Pornography

(Art) Project: Beautiful Agony.

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From Vice:

Coming on Camera: Beautiful Agony's Orgasmic Porn By Rula Al-Nasrawi

[…]

That project is Beautiful Agony—also called “Facettes de La Petite Mort.” It’s an Australia-based erotic website that posts daily videos of people masturbating until they orgasm. The twist is that the videos are only filmed from the shoulders up, so all you see is a succession of O-faces. The videos are basically webcam versions of Andy Warhol’s experimental “Blow Job” short film. Anyone from a DDD-cup porn star to your 95-year-old granddad can submit a video of themselves getting their rocks off. The videos range from one-man shows to group circle jerks, but you never see what’s going on down below. The name “Beautiful Agony” speaks to the almost painful tension you feel right before you come, followed by a zen-like state. The beauty lies in watching people of all walks of life momentarily lose control in the best way.

[…]

Founded by Richard Lawrence and Lauren Olney in 2004, Beautiful Agony hasn’t changed a lot since its inception. The site still has an old Windows 90-something look to it. The only difference between now and its debut is the long list of monthly subscriptions Lawrence and Olney have collected over the years. Pay $15 and you have access to hundreds of videos of people finishing themselves off, and confessing their innermost sexual secrets, for a month. Pay $100 and you’ve got access for the entire year.

Lawrence told me over Skype that the site was essentially born out of the duo’s frustration with mainstream porn.

“If we were to sort of parallel the porn industry with the car industry and imagine what a car looked like if it had the same values and the same sort of commitment to excellence that porn has, I think that you’d be looking at a piece of junk that costs $3 million that would run out of petrol after three miles.”

So Lawrence and Olney took matters into their own hands.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we try this and see what happens?’” Lawrence said. “I think we were a little too embarrassed to film our own [videos] and show each other, so instead we just lent a video camera around to some friends of ours that we knew were open-minded.”

[…]

Along with erotic projects like Hysterical Literature (photographer Clayton Cubitt's video series of women reading literature at a desk, while being pleasured underneath the table) and MakeLoveNotPorn.TV (a site where regular people submit their own sex videos for online rental), Beautiful Agony is pioneering a shift in the porn industry away from the male gaze.

“[Beautiful Agony] is something that fits right in with what has been kind of evolving over the last 10 years with the feminist porn movement internationally,” said Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara. “It’s implicit critique is that the graphic display of pornography doesn’t necessarily equal pleasure for the viewer or the performer, and that you could possibly have something that’s less graphic or a more confined view."

Read the rest of the article here.

Homepage here.

And their videos on Vimeo here.

Video collage:


What do women want in porn?

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From XOJane:

Do You Really Want Your Porn To Look More Like You? I just want my porn to feature women who are confident, self-aware, and get off. I realize this is a lot to ask. by Julieanne

Get excited, my fellow perverts: The sex industry is finally ready to cater to your every womanly need -- in exchange, of course, for your lush mounds of money.

In a Slate column about vibrators, Amanda Hess reflected on the recent shift away from phallic shapes in the dong industry. She wondered, ultimately, if perhaps a sea change in our nudie films might be next:

If even dildo manufacturers can successfully transcend the severed organ, surely the porn industry can offer women a little bit more than the old standby—a disembodied penis thrusting through scene after scene until it satisfies every male fantasy. What if porn were designed with an eye toward the female aesthetic in the way that Jimmyjane’s toys are? What if Girls did for porn what Sex in the City did for the vibrator, breaking the taboo? And what if women demanded more from the porn they’re already viewing?Doesn't it feel like Don Corleone's wedding day? Go ahead! Do a little twirl and ask for something! The world is your Dutch Oyster.

Of course, Hess isn't suggesting that there's something we all want unilaterally. Certainly, female sexual desire is as varied and as different as the whorls of the fingers with which we gently diddle ourselves.

But it's an intriguing thought: what if "good sex" on screen looked like the good sex we're actually having? (Or, okay, would like to have, under ideal circumstances.) It sounds like an unlikely, especially since asthetics in porn seem to shift glacially at best. Besides, most of us can't get instant free sex toys on on RedTube.

Still -- given your druthers, would you change the standard hung stud/horny teen pump-and-blow? The "I'm a naughty tattooed bisexual with no bodyfat having an aloof fingerblast in a warehouse" of alt porn? Or would you be on board with (I'll say it) the Dunhamification of your spank films?

Would you want it to look more like you?

Well, for those of you who consume porn, that is. I realize that some of you don't, or feel guilty about it, for ethical reasons. But if buying more porn is indeed an emollient for the problems that have historically plagued women in the industry (which is ailing or thriving, depending who you ask), then I guess now's our time to come up with a list of demands. Let us hold a summit, and draw up a Vagna Carta.

Whether or not you want to actually see yourself in your porn, "fem porn" director/producer Erika Lust made an interesting point in the Guardian: It would be nice to be able to relate to it a little more. "To get excited," she mused, "women want to see something that looks like us. We want to see independent women exploring their sexuality, who are not afraid, but are not sex heroines either. We want to see attractive men who share our lifestyles, our ideas."

This is difficult, as I realize we are not all into penises or vaginas or sex at all. So, this is going to take a lot of generalizing. So, you know, if you're not into mainstream porn,  I'm not trying to leave you out. But, just like some of us like Hawaiian style or deep dish or hand tossed, most of us can agree that pizza is the greatest.

So for generality's sake, we're going Papa John's here. Let's talk about what we'd like to see in our garden variety, ho-hum, porny porny porno. I'll throw out some of my demands, and you guys can hit me with yours. Sound good? Onward.

Read the recommendations here.

Most Americans still think porn is immoral.

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Keep in mind who collected the data. From the Atlantic:

Most People Think Watching Porn Is Morally Wrong In debates about the industry, it's easy to forget that most people think erotica isn't for them. By Emma Green

"All men look at porn .… The handful of men who claim they don’t look at porn are liars or castrates." That's what Dan Savage, a Seattle-based sex columnist, wrote a few years ago in response to a reader who was fretting about her boyfriend's affinity for erotica. By this point, his argument seems like a trope: All red-blooded men have watched porn. It's just part of life. Get used to it.

Whether or not Savage is right about how often people watch porn, they don't seem to be "getting used to it." According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, only 29 percent of Americans think watching porn is morally acceptable. Somewhat predictably, men and women have very different opinions on the issue: Only 23 percent of women approve, while 35 percent of men think it's okay.

These statistics suggest something wildly different from the Dan Savage view of the sex world. Even if it were true that all men watch porn at some point—which it probably isn't—65 percent of them feel bad about it.

One striking thing about these findings is the incredible variation in how people think about porn on a personal level and how they think about it on a legal level. Overall, 39 percent said they'd oppose legal restrictions on pornography, compared to the 29 percent who consider it morally acceptable. That means roughly ten percent of people disapprove of porn but don't think it should be illegal. The demographic breakdown reveals some unanticipated nuance. A twentysomething and her grandma are just as likely to think access to porn shouldn't be restricted on the Internet (42 percent), but the Millennial is five times as likely to think watching it is morally okay (45 percent versus 9 percent). Democrats and Tea Partiers have similar attitudes about legal restrictions against porn (41 and 40 percent opposed, respectively), and Tea Partiers are much more morally forgiving of erotica than those on the right who just call themselves Republicans: 27 percent versus 19 percent say it's okay. (Earlier this week, I noted a similar divide in the PRRI survey between Americans who support a right to gay marriage while still disapproving of gay sex.)

Read the rest here.

Porn 101.

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The Adult Performer Advocacy Committee advocates to maintain and improve safety and working conditions in the adult film industry by giving adult performers organized representation in matters that affect our health, safety, and community. The mission of APAC is to provide representation for performers in the adult film industry and to protect performers' rights to a safer and more professional work environment.

Tristan Taormino on feminist/ethical porn.

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Tristan Taormino is, to use a well-worn cliche, an unstoppable force of nature. She's an icon within the adult sex education world (her porn-educational videos are widely-regarded as über-awesome), and is a pioneer of the feminist porn movement (check her bio here). Here website PuckerUp is a great resource for everything related to sex.

A while back, she posted a piece on feminist porn and its history. I'd say it's the go-to for an accurate and detailed account of the movement, and how and why it originated. Here's the opening:

What Is Feminist Porn?

Feminists have hotly debated pornography since the Women’s Movement began, and the debate reached an infamous fever pitch during the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s. While there is no one production considered the first example of feminist porn (and, in fact, there must be images and films created even before the term ‘feminist’ was first used), feminist porn has its roots in the 1980s. The modern feminist porn movement gained serious momentum in the 2000s thanks in large part to the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs) by Good For Her in Toronto in 2006, which put the concept of feminist porn on the map. The FPAs raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider audience, prompted more media coverage (see:Bitch, San Francisco Chronicle, and even MTV Canada), and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers, performers, and fans. There is no easy answer to the question, “What is feminist porn?” because there is no singular definition of feminist porn, but rather multiple ideas and definitions.

Let’s begin with a brief history. Annie Sprinkle began performing in porn movies in 1973. In 1981, she produced and starred in the film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, which is described on her website as “innovative for its time, as it showed the women as sexual aggressors, focused on the female orgasm, and Annie spoke directly into the camera to the viewers from the heart.” She also starred in and directed two experimental, explicit, “docudramas” in 1992: Linda/Les & Annie: The First Female-to-Male Transsexual Love Story and Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop, which are considered cult classics and feminist porn prototypes.[1]

Go read the rest here.

Here's an excellent interview with her discussing ethical porn, female sexual agency and pleasure, and why porn isn't always anti-women:

PLay GAME - http://playchromegame.com/


The amazing Jiz Lee.

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Jiz Lee is central figure in a new generation of queer porn performers who are pushing all the boundaries, breaking down the stereotypes, and generally taking the industry by storm. Along with the people like Buck Angel, she's transforming porn from the inside out (or, at the very least, vastly expanding its horizons). Queer porn, more so than any of the other genres of porn, has promoted the feminist, sex-positive, ethical model of porn production. That's not to say it's vanilla - it can be as hardcore as hardcore gets.

From  an interview with The Scavenger:

What implications does this have for the predominantly heterosexual porn industry, with seemingly rigid gender binaries?

I hope that it will expand the industry's language and understanding; and perhaps allow for less rigid ‘rules’ of aesthetics and roles between male and female gender identities.

Some directors are very open and it is exciting as a performer familiar with indie/queer companies to work with people who ‘get it’. It feels incredible.

[...]

Contrary to the accusations that porn is exploitative of women, porn can be a space where you are able control your body and body images. How are you able to do this within the industry?

...As a performer, I have to create my own path and spaces, and be extremely conscious of how my image will be presented. I select who I work with based on whether I think they understand me and will not only let me express my sexuality freely, but also promote my image in a way that feels authentic to me.

I like doing work that I am proud of. In the years I have been performing, I’ve explored work with other companies and directors almost like a sexual relationship with the studios themselves. There is a relationship built through projects with the people behind them.

Most of them act like long-time lovers; though I’ve also had a few ‘one-night stands’ in some regards with projects that weren’t a good fit. That’s taught me a lot. I try not to dwell on the negative but to grow from it, so these encounters have and will continue to inform how I can best present myself.

Overall, I’m happy and satisfied in my career and the choices I’ve made and the successes I’ve experienced. My organic process of trusting my intuitions and being true to myself has led me to meet and perform with some of the most amazing people, and some of my dearest friends.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Jiz Lee is also a very active blogger - check her blog here.

And an interview with QueerPornTV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ96OEckj9g

More from the Duke student who performs in porn.

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This story just won't quit. It appears that the USA has become fascinated with Lauren, so much so that she did an interview on CNN. Check it out, but keep in mind that her experiences and background are not necessarily representative of ALL the people who work in porn: 

Piers Morgan talks to porn actress and Duke student "Belle Knox" about her career, empowerment and society's scorn.

Belle Knox explains how she chose her adult film name

Real-time porn searches.

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From Jezebel (and PornMD):

realtimepornsearch
realtimepornsearch

Here Is a Very Illuminating Feed of Real-Time Porn Searches

Ever wonder what kind of porn people are searching for right now? Wonder no more.

Here is a list of real-time porn searches on PornHub's network. It is a daunting and enlightening look into the human psyche and the very nature of desire. Also, if you are open-minded, it kind of reads like a provocative band name generator that's unusually plagued by spelling errors.

Some of the searches are very oddly specific; some are baffling; some are fairly predictable. Our favorites are as follows:

  • naughty bookworms
  • too drunk to orgy
  • mom tired (this is possibly the best because I imagine it's a weary suburban mom being like, "Not tonight, I just want to put my feet up and watch some Sex and the City.")
  • show one breast
  • farts
  • lucky girl
  • asian perfekt (so close on the spelling!)
  • anal vergine (keep trying!)
  • masculinity fail
  • pokemon hentai
  • son loser
  • feet caned
  • handjob outdoor (sounds very idyllic)
  • bug tits (less idyllic)

Masculinity Fail is clearly the best band name, followed by Bug Tits. Please feel free to share your own PornHub search feed findings in the comments!

Go check it out here. And see the comments, including the best-ofs, here.

Freshman porn start speaks out.

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 This story has drawn considerable attention across the web, and has been quite polarizing. From XOJane:

I'm The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I'm Telling The Story In My Words. By Lauren A.

I am a porn star. I am a college freshman. You know nothing about me.

"But why would you do porn?"

People often ask me this question. They know I am a freshman at Duke University, and their shock and incredulity are apparent when the rumor they've heard whispered or read on a chat board turns out to be true.

However, the answer is actually quite simple. I couldn't afford $60,000 in tuition, my family has undergone significant financial burden, and I saw a way to graduate from my dream school free of debt, doing something I absolutely love. Because to be clear: My experience in porn has been nothing but supportive, exciting, thrilling and empowering.

The next question is always: "But when you graduate, you won’t be able to get a job, will you? I mean, who would hire you?"

I simply shrug and say, “I wouldn’t want to work for someone who discriminates against sex workers.”

I am not ashamed of porn. On the contrary, doing pornography fulfills me. That said, I vehemently want to have my privacy respected -- and I ask that anyone who knows my real name respect the fact that I am only discussing this publicly because it was made a public matter when I was confronted by a fraternity member who chose to tell hundreds of other men in the Greek scene.

[…]

One of the facts Internet commenters have gotten very wrong is accusing me of participating in "rape fantasy porn." This is a horrifying accusation, but I absolutely understand where people are coming from. The site in question that I shot for is a rough sex website. That is how I perceived it at the time. I was not coerced or harmed in any way during the filming of the scene. Everything I did was consensual. I also stand by and defend the right of adult performers to engage in rough sex porn.

Everyone has their kinks and we should not shame anyone for enjoying something that is perfectly legal and consensual for all parties involved.

Of course, I do fully acknowledge that some women don't have such a positive experience in the industry. We need to listen to these women. And to do that we need to remove the stigma attached to their profession and treat it as a legitimate career that needs regulation and oversight. We need to give a voice to the women that are exploited and abused in the industry. Shaming and hurling names at them, the usual treatment we give sex workers, is not the way to achieve this.

For me, shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy. When I finish a scene, I know that I have done so and completed an honest day’s work. It is my artistic outlet: my love, my happiness, my home.

I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality. As a bisexual woman with many sexual quirks, I feel completely accepted. It is freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.

It is the exact opposite of the culture of slut-shaming and rape apology which I have experienced from certain dark corners of the Internet since being recognized on campus a few months ago.

Go read the rest here.

Canadian porn habits.

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From the Huffington Post:

Canadian Porn Habits Revealed, Thanks To Pornhub (NSFW)

Western Canadians like their “teen” porn, the prairies are into MILFs and central Canada is all about lesbian sex.

Those are some of the sordid details of Canadians’ porn habits, as revealed by porn streaming site Pornhub (link is safe for work).

Canadian visitors to Pornhub, which bills itself as “the world’s largest porn site,” searched for “lisa ann,” “massage” and “yoga” more than any other search term, the site finds. Among genres of porn (if you can call them that), “teen,” “MILF” and “babysitter” came out on top.

But there were notable regional differences for the top search term [see photo above].

This actually makes Canadians fairly normal. Worldwide, Pornhub found the most common terms to be “teen,” “milf” and “anal.” So apparently Canadians are slightly less into anal, and slightly more into yoga, than other countries. (Check out the worldwide stats here.)

Canadians also spend somewhat more than the average amount of time on the site, lasting an average of a bit more than 10 minutes and visiting an average of eight pages. That compares to a global average of eight minutes and fifty-six seconds.

Mondays are the busiest days for porn viewing in Canada, the site says, which is also the case for most other countries surveyed. Weekend days generally see the lowest porn traffic.

But there are events that cause porn traffic to plummet. What could pull people away from their smut? Well, in Canada, hockey games definitely can.

During an Ottawa-Pittsburgh semi-finals game last year, porn traffic in major cities dropped by more than 20 per cent, with traffic in Ottawa down nearly 50 per cent, the site notes.

“If that’s not love, [we] don’t know what is. Spezza, congrats, your fans really love you!” Pornhub exclaims.

Read the rest here.

Porn stars before and after: Fantasy versus reality.

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Pornography, in general, it's meant to be fantasy. This is what the consumer wants. While this typically has to do with the behaviour depicted, it is also relevant when considering how the performers look. Much like in mainstream, non-pornographic media, performers undergo aesthetic transformations to make them more appealing to potential consumers (or, at least, what presumably most find appealing). Melissa Murphy is one of the most successful makeup artists in the California porn industry. To show off her work, she posts photos of the performers whose makeup she has done. Some of the photos are before and after. Here are some samples:

See tons more before/afters in her gallery here.

And you can read an interview with her about her experiences here.

James Deen on being a male pornstar.

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From Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon.com:

[...]

This isn’t the first time I’ve watched this man have sex and, if you’ve recently browsed online porn, chances are you’ve seen him before too. At 25, after just seven years in the game, he’s one of the most visible men in the industry. I think of him as a cold, brutish performer — but when he hears that I want to interview him, he comes right up with a warm smile on his face and juts out his hand to introduce himself. As I find when we go back to Kink’s headquarters to chat, he is thoughtful, self-effacing and polite. After a quick shower, he meets me in a conference room barefoot, wearing plaid pajamas and sipping from a bottle of apple juice. He looks more like a kid ready for a bedtime story than the man I watched hock a loogie on a bound, naked woman an hour ago. I notice that his eyes, which are usually upstaged by his aggressive performances, are such a delicate, piercing blue that it just might excuse his choice of pseudonym.

While periodically lifting his shirt to show me the fresh bug bite swelling on his chest, we talk about sex as art, Viagra, fake orgasms and why people should never try to have sex like a porn star.

[...]

The guys at the shoot were coming up to you and saying, “Oh man, you have the best job in the world,” which is something I’m sure you hear a lot. Is the job really as great as they think?

Mhmm, yeah, it is. Every now and then I’ll work with a girl who is doing this just for the money and doesn’t want to kiss, doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to do anything other than get her paycheck. But it’s so rare. For the most part, everybody that is in porn now really genuinely wants to do porn. Nowadays, girls will come out of high school and say, “I’m gonna be the next Jenna Jameson! I’m gonna be a sexual creature of desirability for the world and it’s gonna be amazing!” I think it’s awesome that’s happening. It’s very rare that I meet girls who are like, “I just need to get drunk. I’m just doing this because I have to.”

You have so many men, and women, making assumptions based on your movies about what normal or hot sex looks like. What does it feel like to be influencing the way that people have sex?

That’s way more responsibility than I want. We do stuff for the camera, we are having sex for the people at home, so not necessarily everything that we do feels good. I once did a magazine interview where they asked me for tips on how to have sex like a porn star and one of my biggest pieces of advice was, don’t. The key to sex is that you need to communicate with your partner about what they’re into and what they’re not into. If you’re trying to have sex like a porn star, you’re not — [a guy walks by carrying a giggling, limp girl in a bathrobe up the stairs]. I think somebody made someone come until they couldn’t walk. But, yeah, if you’re going to try to have sex like a porn star you need to make sure that the person you’re having sex with wants to be fucked like a porn star. I really hope I don’t have that responsibility of teaching people how to have sex.

Read the rest of the interview here.

More Stoya on porn.

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From a Vice article on feminism and porn:

As entertainment, mainstream pornography is no more responsible for educating viewers about sexual health and etiquette than Lions Gate is responsible for reminding kids that it’s actually not OK to kill each other despite what they may have seen in The Hunger Games. It isn’t Michael Bay or Megan Fox’s job to mention in every interview that giant robots from outer space are fictional, nor is it the job of every pornographic performer to discuss the testing protocols we use or how consent is given before shooting. I do feel the need to discuss these sorts of things, and there are other performers like Jiz Lee, Danny Wylde, and Jessica Drake who seem to feel a similar need to highlight the context already available for adult films and provide further context.

But what about the wider reaching cultural effects of pornography? I can’t entirely discount the accusation that seeing a video in which I go from giving a blowjob directly to being pounded in the ass has inspired the occasional man to rudely shove his penis into his partner’s rectum without discussion or care. Whoever those guys are, they could probably use a refresher in the difference between TV and real life. In contrast to these butt-burgling-boogey-jerks are the messages I get every week saying that seeing my body or vagina portrayed as some kind of sex symbol made someone feel more comfortable about their own body. Also, the people who’ve said they didn’t realize that things like syphilis can still be transmitted even with a properly used condom and now see the benefit of regular testing and asking to see the tests of their partners in addition to barrier use.

As long as I continue to enjoy performing in pornography and the positive social effects seem to outweigh the negative ones I’m going to keep doing it, but let’s not pretend that performing in mainstream porn is any sort of liberating act for all womankind.

Read the rest here.

The reality of porn.

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From the Scavenger:

What is ‘fake’ and ‘real’ in the sex industry?

Porn has hijacked our sexuality, according to anti-porn author Gail Dines. Her sentiment is not unlike that of other ‘raunch culture’ commentators – the sex industry is damaging because it represents ‘fake’ pleasures and ‘fake’ bodies. Both queer and feminist communities have produced porn/magazines/performances aiming to represent desires, bodies and acts that are ‘authentic’, ‘genuine’, ‘documentary’ and ‘real’. But is this line between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ so clear-cut? Zahra Stardust explores the issues.

by Zhara Stardust [bio in link at bottom]

As someone who works in the sex industry – in spaces that purport to be ‘real’ as well as spaces that are accused of as being ‘fake’ – it seems like there is no distinct line between the two. As someone who works with a body that is sometimes perceived as ‘real’ and other times read as ‘fake’ – it seems that the bodies which move across these spaces are equally fluid.

As someone whose pink bits have been airbrushed in magazines, but which have also been on explicit display; who performs both with and without make-up; whose ‘real’ name is my stage name, distinctions between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ don’t always make sense.

[…]

At the same time, websites that purport to depict ‘real’ or ‘redefined beauty’, often seem to be just as conventionalised as the mainstream genres they criticise. ‘Alternative’ nude modelling site Suicide Girls gives calculated instructions on their website about the kinds of photos, make-up and aesthetic sets they accept: ‘tasteful’, ‘picture perfect’ shoots with ‘a little bit of face powder and mascara and freshly dyed hair’, but specifically not ‘cheap wig[s]’, ‘top hats’, ‘stripper shoes’, ‘food’ or things that look ‘cheesy’, ‘gross’ or ‘creepy’.

Similarly, the ‘girl next door’ look of the Australian all-female explicit adult site Abby Winters represents an alternative to glamour photography, featuring make-up-less, ‘amateur’ adult models – but models are still required to cover up hair re-growth, remove piercings, and not have any scratches, marks or mosquito bites for the shoot in order to appear ‘healthy’.

Other sites I’ve shot for speak about the importance of models representing their ‘own’ sexuality, but then go on to qualify: “We might get you to tone down the eye make up a bit”, “Maybe don’t talk about politics”, “Lesbians don’t really use double-enders do they?” One company asked me repeatedly to stop wearing frills.

In doing so, these sites produce bodies of a particular class, size and appropriate femininity, which are marketed as ‘real’, but which are equally constructed, conventionalised and cultivated. This fear of replicating ‘cheesy’, ‘predictable’ mainstream porn means that depictions of ‘real’ sexuality are often similarly clichéd, albeit with a different set of aesthetics.

[…]

Sure, we may play with, embody and embrace hyper-femininity, but we are no less ‘authentic’, or political, or real, because our lip gloss is hot pink instead of ‘nude’. We don’t need to ‘tone-it-down’ to be any more queer, radical or ‘real’. Our bodies may look ‘unrealistic’ to you, but the labour of preparing for work gives erotic performers a sentient, working knowledge of gender performativity.

Much of the time, our work is far from glamorous. I return from work with smudged mascara, sticky lube, patchy fake tan, knotty hair, smelling like sweat and vaginal fluid – and the customers experience this up close and personal. My vagina certainly isn’t airbrushed when I get it out at buck’s parties, complete with shaving rash, discharge and blonde hair caught in my clit ring.

[…]

The irony is that you can never win – ‘appropriate femininity’ is unachievable. We are either too much or not enough. Our hyper-femininity is often so far beyond normative feminine ideals that it brings us social censure – our make-up is too thick, our heels are too high, our breasts are too large. As Rosalind Gill writes about women in media, our “bodies are evaluated, scrutinised and dissected” and are “always at risk of “failing.”

Read the rest here.

Most religious cities highest porn consumers.

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From Al.com (and reported all over the place):

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be No. 1.

Not when the ranking is on the list of "very religious" cities whose residents watch the most online porn.

Huntsville took top "honors" in the poll in which one of the largest online pornography sites, PornHub.com, used data from a Gallup poll on U.S. cities that are "very religious" and compared it with the cities whose residents most often visit its site, according to the BuzzFeed.com.

The findings - based on most religious cities ranked by per capita visits to Pornhub between December 1, 2012 and April 30, 2013 - showed 55 percent of Huntsville residents are "very religious" and make 23.8 PornHub views per capita.

Montgomery and Birmingham showed up on the list, as well, at Nos. 2 and 7, respectively.

Here is the Top 12 list (see more detailed information at BuzzFeed):

1. Huntsville, Al.

2. Montgomery, Al.

3. Little Rock, Ark. (including North Little Rock and Conway)

4. Baton Rouge, La.

5. Augusta, Ga. (including Richmond County)

6. Jackson, Miss.

7. Birmingham, Al. (including Hoover)

8. Holland, Mich. (including Green Haven)

9. Greenville, S.C. (including Mauldin and Easley)

10. Provo, Utah (including Orem)

11. Hickory, N.C. (including Lenoir and Morganton)

12. Ogden, Utah, (including Clearfield)

To be a male porn star.

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Danny Wylde is a bisexual porn superstar. He's also a writer, musician, blogger, filmmaker, etc. You can read about him here. His blog is extremely candid, and he often uses it to discuss difficult and controversial topics. At times it even verges on academic. Several of his posts address the realities of working in the porn industry (he's done it all).

Here's an excerpt from one of those posts:

There are about two dozen of us at any given time: guys who fuck full-time for a living. At least in straight porn. At least in the good ol' US of A. With gay porn, the number expands indefinitely – though not necessarily for well-known tops.

There is a reason for this. Porn is hard. Hard for women for a number of very legitimate reasons. Hard for men for completely different ones.

My personal reasons for getting into porn can be broken up into two categories: financial need and sexual exploration. If I'm to be honest, the latter included a simple desire to get my dick wet. It's part of why any guy jumps into the industry. Though when it comes to my reasons for continuing, the explanation gets much more complicated.

I can say now, after seven years, that my job is a lot fun. It's because I've learned how to meet the needs of my employers, and also my own. The learning process is (for the most part) behind me.

However, I probably should have quit a long time ago. If not for my ex-girlfriend, I would have. There's no joy to be had in failing at sex.

The first time I looked down at a girl sucking my limp penis, I made an excuse. I needed some time to my self. She wasn't my type. “This has never happened before,” I told the director. And it was true. Before I witnessed the complete lack of my own sexual response, I didn't believe such a thing could be a problem.

Read the rest here.