).

SPUNK 1 Gallon Lube Hybrid is a water based silicone lubricant that resembles the look and feel of natural body lubrication (cum lube).

porn is so damn boring

clearly you're not into strobe zone zero-G space porn

does the spunk just.....fly around

depends on the exit velocity

(which is very easy to measure with the aid of strobe lights, actually)

Mountain climbing porn is really scary.

not if you wear goggles

They were hanging off a slanting rock far from the wall of the mountain by ropes naked in the sky.

if you look behind the shelving units at a decent VHS store you'll find the Zipline Collision tapes. one person zips down, the other waits at the bottom, and blam-mo!

I have never seen it but remember reading all kinds of music fan sites circa 2000 and found out the dude from the prodigy contributed music to porn shot in zero g

you know you're making real zero g porn when someone calls up prodigy to do the music

just imagine the pitch
"Hey you want to contribute music to my porn movie?"
"Ah, nah"
"We rented that airplane that flies like a roller coaster and the actors are going to be doing it while floating like astronauts"
"hmm sure, why not"

I'm a firestarter, zero-g spooge Cruise like Carter.

Have you guys tried watching The Expanse

there's an expanse in my pants

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/government-porn-id-check-mindgeek-porn-hub-digital-economy-act-bbfc-a8820016.html

Good luck UK

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/commentisfree/2019/apr/02/ineffective-insecure-overdue-the-porn-block-gets-everything-wrong

I don't have a passport or driving license so the newsagents better be doing it.

It's likely to get postponed again and then quietly forgotten about amidst the Brexit mess.

postporn.gif

I had probably better read what comes of the switch when it happens for a few months before I do anything.

But if this is paysites and tubesites only then it might not make much of a difference because most of my porn viewing is on blogs, forums, twitter and Instagram. I'm a little ashamed I haven't bought anything from paysites but I don't pirate stuff either because the sheer quantity of legitimately free content is so enormous and difficult enough to keep up with.

Also, RIP Tumblr. Maybe it was for the better because tumblr made it extremely difficult to fight piracy and it was perhaps the easiest site for children to stumble onto something really horrifying, clicking around Tumblr could easily go from kids cartoons to nightmare porn.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kxny7/diy-facial-recognition-for-porn-weibo

Yeah I was reading this earlier. Fucking horrendous idea. Obviously, all the intel types are out there lauding this.

intel types

They wish. ;)

But yeah, this is a disaster waiting to happen, especially in more religiously conservative countries.

seems i really missed out not having a step sister!

Thoughts on the age verification laws (possibly coming to a state near you, if not already there)?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148

I mean, I grew up with age limits on porn so on one hand it hardly seems outrageous to me. I have worried/wondered a bit about the long term effects of massive porn exposure for kids. (Which I would have loved when I was 14, but I’m not sure my life would have been better in any particular way if it had been available.)

On the other hand anti-porn crusades are always bound up with anti-sex religious mindsets that I also think are very harmful. It seems like something that we could reach a reasonable level of regulation on, except that the people who want to ban all forms of sexual expression will hardly stop with age verification. And also, they’ll want you to have to be 18 to check out Toni Morrison books from the library or whatever.

(And I know age verification isn’t that hard to defeat with a VPN or other workarounds. Just wondering what people think philosophically.)

Age verification laws in the US can't do anything about dodgy porn tube sites hosted in former Soviet Republics where they aren't going to do even the most cursory checks on what's being uploaded.

I agree with both of you, with the slight caveat that there are some valid critiques of porn/the porn industry that don't come from a religious anti-sex position but from a feminist, anti-exploitation position.

Yep, and that old ‘70s feminist/evangelical anti-porn alliance is still in effect. The Politico article says that it was a talk by an anti-porn feminist that helped persuade a bunch of Louisiana legislators.

And Milo’s point is obviously true, these laws are at most an inconvenience for anyone with access to Google. I’m also in general not a fan of the government getting overly involved in online content restriction for lots of reasons. At the same time, I can’t make a very strong argument against some basic age restriction efforts.

Philosophically it seems pointless at best - as with surviving off record sales or having functional local newspapers there's no turning the clock on porn. You'd have more success convincing teens that masturbation turns palms hairy than impeding access.

Specifically in regard to the legislation getting passed, it's all in line with the trans panic/drag show/book banning culture war shit, like the Texas law that's already been temporarily blocked where the age verification warning has what amounts to a No Nut November advertisement about the evils of porn.

Seems an overly blunt instrument imo. The privacy implications of tying real life id to porn consumption - not great Bob? Also, does anyone trust any of these sites security?

The underlying matter is an honourable one in intent, I just really hate this solution.

Yeah I definitely agree about the privacy issues. And with the ACLU’s position that all of these things are problematic intrusions on adult rights.

Yeah uploading my driver's license to PornHub? Absolutely not, thanks. Even though I get the concerns, and am willing to at least admit there are some good intentions out there.

I don't know what the solution is, but am not sure it's this.

Actually I do know at least some solutions, but they aren't feasible at scale.

Yeah I’m not showing my drivers license to a porn site thanks, I’m gonna do it the old fashioned way, in front of a schoolyard.

my boss used to call me a wanker for not having a driving license!

Now you need a license to wank

Next James Bond film.

lol

Based on the work of Ian Fapping

On Her Majesty’s Secret Cervix

For Your Thighs Only

Moonraker (all anal)

Goldfingered

Thunderballs

You Only Jizz Twice

The Spy Who Loved Me

wait, i think i missed the joke

Octopussy (vagina edition)

A View to a Thrill

From Russia With No Age Verification Required

GoldenBrownEye

Roger More, More, More

i know this thread is in the middle of a shitposting jag but i do have complicated thoughts here

the politico article... is a good example of why i stay away from these sorts of sites, even if the articles can be funny

According to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub

CAPITALISM!

when it comes to what politico says about the negative sociological effects of porn... there's a patchwork quilt of sources here. you have billie eilish... and i do think, honestly, that the personal _is_ political. i think her example bears this out. sometimes, though, it can be tough to sort out what's personal and political and what's just personal. it's something i've personally struggled a lot with... well, i'll get to that.

anyway, yes, i'm looking at this through a certain lens, which is the lens of trans rights. the republican supermajority in louisiana is pretty strongly anti-trans, which the article points out. in this sense, focusing on the republican legislature opposing porn is kind of... i mean, the point is that the governor didn't veto this, right? so it's down to one person. ultimately.

because with trans rights, you do have this spectacle of people who are supposedly "feminists" working with groups who oppose abortion and so on and so forth, and i mean, admittedly i'm a bit of a radical but i'm not sure what the point of any feminist talking to louisiana republicans at all would be. i don't really think feminists and louisiana republicans share any basic principles.

so the other major players here... gail dines. i can find no documentation anywhere of her stance on trans rights, though admittedly i didn't look very hard. laurie schlegel? not enough in the article to know. both of them are important but from the article i don't get a sense of who they are or where they're coming from.

marc novicoff. now this is an interesting one. intern, 22 or 23, wrote the article. he puts himself in the story. journalists were told not to do that when i was younger, and i'm glad that's changed, honestly. because the stuff he says, the sources he quotes, _do_ say a lot about him personally.

what are his sources? a 2016 time article called "porn and the threat to virility" which takes as one of its prime sources /r/NoFap. that's gonna shape your article, if /r/NoFap (which he also cites directly) is your idea of a credible source.

Visit any number of massively populated internet forums (combined members 1.4 million) if you don’t understand what I mean; bask in the endless tapestry of loneliness, broken marriages and 20-something-year-old men who can’t get it up for women they’re in love with, but have no trouble when they’re watching videos of strangers.

22 or 23.

and then novicoff jumps straight to this:

An important consensus seems to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of many things negatively affecting the minds of Gen Z. Anxiety is mounting around the country over the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis afflicting my generation. Some blame social media; others chime in to add oversensitivity, overdiagnosis and a therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw limitless internet porn into the blame basket.

no cites. no cites on any of that. novicoff asserts that "an important consensus seems to have emerged" but provides no citations for this extraordinary statement. the best he says is that "it hardly seems like a leap".

he lists a litany of things causing generation z anxiety and it's... i'm sorry, what? "a therapeutic culture"? fucking seriously? where's environmental collapse? where's capitalism? no, the problem is _therapy_. this paragraph, more than any, is where novicoff shows his hand, and his hand smells funny. who the hell was this man's _editor_, anyway? does politico _have_ editors?

---

so, for the benefit of anybody to whom this wasn't a foregone conclusion, it's a bad article. that's not why i'm posting. i'm posting because even though the article sucks, the topic is of interest to me.

i didn't grow up with porn exactly. my dad was pretty fanatical about it, but always made sure to keep it away from us kids. after he left my mom, though, my mom was less fastidious. some of the companies kept sending porn catalogs to the house and my mom delighted in showing them to us and making fun of the sick shit my dad was into. you know. stuff like sissy porn.

now, me even saying that, i know some people will take that a certain way, will say "social contagion" and all that crap, but you know, they've already drawn their conclusions. those people aren't going to accept me for who i am no matter what my life experience is. so there's no point, really, in my not being honest about it. just speaking personally, you know, it didn't fucking help. it didn't help to have my transness categorized as a humiliating fetish. i didn't look at that and say "oh you know what that sounds like a great idea".

i never looked at trans porn. wasn't into it. i did look at a lot of porn. nothing hardcore. i didn't like looking at other people's genitals. i didn't like looking at people fucking. i didn't want to fuck anybody. i still don't want to fuck anybody. i'm asexual.

and when it comes to trans porn, well. it's not made for trans people. first off there's the slurs. constantly the slurs. even today... the only time i really ever see the t-slur is in porn. if someone's gonna throw a slur at us outside of that, it's usually the f-slur. also, trans porn seems inordinately focused on showing the genitals. i'm not saying there's anything wrong with girldick. girldick is great. porn, though, there's an element of fantasy to porn, and i'm not gonna look at trans porn and say to myself "gee, i wish i had a dick like that". that was never gonna happen.

what's interesting to me is that to some extent i find that my level of interest in porn _has_ been hormonally influenced. visual erotic depictions just don't interest me like they used to. i like art sometimes. audio. stories. if i'm looking for erotic material, that's the kind of stuff that interests me. that stuff has _always_ interested me, my interest in that stuff, i don't think that's hormonal... it was just easy for that to get lost in a sea of visual depictions.

anyway. a lot of all this comes back to the idea of the "threat to virility". threat to _reproductive capacity_. porn is stealing our kids' virility! porn is... it's... it's... turning our boys into _sissies_! it's making them _queer_!

i mean, that's the subtext here, right? boys don't get it up like they did when _i_ was their age. boys don't nut like they did when _i_ was their age. that's the narrative, isn't it?

i had a hard time keeping an erection, back when that was still a thing for me. i had, and have, a hard time achieving orgasm. that hasn't changed, for the record. my experience is that in functional terms there's not really a meaningful difference between a girldick and a clit. people can show you charts about the anatomical similarities, and that's probably better evidence, but just anecdotally, they _feel_ the same. the only difference is that i no longer have genital dysphoria. i didn't actually know i had genital dysphoria because, you know... i didn't exactly have the opportunity to compare and contrast.

when i went in for my last follow-up on my grs my surgeon asked me "can you cum?" and i said "not without great difficulty, but it was that way before". apparently that's not routine, even for trans women getting grs, but i know i'm not _unique_. it frustrates me, for sure. i have a really difficult time reaching orgasm and porn helps. a little. just like a vibrator helps, well, more than a little.

i've known women who don't use vibrators because, the feeling is, once you use a vibrator you're not going to get off any other way. well, i will get off any goddamn way i can, is how that goes. actually what women say about vibrators is kind of... not dissimilar to what guys who are worried about porn say about porn. that it reduces one's sexual sensitivity, makes orgasm more difficult.

if we're going to talk about it, though, in terms of... i mean, my hitachi can colonize my clitoris all it likes, please. porn, though, it does colonize the mind to some extent. not necessarily the way people think it does. sissy porn didn't make me a girl. it just made me ashamed to be a girl. i'm not a big fan of that. these laws, though... some of my friends, the only real work available to them is sex work, and they keep making laws that make it more difficult for them to support themselves. i'm not a big fan of that.

anyway. i don't know why orgasm is so difficult for me. maybe it's porn. i fucking hated orgasm... i mean it felt good but GOD that fucking dysphoria... so i did edge a lot. and i don't know, has anybody done any studies? does chronic edging make orgasm more difficult? it seems likely that it might. but then there's also the SSRIs. that article talks about porn-influenced erectile dysfunction, but it doesn't talk about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. which is the idea that... what i was told as that sexual dysfunction as an SSRI side effect was extremely rare (not true) and that it would go away once i stopped the SSRI... and in my case it didn't. but who the fuck knows if it was the SSRI or not. i don't think it's a trans thing. there seems to be a lot of variety there.

anyway, i don't know. SSRIs, too much edging, "therapy culture", capitalism. i don't cum nearly as much as i'd like to, and blaming porn, "it hardly seems like a leap", maybe, but also, blaming porn isn't going to get me off either. so why bother? why make my friends' lives harder?

anyway, that's TMI corner with kate!

nice try but I’m not searching “billie eilish porn”

I agree the Politico article has a lot of unexamined assumptions, I just think the underlying issue is interesting. Porn is such an ethical quagmire in so many ways, from multiple different perspectives: free speech, feminism, queer/gender theory, capitalism/exploitation, etc etc. As far as age restrictions go I'm philosophically OK with limiting access to porn for minors while also recognizing the practical and logistical difficulties therein and also the damaging agendas behind anti-porn/anti-sex politics in general.

In respect to trans porn specifically, I interviewed a trans porn performer about a decade ago and she had interesting thoughts about her audience and how they saw her. She made the point that her fans were almost all men who identified as straight, she didn't really see it as a queer niche per se (unlike gay porn e.g.). I also read an interview not long ago with Bree Mills, a gay woman who produces a range of porn for a range of audiences, and she talked about the evolution in how she's trying to present trans porn and performers — e.g., including them in lesbian-themed series, dispensing with old tropes like the "reveal" moment where the characters in a scene are shocked to discover one of them is trans, letting trans performers create their own scenes based on their own sexual preferences rather than on audience fantasies, and so forth. But of course that's from the more progressive corner of porn production and there's still tons of "chicks with dicks" style stuff out there.

In respect to trans porn specifically, I interviewed a trans porn performer about a decade ago and she had interesting thoughts about her audience and how they saw her. She made the point that her fans were almost all men who identified as straight, she didn't really see it as a queer niche per se (unlike gay porn e.g.).

This may have changed a bit over the last 10 years - the trans porn audience may be more relaxed now in identifying as queer rather than straight ?

This may have changed a bit over the last 10 years - the trans porn audience may be more relaxed now in identifying as queer rather than straight ?

― Dr Drudge (Bob Six)

i don't personally see it as a matter of "relaxation"

i'm gonna be blunt, most of the audience for transfem porn, that i can tell, are chasers who fetishize us and are really only interested in our thick, hard, cocks. anybody who associates trans women with thick, hard cocks might perhaps might have the most accurate or empathetic understanding of trans women.

they also might not have the most accurate or empathetic understanding of themselves. there's, for instance, some chasers for whom it's really important to not be gay, but who at the same time, really like dick, dick that's as much like guy dick as possible. these people are not going to identify as "queer". there's this simultaneous attraction and repulsion a lot of consumers of transfem porn have, and you know, whatever shit they have going on, that's their thing. it just doesn't tend to translate into a lot of respect for trans women.

when it comes to transfem t4t porn, i run into a _lot_ more GoneWildAudio stuff than visual stuff. which makes a lot of sense to me, personally!

i have no clue re: trans men in porn. i guess buck angel has an audience, but i don't know who his audience is. i'd prefer to think about him as little as possible.

Blunt is good… There’s a lot to think about here.

I think that sadly the average t girl porn viewer's no more likely to identify as queer than the average lesbian porn viewer is likely to be a queer ally.

FWIW here's that Bree Mills interview I was talking about: https://avn.com/business/articles/video/bree-mills-on-transfixed-and-the-trans-tipping-point-828592.html

interesting interview. i figured i'd go see what mills has been up to since then. looks like she's now with an all-male company called disruptive films, which released one film in 2021. i'm not inclined to read anything into that. a lot of times people try things that don't work out, and i think it's cool that mills gave it a shot. and, i mean, porn keeps changing... even 2019 was a long time ago!

oh just to be clear the term "t-girl" is taken by a lot of people, including myself, as being a slur... a lot of trans porn does get called "t-girl" porn and honestly quite a lot worse, but anybody who calls me a "t-girl" will _not_ get a warm response from me :)

She actually runs a whole porn network, AdultTime. She's certainly not the be-all of woke porn, but she's an interesting figure and a lot different than the sleazelords of old.

She actually runs a whole porn network, AdultTime. She's certainly not the be-all of woke porn, but she's an interesting figure and a lot different than the sleazelords of old.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

see, _that's_ the interesting thing, is the business model at all. i dimly recall there being a porn issue of (academic trans studies publication) TSQ that had some interesting observations in it - the history of trans performers in porn, sissy hypno, stuff like that. anyway i think some of that got into the old-school sleazelord stuff, and... ok, my understanding of this stuff is sketchy, but pornhub kind of killed the california porn industry with easy access to piracy, right? and then once the people running pornhub had done that they used their platform to create a monopoly on porn based out of quebec? and that's where a lot of the incest stuff comes from? although there's a _lot_ of incest anime out there right now as well. particularly incest isekai, because hey, why not hit everything at once.

which was something else that i've seen observed about mass-market porn... as there are more and more fetishes, the pressure to incorporate as many as possible into a single 10-minute clip intensifies. why do a spanking clip when you can do a monsterfucker pissplay breeding fetish (it makes me howl with glee to think of how the "virility" advocates think of BREEDING FETISHES, which are, yes, particularly popular with queers... because if you're not queer, it's not a fetish, right?) spanking clip?

well because of course then you risk losing the people who aren't into all of those things. mass-market porn just doesn't adapt well to the... long tail, as they say.

i don't know what role pornhub plays in the online sex work economy these days. it's not a site i've spent a lot of time around. most of the people i know who do sex work focus it around onlyfans, and really, i feel like that model is just a better fit than the porn industry of old. because that's the other thing... monetization. people who do sex work want to get paid for it. pornhub, in its piracy years, tended to undermine that.

the main problem in doing sex work is something mentioned only in passing in the article - _collecting payment_. most of the online payment processors _won't_ handle sites associated with adult activities, and there's constant, constant financial pressure on the ones that do. so the people who do provide third-party financial processing charge a pretty high overhead. there's ways to get around it, if you operate at a big enough scale, but people trying to work individually...

i know FOSTA/SESTA did the exact opposite of what it was trying to do, it made sex work far more difficult for the people trying to do it, and the people doing that work far more vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking. that's kind of the outcome i expect from this sort of legislation.

Oddly PayPal work with some of the bigger porn companies, despite being generally antiporn.

There's a pretty good interview with Dian Hanson on youtube, she was an influential porn magazine editor and for the last 2 decades she's been editing a large chunk of Taschen's sex books and some of their art books. She said that the male porn editors she taken over from tended to resent the audience and be completely uncomfortable with the fact that people were masturbating to the magazines, which is bizarre and funny/sad.

I've generally heard these new laws are going to make everyone more vulnerable, including politicians and I thought they probably wouldn't have gone down this route because it could cause a lot of political scandals, but it's happening and we'll see how it goes.

tell that to Matt Gaetz, sad lol

completely uncomfortable with the fact that people were masturbating to the magazines, which is bizarre and funny/sad.

They sounded like a bunch of jerks who worked for magazine companies and weren't thrilled about working on those particular ones, but I'm not sure. There was something that seemed similar to me when Jon Ronson interviewed a man from Pornhub who seemed offended when Ronson said he worked in porn.

Is there still a magazine market out there? I admit I haven't been to a shady newsstand in decades. I get the New Yorker and I have an Atlantic online subscription but I do not know about the print porn scene.

So, like, is there still a Chic? Or Playgirl, Penthouse, Oui? This was the stuff of distant fantasy when I was perhaps 13 in 1984.

There's a pretty good interview with Dian Hanson on youtube, she was an influential porn magazine editor and for the last 2 decades she's been editing a large chunk of Taschen's sex books and some of their art books. She said that the male porn editors she taken over from tended to resent the audience and be completely uncomfortable with the fact that people were masturbating to the magazines, which is bizarre and funny/sad.

― Robert Adam Gilmour

honestly being in denial about the actual effects of what they're being paid to do sounds really on-brand for cis dudes

So, like, is there still a Chic? Or Playgirl, Penthouse, Oui? This was the stuff of distant fantasy when I was perhaps 13 in 1984.

― The Royal House of Hangover (Ye Mad Puffin)

no idea, but the fetish mags all shut down ages ago afaik. everything is online now.

The corner store nearest me has old school porn mags on a rack behind the counter - the old titles like Juggs and Barely Legal. Don't know if they're new and in print or just from a warehouse somewhere.

I think the magazine I edited from 2000-2005 (yes, I was making pornography on 9/11) is still extant. But I haven't been in a Hudson News in a while so I'm not 100% sure.

I just checked and the magazines I stopped paying attention to almost a decade ago are still going, maybe on a less frequent basis. I'm really surprised.

Don't know if they're new and in print or just from a warehouse somewhere.

probably AI-generated

I think the magazine I edited from 2000-2005 (yes, I was making pornography on 9/11) is still extant. But I haven't been in a Hudson News in a while so I'm not 100% sure.

"... They hate our freedom to splooge in the privacy of our homes, whenever we want."

https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

That would mean not only sites like Reddit and Twitter would have to verify everyone’s age and identity, and expose visitors to government surveillance, but also sites like Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon and Google.

But consumers hate it, and it’s wildly expensive. So the end result pic.twitter.com/ezKyO4J91U

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile) March 26, 2024

Gonna need some First Amendment cases to go the right way.

That tweet assumes that the value of Reddit/Twitter/etc. aren’t tied so heavily to porn that they’ll acquiesce and not fight back. Reddit just went public, the executives have a duty to shareholders keep it filled with boobs.

They all saw what happened to Tumblr.

first they came be(for)e the porn aficionados

Here's where AI can fill in the gap. "Chat GTPorn, gimme Trent Lott getting rimmed by Benito Mussolini."

I'm curious how successful even authoritarian states are at keeping out porn. Or maybe they don't really care, as long as it's not subversive. But, like, Iran must devote some effort to blocking porn, right?

(per some quick googling, yes, Iran is apparently quite good at keeping out porn)

the porn is coming from within the house

I posted a bit upthread about a Dian Hanson interview on youtube, but this was so much more in-depth and amazing. Her early life was just insane, seems like she has so much emotional distance from it all that she can talk about it very comfortably. She said she's turned down offers to make her life story into a film or book but it's easy to see the appeal of that. She talks about working with Linda Lovelace, Bill Ward and Eric Stanton when their health was falling to pieces, Stanton was eventually drawing while blind. Working with Arnold Schwarzenegger for several years on his book because he is a big fan of her Taschen books. Stories about Robert Crumb, Vanessa Del Rio and many more.

https://www.therialtoreport.com/2024/07/28/dian-hanson/
https://www.therialtoreport.com/2024/08/04/peter-wolff/
https://www.therialtoreport.com/2024/08/11/dian-hanson-2/
https://www.therialtoreport.com/2024/08/18/taschen/

Another interesting thing was the question of whether a leg magazine could be viable in modern times, some people thought that seemed hopelessly old fashioned but no, there was still a devoted audience for that.