Danny Wylde Has Stuff To Say

So there’s this essay by Christopher Zeischegg aka Danny Wylde. It’s titled On The Moral Imperative To Commodify Our Sexual Suffering and I think there’s some stuff in there I disagree with. I have to say “I think” because it’s a dense essay with a lot of nuance, some of which may be getting past me. What’s more, I haven’t been where Zeischegg has been or done what he’s done. What I have done is worked (in my pasty-faced keyboarding way) in the same porn industry as him, and experienced (right along with him) certain changes in the porn business:

You’ve heard of the website PornHub.com? It’s owned by an international corporation called MindGeek. They used to be called Manwin, when they were developing a strategy to make free-mostly-pirated-porn sites the new normal. Employees were paid to rip DVDs and upload pirated content faster than any porn studio could send out their DMCA notices. MindGeek single-handedly caused the collapse of the pay-for-porn model of business. Kind of like how Napster killed the music industry. Except Napster did its damage and then disappeared. MindGeek went on to buy out every financially gutted porn studio until it resembled a production/distribution monopoly. MindGeek is Brazzers. MindGeek is Elegant Angel. MindGeek is Men.com. MindGeek is PornHub. You get the point.

Zeischegg, who no longer performs in porn after “all the ED drugs had caught up with” him, got a full time job filming and producing the stuff. He became bored, and in describing his boredom, he invokes one of the fears that animates me:

I could say with some certainty — after staring at several hundred hours of content in the absence of arousal — that porn had become boring.

There was flesh and it was fucked. Everyone over the age of 12 could list the ways in which a cock could fill a hole. Pornography was the equivalent of pop music — culturally omnipotent and void of all significance. It was visual mediocrity compounded by such widespread financial collapse that there might never again exist the capitalist incentive for novelty or spectacle.

“…that there might never again exist the capitalist incentive for novelty or spectacle.”

Sit with that thought. Allow it to fill you. Taste it, smell it. Try not to cry. If you love porn, novelty, and spectacle (and I love all three!) it’s pretty depressing, and there’s a lot of evidence loose in the world of 2015 that it might be true.

Zeischegg writes of suffering a severe depression “which may have never waned.” I want to think his depression is talking in the above quote. I want to think that porn as an art form will survive the loss of its status as an industry, and that once the MindGeek monoculture is as forgotten as Myspace, pornographic novelty and spectacle will flourish again, in a dynamic commercial ecosystem of small but creative businesses.

I want to think that. But I haven’t seen all that Zeischegg has seen.

As for the rest of his essay? He’s totally not done. He goes on to discuss in-person sexwork and the pressure it’s under as a business in a world where the decline of sexual shame is putting downward pressure on prices. Example sentence: “There’s Grindr. What’s the incentive to pay a young hustler for a blowjob?” He finishes up with an extended parable (or so I choose to read it) carrying his commodification notions to a logical conclusion that features a proposed partnership with a necromancer for the production of snuff films.

As far as I am concerned, he may have his fun with his necromancer. Or don’t call it fun: call it rather his Swiftian condemnation of the quest for novelty in extreme libertinage, if you choose to read him that way. It’s about the decline of sexual shame where I think we differ. He seems (and I freely admit to the possibility of misunderstanding) to think the decline of sexual shame is a bad thing. He’s regretful that, through writing and advocacy, he “did [his] part to normalize a profession that should have remained in the shadows.” He’s downright derisive about young women willing to make porn for low compensation as a (his scare quotes) “political act”. I can’t tell how much of this is a considered philosophy, versus sour grapes or just sourness in general. But I would argue that making porn and doing in-person sexwork are professions that have benefited from, and will benefit further from, the decline of sexual shame. It’s true that the premium wages they used to command will never come back, except perhaps for narrow specialists; but that’s no bad thing. The high wages were in part compensation for the social condemnation that came with the job. As the condemnation wanes — and it’s still got a long way to go! — it’s only logical that the wages will decline too.

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A Consumer-Protection Trick For Porn Subscribers

I’m slow but I learn. And what I learn, I try to remember to share.

One of the consistent and persistent minor frauds in the porn industry is the subscription porn pay site that isn’t actually producing new updates any more. But, you know, nobody is going to subscribe to a site where the last bit of new content has a 2011 date on it, are they? People who pay good money for porn (an ever-dwindling pool) want to see new stuff at least once a week, minimum. So there’s a certain stage in the life cycle of a porn site where the updates aren’t happening any more. But rather than admitting up front that a site is “mostly dead” (and, say, charging a one-time flat rate for access to the moribund site’s archives, as sometimes happens) the site operators decide to use automatic scripts to pull old updates (from, say, 2002 or whenever) and put current dates on them. So you land on the front page of the site today and it says the last update was October 12 (last week), but you (if you are a porn old-timer) might realize the picture was actually shot ten or fifteen years ago. (Yes, some sites out there really do have archives going back into the 1990s that they are presenting in dribs-and-drabs as “new” weekly updates.)

There’s a sense in which this does not matter. (Call this “lies pornographers tell themselves to sleep better at night.”) If a site’s “new to you” and the archives are so very deep that you could subscribe for a year and would never view all the content, the faux weekly updates are just another content-discovery and presentation tool for you to use during your membership, as you wallow in years of yummy porn that you never saw before. But if the actual amount of content on the site is limited, you’ll swiftly be disappointed when you realize that (1) you’ve viewed all the photoshoots and videos of interest to you and (2) the fresh-looking dates on the tour (that made you think there’d be new stuff coming every week) were bogus. And then when the automatic rebill hits your credit card, you very rapidly start to feel cheated, because what are you getting for that money?

Since ErosBlog has historically (again, not so much these days) been supported in part by affiliate links to paid porn sites, it’s always been something I paid attention to. But for many years there was no good easy way to tell when this was happening. Until recently. The rise of decent-quality image searching and the ubiquity of porn on Tumblr have combined to make porn-dating quite easy.

It works like this. You’re looking at a porn site tour, trying to decide if it’s worth paying for (or, if you’re a porn blogger, worth linking to). There are, at a minimum, several pictures (and usually a video clip) presented as a recent update with last week’s date on them. You pick whichever picture you like best, on the assumption that what’s most pleasing to your eye is probably most likely to have been reblogged all over Tumblr. You image-search that picture. The dates visible in the snippets in the Google image search results will have your answer. If they are all as recent as the alleged recent update, the update date is likely to be honest. If you find this picture all over the internet with dates going back years, you’re being lied to.

Easy-peasy!

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A (Silent) View On The Future Of Porn

This Huffington Post interview with Peter Acworth, founder of Kink.com (which HuffPo describes as “the largest fetish porn production company in the world”), is more fascinating to me because of what Peter does not say about his business than because of what he does say. Kink.com has been innovative about extending its brand in startling ways while paring back its costs and its active site portfolio as the pay-by-subscription porn-site business model has crumbled in recent years, and the company has a unique asset in its landmark Armory facility in San Francisco. So what does Peter talk about in the interview when questions turn to the future of his business?

1. A new bar called the Armory Club that now anchors the beginning and end of his new-ish Armory tours;
2. The Armory tours themeselves;
3. A new permit allowing use of the drill court in the Armory for “sporting events, farmers markets, performance art, etc.; and
4. In the “still brainstorming” stage, “a thriving kink-centric online social networking site around our products and services.”

Notice what’s not on that list?

Yeah. There’s nothing about making or selling newer or different porn. No new sites, no new themes, no “reach new markets with our existing products”, no “branch out into newer new media”, nothing. What’s exciting about your current business direction, Mr. Porn Baron? Well, HuffPo, we’re doing all these fascinating things to monetize our awesome real estate better…

One more glimpse at the reality that porn remains, for now, an industry in search of a new business model.

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Kayden Kross On Male Porn Talent

There have been changes in the porn industry over time with respect to the desired attributes for the male talent. Porn star Kayden Kross summarizes them here:

You’d be amazed at what we look for in male talent. It’s always changing. It used to be one thing and one thing only — a working dick. Most guys think they can do it but the test is to tell them to drop their pants and get it hard right then and there. You set a timer for five minutes. If they can’t do it before the clock runs out they lose. But then around 2000 Viagra hit the market and we suddenly started caring about things like looks. Then we over-saturated the market because we had an unlimited supply of male talent, then we started caring again about sexual performance. Now we care about acting too. I requested someone I wanted to work with a few months ago and the producer said, “Yeah, he has a big dick, but he can’t act.” While porn acting is a joke, we are apparently trying to make it less of one.

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College Professor / AlterNet Porn Statistics FAIL

Or: Why you shouldn’t get your porn industry statistics from the guy who was trying to sell anti-porn filtering software to scared parents in 2006.

So, a URL went by on Twitter for a porn article on Alternet. Relevant to my interests, right? So I opened it in a tab. It started reasonably enough:

Pornography 101: Why College Kids Need Porn Literacy Training
Mobile technology and abstinence-only guarantee that more young people get their sex ed from pornography. It’s time to talk to them about what they’re watching.

September 15, 2010 I am a professor. As I return to the classroom this fall, my thoughts turn to porn. More specifically, to the fact that in apartments, dorms — and from the back of some WiFi-ed classrooms — college students are cruising the Internet with the left-handed mouse.

So far, so reasonable. It’s 10 weeks old … so sue me … but I’ll keep reading. Imagine me doing the reader equivalent of the 15 mph cruise through a residential suburb. Then I get to the following paragraph. Consider it to be a railroad tie across the road; the noise you hear is me biting through my tongue as the top of my head bounces off the roof of my vehicle:

“Sex” is the number-one search term used around the globe. Every second, people spend $3,000 on Internet porn. There are an estimate 370 million Internet porn sites, and industry revenues surpass earnings by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined.

Wait, what?

One thing we know about the porn business is that there aren’t any reliable commercial statistics. Most of the companies are privately held, nobody shares sales data, and estimates of the size of the porn business vary wildly.

Nobody knows squat.

Bottom line — seriously — nobody knows. People did use to throw around some huge numbers, especially a few years ago, but the porn industry has fallen on hard times since, with a ton of producers closing up shop and overall sales diminishing sharply. Some of that’s recession, some of that is changing bank credit card rules, some of it is increasing consumer willingness and ability to find and download “free” porn. But these days, nobody seriously believes the porn industry is bigger than all the mega tech companies combined. They probably never were; they certainly aren’t now.

But this is AlterNet — isn’t it a fairly respectable web publication that does real journalism, with editors and everything? Their mission statement says so (my emphasis added):

AlterNet is an award-winning news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources. AlterNet’s aim is to inspire action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, health care issues, and more. Since its inception in 1998, AlterNet.org has grown dramatically to keep pace with the public demand for independent news. We provide free online content to millions of readers, serving as a reliable filter, keeping our vast audience well-informed and engaged, helping them to navigate a culture of information overload and providing an alternative to the commercial media onslaught. Our aim is to stimulate, inform, and instigate.

What’s more, they’ve got at least five people described as “editor” on their staff page. So, surely they didn’t just let this “I am a professor” argument-from-credentials person pull her “$3,000-a-second, more revenue than all the megatech companies earn” numbers out of her ass, did they?

You wouldn’t think.

So, who actually wrote this dog of a paragraph, and where did she pull those numbers, if not from the Stygian depths of her own “personal area”?

The article is bylined by one Shira Tarrant, and the byline is linked to this author info page, where we learn:

Shira Tarrant, Ph.D., is a nationally recognized expert on gender politics, feminism, pop culture, and masculinity. She is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of several books, including Men and Feminism (Seal Press). She is currently writing The Sex Wars: Pole Dancing, Porn and Other Things That Freak People Out.

Good: she’s got a Ph.D., so she knows about the value of having sources, and citing them, and not just pulling numbers out of her ass.

Bad: her field is not really numbers-heavy, so it might be possible for her to be suckered by some of the authoritative-looking but bullshit-laden wild-ass-guessing that passes for the only numbers that exist out there, on the size of the porn industry.

Still, her numbers are very specific, to a peculiar degree in fact. Again, where did she get them?

I went back and looked again at the paragraph with extra care. In the original, there were some links in there, and one of them was under the words “industry revenues”. Aha! Her source! Sweet, some numbers!

Oh, the quickly dashed hopes. Oh, the terrible pain.

The link took me here, to a website called “Internet Pornography Statistics” run by an outfit called “Top Ten Reviews” with the motto of “We do the research so you don’t have to.”

Are you nervous yet?

Professor Tarrant, I think, should be ashamed of herself. What score would she have given her students for citing a source of this quality in work for one of her classes?

Likewise, the editors of Alternet. This is journalism? Sorry, it ain’t even web journalism. I’m “just” a blogger, and even I won’t link to shit this weak.

How weak are we talking? Venture with me, as we survey the grandiose weakness of the shit, yeah and verily with unknowable precision even unto the penny:

According to compiled numbers from respected news and research organizations, every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography…. The pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined. 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues ballooned to $97.06 billion.

That’s from the introduction to an 11-page report. Those numbers are awesomely specific, but where do they come from? “Respected news and research organizations” you say? Oh really?

I say again, respected news and research organizations? Which ones, exactly? And, kiddies, do we notice that the one date we’ve got is for 2006? Professor Tarrant, did you happen to notice that in your 2010 article?

Well, it’s an 11 page report, maybe there are citations at the end. (I’ll save you some trouble; don’t hold your breath.) But meanwhile, who wrote this piece of exquisite shyte, and why did they write it?

Well, the author listed as one Jerry Ropalato, and the content management system used by Top Ten Reviews links that byline to this utterly bland and sterile user profile page that doesn’t tell you anything about who he is. But Top Ten Reviews is a product of Tech Media Network and by rummaging in the footer links we eventually discover this informative link to the executive profiles, where we discover that our friend Jerry is the CEO, has “a reputation for his contributions to Internet marketing” and is a “recognized Internet Safety expert” (capitalization his). He also used to be the Chief Operating Officer of a company called “ContentWatch”.

Hmm, I wonder if he’s entirely neutral and reliable on this whole internet porn question?

Let’s read further. Back to the porn statistics article, still in the introduction, a couple of sentences further along:

Anyone interested in Internet Filter Software and Internet Security Suites Software will find plentiful information about creating and maintaining a safe and secure internet experience at home and work.

Wait, what? Those two capitalized phrases (“Internet Filter Software” and “Internet Security Suites Software”) are linked in the article, linked to other pages at Top Ten Reviews. The first one goes to a page featuring a photo of a cute kid at a computer and copy that reads:

Shield Your Family from Pornography and Predators

Today’s high-tech porn-pushers make it a challenge to protect families from unwanted pornography. Fortunately, with tools like internet filter software, it’s possible to fight back.

Do we still think this guy is a reliable source for internet pornography statistics? His whole business is built around building up the size of the threat!

But still, 11 page report, yada yada, maybe his heart is pure and he actually has some good sources and cites them, right? I’ll read through and check.

It’s a fast trip. The 11 “pages” are for SEO and advertising purposes only … there’s more prose on this ErosBlog post, quite a lot more in fact. It’s a tiny report, broken up to ensure pointless clicking, annoy you, and provide more page views. But no, there’s nothing in there like a specific source. And then we finally get to the end, where we find the most hilarious not-quite-disclaimer and non-specific string citation I’ve ever seen. Once again, I must quote:

Sources:
Statistics are compiled from the credible sources mentioned below. In reality, statistics are hard to ascertain and may be estimated by local and regional worldwide sources.

ABC, Associated Press, AsiaMedia, AVN, BBC, CATW, U.S. Census, Central Intelligence Agency, China Daily, Chosen.com, Comscore Media Metrix, Crimes Against Children, Eros, Forbes, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Free Speech Coalition, Google, Harris Interactive, Hitwise, Hoover’s, Japan Inc., Japan Review, Juniper Research, Kagan Research, ICMEC, Jan LaRue, The Miami Herald, MSN, Nielsen/NetRatings, The New York Times, Nordic Institute, PhysOrg.com, PornStudies, Pravda, Sarmatian Review, SEC filings, Secure Computing Corp., SMH, TopTenREVIEWS, Trellian, WICAT, Yahoo!, XBIZ

I especially love that “In reality, statistics are hard to ascertain and may be estimated…” No shit, Sherlock. Translation: “After much fruitless Googling, I pulled a bunch of impressive-sounding numbers out of my ass to compile this worthless piece of linkbait.”

So, why am I exercised? At Jerry, I’m not, really. He’s just a transparent fear-mongering SEO monkey trying to sell nearly-worthless filtering software to clueless parents who don’t know any better and are too lazy to parent their children in the digital age. Garden variety internet business scum, but there are people who would say the same of me for daring to try and make a buck selling internet porn, and across the philosophical gulf that separates us, I see no point in throwing (any more) stones.

But my sentiments with respect to Professor Tarrant are actually rather more derisive. She should fucking know better. She’s a scholar, or she’s paid to be; to her, facts are supposed to matter. And yet she got suckered by made-up commercial link-bait nonsense, and cited it as fact to make a rhetorical point simply because it was convenient. The point wasn’t central to her article, so I’m guessing it was a lazy rhetorical flourish — she wanted a number, so she Googled one, and didn’t give very much of a damn if it was real. She probably forbids her students from using or citing WikiPedia — my college professor friends tell me that’s getting trendy in academia — but she herself cited an internet source that doesn’t have a tenth of its reliability.

Balanced against all this, I grant her only that she could have Googled carefully and at length, and she would have done no better; there realio trulio aren’t any good numbers out there. This Economist article from 2009 is about the best sort of thing you will find, and it has nothing in it better than a number that one really knowledgeable industry insider pulled out of his ass. There’s just no freakin’ data. If she’d been careful and honest, she would have wasted an hour, then had to re-write the article without that zippy paragraph. Just as, I presume, she would expect her students to do, in the absence of reliable sources to cite for a sexy statistic in a class assignment.

And what about Alternet? Do they not edit? I know that fact checking is a luxury that web publications cannot afford, but I’m just a damned blogger, and when I make a factual assertion backed by a link, I at least look at where the link goes to make sure it’s not some complete bullshit destination. Five editors at the “award winning news magazine”, and nobody noticed the link to mendacious four-years-outdated linkbait?

I don’t function often in the role of web critic, in great part because my own feet are made of a rich earthen mixture. But this, my friends, is an entire shipment of FAIL: