Looking at porn is one thing. But, to state the obvious, porn is pictures, commercial pictures. Everybody who makes porn wants to sell it. Specifically, they want to sell it on the internet. Which means they need words about their pictures.
What’s strange is the way people write, commercially, about their pictures. Every nude is a “scorching hot teen beauty!” or a “filthy cum-covered nasty slut”. Every penetration is a deep dicking, every orgasm a screaming fountain of some hyperbolized fluid or other. It’s rare to find anybody who writes honestly and descriptively about erotic imagery.
It is so rare, in fact, that after seven years of sex blogging I sometimes fantasize about creating a porn blog or review site that allows people to market their own stuff, but only to the extent that their posts can survive some sort of Slashdot-style community moderation on the sole criterion of honest and non-hyperbolic descriptivity. The trouble is, I’m not sure anybody would participate.
Sometimes, I’ll even catch myself imagining what bits of porn — especially in some of its more specialized or unusual forms — would sound like if neutrally and fairly described, in sentences of standard English, without emphatic punctuation.
An unusual post on Bondage Blog triggered my lastest “porn, described” reverie. The linked gallery contains the following descriptive prose, mostly in all caps before I standardized it:
“Gorgeous babes and teens bound, tied, gagged, probed and submissively serving their master and misstresses [sic]. Real bondage. Real torture. Real pain. Real tears. Click here for more erotic fetish action! Submissive slaves bound in rope, chains, and leather. Domination. Discipline. Sadism. Humiliation. Hard sex.”
The picture displayed on Bondage Blog? Here’s my best shot:
A nude woman with a shaved head (think Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta) is tied with rope, in a squatting position, inside what looks like a wrought-iron basket. The basket, and she, are on top of a bale of hay, next to a ladder with a rusty chain hanging from it. She’s looking nervously at a reasonably-buff man wearing leather pants. He’s approaching her, and in his left hand is an old-fashioned wooden blueberry-picking scoop with metal tines.
I know my description wouldn’t sell porn the way “bound, tied, gagged, probed” presumably does. But I’ve got some sort of defiant, lingering attachment to the idea that words ought to be deployed usefully. Maybe a list of fetish-triggering words is useful in the sense that it encourages more credit cards to be deployed, but in the sense of actually painting a useful mental picture of the thing described, it’s full of fail.
Even more interesting is the fact that nobody sees the same things when they look at a porn picture. How would you describe our basket girl?
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