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.