A short film by Tatia Pilieva, in collaboration with Showtime for Masters of Sex.
“I asked strangers to undress each other and get in bed. Noting else. No rules.”
Pornography
Best of old-school science fiction porn.
in Pornography
From io9:
The Greatest Science Fiction Porn Movies of All Time: 1961-1991 [NSFW]
Science fiction has long encompassed every aspect of human experience — including sex. For as long as we've dreamed of going to space, we've dreamed of getting it on there. And porn has embraced science fiction as well — from 1968's softcore masterpiece Barbarella to the 1990s cyberpunk boom to the recent craze for porn spoofs, there has always been science fiction porn. After all, porn is an escapist genre when you get right down to it. And the line between a science fiction "B" movie and a softcore porn film is often more seethru than Jane Fonda's breast bubbles.
Here are the greatest science fiction porn films of all time, from 1961 to 1991. It's NSFW! Note: There are a number of exploitation films on this list, but no horror, since that's a very different category. Likewise, no fantasy. Also, if we missed your favorite, please chime in in the comments! With such a huge and sweeping topic, I'm sure we missed some stuff. We'll be covering 1992 to the present very soon.
To see the list, and the corresponding NSFW images and videos, you'll have to click here.
Sam Benjamin: A Brief History of Porn.
in Pornography
Make Love, Not Porn.
in Attitudes, Pornography
Cindy Gallops' project, Make Love, Not Porn, has become a huge success. There are two websites, one which provides a dose of reality to counter the unreal expectations one might develop watching pornography (link).
The other site features user-submitted video content. From the website (link):
MakeLoveNotPorn.tv is of the people, by the people, and for the people who believe that the sex we have in our everyday life is the hottest sex there is.
We are not porn - porn is performance (often an exceedingly delicious performance, but a performance nonetheless).
We are not 'amateur' - a label that implies that the only people doing it right are the professionals and the rest of us are bumbling idiots. (Honey, please.)
We are #realworldpeople, #realworldsex, #realworldfeelings, #realworldrelationships, #realworldbodies, #realworldhotness, #realworldeverything.
The site works on a profit-sharing basis. Users submit their videos for curation, and if posted on the site, the videos can be rented for $5. Half goes to the users, half goes to the website. Read about how it works here.
Here is a sample screenshot from the homepage (click to make larger):
Pornography and sex ed.
in Attitudes, Pornography, Sex Ed
From the CBC:
Pornography, Kids And Sex Education: What To Do?Porn industry the main sex educator of kids, says child advocate By Daniel Schwartz
More kids at ever younger ages are accessing pornography online, according to a range of international studies, but there's not much consensus about what, if anything, should be done by parents or teachers to address the issue.
Today in Winnipeg, a children's advocacy group called Beyond Borders will host a symposium entitled "Generation XXX, the pornification of our children."
"The porn industry is the country's main sex educator of our boys and girls," says Cordelia Anderson, one of the experts scheduled to speak at the symposium, referring to the situation in the U.S.
"Young people have never had this ease of access to this type of material at this young of age," the founding president of the U.S. National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation told CBC Radio. "This alone should encourage us to be talking about it and studying it."
Cathy Wing, the co-executive director of Ottawa-based MediaSmarts, another conference speaker, says "we really need to talk to kids from an early age, before they become exposed to online porn."
[…]
"Porn can have both negative and positive impacts," says Alice Gauntley, a sex education activist and a student in gender and sexuality studies at McGill University in Montreal.
"It can reinforce sexist, racist and transphobic stereotypes and give us unrealistic expectations about sex and our bodies. But it can also be a source of pleasure and a means of exploring our sexualities."
But for young teens with no sexual experience, processing the porn on their screens may be quite a challenge. Gauntley argues, "it is necessary to equip teens with the tools they need to make sense of the erotic material they might come across."
Sex educators are concerned that young people are getting the wrong picture about sex from viewing online pornography.
As Wing points out, "you're not going to get realistic portrayals in the pornography industry. It's a business; everything is constructed, like all media."
She advises teachers and parents to, "make sure the kids understand that this is not reflecting reality, that it's a constructed reality that contains bias and it's there to make money."
Fantasy, not reality
Sex therapist Wendy Maltz says that while kids have a sense that they should view pornography as fiction, she doesn't think they do.
"That takes a lot of high-order thinking to maintain that, especially under the influence of sexual arousal. It can start getting blurry when there's an excitement associated with it."
Maltz, author of The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography, says "the image is the reality on the internet."
She adds that you won't stop young people's curiosity about sex, but that it's important for them to know that curiosity is normal. "It doesn't mean you're sick if you found this stuff exciting."
But it bothers Maltz that, because of the prevalence of pornography, "kids are getting robbed of having their own sexual conditioning come from real-life romantic experiences."
She would like to see kids start getting a healthy sex education before they start viewing pornography.
Getting educated about porn
The questions is where should young people get that education?
Linda Kasdorf is studying the impact of pornography on children and youth for her social work degree at the University of Regina, and she works at Saskatoon Christian Counselling Services. She says parents have the responsibility not only to protect kids from pornography, but also to educate them about sex.
"Sexual intimacy is totally missed when kids view porn, and there's no way to prepare them to understand that void."
Kasdorf argues when it comes to pornography, the education needs to begin with the adults. "Many parents have no idea that their children can even access pornography, they're that naive."
She adds that, "parents needs to be taught how to talk about pornography with their kids, how to help dissect experiences when kids are exposed to pornography."
But she also wants to see pornography become a component of school sex education programs. Those programs should ensure that, "kids actually have trusted adults that they can talk to about things they're curious about."
Gauntley would like to see a media literacy component on pornography, "because it encourages teens to be critical thinkers — to be able to recognize the differences between sex in porn and in real life."
Max Hardcore and (un)ethical porn.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE.
Depending on your perspective, Max Hardcore is either a champion of free speech or one of the most reviled men in the porn industry (second only, perhaps, to Khan Tusion, the director of the infamous Meat Holes and Rough Sex series, etc. - to read about him click here - it's brutal, so heads-up). Max Hardcore did a 4-year stint in prison for breaking American obscenity laws. He is also very successful; in other words, his content sells.
Max Hardcore's films feature adult women dressed as, and acting like, young girls, gynecological toys, and extremely rough sex. He regularly spits and urinates on his performers, and chokes them with his genitals until they vomit. [These acts aren't necessarily indicative of unethical pornography in and of themselves - what matters more is labour rights, respect for and empowerment of performers, and consent.]
Max Hardcore claims that all his performers provide freely given consent and that pushing their boundaries is a requisite part of the contract. Some women like performing for him, but many do not, and some have even tried to press criminal charges of sexual assault against him. Performing for him was once considered a rite of passage - i.e., if you could work for him, you could work for anyone.
Despite his claims that he treats his performers with respect and that they freely consent to work with him, anecdotal evidence suggests that his tactics can be emotionally abusive, manipulative, and that he uses soft coercion to get performers to do things they would not normally do. For many of the women who worked for him, if they refused certain acts, or stopped their scenes, they knew that their careers were in jeopardy.
Still, we as outside observers must take care not to infantilize performers, and to balance our concerns with respect for autonomy. In other words, people need to be free to make their own decisions for the better or worse, regardless of the outcome as judged by us.
This is a scene about Max Hardcore from the documentary Hardcore. You can see the rest of the documentary here, although the video quality is very poor (NSFW!).
If the previous info and clip about Max Hardcore haven't already left a bad taste in your mouth, this is post-scene debriefing with one of his performers likely will. Presumably, he secretly taped it as insurance against claims of misconduct and exploitation. The woman he's talking with later accused him of sexual assault, among other things. This clip includes extremely NSFW language, is uber-creepy, and may be a trigger for those who have experienced sexual violence. It perfectly exemplifies the dark side of the industry.
This video clip is an interview with from the AVN expo, post-release from jail:
And here is a longer interview with him from 2011:
The Japanese porn titan.
in Pornography, Sex Work
From Details:
Meet the Hardest Working Man in Porn At 35, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, a $20 billion industry that produces more than double the number of adult films that America does. The only problem: He's part of an endangered species—1 of only 70 (maybe just 30, by some estimates) male actors in a business that churns out thousands of videos a year—and while he keeps coming, the reinforcements don't. Why won't anybody help this guy out, for f***'s sake?
By Paige Ferrari, Photo by Jeremy Liebman
On a sunny Saturday morning in eastern Tokyo, a silver Audi pulls into a parking lot and sparks pandemonium. Out of the driver's seat bounces a small, stocky man with bulging biceps, spiky orange hair, and a broad smile spread across his effulgent, spray-tanned face. He bounds onto the pavement wearing a hoodie and a T-shirt that reads SEX INSTRUCTOR. To his left, the mostly male crowd leans forward, en masse. "Shimiken!" several shout, and a clatter of smartphone shutter sounds follows like a round of applause.
"Let's go," Shimiken whispers to a handler attempting to clear a path through the throng. He raises one arm over his head to air-high-five his riveted fans. It's the morning of the Japan Adult Expo, and the crowd has been waiting for tickets. Inside, they'll get to meet the stars of their wildest fantasies. Outside, they've already caught a glimpse of something rarer: the man who has actually lived them all.
At 35 years old, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, more often referred to here as AV (adult video), and there is essentially nothing he won't do or hasn't done while getting busy with more than 7,500 different female costars, including a former teen pop singer, Hungarian exchange students, and a pair of 72-year-old twins. In 18 years and more than 7,000 films, Shimiken has refused only one scenario: having sex with an actress after she had sex with a dog. (He agreed to a rewrite in which the dog merely licked butter off the woman before their scene.)
Read the rest here.
Pornhub: The impact of 50 Shades of Grey on porn searches.
Pornhub, one of the huge porn aggregator tube sites, has its own research wing (how nerdy!). They analyze search data, and some of it gets reported on Pornhub Insights (check it out here). A recent project examined the impact of 50 Shades of Grey on porn searches. Here's what they found (in its entirety):
50 Shades of Pornhub
Cinema has come to affect our lives and views in real and meaningful ways. For instance, after the release of the film Sideways, Merlot became more difficult to move off of shelves while Pinot Noir enjoyed a 16% spike in sales. Deer hunting decreased by nearly half for a few years after Bambi. In the same vein, the recent release of the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey has been shaking things up over here at Pornhub. Specifically, people are getting freakier in their pornographic preferences and we’ve got the data to prove it.
Not So Grey Area
There’s no real debate here; since the now infamous film was released overValentine’s Day weekend, BDSM related searches have seen a significant increase on Pornhub. The charts below trace BDSM related searches during the days leading up to and then immediately following the film’s February 13th release date. When comparing this activity in the US to the rest of the world as well as to women versus men, the specific traffic patterns follow the same general rises and falls, with a few exceptions. Overall, it seems that the press tour leading up to the premiere helped things along a little, with a decent increase in BDSM searches having been observed the weekend before, over the 6th through the 8th of February.
The 13th marks the real threshold though, with searches for words like ‘submission,’ ‘spank,’ and ‘bondage’ among others, increasing in the US by over 20% and by nearly 40% in women. Suffice it to say, our female users have definitely been channeling their inner Anastasia Steele’s.
Handcuffs and Flogging and Whipe, Oh My!
Now for a look at which specific search terms Pornhub users have been employing to access their new favorite kind of content. Here, action words like ‘submission’ and ‘dominate,’ top the chart, both having increased in the range of about 50% in searches since the movie premiere. Other tools of the trade type terms like ‘whip,’ ‘master,’ and ‘leather’ all also saw some notable spikes in search activity during this time. According to some research by our friends over at Refinery29, these last 3 words are interestingly some of the most used throughout the 50 Shades novel as well.
Femme Domination
It’s no secret that the intended audience of both the novel and subsequent film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey is women. Touted for a while now as ‘mommy porn,’ it seems that after having experienced the film women are now looking to have a red room experience of their own, at least according to these numbers. In this last chart, the Pornhub statisticians have whipped up this impressive list of which kinky terms women are more likely to search for than men, proving some dominating female tendencies. Following the release of the 50 Shades film, women appear to be more curious about most BDSM terms, searching upwards of 200% more for certain terms in some cases than prior to the release date. Men have been exploring these new waters as well, with increases closer to the range of 20% having been observed with these same terms. Again, action words like ‘submission,’ ‘dominate,’ and ‘spanking’ all skyrocketed by 150-220% by female Pornhub viewers. Suffice it to say, the desire for less vanilla type videos is strong among the ladies – the only thing we can’t say for sure is which side of the paddle they’d prefer to be on.
Pornhub's 2014 year in review.
in Pornography
Another post on data from Pornhub. At the end of the year, Pornhub publishes an annual review of searches and user information. The 2014 review is long so I've selected out some of the things I thought might be most interesting. But, there's piles more interesting data so go check it out here.
From Pornhub Insights:
2014 Year In Review
2014 was a huge year for us here at Pornhub HQ. We put our team of statisticians to work time and time again to deliver the data and bring you the most fascinating facts having to do with the world’s #1 porn site. Focusing largely on search trends and how user interactions react to major events around the world, we’ve covered everything from the traffic changes during the recent Scottish referendum to America’s obsession with anal sexand everything in between. Be it sports, politics, climate or demographicrelated, we found a way to relate it to porn trends and offer up some awesome insights. Today, we’re going to relive the magic one more time and take a long and hard look at how Pornhub’s user habits have evolved over the course of the past year, when compared to our 2013 review, as well as introduce some exclusive new and updated data. Let’s get started!
[…]
THE BARE BASICS Overall, Pornhub saw a whopping 78.9 billion video views through 2014, which considerably surpasses last year’s 63.2 billion. Specifically, this breaks down to 18.35 individual visits to the site over the course of the year, translating to about 5800 visits per second. However you look at it, that’s a lot of people getting busy on Pornhub!
[…]
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? If Pornhub users all over the world are thirsty for one thing in particular, it’s teen-themed porn, as ‘teen’ was the most searched term in the world both this year and last. Coming in at number 2 with an impressive 7 place gain is ‘lesbian,’ with ‘MILF” taking a slight hit, falling into 3rd place and down from last year’s 2nd. Some interesting gainers here are the step-family themed searches, with ‘step mom’ climbing up 14 slots to land in at 4th place, and ‘step sister’ reaching up 53 spots to land in at this year’s 13th place. Group themed porn searches like ‘threesome’ and ‘gangbang’ also made some impressive leaps, having climbed 31 and 14 positions respectively. The world witnessed some interesting get-togethers on Pornhub this year!
[...]
[…]
A QUESTION OF GENDER AND SEX Our gender demographics collaborative with Buzzfeed was one of our favorite and arguably most interesting posts of the year. In What Women Want we took a look at how the porn viewing habits of men and women differ, according to our anonymized data, segmented by gender.
We’ve since collected some new, specified data which breaks down the Pornhub viewership proportions by gender in our top 20 countries. Topping off this list is Brazil, which has an impressive 29% female viewership base, a solid 6% above the 23% world average. Of particular note are the Philippines and Finland, both of which are home to populations featuring over a quarter of female Pornhub viewers. This is interestingly juxtaposed to the most recent Global Gender Gap Report compiled by the World Economic Forum, which reports Finland in 2nd place and the Philippines in 5th of all countries in the world as having most successfully closed the gender gaps. It looks like these countries are getting closer to sealing the same gap here too as far as porn is concerned!
TED: Cindy Gallop - Make love, not porn
in Attitudes, Pornography
Cindy Gallop isn't opposed to porn, per say. But she does have some concerns about the way it's affecting expectations when it comes to sex. From TED:
[]
XKCD: Porn.
Trans (porn) superstar Buck Angel.
This is Buck Angel. He's a porn superstar, educator, advocate and supposedly all-around awesome dude. He describes himself as "the man with a pussy."
He was interviewed and photographed a while by Dirty Magazine:
BUCK WILD By Kirsten Matthew
Buck Angel has lived through several lifetimes. Born a girl in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, he made a living as a model (and developed a serious crack habit) before deciding to become a man, 18 years ago. As the "Man with a Pussy" he went on to marry a woman, and make award-winning porn. Now, he's keen to mainstream, by becoming an author, educator and lecturer.
DIRTY: DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU REALIZED YOU WANTED TO BE A BOY RATHER THAN A GIRL?
BUCK ANGEL: I always felt like a man. It wasn’t ‘I think’; it was ‘I am’. My parents treated me very much like a boy. They called me Buck. They didn’t treat my sisters like that. My sisters are both butch too; they have that masculine energy. But mine was male energy. That’s not really normal but it felt normal to me. Going through puberty at 15, things started changing. That was a breaking point for me. I got into drinking and smoking pot; had a psychological breakdown. I was extremely shy. I always wore a baseball cap. I couldn’t make eye contact, start up a conversation.
[…]
D: HOW DID YOU MOVE INTO THE ADULT FILM INDUSTRY?
BA: I think it was over 10 years ago or so that I made my first fetish film. It was for my own company, The Pro Dominatrix, that I started with my wife at the time. We made dominatrix and fetish (foot, smoking, bondage) films in our dungeon in downtown Los Angeles. I taught myself to use a camera and edit. We put them on VHS and sold them through the website. Then I started trying the Buck stuff. I have done 15 Buck films; most under my own label, Buck Angel Entertainment. I control my image. I only release one or two movies a year because I do not want to over-saturate the market with my product. I really love all my films. I have seen such a growth with my work and also with the talent that I am able to cast now. In the beginning it was very hard for me to cast, as people were scared to be in a film with me because they had no idea how this would reflect on their career. The adult entertainment business is very conservative in a sense that you can not really do crossover gay, straight work. But, I did it. And one more film and then I think I’m done with making adult films.
His commercial website can be found here (NSFW!).
Buck did a talk a while back at Idea City. He discussed his experiences growing up, his rise to stardom in both the adult movie industry and the popular media, and the politics and culture surrounding transgenderism. The clip of his talk is long, but worth every minute.
A documentary about Buck was released last year. Here's the trailer:
http://www.thegayuk.com/magazine/4574334751/SEXING-THE-TRANSMAN-The-Buck-Angel-Interview/9298703
Ethical porn.
in Attitudes, Pornography
From The Guardian:
Is there such a thing as ethical porn? The actors say they’re happy, the makers say it’s guilt-free – but what exactly is ‘fair trade’ porn? We find out By Zoe Williams
[…]
I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map. It was, in other words, a total conflict, and the rogue factor was that I don’t watch porn. So I could just absent myself into neutrality. (I think I was chairing the meeting, so I was meant to be neutral anyway.)
[…]
A common assumption is that “fair-trade” porn is going to be very soft and wholemeal and respectful; some of it is, but most of it isn’t. It does address female sexuality in a way that mainstream porn doesn’t (how you go from “female gaze” to “wholemeal” is, of course, via the misapprehension that female sexuality is really sweet). “This image of ethical porn is pretty and fluffy and storyline-driven, a hardcore version of daytime soap operas or Harlequin romance novels,” says Sinnamon Love, previously a performer, now a “sex educator”. “But a lot of women, especially of this younger generation, are looking for more hardcore porn that’s to their taste.”
[…]
Feminism is not a prerequisite when it comes to making ethical porn, Blake says. “Feminist porn is explicitly focused on women’s desires and sexuality. So, for example, the belt-whipping scene where I got the life thrashed out of me, that I would say is feminist, because it’s about my journey and my sexuality. Whereas I think it’s possible to produce male-gaze porn in an ethical and fair trade way. That means complete respect for performers, for their boundaries and consent. If someone says no, you don’t ask again, you don’t ask last minute in the middle of a scene. You don’t trick them into doing stuff. You pay them. It’s not only all of those principles, but also communicating that to your audience.”
People protesting against porn and sex work take as their opening position that nobody would be doing it if they weren’t coerced, or so desperate for money that it amounted to coercion. Ms Naughty insists that the porn she produces is not done this way: “There’s this urban myth that all of the women in porn are drug addicts or abused and don’t know what they’re doing.” She doesn’t say this never happens, that nobody is ever on drugs; but when you look at what she makes, you’ve never seen couples who look so consensual, so un-ground down by the heel of life.
[…]
Makers of ethical porn believe you can have a violent fantasy, of any kind, and that can be a legitimate part of your sexual identity, one that you have a right to explore. This is the point at which anti-porn campaigners stick. There is a chasm here, between people who think that all violence in sex is the result of a patriarchal culture and will lead to violence in real life, and should be stamped out; and people who think that all fantasy is legitimate, and almost all of it can be legitimately met by porn.
[…]
And perhaps this is the sophistication of ethical porn: without exploiting or harming the participants, it allows you to explore what you’re into. You have a right not to be ashamed. This, says Cindy Gallop, gives us our cue about how to talk about porn: “When you force anything into the darkness, you make it much easier for bad things to happen, and much harder for good things to happen. The answer is not to shut down. The answer is to open up.”
And some more related pieces for those interested:
Ethical Porn at the Huffington Post Tristan Taormino Feminist Pornographer as Cosmopolitan The Rise of Ethical Porn at the Globe and Mail
Data visualization of top 500 porn tags.
From Gizmodo:
The 500 most popular types of porn in one chartEverybody watches porn but everybody has different tastes. And there is just so much porn to watch. But how can we figure which type of porn is most popular? This chart from Data Looks Dope's Max Einstein reveals the top 500 video tags in porn. You'll see everything from hardcore to Argentina.
The data comes from Xvideos' 500 most used tags. The idea is simple, if there are a lot of tags, there's a lot of demand.
Any surprises? Brunette beats Blonde, stockings is shockingly popular and words like 'this' 'and' and others make the cut. Einstein writes:
This is a visualization of how users of the most popular porn website in the world tag the astronomical amount of content being transferred each month.
And the chart (click to make larger - it's enormous):
Pornhub data on women's porn preferences.
Pornhub, as described by Wikipedia, is a "video sharing website and the largest pornography site on the internet." Like most modern businesses, Pornhub do analytics to better monitor performance and gain insights into their customers and market. They report some of their findings on a blog called Pornhub Insights, which is good fun. One of their more recent posts provided a glimpse at what their female viewers search for and watch:
What Women Want
Pornhub Insights is getting down with demographics! As part of a collaboration with our friends over at Buzzfeed, the Pornhub statisticians are offering a unique look at the way that members of the fairer sex get turned on with everyone’s favorite porn site. By segmenting by gender within our analytics tools, we were able to generate anonymized data that brings us one step closer to answering the time old question: what do women want? What does she desire? Well, apparently they want to watch a bunch of gay sex. Pornhub’s Lesbian category is the leading favorite among the ladies, with Gay (male) following close at second place. The Gay category only falls into 7th place for men in terms of top viewed categories so it’s noteworthy here that overall, this category ranks higher with the sex opposite to that which this type of content is intended for.
There’s no love from the ladies for the bigger beauties of porno land with the BBW category noticeably absent from the list on the female side despite its ranking at 13th place for the men. Though other classics like Teen, MILF, Threesome and Anal pepper this list as well, it’s clear that the type of sex that women are most interested in watching occurs between members of the same sex.
Research: The average porn star.
While this study isn't academic in the sense that it was done at a university, was paid for by a funding agency, and went through the peer-review process, it is exceptionally good. The researcher (and authour), John Millward, waded through piles of publicly available data to determine the characteristics of the average porn star and what they do. The resulting article is entertaining and provides infographics displaying his findings. From John Millward:
For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.
‘Without any mental deliberation, picture the average female porn star. Just let her spring into your mind’s eye looking however she looks. Can you see her?’
I had bumped into a friend who I’d not seen in a while and this was the first question I asked him. He didn’t realise at the time that I’d been in self-imposed smutty exile for an untold number of weeks, working on the largest study of porn stars ever undertaken, and now I was out and eager to spread the news.
‘Erm, yeah, I suppose,’ he said.
‘What does she look like?’ I asked, struggling to hide my smile.
When he replied by saying ‘a blonde with big boobs’, I must admit I relished the opportunity to lean in, let the grin spread across my tired face, and say ‘That’s what everyone says. And in fact, it’s wrong’.
‘Oh,’ he said, after I explained how I knew what the average porn star actually looks like, as well as what her name probably is, how many films she’s most likely done and the probability of her having a tattoo or body piercing.
‘So you’ve spent all this time watching hundreds of porn movies?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve spent all this time analysing the demographic profiles and filmographies of ten thousand adult performers. There is a difference.’
‘I see’, he then said. ‘And how, dare I ask, does one go about doing that?’
Go read the rest here.
And the massive infographic depicting his findings (click to make larger):
Hump!
Speaking of porn…this film festival/film competition has blown up. It was the brainchild of Dan Savage and some of the staff at the Stranger newspaper in Seattle. And now it's coming to Vancouver. The details:
It's the Sexiest, Funnest, Most Creative Dirty Movie Fest in the World... HUMP!
Since 2005 the HUMP! Film Festival has challenged ordinary people from all over the Pacific Northwest to become temporary, weekend porn stars-by making their very own five-minute dirty movies for a chance to win big cash prizes! And they did not disappoint! The resulting short films run the gamut of sexual styles: straight, gay, lesbian, transgender... every color in the sexual rainbow... and some we never knew existed. HUMP! films are funny, thought-provoking, sad, artistic, outrageous, and almost overwhelmingly sexy-because they're real. And they're real because they were created and performed by sex-positive people, just like YOU. That's why we're bringing the very best of HUMP! to your town! See 20 of the hottest HUMP films in action... they'll make you laugh, squeal, and marvel at the broad (and creative) range of human sexuality. It's the HUMP! Tour 2014! And you're going to have a blast.
The homepage (tickets) is here.
The trailer (NSFW):
Vice: The Feminist Porn Awards.
in Attitudes, Gender, Pornography
Stoya on porn, feminism, and capitalism.
in Pornography
From her blog:
I see feminism and porn as two separate entities. Doing porn is not necessarily an act of feminism, sex positive feminism is not necessarily pornographic. The two can intermingle happily or butt heads, depending on the groups involved. The adult industry and the status and control of women varies vastly. Joanna Angel, Belladonna, Kimberly Kane and Sasha Grey all control their own careers and are doing quite well. Joanna and Bella both have their own production companies AND actually run them. Joanna in particular made some serious changes to what people think is sexy and what sort of look the adult industry as a whole puts in their films. April Flores (who also goes by Fatty Delicious) is another woman who is opening up ‘mainstream’ pornography to different body types/shapes and pushing for them to be highlighted purely as beautiful women as opposed to only starring in niche market films. Kimberly Kane and Mason are directors who make movies that show what *they* think is sexy.
Digital Playground is owned by two people. One is female. For the past three years they have managed my career and controlled my image and brand. They’ve brought me opportunities and they’ve told me I can’t do certain things. This is a capitalism, not anti-feminism. This is an (ideally) symbiotic relationship between any artist/performer/talent and their production company/publisher/label. In any situation that involves working for a company, the company tries to get as much work as possible while paying the worker as little as possible. The worker tries to get paid the most they can for the work they do. This happens in hiring negotiations between secretary and office HR manager, freelancer and client, and musician and label. Sometimes people don’t know how much they can ask for, sometimes they get out-negotiated, sometimes they do get taken advantage of. That concept applies to any industry and any worker of any gender. Like other industries, pornography has a range of working conditions, levels of respect for their workers, and general treatment of women.
Read more from her blog here.
Gail Dines on porn, feminism, and capitalism.
in Attitudes, Pornography
I don't post much on anti-pornography advocates and their research, as many consider it unreliable (i.e., lacking scientific rigour) and overwhelmingly biased. However, I believe it's still important to acknowledge their work, as it does feature prominently in the debate about access to, and regulation of, pornography. Also, some of their criticisms are valid.
Gail Dines is arguably the leading anti-pornography campaigner and academic of the current generation. Her research and writing is celebrated by anti-pornography advocates, but has also been sharply criticized by many working in the field. The following snippets are from an article about her and her work, published by the Guardian:
"Porn culture doesn't only affect men. It also changes "the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships," says Dines. "Every group that has fought for liberation understands that media images are part and parcel of the systematic dehumanisation of an oppressed group . . . The more porn images filter into mainstream culture, the more girls and women are stripped of full human status and reduced to sex objects. This has a terrible effect on girls' sexual identity because it robs them of their own sexual desire."
[...]
"To think that so many men hate women to the degree that they can get aroused by such vile images is quite profound," says Dines. "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear."
[...]
As a result of her research, Dines believes that pornography is driving men to commit particular acts of violence towards women. "I am not saying that a man reads porn and goes out to rape," she says, "but what I do know is that porn gives permission to its consumers to treat women as they are treated in porn."
The rest of the article, including much more discussion of Gail Dines and her views, can be found here.