February 11th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Sanity Returns
This comes from Mouffette Fatale, where it has a caption:
Slowly, sanity returned to Grace and she drew herself erect and started straightening up her clothes.
Darn that sanity!
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February 9th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Please Disturb, Again
Obviously this is the sort of jest that comes up over and over once you’re looking out for it. Here’s the drawn version, from a (1960s?) men’s magazine, Mood Vol. 1 No. 1.:
February 8th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Porn Needs More Leg Warmers
I suppose it’s going to piss off too many people of my generation and older if I start referring to 1980s porn as “vintage” — but I confess it’s been rather a long time since I saw any porn stars wearing leg warmers:
From Lust #17, precise date unknown.
February 7th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
When Porn Stars Fight
One thing about vintage porn. Nobody claims porn ever had much plot, but there was a time when it had sometimes had a little bit.
For instance, I just stumbled over this French title from 1980 (Jolies Petites Garces) in which the scene change from one actress to the other is mediated by a little jealous catfight:
Do you suppose they had their rabies shots?
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February 5th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
The Happy Sadist Dance
Here’s another post in the sex blog genre I think of as “people telling us how it feels to like what they like.”
Mistress Matisse is a professional dominatrix. But, you know that sort of perpetually bored sneer that so many dominatrices seem to display in their advertising? I’ve never gotten any whiff of that boredom in her prolific internet writings.
Indeed, it would be a mistake to imagine that hurting her clients bores her:
A little electricity runs up my spine, down my arms, and into my hands. My vision changes — the outside edges get dim and blurry, but whatever I’m focused on gets very sharp. My voice changes too, sliding back into a bit of a Georgia twang. I walk differently – bouncing a little on the balls of my feet – because the adrenaline that’s singing in my blood lifts me up off the ground slightly.
When I feel like that, I am not going to bother much with weaving subtle threads together, or going for a long build-up of psychological tension in my play partner. I admire that sort of thing, but in that space, my elegant sophistication and my carefully-learned feminine graces fall away from me like unzipped clothing, and I am a roughneck with a pretty face. I’m going to pick up something that’ll hurt you and just start hitting you with it. If I lack a tool, I’ll use my hands, or my feet, or my teeth, or any other part of my body I think would be effective. I’ll try to ramp it up at a speed you can handle, but try is the best I can promise, because there is something in me that wants to come out, and it wants out right nownowNOW.
I am not cool and calm about it, either. I take a great deal of sadistic glee in what I’m doing. There is a certain way I laugh when I’m really being mean — I don’t laugh that way at any other time. At particularly satisfying moments, I also tend to do what my friends call “the happy sadist dance” which involves wiggling my hips, clapping my hands, and sometimes hopping from foot to foot.
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February 4th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Nudes, Grilling
February 3rd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
The Most Lucrative Blog Post Ever Written
Yesterday the big internet news was that IAC, the company behind Match.com and Chemistry.com (two of the bigger online paid dating sites) had purchased OkCupid, which is perhaps the biggest of the free dating sites, and is a company that was famous for interesting data-driven blog posts about its users and (notoriously) about the business models and advertising claims of its paid-dating competitors, specifically including Match.com.
[Disclosure: IAC owns a metric ton of sites in the paid dating space, and I’m fairly sure some of them have advertised on ErosBlog at one time or another.]
OKCupid’s price tag? Fifty million bucks. That’s a lot of clams for an advertising-supported company, especially in an internet economy where all the smart people say that advertising-supported business models are in decline.
My first thought when I heard the news was “Wow, OkCupid really must have been cutting into their sales if the paid boys were willing to pay that much to take them out.”
My second thought — and I tweeted a version of it — was “Damn, no more hilarious blog posts lampooning the ridiculous advertising claims of the big paid dating sites.”
So you can imagine my amusement this morning to discover Violet Blue’s collection of links about this, which included the it-shouldn’t-be-surprising-news that OkCupid has already taken down its most notorious blog post about Match.com, the one called “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating” (link is to cached version), the one that started “Today I’d like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don’t realize…”
The most amusing of Violet Blue’s links, however, is this the-lady-protesteth-too-much link from the New York Observer: OKCupid: We Didn’t Censor Our Match.com-Bashing Blog Post. In which OkCupid says, of course, something that doesn’t perfectly match the headline. That blog post? That old thing? Not censored, no, of course not. But, uh, dudes, they paid us fifty million bucks, it wasn’t exactly a secret what they were buying, you expected us not to give it to them? They didn’t have to spell it out for us, no, that would be crass:
Match.com didn’t ask OKCupid to take down the post, CEO Sam Yagan told The Observer, it was just the “common sense thing to do.”
“I know everyone wants to make a big deal out of this,” he said. “They didn’t tell us take it down. I wanted to do it. … We obviously believe in a free model but there are also paid models and I didn’t think [the post’s] continued existence served much of a purpose. People will say, ‘Oh my God, they’ve sold out and they’re censoring it,’ that’s fine. When we put our next blog post next week and keep being awesome and the product keeps being awesome and free, people will just realize they’re overreacting.”
Furthermore, the data that OKCupid gathered from Match.com’s public filings and press kit were not completely accurate, he said, which he realized once he saw the real data.
“Upon having more knowledge as we’ve gone through the process of getting to know Match and them getting to know us, some of the conclusions we drew are not quite as exaggerated as we made them out to be,” he said.
Not quite? Well, that’s a relief, then.
It will be very interesting to see, in the coming months, what happens to the free dating experience on OkCupid, and I invite people who are familiar with it (I’m not) to post here in the comments as that develops. My suspicion is that they will develop the site to function as a feeder to the paid sites, making the free experience less and less functional and more and more annoying, slowly and incrementally over time. I’m basing that on a cynical reading of this language from the buyout press release:
“We know that many people who start out on advertising-based sites ultimately develop an appetite for the broader feature set and more committed community, which subscription sites like Match.com and Chemistry.com offer, creating a true complimentary relationship between our various business models.”
And if they don’t develop that appetite now, we’re pretty sure that once Tarzan comes swinging across the screen selling auto insurance for the nine hundredth time, they might start. And all you’ve got to do is get rid of that pesky little “show once” cookie on the advertisement! Easy peasy…
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