Fair warning: this might be considered another one of my “overthinking porn” posts in the same family with my Porn Described post.

So, I was looking at yet another Kink.com free sample gallery and finding it to be a perfectly fine specimen of its BDSM type, but somewhat difficult to distinguish from a great many others. It’s commodity porn, to be blunt — good quality, well made, but not really striving for uniqueness of theme.

As I always do, I scanned for shots that struck me as unusual, special, specially good — or to put it another way, different in some positive way. And, as I usually do when I look at a Kink.com photoshoot, I found some.

The trouble is, the two pictures that grabbed my eye were very much what you might consider to be “stock photos” or “standard views”. They are nondescript in a way that will become obvious when I attempt the fruitless exercise of describing them in words, and their “nondescriptness” is a function, I speculate, of their place in the standard pantheon of porn shots. They are so generic, thematically, that the functional words describing them have no power to distinguish them from ten zillion similar pictures.

First, here’s how standard porn-marketing prose would describe these pictures:

Picture One: Dripping wet pussy. Picture Two: He cums on her ass.

You know that I try to avoid stereotypical porn-marketing tropes here on ErosBlog, so let me take another run at these pictures, in slightly more descriptive fashion:

Picture One: “Attractive rear view, from a close low angle, of a woman’s pussy, wet and dripping with lube or her natural juices.” Picture Two: “A man strokes his dick as he finishes ejaculating all over a woman’s taught round bottom.”

Now, at this point, having been presented with viewing links, some of my readers are going to choose to step off the culture bus. I am describing, they might say, commodity porn, nothing special about it, not worth the half-a-dozen paragraphs I’ve wasted on it, utterly banal.

That’s OK with me. The doors are opening, exit to the rear, keep your hands clear of the door. If there’s anybody left, we’ll continue with our tour presentation.

OK, I see we still have a few faces. Moving on: I find I have become, perforce, something of a porn critic. It’s not a lofty or academic avocation, but it’s real — when you spend enough years not just looking at porn, but trying to sort it for quality and interest, you can tell when a pornographer is just phoning it in.

My assertion, then — and if you disagree, you might as well step off the bus and buy yourself an ice cream cone — is that the two sample photos, though utterly pedestrian in their content, are better-than-average in some other way.

And here’s the frustrating thing: I find myself utterly lacking in tools to identify and describe what makes them different or better than your general run of wet pussy and money-shot photos. Is it the lighting? Is it the camera angles? Does Bella Rossi just have a better looking bottom and pussy than your average porn starlet? Is Wolf Hudson’s dick somehow more pleasingly proportioned than average, as if it were a marble column carved under the supervision of legendary Greek geometer-aesthetes?

My ignorance is so profound that I’m not even sure what field I’m being ignorant in. Is this a photography thing? Or is it an art-criticism thing? If I had education in either or both of those fields, would I be able to write a thousand words on why these pictures are special, and have it be something more than empty hand-waving? Or would it still just be one man’s gut opinion, expressed in fancier language than “I like this more than I like that”?

These are the things that haunt you when you look at porn for long enough while burdened with too much of the wrong kind of education.

This Burger King ad is so tacky I thought it was a spoof at first, but apparently it’s real and ran in print in Singapore:

The small print ad copy begins (and I am not making this up): “Fill your desire for something long, juicy and flame-grilled with the NEW BK SUPER SEVEN INCHER. Yearn for more after you taste…”

Thanks to alert reader James for the tip.

Your conundrum for today: Why do they always call it “needle play” when, in every photo or drawing, they are inevitably using some variety of pin?

Similar Sex Blogging:

• This Might Sting A Bit
• A Shot In The Butt

Robert Burton, vicar of St. Thomas Church in Oxford and perhaps literature’s most spectacular depressive, reviews the classical poets on the subject of men in love in The Anatomy of Melancholy(1621):

Another, he sighs and sobs, swears he hath Cor scissum, a heart bruised to powder, dissolved and melted within him, or quite gone from him, to his mistress’ bosom belike, he is in an oven, a salamander in the fire, so scorched with love’s heat; he wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged, if he might be strangled in her garters: he would willingly die tomorrow, so that she might kill him with her own hands.

Yikes!

I can’t believe this medical knowledge hasn’t been more widely distributed. You’d think guys would be printing this on handbills and posting it on every flat surface. I quote now from a blog called MommyLogic:

If you’re thinking about conceiving, or certainly if you are already pregnant, there is some pretty convincing evidence that instead of just swallowing, say, folic acid, you might want to swallow something else.

Let me be delicate about this, if I can.

As far as I can tell, not only should you be having lots of oral sex with the father of your baby — even up to a year before conceiving — you should also make sure to ingest his seminal fluid. Listen to what I’m telling you: the international medical community is giving you an Rx for oral. Sure, they say frequent intercourse is good, too, but oral is better. So, if you care about having a healthy baby and not potentially unleashing what scientists call a “destructive attack on the foreign tissues” of your fetus, if you want to avoid immunological disorders during pregnancy, and I’m sure you do, get to work. Or to pleasure, depending on how you feel about it.

Basically, the research says you need to be able to tolerate your baby’s foreign, paternal DNA; in other words, you need to get your body accustomed to the stuff, need to cozy up to some daddy double helix for a while so your body doesn’t reject it.

I’m no doctor, just a pregnant lady with Google, so maybe I’m horribly confused, but here is what I found excerpted online, from the Journal of Reproductive Immunology:

“While any exposure to a partner’s semen during sexual activity appears to decrease a woman’s chances for the various immunological disorders that can occur during pregnancy, immunological tolerance could be most quickly established through oral introduction and gastrointestinal absorption of semen.”

I could not make this up. Gastrointestinal absorption of semen. I know. For the man in your life, this news should not be hard to swallow. Sorry.

According to a group of Dutch researchers, “exposure to semen provides protection against developing preeclampsia.” That’s from a paper with the catchy title, “Immune Maladaptation in the Etiology of Preeclampsia: a Review of Corroborative Epidemiologic Studies.” Or you could use the subtitle: “Semen is Your Friend.”

I just can’t figure out why the whole “blue balls” thing has gotten so much traction with men, but they never got ahold of this medical morsel.

Thanks to Sexoteric for the link.

Last year, Bacchus blogged about a fetish map created by Franklin Veaux which I was delighted to behold. Bacchus provides a detail and Franklin the whole map and I highly recommend your having a look yourself.

While you’re looking, I want to suggest an exercise for you. Find something on the map that you think is a little weird, or maybe even a lot weird, but something that you can reasonably believe there is actually a group of people into, whether in actuality or just in fantasy. Then as a thought experiment, ask yourself how many of the people in this group are “out” about their fetish, in the sense that they tell their boss, their co-workers, their neighbors, and members of their families about it, compared with the number who are “out” about more “normal” sorts of sexuality that might be manifested by, say, having a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Do you think “probably not that many?” I think that. But why not that many?

The obvious first-order explanation is that many fetishes are stigmatized: if you’re out about being into something weird, people will avoid you, gossip about you, exclude you from their company, not hire you for jobs, and so on. And that’s probably true. But what is the source of the stigma? Why is weird equated to bad?

Conservative moral sentiments and religious doctrines doubtless explain some of the stigma. Psychological research of the sort done by Jonathan Haidt suggests that conservative are wired up with intuitions about purity and disgust in a way that liberals, who focus primarily on fairness and harm avoidance, are not. (This is an oversimplification of Professor Haidt’s views, but should do for here. Readers interested in more detail can read a PDF version of one of his major papers here.) But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because I don’t think people are that “out” to their secular, liberal, nonjudgmental bosses, co-workers, neighbors, and family members either. Even if your same-sex partner would be welcomed with open arms at the company picnic or the family reunion, your RealDoll will probably not be. My aim is to offer a conjecture as to why that might be (and maybe throw in some naughty pictures along the way).

Begin with the observation that sex involves both imagination and physics, but these are not always equally proportioned in all the things that one might do. As a rough general principle, the more imagination dominates over physics, the weirder what you’re doing is likely to seem, at least to people outside your practice. Sex with your spouse does not strike anyone as weird. Through in some extra imagination, say sex where your spouse pretends to be Elizabeth I (where your spouse is a woman) and you pretend to be Sir Walter Raleigh (if you are a man) strikes most people as a little weird. Making it even more imaginative, say if you are a man who pretends to be Elizabeth I while his wife pretends to be Sir Walter Raleigh — I’m not sure exactly how that’s supposed to work but never count out human ingenuity with props and costumes — will probably strike most people as weirder still.

Among the weirdest things in human sexuality are those in which the imagination has to take over entirely (or almost entirely, since they might be coupled with the de minimis physics of masturbation), because their realization is technically impossible. You can dress up in a fursuit and roleplay, but you cannot actually transform into a furry. Some people might play at freezing games, but something like this cannot be made to happen:

(Source: Medusariffic )

Not, at least, short of someone’s mastery of truly Promethean nanotechnology. (And by the way, I hope the technology is Promethean enough to be reversible, becasue otherwise this strikes me as something not at all nice to do, even to a voluntary submissive.)

Some other things I am somewhat at a loss to figure out how someone would role-play, like this inflation fetish shown in Agnès Giard’s Le Sexe Bizarre (p. 117):

Dialogue: Tiny woman in a basket beneath: “Hey! It’s my turn to be the balloon after we get past the mountains!” Inflated woman above: “Whee!!! Just give me ’til we hit the coast.” No, I can’t say I really understand, except that somebody clearly took the trouble to create this image and write the dialogue, so presumably it matters to him or her.

If you enjoy weirdness, you have a fair amount of imagination. And imagination is a good thing, right? Well, as it turns out, it depends on which perspective you’re occupying.

The problem is this: much of life is drudgery. It’s true on the job. Even in high-powered professional jobs, much of what you’re doing from minute to minute involves close concentration on stuff that is going to be boring. Corporate recruiters may like to represent their workplaces as venues of free-spirited creativity, but the reality of what goes on there is very different and no one more than a year or so out of school will be fooled. Proofread that contract. Check those figures in the spreadsheet. Spot check the work of your subordinates to make sure there are no errors. Decipher the squiggles on the chart. And it’s true at home as well. Much of your time there will be spent paying bills, doing dishes, cleaning up. Even time spent with one’s children is often pretty tedious. Unfortunately, diligent performance of drudge-work is a large part of what other people really want from us. Your boss really, really wants you to check those figures accurately. Your spouse really, really wants you to look after the kids.

But if you have powerful imagination, especially a powerful sexual imagination, then the opportunity cost for drudgery is going to be high. Imagination competes with diligent drudgery for time and mental energy. The more imagination you have, the better the hedonics of imagination, but that means that for every minute of drudgery, the more pleasure foregone. And what does the most basic economics of opportunity cost tell us about what happens when the opportunity cost of X goes up? Precisely. Less X.

So if you advertise that you are sexually weird, you might be inviting people to draw the inference that other things being equal, you will be a worse employee or spouse or whatever than someone whose interests are more conventional (think golf, or lawn care, or something). You will face temptations to slack off that other people won’t have. Other people won’t like that.

Is it any wonder, then, that people who are weird go to some lengths to conceal the fact?

It saddens me, because I guess I’m sort of weird myself. (I mean, here I am, spending part of Sunday morning on social-psychological conjecture.) I don’t have a ready fix, even if I wish I did.

This illustration is from the 1963 publication Black Stocking Parade:

Of course the legendary standard of skill with the pasty-attached tassels is the ability to get them rotating in opposite directions, which may or may not be suggested by this unmoving drawing. But my eye is drawn elsewhere; I confess to wondering exactly where and how the rear “tail tassel” is affixed.

As you might imagine, I get dozens of PR emails a week from people who want me to promote their adult sites (usually sex toy sales sites). And most of them I ignore, because they all look the same after enough years in the business.

However, there’s a difference between ignoring a PR effort (which leaves open the possibility that I’ll notice or care about the next, more creative effort) and deleting it with extreme prejudice and a derisive mental annotation. And that’s what you get when your PR is fraudulent on its face.

Latest example: I got an email (actually I got about four of these at different email addresses, so I know it was a marketing blast) that went like this, with my comments in [brackets] and alterations (to protect the guilty from the attention they desire) in {curly brackets}:

Hello, my name is Elizabeth , [note the extra space left as a consequence of the "writer" not filling in the last name on their email-spam-generating software's template] I’m the admin for www.{site}.com. We’re a female friendly, Canadian source for Adult [ooh! Capitalized so you know it's good!] toys and information. We’ve just finished posting a new Vibrator Guide [ooh! ooh!] on our site and would love to share it with your viewers.

Herewith a digression, in the nature of Bacchus’s suggested alternative Vibrator Guide: “Batteries go in one end. Other end goes on or near her/your clit. Cheap ones burn out fast. Most won’t survive in the bathtub. Get a rechargeable if you use them a lot. Gold standard for lots of sensation is the Hitachi Magic Wand. Next question?”

I’ll betcha a tube of lube mine is more “female friendly” than the one I got spammed in connection with.

Moving on. The spammy PR email I quoted above is mildly risible, but not, as promised, fraudulent on its face. So, what am I bitching about?

Note that it claims to come from “Elizabeth … the admin” for the promoted site. Guess what email it came from?

{malename} <admin@{site}.com>

As you might imagine, I’ve got some advice for {malename}.

1) It’s possible for a male to publish and market a “female friendly” website. You don’t need a fake Elizabeth as a front-woman.

2) If you do decide to gin up a fake Elizabeth as the public face of your company, you might consider getting “her” her own damned email address. But, you’ll still be a moron, because:

3) In the twenty-first century, a new business venture founded on deception is doomed to failure. The internet slashes through and exposes most lies, and, as people’s bullshit meters grow more sensitive, they learn to avoid obvious bullshit (especially empty commercial bullshit with no point to it or need behind it.)

In fairness to {malename}, I need to point out that “his” name is, technically, gender-ambiguous. But, it still ain’t “Elizabeth” or any variation thereof. So, if “he” is a girl, why create a false Elizabeth? The deception, in this case, solidifies my otherwise-necessarily-tentative gender identification.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Clueless At Conde Nast
• Beware EdenFantasys.com
• Lying For Your Business: Etology.com
• Anatomy Of A Sex Spam
• The Porn We Don't Show You
• Grumpy Bacchus

You want to know what this showgirl is thinking?

I’ll tell you what she’s thinking: “When I get down off this pedestal, I am going to find the man who designed this costume and I am going to shove it up his ass!”

From alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. vintage.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Mary Jane At The Movies
• Smiling Showgirl
• Janet Pilgrim Under Your Tree
• Pretty Nude With Roses

On last Friday’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, political strategist Paul Begala made me laugh when he said:

I’m a Catholic. We’re taught that sex is a dirty, vile, disgusting act — that you save for the one you truly love.

EverythingButt.com — announced in this space on Saturday — has now gone live, along with another new Kink.com feature I quite like, which is Flash movie galleries that stream the free sample movie clips “on the page” without the need to download them first. This last feature contributed to my discovery of something that’s rare in porn: the genuine laugh-out-loud moment.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, so I’ll just direct you to it. If you view the first clip in this flash gallery, you’ll see Mark Davis plumbing the surprisingly-capacious and hitherto-unsuspected depths of Kylie Ireland’s anal vicinity. He’s using the “toy” shown in this photo:

This gallery, first clip, she’s bent way over, he’s plumbing away, then suddenly he bends over a little bit himself and says… well, you just have to hear it for yourself. I literally laughed out loud, and then a beat later, so did Kylie — whom you wouldn’t have expected to be in a laughing frame of mind. It’s good dirty fun.

For some reason when I view this gallery I can hear the mock nature-documentary narration: “Here we have a rare specimen, an absolutely beautiful Large-Eyed Mima, bathing in her natural habitat, a tumbling mountain stream. This species is often forced to compete with aggressive brown bears, who frequently fish in the same waterfalls…”

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Those Deadly Sirens
• The Girls Of Summer
• Art Keeps Getting In My Porn
• The Pleasure Of Farm Girls