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.

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.