I’m always a sucker for that genre of writing that can be characterized as “What I Saw At The Porn Shoot”. For me, it’s one of the best ways to be an informed porn consumer. So I was pleased to see another example from the genre pop up in Violet Blue’s latest sex news roundup:
The Sexual Manifesto: And Now I’m An Extra In A Porn Shoot
The more of these pieces you read, though, the more you start spotting tired tropes that are best avoided. One of them is what I call the “perverts: surprisingly normal” expression of surprise. (Hello? The rest of us went out on the internet right after it was discovered. We looked at the perverts, and discovered that they is us.) Another one is the “watching people fuck is more boring than you would think” observation. (You must not look at porn much?)
Sadly, Christine Borden in the SF Appeal commits both of these in two short paragraphs:
What brings these people here? The open space to play with each other? The chance to fuck a porn star? The thrill of the voyeur? Whatever their kinks, they are surprisingly not creepy. Instead, they are sociable, friendly, and open-minded.
After sneaking peeks at Act III (in which the three girls are tied to a table as the men shuffle around for spare holes), I grow tired. When you’re spectating a several person orgy, there’s only so many combinations of holes and dicks until you eventually get bored with watching attractive strangers fuck.
But don’t worry, she saved space in the rest of the piece for unfriendly sarcasm, more poseur ennui, and even an “I was so busy correcting someone for politically incorrect speech that I forgot to watch what else was going on in the room” moment. In fine, she was at great pains to make sure nobody thought for a moment that she was sympathetic to the room, the other people in it, or the enterprise of the evening.
Which is rather a pity, because the porn shoot she was at was (from the sound of it) one of the indoor-kinky-orgy shoots for Public Disgrace (a genre that must be popular, since it later inspired Kink.com to start up Bound Gangbangs to focus on more scenes of that sort). Public Disgrace was a bit controversial when it got started, because its branding and market positioning overstated the “public” bit. In fact, the site appears to do very little shooting in uncontrolled public spaces, but its market positioning deliberately under-emphasizes the degree of control they exercise over the public-looking places they feature and over the extras they feature in the role of the observing public. People saw the advertising, thought Kink.com was shoving bondage pussy into the faces of unsuspecting passersby, and got outraged.
So it’s got to be a good thing to show people how the sausage is actually made, right? Yeah. Yeah it is. For instance, this particular “public disgrace” photoshoot turns out to have taken place on Kink.com’s highly-controlled kinky party set in their Armory facility, the one normally used for shooting content for The Upper Floor:
It’s not every day that you get to be an extra in a porn shoot. At the Armory, that’s called Thursday night.
It’s 6:30 p.m., and I’m on the Upper Floor after signing a release, getting my ID scanned, and taking a photo with my ID posed next to my cheek. I’m here for Public Disgrace, a Kink.com site focused on kinky public sex…
Kinky it may be, but the access-and-ID-controlled set is hardly public in truth — it’s just a studio for the production of a sort of art that can look a little bit public to the undiscerning eye. It’s good to get that out there. (And no slam here on Public Disgrace fans for having undiscerning eyes — willing suspension of disbelief is central to the experience of enjoying fiction. We buy fictions that give us enough help to enable us to suspend our disbelief; we don’t demand fictions so solid that we can’t spot the set dressing.)
I’ll wrap this up with the little vignette from the piece about James Deen, who has been much in the public eye of late (including here at ErosBlog). It’s artfully crafted, I guess, in a way that could stand in for the entire article, being a nominally positive paragraph that still manages to express the author’s discomfort with her material:
James Deen walks toward the green room to fetch his robe. A fan stops him short, praising his performance tonight. The fan sticks out his hand. Without missing a beat, James offers up his elbow. We actually all know where that hand has been.
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