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The Sex Blog Of Record
Tuesday, August 13th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I am a nut, and my nuttery takes several very narrow and specific shapes. One of those shapes is my eternal obsession with the problem of porn curation: how do we publish, distribute, discover, access, and preserve access to ephemeral erotic material in a world where #pornocalypse and its social cousins have denied independent porn creators most access to search, social media, and the payments system?
Thus when I saw a Mastodon post blurbing Miss Pearl’s latest blog post On Having Porn For Dommes in terms of the “curation and censorship problem” affecting such porn, I knew it would perforce be relevant to my interests.
Longtime readers know that my BDSM porn interests as displayed here on ErosBlog are dirt-common, with male-gaze M/f porn at the top of the list, followed by the usual substantial fraction of commercial F/f material and then by token amounts of F/m and M/m stuff. That said, the Femdom Resource blog (written by a male client and appreciator of pro dommes, but ranging widely across the femdom content space) is one of my frequently-linked favorites, and I have a long history of featuring nonprofessional or lifestyle femdom bloggers (like Bitchy Jones) on the rare occasion that I’ve been able to find them under the avalanche of cookie-cutter pro-domme “spam” (promotional) content that floods most available channels. O Miss Pearl (subtitle: “non-professional perspective femdom & kink, with awesome erotica”) was therefore an instant addition to the ErosBlog blogroll as soon as I saw it.
But what about the “domme gaze drought” (as she teased it on Mastodon) in Miss Pearls’ recent post?
It has been true for the entire lifetime of this blog that fictional depictions of dominant women are really limited, and most typically tailored to what subs are attracted to. Or being more precise, what a certain paying audience of sub men will purchase. This standard tends to depict dominance in women as a vocation performed for the benefit of subs (or their vulnerability and persecution fantasies) and is often gender regressive as heck.
Yup, that sounds right; this isn’t content that I actively search for, but I do watch for it (if that distinction makes sense) and I don’t see much of it.
Her wide-ranging post covers a lot of subtopics in plenty of detail, but I began crying my amens when I got to this part about the problems facing porn creators:
Let’s drop some of our illusions about porn and how it’s made.
Porn, contrary to the way we talk about it, is a marginalized industry, disproportionately queer, with most people not making much money. Artistic talent and skill are not evenly distributed – nevermind that you need to be a wizard at marketing, with a work ethic that is punishing on the body to make it as any kind of artist, sexy or not. That’s on top of an ever increasingly sanitized internet and the frankly censorship oriented nature of most payment providers and most publishing platforms.
Writing, illustration and modeling are also incredibly poorly paid, whether it’s R, E, or P. One of the first things consumers need to know is that the big names are lottery winner, and most stuff falls into the obscure outsider art and cottage industry level. People who create stuff are not trying to cater to the patriarchy to be willing agents of it, they are navigating razor thin profits, fussy platforms and content saturation of a competition that puts you at odds with not only every creator currently working right now, but every surviving work running back more than a thousand years. And every other possible way humans can amuse or occupy their time.
There follows a highly educational tour of the deep weeds of the curation problems faced by Miss Pearl’s specific porn genre of interest. I’m not dismissing any of that by failing to quote or summarize it here; you’ll want to read it yourself in any case. (Yes, dear readers, I am telling you, yet again, that you’ll need to clicky the damn linky. This is a 22-year-old blog; it can serve as social media, but it doesn’t do so without reader participation.) Miss Pearl calls for smart and aggressive curation of niche porn (the fans cheer), talks about the value of self-hosting (a subject long dear to my own heart), and concludes that domme-gaze porn “isn’t reaching the audience. It’s fragmented across different platforms, only has so much advertising and the market it might have doesn’t know it exists.”
In conclusion, Miss Pearl points out that making niche porn is a fiscally-irresponsible artistic act, and that we need to be better curators and better fans if we want to encourage it:
Someone who is an honest to goodness lifestyle domme for real and a good creator, if they are being fiscally responsible, is much better off making something else.
If you want to turn that around, we have to actually make more of a project of curation and sharing out of it, and you are simply going to have to be more assertive fans. You are also going to need to develop a lot more gentleness around the content you consume.
Indeed.
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Tuesday, December 5th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
It’s really common — especially among people who are still trying to reason with the unfeeling prudish moderation robots of porn-hostile social media — to argue that a certain thing is not porn, but art.
Any time you hear that argument, remember that the speaker is off the bubble and has lost the plot.
Anything can be porn. A watercolor painting of an elbow. It doesn’t matter. ANYTHING.
The important thing is that there’s nothing wrong with porn. Trying to shame social media owners into changing the nipple-shy behavior of their bots only proves that you’ve been seduced into division. “My tasteful photos are erotica, or art, or a lunch menu; it’s your stinky stuff that’s porn.”
If you’re not defending porn with your whole chest, you aren’t in the fight.
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Tuesday, February 28th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
In a recent column, advice columnist and kink/sex educator Rain DeGrey addresses a reader’s worried impression that people are coming to prefer porn and self-pleasure over “actual physical sex”. Rain thinks it may be true, but if so it’s far from worrisome:
If some people decide that hopping online and summoning up porn in any style, any shape, any hair color, any variety without even popping a breath mint first is easier than meeting up with an actual human, well, who can blame them? We live like Greek Gods and are spoiled for choice.
Yes, indeed.
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Monday, September 13th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
We don’t know what kind of internet porn this blonde is watching while she wanks, but from the look on her face it’s pretty nasty and transgressive. Probably she tells herself after every session of orgasmic “her time” that she’s not going to look at that horrible stuff again:
Via Kinky Delight. From the style I believe the artist may be John Persons.
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Friday, December 21st, 2018 -- by Bacchus
In 1981’s Delicious, the porn “plot” centers on a witch who uses her powers for seduction and sex. At one point she shrinks some of the movie’s characters down the size of paper clips and they fuck on a yellow school notepad, or so the special effects department with the giant crayons and pencils would have you believe:
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Sunday, November 11th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
My commentary would be superfluous:
And yet lo I am a man, so here I am flapping my fingertips with the commentary anyway. In fact I have spent a lot of time and bashed up a lot of keyboards over the last sixteen years on this blog addressing particulars: posting a particular porn image, analyzing it as art, speculating about what it means. As a matter of editorial policy, ErosBlog (the blog is me!) is pro-porn and 100% coming from the notion that you can’t wedge a playing card between the baskets that “porn” and “art” live in.
Mostly I have only contempt for the conversations about porn that are seeking to disestablish porn from the realm of culture. In the early days of the blog, I would read them and sometimes post derisive responses to them. Nowadays I rarely even read them. I have pushed fifty. I don’t have time. The music analogy is a good one. You don’t like folk music? Don’t listen! But I am not going to engage with your 4,000-word thinkpiece on how folk music should be banned because of its pernicious effects on banjo players and folk festival attendees. Folk music is here to stay and I can only read so many more words before I die. Your attempt to destroy a cultural force that offends you will not be among them.
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Tuesday, July 24th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
This gorgeous image is said to be Lynda Carter on the set of Wonder Woman, which would date it to the mid-late 1970s. Hat tips are owed to This Is Not Porn on Twitter and (perhaps less obviously) to Epimenides the Cretan and René Magritte.
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Saturday, February 24th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
There’s apparently been a silly debate going on somewhere just beyond the periphery of my Twitter feed; from what I can gather, some of the usual marching morons attempted to assert that porn is not art, or cannot be art, or some such blathering nuttery of that long-discredited ilk. All I really know or care to know comes via having noted Conner Habib stalwartly engaged in refutations; some stupidities are too wearying, honestly, to even be worth rubber-necking at. Drive on.
I am so utterly convinced that the veil between art and pornography is, if it exists at all, a flimsy thing that’s penetrated more often than the most industrious sex worker in a busy port during Fleet Week, that I can never resist posting so-called “fine art” that checks every box you might care to design on any notional mythical “Porn Identification Checklist”. How about, for example, Paul Gustave Fischer’s Morgentoilette?
No? Still not convinced? Back up, close the door, bend down, and look again, this time through the key hole:
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Monday, August 7th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
In the Eidolon Initiative comic currently running at Erotic Mad Science, there appears to be a pornocalyptic mystery developing:
But there’s something decidedly odd about whatever it is that’s going on with the vanishing porn:
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Wednesday, October 5th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Update on the below: It took them many many months, but Kink.com eventually restored still photos to its product offering. Don’t panic.
Bondage Blog on Monday reported in detail on the removal of still photography from all of Kink.com’s paid/subscription product offerings. The Kink.com library of BDSM and fetish stills, which dated back to 1998 and was advertised as containing “over two million photos”, was apparently removed from sale because the Kink.com people “have only been able to isolate a small portion of our members who use or appreciate them” and because of “complicated” but otherwise undisclosed technical issues associated with Kink.com’s recent consolidation of its numerous porn sites and domains into areas (now called “channels”) at the Kink.com URL.
The company continues to offer a handful of still photos for free to the public on the landing pages of its individual shoots, such as this shoot for the Sex and Submission channel. Those are the same pictures that used to be offered for free as part of the galleries used in promoting the various Kink.com sites. What’s changed is that paying members formerly would have found somewhere between 50 and 400 additional still photos in the member area for each shoot; those are now entirely gone, and are no longer available anywhere to anyone. Paying members now get video, period.
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Friday, June 10th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Have you every been frustrated by the fact that good porn is made obscure and hard to find because it gets described with bad keywords? I know I have! Here’s Shira Tarrant talking about the problem in The Atlantic:
It starts with how pornography is keyworded. So, people put in search terms, but those search terms aren’t all that original, really. Because where do we learn the search words that we’re looking for? It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. And so porn gets keyworded in very stereotyped, often sexist, often racist ways, and also just with a narrow-minded view of sexuality.
If you are interested in something like double oral, and you put that into a browser, you’re going to get two women giving one guy a blowjob. If you put “double oral” into a browser you’re not likely to get two men or two people giving a woman oral sex. That’s just not how it’s keyworded. That then feeds into what the industry decides to make more of.
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Sunday, March 20th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
The notion of making the porn you want to see in the world has been an interest of mine for some time, although I personally don’t have the right sort of creative skills to do very much of it. My friend and erstwhile co-blogger Dr. Faustus wrote an epic sequence of posts on making your own porn back in 2011, and he’s been practicing what he preaches (most notably but by no means exclusively with his Gnosis College series of comics) for longer than that. So it’s natural enough that when I see a headline like “DIY Tumblr Porn: The Porn Movement We’ve All Been Waiting For?” I would parse it as potentially relevant to my interests.
You can imagine, then, my disappointment upon reading this sentence in the fourth paragraph:
Log in to Tumblr, however, and it’s unlikely you’ll find anything resembling hardcore pornography. Instead, you’ll find erotic and even romantically-charged content that couldn’t be further from the fake orgasms and artificiality of mainstream porn.
Am I the only one who feels this sentence disqualifies the author from any claim of knowing anything about mainstream porn or Tumblr?
If you’re interested in the phenomenon of people who make porn to share on Tumblr, you’ll find some things of interest in the article. But the notion that Tumblr isn’t first and foremost full of the same commercial porn the author disdains with words like “artificiality” suggests a dangerous lack of familiarity with Tumblr for someone writing about it for an audience. Worse, the notion that “mainstream porn” (whatever that means) can be somehow typified by the most boring and least authentic material in the genre suggests (and this is me being charitable) a lack of familiarity with the truism that is Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
I’m not going to list any more of the ill-informed negative generalizations about commercial porn from the article. The obligatory quote from a sex-negative “therapist” with a book to sell on the “problems caused by pornography” didn’t help much either. Yes, there are people making porn for primary publication on Tumblr. But if you want to learn very much about that phenomenon and how it fits in the broader picture of commercial porn generally or the most recent pornographic innovations of whatever kind, this article will prove shallow and disappointing. Once again, I look at these things so you don’t have to.
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Monday, July 27th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
In one of his trademark long smart articles, Dr. Marty Klein addressed the many concerns of wives who are dismayed by spousal porn-watching. The entirety of Your Husband Watches Porn — Now What? is worth reading, but I thought his response to “I can’t compete with those damn women who perform in porn films” was worth repeating here:
The idea that a woman has to compete with the women or activities in porn films is fascinating. Of course, some women feel they have to compete with Scarlett Johansson and Beyonce; that’s a fool’s errand that no one should attempt (they are professionals; do not attempt to do their job in your home).
If you try to compete with mega-stars of course you’ll try to compete with Rosie Cheex; but if you’re smart enough to realize you can’t match the Beyonce machine, please let go of Candye Kisses as well.
While making superficial comparisons is inevitable, most men know that porn is a fantasy, not a documentary; no one actually expects his girlfriend to pay the pizza delivery man with oral sex, and no grownup really expects his partner to look or act like a porn star.
Porn or no porn, every man and woman has to figure out how to feel OK with themselves when they don’t look as good as others, have as much money as others, or have jobs or children as prestigious as others. This is the fundamental existential task of all people who want to enjoy life, and porn didn’t invent it.
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Saturday, January 3rd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
In her lengthy intro to a pair of business articles written by sex workers, Violet Blue writes about some of the business challenges she faces as an independent businesswoman in the business of writing about sex. I can’t speak to the challenges specifically faced by women, but there remain many resonances in this that are bitterly familiar to me, a man in the business of writing and blogging about sex and porn:
I’ll just put it this way: If it wasn’t for sex censorship by so many major companies, financial institutions, tools and platforms, I’d *only* have to face the typical set of challenges all women face who run their own business. The limitations of censorship, plus the danger of doing business with companies who routinely deal unfairly (and occasionally behave harmfully) to independent businesses/businesspeople (whose business might be sex-related), has absolutely hurt me as a businessperson.
That’s everything from having my name blacklisted in search engine autocompletes, to getting accounts revoked without actually breaking any rules, being disallowed to advertise (or take advertising) through everyday channels like AdSense, worrying payment processors and social media sites (and more) will delete my account, unable to plan around Amazon and Google who may de-list (or deep-six) sexuality searches without notice, being unable to do a Kickstarter or put an app about human sexuality in Apple or Google’s marketplaces, constantly being reported on sites I have accounts on simply because some people think what I do is wrong, not being able to use any of the decent mailing list companies to have a newsletter… I could go on.
I just write about sex. That’s it.
I’m not even a sex worker, a porn maker, nor have I ever been a porn performer – what they (mostly female entrepreneurs, natch) go through trying to run their businesses is so beyond unfair, it paralyzes me with anger sometimes to think about it.
So I have to approach business differently; none of the formulas – or even tools and services – available to everyday, independent women in business are actually available to me. I imagine that if the playing field were even, I might be as financially stable (or even thriving) as many of my friends are.
She’s not wrong. At least once a week I have some business notion in the adult space, and 99% of the time that notion doesn’t survive five minutes of serious thought. “That would be great, but there’s no reliable way to get paid without PayPal or credit cards.” “Awesome, but I can’t finance the start-up costs, not even with crowd-funding.” “How on earth could we market such a thing without access to social media?” “No way would that app ever get into the app stores.” Yes, there are workarounds and expensive middlemen (they do always seem to be men) and kludges and sneaky back doors and potential ways to bootstrap. Nothing is impossible, but in time it begins to feel like running a marathon in a fat-suit.
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Thursday, November 13th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
You don’t often see porn sites that have mission statements, much less mission statements emblazoned on their front pages. But Little Mutt is just such a site, and this is that totally awesome mission statement:
OUR MISSION: We love porn. We think that most porn is a healthy expression of sexuality in our society. We do not debase women nor are we misogynistic. We love women and what women do for each other and us. We are dedicated to women and good sex. We will always strive to bring you the best porn you’ve ever seen.
What’s not to like about that?
The Little Mutt photos in this post are of a young James Deen making out with Hailey Young, who seems quite into it. I’ve been linking to porn from Little Mutt for many years, but not so often as you would think considering how fresh-looking and stylish it is.
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Sunday, November 2nd, 2014 -- by Bacchus
There was an excellent article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian yesterday about fair trade porn. So excellent was it that, frankly, I think the editors should be ashamed of the unwarranted click-baiting question mark in their headline: Is there such a thing as ethical porn?
Zoe Williams seems to have relied heavily on detailed interviews with Pandora Blake and her merry band of collaborators at Dreams Of Spanking, which was a wise choice. And there’s much goodness to be had in the interviews and quotes with other “fair trade” pornographers, such as long-time ErosBlog favorite Madison Young. But my absolute favorite part of the article is a single lengthy paragraph in which the complete history of the feminist porn wars is recapitulated and fought in Zoe Williams’s mind at a feminist convention in 2011:
I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map.
If I was the kind of guy who got text tattoos, I think “I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are” would be a fine candidate. It would do for an ErosBlog motto, too.
Moving on: Pandora Blake is quoted being smart about porn throughout the article, but my favorite quote is this one on anti-porn feminists watching the wrong porn:
Blake says: “When you read them [anti-porn feminists], it’s very obvious that they’ve typed ‘hardcore gonzo’ into Google and watched the free stuff. They’re obsessed with the worst of it.”
Not only do I agree that the anti-porn feminists (although I cannot use that phrase without wondering how feminist it can possibly be to deny the agency of women who make porn) are looking at the worst porn, but I think the problem even goes beyond that. I think they are looking at the worst porn and then, using empathy, they are projecting their own imagined reaction were they modeling the scene onto the models, of whose motivations, professionalism, and physical skills they are utterly ignorant. I first encountered this made explicit in the notorious “threads swimming in blood in your throat” passage by Andrea Dworkin, who, upon seeing the movie Deep Throat, seems to have re-imagined it as a horror movie based on her own gruesome fantasies of what giving a blowjob must be like. The rest of us saw rather a different movie.
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Tuesday, October 28th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
The click-bait headline is a complete lie. This account covers only two days of unrestricted sexing, it’s written in the style of erotic fiction, and we never find out what happens: For One Week I Decided To Have Sex With My Boyfriend Whenever He Wanted (Here’s What Happened).
However, early on there’s a brief discussion of why men like porn, that I think may have some wisdom in it:
Anyways, we watched porn together sometimes and I knew he watched it alone. I’m not like, “the cool girl” who’s totally okay with her boyfriend watching porn but I knew it was an uphill battle and one that wasn’t going to end well for either of us, so I tried to use it to bring us closer together. One night … I asked him what he liked about porn, and whether access to me or all the other women in the world (hotter ones, I even gave him) would be better, ideally.
His answer surprised me, it wasn’t about quality or quantity, but about availability. With me, (and he loved me very much, he clarified), he had to woo me, constantly. Sex was never a given, and this is a biological difference between men and women. He was trying, all the time, to make me think of him sexually and to initiate sex and even my higher-than-average female libido couldn’t keep up with him. As loving and as open and assuring as I was towards him, he was still getting rejected by me in this way, often (and even more often if he would be honest about how frequently he wanted sex).
And so watching porn made sense to me in a way it never had before. The fantasy, the real fantasy, was a world free of rejection….
In my experience and observation, even the most sexually generous women, in even the most loving and sexual relationships, are but dipping with a small spoon into the hogshead of available male proposition. I would be open to the argument that they need to be skilled at rejection and at preempting the propositions that make outright rejection (with all its costs and dangers) necessary. But it had never occurred to me that this project of ongoing rejection could become so automatic, as with breathing, that a woman might cease to be aware of doing it. And yet this author was, she says, surprised to learn how often she was rejecting her boyfriend.
That surprise? It surprises me.
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Sunday, September 7th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
In the 1980s, Ms. Magazine was the publication of record for sex-hostile feminists (who were a much larger proportion of the feminist movement back then, and who claimed to be the entire movement). Here’s a photo of Annie Sprinkle, who tweets “1980’s photo of me when porn stars protested Ms. Magazine for having no porn stars @ round table discussion abt porn!”
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Thursday, May 15th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
If you’re old enough to remember the early days of PC gaming, you won’t have missed the ubiquitous magazine advertising for “sexy” games like the notorious Custer’s Revenge, even if you never played them (as most did not). Recently PC Magazine ran a game-by-game retrospective on some of those titles, along with some interesting history:
Many of these explicit titles were developed by Mystique, an offshoot of porn film studio, Caballero Control Corporation. In Mystique’s two-or-so years of existence, it published several “X-rated” games under the “Swedish Erotica” banner (though the titles were all created in the U.S.). As the completely predictable (and surely sought-after) furor erupted, Atari ended up suing Mystique to block the production of its digital debauchery.
But then came the video game crash of 1983 and Mystique went under. The games, however, enjoyed a few additional years of novelty existence when the rights were purchased by a new company, Playaround, which also created gender-switched versions of the original Mystique titles.
Are the games any good? Eh, not really. And while the basic blocky graphics of the era were a natural barrier to anything being too explicit, some of the concepts are just downright gross, even by the standards of today’s porn-on-demand culture.
Youngsters these days, they don’t know how good they got it…
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Monday, December 2nd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Instead of fulminating in a ranty thrown-together blog post on Wednesday as I did, tireless warrior for civil liberties Jennifer Granick took two extra days and wrote a serious, detailed, well-researched think piece, with citations, like a grownup:
NSA SEXINT is the Abuse You’ve All Been Waiting For
The important thing to keep in mind as media apologists attempt to minimize the story:
There are only six targets discussed in the paper. These six are worthwhile “exemplars,” according to the documents. But NSA profiles more than six people, we don’t know how many more, and we don’t know why.
Her conclusion:
In a mass surveillance ecosystem, the scale and scope on which this kind of activity can take place is unprecedented. Once it collects information about hundreds of millions of people in mass, “dossiers” of potentially embarrassing information — or blackmail quality secrets — dirt on anyone is just a few searches away. Intelligence operatives can secretly tar anyone, seemingly at will, since the NSA has the technological capacity, and no one has identified a law which would, if followed, intercede. These abilities, never mind the will to use them, are incompatible with individual freedom and democracy.
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Wednesday, November 27th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Any student of human nature understands that when you put a powerful tool in human hands and promise that the tool will only be used against the most extreme threats and direst enemies, that promise of limits will inevitably prove to be an empty one. There’s always mission creep. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Perhaps broad data collection is only supposed to be used against violence-plotting foreigners-and-terrorists, but those limits are not realistic. Human nature and mission creep guarantee that if it’s possible to know everybody’s creepy porn-watching habits, the surveillance state will take care to know them. Nor will that state hesitate to use that knowledge against anybody who opposes it, even if that opposition takes no form more dangerous than posting political speech to YouTube.
All this we knew even before Edward Snowden pulled the scab off the festering wound on the body of democracy that our “homeland” security apparatus has become in the last dozen years. We learned these lessons from J. Edgar Hoover, before I was born, back when life happened in black and white. We learned them a long time ago, and we learned them well.
But now? Now we know more specifics. Now, thanks to an article by Glen Greenwald and others in The Huffington Post, we have details of how the NSA tracked the porn-viewing habits and other “personal vulnerabilities” of people (including US people) whose only crime was being identified by NSA as “radicalizers”. This appears to have meant that they advocated their political and religious views on YouTube, which you or I might understandably view as protected political speech.
Here’s how it went down:
The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target’s credibility, reputation and authority.
Note that the six individuals in the document are “exemplars” — case studies if you will — and not the only six people having their porn visits tracked. NSA presumably chose the most unsympathetic “exemplars” for its self-congratulatory internal documentation. Don’t assume that this porn-surveillance program is limited to Muslims.
None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots. The agency believes they all currently reside outside the United States. It identifies one of them, however, as a “U.S. person,” which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident.
Once again, nothing in the document suggests that these are the only “six individuals targeted by the NSA”. These are six examples, the six most dangerous-sounding radicals the NSA could find in its database when it went to write a document justifying its porn-snooping program to itself.
NSA is forthright that it is collecting information about online porn use in order to embarrass and discredit these “radicalizers”:
According to the document, the NSA believes that exploiting electronic surveillance to publicly reveal online sexual activities can make it harder for these “radicalizers” to maintain their credibility. “Focusing on access reveals potential vulnerabilities that could be even more effectively exploited when used in combination with vulnerabilities of character or credibility, or both, of the message in order to shape the perception of the messenger as well as that of his followers,” the document argues.
The NSA seems not even to have considered whether it might be illegal to snoop after the porn habits of US persons in order to chill or discredit their political speech. As the article puts it:
There is also no discussion in the document of any legal or ethical constraints on exploiting electronic surveillance in this manner.
Nor am I the only one who sees the parallels to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover:
James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. “The NSA’s operation is eerily similar to the FBI’s operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to ‘neutralize’ their targets,” he said. “Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history.”
Most of us, I think, want privacy in our porn habits for reasons of personal comfort and convenience. We’d prefer that our family members and coworkers and the others in our immediate personal spheres not know the intimate details of our erotic inner lives, but for most of us, this is a preference aimed at avoiding the awkwardness that arises from “TMI” moments. We assume that nobody in officialdom really gives much of a shit about our porn interests, so it’s not a day-to-day problem that we mostly surf our porn on an internet that everyone now understands has been utterly pwned by the surveillance state.
And, perhaps, for most people, that’s rational enough. But everybody has opinions, and now we’ve learned what only the paranoid of long memory knew before: if your opinions are unpopular enough with the folks in charge, and if you express them with uncommon clarity and vigor on YouTube or anywhere else, suddenly the folks in charge might come to care about your porn. Not because it’s porn, but because it might be embarrassing to you. Now, suddenly, your porn has become a lever to be used against you; and discovering and using those levers is the chief business of the powerful.
Yes, we already knew all this in the abstract. Now, it’s made concrete by documentary evidence. Along with everything else they track in their bulk data collections, the NSA is in fact tracking your porn habits. Those porn habits go into the big database in Utah along with everything else, to be pulled out and used against you when and if you’re ever officially determined to be too good at expressing political opinions that discomfit the powerful. You radicalizer. Go, you.
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Sunday, November 17th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
It has long been a mystery to me why more mainstream products that are sold to porn-watching adults are afraid to advertise on porn websites. Porn advertising is dirt cheap, and so you’d think that any brand that’s not afraid to admit its customers also like porn would be all over the porn website world with huge ad campaigns. Whiskey and cigarette advertisers used to buy endless full-page ads in PlayBoy and Hustler back in the day; why don’t they now?
Thus I was both heartened and pleased to see that one of the online food-delivery startups has not only taken to porn site advertising, they’ve blogged in detail about why they did it and how well it worked:
This got us thinking about porn websites. Are they a good place for us to advertise? Will we hit our target audience? Can we afford it? And why is everyone always shaking their head at us when we bring it up?
We decided to seriously look into it and what we found was boobs. A lot of them. But, we also found an advertising gold mine. We always assumed that a lot of people love porn, but when you look at the numbers, the proof is in the hot tub full of pudding. A whopping 30% of ALL web traffic is dedicated to adult sites. In fact, by the time you’re done reading this sentence, about 197,806 people have looked at porn on the Internet (including you. We see that incognito tab).
So where does America like to spend its time on the Internet? We took a closer look at the top websites by traffic in the United States. Leading the charts are Google, Facebook and YouTube. Duh. No news there. Moving down the list, we couldn’t help but notice that many of the top 100 sites in the US are pornographic.
Considering these numbers, you’d think it’d be pretty expensive to shove your brand message in the face of such a large, captive audience. Right? It probably costs an arm and a third leg, right? Wrong!
We compared our average CPM across major ad publishers such as Google, Twitter and Facebook and found we could get more impressions via porn sites than the big three combined, and at roughly 1/10th of the cost (!) High traffic sites with cheap ad space?? Did we just see a unicorn?
If you ever take two seconds out of your naughty time to glance at the ads on porn sites, you’ll notice that 99% of them are for more porn. It’s a world where no one besides male enhancement pills and adult friend finders have dared to go. Not a single mainstream brand advertising there. We could be that 1%.
The evidence was in. Porn advertising is an untapped market, and our mission was clear:
Tap. Dat. Ass.
Monday, November 11th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This article at Erotic Scribes (the house blog for Sssh.com) is a sort of ranty mashup of several related screeds from the perspective of someone who has been making commercial porn for a long time. Themes include
- Google’s abandonment of its “don’t be evil” corporate ethos;
- How Google makes money prioritizing search results for stolen porn over results from the people who make and sell the porn in the first place;
- How Google makes even more money selling arguably-illegal ads for obviously-illegal frauds and scams and criminal enterprises; and
- How the mainstream press is useless, craven, and stupid about anything having to do with porn and the porn business.
Although I think these rants could have been more usefully subdivided into separate posts, they’re all somewhat intertwined (along various tangents) and it’s no exaggeration that in just a few short years, Google has gone from “an important ally of and primary traffic source for the internet porn business” to “a huge obstacle to anybody trying to market internet porn”. Since I’m in the porn business and I like making money, this particular exercise in soapboxing comes from a place close to my heart. Thus, some excerpts:
It’s a well documented fact that the vast majority of viruses and malware come not from pornsites, but high traffic mainstream ones. Tech Republic and Cisco published some interesting findings on this. Read it and please then shut up about the “porn problem”.
…
As part of my job at a porn company, I probably visit several hundred porn sites per week to ferret out our movies that have been stolen and are being promoted by Google links. Never ONCE in 12 years have I ever gotten a virus. But then, I know enough not to download shit from the internet, porn or not! Viral payloads typically come with special offers for ringtones, screensavers, free software and apps to database your DVD collection on your GameBoy. Not Pornsites, you dummy. Pornsites want you to come back again and again so maybe they can sell you something. Not infect your computer.
…
Anything you read on the internet from “mainstream media” about porn or adult entertainment is now simply bullshit. Yes, we had a nice recess from abuse from “Fifty Shades Of Grey” (mainstream media made a LOT of money off of that), but just realize anything you read now about porn from a mainstream media website or news source is going to try to make you feel afraid of it. Or disgusted by it. Or think Hitler invented it. It’s their way of boosting readership by blaming every ill of society and the net on porn. Don’t believe it.
Porn surfing and consumption is, and has been, created as a very safe experience for you by all of us in the responsible adult industry. We have worked hard for 20 years to gain your trust and patronage. Don’t let mainstream scare you. We are on your side to bring joy to your panties and get a reasonable amount of money from you to pay the actors and operating expenses. Yeah, go watch a free vid on a tube once in a while, but realize the good stuff is over at the paysites, DVD stores and other places that charge a bit of money. Fair is fair, and we aim to please!
Indeed!
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Saturday, July 20th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
It’s time to be very clear about the words “NSFW” and “Adult” in the Tumblr context. They mean different things. Until recently, users were faced with two self-flagging options. This is the relevant screenshot from my May 15 post:
Here’s how Tumblr’s page on Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs explained the difference, then and now:
Please respect the choices of people in our community and flag your blog as NSFW or Adult from your blog Settings page.
- NSFW blogs contain occasional nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
- Adult blogs contain substantial nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
Note what’s not present (this will be important later). There’s nothing there about commercial porn sites or affiliate links. The difference between NSFW and Adult is the extent of nudity or “mature/adult-oriented” content. If it’s occasional, your blog should be flagged NSFW; if it’s “substantial”, your blog should be flagged Adult. When we talk about “porn on Tumblr” everybody is talking about Tumblrs that should be flagged Adult. We’re talking about the blogs that are all porn, all the time, the raunchier the better. Accept no substitutes!
So, that’s the Tumblr policy as it’s been for at least the last several months. I am going into this so carefully because Tumblr has been (IMO deliberately) using these words to deflect inquiries and confuse the press. Ask Tumblr about porn or Adult-flagged blogs and they will come back with a phrase about NSFW blogs. The questioner may think he or she just got an answer, but in reality he got a load of bullshit about something else. Everybody needs to watch out for this going forward, if only so you can avoid all the incoherent tech press articles by reporters who never understood that this distinction exists and who (typically and somewhat reasonably) think “Adult” and “NSFW” are plain-language synonyms as they normally are.
OK, that’s the history. What’s the news?
Yesterday, at some time after I posted about the plain falsehoods in that press email from the Tumblr Head of Communications Katherine Barna, Tumblr founder David Karp posted this article to the Tumblr Staff blog, which is “The official feed from the people behind Tumblr.” Karp’s post suggests that changes are coming, and that’s reinforced by a new yellow-highlighted “This Page is out of date and is in the process of being updated” legend on the Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs page. (That’s the one that just got updated on Thursday when Tumblr started admitting they were excluding Adult blogs from their internal search indexing. Yup, now it’s “out of date”.)
So what’s the awesome new Tumblr plan to reassure us all that Tumblr has heard our feedback? Well, it looks like the new plan is to hide all the seach-banned Adult-flagged blogs from the interface, deploy a new set of vilifying lies about these now-even-harder-to-find blogs, and carry on talking about the NSFW category only. Possibly I’m uncharitable. So let’s look at Karp’s post together, shall we?
It begins:
All, we’ve heard from a bunch of you who are concerned about Tumblr censoring NSFW/adult content. While there seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around, most of the confusion seems to stem from our complicated flagging/filtering features.
It opens like a classic corporate non-apology backtrack. “We hear you, it’s a damned shame you’ve all fallen for the terrible misinformation that’s flying around, however we are complicated which may have prevented you from understanding how awesome we are.” Note the “NSFW/adult” terms being used together in this nonspecific way. Moving on:
Let me clear up (and fix) a few things:
1. Last year, we added “Safe Mode” which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings.
Here he’s using “NSFW” to mean both “NSFW” and “Adult”. Of course the Safe Mode applied to both NSFW and Adult-flagged blogs (once the Adult category was added) and it filtered them both out by default.
As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.
This appears to be another flat lie. It may well be true of blogs with the NSFW tag, but Karp says “all blogs” here, and I can show you how to disprove that. Remember, Tumblr’s own little check-box chart says that NSFW blogs are indexed by Tumblr search and Adult ones are not. If they’re not indexed, how can they hope to show up when a user turns off Safe Mode? Now, watch me prove it, using a recent post on Fifi’s wonderful Feeling Is First Tumblr. Is it flagged as Adult? Yes it is; you have only to navigate to http://feeling-is-first.tumblr.com/robots.txt to see the deadly disallow-all instruction.
So, Fifi posted this yesterday (Friday, July 19th) and she tagged it #phonograph:
So, Feeling Is First is a Tumblr blog, and David Karp says that turning off the default Safe Mode in your Tumblr account “wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear” but has been fixed. Well, was it actually fixed? See for yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, check that you’re not in Safe Mode, and type “phonograph” into the search box. As I write this, the search is returning precisely two results from yesterday for the “phonograph” tag and neither of them is Fifi’s post.
A Karp apologist might remind us that Tumblr isn’t indexing Adult-flagged blogs, so there are no search results from these blogs to appear; they weren’t being blocked by Safe Mode, they just don’t exist. My response to that would be, it tortures the language beyond its limits. You can’t brag about enabling “search results from all blogs to appear” while chortling behind your hand about an entire class of porn blogs for which you aren’t generating search results. Especially not in a post about a controversy over disappearing porn blogs.
Karp goes on:
Some search terms are blocked (returning no results) in some of our mobile apps. Unfortunately, different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for. The solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon. In the meantime, you can browse #lgbtq – which is moderated by our community editors – in all of Tumblr’s mobile apps. You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.
There’s another whole blog post to be done on how Apple’s anti-porn apps market is chilling adult discourse on the modern internet, but that’s for another day. Let’s focus on Karp’s last sentence here: “You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.” Yesterday I called out Tumblr Head of Communications Katherine Barna for lying when she said “Users can also find all content with Tumblr search in their mobile web browser.” Karp has cleaned this up to the extent of replacing “all content” with “unfiltered search results”. Since Tumblr says it is not indexing Adult-flagged blogs, there are no search results from them to include in unfiltered results. So Karp avoids the direct lie here. But the deception remains. Karp doesn’t get to brag about “unfiltered search results” while excluding an entire class of supposedly-welcome blogs from search indexing.
But now we get to the truly-astonishing “demonize, vilify, and disappear” discussion where Karp acknowledges the genuinely Adult-flagged blogs for the first time:
Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW → Adult in your blog settings. This was confusing and unnecessary, so we’ve dropped the extra option. If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check “Flag this blog as NSFW” so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.
Here is the genuine bad news for Adult bloggers on Tumblr. According to the soon-to-be-revised policy, the Adult-flagged blogs were formerly a perfectly-welcome part of the Tumblr community, and porn bloggers on Tumblr were asked to voluntarily flag as such if they posted “substantial” nudity. Now Tumblr is claiming this was all an accident and they are burying the Adult-flagged blogs behind an additional barrier of invisibility. They’ve removed the radio button (that somehow accidentally wrote itself into the interface) for Adult blogs and they will only use an NSFW flag going forward. In the interface, Adult-flagged blogs will no longer exist. You’ll be NSFW or nothing — and, Karp promises, NSFW blogs will (continue to be) visible to the search engines.
So, what about those gazillions of porn bloggers already on Tumblr? You know, the ones this controversy is actually about? The ones Karp now newly claims were “a tiny subset” of “not so nice people” “using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites”? What’s going to happen to them?
Let’s be clear about the fast one Karp is trying to pull here. Tumblr’s community guidelines have long prohibited the creation of blogs that were “for the primary purpose of affiliate marketing.” If caught, the penalty for this (according to some threads I’ve perused on adult webmaster forums) was deletion of the offending blog. At first, Tumblr’s enforcement was lax; but as abuses piled up, they went through a period where they were deleting blogs that had just a single affiliate link. So Karp is lying when he claims that the Adult flag was only intended for “spammy commercial porn sites”. The defining characteristic was “substantial nudity”, not commercial spam. The affiliate spammers were a whole different problem with an entirely different and more draconian solution. Karp knows this. This is not a failure to communicate. This is deliberate deception aimed at marginalizing Tumblr’s porn bloggers and justifying that marginalization.
So what’s going on? Karp has gone out of his way to demonize the blogs that were flagged as Adult. That suggests to me that we won’t be seeing an “all is forgiven” removal of the search engine exclusion for formerly Adult-flagged blogs that are now (by the new definition) merely NSFW. Instead, it looks like the blogs already flagged as “Adult” will stay that way, only now the very existence of the “Adult” category will be invisible in the interface. And anybody who complains? They’re just “not so nice people” trying to scam Tumblr out of free hosting for their commercial spam.
If Karp were honestly trying to fix this, he’d have announced that the search engine blocks for blogs with substantial nudity were being removed. He didn’t say anything of the sort. Instead, he lied, and claimed that they were only supposed to be applied to spammers in the first place. But his own soon-to-be-revised policy documents show the lie; they show that the Adult flag and the search engine exclusion were intended for everyone showing substantial nudity. That’s the history Tumblr is now trying to sweep under the rug. Tumblr has buried its porn blogs, and now it’s trying to scratch dirt over the evidence with its rear claws.
Karp goes on:
Aside from these fixes, there haven’t been any recent changes to Tumblr’s treatment of NSFW content, and our view on the topic hasn’t changed.
Here he uses the NSFW word (and that “recent”) to ignore the actual controversy, which is over the search limitations on Adult (not “NSFW”) blogs that were implemented several months ago. He closes with some happy boilerplate:
Empowering your creative expression is the most important thing in the world to us. Making sure people aren’t surprised by content they find offensive is also incredibly important and we are always working to put more control in your hands.
Sorry for all of the confusion. If you have any more concerns or suggestions on how we can make these features clearer or more useful, please email us!
My predictions for the future:
- When the “in the process of being updated” Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs page gets updated, all references to the former “adult” category will be gone. No search blocking (internal or external) will be disclosed on the page.
- The millions of currently Adult-flagged blogs (the ones that have “substantial nudity”) will still have the no-longer-visible-in-the-interface Adult flag, they will still have a robots.txt block in place, and they still won’t show in Tumblr’s internal searches.
- Tumblr’s porn blog community will be invisible and unacknowledged. The suits will call this “winning”.
There is another possibility. The correct thing for Tumblr to do (if they were sincere about replacing the dual system with a single, simpler, NSFW flag) would be to reflag all the Adult-flagged blogs as NSFW. But if they were going to do that, would Karp have lied about the reason the Adult flag was implemented? I do not think so.
Somebody on Reddit said it best, yesterday: “So passes Tumblr, son of Geocities, and cousin to Digg. May it rest in cache.”
Except, of course, that the good stuff won’t be in anybody’s cache, because of robots.txt…
UPDATE: Wow, that was fast. In just three hours, the first of my predictions has already come true: the Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs page has been updated and it looks just like I thought it would. No charts, no checkboxes, no more “adult” category, it’s all NSFW and there’s no mention of anything being excluded from search engines.
However, it looks like I missed the mark on my other two predictions (time will tell). I’m getting preliminary reports in my comments (and my own random tests agree) that the hated robots.txt is vanishing from many or most of the formerly-hidden Adult-flagged blogs. Karp still deserves censure for telling a big hairy lie about the history and reason for the Adult-flagged groups (and for attempting to deceive the world into thinking these were principally self-flagged by accident rather than auto-flagged by Tumblr) but perhaps the reason for the deception was to avoid the perception of a back-track, rather than to conceal the deeper burying of adult blogs that I feared was coming. But if the robots.txt files that are going away stay gone, this is actually a huge win for adult content on Tumblr.
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Friday, July 19th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I was among the first to discover back on May 15 that Tumblr was using an exclusionary robots.txt file to hide the contents of blogs flagged “Adult” from all search engines, the Internet Archive crawler, and any other internet service that respects robots.txt files. A few days later when I was poking at that unpleasant fact, I also discovered that Tumblr was excluding these blogs from its internal tag-search function:
Worse yet? Tumblr blogs flagged “adult” aren’t searchable even with Tumblr’s own internal search. You can test this yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, go to your settings, and make sure you haven’t checked the “Browse tag pages in Safe Mode (Hide content from NSFW blogs)” setting:
Unlike the one that doesn’t actually “allow search engines to index your blog”, this checkbox appears to actually work in the narrow sense that if it is not checked, you can search for blogs flagged “NSWF” within the Tumblr tag search interface. But this checkbox lies by omission. You’ve got the option to search tag pages of NSFW blogs (or not) but opting to search them does not let you search blogs that have the deeper-level-of-perdition “adult” flag.
I even proved it with a careful set of screenshots:
My test for this is to search for a recent post at Wicked Knickers, which I used as my “adult” flagged example in the Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post:
The post we will be looking for in the Tumblr dashboard tag search has a time stamp of 9:30pm yesterday, May 18, and is tagged “ziegfeld” which makes it a nice handy and recent thing to search for.
So, what happens in the Tumblr tag search interface? If you’re logged in, this is what you see when you search for tumblr posts with the “ziegfeld” tag. The posts returned are listed in date order (most recent first) and dates are visible as tooltips on the live page, so I’ve added them in the margin with red arrows and white text. You’ll see that the Wicked Knickers post is not returned by the Tumblr search:
Thus you can imagine my surprise when Twitter started blowing up yesterday with outraged Tumblr-users who had only just discovered that their adult blogs had gone missing (2-3 months ago) from the Tumblr tag search interface. Of course it was all over Tumblr as well. I didn’t pay it any mind; I was busy yesterday and figured it was just one of those moments when public consciousness crystallizes about a long-established injustice.
It wasn’t until this morning, when I finally had time to get caught up, that I discovered what had caused the moment of crystallization. At first I thought it was the Daily Dot article that appeared yesterday, which I only skimmed at the time due to it being such ancient news to me: New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users. But then this morning Violet Blue published a similar (but much better, and I’d say that even if she hadn’t quoted my May reportage in detail) article at ZDNet: Adult Tumblr blogs now removed from every form of search possible. Violet’s too good a reporter to jump on a bandwagon just because it’s starting to speed up, so I took a second look at both articles to see what, if anything, had actually happened recently and wasn’t old news. Finally I twigged to it. Although the Tumblr internal search (which has always been a tags-only search) hasn’t revealed content from blogs flagged “adult” for months, the “new thing” is that Tumblr’s cryptic little internal checklist has finally (yesterday? Nobody seems to know just when) been updated to reveal that fact. Here’s the box as it existed on May 15, with my red arrow:
And here’s the box as it is today, which Violet linked to and the Daily Dot printed:
I’ve outlined what’s actually new in the graphic. Once again, it isn’t new policy at Tumblr; these are the rules since (near as I can tell) some time in February. What’s new is that Tumblr is now admitting what the rules have been for some time.
Now we come to the happy fun-time “evasions and denials” section of this post!
Remember, first, that Tumblr’s internal search has always been a tags-and-titles-only affair. So, look again at that line in the first red box of mine: “Posts appear in tag pages and search pages for logged-out users.” They are playing games with multiple pairs of yes-no variables here, for maximum confusion. The one checked box is for unflagged blogs; the unstated obverse is that “posts on flagged Adult and NSFW blogs do not appear for logged-out users”. Fair enough so far. What does the statement “do not appear for logged-out users” imply? Well, it implies that the posts do appear for logged-in users, which would make this a fairly benign (if still nanny-ish) attempt to make sure everybody who sees porn has opted-in to see it.
But that benign implication is false. Remember the other new (red boxed) line in the graphic? It says “Blog indexed by Tumblr search” and shows an unchecked box under “Adult”. So, in the first red box they say “you can’t see adult adult or NSFW blogs when logged out”, implying that logged in users can see them. But then in the second red box they carve the adult ones away, because they admit that Tumblr search (which is tag search) won’t index these blogs at all, meaning that logged-in users won’t see them either. NOBODY WILL SEE THEM except your logged-in followers, and that appears to mean legacy followers only, because how would anybody not already a follower of an adult-flagged blog ever discover it now? If your blog is flagged adult on Tumblr, you’re blogging inside a sealed black box, and you have been for months.
So much for evasion — now for the outright false denials. The reporters for the Daily Dot sought comment from Tumblr, and they got this from Tumblr Head of Communications Katherine Barna. I’m including my commentary inline [in italicized brackets like this]:
Tumblr’s longstanding policy regarding NSFW content has not changed [true, if a few months is “longstanding”] and emphasizes the importance of free expression. [Bullshit!] As addressed in these policies, we are constantly taking measures to ensure our users can avoid this content [true so far] unless they’d like to see it. [A lie — if they’d like to see it, they still can’t find it because Tumblr doesn’t index it.] You can read about some of these features here: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw
Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page. [“Visible” only if you know the link already, but not searchable for anyone. In other words, more bullshit. Unless the “will be” future phrasing means Tumblr plans to change this? Do not die holding your breath.]
Different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. [Presumably true, but freighted with the false implication that this is why Tumblr restricts adult content in its apps, given that they restrict it elsewhere likewise] Users can also find all content with Tumblr search in their mobile web browser. [Flat lie. Tumblr’s own policy chart newly shows that Tumblr search does not index the adult-flagged blogs.]
So, there you have it, folks! Months after making a policy change to exclude adult-flagged blogs from its internal search, Tumblr updates its docs to disclose the change. Internet goes wild, so their spokeswoman sends email that contradicts the new policy document and falsely denies the change.
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Thursday, July 18th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Yesterday Spanking Blog linked to spanking model Alex Reynold’s self-described rant about the unwarranted judgmental criticism that porn models are subjected to. Myself, I wouldn’t call it a rant at all; to me, it reads more like a stirring manifesto. Here’s my favorite paragraph, on the social importance of porn (emphasis in original):
Porn, especially fetish porn, is actually important. Fetish porn allows people to realize that they aren’t the only people who are interested in what they are, to visualize their fantasies when they can’t connect with people in their personal lives and to be validated that what they like is okay. Despite how deeply involved I am in the creation of porn, I’m still a consumer of spanking pornography. I have subscriptions to five sites, and I watch them for my personal enjoyment, especially when I am unable to play for periods of time. There are lots of people for whom videos are the only way that they interact with their fetish. This is very important to them. Even when it’s not something so near and dear to someone’s heart, porn makes people happy. It doesn’t save anyone’s life. This is true. Neither does art. Neither does working in sales. Neither does designing roller coasters. The amount of people I know whose jobs are actually “necessary” when you really get down to it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I have a job that makes other people AND me happy. That’s a win.
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Tuesday, June 25th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Pandora Blake, who has been turning a lot of heads recently in the spanking porn community with her “fairtrade, sex positive, performer-driven and gender egalitarian” (and 2013 Feminist Porn Awards nominated) Dreams Of Spanking site, has written a magnificent manifesto against the pernicious feminist ideology that deems all porn to be exploitative and denies the agency of the people who make and perform in it. This is just a bit of it:
Making porn empowers me, creatively expresses my true self, and connects me positively with my sexuality. To say “porn never empowers” is to dismiss and deny my lived experience. Porn empowers me. I’m not just talking about the sexy patriarchal power of being desirable to men. I’m talking about my own personal power: the power to choose what I do with each day. The power to run my own business. The power to make creative choices, to make political choices. Making porn has empowered me to develop my dominant side, to connect with new facets of my sexual self. It has given me confidence; satisfaction; skills; courage in my convictions; creative, sexual and political fulfilment. Making porn gives me freedom in multiple areas of my life, and choosing to continue making it is one of the ways I exercise that freedom.
…
In the age of the internet, anyone with a smartphone can shoot footage and sell it on clips4sale or AdultWork — and lots of performers do. So when a performer has a cute idea for a solo scene, shoots it at home on their phone, uploads it and starts receiving cheques in the mail, who exactly is exploiting them? The people sending them money? Do you feel exploited when you get paid for work you do?
In my work I am producer, director, writer, videographer, business owner. I am my own agent, webmistress and promoter. When I have the sexual experiences I want to have with my own lovers, and film it in my own home with my own camera, upload it with my own internet connection and receive money into my own bank account, who exactly is exploiting me?
But even if if I wasn’t running my own business, it would still be possible for me to work for porn productions that didn’t exploit me. Some do, others don’t. As in any other industry, part of a performer’s job is making choices about which clients and companies they want to work with.
What she said!
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Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
It was February 22, really, when the stories about Google Glass finally began to catch my attention. This is the one that first fired my imagination:
Verge: I used Google Glass: Up close and personal with Google’s visionary new computer
That was the story that convinced me that Glass (or some future, similar device) was something I’d actually maybe want to use. I believe it was this paragraph that actually did the trick:
If you get a text message or have an incoming call when you’re walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up – nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people.
Of course, it was only six days later on February 28 that I began to see the hideous tentacles behind the curtain:
Creative Good: The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
I was (and remain) confident that all the person-to-person privacy issues (“Are you filming me now? Please take off the glasses”) will sort themselves out through normal cultural adjustment, but I hadn’t really considered the full implications of making every Glass-wearer into an uncompensated Google StreetView camera-monkey:
Take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.
Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.
…
The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.
Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.
Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device — every single day, everywhere they go — on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
Well, that’s gonna suck. But if wearable computing is a compelling user experience, people will suck it up and monkey-cam their way to happiness. Let’s move on to the porn stuff, shall we?
Fast forward to April 17, which was the day a bizarre trainwreck of competing Glass stories landed. Let me just dump these two headlines here for you in the order that I saw them:
Wired: Google Is Forbidding Users From Reselling, Loaning Glass Eyewear
BizJournals: How Google Glass will change porn forever
Do you see the dialectical struggle between those two headlines?
Up until the moment I saw the first headline, I had assumed that Glass would be just another Android device, running some sort of special Android software to be sure, but basically part of the open Android ecosystem that allows users to run whatever software they want on their hardware. More fool me:
The company’s terms of service on the limited-edition wearable computer specifically states, “you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google’s authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty.”
If they’ve got the power to remotely deactivate your computer, that means you don’t own it; and it also means that in order to preserve that power, they’ve got to control the software you run on it. Which means Google Glass will be like the iPhone — a walled garden ecosystem, not an open one.
And porn is never welcome for long in corporate walled gardens. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. The instant I saw those terms of service, I knew that Glass would never be a porn-friendly device. Knew it. Dismissed it from my adult interest. Never gonna happen. Game over, man.
Nor was that any kind of surprise. Google has grown increasingly porn-hostile in recent years. Remember when they removed the “off” setting from the SafeSearch filter button, and turned it into a toggle between “on” and the former “moderate” setting? Have you noticed how harshly porn sites are penalized in the search algorithms lately? Remember when they started filtering Violet Blue out of the autocomplete search dropdowns? Or decided that there’s no such thing as a “safe search” for “clitoris” while allowing three million “safe” results for “penis”? The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
So if porn on Google Glass was always a non-starter, what was up with that other “Glass will change porn forever” headline that dropped on the same day? Well, it turns out that the Silicon Valley Business Journal interviewed Kink.com’s Peter Acworth and got some great quotes, which (because he makes porn for a living) are (when you look at them closely) all about how Google Glass might change the making of porn, rather than its consumption or distribution:
“Google Glass opens up new opportunities for reality-based films,” says Acworth.
Acworth says Glass offers amateur filmmakers the opportunity to produce homegrown films featuring couples at home or other spontaneous situations.
“You could film picking up someone at a bar and taking them home, for example,” he said. “It takes the whole genre of POV and reality productions one stage further. You’ll hopefully get something very authentic.”
And that’s nifty (once you gulp yourself past those “sorting out the interpersonal privacy stuff” issues I hand-waved us past near the beginning of this post), but it doesn’t require Glass to be porn-friendly. Acworth is talking about Glass as a new sort of camera device, and that’s it.
So, that was April. In early May, I wrote this post:
ErosBlog: Google Glass: No Fuck For You!
It was actually a bit of a cheap shot on my part, reflecting my increasing awareness (and perhaps even a bit of nascent bitterness) that Google Glass wasn’t going to be an open platform that adults could play with. The actual story was that the voice-recogniton-to-email engine built into Glass was censoring cuss words, replacing them with asterisks. And as I noted at the time, this “felt” more like an accidental default setting inherited from some earlier, more business-corporate use of the voice recognition engine. But it prompted me to write this:
What’s it going to be like, living in a world where everything you say passes through filters you can’t see and don’t control? Where, when you search for something you can’t find, you don’t know if it doesn’t exist or if it was silently filtered from your search results? When someone says something to you, did they actually say that? Or were their words edited on the fly?
Obviously this is relevant to the Pornocalypse discussion. If the corporate data silos that own the filters are porn-hostile, the world will look very different than it would if the filters were transparent and under user control.
That was early May. Then in late May came a spate of stories about genuine porn apps (well, really only one) coming soon for Google Glass:
Huffington Post: Google Glass Porn App To Be Released In A ‘Couple Of Days’ By MiKandi Porn App Store
New York Post: XXX-ray vision: Google Glass getting porn apps
Time: Yes, Of Course There Will Be Google Glass Porn
The only story I actually bothered to read at the time was the one by Violet Blue, because I knew deep in my gut that there would never be porn apps on Google Glass:
ZDNet: MiKandi making Google Glass porn, app imminent
Violet expressed a little bit of the necessary skepticism:
However excited as I am to see what Mikandi does with Glass, I think I’m not the only one wondering if Google is going to pull an Apple and send MiKiandi a cease-and-desist — or worse.
Indeed. And that brings our pornocalypse timeline up to yesterday, June 3rd, when the “porn app for Glass” finally released:
TechNewsDaily: MiKandi Launches First Google Glass Porn App
Mashable: Google Glass Gets Its First Porn App
NBC: Porn app comes to Google Glass – are you surprised?
Buried in the TechNewsDaily story was the key kernel of cold-water truth that would inform the next wave of headlines:
MiKandi has been keeping close tabs on Google Glass’ terms of service, and discovered that over the weekend that they now prohibit sexually explicit apps. “We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified,” said McEwen. “We wanted to be sure we played within Google’s boundaries and push the envelope in a responsible way.”
That’s the anticipatory drumroll before the headsman’s axe falls, people. But — late yesterday while the drum tattoo was still beating — I saw a different story that reinforced the extent to which Glass is going to be a walled garden:
Slate: “Don’t Be Creepy”: Google Glass Won’t Allow Face Recognition
People (and not just cops!) are really going to want facial recognition in their wearable field-of-vision computers. Those of us with a touch of face-blindness, in particular, would really welcome an app that put names over heads just like in World Of Warcraft. But, no, here’s Google’s Saturday update to the developer policies:
Don’t use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time.
Walled garden, folks. Your hardware is not actually yours. It will not run the software that you want it to run. It will only run the software Google wants it to run.
Meanwhile, back here in porn world, the drumbeat about the Glass porn app came to its abrupt crescendo later in the day yesterday. The axe fell. Let’s go right to the horse’s mouth for this one, to the Mikandi blog:
Mikandi: Google Bans Glass Porn Apps
This is worth quoting in some detail:
Wow, what a morning, folks. Really. We appreciate all the positive feedback on our adult Glass app, Tits & Glass.
Since we announced the availability of Tits & Glass this morning, nearly 10,000 unique vistors have visited TitsAndGlass.com, and a dozen Glass users have already signed up with our app. Not surprisingly, we’ve reached our API limits. Our previously approved request to up our limit was later denied today, so unfortunately, there’ll be no more updates to Tits & Glass until tomorrow.
However, more importantly, and thus the purpose behind this blog post- MiKandi became aware today that Google changed its policy over the weekend to ban adult content on all Glassware.
When we received our Glass and started developing our app 2 weeks ago, we went through the policy very carefully to make sure we were developing the app within the terms. We double checked again last week when making the site live on the Internet and available for install for testing during last week’s announcement. We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified by Google. We also double checked our emails to see if any notifications of policy changes were announced, but we haven’t found any such emails.
Although the app is still live and people are using it, at this point we must make changes to the app in order to comply with the new policies.
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. I could have told ’em, if they’d asked me.
Of course this has triggered a storm of breathless headlines that I found waiting in my morning feeds:
Fox News: Mikandi Porn app for Google Glass released, immediately banned
ABC: Google Strips First Glass Porn App, Bans Adult Content on Its Connected Glasses
Daily Mail: Google Glass porn app launched – and then swiftly banned
Silicon Republic: Google quickly updates policy to shut down porn apps for Glass
There’s about 600 more of these — it appears to be the tech story of yesterday and today — but they all say the same thing. Here’s Google’s corporate-bland response, to the Fox News reporter:
“Our policies make it clear that Glass does not allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sexual acts, or sexually explicit material. Any Glassware that violates this policy will be blocked from appearing on Glass.
Our Explorer Program makes users active participants in evolving Glass ahead of a wider consumer launch. In keeping with this approach, we’ve updated our developer policies. We look forward to learning more from our users as we update the software and evolve our policies in the weeks and months ahead.”
And there you have it, folks, straight from the belly of the data-silo. You might spend 1,500 smackeroos to buy your Google Glasses, but Google says you can’t run any software on there that might specifically facilitate your ability to see bare titties. It’s the iPhone all over again. Nifty for what it does? Sure enough. But the device does not work for you. It doesn’t truly belong to you. You’ll never truly own it. It’s just a hardware portal for that limited subset of activities the manufacturer considers to be consistent with its own corporate image.
I’ve said it before and I’ve got the weary certainty that I’ll be saying it many times again:
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
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Friday, May 17th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
As Tumblr users leave comments on my Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post, it’s becoming clearer that the new robots.txt that prohibits search engines from indexing adult Tumblrs is quite new. But nobody seems to know precisely why Tumblr is newly trying to hide all its adult blogs, and Tumblr still hasn’t responded to my inquiry.
Well, here’s a Time report that Tumblr is in talks to be acquired by Yahoo for big bucks. A potential acquisition like that would certainly explain the urge to scratch kitty litter hastily over the porn that made your system big enough to sell in the first place:
Internet icon Yahoo! is in talks to buy New York-based social blogging platform Tumblr for as much as $1 billion, according to multiple reports. At that price, Tumblr would be pretty expensive, given that it reportedly only booked $13 million in revenue last year, but the deal could still make sense for Yahoo! That’s because Tumblr is extremely popular with the 18-to-24 year-old-set, precisely the demographic CEO Marissa Mayer is targeting as she attempts to turn the purple-hued Internet pioneer around following a multi-year slump.
It’s like I said in The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All:
But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up” (for the VCs, for the advertisers, for the potential buyers, for somebody). A lot more porn tumblrs will go away when that happens.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Note well: Yahoo itself is no friend to adult content. As early as 2001 Yahoo started hiding adult Yahoo Groups from its own directories and site search, making them very hard to find. And adult Yahoo Groups used to be (it’s been some years since I stopped paying attention) frequently deleted, seemingly at random and without any notice or hope of appeal, forcing the group members to reconstitute themselves on other services or in new, temporary, Yahoo groups. If Yahoo buys Tumblr, the adult Tumblr ecosystem is in for a rough ride.
Update:
According to sources close to the situation, the Yahoo board plans to meet Sunday night to decide whether to approve a $1.1 billion all-cash offer for New York-based blogging site Tumblr.
Update, via Violet Blue’s sex news:
If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn? (Businessweek)
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Thursday, May 16th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
If this article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf is any guide, there’s a sort of debate going on in the intellectual press, triggered by this article, which is a more-detailed-than-usual and fairly sympathetic exemplar of the increasingly-common “I went to a Kink.com porn shoot and had some deep thoughts about it” genre. From my fast skim-reading pass, it appears that the ensuing debate consists of a conversation where various persons disagree with each other about precisely why they ought to hate and disparage kinky sex and porn. It’s all somewhat interesting, but The Atlantic piece deserves quoting, because of some paragraphs on the value of consent as the lodestar of sexual ethics:
My generation doesn’t treat consent as a lodestar merely because consent permits pleasurable sexual activity that more traditional sexual codes would prohibit. The ethos of consent is regarded as a lodestar because its embrace is widely seen as an incredible improvement over much of human history; and because instances when the culture of consent is rejected are superlatively horrific. The average 30-something San Franciscan has had multiple friends confide to them about being raped, and multiple friends confide about participating in consensual BDSM. Only the former routinely plays out as extreme trauma that devastates the teller for decades. Little wonder that consent is treated as the preeminent ethos even by many who suspect that transgressive sex like what Witt describes is ultimately unwise or even immoral.
Let us imagine that, 50 years hence, we have a society where the ethos of consent and attendant norms of sexual conduct have triumphed so completely that rape is as rare as cannibalism. Everyone would regard that as a civilizational triumph. Would it be a bigger or smaller triumph of sexual mores than a culture where consent was valued exactly as much or little as it was in 1950, but BDSM and kink, extreme or tame, was so widely rejected as to render it as rare as cannibalism? That I’d strongly prefer the former triumph explains why I cannot agree with Alan Jacobs when he writes of the San Francisco pornographers, “I do not believe that it is possible to be more uncivilized than they are, though one might be equally uncivilized in different ways.”
I think rapists are far more uncivilized, and that every champion of consent, however myopic they are about other moral norms they ought to follow, are trying to build “structures of thought and practice that harness humankind’s sexual instincts and direct them in socially up-building ways.” Consent isn’t, after all, entirely separable from other widely accepted norms of civilized behavior. Taking it seriously means refusing to watch certain types of porn (the hidden up-skirt camera, for example); it means being forced to conceive of every potential sexual partner as an autonomous individual with inherent worth and desires so important that they frequently trump yours; it means, in at least that one respect, treating other people as you’d want to be treated.
None of that means one must approve of the acts described in the San Francisco basement. I happen to think it doesn’t in fact threaten civilization, that transgressive sex cannot, by definition, become the norm. Others may differ, and I’m just guessing there; but it is to say that, whatever you think of the porn shoot, the scattered, unconsensual sex that went down in the Bay Area that night was more worthy of condemnation, more uncivilized, more destructive and less moral.
To me, the fact that Friedersdorf felt consent culture needed defending in the conversation says rather a lot about the conversation itself. Friedersdorf himself is at pains to disclaim any suggestion that his interlocutors “are insufficiently horrified by rape” — but how else are we to parse that “impossible to be more uncivilized” remark by one of them?
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Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
If you’ve got an adult blog on Tumblr, there’s a good chance Tumblr uses robots.txt to exclude the search engines from indexing it. Did you know that?
Two weeks ago in The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All, I wrote:
Who is next? My guess would be Tumblr. Tumblr is, of all the big platforms, perhaps the most porn friendly; there’s lots of porn on there and the Terms of Service do not prohibit it… But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up”…
And now, guess what? I’ve discovered that Tumblr uses robots.txt to bar all search engine access to blogs flagged as adult. If you’ve got an adult Tumblr, go look at your own settings. Do you see that first checkbox, the one that says “allow search engines to index your blog”?
That checkbox is a lie. It’s nicely checked, it’s not greyed out, but if your blog is flagged “adult” it’s a lie. Do you see the “Learn more about what this means” link under “Your blog was flagged NSFW” selector? It leads to this page, where Tumblr requests users to appropriately self-flag their blogs:
Please respect the choices of people in our community and flag your blog as NSFW or Adult from your blog Settings page.
- NSFW blogs contain occasional nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
- Adult blogs contain substantial nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
If you’re not sure if you should flag your blog you can leave it unflagged, but keep in mind that we might flag it later if we see a lot of mature/adult-oriented content.
To answer the question “What happens to blogs that are flagged NSFW or Adult?” Tumblr offers this handy chart. The key piece of information is the white space indicated by my red superimposed arrow:
That’s right — where the “Blog indexed by Google” row intersects the “Adult Blogs” column, we find a ringing silence.
Would you have noticed? None of the adult Tumblr bloggers I know ever did. I knew from my porn researching that adult Tumblrs tended to be poorly represented in Google search results, but I chalked it up to the sheer scale of Tumblr and Google’s growing bias against returning porn search results. Nope, I found out the truth in one stark moment of astonishment, summed up by this image:
Let’s click the “See wickedknickers.tumblr.com robots.txt page” link:
From me: Aghast. Fucking. Gulp.
In robot, that means, roughly “All robots: stay out!” No search spiders allowed. No Internet Archive crawler. The Wicked Knickers tumblr is there, but you have to know about it, or you have to be linked to it. You won’t find it in Google, you won’t find it in any other search engine that honors robots.txt, and when Tumblr decides to stop hosting it, you won’t find the pages in the Wayback Machine — it will be gone for good, lost to humanity unless somebody with the technical chops and outlaw sensibilities of Archive Team finds a way to archive it anyway, robots.txt be damned.
Wicked Knickers is just an example, one that has some meaning to me because it’s one of the first Tumblr blogs I ever noticed, and I’ve been linking to it since 2010. That’s almost 6,000 vintage erotica posts since January 2009, and none of those pages are in Google or the Wayback Machine. It was only when I twigged to that anomaly that I finally understood what Tumblr is doing to adult blogs.
In all the years that I’ve been preaching Bacchus’s First Rule (“Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own domain that you control”), I’ll confess that I never considered the power of robots.txt, or what it means to be putting stuff on an internet site where somebody else controls what robots.txt says. Not only do they control your visibility to search engines, they control whether history will remember what you said. That strikes me as a high price to pay for a “free” blogging platform.
It’s worth noting that there’s still rather a lot we don’t know about the Tumblr robots.txt blockade on adult Tumblr sites. Unanswered questions include:
- Does Tumblr have any flexibility on this? Would their support, if asked, remove or modify the robots.txt barrier in specific cases?
- When did Tumblr start using robots.txt to block Google from adult blogs? Has it always been like this, or is it a recent innovation?
- Why does Tumblr display the misleading checkbox that falsely implies that search engines can see flagged adult blogs?
- What is the actual reason for excluding adult Tumblrs from search engine and (especially) archive crawls?
In an unusual move for me, I actually reached out to press@tumblr.com, told Tumblr I was going to write this post, and asked them for answers to those questions. That was on May 11th. No response so far. If they ever do answer, I’ll be sure to update this post.
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Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Ask not for whom the pornocalypse tolls. It tolls for thee.
Recently I’ve been seeing lots of tweets and headlines suggesting that Amazon is going through another round of cracking down on porn ebooks, generally burying them deeper and making them harder to find (or, as their people would no doubt put it, making it harder for porn to pop up accidentally in general searches.) I haven’t paid a lot of attention, because I’m old and I’m weary and I’ve seen this pattern repeated over and over again throughout the internet age. Somebody builds a platform or service or community or whatever, it is even better with porn, lots of people use it for porn, it grows awesomely, eventually the suits get uncomfortable with all the porn that is at the foundation of their business, and so they try to marginalize it or (usually later in the process) drive it out entirely (though this often fails).
Smart people know that the internet (hell, any new technology disruptive enough to be interesting) is for porn. Remember why home VCRs exploded in popularity? How many of you Usenet veterans were motivated to get a Usenet feed (or a better feed than the on you started with) because of the porn groups? Smarter observers than me have noticed that the appearance of porn on your new platform is proof, of a weak sort, that your platform is important enough to matter:
I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media — it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test — if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
There’s one sentence there that’s very important: “If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work.” The suits always miss an important corollary: “If you’re trying to root out the porn in your system, you’re trying to break your own system.”
But, strive to break it they do. It’s a seemingly-inevitable phase in the growth cycle of any commercial “read/write technology”. (Although, these days, I’ve noticed that a lot of new platforms are attempting to bake “broken for grownups” into their products from the beginning. Pinterest and your “no nudity” TOS, I’m thinking of you! Google+ and your war on nyms, you also.)
The first one of these cycles I lived through was eBay in the early days. If you remember that far back (we’re talking mid 1990s) eBay was especially vital and amazing right after it got a critical mass of users, but before the whole world had figured out that old stuff was suddenly much more valuable now that there was an efficient mechanism for matching it to willing buyers. Basically there was a supply glut on nifty old stuff right at first, the accumulated collectibles of history all hitting the market at once. And this was as true for vintage porn (magazines and books and videotapes) as it was for any other genre of collectibles.
And it was AWESOME. I still have (in very deep storage) apple boxes full of vintage porn magazines I bought for less money than it cost to have them shipped to me via USPS media mail. Someday I’d love to get a high speed scanner and put them all up on the web Internet Archive style, but it would be a labor of years and I’d need a very wealthy and eccentric patron. Meanwhile, I preserve them as best I can.
But then Meg Whitman happened. It’s too many years ago now for me to recall how many successive waves of anti-porn activism swept the eBay auction platform, but it was many.
The adult items got their own section, it got put behind an age self-verification button, the adult items vanished from the general search, the adult section itself got removed from the category listing making it very hard to find, and then there was wave after wave of auction removals based on listing policies that were vague and erratically enforced. There were rules about how much nudity could show on magazine covers, there were wide-ranging keyword bans that meant you could not list (or show an uncensored photo of) the true titles of many porn items, there was a ton of selective enforcement, and there was an enormous chilling effect because seller accounts were often banned or limited based on first-offense violations of these deeply-murky rules.
It eventually became clear to everyone that Ebay under Meg Whitman (the former Disney exec) was now officially hostile to porn, where once it had been the leading sales platform for vintage porn especially. The market dried up, market offerings became bland and boring, and everybody who was on eBay for that reason had left. The suits, having stricken off the member that so offended them, declared victory and moved on. They broke it, but they like broken better. Broken is what they wanted, broken is what they got.
So now: is Amazon doing the same with erotic ebooks? To me it looks like early days, but yeah, I see the handwriting on the wall.
One high-profile erotica author, Selena Kitt, writes: “The Pornocalypse has begun. Amazon continues filtering erotica out of their All Department Search in large numbers.”
That’s true as far as it goes. My nascent Bacchus Media porn ebook project has one erotica title (a Victorian erotica classic that I repackaged for the Kindle back in 2009) for sale on Amazon, and sure enough, it’s flagged “Adult” and does not appear in an “All Departments” search. But it does appear in “Kindle Store” and “Books” searches, which strikes me as proper behavior. This is not (yet) a hidden and unsearchable category ghetto.
Not yet. But erotic authors are starting to feel the noose. Here’s Selena Kitt in another post:
Hey, does anyone remember when Amazon started banning erotic fiction?
Or when Apple removed “certain” titles from their bestseller lists?
Or when Paypal stopped paying for “certain types” of erotica?
When Amazon began excluding books from its “all department” search?
When Smashwords started cracking down on “nipples and floppy bits and dangly parts?”
Or when Apple began rejecting outright those books which contained “certain content” they didn’t agree with?
Or when Barnes and Noble stripped bestselling erotica books (in the top 100) of their ranks by 1,000 points?
And the new anti-porn pornocalypse rules get bizarre very quickly. Why would the largest bookseller in the world deny the existence of the Erotic Romance category? Back to the first Selena Kitt post I linked to:
Back when I hit the top 100 on Amazon, the competition wasn’t anywhere near as fierce as it is today. They didn’t know quite what to do with a naked woman’s bottom on their bestseller list.
That’s when they began the system that we are seeing them implementing now — what we in erotica circles call the “ADULT filter.” Back then, you were only filtered (which means that you were excluded from the all-department search, and your book didn’t appear in the also-boughts of any books that were not filtered, which was very limiting at the time!) if your book contained nudity on the cover.
So I slapped a thong on the woman on my Babysitting the Baumgartners cover and Amazon “unfiltered” my book. Sales resumed at their usual pace and life went on. But I had to figure out myself what the problem was, the reason the filter had been applied in the first place. There was no transparency on Amazon’s part. None. Nada. I even talked on the phone to an “Amazon executive customer service representative” who would only “confirm or deny” my suspicions.
I felt like Woodward and Bernstein talking to Deep Throat in a parking garage somewhere. That’s how bizarre and surreal the conversation was.
The media has recently picked up on Amazon’s latest attack on “porn,” but the Pornocalypse looks as if it’s just begun.
The filtering tool that Amazon previously only used to exclude nudity on covers is now being applied to books arbitrarily, but in very, very large numbers. We haven’t seen a purge this big on Amazon since they banned incest and bestiality in erotic work.
First of all, Amazon has now separated Erotica and Romance. I don’t know if erotic romance writers know this or have realized it yet, but Amazon has recently changed their policy (not that they’ve told anyone about it or anything!) and you can no longer put your book in BOTH Erotica and Romance categories. You have to choose one or the other. “Erotic Romance” as a category will now classify your book as “erotica.”
And be careful, because once you have labeled your book as “erotic,” they will not allow you to reclassify it as NOT erotic. The only exception to this rule I have seen so far is for traditionally published books (ala Fifty Shades). Self-published books don’t get this treatment.
Meg Whitman rides again, and this time her name is Jeff Bezos. My prediction is, the pornocalypse rules will get more restrictive and more opaque and more arbitrary. Erotica will never vanish from Amazon’s platform — just like it never vanished completely from Ebay — but its prominence in the success of the Kindle platform will be swept under the rug of history.
And make no mistake: erotica mattered to the success of the Kindle and to that of ebook readers in general. Here’s my own take on that from a few months ago, from a post I called Discreet Porn For Women:
It’s no secret that the rise of the portable e-book reader (whatever brand you favor) has triggered a quiet boom in the prose-porn-for-women industry. But if you’re a man and you’re like me, you may have been fooled by the unassuming “Erotic Romance” styling of the genre.
…
When a book was a physical artifact only, you had three choices. First, you could limit your reading to book-objects that wouldn’t get you more grief than you could handle, when you were observed with them by your friends and family. Second, you could limit your reading to times and places so private that your book-objects were physically secure from observation. Or, third, you could fudge, by reading book-objects that looked more innocuous than they were, placing them in the first category by courtesy.
Now the electronic reader gives you a fourth choice: read whatever the hell you want, where-ever the hell you want, and just flip closed your completely opaque personalized bejazzled leatherette Hello Kitty e-reader cover whenever anybody else gets too close to your screen. Throw in the Internet so you can buy whatever the hell you want without any witnesses, and the circle is complete. Your credit card statement says “Amazon” and your browser history says (at worst) “erotic romance” and it’s all so very safe from inspection, criticism, or judgment.
Here’s a confirming related visual found at Bondage Blog, talking about why an iPad is an awesome thing to have for looking at porn in public:
Selena Kitt puts the “porn built the Kindle” case even more strongly, from her erotica author’s perspective:
Jeff Bezos may have put out the product, but I made the Kindle into what it is today. Me, and legions of other erotica writers who were already writing it, and those who came later, who saw how much readers were clamoring for it. Readers could suddenly read erotica without anyone seeing the cover. The Kindle device made that possible, Amazon made the Kindle available… but I provided the content readers were surreptitiously reading under their desks at work and on the subway home.
…
THAT is what sold Kindles. Porn. Face it, Jeff Bezos. You owe the success of Kindle to me, and to every erotica writer out there making a living writing “porn.”
It’s true. And Jeff Bezos knows it. But Amazon is moving on nonetheless. The Pornocalypse comes for us all.
Who is next? My guess would be Tumblr. [2018 update: Did I call this or what?] Tumblr is, of all the big platforms, perhaps the most porn friendly; there’s lots of porn on there and the Terms of Service do not prohibit it. But if you surf Tumblr porn blogs for very long, you’ll notice that they get deactivated a lot. There are some kind of rules (not published anywhere) and if you break them (or, maybe, if somebody complains) you get nuked.
What is forbidden? Tumblr does not say. Maybe it’s age-play images that causes trouble (it can be hard to distinguish that stuff from illegal/pedo shit after all), maybe it’s rough sex photos that aren’t obviously consensual/commercial porn, maybe it’s scat or bestiality. It’s hard to say when all you’ve got to go by is the occasional non-working link with [deactivated] in it.
But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up” (for the VCs, for the advertisers, for the potential buyers, for somebody). A lot more porn tumblrs will go away when that happens.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Is there any defense against the pornocalypse? Not really. To be sure, if you follow Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet you can at least protect yourself from losing your data and intellectual property when the anti-porn suits decide to “clean up” whatever social publishing platform you might otherwise have been using. You remember my First Rule: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.”
Unfortunately I wrote that before the true social power of platforms became fully apparent to me. You can protect your physical stuff from loss if you keep it buried in a cave, too, but what good is it if people can’t see it and play with it?
Social media platforms, publishing platforms, auction platforms, online stores, all of these benefit from the network effects of their many connected users, and increasingly they are turning into self-contained silos that aren’t sufficiently connected to the open internet. Following the First Rule protects you from loss, but it doesn’t expose you to gain as well as I thought it did, back in 2004 when I first wrote it down. Back then I believed in the power of the open web and in the impartiality of Google. You make a cool porn thing, you put it on the web, people will find it, joy and orgasms and profit for everybody.
But here in 2013 things look very different. What’s more useless than an iPhone app that isn’t allowed into the Apple store? If you publish that bad boy on your own domain, Google won’t surface it well for searchers and Apple won’t let them install it if they did find it. Nope, the First Rule is not enough.
If you want to play, you have to play where the people are. If you do anything with erotica and porn, that means shunning the platforms where you’re wholly unwelcome, pushing yourself as far as possible onto the platforms where you’re somewhat tolerated, and enthusiastically exploiting the platforms where you’re truly welcome.
But even when you do all this, it’s important to understand that companies and platforms have life cycles, and there seems inevitably to come a time in all of them where porn that was formerly welcome (often, porn that played a fundamental role in building the popularity of the platform) will get kicked to the curb or shoved behind a sleazy curtain at the back of the store. Although I believe in making this process as embarrassing and painful as possible for the companies that do it, I don’t really believe it can be prevented, or even mitigated much. All you can do is expect it, prepare for it, diversify as much as possible onto as many platforms as possible, and stay agile.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
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Monday, April 15th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
From Models And Prejudice, by fetish photographer and pornographer Hywel Phillips:
A vast number of people consume erotica and porn.
It is only OK to do so if you treat the people who make it and appear it with respect and let them feel good about the work they’ve done for you to enjoy.
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Monday, March 25th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a very personal and persuasive essay from a man who found that doing escort work (and, later, making porn) was more personally and ethically satisfying than working as a personal injury lawyer:
I found myself shackled with $100,000 in student loans, and no law firms specialized in what I loved and hoped to pursue, Constitutional Law. Instead, I felt forced to settle on a job as a trial lawyer for injury cases. I reasoned, If I couldn’t serve the greater public good by using my legal education, then at least I could succor the injured in their quest for justice against those who harmed them.
But studying law and practicing it proved to be a different story. It quickly became apparent that my colleagues were exploiting the suffering of injured clients as a means to satisfy their own avarice. It was standard practice to use any methods necessary to wrest, cajole or hack a settlement from anyone they sued. After all, if they won a case, my colleagues received a hefty one-third of the settlement. For them the law was a self-serving instrument to be wielded for “victory.” The principles of law I so deeply valued were routinely violated. I quickly grew disillusioned.
After a year, I had seen enough. I fell into a moral crisis.
On the other hand, after he started advertising his services on Rentboy.com:
Because I was non-judgmental and respectful, clients felt safe to share their true desires. None of their requests seemed strange to me. Whether they wanted to be beaten or bound, made loved to or pissed on, their desires were pure and honest. It satisfied me to gratify them.
But what thrilled me most was the idea that spending time with me actually positively affected my clients’ lives. It wasn’t just about sex. It was about connection, authenticity, healing. Through our conversations and play, clients learned to understand and honor what deeply aroused them. Many rediscovered parts of themselves that had long been repressed or buried; some even gained insight as to why. One client, whose partner of 30 years had died, told me that his time with me stopped him from committing suicide. Another chose me to bring sex back into his life for the first time since his true love was killed in 1971. The skills that I had learned in caring for Steve translated into my work as an escort. At times, I considered myself as much of a healer as any therapist.
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Sunday, September 30th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Next Wednesday (October 3) will mark the first day of the eleventh year of operations here at ErosBlog. So it looks like this will the last of the “10 Years of Sex Blogging” retrospectives. That’s OK — covering the first five years has a decent symmetry to it. Without further ado, here’s 2006:
- My micro-rant on why lap dances in strip clubs are “DO NOT WANT” territory for me, plus somebody else’s tips for getting a good one: How To Get A Killer Lapdance
- I found possibly the best happy-exhibitionist photo I’ve ever seen: Half-Naked And Happy To Be There
- Of all the things I’ve ever written on ErosBlog, this essay on joy and BDSM acceptance is perhaps the post I’m most proud of: Two Smiles
- Remember that shower gel commercial with the tagline “How dirty girls get clean?” Yeah, me neither; or I wouldn’t, if I hadn’t managed to associate it in my mind with this memorable photo: Girl Washing
- I can’t recall laughing harder or longer over a web thing (unless maybe it was the immortal Dogs in Elk waaay back in the last century) than I did over this cybersex transcript that didn’t quite go the way the dude expected it to: And Who Shall Be Master?
- I don’t often lose myself in consumerist fantasies, but I confess I did the first time I saw this product for sale. It’s still for sale, but sadly, I still don’t have any: Leather Sheets
- I’ve softened my stance on the virtues of color blindness over the years (having been exposed to possibly-better arguments) but I haven’t come close to abandoning it. Here’s one of the places it got me griped at, especially in the comments: Nude Women, Skin Color, Huh?
- This post and its comments was one of the places I’ve tried to expound on the foolishness and impossibility of imposing our personal interpretations of art (here, pulpy sex comics) onto other people. Of course it got me snarled at, as it generally does: Whipped With A Hat On
- What’s going on when women dress themselves to be looked at, and then appear to resent the looks they get? I had a theory: On Looking At Women
- I think every sex blogger has taken a go at mocking the contents of sex spam. Here’s one of mine: Sex Spam Subject Lines
- This I still believe: “If you can’t see a person without having a racial classification for them pop into your head, you’re part of the problem.” Not Ignorant, Adamant
- Even a cartoon ’70s metrosexual (before they called them that) understood that a fist in her hair can make the blowjob better: Hair Pulling Blowjob
- In which I stand up for the proposition that not all men are dicks: No Gentlemen, No Sex Pictures
- I had forgotten until just now this back-and-forth with Susie Bright about the reasons for the gender imbalance in the sex blogging world: Sex Bias In Blogging
- I still want to know what happened to this sex doll: Sex Doll Accident
- I still don’t think Violet is wrong about a word of this: Public Submission Ritual
- Another effort on my part to demonstrate that the sexy elements in art are (and ought to be) available to the viewer no matter how reprehensible the artist, his motives, or his historical context: Male Soldiers Fucking
- My irritation with a certain class of creepy comments, it overfloweth: Flashing From A Window
- My opinion on fake boobs, followed by an opinion that arguably matters quite a bit more: Big Fake Boobs
- I still laugh every time I see this: Bill Versus The Penguin
- The topic of what it does (did) to our society to have porn go from “hard to get” to “available on all screens” is fascinating to me, and has been for a long time: Internet Porn For The Greater Good
- Title speaks for itself: Dirty Owl-Fucker!
- “Who wants to find herself covered with Winnie-the-Pooh BandAids after sex?” There’s always somebody: But Gardens Do Differ
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Monday, August 6th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Once you can get past the timorous-sounding paragraphs of initial disclaimers designed to neutralize the barrage of inevitable carping from porn-negative folks, this list by Dr. Marty Klein is actually somewhat eye-opening by reason of its length. I’m not sure it should be surprising, though. I know I’m not the only one whose initial comprehension of sex would have been much the worse if all porn had been subtracted from the information available to me:
32 Helpful Things You Can Learn From Porn
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Friday, July 27th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Miss Maggie Mayhem makes a powerful point about the roleplaying that’s at the heart of so much porn, even when it’s what I might consider to be crappy brutal stuff:
When a small child comes up to you with a pointed finger shouting “bang bang” you know immediately to act out a terrible, painful death. Why?
The power of the imagination is one of the greatest gifts we have and we use it to understand what’s happening with our universe, our planet, our fellow humans, and our interior landscapes. Yes, there are a lot of things depicted in porn that I would never want to see happening in real life, non-consensually, before my eyes. I know that most children would be horrified if their pretend firearm were actually harming you. What they’re thrilled about is the magic of altering consciousness by employing focused attention on an idea.
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Thursday, March 8th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Watching porn is not cheating. Of course it’s not. But as GirlOnTheNet says, it’s hard to formulate actual arguments in support of this proposition that don’t boil down to (her words) “What the ACTUAL MENTAL FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT?”
I once wrote:
Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word.
GirlOnTheNet suggests it’s more about jealousy:
But it’s cheating in the mind, right?
No. Because what you’re describing there is a thought crime. If watching porn is cheating then writing slashfic is a form of rape.
I think this comes from female (and it is usually female — I’d like to see how men react to the idea that their girl watching porn is ‘cheating’) worries about not being adequate, and their partner being sexually interested in other people and things. It’s ‘cheating’ because he’s getting off to something that isn’t you, and that taps into a fairly primitive female jealousy about boys leaving their girlfriends for younger/prettier/thinner/more-willing-to-do-anal models.
Well, it probably sucks for these girls to hear this but he is interested in other people. Sexually. No matter how stunning or sexually adventurous you are, you are not the only thing that makes your man’s dick hard. Nice though you might think that would be, it’s not practical, nor even desirable. Many of his best moves have probably come from things he’s seen while doing some one-handed browsing during an idle moment.
She also points out something I’d never noticed, which is that the visual nature of men’s arousal processes makes us much more open and vulnerable to having our fantasies discovered and judged:
But what he watches is so disgusting and degrading
Hahahaha.
Haha.
No, seriously, stop it — you’re killing me.
It’s so much easier to demonise men for the porn they watch because men tend to require more visual stimulation than women do to get off. In short — you can watch theirs too whereas yours is probably locked away inside your head. Saying that their fantasies are ‘degrading’ and ‘disgusting’ is really easy to do when your own fantasies aren’t exposed for all to see, at the click of a mouse on the 3 a.m. section of your Chrome history.
Ain’t that the truth?
Thanks to Adele Haze for the link.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
I wasn’t surprised to see James Deen get profiled in The Observer, but I was a little surprised to hear that he’s turning into a bit of a heart-throb / feminine lust object, a “sensitive boy with closed-door swagger — the flip side of a good girl with a dirty mind”:
At 5′ 8″ and 26-years-old, Mr. Deen is slight of build, fresh of face, and looks like that cute boy from your high school Spanish class. A little bro-y, maybe. Sophomoric, definitely. But he has a surprisingly witty Gmail handle and a sly sense of humor. He could be your boyfriend, if your boyfriend knew his way around a ball gag and just when to pull your hair.
Obviously I don’t look at him “that way”, but I’ve definitely noticed that he’s more than just another over-muscled hunk on a porn set. Here he’s demonstrating just when and how to pinch a lady’s nipples:
I liked this quote about rough sex:
“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole sexual life and so I’m not, like, bad at it,” Mr. Deen told me by phone last month, on his 26th birthday. “I don’t know how to say it without being a hideous prick, but I’m pretty good at having rough sex. It got to the point where a lot of girls who aren’t into that type of sex were afraid to work with me because they thought I was going to slap them in the face or something. But I only do that if the girl is into it. There’s no reason to choke somebody if they don’t like getting choked. Then you’re basically being an asshole.”
Image is from here.
Saturday, January 14th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Bruce Sterling, whose futurism writing is always a wild ride, has something to say about the future of porn. First he predicts the death of genres in general by 2031:
Genres are gone — well, genres haven’t vanished exactly, but genre conventions have to be carefully explained to people, like the extravagant gestures once native to silent film.
And then:
Since pornography is a genre, there isn’t any left. Of course, there are mega-terabytes of recorded sex acts, but since nobody pays to view all that, it doesn’t formally exist as a social problem. Prostitution exists. Espionage exists. Prostitution and espionage have never been closer, because, in 2031, sex scandals are a major political enterprise. Old commercial porn has become new political power-porn; everyone in power is surrounded by a haze of prurient micro-video, captured and spread by enemies. Popes, queens, supermodels, billionaires, socialites, anybody really. This is the massive civilizational moral crisis. It is routinely decried as shocking and decadent and shameful and how-could-they. Nobody does anything much to stop it.
Friday, November 25th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Well, I suppose this is one explanation for that slack-jawed look the actresses adopt in a certain style of over-produced porn:
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Friday, November 11th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Right now there’s an interesting conversation about sex and religious guilt developing in the comments on this post over at Bondage Blog:
Ropes And Ball Gags In Heaven?
The Bondage Blog post is about one of those “magazine writer sets out to write about porn but is derailed by his own sexual guilt and fails to get his head out of his own navel” articles that go by from time to time. I found the article chiefly interesting because it’s billed as including a bit of a prison interview with sexual political prisoner and pornographer Max Hardcore/Paul Little … but when you read the interview portion, you may want to scream in frustration. The interview is utterly banal because the interviewer cares only about his inner spiritual drama, and thus fails to ask any interesting questions. Narcissistic fucker spent two hours with our society’s current designated archetypal Beast/Pornographer (a position formerly held by Larry Flynt in a more innocent age) and this is the best he came up with?
When I arrive at the prison early the next morning, Max meets me in the prison’s busy visitation room. He is of medium height, with silver hair and an easy smile; with his cowboy hat off and his pants on, he looks like a dentist, like a salesman, like he’d be more interested in putting me in a Toyota than a porn film. He shakes my hand firmly (too firmly; did he hurt those girls, I wonder, did he squeeze them that hard?) and says, “Thanks for coming.” I can’t help cringing and wishing that the first sentence Max Hardcore said to me hadn’t contained the word “coming.” And that he hadn’t said it quite so loudly.
We find an empty bench and sit down. Max tells me to call him Paul. Paul tells me he’s glad I enjoyed his movie. I tell Paul that I feel like I jerked off to a crime.
“They know what they’re getting into,” says Paul.
“Do you ever feel guilty?” I ask.
I expect him to say no. I want him to say no. I want the guilt to myself. My guilt, at least, makes me better than him.
Paul shrugs and sighs.
“Sure,” he says.
“Really?”
He nods.
“But they know what they’re getting into,” he quickly adds. “It’s like boxing. You don’t feel bad for the guy who loses; you don’t wonder why they’re in the ring.”
“I don’t watch boxing.”
“Why not?”
“I feel bad for the loser,” I say. “I wonder why they’re in the ring.”
“I have this board,” Paul explains, “in my office. There are twenty Polaroids on it, each one showing what we’re going to do in the scene. I tell the girl, ‘See this? This is what we’re going to do. First we’re going to deep throat, then we’ll do some puking. Are you okay with puking? Good. Then we’re going to do some anal, then I’m going to fist you. Oh, you’ve never been fisted? Don’t worry, we’ll show you how. Then
I’m going to piss on you, then we’ll do the pop shot.’ ”
I ask him if he ever shows them the twenty-first Polaroid, the one where they crawl into the corner, suck their thumbs, and think about how to kill themselves.
“It’s not like that,” he says. “I’m not Khan Tusion.”
Khan Tusion is the notorious porno director of a series of films called Meatholes and Rough Sex. They are extraordinarily violent. There is choking. There is hitting. There is crying. In the videos, Khan masks his voice and obscures his face.
“Khan wants the girls to feel like shit,” says Paul. “With Khan it’s real. Khan hates women.”
Paul is soft-spoken and often laughs at himself. I know it’s all bullshit–he’s in prison, he’s on his best behavior. I try to picture him violating someone I love.
“I’m playing a character,” says Paul. “I’m playing this average guy who can get these babes to do all this stuff. That’s Max. But the minute the scene is over, I’m Paul. Ask anyone. Talk to Layla. Go see Layla. Ask Layla if you should feel bad.”
It was time to go. Paul walked me to the door.
“I don’t want people watching my films to feel lousy,” said Paul. “I guess I just want them to be more like guilty pleasures, like eating chocolate. Is that the way you felt?”
“Kind of,” I said. “Like eating chocolate made from babies.”
It had been over two hours. I didn’t hate him nearly enough. And it made me hate myself even more.
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Monday, September 12th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
This is one of the most sensible, measured, and accessible articles I’ve seen covering the state of available data about the sociological effects of porn. It’s worth a look:
Evidence-based Masturbation (or, The Science of Porn)
Thursday, August 25th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Here’s what porn star Kayden Cross has to say about being degraded:
I had an arsenal of stupid resolve when I came in [to porn]. I was against more than one dick in a scene, and against facials, and against degradation and things that I was told were degrading. I’ve since decided that the most degrading thing of all is being told by strangers that they have a better sense of when I’m being degraded than I do. I’ve also decided that degradation is simply lovely when you’re asking for it, especially when you’re begging for it on your knees with your makeup streaming down your face and you can taste your own sweat and you’ve lost all sense of your surroundings save the larger than life cock that is immediately in front of you, baiting you with the kind of intensity that can only come from extremes.
Monday, August 15th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Since basically forever the world’s porn-haters have gone prospecting for some causal link between porn and Something Bad, and for the most part they drill dry holes. But boy do they never give up. Thanks to alicublog I’ve just been treated to a rather inventive attempt at finding a new Something Bad.
Jennifer S. Bryson, director of something called the “Islam and Civil Society Project” at the Witherspoon Institute (an Opus Dei-linked theocon outfit in Princeton, New Jersey) has taken notice of the (alleged) possession of pornography by Islamic terrorists and generated 2067 words of vaporings entitled “Pornography and National Security.” Her evidence of a casual link between pornography and terrorism? Well, none. And she even admits this.
I do not know what link, if any, exists between terrorism and pornography, but I do think this question warrants attention…
Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own national peril.
Ohh-kay. It’s pretty clear that she’d just love to find some.
What is going on here? One is of course tempted to mock, and it is very good to yield to that temptation, if only for a little while. I could write my own essay:
I do not know what link exists, if any, between buttsex and earthquakes, but I do think the question merits attention…
Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own seismic peril.
(Do you feel the earth move, dear reader?) And one is also tempted to be cynical. The Witherspoon Institute might be but a humble branch of wingnut welfare (albeit with a prestigious address), but even so it seems likely you have to put forth at least a simulacrum of effort before Robbie George will sign your paycheck.
But some deeper analysis is warranted, I think, because two things are going on here. I do not wish to accuse Ms. Bryson of a deliberate deception in writing this essay: on the evidence of her writing, she seems rather too dim to manifest the self-awareness necessary for that sort of Machiavellianism. But nonetheless I can see through the rhetorical tricks, which she would have soaked up from her environment.
First, we have here a prime example of the rhetorical phenomenon known as “JAQing off.” (How apprpriate in this context.) The term is derived from the phrase Just Asking Questions, and it’s the cowardly and dishonest strategy of attempting to insinuate a proposition into the minds of readers by striking a pose of false epistemic modesty. It’s perfectly obvious that neither Ms. Bryson nor her theocon paymasters are motivated by anything like intellectual curiosity here. They hate porn (and sexual liberty generally) and will smear it in any way they can. Getting more people to “just ask questions” about an imagined link, the more people will begin to think that there might actually be a link.
And more deeply, calling for “more studies” is also a classic trick that one might call “hoping to pick future cherries.” (Also appropriate in this context.) In a stochastic world if you study any relationship between Variable A and Variable B enough times and in enough ways that there will be at least some studies that show a relationship between A and B. You don’t even need badly-designed studies or intellectual dishonesty for this to happen — the work of chance and sampling will make it happen. There will just always be some false positives if you just run enough tests. Of course, the Witherspoon Institute folks are pining to get their hands on one of those, so that they can blast it out to the world with a press release and, they hope, hyperventilating media coverage “PORN CAUSES TERRORISM! Study says.” AHH! Somebody think of the children!
Of such things are the careers of suceessful propagandists made. But I urge you, dear reader, not to be fooled.
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Thursday, August 11th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Long-time Kink.com porn legend Lorelei Lee has co-written a mainstream movie about the porn business. It’s due out in 2012, and Gram Ponante has the scoop:
With the completion of the movie “Cherry,” a story about the porn industry that she co-wrote with “Adderall Diaries” author Stephen Elliot, Lee is poised to quietly overtake Sasha Grey, Tera Patrick, and Jenna Jameson in bringing an adult industry narrative to the general public. The movie stars James Franco, Heather Graham, Ashley Hinshaw, and Lili Taylor.
…
“It’s one girl’s story who happens to be a porn performer,” Lee says.
“Is Cherry’s character based on you?” I ask.
“People are going to think that this is a story of my life,” Lee says, “but it’s not. Tiny bits are similar, but Cherry is a different person.”
Saturday, May 28th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Ms. Naughty:
In all the hysterical hand flapping of “somebody think of the children!”, nobody really sits down and says: “Well, what is it that we don’t want kids to learn or do when it comes to sex?”
Thursday, February 24th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I wonder if this wonderful mechanical dildo chair (complete with metal restraints to make sure the pleasure doesn’t stop until the person with access to the control panel says it stops) is as vintage-historical as it looks, or whether it’s a modern-ish steampunky created artifact?
More proof, if you needed it, that fucking machines aren’t just for porn.
From Bondage Blog via Kinky Delight.
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Monday, February 7th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
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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Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Once or twice before I’ve gotten inbound links from the very hip and very cool Autostraddle, which describes itself as “an intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressive online community for a new generation of kickass lesbian, bisexual & otherwise inclined ladies.”
I tend to take links from sources like this as a sort of “mission accomplished” compliment. Yes, I’m a straight guy who blogs mostly male-gaze porn with male-gaze commentary. Does that mean I have to be creepy and boys-only about it? I’ve never thought so.
But I’ve got to say, this particular inbound link had some curiously prudish and distancing anchor text that’s got me scratching my head.
The post in question was this one, and contained this line:
THIS is how they used to take a photograph of a pussy. (Emphasis and link in original.)
When they linked this post at Autostraddle, here’s the line of anchor text they used:
“This is how they used to have to take a picture of a p*ssy”
Notice what’s different?
First of all, they added the phrase “have to”. Like there was something repugnant about that perfectly delicious pussy. WTF?
And then, they asterisked the spelling of “pussy”. Again, WTF?
I’m not complaining — I’m happy for the link and the attention. But a site like that’s the last place I would expect to be pussy-squeamish. Maybe there’s another explanation I’m not getting?
Update: Riese from Autostraddle explains.
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
There’s a very strange article about sex and porn in The Atlantic, which I cannot decide quite how to respond to. On the one hand it strikes me as wrongheaded and sad, especially in author Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s apparent opinion that male sexuality is essentially brutal and violent and, in her word, “extreme”. On the other hand, she has a clearer-than-usual view that men and women are different, and that the modern batch of anti-porn crusaders seem to want a “pygmy race of sexually neutered males” that is not achievable and wouldn’t be “all that enticing” even if it were. It would be easy to pull paragraphs and sentences out of this article and mock them, but on balance, I think I shan’t. Instead, it’s thoughtful enough — and such an intricate piece of interlocking arguments, each needing to be considered with the buttresses of its supporting paragraphs — that I shall simply point you there, with fair warning that it may piss you off if you don’t already have a somewhat negative view of male sexuality.
However, there was an amusing personal anecdote from the article that stands easily on its own while also, I think, serving quite handily to illustrate why I think Vargas-Cooper has somewhat bizarre ideas about male sexuality:
At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”–the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.
Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced–and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.
And as for our “honest” man, I think he’d have saved himself a deal of trouble and psychodrama by investing in a good pair of nipple clamps.
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Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Over at the Agony Booth Martini Shark recaps a 3D soft-core porn film made in 1969 called The Stewardesses and has the following epiphany:
[D]id you know that “stewardesses” is the longest word in the English language that can be typed with only one hand?
Please don’t ask me how I figured that one out.
I won’t ask. Promise.
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Thursday, September 30th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
You can hear the order being given in your head, it doesn’t require much imagination.
“Soldier, secure all the porn on this base!”
“Sir, yes sir!”
Probably this is military humor.
Probably.
Via a Tumblr. [It has died.]
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Monday, March 15th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
According to this blog post at Psychology Today (which has not yet discovered the typographical wonder that is paragraphs, so I’m helping them out with that) even anti-porn researchers are discovering that if their “porn wrecks lives” theory is true, it’s true in ways so subtle that the people with wrecked lives somehow fail to notice. Not only do people think porn is good for them, but the more they see, the better off they think they are:
What about at the individual level? Are women who view pornography terrorized beyond redemption? Do they descend into a well of despair and self-doubt about their sexuality? Do men become misogynist monsters upon viewing pornographic material? Do they develop debilitating penis insecurities at the sight of well-endowed male porn actors?
Let’s see what Gert Martin Hald and Neil M. Malamuth found in their 2008 paper titled Self-Perceived Effects of Pornographic Consumption. I should mention that Neil Malamuth is a highly regarded scholar of pornography who has often argued for its supposed ill effects. Hence, if there exists a possibility of an a priori bias here, it would be in hoping to find that pornography yields negative consequences.
In their survey of 688 young Danish adults (men = 316; women = 372), Hald and Malamuth found that respondents construed the viewing of hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives, their attitudes towards sex, their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite sex, toward life in general, and over all. The obtained beneficial effects were statistically significant for all but one measure across both sexes. Now here is the kicker: A positive correlation was obtained between the amount of hardcore pornography that was viewed and the impact of the benefits reaped. This positive correlation was found for both sexes. In other words, the more that one watched porn, the stronger the benefits (for both sexes)! There you have it.
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Adele Haze has published a manifesto that should be required reading for anybody who makes, sells, or markets porn.
No, wait. It’s not a manifesto, it’s a tweet. But still:
I’ve written about a million decriptions of sexy pictures this morning. And none of them involve insults. See? It can be done.
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Monday, February 15th, 2010 -- by Dr. Faustus
In my unending (and possibly futile) quest to keep up with conversation around the office water cooler I’ve been catching up on the last few seasons of Dexter on DVD. I confess to being entertained. For the most part it comes across to me as an expertly-done black comedy, even if I find the flashback scenes to Dexter’s early childhood one of the most depressing things I’ve seen on a screen this side of Grave of the Fireflies.
And, just the other night, I got an ErogBloggable joke out of my viewing.
For those of you who don’t know the premise, Dexter is built around the adventures of an anti-hero, Dexter Morgan. Dexter is traumatized in early childhood by witnessing a horrific crime, and grows up to become a sociopath. He’s an unusual sociopath, though, because his adoptive father, a Miami police officer, recognizes Dexter’s sociopathy and successfully channels it by imbuing Dexter with a “Code,” a set of behavioral norms that permit Dexter to kill, but only other killers.
So Dexter ends up working as a forensic scientist for the Metro Miami Police Department, while at the same time functioning as a serial killer. It’s a complicated life, but for the most part Dexter successfully manages to deflect suspicion from himself by adopting a normal, nice-guy persona.
Except that not everyone is fooled. Dexter has an on-the-job enemy in one Sergeant James Doakes, a profoundly troubled soul but also the only cop in Miami who suspects that Dexter is Up To No Good. And this conflict sets up my bloggable moment.
The relevant piece of script I’ve transcribed as follows (I have omitted one line of dialog and made one description sort of vague to avoid spoilers):
INT. DEXTER'S LABORATORY - DAY
DEXTER is viewing his computer screen.
DEXTER (V.O.)
I'll be okay. I followed the
code. The stalk was good. [Dialog
line omitted to avoid spoiler.]Â Or
maybe I took pity on my victim.
CLOSE-UP: DEXTER'S COMPUTER SCREEN
Shots of one of Dexter's would-be victims.
DEXTER (V.O.)
I mean sure he's a heinous killer,
but he also bumps into walls.
BACK TO SCENE
Sergeant DOAKES enters the laboratory. As he does so,
Dexter hastily changes the view on his computer screen to a
topless blond woman.
DEXTER
Hey, sergeant.
(snaps his fingers)
Thanks for supporting the bowling
team.
DOAKES
Fuck you. Where's my blood report
on the Maynard victim?
Dexter hands Doakes a folder containing a report, which
Doakes then leafs through.
DOAKES
(glancing at Dexter's screen)
So what's that, a titty site?
DEXTER
Oops. Caught me.
DOAKES
Bullshit. What the hell were you
were you really doing in here?
DEXTER
(pointing at the screen with
two fingers)
The tits are right there.
DOAKES
Yeah. But in ten years you've
never rented a single porn title.
DEXTER
Huh.
(smiles, turns to face Doakes)
How would you know? Call me an
office crazy but your humbling
interest in my personal life could
be misinterpreted as harassment in
some circles.
DOAKES
So report me.
Doakes starts to leave.
DEXTER (V.O.)
I could think of easier solutions.
DOAKES
(while leaving)
Nice tits.
Doakes leaves, closing the door behind himself.
Now of course Doakes’s line about Dexter’s viewing habits or rather lack thereof has an obvious surface meaning: “I know you don’t look at porn, so I know you’re up to no good in here,” and also serves to reveal something about Doakes’s character, namely his doggedness in trying to figure out Dexter.
But as I saw this I read a second layer of meaning under Doakes’s comment, to the effect that in today’s day and age, it is your not being interested in porn that is evidence of your being a dangerous creep. An intriguing comment about the mores of today that the writers might slide this in as a joke, and expect the audience to get it!
Monday, July 13th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
A learned friend sent me a link to a story in the New York Times about the decline (from a low prominence to an even lower one) of plot in pornography. Unfortunately, that was a few days ago, and the story is now unavailable unless you have a NYT login, so I’ll accomplish much the same thing for you by repurposing Violet Blue’s two-sentence summary:
They discuss the gradual demise of scripted porn movies and the increase of all-action porn. In the article they talk to Steven Hirsch at Vivid, who blames the short attention span of Internet porn consumers.
Now, if I were doing a dead media watch the way Bruce Sterling often does at Beyond The Beyond, I’d have trenchant observations for you about a dead-tree newspaper that can’t even manage to publish its material online at a persistent link that works for everyone, writing about the decline of plot in an industry that never particularly valued plot, while neglecting — in the last couple of years alone — probably several dozen more interesting news developments in that same industry. Is this news, or is it “old man shouts at cloud” stuff?
But instead of making this a dead media watch piece, I want to praise the dancing bear a little bit. Not only has the NYT deigned to notice the porn industry, but they wrote about it in a manner that doesn’t dispute the significant place pornography has in our cultural canon. For the major print media to write anything about porn that doesn’t include a big dose of anti-porn fear-mongering is unusual enough. For them to treat with it as a literary genre — which it surely is — and analyze its literary evolution and shortcomings? That’s downright revolutionary, and certainly to be commended.
That said, the instant I saw it I thought of Bruce Sterling again. About six weeks ago he published the very succinct Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature on his blog. If you are willing to read them with a bit of mental flexibility with regard to media (substituting, for example, “DVD” for “book”) they are germane to, and do a better job of explaining, the changes in porn production, distribution, and marketing that have driven the plot “decline” that the NYT was grappling with. I’d gesture specifically at items 2-4, 7, and 8-14. That’s what, 11 out of 18?
1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication – cellphones, social networks, streaming video – are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
3. Intellectual property systems failing.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.
13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.
15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.
18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
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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Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
As I was walking down an avenue on a pleasant spring evening in the metropolis I call home, I encountered on the side of a bus shelter a poster advertising a forthcoming effort from Pixar, which has been given the title Up. Well, nothing wrong there. I’m sure it will be a fun movie for the whole family, even if Pixar has been assimilated into the Empire of the Mouse. Except that I couldn’t help but think “didn’t I blog on a topic related to this somehow, just the other day?”
Yes, I did.
As it happens, there is a major softcore porn effort called Up! put out by the same Russ Meyer who gave the world Supervixens on which I had just blogged.
Not one of his better efforts, for my money, even if we do get to watch Kitten Natividad frolicking about sunshiney northern California wearing naught but a smile, But the point here is not film criticism. It’s more like company criticism.
Granted, the Empire of the Mouse has it headquarters in Southern California, so it surely unfair to expect them to exhibit a Germanic degree of historical consciousness, even about film. But really, do none of those highly-paid executives know how to use Google? Or Wikipedia?
There are people out there, whom I lampooned in what is probably my most controversial ErosBlog post who certainly do know how to use Google. And I have a feeling that when they Google this one up (so to speak), they might be a little less than happy about the family movie they think they’re researching.
There might be no joy in Burbank, come that day.
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
I realize that on any number of occasions Bacchus has expressed skepticism about the validity of the distinction between “porn” and “art”. Perhaps such skepticism is well founded. But in the spirit of friendly controversy, I shall offer an explanation of the distinction.
Bertrand Russell once introduced the concept of “emotive conjugations,” meaning that the words we use are determined by the person of the speaker. His example was as follows:
I am firm.
You are stubborn.
He is pig-headed.
The concept transfer nicely into the porn-versus-art debate, to wit:
I enjoy the erotic arts.
You get off on porn.
He is addicted to horrible smut.
Though perhaps the distinction doesn’t apply to absolutely everyone. Cue the classic Tom Lehrer song!
Saturday, February 28th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
Via Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution comes word that Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman has gotten hold of a data set on the number of broadband subscribers per zip code who pay for adult content. Professor Edelman breaks down the numbers for us by state in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The porn-consumption winner in all categories is: Utah!
I was mildly surprised by this; perhaps I am too easily surprised.
Professor Edelman provides an analysis of what drives subscriptions, which gives me an opportunity to come up with an additional winner for most (unintentionally?) funny social science inference I’ve seen in a while:
The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p=0.848). However, in such regions, a statistically significantly smaller proportion of subscriptions begin on Sundays, compared with other regions. In particular, a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others.
This competes for attention with:
Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in ‘blue’ states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the ‘red’ states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.
I’m afraid I have no idea what any of this means, really, but what are comments sections for if not interesting speculation? You can read the original paper in PDF format here, but remember, Faustus cheerfully reads academic papers so that you don’t have to!
Postscript: I can’t help also noting that the fourth paragraph of the paper contains a pleasing scholarly corroboration of my February 15th thesis that porn is an engine of progress.
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
When I blogged up what I thought was a fairly harmless and charming little remark from Steve Landsburg earlier this week, at least one of ErosBlog’s readers got at least a little bit perturbed. How dare I, or perhaps more accurately how dare Professor Landsburg, suggest that it’s okay for a minor to go surfing freely around the Internet, wherein she might encounter not just sexually explicit images, but {shudder} evil nasty porn?
A fair enough question, and one worthy of another one of my Sunday sermons.
Whenever someone gets up to defend the application of J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle — the view that the coercion of others can only be justified by self-defense and that we’re not allowed to force others to do or refrain from doing things for their own good — someone else will invariably hop up and ask, in plangent tones, “won’t anyone please think about the children?” (“Who will save the wee bairns?”)
What they mean by this is that if we allow adults full liberty to enjoy certain things like erotic materials, then Poor Innocent Children will also get exposed to them, and that this will be some sort of Very Bad Thing. So maybe we need to restrict the liberty of adults, at least to the extent of building high walls (real or virtual) around the Very Bad (if Poor Innocent Children will see it) Thing.
Hmm. Sounds like the putative well-being of children provides a very handy pretext for action by those who are not so much concerned to protect the well-being of children, as to extinguish the liberty of adults. And I don’t doubt that it is used exactly as such a pretext, much of the time. But let’s grant that those who would defend children — the Knights of the Wee Bairns, shall we call them? — are, in this instance, acting in good faith. Is there a harm here that merits our attention? Is Professor Landsburg’s daughter in some terrible danger from the Internet?
The Knights of the Wee Bairns, at the very least, want paywalls and adult filtering around “bad” content; some of the more maximalist among them want this content to disappear entirely, of course, and not just from the Internet.
People who fret about the danger that Internet porn supposedly represents to children most likely fear that free access to it will endanger their own ability to transmit their values and worldview to their children. This possibility is the “harm” that they fear. Perhaps their fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Maybe something children see on the Internet will affect their values or worldview in ways their parents won’t like. Too bad. In a free society, children are not robots to be programmed by their parents. You’re not entitled to demand that anyone else build a wall around anything just because of the worldview you want to transmit to your children.
I’ll sharpen this claim with an example, pointed right at myself. I am a religious nonbeliever. I am robust in my non-belief, and apologize for it to no one. It would be grounds for substantial disappointment, no, actually it would be grounds for considerable soul-searching and condign self-reproach, if either of my own daughters were to end up as some sort of evangelical Christian, because for my money that means they ended up believing something that is almost certainly false and probably pernicious as well. But I do not, not for one minute, think that this means that someone who runs a website devoted to Christian apologetics should be required to put up an age-determining wall, or require a valid credit card before visiting his site, or put some sort of objectionable content flag in his HTML code so that Atheist Net Nanny can filter out his content, with its explicit promotion of a worldview and values I’d rather my own children not end up subscribing to.
If we must censor content based on its potential to change some child’s values or worldview to something her parents won’t like, then there will be precious little liberty for anyone.
“Oh, but that’s not what we mean,” say the Knights of the Wee Bairns. “We’re only against porn, which is bad. We don’t mean to stifle vigorous debate in a free society. We don’t want to extinguish the liberty of adults. We think that children will be harmed if they see certain images or read certain stories. We insist only that there be some walls across the Internet, so the kids can’t get access to this sort of material.”
I would begin by noting that there really is no such thing a harmless wall across the Internet. The wall will never be truly voluntary. It will invariably be enforced by legal and social sanctions, which means that some content will disappear, simply because it isn’t worth the trouble or the risk of the provider to deal with the compliance burden. Other content, which should be available to all, will end up behind such a wall. To site just one prominent example, it’s been clear for years that Net Nanny and the censors keep material having to do with sexual health away from the teenagers who could really benefit from it.
So there’s a real cost to building walls across the Internet. Is there a corresponding benefit, in the form of harms avoided to minors who happen to view porn?
No.
There are many reasons why I think there is a strong prima facie case why there is no such benefit, no avoided harm to minors. Among the two strongest are the relative resilience of minors and the fact that things on the Internet don’t really change the incentives associated with real-world behavior.
Does viewing stuff — even nasty stuff — make children into nasty adults? Where is the evidence? Let’s look at some history. About two generations ago there was, you might recall, a huge conflict called the Second World War. Children living in the United States experienced this conflict largely as a series of deprivations. But tens of millions of children living the vast zones between the North Sea and the Volga, between Hokkaido and Java, experienced the war as terror — bombings and shellings and occupations and persecutions. Nothing anywhere on the Internet is as obscene as what happens in the real world when a war sweeps through. And what became of this generation of children? Some were psychically scarred for life, sadly. But most of those tens of millions grew up in the postwar world to have pretty normal lives, no more prone to criminality or dysfunction than human beings generally. Children can be, and are, pretty resilient. And keep in mind that Internet surfing, unlike having your country bombed or invaded, is voluntary. Anyone, children included, who encounters a distressing image can always just surf away.
Meanwhile, the real world continues to impose its set of costs and benefits, and these will be more powerful shapers of human behavior than what children or teenagers see on the internet. Out in meatspace, aggressive sexual conduct toward non-consenting others can lose you your job, ruin your reputation, and even land you in jail. Poorly-timed pregnancies can derail your life. HIV infection can kill you. None of these hard facts change, no matter what you’ve seen on the Internet, and people, including underage people, know this. Costs are real. People’s behavior is highly sensitive to cost. Homo economicus might be a crude approximation of actual human beings, but he’s a hell of a lot better than the “monkey see, monkey do” psychology that seemingly can be attributed to many fear mongers about porn.
“But you still might be wrong!” cry the Knights of the Wee Bairns.
Sure. Anything might be wrong. But if the mere theoretical possibility of harm is enough to forbid someone from doing something, then there really will be no liberty for anyone. That much should be too obvious even to require exposition.
All the same, I have no desire to be a dogmatist or an armchair theorist. I’ll respect anyone who civilly disagrees with me. And I’ll go one better than that. I’ll even agree to change my mind, provided that someone can honestly meet the following challenge:
Begin by defining a Bad Life Outcome as something that is uncontroversially bad to happen to someone. I mean bad in a thin sense. It has to be an outcome that pretty much everyone would agree would be bad. In defining bad you don’t get to cheat and load into the concept of “bad” something distinctive about your own worldview. I know that if you’re a die-hard Democrat you might think turning into a Republican or if you’re a Christian you might think becoming an atheist is a bad life outcome, but these don’t count: these outcomes are only bad relative to your specific worldview. Spending your life in prison, or dying of some terrible disease at 25, are Bad Life Outcomes as defined here.
Now suppose further a hypothetical experiment. Take 200,000 nine year-olds. Assign 100,000 of them at random to a Control Group and 100,000 to a Test Group. The Control Group has to spend their time on the Internet until age 18 with Net Nanny filtering out most (surely not all) of the bad old porn on the Internet (along with quite a lot of other stuff, probably). The Test Group gets uncensored access to the Internet until the age 18.
If you can tell me what the number of Bad Life Outcomes will be in the Control Group and the Test Group, and give me a convincing explanation as to why a skeptical and competent social scientist — someone like, oh, Steve Landsburg, say — should credit your numbers; oh, and furthermore, if the rate of Bad Life Outcomes in the Test Group really is materially larger than in the Control Group, then I will cheerfully change my mind.
Sunday, February 15th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
I mount the pulpit again for another Sunday sermon.
There is a common accusation cast against pornography, indeed against erotic arts of any kind, indeed against anything resembling a hedonistic theory of value, that it encourages people to be passive, to be mere consumers, couch potatoes even. I am in the pulpit this week to tell you that this is not true.
I’ll coin a term to cover the broad concept I need: neophorics, the bearing of the new — to represent together invention, creation, discovery, innovation — that lie at the heart of progress, whether in the sciences or the arts or in engineering. And I shall use an older word — hedonics — to represent the art of achieving enjoyment (and correspondingly avoiding suffering) in sentient experience. That the erotic arts and practices are a big part of hedonics I doubt many readers of ErosBlog will deny.
The key to understanding here is that hedonics and neophorics are intimately connected, as entwined with each other as the coupling snakes seen by Teiresias of old. Each needs and drives the other, and would wither without the other.
Hedonics needs neophorics. A simple thought experiment should make this clear. Take your favorite fantasy, the thing that makes you really hot, your best personal X in the language of earlier sermons. Eliezer Yudkowsky at one point offered “living in your volcano lair with a bevy of sexy (and presumably eager, skilled, and willing) catgirls” as an example of one that someone might have (it’s not my X and I don’t think it’s Eliezer’s X either, but it’s a good example). Now ask yourself: is that all you would want to do with the rest of your life? Or if the fond wishes of transhumanism are realized and you become effectively immortal, is that all you would want to do for the next thousand years? The next million? Wouldn’t there come a point at which you would get bored? Feel a lack of achievement? Wouldn’t your life be much better — even in purely hedonic terms — if you could be surprised by things at some point? Get outside your lair and meet something or someone that wasn’t a catgirl? There will always come a point for the sort of beings that we are at which something new will be needed in our lives. That’s one reason why I urge people who can to get busy in the arts and create new erotica.
But what’s more, hedonics drives neophorics. The quest for pleasure is a mighty force for innovation. I cannot think of any artistic medium aside from absolute music (and maybe not even that) that has not been pushed forward by the drive for erotic satisfaction. As soon as the Greeks figured out how to paint on vases they were painting amazing orgy scenes on them. As soon as the camera was invented someone took his clothes off in front of one. The Internet really is for porn, like the song says, and certainly wouldn’t have been built out as fast as it was had people not wanted to look at naughty pictures or share naughty stories.
And it’s not just erotic pleasures that drive achievement. Centuries ago there were great voyages of exploration motivated by…the search for fisheries? The quest for new fields in which to plant barley? No, by search for cheaper and better ways to get pleasure commodities, silk and spices. No one ever perished for want of the taste of cinnamon or the touch of silk, but many men nonetheless risked their lives to get these things. And out of these voyages grew mighty forms of commerce,not just in silk and spices, but in other tangible forms of enjoyment: coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, sugar, wine, spirits, and lets face it, opium and other drugs.
And the neophorics will go on and on, driven by hedonics. Right now we are just scratching the surface with new media like video games. Immersive virtual reality is probably yet to come. And who knows? Maybe someday some clever bioengineer will actually deliver up a catgirl.
The lesson to take away? There is nothing passive about porn. It is an engine of progress.
Sunday, February 15th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Although I have it as a policy not to blog for the boring purpose of explaining or apologizing for my frequent lapses in blogging, I don’t mind saying the paltry and image-heavy posts I’ve made this past week are in part due to a standard and crashingly dull winter cold. When I’m zonked on cold meds, I tend to play lots of computer games and neglect my long-suffering ErosBlog readers, or fob off on you various barely-explained images from my hard drive.
That said, last night I took a TV break, during which I watched D.L. Hughley interview some nominally-hip pastor from Seattle who is said to preach good sex (for married people only) from his pulpit. Of course, when D.L. turned to topic to porn, we got a concerned face and a hasty “D.L., porn’s all bad” or some similar short dismissive statement.
Thus it was with great glee that I learned, upon waking up this morning, that ErosBlog readers will soon (it should be up within an hour) be able to read another Sunday Sermon in defense of porn from our new guest blogger Faustus. This one has … wait for it … cat girls!
Are you all enjoying these sermons as much as I am?
Thursday, January 15th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Wicked star Stormy Daniels tells you what not to say:
10. You’re too pretty to do porn. (So, you’re saying you would prefer to watch ugly people fuck?)
9. Your vagina must be really worn out. (Mine isn’t nearly as bad as your mother’s after pushing such a giant idiot like you out of it.)
8. I would never watch porn. I think it is degrading to women. (Then how did you know my name? And my measurements? And my astrological sign? And my birthdate?)
7. How do I get my girlfriend/wife to do ________? (Ask her, not me. By the way, talking to me in the first place is not helping your cause.)
6. Wow! You’re so much prettier/younger/thinner in your photos. (Obviously your mother didn’t teach you anything and it is called Photoshop.)
5. I pleasured myself to you 10 times this week! (OK, I didn’t need to know precisely how pathetic you are. And stop trying to shake my hand. I now unfortunately know exactly where it has been.)
4. I could do porn. (No, you couldn’t. If you could, you already would be … and no, I will NOT audition you!)
3. Are those yours? (Well, I paid for them.)
2. Do you think you are going to hell? (Discussing religion with a porn star will get you as far as discussing porn with your grandmother … just don’t try it.)
1. I wanna take you out on a “real” date. ( I did not realize all my other ones were imaginary.)
The items on this list don’t really surprise me; the fact that the world is full of people who are just sort of … broken … when it comes to their ideas about sex and porn is one of the primary motivating factors behind this blog. But if we take this list as evidence that people say these things fairly often to people like Stormy, it does surprise me in one sense. Don’t these people have any verbal filters? It’s one thing to be full of screwed-up attitudes, but how do you get that comfortable with ’em?
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Friday, January 2nd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
How do we know? Because Facebook says so!
Remember a couple of years ago when LiveJournal crapped all over itself by threatening to suspend people who posted breast-feeding imagery including the dreaded and oh-so-dangerous wild MILF-nipple?
Well, this time it’s Facebook’s turn. The story is all over the internets, but this story sums up the fundamental stupidities. First, Facebook claims that breastfeeding images violate their policy on “obscene, pornographic or sexually-explicit material” — proving only that they don’t know what any of those words mean — and then they try, pretty much in the same breath, to backpedal by explaining that they know nipples aren’t obscene — nipples are of course wonderful! — but the dark skin surrounding the nipple is dangerous to teens, you see:
Facebook said the pictures violate the company’s policy on obscene, pornographic or sexually-explicit material, because of the display of the aureola – the dark skin around the nipple. Reportedly, it had also threatened to terminate accounts of people who do not comply with such policy.
“We agree that breast-feeding is natural and beautiful, and we’re very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook,” said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.
The company insists it is not about obscenity, but more about safety. The policies are to ensure the site remains safe, secure and trusted by its users, who also include teenagers.
Mr Schnitt said only photos which showed the aureola have been removed and others left intact.
I know if I had teens who were big Facebook users, I’d be losing sleep at night worrying about all the aureola-skin they might see on Facebook. Yup, that would be my number one concern about teen safety in connection with a social networking site. Boy howdy.
Memo to Tony Comstock: Did you know that when you turn on Google’s SafeSearch filtering, it filters out most of the internet dictionary pages that will tell you what “aureola” means? Yup, even the dictionaries that limit themselves to art and astronomy and never even mention the medical meaning. Citizen, nipples aren’t safe even when you’re a doctor and want to talk about them in Latin! It’s not even safe to teach people the words!
Saturday, December 6th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
So I was reading a modest rant (title: The Horrors of Porn) over at The Twisted Monk and it was going like this:
A common trend in porn would be body art, I know what you are going to say tattoos are as old as civilization so this is not a new development, I agree, but since most porn focuses primarily on the “point of contact”, ie the wet, pink bits, as they thrust away more and more talent are opting to get tattoos on their hips, asses and even genitals in order to retain some level of uniquely identifying marks, lest they get lost in the sea of shaved wangs and oddly tanned taints.
And I thought: “Aha!” For, I knew where this was going.
And I was right:
So when I noticed the female model sporting what at first glance looked to be…ahem… well how shall I put it, a stain on her pink bits? No, more of discolored ring around her asshole. I was naturally taken aback. Surely this site has the budget for some hand-wipes and a videographer with the brains to know that he will soon be shooting this girls bottom in hi-def so it would be in his best interest to make sure that he has a, shall we say tidy pallet from which to paint his jizz stained masterpiece.
No, no on second glance it was not a stain but rather a tattoo. Yes, dear readers a tattoo on that most taboo ring of muscle.
Like passing a highway fatality involving a bus full of crippled nuns colliding with a tanker truck carrying sulfuric acid, I had to stop and stare. What the hell would you posses you to get tattooed there?! Can you imagine that tattoo session? Can you say ouch? I don’t even want to think about the post ink healing process. 4 weeks of scabbing and itching anyone? How do you keep it sterile? Fuck that, how hell do you take a crap?! Gah! The mind reels. Sadly, or possibly thankfully, the series of images in question chose to opt against using the ULTRA zoom lens and show a close-up of said tattoo as it was taking on the business end of her co-star so I still have no idea exactly what she chose to have permanently etched upon the ring of her ass.
Fortunately, some of his commenters guided him to ErosBlog and thus, to enlightenment.
(Monk’s post also links to a different photograph of the tattoo in question, for those of you whose fascination with the topic is not yet fully satiated.)
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Friday, December 5th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
From time to time, I have posted to remind people that there’s no substitute for having your own server (not literally your own, but one that you pay the hosting bill for) before building anything of substance on the internet. It’s always struck me as insane to build stuff on “free” servers run by somebody else who hopes to monetize the traffic you generate, especially if you’re involved with sexual content that they might decide is icky. Either they will like you too much, and try to steal your traffic in various ways, or they like you too little, and kick you out (oh, and keep your traffic). You might hope to be Goldilocks, but hey, good luck with that.
Thus, posts like my:
Why Blogging Services Suck
Indecent Blog Hosting
Blogging Services Still Suck
I don’t remember posting again when Blogspot (now Blogger, a Google company) killed about half the sex blogs out there over a period of months, deleting many of them and putting many more behind ugly, traffic-killing warning pages. It struck me as inevitable, and I saw a lot of sex bloggers take my advice when it happened and get their own host and domain. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot more just vanish when their “free” hosting environment became toxic. This might even be the second most common reason (after “stopped posting”) why sex blogs die. So, I notice it.
But it’s important to remember, this is a broader principle of life and business on the internet. It’s not just blogs.
Remember way back in 2004, when an outfit called Ning announced (with great fanfare) that they were going to host social networks like MySpace, for free, so you could set up your own? I even (briefly and somewhat later) toyed with the idea of setting up a social network on Ning for my ErosBlog community of fans, but I wasn’t confident Ning would prove adult-friendly over the long haul.
Well, other people dove into it. And as of this week, all the folks who started social networks around porn, sexual nudity, or “fetishes” learned they were about to be royally screwed, with all their years of community-building effort flushed right down Ning’s toilet:
On Monday night we announced that we will no longer support adult networks on Ning beginning January 1st, 2009.
As it relates to the Ning Platform, adult networks include, but aren’t limited to pornography and depictions of sexual acts. To clarify the point, networks that contain or are focused on the following topics would clearly fall into the adult category include:
* Pornography or images of sexual acts
* Nudity intended to sexually arouse the viewer
* Graphic photos or videos
* Fetishes
To be fair, the original announcement cites practical and (to me) believable financial reasons why the adult networks are being evicted from Ning’s network. Some of these networks — and this is no surprise to me, given some of the toxic porn marketing I encounter daily — seem not to have been good tenants.
To their credit, Ning appears to have embraced open standards that may (I am far from certain) make it possible for these banished Ning communities to export at least their user lists, and possibly more of the network content. Maybe some of them will be able to reconstitute themselves on their own servers — is there free open-source social-networking software out there these days?
Anyway, I’m not saying the Ning people are being bad or evil. But the effect of their sweeping anti-adult business decision has been to wipe out an enormous amount of effort that users invested in their platform. It’s a pattern that repeats itself whenever people use “free hosting” of whatever kind. If you build your shit on somebody else’s land, they can, and they eventually will, either tear it down or tell you to haul it away (if you’re lucky). Nor does “upgrading” necessarily save you; Ning offers paid upgrades from its free advertising-supported service, but it appears that, upgraded or not, if you like teh fetishes or teh pornz, you’re still banished.
It’s not just blogging services that suck.
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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Since I wrote last week about Google’s Secret Sexual No-Fly List, Tony Comstock has been doing some more digging into the perversities of Google’s various admitted and secret adult keyword filters. He’s been blogging up a storm about it, with posts like this:
In that last one, Tony shared the startling discovery that Google’s SafeSearch algorithm returns thirty three million “safe” results for [penis], but not a single one for [clitoris]. On top of all the other problems, Google’s filters are sexist! Tony expounded on this in his subsequent post, Dragged into Google’s Sex Ghetto, Kicking and Screaming:
As mentioned previously, I had been working on a post tentatively entitled “Does the Googlebot have Asperger’s Syndrome?” but I realize now that the analogy is too generous. People with Asperger’s see and understand the world differently from “normal” people, but I’ve never read anything about Asperger’s that suggests that Aspies are especially lazy or malfeasant.
The way that Google’s SafeSearch filter handles returns for [penis] vs. the way it handles them for [clitoris] isn’t a product of seeing things differently. It’s just plain lazy. Somewhere inside of Google, an engineer was tasked with filtering “adult” sites from returning under “strict filtering” searches. Somehow he (I’m going to have to assume this engineer is a man,) when confronted with the vagaries English language, was able to write an algorithm that allowed 30 million “safe” returns for [penis]. But when faced with the same problem for [clitoris] he found it easier to simply put clitoris on a list of banned words.
That’s not Aspie-ish, that’s just lazy and sexiest.
[Erotic] was too much trouble for him, so it got banned too. [Nude] and [naked] were too much trouble, so they were out. His algorithm couldn’t tell the difference between a nursery rhyme rooster and a raging hard-on, so [cock] got banned. Is this webpage talking about kitty-cats or cunts? His algorithm couldn’t tell, so [pussy] went on to the list, along with [bastard] and [anus]. For some reason his algorithm could find 4.7 million “safe” returns for [glans] and 2.5 million “safe” returns for [testicle], but not a single “safe” return for [fellatio] or [cunnilingus], so they went on the list as well.
That’s not the product of a odd blind spot to social interaction, that’s just lazy and ass-covering; not to mention laughable coming from a company that touts its “advance proprietary technology.” (I’ll leave it to someone else to decide whether or not it’s [evil].)
Now Susie Bright has gotten her teeth into the sexist implications of the penis versus clitoris filtering, and has written, in “Clitoris” on Google’s Banned Word List:
I recall the 1970s abortion rights poster that read “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” The sexism of the Internet infrastructure is the same joke. There is no way that men would consider “prostate cancer” an inappropriate search or conversation item. They would never for a moment consider that their “penis” was a word that couldn’t be allowed in a respectable business or learning environment.
But women’s bodies? Oh, you’re familiar with the filthy and unspeakable territory those will lead you into. It’s in the Bible, right?
Let’s stop coddling Internet censorship as if it were an etiquette or a “children’s” issue. The people suffering from being firewalled and banned aren’t commercial porn-makers with some gonzo to pitch – they’re educators, healthcare professionals, midwives, nurses, doctors, researchers, artists, writers, filmmakers, political activists, critics and analysts– all of whom find their interest in women’s lives to be shrouded in the great Internet burqa of “safeness.”
Look. I write a blog with “sex” right up in the title, and I make part of a living at it. So it’s no surprise that I’ve always hated the lame and weak approach to filtering that Google (well, all the search engines, but who else matters?) uses to disrupt and marginalize the great internet conversation about sex. It’s also no surprise that I can’t talk about this without some mental genius popping up in my comments to suggest that I wouldn’t care about this if I didn’t want more visitors to my blog. Happens, I’ve got six years of blog posts that prove I care passionately about the free exchange of sexual ideas, so I don’t let the nattering slow me down much. All of which is preface to my point, which is that I’m freaking delighted to see the beginnings of a noisy conversation about this.
Is there any hope that the sex bloggers of America can shame Google into being less shame-faced about the sexual contents of its search index? Given the massively overwhelming numerical superiority of the prudish majority to whom Google is catering with searches “safe” from female sexuality, probably not. But it’s important to remember that the actual people at Google are unlikely to be all that prudish or sexist; they are just, as Tony has pointed out so well, taking the lazy way out when attempting to do something (catering to sexist prudes) that they’d probably rather not be doing anyway, but for their perception (or perhaps assumption?) that it’s a corporate necessity.
Thus, I see at least a faint hope that if the mockery of their weak and lame filtering shortcuts is loud enough, they’ll have to improve their filtering systems out of a mix of professional pride and a sense of public relations necessity. If we can just disrupt their comfortable assumption that all sexual discussion is acceptable collateral damage, to be readily sacrificed in their (very difficult and endless) war against spammy porn sites, that alone would be a worthwhile step in the right direction.
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
There’s a blog post out there listing seven reasons why it sucks to be a male porn star. They aren’t terribly novel reasons, honestly; and to me #2 (the pay sucks) pretty much undermines all the rest; if being a male porn star really sucked so badly, porn directors wouldn’t be able to get male talent for, essentially, free.
Which is why I snickered when spanking movie model Adele Haze mocked the guy:
Of course some aspects of shooting porn are uncomfortable. You’re not doing it for you: you’re doing it to make the finished movie look good. That’s the job. If you feel that you’re having a bad time, try being a female porn-star: you get all that, plus some whiny boy’s spunk in your eye.
Monday, October 27th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
From Tony’s blog:
It’s going to be from Tuesday, Oct. 28, 12AM Eastern to Oct. 29 3AM Eastern. For 27 hours, 100% of the purchase price on our erotic documentary DVDs (excluding S&H) is going to the No On Proposition 8 Campaign to preserve marriage equality in California.
So get your blog on. Get your Twitter and your Facebook and your MySpace on. Text a friend, e-mail a loved one. Tell them that if they buy any Comstock Films DVD on October 28, 100% of the purchase price will go helping stop Ballot Measure 8 in California.
I don’t follow California politics, but I’m pretty sure this is a good cause. The view from thirty thousand feet (as an old B-52 crewman I used to know was wont to say) is that Prop. 8 will amend the California constitution to eliminate the current right, as recognized by the California courts, for gay people to marry. As such, it appears to me (from 30,000 feet, remember?) to be one of those ugly “culture war” initiatives that serves no real purpose but to give cultural conservatives an excuse to slap people they don’t like around and put ’em back in their place.
So, if you were planning on buying any of Comstock Film’s excellent and award-winning porno for grownups, you couldn’t pick a finer day (in my humble opinion) to do it.
Sunday, October 19th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
One of the nicer perks of publishing a long-running sex blog is that sometimes I get the most amazing stuff in the mail from people who hope I’ll blog about it. This strategy has mixed results at best, because I’m terrible about actually doing product reviews. However, if the swag impresses me enough, I will sometimes write about it.
The latest “blow me away” box of goodies was a HUGE pile of dirty manga (close to thirty titles) from Icarus Publishing. (Their motto: “Keeping the ‘manga is porn’ stereotype alive”.) These turn out to be way better (for an ugly American like me) than the stuff I can download a few random pages at a time from 4chan or Usenet. Icarus Publishing puts out well-printed publications that are nicely translated and (the ones I’ve looked at, anyway) completely uncensored — no pixelations or stupid little black lines. All in all, I found shuffling through these titles to be a premium manga porn viewing experience.
Given the ongoing financial meltdown, the first title I pulled out of the box was something called “The Spirit of Capitalism.” It’s a fitting title in these trying economic times, especially since it features office workers getting fucked:
Icarus Publishing (aka Icarus Comics) has some sample pages from The Spirit of Capitalism online for your viewing pleasure, and a deep web catalog that’s well worth your time.
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Friday, October 17th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
There’s an old folk song out there, sung by the Kingston Trio and many others, that goes a little bit like this:
We came to town to see
that old tattooed lady.
She was a sight to see,
tattooed from head to knee.
My uncle Ned was there.
He came to gape and stare.
“I’ve never!” he declared
“seen such a freak so fair.
And on her jaw
was the Royal Flying Corp
and on her back
was the Union Jack,
now could you ask for more?
All up and down her spine
marched the Queen’s own guards in line
and all around her hips
sailed a fleet of battleships.
And over her left kidney
was a bird’s eye view of Sidney
but what we liked best
was upon her chest:
My little home in Waikiki!
And which point a voice shouts in surprise “What did you say?” And the whole song starts over. You can sing it all day if you like.
If you’ve heard the song, you’ll recognize the mental voice in which I thought “What?” when I saw a mention on Fleshbot of a woman with a ring of writing tattooed around her anus.
“What did he say?”
Also: Ouch.
Apparently the writing does not, as has been suggested elsewhere, say (in Elvish runes or otherwise): “One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
Aside: I know a guy who would fall over dead from sheer nerd joy if he had a girlfriend who (a) liked anal and (b) had that tattooed around her rosebud.
Sadly, no; what porn star Adrenalynn actually has tattooed on her asshole is (reportedly) the phrase “Jarrod’s Little Fuckdoll.”
Jarrod is her husband, and I heartily hope the tender sentiment has the same effect on him as the runes would have on your average 19-year-old anal-loving Tolkien fan.
For the curious, there’s a fairly clear view of Adrenalynn’s anal tattoo in the twelfth picture from this gallery. The last ten seconds of the fourth video clip here also gives you several good views, if you’re fast with the pause button. Adrenalynn is pretty cute, so your time won’t be wasted!
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Sunday, October 5th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Remember the huge pinup series by Art Frahm, the one that featured girls whose panties had fallen down around their ankles at the most embarrassing moment possible? I blogged about it here (more than five years ago, urk) and linked to James Lilek’s definitive essay on the subject. I see a certain stylistic sympathy to Frahm’s lost lingerie oeuvre in this photograph of a woman whose skirt has just headed south:
There’s a larger version of this picture where I found it, at Silent Porn Star.
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Remember about two weeks ago, when I mentioned the new public bondage site, coming from our kinky friends at Kink.com?
Well, Public Disgrace is now live, and looks to be living up to (some of) its promises.
About half the pictures in the sample galleries are close-in shots of hardcore bondage sex in what look to be protected, semi-outdoor spaces. To be honest, those aren’t terribly interesting to me, because I have a harder time with suspension of disbelief, and so there isn’t a lot of newness there. To me it’s “just porn”, with (by 21st century standards) no particularly transgressive edge.
On the other hand, I find the soft-core “pure” public bondage shots to be more interesting, because they seem to occur in genuinely public settings, complete with interested onlookers:
I will confess I find the branding for this new site a little confusing. If the goal is, to use their words, “unique street scenes of erotic humiliation”, what’s disgraceful about that? If the fantasy of a woman in chains is that she has to do what you make her do, I get that she may be embarrassed or humiliated by the public exposure, but I don’t see any disgrace in it; to me, disgrace connotes an aspect of guilt or sin or wrongdoing or bad behavior, and one of the essential transactions at the core of BDSM is that the submissive is liberated of responsibility for the things he or she is “made” to do. Hence, no disgrace. Unless the disgrace is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, the putative onlooker shouting “that’s disgraceful!” or getting violent, like this guy?
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I was reminded, Sunday night, of the strange way in which there’s no one truth about love or lust or romance or about anything else interesting to humans. The Nymph and I went to see Vicki Christina Barcelona, the latest Woody Allen movie. I enjoyed it right well — and Penelope Cruz is just brilliant in her role — but it also gave me a modest insight of sorts.
In the movie, there’s a love triangle that is brief, implausible, and complex. (“Complex” is my eighty-cent college word; my blue collar brother-in-law would be content to say “fucked up”, in a tone of voice suggesting an unacceptable depth of complexity but without any connotation of condemnation.) And yet, just as I was marveling at the very implausibility of the arrangement, I was startled to realize “no, this is just remarkable for being in a movie; it’s not the least bit more complicated than a thousand unusual romantic understandings I’ve seen people reach in the real world, or describe on their personal blogs.” People, real people even more so than scripted people, are willing and able to make the most astonishing compromises and bargains (physical, emotional, financial) in order to get the love, affection, validation (and, yes, sex!) that they need.
Hardly a deep or original insight, but then, I never claimed different. Still, it served to remind me of what I love about the sex blog genre (and to a lesser extent, blogs in general) — namely, that they provide a relatively unfiltered window into the inner romantic and emotional lives of a great many more people than we would normally know well enough (in meat space) to know on that level. And that’s just interesting.
Today’s example is an excerpt from Bitchy Jone’s Diary, in which she is talking about the big strong man she enjoys hurting, and the reasons he enjoys being hurt by her. That’s one of the categories of sexual bargains that usually overstrains the limited capacities my empathic sexual imagination; and so — despite bearing firmly in mind that an explanation of what’s going on for these people may not speak with authority about any other people — I found it fascinating and instructive:
I live in a small, papery ordinary house. I have radiators, I have chairs and tables, but these things are all built practicality, not practical evil. I do not have access to one of those fortresses built out of rusty steel columns where they make the kinky porno. I do not have a room with red walls. The only thing I can really tie Jack to and not have him killcrushdestroy (killcrushdestroy my soft nest of an IKEA catalogue interior that is) is other parts of himself.
‘Cause the trouble is, with him, resistance is fertile.
For all I try and say that submission and masculinity work with each other not against each other: that the whole world has got it wrong with its stupid prevailing ideology about which way round bondage goes. But, no one listens to Cassandra Jones, the world of people-tied-up is built for tying up women. Every guide book, every instructional video is about tying up women, pretty much. Bondage for sex means bondage for being penetrated. So what of me? I like it tough and scary. I like the great big man brought down, down, down. Works brilliantly in my head. In real life: hard work.
Because I like to feel a huge rush of power over a conquered kingdom of a man. But because I reach so high it’s so much harder to bring the thing down low.
Sometimes he feels unscaleable and more often *unbreakable*. And broken is a wonderful state. But so much harder to achieve when starting with an unbreakable thing.
There is that little moment when I hurt him. Right at the start. He makes it very obvious: He assesses what I’m doing and works out if he can deal with it. And he always can — always finds a place to put it — but right before that you see the tiny panic before he *knows* that he can. I’m happiest right there. The moment before either of us remember that he is unbreakable.
Not that I am not in love with that brave thing. That self sacrifice. Once I said to him, ‘I want to him you on the backs of your thighs with a metal ruler.’
And he said, ‘Fine.’ He said ‘fine’ like I’d said ‘I want to go make a cup of tea.’
So I said — more fierce, but more fierce for me just means my jaw sets a little hard — ‘And I want you to hate it.’
He’s rolled over ready for me by now, so he’s looking back over his shoulder. ‘Well I don’t expect I’m going to like it very much.’
And I swoon, there, at the stoic and the brave and the acceptance of me and the things that I need. But I still pine for something more fragile. For more doubt and fear.
I make him fake it. Make him ask for it to stop. Make him ask me not to hurt him. But that’s a level up on the unreality game. And I know that if I wanted it the other way he’d ask me *to* do it too. He doesn’t like pain. He likes being brave. I honestly don’t know where his desire to feel brave would end. Where rationality would take over. I’d like to find out — let the bravery drive us, let it set the pace, decide when we stop – but it’s a frightening place I might end up.
Monday, September 22nd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
“Google Suggest” Ignores Adult Search Preference Cookies
Google, as all sex blog readers probably know, filters porn (they call it “explicit sexual content”) out of your search results by default. They call this “Safe Search”, and you can turn if off by letting Google set a cookie in your browser. (Most ErosBlog readers have, presumably, done this.) No worries, it’s been like this for years. We’re used to it, and in many contexts it’s useful to have the filtered option.
Recently, however, Google introduced a dynamic on-the-fly search suggestion feature called Google Suggest. When you type Britney Spears into the search box, a drop-down appears with what Google calls “relevant suggested search terms” in real time:
Nerd response: Cool!
Sex blogger response: Hey, wait a minute! Isn’t something missing from that search box? Wouldn’t you expect to see “Britney Spears nude” on that list?
Let’s check. The list changes with every character you type, so let’s go “britney spears nu” and see if it fills in the suggestion:
Suspicious, but maybe all those “number one” sites are just crowding it out? Let’s make this impossible to miss, let’s try “britney spears nud”:
Whoa! Is that the sound of crickets I’m hearing? “Mom, Google Suggest won’t come out and play with me any more!”
At this point I hit the “Preferences” link and went to check my Safe Search setting; it forgets the “Do not filter my search results” setting every time I clean out all my cookies, and resetting it is the first thing I do after that. Nope, “Do not filter my search results” is checked! That’s not the problem.
And make no mistake, this is a problem, and not just for feelthy perverts like me. This is the sort of thing that sets mild-mannered eyeglasses-wearing librarians sputtering with rage, because once you start filtering out words, like “nude”, that do double duty as erotic signifiers and, you know, plain old information tags, you begin to muck up basic research of the sort that any high school civics class might legitimately be doing. Allow me to illustrate.
Does anybody remember John Ashcroft, and his infamous prudery that had him covering up fine art at the Department of Justice because the bare breasts offended him? Imagine you were trying to write a high school essay about public art and needed to reference that incident. If you actually Google John Ashcroft nude (shudder) you’ll get 39,000-ish results. But start typing that request into Google, and you’ll learn that while John Ashcroft singing “Let The Eagle Soar” might be relevant to your search request (with 10,500 results), “John Ashcroft nude” could not possibly be, even though there are four times as many potential results out there:
Again, we need to check to make sure it didn’t just get choked by having to select between too many potentially relevant suggestions. We can do that by typing more letters; “john ashcroft n” gets me “john ashcroft news” as the sole suggestion, and with “john ashcroft nu” we’re back to the sound of crickets. Sorry, seeker after knowledge, nothing with “nude” in it could possibly be relevant to your search, EVER.
That’s search engine prudery right there, and it’s as stupid and mindless as automated mechanical prudery always is.
Of course, I’m not dealing with search results filtering, what I’m complaining about is search suggestions filtering. But that’s a distinction without a difference, a nit only a lawyer could enjoy picking. Google already has a cookie on my computer telling them that I don’t want them to protect me from the pollution of my vital essences that is the adult internet; what earthly reason could they have for ignoring that preference in determining which searches to show me in the suggestion box?
Just to show the full ridiculousness that is Mrs Grundy as played by The Mechanical Turk, let’s search for dear old Jenna, once said to be the most-searched woman on the internet:
That settles it. The Mechanical Turk “knows” damned well who I’m searching for, knows when I’m two characters into her last name, but it can’t mechanically imagine that “jenna jameson nude” (with nearly half a million search results out there) might be at least as relevant as “jenna jameson neck tattoo”? Sorry my friends, but inside the amazing Mechanical Turk there sits a very human prude.
Again, it’s easy to imagine lots of good business reasons why Google might want to filter even the mildest adult topics out of its search suggestion tool. That’s not my point.
My point is that for many people, Google is only useful if they can get the unfiltered version. Google knows this. Google makes it easy to set the “don’t filter me” button. But what good is that, if they then silently ignore the setting?
OK, now let’s have some fun looking at all the things Google Suggest refuses to suggest.
How about a good spanking? That’s only about as kinky as six inches of your average garden hose these days, plus there’s the whole universe of information out there about why you shouldn’t do it to your kids. Surely Google Suggest has something for the spanking searcher?
Google Suggest says: No spankings for you!
How about porn? If I type “por” into my search bar, you think maybe “porn” might be a relevant search to suggest?
Duh, no, silly me.
Ok, would you like to look at some fine rubber nipples? Or, you know, buy some, for your baby’s bottle or for your plumbing supply store? Sorry, you’re shit outta luck — Google Suggest can offer you “nippleplay” (presumably because the guy writing the filter didn’t get warned against it), but the Mechanical Prude has never heard of a nipple that was relevant to anybody:
That’s enough for now, although readers are invited to find other, especially laughable “never relevant” stop words that choke Google Suggest. Have fun teasing the Mechanical Prude!
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Bondage Blog, which can be trusted to stay on top of important developments in the kinky porn department, reports here on the newest project from Kink.com. It’s a public bondage extravaganza by the name of Public Disgrace, and it’s going to make a lot of you think you’re not living in the right cities:
Site goes live on October 1, but there’s a preview shoot you can buy if you just can’t wait.
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Saturday, September 6th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I’m not a fan of the Subway sandwich shops; going to one of them strikes me as a lot of standing in line for a result that’s usually little better than a wrapped sandwich from the deli case. I particularly don’t like being subjected to blank looks from slow fast-food workers who act as if simple instructions like “lots of onions, please” is some deeply incomprehensible request in a cryptic ancient tongue. Dude, I don’t need you to carve me a mathematically perfect rocket combustion chamber out of stale cheese; I just need you to move your baggie-wrapped fingers to the onions bin, grasp, return to the vicinity of my sandwich, and release. It’s not rocket science. And, please, stop drooling on my sandwich.
Honestly, I’m being unfair. I live in a tight labor market, where the fast food stores are always hiring, and cannot afford to be fussy. And even then, Subway is a franchise; one store is not like another. But still. My local Subways are terrible, and I hate them.
Bad as they are, though, there’s always a worse one. Case in point: the Subway shop (location unknown) that caters to bigots, by firing a sandwich technician after a customer complained that the dude was also a gay porn star. The dude in question makes movies under the name Kurt Wild, and here’s the email (circulated by his agent, as reported at Fleshbot):
Hey everyone.
I just wanted to tell everyone that I was just fired from my work at subway because I have done gay porn. A customer said they wouldn’t even eat there at subway anymore because of my past work and said that if I wasn’t fired then they would boycott the store. What I say is, if one person can try to ruin me everywhere I work… maybe I should take a stand and boycott their store too if they can’t let people’s privacy be treated right. I should have the right to work anywhere I can and it isn’t right or fair that people can keep me from working simply because of a “gay” issue. If a girl did what we do it would probably be ok.. and if a guy does straight porn.. he is bragged about. When I do gay porn, I feel a bit lynched for the rest of my life. Not right. Thanks for reading.
– Kurt Wild
Now, I’m not one to cry boycott. It would be stupid in this case, when there’s no accountability to the Subway “brand” by individual store owners. But seriously — are there really still people out there who are dumb enough to be worried about gay cooties, and shameless enough to admit it?
Apparently, there are, and they eat at Subway.
Friday, September 5th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
This is another fine demonstration of that ancient truism that, if you take the world’s horrors and turn them over to the artists and pornographers to play with, they’ll improve on them and turn them into something fun. (At least, they will if you’ve got a sufficiently flexible definition of “fun”.) For an example, consider this dank and anonymous prison “stress position” as implemented by the clever pornographers at Bound Gods:
Considering the helpless exposure of the position, it might also be a snapshot from the secret fears (or, maybe, fantasies?) of that boorish guy you know, the one who is always making stupid and nervous jokes about not dropping the soap, whenever the topic of somebody going to prison comes up in conversation. Show him this kind of gay porn? There’s no telling what he’ll do.
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Way back in the dark ages, when computer games were something that came on floppy disks that mostly weren’t actually floppy, it was not unheard of for a man to spend too much time playing his computer games, nor for his woman to complain about the amount of his time and attention she didn’t enjoy because of it. (Sometimes the gender arrow pointed the other way, but numerically, not often.)
Then came the internet, and massively addictive massively multiplayer online games, and the situation only got worse. As early as the late 1990s, the “EverQuest widow” phenomenon was getting widely remarked upon. Once World of Warcraft exploded on the MMORPG scene and increased the U.S. MMORPG playerbase to many millions, the “problem” became a widely-understood social phenomenon. (The gendered nature of “the problem” also diminished a little more.)
In geek male circles, it was common and easy to say “Dude, you’ve got an actual live girl in your house, and she’s mad at you because you’re playing with us and not with her? What’s wrong with you? LOG THE HELL OFF!”
But in practice, that doesn’t always happen. My own gaming policy has always been to attempt to prioritize “real life people” above my games. Phone rings? Answer it. Relative wants a hand? Log off and give it. The Nymph walks into the room to show me the panties she bought? Give her my full attention; the raid (the fleet, the gang, the quest, the mobs, the squad, the enemies, the targets, the loot) they are eternal, they will always be there when I get back. The panties? They are gonna walk out of the room, and it won’t take them very long, either.
But, it’s not always that simple.
Early on, it became clear to me that the type of game mattered. Shooting games weren’t quite as bad, because (although addictive) it’s a lot easier to drop in and out of fast-paced shooting games where deaths and respawns are common and mostly painless. But the immersive multiplayer games where you accumulate stuff, and getting the best stuff requires coordination between many different players? The people in those games are also “real life people”, and some of them become your friends, and you make commitments to them just as you would your meatspace friends, and those commitments have power. And that’s very very hard to explain to someone in your life who thinks you spend too much time “typing at that silly box” and cannot comprehend that it can take thirty seconds, or twenty minutes, to resolve in-game affairs to the point where you can safely avert your eyes from the screen.
Obviously living with a gamer helps, although sometime it just means it’s you who’s getting the “not tonight, I promised Malathion_69 that I’d help camp for dragon armor” treatment.
I eventually, and fairly recently, realized that the “I prioritize the real people in my life over my computer games” rule-of-thumb (perhaps call it an aspiration, as it’s not always an easy rule to follow) was a little bit broken. My gaming buddies, after all, are people too, and it’s rude, socially broken, possibly even a teeny bit sociopathic, to tell anyone, by word or deed, “you’re always my lowest priority.”
That said, what’s the real challenge? As always, we need to meet our social obligations, and when you share a house and a life and a bed with someone, they have a legitimate claim to a high-priority interrupt on whatever it is you do to fill your idle hours. But “high-priority” is not the same as “absolute”, nor is it the same as “immediate”. An enlightened balance is the ideal, and how Buddhist does that sound?
I was reminded of my developing thinking on this subject by a sad memory AAG recounts:
Wrapped in a blanket to keep off the cold and armed with tea, I’d take to the porch with a book and a tiny reading light. It was a lovely retreat, and most days I was at least moderately content to spend a few hours out there reading while my husband worked or played computer games.
But on the chilliest Friday something was different. Was it hormones? An extra-hard dose of child-inspired loneliness? Too long since our last attempt at sex? I don’t know, but on that Friday night I needed the comfort and warmth of the man who I’d hoped would be my partner forever. I suggested it to him as he headed off to his work and computer. “Can we have some time alone this weekend? Maybe tonight? Or tomorrow?” I asked, attempting the lowest-pressure sell possible.
“I’m not going to have the time,” he answered. “I really need to finish that project for work, and I need to organize everyone’s fantasy football picks by Monday. Maybe early next week?”
And then he scooted off, leaving me with book and tea on the desk.
It was the first of many moments of clarity I experienced over the state of our relationship. I cried, book and tea forgotten…
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Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I know this is supposed to be a sex blog and not a porn industry blog, dammit, but I’ve published ErosBlog for long enough to put me in the porn industry if you look at things just right, and this is where I blog. Anyway, I’m sharing this porn industry link for its sad sad comedy value. What happened is that a self-described “independent film maker” with “friends who work in your industry” posted a long rambling article to the leading adult webmaster board entitled “Porner’s Manifesto: How To Fix Your Industry“.
Some of the guy’s points are sort of obvious “how to do business” advice, but all mixed up with the unsolicited business advice were angry off-topic ranty bits about how porn stars should be more willing to sleep with their fans. I’ve excerpted heavily and taken liberties with paragraph order:
I know its hard but try to care about your fans. Afterall, if you did not have them, where would you be other than in some club trying to get noticed? Give something back to those who pay your bills and I am not talking about the director or producer. They get laid enough. You want to make a difference, try laying one of your fans. Get passed the fact that they do not look like your normal porn partners. So what? In a few years, you will not be as hot as the chick they will be supporting with their hard earned cash then. Build for your future. Ensure a fan for life. I promise you, one day your current fame or vision of fame will fade and what will you be?
Let’s get one thing straight. You have sex for money. Pure and simple. While I would agree this is an art form, it what it is. The only difference between a porn star and an escort is there is a camera involved. Yet, many of these stars tend to smoke the diva hash pipe. These so called stars are hot the day they arrive but once they have been around for awhile, a new girl comes right in to replace you. It doesn’t mean to get an attitude.
I overheard this porn chick one day at Starbucks in LA. Her and her agent were talking about how to increase her popularity and you can imagine the same bullshit. Go on KSex, web sites, radio, etc… So I mention the same things I just did above and the porner looked back at me and said and I quote: “Are you fucking stupid? Why would I ever want to fuck any of my fans? Have you ever seen my fans? They are fucking gross and fat. Why do you think they have to jerk off to me? The day I fuck my fans is the day I become a whore.â€? Now imagine that. I simply replied, you fuck for money, youre a whore.
Seriously, I have never seen an industry that ignores their fans the way porn stars do. Not to mention, these same stars are the ones who think they should be immune to the down times by charging the same rates to producers. I am unsure if anyone has tried to sit them down and explain that what they do isn’t that difficult to find someone else to do. Unless you shoot fireworks out of your vagina, you have sex on camera. It’s not something you went to college for. You do not need a special degree for it. You lay down, you have sex, and then take a brick in the mouth. But to listen to some girls, you would think they are curing world hunger or cancer. The only cancer they may be preventing is prostate cancer but thats still open to debate.
Anybody want to take odds that this guy has (or had) himself in mind as one of the fans “the talent” should be fucking for free? No, too easy? OK, what are the odds he’s actually tried, and failed miserably, to seduce a porn girl? (For “seduce” you could read “make a crude and lazy pass at” with, I suspect, great accuracy.)
Friday, August 1st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
If I had to guess, I’d guess that this photograph is of a nudist, from the era when porn was pretty dangerous to publish. Publications featuring pictures of the “sunshine and health” lifestyle sold as well as you’d expect, but they were so gosh-darn wholesome that blue-nosed prosecutors found them difficult to suppress:
Like most of the vintage photos you’ll see on ErosBlog, I found this on alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. vintage.
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Porn from the days when furs were still popular:
From Eye Candy Blog.
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Friday, July 25th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
These are from an erotic comic called The College Of Erotic Science by Ferocius:
I have heard guys scoff — in theory, as these opportunities arise rarely outside of porn and your better class of orgies — at this sort of woman-sharing. Usually they proclaim, loudly, that they’d never do such a thing because your dick would be, like, almost touching another guy’s dick. Too close for comfort, anyway; if you’d do that, you’d have to be gay.
Yes, they say this like it’s a bad thing.
Word of advice to those guys: Like Ron White says, we’re all a little bit gay anyways. Grow up, nut up, and get over it. You’re still stuck in your high school locker room, while the grownups — the Men with a capital M — are out seizing the day and eating the oysters and, yup, laughing at you.
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Thursday, July 24th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
A while back there a jokey “Porn For Women” book that came out, full of handsome SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys) doing stuff like laundry while captioned as saying “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll go grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me, so you can relax.”
Some of it was mildly funny, but the stereotypes were so tiring that I never bothered to link.
And then I stumbled over this picture, which was, like, the same thing — only better:
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been having a lot of fun with my collection of vintage skin magazines lately, but some of the things you find in them are absolutely astonishing cultural artifacts. Of course it’s no surprise that pornographers, like fashion photographers, tend to have a warped idea of what constitutes “chubby” in a woman. But I was still astonished to find this photograph as the illustration, in a 1962 Mood magazine, for an article about “chubby girls”:
The article itself is an amazing compilation of wild stereotypes and unreconstructed male smugness:
HIGH WIDE AND HANDSOME
Chubby Chums Are Grateful Girls!
By George Pesante
The trouble with this country is not smog or juvenile delinquency or even TV commercials. The trouble with this country is, that it’s getting so hard to find a fat girl.
Oh, sure, they still exist, and a good thing too, because if they ever do disappear from view, we’re going to have to raise them in special herds like the vanishing buffalo.
But what with all this diet talk and reducing salons springing up to replace the corner pool room, and what with cars getting smaller, lower, the fat girl is being driven out of fashion.
This is too bad. Any man who has played parlor hockey with a fat girl knows that here is a wonderful fund of fun, frolic and felicity.
Unlike slim girls who are the darlings of modern fashion, fat girls get little attention. That means that when a man does bestow his favors upon them, they react like a St. Bernard in a sausage factory.
They laugh, they giggle, they respond to your attentions with happy shrieks. In short, they just lap it up. What’s more, they don’t need to be persuaded. Simply give them the nod and they’re off to the races. And once a fat girl gets herself in motion, she’s awfully hard to stop.
Incidentally, the old belief that fat girls are necessarily jolly girls is only sometimes true. There are plenty of fat girls who are so frustrated by their lack of male attention that they are foul-tempered, mean and sullen.
The majority of them are sunny though, and even the grumpy lumpies will respond much more quickly to a little warmth than the average slim-waisted woman.
Some girls are fat, of course, because they have glandular deficiencies and these are generally to be avoided. Frequently they have moustaches and evil tempers and are so fat as to cause topographical confusion.
On the other hand, a girl who is generously plump, simply because the good Lord made her that way, a girl who likes to eat and drink and have herself a good time — this girl is worth solid gold, all 180 pounds of her.
Another fallacy about fat girls is that they are light on their feet. This isn’t true, most of them are as heavy as all get-out. But it’s pretty easy to get them off their feet. And that’s what really counts.
A fat girl is used to the notiion that people can’t lift her up and toss her around as if she were a ballerina. Consequently, she won’t force you to go through those gymnastics. She’ll arrange herself in such a way as to spare you the grunt and groan preliminaries.
Generally speaking, fat girls have one trait in common which their slimmer sisters do not always enjoy. They tend to have skins as smooth as foam rubber and twice as bouncy.
They cost less to feed than slim girls because they go in heavy for bread and mashed potatoes and show a marked preference for beer.
Because fat girls do not get the rush that slim girls do, they don’t expect to be taken out to fancy places. They don’t expect filet mignon and champagne. The back seat of a car and a pile of sandwiches will do nicely, especially if both the sandwiches and the back seat are big.
Fat girls tend to live alone more often than slim girls. They need more room around them and also, they are embarrassed by their slimmer roommates. This makes it much easier to date a fat girl, and what’s more, to make the date pay off.
Needless to say, fat girls are a joy in the wintertime, because there’s nothing more comforting than to find yourself enfolded by great mounds of curvy girl. They are equally delightful in the summer time, however, because they like nothing on but the electric fan. And, after all, what could be more fun than that?
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
There is no sex in this post — it’s a post about the business of blogging. Feel free to skip it.
Short version: this is a warning to my fellow adult bloggers about a very dubious pitch you may have received recently. Etology.com is sending out spammy emails to adult bloggers in which the company feigns an interest in buying ads, only to abandon that pretense once you answer the email. Without further ado, having confirmed your interest in selling ads, they begin giving the hard sell for ad brokerage services — not buying any ads at all, but rather, offering your ad space to their network of potential advertisers. Classic bait-and-switch: first the false offer (the bait) to get your attention, then the switch to the real offer. Illegal in some jurisdictions, scummy everywhere.
Long version follows.
On Monday, I received a curious email:
Subject: I want to Buy Ad Space on erosblog.com
Greetings,
I would like to buy advertising space on your website erosblog.com. Do you have anything available? Please let me know.
Best Regards,
Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com
Emails like this are not uncommon. What made this one curious is that Etology.com is an advertising broker; they act as a middleman between web publishers and web advertisers, collecting a commission on all the advertising transactions they touch, and helping to facilitate those transactions. I would expect them to be making a pitch to broker any available ad space ErosBlog might have, but buying advertising space here? It didn’t make sense. The “spam or con job” hairs on the back of my neck went up.
No matter; they got one of my standard responses, the low-effort one I save for leads I don’t think will amount to anything:
Hi, Tai. Ad space on Erosblog is available through the Blogads “advertise on ErosBlog” links in the ErosBlog sidebars. Prices and availability are visible when you follow those links.
Thanks for your interest!
I will confess to sending the above in a spirit of modest mischief. Even if Etology.com had a genuine interest in buying advertising space on ErosBlog, the idea that they might wish to do so via the services of a competing ad brokerage service (BlogAds) is, perhaps, implausible.
When I sent the above email, my “send-and-receive” email operation brought an identically worded email addressed to another one of my sites, with the only word of difference being the domain name. Asking about buying ad space via bulk email? Really? The unlikely inquiry now began to seem downright implausible.
And sure enough, my next communique from Etology.com was strangely silent about the ad space they wanted to buy just three hours and twenty-seven minutes previously:
Thank you for your quick response. I just want to mention that we are the largest adult advertising network and we have great relationships with big advertisers like rude.com, redtube.com, youporn.com, and many others. We offer the highest industry publisher payouts and I would like the opportunity to help you better monetize your ad space. I’m very interested in working with you and your website, please contact me so that we can see if we are a good fit.
Regards,
Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com
That’s a form letter, an email macro, and it contains the standard ad brokerage sales pitch: “to help you better monetize your ad space.” Which, it may surprise you to learn, I am not against. Monetization buys me beer and bacon and dinners out with The Nymph. But there’s the little matter of the bait and switch, which is so offensively blatant and dishonest that it has — not to put too fine a point on things — righteously pissed me off. What, am I supposed to be too stupid to notice that the bait has been yanked away?
More serious than me being pissed off is the issue of trust. Ad brokers, like affiliate programs, are notorious for collecting services from webmasters (in this case, ad inventory, page views for web ads) and then being slow to pay, or finding some lame excuse (“bad traffic” is the vague classic) not to pay at all, or simply getting behind on payments and then going out of business without paying anybody. It happens all the time.
Which means, of course, that if you do business on the web, business that involves collecting, holding, and transmitting money on behalf of webmasters, you need to be (or at least to look) as trustworthy as a bank. Your fundamental business challenge is to convince webmasters to trust you with their money. And that’s not easy. Webmasters who have been been repeatedly burned are a hostile and suspicious lot, when it comes to trying the next great new program. We’ve heard all the monetization promises before, and been burned by too many of them.
One way in which you do NOT gain a reputation for being trustworthy is to lie to your potential business associates in your very first freaking email to them. As J.P. Morgan once famously said, “A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.” Thus, my interest in pursuing Etology’s offer to broker my ad inventory, an interest that was never very high, is now … how shall I put this delicately? … very low.
Nonetheless, I was fascinated by the blatant nature of the initial deception, and amused by the slight dissonance resulting from the macro/form-letter nature of their brokerage pitch. In response to my response, they sent me a standard brokerage marketing pitch with out-of-place “please contact me” phrasing. Let’s ask about that, aggressively:
Er, I’m confused. I just DID contact you in response to a request from you to buy ad space. Why are you asking me to contact you a second time? Was your first email just a bait-and-switch spam to advertise your ad brokerage service? If so, that’s an exceptionally dubious business practice that’s not encouraging me to explore doing business with you.
In all honesty, I never expected to hear from them again. I was forgetting that it never pays to underestimate the tenacity, or overestimate the chutzpah, of a commissioned salesperson:
I apologize for the confusion. I just wanted to see if there was any interest in me helping you monetize your ad space on your website. Like I said before we are the largest adult advertising network and we have the highest industry publisher payouts. My intention is to help pair up our advertisers with publishers that have great sites like yours. Please let me know if there is any interest.
Thank you for your time,
Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com
Well, there we have it — a bare apology (for my confusion, natch, not for anything Tai actually did) and the sales pitch a second time. At least it’s now fairly clear that Tai never had any interest in buying ad space; the deceptive intent in the first email is now confirmed.
Sometimes the devil gets in me, and I write challenging emails to people. This was one of those times:
I’m sorry, Tailynn, but I’m still not sure I understand what’s going on here. The first email from you had the following subject line: “I want to Buy Ad Space on erosblog.com.” The first sentence of that email was “I would like to buy advertising space on your website erosblog.com.”
You are now saying “I just wanted to see if there was any interest in me helping you monetize your ad space.” That’s really quite different, and not, I think, a matter of “confusion” if your only interest is in brokering sales of ad space on behalf of third-party advertisers. That would not be confusion on my part, but rather, deception on yours.
So, which is it? Was your initial inquiry in respect to buying ad space, or brokering it?
I note with interest that I am now receiving queries identical to your first at some of my other blog properties. Right now it looks very much to me like you are engaging in deceptive spam practices, unless there’s some aspect to our communications which I am misunderstanding. I hope you can clear this up for me?
At this point, Tai’s best plan would have been to fess up to the deception, apologize for it, wish me a nice day, and move on, hoping I would forget all about it and never mention it to anyone.
What I got was the first two things in eight words, a miraculous verbal economy. This full and fair but extremely sparse apology was followed by — you guessed it! — more sales pitch. First sentence: I’m sorry I lied to you. Next seven sentences: now let me tell you how great it’s going to be doing business with you!
I apologize for being misleading in my inquiries. Let me start over. My company Etology.com is an adult advertising network that helps pair up advertisers with publishers like yourself that have great sites. We’ve developed extensive relationships with big advertisers like youporn, rude.com, and redtube to name a few. We also have a large selection of network ads. My offering to you is to place advertising on your site to help monetize your ad space, thus helping you make money from your site. The types of ads available to you are GTBs, text, banner, commercial breaks, and in-video XML. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best Regards,
Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com
Astonishing. Shorter Tai: “I lied, I’m sorry, but I don’t see why we can’t still do business.”
I decided to decline the invitation to let Tai start over. Churlish of me, I suppose. Instead, I offered Tai the short lecture on business ethics, along with modest foreshadowing as to why it’s not smart to lie to bloggers on behalf of your internet company:
Tailynn, thank you for being — on your fourth try — straightforward with me. I’ll try to be as straightforward with you.
As it happens, I am interested in finding another ad broker. I had previously looked at Etology, but your website contains no information suggesting that it is an adult-advertising friendly network, so I had dismissed it as a possibility.
However, your initial contact with me was, as you have now admitted, a deliberate lie. You are spamming bloggers with a false and misleading inquiry in an attempt to get attention, and then you are baiting and switching, disclaiming any interest in buying ad space and instead offering your brokerage services.
Not only is that unconscionable as a spamming technique, it is laughably stupid. It establishes you and your company as untrustworthy, which is a very poor basis for attracting new publishers to your network. A publisher has to trust an ad broker with collection and remission of funds. How on earth could I trust your company with my money, when your initial business contact with me consisted of a blatant and deliberate lie?
I am planning to complain publicly about your mendacious business practices to provide warning to the blogging community, but before I do so, I’d like to give someone in a position of higher authority in your organization an opportunity to comment on whether this sort of mendacious business practice is consistent with your corporate policies. Do you have any suggestions as to whom I should forward my complaint and request for corporate comment? Or shall I simply start with your abuse and support emails and work from there?
That one was sent after close of business Monday. A couple of hours into Tuesday’s business day, there was no response. As I was indeed planning to make this blog post, it seemed only fair to Etology to give them at least one shot to spin this their way. So I sent the following email to support@, abuse@, Tai, and to Brock Purpura, Etology CEO, whose email I deduced from press releases and from the Etology.com standard email conventions:
Subject: Complaint And Request For Corporate Comment
Hello. I have a complaint about Etology’s email marketing practices. Specifically, one of your Account Managers is spamming adult bloggers with a deceptive come-on, claiming that Etology wants to “buy” ad space and then, once this lie gets a blogger response, switching over to the standard “we’d like to help you monetize your ad space” broker sales pitch. As you are in the brokerage business, there can be no doubt that your sales managers know the difference between “buy” and “help monetize”, so the initial email appears to be an obvious and deliberate lie.
I consider lying to prospective customers to be an abusive and deceptive marketing practice that reflects extremely badly on Etology.com. I will, for whatever little it may be worth, be making my disgust at this marketing practice public, on my blog, tomorrow morning.
However, I am conscious that in a competitive sales environment, sales personnel sometimes do things that are not in accord with company policy. Accordingly, I have decided to hold off on making my complaint public until tomorrow morning, and to send this email in the interim. Please forward this email to whomever in your company might wish to comment on whether lying to generate sales leads comports with Etology’s accepted business ethics and policies.
The “abuse” email address bounced, no such address. None of the others bounced. Thirty six minutes later, I had my answer. There is a {snip} in the middle; I have elided (for brevity) four more paragraphs of sales pitch about Etology’s ad brokerage services:
I know that you are upset and I apologize for the choice of words that were used in the emails below. Tailynn is fairly new and may have overstepped with her first few emails.
I would like to provide an explanation of what Etology does. We are an online ad network that pairs up advertisers and publishers. Simple as that. We broker the ads and pay the publishers 75% of all the earnings. We pay our internally managed publishers twice a month, as opposed to net 30, like other ad networks.
{snip}
I apologize again, but hope I have cleared up any misunderstandings about our service and practices. I will be here to answer any questions or address concerns that you have about our service and practices. Feel free to contact me through instant message if that is easier for you. Thank you.
Jeff Sue
Account Manager
www.etology.com
This is standard PR smoothing, consisting of an acknowledging my aggrieved status followed by a non-apology apology. The “choice of words” is apologized for, but the underlying deception? Nope. This was a matter of unfortunate phrasing, nothing more, now let me tell you how we are going to get rich together!
Those of you in the adult industry will also recognize, and be laughing at, that phrase “Tailynn is fairly new.” Whenever an adult industry company is caught spamming, shaving, stealing web page designs, or doing anything else unsavory, the standard PR response is that “it was a new employee, and we didn’t know about the behavior.” It’s such a predictable response that it’s become something of an inside joke.
To be fair, in this case I wouldn’t be surprised if the bog-standard excuse also turned out to be actually true. The bait-and-switch deception is such a phenomenally bad idea from a business standpoint that it very well might be the act of a new employee desperate and eager to make a tough sales quota. But in that case, shouldn’t I be hearing an unequivocal disavowal of the practice, and an apology for something more substantial than “choice of words”? No, Jeff said “Tailynn … may have overstepped with her first few emails.” Or maybe not; for Jeff, it’s a wobbler. Maybe we really do approve of lying to sales leads? Jeff doesn’t know; Jeff can’t say.
Of course you know I had to write back to him:
Jeff, I appreciate your email, and I’ll be including the pertinent paragraphs in the blog post I make about this matter. Unfortunately, I find your reaction to this problem to show a disturbing lack of concern.
This is not a “choice of words” issue. One of your people is *lying* to prospective business contacts. Your response fails to indicate whether Etology condones that behavior; when you say she “may have overstepped” you leave open that she may *not* have. I’m looking for an unequivocal response from Etology.com as to whether, as a matter of corporate policy, she did.
Let me be explicit. Like everyone who does business on the internet, I prioritize my email responses. Spammish emails offering me business services like your ad brokerage receive attention at a much lower priority than requests to purchase advertising. By sending a fraudulent request to buy advertising, your person is deliberately exploiting this difference in priorities — lying to get to the head of the line. Obviously, when the lie is discovered, it creates anger and resentment, along with a fundamental lack of trust that — one would think — is a problem for a company that’s expected to collect and remit funds to its publisher customers.
I used to work in an office where salesmen would lie to our receptionist, claiming to be clients, in order to get their sales calls forwarded to my desk. Obviously, they and their companies went on my permanent blacklist for this behavior. My current complaint — and my reaction to it — is analogous. But, now that we live in the era of blogs and Google, I can more easily “share my blacklist” (and the reasons for it) with the world, in the interest of making this sort of behavior off limits for reputable companies.
Accordingly, I think it would be in Etology’s best interest to disavow this marketing practice in unequivocal words.
Thanks for your time.
Writing that email forced me to figure out why I care as much about this as I do. We live in an attention economy these days, and prioritizing our attention is vital to business success. I (well, me and my filters) sort four or five thousand emails a day, most of them spam and most of the rest, bacn. Sorting out the tiny but significant fraction of business email from people who actually want to send me money? That’s a vital business function that takes a lot of time and effort. Lying to me in an effort to subvert my vital business functions? Way to piss me off.
Lying for attention is theft of attention, and it’s not just a minor offense. Time is money, and stealing one is as bad as stealing the other. If the corporate culture at Etology.com is honestly supportive of this type of deception, they are not a company I’d enjoy having to trust for a monthly check.
Jeff’s response, this morning:
I am very concerned about all customers of Etology/AVN. Without our customers being happy and satisfied, we would not exist as the largest adult ad network.
As I mentioned Tailynn is fairly new here. It was not that she was lying, it’s just that she took the wrong approach and didn’t explain herself properly (as we do offer to buy adspace out right for a flat rate). I’m sure you can understand how issues happen when you are new on a job. Regardless, the lack of information resulted in your time used on deciphering, which ultimately led to mistrust. Again, I apologize for that.
We have addressed the issue with Tailynn and management and offer our customer support to your questions and concerns.
Jeff Sue
Account Manager
www.etology.com
So there you have it, another non-apology apology, apologizing for my reaction and my “mistrust” rather than for the actual wrong done. No, wait, I forgot, Jeff says “I would like to buy advertising space” was not a lie, even though the person writing it had no intention of buying advertising space, because the company more broadly does sometimes (but not this time) “offer to buy adspace.” Sorry, Jeff, but Tailynn herself told me “I just wanted to see if there was any interest in me helping you monetize your ad space.” Tailynn herself said “I apologize for being misleading in my inquiries.” If there was ever any intention to “buy” ad space on Erosblog, I gave Tailynn three chances to say so. She never did. If Etology.com cannot recognize the deliberately deceptive bait-and-switch, and acknowledge that it was problematic, Etology.com is not a safe company to do business with.
If any other webmasters have received dishonest solicitations from Etology.com, I’d be interested in hearing about it in the comments. And especially, if there’s any adult blogger from whom Etology.com has actually bought advertising space outright (as opposed to brokering it through their network) I’d like to hear about it.
Monday, July 14th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
As every red-blooded American guy knows, there’s an entire genre of “women in prison” movies featuring, in varying degrees, bondage, nudity, sex, and soapy lesbian shower scenes. Most of these movies ultimately deliver less of all four than they advertise in the trailer, although rare (and inevitably hard to find) counter-examples do exist. Still and all, if there’s a guy out there who hasn’t been disappointed by a “WIP” flick, I haven’t met him.
Pornographers, fortunately, are not constrained by the legalities and customs appurtenant to theatrical distribution. For anybody who has a credit card, it’s now possible to remedy the almost-forgotten adolescent dissatisfaction with the six short seconds of grainy naked boobies that were the highlight of the (only) shower scene in “South American Chain Gang Girls” on Cinemax at 2:00AM in 1988. I’m thinking the Captive Slut movie and photo shoot is what somebody at Whipped Ass thinks South American Chain Gang Girls should have looked like, back in 1988, or maybe 1974:
The getting-rapidly-cleaner model with the expressively worried-looking face is Clare Dames. As mentioned above, the move/shoot is called Captive Slut.
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Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
We have treaded before on the well-trod ground of Leda and her excessively friendly swan. But this circa 1740 painting attributed to François Boucher puts things in a more sexually vivid (not to mention, better shaved) perspective than we had formerly seen here on ErosBlog:
(Click the image for a larger and uncropped version.)
By the way, if you were so inclined you could use this bit of art to mock all the people who complain about the “modern trend” to show hairless pussies in porn.
Friday, June 6th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
This is one of those old snapshots that grown children sometimes worry about finding in a shoe box in the attic. It was back when the kids were babies, in that first crackerbox of a house over in that little neighborhood about three blocks from the tracks, and after Mom saved enough green stamps to get Dad a camera and darkroom kit for his birthday, how could she refuse to model for him in the garden?
Found on Usenet.
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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
In making this post, I feel like some guy in 1996 going “there’s this little website called eBay, it’s like an auction but it’s all over the world at once, right now it’s just got a few old lunchboxes and some busted electronics, but I think it could be huge someday!”
First, some background. Nobody I know of is happy with the current search monopoly situation. You search one place because they have the best results, nobody else even comes close. But when those results suck, what can you do? Nothing.
This problem is particularly acute with adult blogs, which often perform poorly in the search engines despite having some of the most detailed textual discussions extant of many sexual issues. There’s presumably a complex of reasons for this, the biggest of which is probably spam. So many porn spammers attempt to game the search engines to promote their sex sites, that the search engine “immune systems” (filters and controls) are quick to kick in when adult search terms are present. There’s also some evidence (endlessly blogged about elsewhere) that the search engines, being corporate, are fairly hostile to sexual material, or at best indifferent to the quality of adult searches.
Anyway, what can be done? The paradigm of automatic crawling plus automated anti-spam filters yields a functional index, but in adult areas the subjective quality of the results often seems low. And, in my experience, the more I know about a search term, the worse the results look to me — there are too many “where is that site, it should be here?” and “that site is just a slick-looking front end for spammy scraped-and-morphed RSS” moments.
Enter Jimmy Wales, the guy (love him or hate him) who was instrumental in making Wikipedia what it is today. He’s been working for quite awhile on using wiki-style user interaction to create better search results than anything available today. It’s an insanely ambitious concept, because the easier you make it for folks to “improve” search results, the easier you make it for them to game them, spam them, and crap all over them in wild orgies of sheerest vandalism. Is it possible for the crowdsourced wiki magic to overwhelm the forces of spam, or at least to fight them to a useful draw? Right now, it seems unlikely. But everybody thought Wikipedia could never be useful, either. That turned out to be dead wrong; for all its manifest flaws, Wikipedia is insanely useful on many topics.
If — please join me in my pipe dream — if only the new Wikia Search (re-released today in open Alpha with, for the first time, useful user-editing features) could produce a user experience that’s competitive with the current search behemoth, wouldn’t that be awesome? It doesn’t have to win or be better — it just needs a fan base and an integer percentage of total search volume, enough to trigger some concern and competition from the corporate search providers. We all know that internet users search for adult stuff (including, but not limited to, porn) a whole lot. Right now, those search outcomes are poor, and nobody in corporate America seems much interested in improving them.
I am hoping that Wikia Search offers a way forward. Why not check it out, play around with the very intuitive tools for improving the results of the searches that you do, see if it isn’t fun to use and fun to improve? (I got sucked in on my first visit; before I knew it, I’d deleted tons of spammy results from several searches and fixed the ugly “snippets” for several favorite sites. I even added a few worthy sites that weren’t showing up. It’s addictively fun, and much easier than working on a Wikipedia article.)
We know the spammers — including the porn spammers — are going to be all over this if it gets any traction. In my (metaphorical) pipe dream, I’m imagining the non-spammy adult web people getting there first, to help build and defend useful search results for adult terms. Idealistic, I know, and pointless if this turns out to be a failed experiment. But imagine the fun if it succeeds!
Here’s the TechCrunch article where I learned of today’s relaunch, and there’s also a short video there explaining how to use the user-modification tools to improve the search results:
Today, Wikia Search is beginning to suck a lot less. It has only indexed 30 million Websites, but it is finally rolling out a set of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results. It also makes it easier for anyone to try to game the search results. Although, as with Wikipedia, an spammers can be banned by the community. We should see some fierce edit wars on this one.
Here’s Jimmy himself, in Forbes:
Participation in Wikia search has the same incentive as anything online–it’s something people enjoy doing. People edit wikis not because it’s a charity, but because they have common interests and because it’s fun. Also, we’re making the barriers to participation very, very low. If you search for something and find a result that’s not relevant, it’s gone with a single click, and you’ve made the search results a little better.
…
Right now search is a closed box, and there are some plausible reasons for that, like preventing people from gaming the algorithm for commercial gain and keeping out malicious players. But can we create something that’s as open and transparent as possible and publicly accountable? That’s what we’re shooting for.
Two years from now, people may point at this post and go “LOL, whut?” But I’m hoping, instead, that everybody goes “You mean, search used to be done by brainless robots trying to follow clever rules? Wow, that must have really sucked.”
Because, it does.
Monday, May 19th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
One of the first strong porn brands on the web was an outfit called ALS Scan, who, in the middle-late 1990s, pioneered a then-new aesthetic: the girl next door, pretty and fresh and freshly shaved all over, in a brightly-lit photoshoot with vibrant colors, doing astonishingly dirty deeds with whatever fruits, vegetables, or household objects are handy, all with a big come-hither smile. It’s not that other pornographers haven’t done the same thing before or since; it’s that ALS has always done it better than anybody else, for certain values of better.
Take Amy Lee:
She’s a pretty girl. She’s just as pretty with her shirt on (in a photo that proves she actually has arms) especially if you appreciate a girl who can cook:
So far, she’s just like a zillion other pretty internet ladies who prance around in and out of some cute undies, maybe flashing some pink at the end of the photoshoot so you don’t feel cheated out of the price of your subscription. You’ve seen it before, you’ve seen it all, ho hum.
What you’re not expecting — what nobody was expecting until ALS Scan pretty much invented the genre — is that this cute young model (who has not yet starred in half a dozen movies with names like Anal Ass-Bangers #22, and is not yet staring at the looming end of her porn career) will lick her lips with an excellent facsimile of honest lust, tuck her ankles cheerfully in behind her ears, look you straight in the eye, and use four fingers to stretch her pussy open until you’ve got a distinctly gynecological view of her assets. And yet, that’s exactly what she does.
It can be an eye-opener. And, for me at least, it makes every visit to ALS Scan a memorable one.
Thursday, May 15th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
One thing I like about writing a sex blog, in this era of increasing porn saturation, is that as the competition heats up, and production values increase, I’m seeing more and more porn that looks like art, especially from the high-quality porn producers like Kink.com or (for your non-kinky examples) Femjoy or Domai.
It used to be that a shot like this one, of Candice Nicole enjoying an enforced contemplative post-ejaculatory moment during a Sex And Submission shoot, would have come only from the studio of one of the “arty” guys like Craig Morey or Richard Kern:
My problem with erotic art photography is that, historically, it has tended to strike me as self-conscious and defensive, and in its defensiveness, it often grew boring. In its worst form, we get that endless flood of semi-abstract nudes that congest web galleries and college sophomore life photography classes. You know what I’m talking about: the curve of a buttock or breast, usually upside down or at an odd angle, often pressed against some random implausible texture like old roofing tin, presented in black and white with funky lighting so as to make the whole project safely non-sexual.)
Luckily, as the standards and technology of porn photography get better, I’m seeing a best-of-both-worlds convergence, with your favorite subscription porn shack pumping out art-quality photos of a volume and diversity and unapologetic lustful sexuality that even the best “erotic art” photographers never seemed to manage. And I love it!
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Reader KingTaco writes in with some choice sex spam. I didn’t want it in the comment thread where KingTaco put it, but I fully concur with the urge to share it with the broader world. KingTaco says:
I’ve just received what I consider to be the holy grail of porn spam. It’s easily the most impressive piece of all-text advertising I’ve ever seen. I hope it’s not in bad taste of me to post it in it’s near entirety here (near in the sense that I’ve removed the linked porn site because it’s not my intention to try and advertise for them using the Eros Blog comments as a free ride):
“You could be thinking to yourself, how did an exotic Oriental fetish such as bukkake could become so widespread. It’s pretty simple, really. It’s all about traditional, conservative values. And what can be more accepted or conservative than openly humiliating women who cheat on their husbands by dragging them into the public square, binding them tightly with ropes and having every able-bodied male in town shoot hot loads of thick, burbling man-sap into the offending wenches’ pleading, upturned faces?
Nowadays, bukkake isn’t a punishment… it’s a way of life! Modern, liberated young women of all races, colors and creed have awoken to the sexual potentials of this practice, and today, you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a gal who loves it right up on the face, or right down the throat, or in the eyes, or all over their heads, whatever way they can get it, really.
If you desire your models charming, your content exclusive and your facials hardcore, then (link removed) is certainly what you have been looking for.”
Such a prose poem to the glories of facial spooge almost cries out for a picture, so I went and found one for you:
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Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
So of course, my skepticism of yesterday’s Marilyn Monroe blowjob movie report was shared by others, some of whom now claim to be “debunking” the “hoax”. To me, the “debunking” sounds like skeptical experts explaining why skepticism is in order, but you can’t really establish “hoax” unless you have evidence or a confession, which the skeptical experts do not (yet) appear to have. It wouldn’t be fair for us to expect debunkers to do the impossible (“Prove that the movie doesn’t exist!) but it’s still cheating for them to engage in their informed arm-waving and then claim that’s the same as if they did prove the movie doesn’t exist. I’ll chalk this up to Defamer’s over-hyperbolic headline writing, and wait to see what else develops.
Meanwhile, there’s much internet talk of a tame old porno loop called The Apple, Knockers, and the Coke Bottle, starring Arline (or Arlene?) Hunter, who (some people say) looks a bit like Marilyn. If anybody out there is treasuring that loop in a format suitable for emailing, ErosBlog stands ready to share it with a broader public. My Google-Fu is weak today, and has so far yielded only this:
Source is a Marilyn Monroe fan site with this to say:
The actress in this film is named Arlene Hunter who was a 1954 playmate for Playboy magazine. In it Miss Hunter removes her clothes, rolls an apple around her breasts, and then provocatively sips from a Coke Bottle.
I can’t believe that people are making money off of this stag film by ripping off unsuspecting fans. I personally don’t even see how someone could mistake the two women, Arlene Hunter has a faint resemblence to Norma Jeane but is certainly no look alike.
Interestingly, there may be another stag film out there that’s commonly claimed to feature Marilyn. This site is adamant that it’s not the Apple/Coke Bottle movie, and has the best compilation I found of stills, links to magazine coverage, and the like. I myself don’t find the stills to be all that compelling:
Open season:
I hereby declare that the usual Erosblog rules against the “Is it real? Is it fake? Is it Photoshop?” game in the comments DO NOT APPLY to this post, or to the previous one. Hell, for this story, that’s got to be at least half the fun. Go wild, but remember this — unless you are the photographer of one of the images in question and want to share your first hand knowledge, your opinion is not fact and should not be presented as such, or with unwarranted certitude.
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
BJ from BJ’s Gay Porno-crazed Ramblings is one of the very few people on my blogroll who have been doing this sex blog thing longer than I have. He appears to have a vintage gay porn collection of enormous depth and scope, bits of which he sometimes blogs about when he offers them (the bits) for sale on eBay. It is, however, exceedingly rare for BJ to mention anything that might involve the risk of girl-cooties, which makes this description doubly hilarious:
WARNING! DANGER!
I can only hope you read the warning! danger! before clicking for the clip. It’s from my all-time favorite (porno) film, BUT it involves a chick. To my closest friends who know me as a Kinsey 8, the fact that I can not only watch, but actually enjoy this scene is bewildering. Roy Garrett goes to the local porno shop (in rural Montana in 1982 – willing suspension of disbelief, anyone?) and winds up feeding dollars to Jolene (wonderfully portrayed by Suzanne Tyson, who you no doubt remember form the 1981 classic, Wanda Whips Wall Street, but I digress…) and doing terrible, disgusting, sickening things – meaning he touches “it”, she touches her own “it”, he even… oh, I can’t even type it… but there’s also these two other guys watching, and watching each other. It’s not about gaysex, it’s about Male Bonding (with a vengeance, as the video box says).
I —– JUST —– LOVE IT!
He’s talking about a film called Heatstroke, and he’s kindly included a link to a ten minute clip.
Friday, April 4th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
A spam that made it through my filters today made me smile with the sheer excess of the offer in the subject line:
Hogtied Amateur Vacuum Tortured On Butt Hardcore
Gracious me, I sure wouldn’t want to settle for softcore vacuum torturing on the butts of hogtied amateurs!
The pitch inside the spam email was softened just a bit: “Brunette Bdsm Slave Vacuum Tortured Hardcore” and a link.
It’s possible they actually wanted to sell me some hogtied amateur brunettes, but I doubt it. Reputable porn sites eschew spam as a marketing method, because spam creates blind rage that tends to be an insurmountable marketing barrier. Plus, it’s illegal in the United States. Sometime I’ll get spam (not this one) that seems to be selling a porn site I know about, but it’s usually a form of social proof; if you think you’re familiar with the pitched product, you’re more likely to click through into unsuspected spyware browser-hijacking hell.
Anyway, I’ll never know for sure what this particular spam was selling, because I lacked the courage or foolhardiness to click the link. The domain had certain famous small fuzzy toy keywords in it (maybe so it would look safe?) and a .cn domain extension. Those Chinese domain names are notorious these days because spammers can buy them in bulk for cheap, which means that they can use them for hostile and malicious spam campaigns that lead directly to aggressive malware installers, browser hacks, and the like. Once the domain gets widely banned, or even deactivated, just move on to a new one!
The return email address looked like the email for some poor guy’s AT&T cell phone. That’s easily spoofed and was probably pure fiction, but it made me wonder. Is this yet another bad thing that can happen to you when you get your cell phone stolen?
Now, start your vacuum cleaners!
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
One of the things I like about reading a diversity of sex blogs is that you get sexual accounts that are written in historic, rather than fictive, voice. Commercial porn is most often told in the voices we reserve for telling tales. Sex blogs, by contrast, are often written in the voices we use to retell our lives and histories. It can be refreshingly different, because it allows for real moments that would usually be edited out of the smooth story arc of competent fiction, but which are really the heart and soul and flavor of a good history.
Today’s example: Always Aroused Girl writing about what got up her nose.
“I want to come on your face.”
My head already hung half-way over the edge of the bed, so I quickly swiveled under him. “Give it to me,” I demanded, and I didn’t have to wait long. Before I could hoist my tits into what I thought would be the most attractive position, hot come splashed over me.
And then it obeyed the call of gravity, as fluids are wont to do. If I’d have moved I would have destroyed the tail end of his orgasm and possibly run head first into his nut-sack. So I laid still, but I couldn’t control my laughter as the come found its way into my hair.
And into my eyes. And up my nose.
He came to from the pleasure and noticed the state of my face. Immediately a stream of apologies shot forth from his mouth. I assured him that I loved – nay, lived for – being covered in come. “Can I get you a towel?” he asked, heading toward the bathroom.
“Yes please, and a nasal aspirator, if you have one.”
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Holly from The Pervocracy writes:
I have to stop reading radical feminist writing. … I go nuts when I read stuff like this:
“In a patriarchy, the cornerstone of which is a paradigm of male dominance and female submission, women do not enjoy the same degree of personal sovereignty that men do. This oppressed condition obtains a priori to all other conditions, and nullifies any presumption of fully human status on the part of women. A woman, therefore, cannot freely “consent,â€? because her will is obviated by her status as a subhuman.”
I don’t know what kind of women-in-chains Gor crazyworld this author is coming from, but I’m pretty damn sure that no means no, yes means yes, and throwing up your hands and screaming “we’re so oppressed we can’t even make decisions!” is not actually advancing the cause of female strength and independence.
In fact, it’s an example of something I’ve seen a few times in radfem thought–going so far that they actually come full circle. You see statements like “women aren’t able to give consent” and “women just want love, but men exploit it for sex,” and you might as well be on the Abstinence Warriors forum–it’s the same stereotyping of both men and women and unreasonable fear of sex.
Amen, sister!
I’ve always been surprised to hear so-called “feminist” arguments that are founded in claims of female incapacity or inability to consent, or to discover and to know their own best interest.
(I say “so called”, and use scare quotes, because I’m on record: when feminists stop standing up for the choices women make, I stop recognizing them as feminists.)
Holly may wonder what sort of “women-in-chains Gor crazyworld” these arguments are coming from, but I’m more concerned with the people-in-chains world these arguments are aimed at creating. I’ve said it before in a post defending the, uh, “fully human status” of porn performers, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: once you stop respecting people’s choices, you’ve embraced the ideology of enslavement:
Built right into the postulate that people can’t know what’s good for themselves is the idea that somebody else knows better, and should therefore have the right to control the poor people who can’t tell their own good. A nasty and foul rhetorical trick to justify political power over others, and I reject it categorically.
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Thursday, March 27th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Some long while ago, when I was a young and bookish and entirely virgin lad, I stumbled across the old truism “all brides are beautiful.” Being a literal sort, my first reaction was “that’s nonsense!” I’m not sure I’d ever even been to a wedding at that point in my life, but I was confident I’d seen unattractive women who would surely marry. However, as I grew older and wiser and more experienced, I came to appreciate the logic of the thing, especially its similarity to that hoary old chestnut and maxim of firearms safety: “There’s no such thing as an unloaded firearm.”
With a particular bride or a particular firearm, it might be possible to raise a literal objection; there are, in a literal sense, firearms with empty chambers, and there might be, in a literal sense, brides whose beauty cannot be limned by describing their physical attributes. But the social utility of the claim, in either case, must entirely overwhelm and sweep away any crabbed literal objections; and the man who cannot understand this, ought not to be allowed near a firearm or a woman, either one.
Having reached that stage in my moral and social development, the notion then struck me: Why do we limit this maxim of beauty to brides alone? No obvious reason presenting itself, I resolved that there must, indeed, be no such thing as an ugly woman. And for the most part, I’ve found it to be true.
Which brings me now to the latest barrage launched by Violet Blue against the tirelessly undead troll armies of the Internet. I’d hate to have people think that I’m just YAVBF (that would be Yet Another Violet Blue Fanboy, and yes, I have been accused of this by my own small half-platoon of trolls), but I am often in awe of her unique brand of combative courage. This time she takes on all the morons who enjoy what I’ve called crapping all over beauty, and she pulls no punches:
Every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. In dinner conversation, my friend Lori reminded me of the Oscar Wilde quote, “Give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” I restated it for the Internet, replying, “Give a man a mask, and he’ll slit your throat.” The application here is, “Give a man (or a woman) an anonymous account, and he’ll eviscerate your self-esteem.”
The problem is, with so many women I talk to, the trolling is effective. The number of times I’ve talked down a crying girlfriend after she’s been trolled in her comments about being fat, ugly, skanky, slutty or stupid is higher than I can count (no matter what she writes about). Trolls watch too much mainstream porn and TV, and believe stereotypes are real; they slap us with it and then we believe it, too. We compare ourselves to overly thin models, actresses, and porn stars, and it messes with our self-image and our ability to express ourselves sexually, and especially to enjoy sex.
She also quotes Margaret Cho:
In Margaret Cho’s “Beautiful” tour, she talks about recently being on a radio show and having the host ask her point-blank, live, on the air, “What if you woke up one day, and you were beautiful?” When asked, he defined beautiful as blonde, thin, large-breasted, a porno stereotype. Cho says, “Just think of what life is like for this poor guy. There’s beauty all around him in the world, and he can only see the most narrow definition of it.”
Poor guy, indeed. Has he not seen the way Margaret Cho can fill a leather jumpsuit? I’m no LOLcat, but I known a NOM NOM NOM scenario when I see one.
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Monday, March 10th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I cannot begin to explain my recent interest in the non-explicit photographs found in explicit porn galleries. But explain it or not, here are some before and after portraits of model Samantha Sin:
In between these pictures, Samantha gets tied up and quite roughly used in this bondage sex shoot for Sex and Submission.
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Sunday, March 9th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Just in case you missed it, Violet Blue did a talk at the big Etech 2008 shindig, a talk that ranges widely across the big topic of sexual identity online and how we construct it, shape it, and especially, defend it (and ourselves, where there’s a difference) from online trolls, stalkers, and haters of all sorts. Here’s Violet Blue about her talk, here’s the transcript.
It’s juicy chewy idea-rich media, the sort of thing that makes me worry about the decline in printed magazines, because I like to buy printed magazines with this sort of info-dense article in them (Wired used to do a lot of this) to read when I’m traveling and have a lot of time to read and think. Just pulling out a random useful and true paragraph:
I’ve been a blogger and occasional full-time editor at Fleshbot.com almost since its inception, a job when full time requires me to scour the internets for explicit sexual content of reasonable quality. We endeavor to cover a wide range of sexual expression and all genders and orientations; one of our regular features is the Sex Blog Roundup. When I did it weekly, I had upwards of 300 text-only sex blogs written by individuals worldwide in my RSS reader — outside the 50 or so usual suspects of variety sex blogs, mainstream media news, linkdumps and sex news blogs. Every week I’d have to cull for new blogs to add to my feeds because invariably a handful of sex bloggers who were blogging “anonymously” had to quit blogging — meaning they were for one reason or another, no longer anonymous. It was such a regular occurrence I developed a snarky attitude toward the anonymous sex blogger, even though they often offered up the juiciest and most explicit posts about sex. Time and again, they are a sure bet for being outed or discovered, have the shortest life span, and are the least reliable for following as a human narrative.
(That paragraph is also nostalgic for me, because I compiled the first of Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundups, and immensely enjoyed doing them until I ran out of time to keep up with the extra work. Sadly, I don’t think I understood the full power of RSS back then, or I might be doing them yet.)
One thing that struck me about Violet’s talk, however, was that it describes a dangerous-sounding online world for sex bloggers, full of hatred and weird jealousies and stalker trolls and malevolent creeps, so much so that she’s got an entire array of procedures and tactics for defending herself and returning the fight to her attackers. And that’s bizarre to me; in more the five years of blogging, the worst I’ve seen from that list is ranting commenters who are deeply threatened by a world — the world I advocate — in which no sexuality is condemned or forcibly closeted or judged by any standard other than who gets hurt. Death threats she gets? It’s been months since I so much as got one of those “you’re going to burn in hell” invitations to attend church services.
So, why the difference? I trust Violet innately — as far as I’m concerned, she’s one of the most honest voices on the Internet — so she’s not exaggerating or being oversensitive or doing anything else from the “there there, little lady, don’t be hysterical” laundry list of excuses for men to ignore surprising and unwelcome female narratives. Of course, she is a woman and I’m not. And equally of course, she’s got ten thousand times more skin in the game, literally and figuratively. She doesn’t use a pseudonym, she’s active in print and broadcast media, she lives and works visibly in a vital and media-connected city, she talks about her real and actual life, she gives people handles by which to grab for her, and she bares experiences online that actually matter to her, stuff her enemies can use against her.
Whereas, I sit in my undisclosed location in Red-State America and upload an endless stream of pointers to, and scanty commentary on, sexually entertaining stuff that’s happening somewhere else in the vast internet information ecology. When I started this blog, I didn’t even have a personal sex life to blog about. I was temporarily unemployed and sitting in a studio apartment sharing badly microwaved nachos with an unsympathetic parrot who perched on my shoulder and chewed holes in my undershirt while I blogged. (I know that sounds sad, but I was actually enjoying life quite a lot, apart from the “no girlfriend” thing.) By the time I fell in with The Nymph, I was comfortable with my pattern; sex blogging is something I do about other people, using information they’ve already made public. It makes things much safer and more comfortable, and (combined with the male versus female thing) explains a great deal of the difference between Violet’s and my experiences of the sex-blogging life.
So, that’s a lot of the explanation, but is it all of it? While pondering the matter, and reading reactions to Violet’s talk, I found Ethan Zuckerman’s blog and especially, his notes from his own Etech talk on The Cute Cat Theory Of Digital Activism. He was apparently at Tripod back in those dark ages where most folks needed a service like Tripod in order to “have a web page”, and he formulated the theory that
Any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
Reading that paragraph was an “ah-ha!” moment for me. Because another huge difference between Violet and me is that, although we are both sex bloggers by any reasonable definition, I’m more of a pornographer and she’s more of an activist.
We both do stuff that blurs the lines, of course; sometimes I make posts that have at least a whiff of activist sentiment in them, and often she links to pretty pr0n pictures. But at any given blogging moment, my first thought is “will this amuse, entertain, or turn somebody on?” And, while I can’t speak for what happens in Violet’s thoughts, she’s clearly got causes — like sex education, to name just one — that animate and drive her blogging, her published writing, her public appearances, whole swathes of her professional life.
Perversely, I think her activism makes her sex blogging even more interesting and entertaining than my detached approach, so it’s not like there’s a sharp division between entertainer and activist. It’s just that — and this is the not-very-startling hypothesis you’ve waded through many long paragraphs to hear about — activists are more threatening than entertainers. They upset more apple carts, gore more oxen, get more done, make more enemies because they threat more status quos. Activists piss people off. Their fans and enemies alike are more animated and engaged.
And that, maybe, is why Violet Blue needs police contacts at the SFPD, while I make do with a lightly tweaked comment moderation plugin for my WordPress install.
Thursday, March 6th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
This is as posed as any other porn, but it’s at least a couple of decades old and the couple seems (to my eye, at least) do be doing a better-than-usual job of simulating passion:
I can’t shake the sense that these are bigger-name porn stars, so if you recognize them, please chime in!
Via alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. pornstar.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
With a few notable exceptions, this sex blog generally stays away from the feminist porn wars, which always strike me as being in the nature of unhappy negotiations over the way political correctness ought to be defined by and among its most cutting-edge advocates and devotees.
Still, the wars continue, whether I blog about them or not. Case in point: this account from Audacia Ray, about some flack she took for allowing oppressive patriarchal semen to touch women’s bodies in a porn movie she made:
I was on a panel called “Good Porn for Good Girls” that featured some female porn directors. When I first found out about the panel, I was a little apprehensive — the idea of me being a good girl is kind of funny (to say the least), and it’s also annoying that despite the fact that I’ve never called The Bi Apple “porn for women,” other people enthusiastically slap that label on it. I’m a woman, and a self-identified feminist. Ergo, my porn must be for women.
Really, I find this tiresome — I made The Bi Apple for people who want to see a slightly different vision of sexual interaction, people who are queer or pansexual or just plain curious about people and bodies and fucking. Women are of course invited — but so is everyone.
…
Anyway … the panel quickly devolved into an argument about blowjobs. A few audience members questioned the prevalence of blowjobs in Erika Lust’s films and the extent to which giving a blowjob is a feminist act. Erika quickly said that she personally likes giving blowjobs, which is why they are in her films so much, and she personally is a feminist, so do the math. It definitely seemed like the crowd didn’t buy this explanation.
I’ve seen this happen too when people ask “Why do the men in your movie ejaculate on the women’s bodies?” and my answer “I asked the female performers where they wanted the cum, so it’s all up to them where it’s deposited” is often greeted with skepticism. This kind of skepticism is the stuff of “false consciousness” — or the belief that if only we (being Erika, me, and female porn performers who like getting cum on them) were radicalized to better understand our oppression, we would know that cocksucking and money shots are Bad For Women.
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
The diversity of expressions on Sex And Submission model Charley Chase’s face in this shoot impressed me, so I thought it would be fun to whip up a matrix (bigger version here) showing just her expressive face:
Not shown: the one that’s mostly penis.
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I love this audio clip from a TV show The Nymph watches. Dr. House is making his excuse to walk away from somebody:
– house.wav –
“There’s a lot of porn piling up on the internet. It doesn’t download itself!”
Saturday, February 16th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I pretty much ignored the sad story of Zoey Zane’s disappearance when it happened, because the press treatment was so disgusting and I didn’t have any useful insight on the story. However, I was pleased to see some hints of porn positivity in this article by Alan Scherstuhl in the Kansas City Pitch:
Here’s the victim in happier times. She’s spread across a beige bed in a beige room in what must be a beige apartment complex off a frontage road someplace. She wears a pink mesh top and black knee-highs but is otherwise exposed, with one leg scissored up and the other spread wide with gynecological bluntness. This is the point of the photo, of course, the only reason that it exists.
But that’s not what makes it arresting.
She’s grinning. She has slipped off her panties with a cheerful flourish, is waving them high above her head. The air blooms in them. There’s a blooming in her face, too, a look wholly unlike what we expect from women who make sex a performance or a business. [That’s a sad commentary on your expectations — Bacchus.] She looks pleased and surprised, the way you might if you somehow managed to yank away a tablecloth without disturbing the place settings.
She looks the way any of us look when we’re naked and goofy with someone we trust. Except better, of course. She looks better.
What? Porn girls can be happy? And the news has reached Kansas?
Sander’s death is shocking. But what isn’t is the fact that, in America Gone Wild, a “sweet, good kid” – as her grandfather described her to ABC – might take her clothes off for money and post her naked photos online. For half a century now, Hef’s Girls Next Door have been leaning nude on hay bales and stirring lemonade topless. Playboy bush is a perfect timeline of both the country’s increasing comfort with pornography and pornography’s corresponding discomfort with the natural. Before ’69, the magazine hid the bush entirely. When it appeared, it immediately began to thin, becoming less unruly every year – a patch, then a tuft, then a Velcro strip, then a sharp-lined eyebrow. And then, finally, to keep up with Penthouse and strippers and former Mouseketeer starlets, nothing at all.
The women changed elsewhere, too. Now they’re glazed over, poreless, their flesh like the caramel dripping in a candy-bar commercial. Breast implants are so common that a couple of times a year, Playboy publishes Natural Beauties as a sort of event: “real” as a fetish.
As the Girl Next Door goes, so – to an extent – goes the girl next door. Sander was shaved and tattooed, professionally tanned and pierced through the lip. But she still was “natural,” both in the categorical sense and in that real-girl essence that is the selling point of online amateurs. She looked real because that’s what she was: a real young woman trying – like so many of her peers – to look like a porn star.
The day-night writers prefer to think of Zoey Zane as someone separate from Emily Sander. But such real feeling pulses in that photograph of her grinning in that beige bedroom that it’s dishonest not to ask the hard questions. What if this is simply who she is? Who we are? At what point does pornography become documentary?
The article goes on to detail some of the tasteless internet “humor” that’s sprung up around Zoey Zane’s death, explaining it thusly: “Check any message board where Sander is discussed, and you’ll find yourself staring hard into an ugly truth: Many users of porn despise the women who turn them on.” Which may indeed be true; at least, it’s a theory we’ve discussed here in connection with ugly porn marketing tactics.
However, there’s still an obvious and gaping void between dead tree newspapers and the internet culture they sometimes try to report on. One might wish that Scherstuhl had seen this article in Wired Magazine, especially this bit:
If there’s one thing, though, that all these factions seem to agree on, it’s the philosophy summed up in a regularly invoked catchphrase: “The Internet is serious business.”
Look it up in the Encyclopedia Dramatica (a wikified lexicon of all things /b/) and you’ll find it defined as: “a phrase used to remind [the reader] that being mocked on the Internets is, in fact, the end of the world.” In short, “the Internet is serious business” means exactly the opposite of what it says. It encodes two truths held as self-evident by Goons and /b/tards alike – that nothing on the Internet is so serious it can’t be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise.
To see the philosophy in action, skim the pages of Something Awful or Encyclopedia Dramatica, where it seems every pocket of the Web harbors objects of ridicule. Vampire goths with MySpace pages, white supremacist bloggers, self-diagnosed Asperger’s sufferers coming out to share their struggles with the online world – all these and many others have been found guilty of taking themselves seriously and condemned to crude but hilarious derision.
It’s certainly true enough that the folks abusing Zoe Zane’s memory don’t respect her. But what’s apparently not evident in Kansas is that they don’t respect anybody. There’s a whole internet subculture, prominent and youthful, that is aimed at self-importance and sacred cows and social propriety and any other sort of stuffed-shirtness they can find. They live for outrage, they think outrage is funny, and they don’t care what they have to tread on to get it. They are as distinctive in their online social presentation as, say, Goths are in their clothing. (Really, they are that distinctively easy to spot. Last night I dropped into a Team Fortress Two server they were infesting, and I could tell who was there by the offensive usernames and by the sound clips they were playing incessantly and in violation of that game’s social norms. Within two minutes, one of them had cried “The internet is serious business!” over his mike in response to somebody’s complaint about his behavior.)
Whatever you may think of the Serious Business Brigade (if you couldn’t tell, I don’t like them much because I treasure civility, which they tend to spit on) it’s pretty ignorant for a newspaper writer to Google up their spoors and write about them as generic internet users without, apparently, being aware that they exist as a distinct subculture.
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Saturday, February 9th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
There’s a video up at Atlanta Bondage under the title Can’t A Girl Pee In Peace? (Backup link.) I’m not going to re-publish it here, because it’s not, to my eye, erotic, nor funny either. However, it has some interesting social implications that aren’t likely to get mentioned anywhere else, there not being very many places that combine occasional social analysis with comfort in referencing a video clip featuring bare boobies and mildly kinky porn.
The “girl” in question is pretty clearly, to my eye at least, a model for one of the many porn sites that cater to the public urination fetish (subfetish category: women squatting to pee in the public streets). This model is bare breasted, smiling, and squatted-down right in the middle of some sort of street or public way (perhaps a wharf, or pedestrian mall). Here’s a cropped still from the beginning of the clip, in which I’ve highlighted the villain of the piece, to whom I am semi-arbitrarily assigning a male pronoun:
In the clip, he strides forward and kicks our incontinent heroine solidly in the ass, nearly knocking her over. The remainder of the clip shows her steadying herself with a hand, then turning and standing up to confront her attacker.
So, what’s going on here, and why is it interesting?
As it happens, I just read a piece by Chuck Klosterman in Esquire magazine about declining interest in professional boxing. As Klosterman explains it, people have lost interest in the sport of boxing because they no longer have a visceral relationship with the idea of hitting people or getting hit. A fine theory about which I have little opinion, never having been a fan myself of hitting people or being hit or watching big burly dudes do either one. But I was fascinated by Klosterman’s next line of speculation:
Now, I realize all of this is (obviously) more good than bad. I’m happy that avoiding physical confrontation has become so easy that I don’t even have to think about it. But I wonder: If the decline of boxing is the product of civilization’s detachment from physical fear, what is the accompanying downside? I think one possible answer might be a depressing brand of social overconfidence.
It is impossible to deny that the culture is coarsening. Everyone concedes this — even the people who are happy about it. It is now acceptable to say almost anything, about almost anyone, in a public space, and for no reason whatsoever. There is no line to step over, because such lines no longer exist. And I think those boundaries disappeared the moment people really, truly lost the fear of getting punched in the face. Americans have understood this intellectually for decades, but I don’t think we accepted it in totality until now. Adults are now so insulated by technology (and so protected by modernity) that the possibility of a physical consequence for any action is a psychological nonfactor. We have removed interpersonal fear from day-to-day behavior. Today, boxers are the only people who get hit for fucking up.
So, what does this have to do with our punted piddle-princess? Everything! His foot hitting her ass is a classic example of generation-gapped cultural conflict.
By my own lights, the peeing porn starlet was misbehaving. People who enjoy seeing girls peeing in public have a fetish, a modestly rare one. Most everybody else doesn’t want to see it, and they surely don’t want to step in it, or walk around it. At best, it’s horribly rude and socially transgressive to be doing what she was doing. Responsible pornographers would secure a movie set and provide sufficient extras to achieve the same visual effect without imposing their fetish on unwilling passers-by. And they would hire a dude with a mop, to clean up after.
I think it’s fair to speculate further that she and her photographer knew she was violating the social contract, but were sanguine about getting away with it. They probably worried about police intervention — perhaps they had a spotter watching for cops and ready to call a warning — but I suspect that it never occurred to her that any of the passers-by upon whom she was imposing her bare breasts and pussy and urine stream would take physical action against her to interrupt or to punish the imposition. People of her generation, or mine, just don’t do that sort of thing.
But our man (and I do think it’s a man, but I’m not sure) with the crazed white Einstein hair and the armload of files is not from our generation. He’s from a generation in which people cared a lot more about public propriety, and frequently took it upon themselves to enforce it with direct action. Doubtless he was offended by some half-naked [four letter term of derision] pissing in his path. Doubtless he considered he was doing a public service by applying a swift kick in the ass to both interrupt and punish the breach of the social contract. I have no doubt he felt good about doing it, and the way he stops and squares his stance after the kick suggests that he was ready to do it again if need be, or to stay and defend his actions otherwise. If we had an audio track, we’d be hearing somebody getting a piece of his mind about now.
So, who is really the villain of the piece? The pisser, or the kicker?
I’d like to weasel out with “a pox on both their houses”, but I need to acknowledge that it’s really not quite that simple. The trouble with enforcing social contracts with fists and feet is that social contracts aren’t really contracts, and they tend to get made up on the spot by cultural bigots and then enforced on people who never consented to them. (Don’t believe me? Ask Matthew Shepard.) I don’t really want people in my society feeling free to piss on my toes for profit, but I’m a lot more worried about living in a society where disagreements about appropriate public behavior get “settled” by sudden assault.
So, I guess my bottom line is, ix-nay on the ass-kicking. But I do agree with Klosterman that by creating a world where the ass-kicking is improbable, we’ve also created a world full of people who feel free to (metaphorically, most days) pee on your toes and tell you to go fuck yourself. That’s good more often than it’s bad, but it’s definitely a mixed blessing.
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Monday, January 28th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
It sounds like the Girl With A One Track Mind has been getting some of the same emails ErosBlog gets, trying to promote some of the porn I try not to promote:
During the four years I have been writing this blog I have regularly received emails from one particular contingent of the internet. It doesn’t take much guessing who: porn sites who want me to link, plug and promote their products. Usually I just scan these emails and deposit them straight into my spam folder. Why? I’ll explain, using an email I received last night as a good example.
“Dear Abby,” it begins, “Like you, I am very interested in getting discussion of sex, naughtiness ad [sic] all things deeed [sic] taboo by the Great British public [sic] into the wide world.”
Even given the atrocious spelling, this sounded promising.
However, the email then continued and asked me to plug a certain satellite television station where there would be “lezzed-up action,” “two girls will get seriously hardcore,” and where the show would include “full-frontal bean-flicking, boob bouncing, cunt lapping fun.”
As soon as I read that the email got junked, along with all the other offers to extend the size of my penis or buy generic viagra.
Yeah, you can bet I get mail like this every day. The Girl has a variety of issues with it, but I pick up here with her third issue, which I endorse wholeheartedly:
I might be willing to plug some porn, if the stuff recommended to me wasn’t so dreadfully offensive and insulting to my sex. Clicking on the link the porn webmaster (and yes, besides wonderful people like Ms Naughty, there are very few porn webmistresses) sent me, I found the following titles:
“Hotel Bitches”
“Bitch in a box”
“Cunt suckers”
“Babe spotting”
“Dirty pig”
And this is a sample that is relatively pleasant; there’s also the usual labelling of women as sluts or whores, alongside the bitches, babes, cunts and nymphos. Whichever it is, it’s the same thing overall: if there is sex onscreen, it’s likely to be focussed on the women, and those women have to be insulted and degraded (in words and/or perhaps actions) in some way. To my mind, this is just as offensive to men as it is to women – suggesting that men can not get off on explicit imagery that is not disrespecting women. Excuse me, but I think that is utter bollocks. Naked people fucking are naked people fucking and it’s hot to watch – so why bring in the sexist and misogynist titles?
It’s this position that most porn defaults to, that I find so offensive. And, let me be frank, a turn off too. There’s nothing like a bit of sexism (and racism) to put a girl off her stroke – and this girl likes her stroke very fucking much, thanks, hence why I am so particular about the porn I consume.
I’ve called this the “bitch-cunt-slut” porn marketing syndrome, and frankly it baffles me. Who enjoys that? Obviously some pornographers think that’s what heats up their male market, but are they right? Who are these men supposedly buying this stuff? The men I know love women. Yeah, some of them have old fashioned redneck attitudes and don’t really respect women as equals, but they still love them.
They don’t want a “bitch in a box” — even in a bondage fantasy, they want a hot babe in a box.
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Thursday, January 24th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
A funny porn 404 message from Never Give A Cheerleader A Keyboard:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I porn surfed, weak and weary,
over many a strange and spurious screenful of “Hot Nudes Galore”,
When I clicked my fav’rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
and my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour –
“‘Tis not possible!’, I muttered, “Give me back my free hardcore!”
Quoth the server: 404.
Sunday, January 20th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Apparently there was just a big porn convention in Vegas, and Gawker Media was there. You may know Gawker Media for its several stylish blog titles, but it’s Fleshbot you’ll be most familiar with as an ErosBlog reader. Well, now I’ve been introduced to one of their newer titles, which also looks very promising indeed. Here now via Jezebel is Jezebel editor Tracie “Slut Machine” Egan’s Last Night I Boned An AVN Award Nominee, complete with “pictures or STFU” proof in the form of her triumphal hickie photograph:
They had this dude — the one I blew for a little bit in the bathroom — who was very easy to convince to come back to my hotel with me.
…
Back in the hotel, I decided I could use another drink (I really didn’t need it at all), and the dude I brought back with me said he wanted french fries, so we went to the Grand Lux Cafe (which is like the same thing as Cheesecake Factory) in the casino of the Venetian. We didn’t even touch what we ordered. We just drunkenly made out hardcore in the booth, and then I put my hand under the napkin on his lap and started jerking him off. Nobody blinked an eye. People weren’t even looking at us. When I remembered for a minute that I was in public and came up for air, I looked around and saw that people were too immersed in their own 3 AM dramas played out over extra large servings of fried food. One lady was crying next to a tight-jawed man, who was looking anywhere but at her face. The middle-aged gay couple next to us were arguing over whether to share or get their own meals. And the waiters were just happy that we weren’t bothering them with requests.
The dude put his dick back in his pants, we got the check and went back up to my room. (I’m sharing it with Jonno and Dash from Fleshbot.) We have an awesome suite; there are two beds and a sofa bed. Since I was the last one home, I got the sofa bed in the living room area, but that was fine for my purposes. Me and the dude went into the bathroom (I don’t have a picture of it, but it’s pretty grand) and just went at it. He lifted me onto the marble counter top. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, koala-bear style, and he fucked the shit out of me. He ruled and his dick was nice. I told him that he should maybe consider working in front of the camera instead of behind it.
We stayed in there for a little bit more and he finger banged me. I ended up squirting all over the damn place — which hasn’t happened to me in what seems like ages. It was shooting out sideways and shit, getting on both of our legs. I’m always a little afraid for that to happen in front of dudes, ’cause it’s such a fucking mess sometimes, but he seemed to be really into it.
Then we went to the sofa bed and I had every intention of falling asleep and not fooling around (the boys were just like 10 or 20 feet away), but he kept kissing me, and he was really too cute to turn down. I ended up blowing him again, and then he came on my tits. What the hay! We’re in Vegas!
We passed out, but I think I was only sleeping for like an hour before I felt his boner pressing up on my ass again. I pushed back, and before I knew it, we were spoon-fucking. Seriously, this guy is more of a machine than I am. I woke up in the morning with this:
I was kinda pissed about it. I’m not thirteen, you know. But Jonno put it into perspective for me when he said, “Consider yourself lucky that you fucked someone at the porn convention and all you got was a hickey.”
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
When was the last time you saw a porn star wearing overalls? Here’s Eddy the Plumber, looking a lot like one of the Mario Brothers in trouble:
“Jessica” clearly isn’t willing to accept an inferior plumbing experience. “Eddy, your work is shoddy, and now it has broken, so you must be punished”:
At least now Eddy’s nice and clean for the rest of his punishment:
You can see the rest of this TS Seduction photo story here. Don’t worry, a lot of plumbing gets done and Eddy goes away happy.
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 -- by Bacchus
I stumbled over these vintage shots of Ginger Lynn [update: or not] in a collection of old porn magazine scans. I thought her “orgasm faces” were pretty and fun and worth sharing:
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Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
From one of their end-of-the-year wrap-up columns:
Last year may have marked the beginning of the end of the Internet’s greatest financial success story: hugely profitable pornography. While the mainstream media spent billions of dollars and nearly a decade trying to make a buck off the Internet, the porn industry raked in cash from the moment Al Gore invented the thing. But with the rise of such free sites as YouPorn (the YouTube of the pornography business), the online subscriber model is imploding. DVD sales are plummeting too, and the adult video business is actually laying off workers (no pun intended). YouPorn is now the most-visited adult site in the world, and its traffic is growing at nearly 40% a month.
Smut’s not going away, to be sure. But its industrialization may finally be in retreat.
This is aggressively stupid because it assumes that porn’s “huge” profits were the product of its industrialization. That’s twentieth century thinking, and this is 2008. Four years ago, we’d say this columnist was not paying attention. Today, he looks to be sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting “Nyah nyah nyah, I can’t hear you!” at reality.
It looks (from where I sit) to be true that the traditional business models of the porn industry are evaporating faster than sweat on Ron Jeremy’s ass. The trends that ate the industrial music industry over the course of a decade are now eating the industrial porn industry at a much faster pace — it started later and will be over more quickly, since porn lacks the sort of Leviathan corporate dinosaurs that take decades to stop twitching after you pith their brain stems.
But, has the de-industrialization of the music industry stripped that industry of huge profits? Not in the least! It’s stripped the industrial dinosaurs of huge profits, but that’s a very different thing. Don’t believe me? Ask Steve Jobs and the Apple shareholders.
In like fashion, the porn industry is going to evolve, and some of its more dinosaur-like producers may fail. (Hint: anybody whose sole product / marketing channel is DVDs in 2008 will likely be bankrupt before the end of the decade.) But people won’t stop wanting porn any more than they’ve stopped wanting music. And, unlike music, which is ubiquitous, porn has room for growth. Broader social acceptance means broader markets, plus better access to existing markets that are currently under served due to negative social pressure. Not to mention access to capital markets, which has hitherto been very difficult.
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Is there anal fisting in the Sistine Chapel? If not, did there used to be? Art historians (amateur or otherwise) are invited to weigh in!
Here’s the image:
And here’s the attribution: (via)
Michelangelo’s Punishment of Sodomy. Detail of the Last Judgement from the Sistine Chapel, 1536-1541. Source: Erotica Universalis by Gilles Néret, p. 102. Copy by Witkowski, Gustave-Joseph-Alphonse (1844-1923)
So, this image is said to be a copy by a relatively modern artist. But, a copy of what, exactly?
I’ve studied available online images of the Last Judgment as it appears in the Sistine Chapel, and no detail like this is immediately apparent. However, I know that Michelangelo made many sketches and drawings before climbing his scaffold, and I know the church has had a habit over the years of altering details of religious artworks it found inconvenient. See, e.g., the bronze underwear I blogged about when this sex blog was impossibly new.
So, is this fisting image really a copy of something Michelangelo drew or painted? And if so, does such a Michelangelo fisting image really appear in the Sistine Chapel? Inquiring minds want to know.
As it happens, I’ve got a copy of Erotica Universalis, but it’s in impossibly deep storage, and it wouldn’t help further anyway. Being essentially a catalog of ancient pornographic curiousities, its attributions cannot be expected to be unduly rigid.
My own theory is that this Witowski character actually drew a deliberately pornographic parody of Michelangelo’s sinners, rather than a copy. But there were strange things done in the history of religious art, and I’d be delighted to find out I was wrong.
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I’ve got to share this vignette from Mistress Matisse’s much longer article about the ups and downs of sex work around Christmas time. I simply can’t read these paragraphs without cracking up:
It was midafternoon on Christmas Eve. The client and I had never met before, but I showed up at his house at the appointed time, and he quickly ushered me inside. The man of the house was thin and pale, with faded blond hair, and he looked nervous. I could understand why: There’s a reason married guys rarely have whores come to their homes.
How could I tell he was married? Well, the fact that the house was decorated in a nauseatingly cutesy-country-crafty style was a big tip-off. Not just decorated–the place was stuffed full of ruffled chintz and gingham, designer teddy bears and American primitive wooden plaques with bunnies and angels and hearts burned on them. There was a flowered platter of homemade iced cookies sitting on the hall table. And there were a lot of family portraits on the foyer wall, with Mom, Dad, and three little rug rats.
“So you can be gone by six, right?” he asked.
“Sweetie, I’ll leave whenever you want,” I replied.
I paused before asking the obvious question.
“Is your wife coming home?”
He nodded jerkily. “She and the kids are at church.”
I couldn’t believe it. This guy had a hooker come to his house on Christmas Eve while his wife and kids were at church? He is so going to hell for this, I thought, and I’ll undoubtedly see him there.
“Well, let’s not waste playtime,” I said, moving toward the stairs. “Where would you like to…?”
“No, not upstairs!” he said, practically panicking. “I don’t want to mess up the bed. Let’s just–do it in the living room.”
Easier said than done. We edged around the eight-foot Christmas tree that dominated the room and sat down on the powder-blue couch. He handed me an envelope with the cash in it. I tucked it into my purse and then looked at him, waiting for him to give me some sign of how he wanted to proceed. But he just stared at me like a trapped rabbit. The room was dim, and the lights from the tree threw alternating red and green splotches on his face. The effect made him look like he had some kind of facial tic, and I doubted that it was enhancing my complexion, either.
“Okay,” I thought to myself, “if I have to be gone soon, I am going to have to take control of this fuck.”
I stripped down to my tarty black lace lingerie and stockings, got his pants around his knees, and started unrolling a condom onto his dick with my mouth. He moaned and leaned back on the couch–and then we both gasped and jumped as the tinkling strains of “White Christmas” suddenly rose into the air. He looked wildly around the room for a moment, then relaxed and said, “Oh, wait, it’s this pillow. It’s got a music box in it, when you lean on it, it plays…” He fished a red-and-green throw pillow from behind his back and tossed it away. It played on for a minute, before ceasing abruptly with a mechanical click.
He lay back again, but it seemed that our musical interruption had made his little Saint Nick unhappy. Or maybe it’s this house, I thought, as I sucked him. It’s completely antisexual. Interior decor as visual saltpeter.
I stood up, pulled off my panties, and bent over the couch. I knew I should give him some dirty verbal encouragement, but my vast repertoire of porn talk had deserted me, and the best I could manage was a come-hither expression that felt as painted-on as the faces of the knee-high nutcrackers flanking the fireplace. I watched him maneuver into position behind me in the gilt-framed, holly-draped mirror over the mantel. In my black bra and stockings, I was jarringly out of place in the room, an affront to the relentless, smothering cozy cuteness. It was hard to even breathe. As he fumbled around behind me, the bowls of cloyingly sweet potpourri that sat on both end tables began to make my eyes water and my nose itch. I was going to start sneezing uncontrollably in a minute, I thought, and my mascara was going to run down my face in black streaks. It was like a Stephen King Christmas house, where it looks all sweet, but if you don’t behave, it kills you.
At first impression, this story is sad. But the more I read it, the funnier it gets. This guy was a fool (“I pity the fool!”) but he was also a rebel. What, he couldn’t sneak out and rent a room where he didn’t have to worry about the sheets? No, he was in rebellion. His wife had made his house uninhabitable (trust me, ladies, there’s only so much chintz and gingham we can tolerate, and those stanky bowls of boiled flower petals are nasty!) for him, and this was his way of trying to reclaim it, if only for forty minutes.
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
OK, normally I try to keep the “schoolgirl” porn to a dull roar around here. But I admit it, I got sucked into this picture gallery. Who wouldn’t enjoy meeting this young lady on her way to class? Who wouldn’t offer to help her carry her books?
She seems very friendly:
If you’ve followed me this far in our voyage of pervery, you’ll not have failed to notice that her panties have a moist spot…
From Digital Desires.
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Thursday, December 13th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Although Vintage Lust is mostly about the hardcore man-and-woman sort of vintage sex, there’s a little something there for everyone:
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Sunday, November 18th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
From an interview in Playboy, kindly typed in by Hump Jones, this observation by the guru George Carlin:
It’s actually a weird time for sex. Sex is all over the place in this culture. It’s wide open. Compared with the 1960’s, when it was merely an aspect of youth culture — free love and all that –it’s a virtual sexual carnival right now. You’ve got the internet, strip clubs, porn stars on the radio. Even regular television is all cleavage and legs and asses and hot policewomen on CSI. You got into any hotel and you can buy movies in which the mailman shows up with a big hard-on and suddenly he’s fucking three women at a tupperware party — and it all goes straight to your hotel bill.
Sunday, October 21st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
From a 1974 profile of Brian Eno, found via Bondage Blog:
His voice trails off as he spies a copy of Search magazine. He leafs through it with obvious pleasure, but the gleam in his eyes softens, and sadly he shakes his head, “It’s a burning shame that most people want to keep pornography under cover when it’s such a highly developed art form — which is one of the reasons that I started collecting pornographic playing cards I’ve got about 50 packs which feature on all my record covers for the astute observer.
“There’s something about pornography which has a similarity to rock music. A pornographic photographer aims his camera absolutely directly, at the centre of sexual attention. He’s not interested in the environment of the room.
“I hate the sort of photography in Penthouse and Playboy which is such a compromise between something to give you a hard-on and something which pretends to be artistic. The straight pornographers aim right there where it’s at.
“Which is analogous to so many other situations where somebody thinks one thing is important, so they focus completely on that and don’t realize they’re unconsciously organizing everything else around it as well. I have such beautiful pornography – I’ll show you my collection sometime.
The last guy invited me up to see his etchings.
“One theory is that black-and-white photography is always more sexy than colour photography. The reason for this is provided by Marshall McLuhan, who points out that if a thing is ‘high definition,’ which colour photography is, it provides more information and doesn’t require participation as much as if it is ‘low definition’.” I.e. a horror play on the radio is always very, very frightening because the imagery is always your own. If youUre choosing your own imagery, you’ll always choose the most frightening, or in the case of pornography, the most sexual.
“The idea of things being low definition has always interested me a lot – of being unspecific – another thing which is a key-point of my lyrics. They must be ‘low definition’ so that they don’t say anything at all direct. I think the masters of that were Lou Reed and Bob Dylan (on “Blonde on Blonde”). The lyrics are so inviting.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT ‘burning shame’ is by the way? It’s a pornographic term for a deviation involving candles.
“Ouch!”
“Very popular in Japanese pornography. They’re always using lit candles because Japanese pornography is very sadistic, partly because of the Japanese view of women, which is a mixture of resentment and pure animal lust.
“In the traditional view, a woman is still expected to be at the beck and call of her husband, so that manifests itself in that kind of pornography. Of which I have a few examples, of course.
“Mexican pornography is an interesting island of thought because they seem to be heavily into excretory functions. The traditional American view is that anything issued from the body is dirty. It’s incredibly puritanical and it resents bodily fluids, so if one is trying to debase a woman, you cover them with that and hence you get the fabulous term ‘Golden Showers’ — the term for pissing on someone, which some well-known rock musicians are said to be very involved in…
“Here come the warm jets?”
“That’s certainly a reference.”
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Ladies and gentlemen and faithful readers and visitors, I’m pleased to announce that today marks the fifth anniversary of ErosBlog’s first post.
I’m rather proud to have been in continuous publication for half a decade. 1,853 posts spread over 1,825 days averages to 1.015 posts per day. Of course it wasn’t that regular — there are a couple of posting gaps that stretch close to a month in length. But a daily post has always been the goal, and if I never managed that much, I’ll settle for that 1.015 posts-per-day average.
When I started this thing, internet diaries had been around for at least as long as the web, and some of them (especially the BDSM lifestyle ones) had a lot of adult content. Blogs (known by that name, or by its then-still-in-use linguistic ancestor, “weblogs”) were a few years old, but had exploded in popularity and visibility just in the previous year. Sex blogs — as a genre — were unheard of. There was Daze Reader, there was World Sex News, there was BJ’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings. There were pretty pictures every day at Sensual Liberation Army and some other places. Lots of proto-sex-blogs, but none that had adopted that characterization of themselves. So, as far as I know, Eros Blog was the first internet thing to claim that description.
I can’t claim to have invented the idea of a sex blog — whomever registered sexblog.com, before I tried to, can prove that — and I can’t claim to have invented the act of sex blogging, which was all over LiveJournal before I ever heard of blogging. But I think I was the first person, to think of it, do it, and call it by the name.
One possible exception — a sex blogger who was there before me by a few months, doing what I’d consider the first recognizable sex blog and conceptualizing her work in roughly that way, was Susannah Breslin. She did a blog called The Reverse Cowgirl, she was well connected with web heavyweights and early blogging gurus, and she blogged pretty exclusively about sex and culture. It was nice stuff, she was kind enough to link me early, but I simply cannot remember if she ever called her project a sex blog. She might have; certainly she could have, because that’s what it was.
Unfortunately it was from Susannah that I first learned to hate the destruction wrought by blog vandalism. She was linked all over the web, she was getting a lot of media attention, and then one day without a word of explanation her blog was gone and links all over the blogosphere were 404ing. Then a while later she had another project up, very artistic and overdesigned but having many bloglike features; it too vanished. After that I lost track, but there have been more; she’s got another “Reverse Cowgirl” blog going at the moment, with archives going all the way back to 2006, but not a single link to any of her earlier projects (presumably because they are all gone). I owe Susannah a considerable debt for inspiration and early traffic, but she’s also the one who taught me to be wary of folks who treat the web like a rented space for temporary performance art.
So! Five years. Two hosts. Three blog software platforms. At least half a dozen different templates. A metric buttload of spam and raging idiocy moderated out of the comments. Two web interviews, perhaps half a dozen press inquiries (ignored because I still enjoy psuedonymous posting). One hell of a lot of fun.
One of the fun things for me is to look at how my posts (and me) have changed over five years. When I started, writing about sexual stuff was very hard for me (even in my usual detached “look at those people over there and what they say they are doing” style). I was stilted and awkward. I was afraid that to write about a thing meant people would think I liked it. Worse yet, I cared about that, and would include horrid little disclaimers. Bacchus wrote about Bacchus in the third person for eight long months. I remain indebted to Eugene Volokh for providing me, a day too late, with the vocabulary word for that literary atrocity. Thanks to him, I now understand that I Am No Longer An Illeist.
As for me, when I started this blog I was single, lonely, and underemployed by my own choice due to increasing disillusionment with my profession (a little) and with the demands of the job culture (a lot). Now I’ve got The Nymph, we’re ridiculously happy together, and my adult web projects support me better than a job ever did, with me working only when it suits me. And it does suit me! I used to read in the business magazines about successful power suit types who would wake up in the morning full of enthusiasm for getting into the office to do whatever they did, and I’d boggle at that alien worldview. Now, I wake up in the morning, often as not, with an idea for tweaking or improving one of my websites, and I’m full of enthusiasm for the idea of getting up and tinkering with it. Life has never been better.
I couldn’t hope to thank properly all the other bloggers who deserve it, for providing me with support, encouragement, linkage, ideas, material, inspiration… but to list even the first fraction of them would require listing half my blog roll. All I can say is, thanks to you all. And thanks — even more thanks! — to the thousands of loyal readers who come back every day to see my blather and follow my links.
I owe special thanks to my regular guest blogger, Aphrodite, who has been backing me up and providing the woman’s touch around here for more than three years. Although her posts have never been frequent, she’s provided considerable invisible assistance, especially with comment spam filtering before we got it as automated as it tends to be today. I remain delighted and honored to have her help.
What about the future? Will there be a “Ten Candles” post on October 3, 2012?
At the speed technology, culture, and politics are changing in this crazy world, it’s hard to know for sure, but I truly do hope so! I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.
I’ll conclude with a list of some of my forgotten favorites — an even dozen sex blog posts I enjoyed writing and still enjoy reading, posts that seemed important to me, or posts that other people seemed particularly to enjoy.
Monday, September 24th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Mistress Matisse has some observations on making real money (“money to live comfortably, buy a house, create a retirement fund, build some security”) in the sex business:
If you want to make good money in the sex industry, then you need to do two things. One: get in the room with the client, and two: eliminate the middleman.
That means that any form of sex work you do which does not place you in the room with a client should be viewed as temporary and prone to marked fluctuations. Nice extra money, but not to be exclusively relied on to make you a steady, long-term living. So, phone sex, modeling, peep-shows, cam sites, and yes, porn videos — that kind of work can provide a continuous small trickle of money into your pocket, or it can occasionally inject a large wad of cash into your budget. But while I know a lot of people in the sex industry, I don’t personally know anyone who has made a decent living exclusively from such avenues for any long period of time.
(And no, the photographer who pays you to model for commercial publication is the not the client. He’s a middle-man. The guy who buys the magazine or joins the paysite is the client.)
The money in those gigs is a bit better if you own the venue. There was a window of time in which mom-and-pop porn sites could do pretty well. But unfortunately I think that era is over – between the federal government regulations, and the expansion of the corporate porn industry, a lot of indie porn sites have been muscled out of business, or at least out of the black.
As a middleman myself, or what’s worse, a middleman’s middleman, the guy who sells advertising to middlemen or sends them traffic, I can’t agree more with her “temporary and prone to marked fluctuations” characterization. “Eliminate the middleman” is the plain English, the $100 word from B-school is “disintermediation”, and I noticed long ago that without constant vigilance and a ready flexibility, I’m never more than six months away from being disintermediated right out of business. The internet is the great disintermediator, it brings the clients and the talent together in a way that makes middlemen increasingly seem irrelevant.
As an aside, this disintermediation effect means that indie porn continues to thrive, but at a lower level of visibility. How many indie camgirls are there out there, who hook up with clients on Craig’s List and turn on their webcams after he PayPals them forty bucks? I dunno. Neither do you. The biggest remaining barrier on the internet is the payment middleman — PayPal will kill that transaction if it can spot it. Of course, if you can literally get in the room with the client, good old fashioned folding cash money still works.
Matisse concludes:
So if you want to make a good living in the sex industry, my advice is: Set up your own shop, run the business yourself, and deal with your clients directly and personally. Don’t be fodder in someone else’s money machine.
And that’s advice you can take to the bank, in the sex industry or any other.
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Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I suppose it’s possible that after almost five solid years of sex blogging, I tilt too much toward novelty and shock in selecting new material to blog about. Not that sex ever gets boring, but the blogging fingers can get jaded. Whatever the topic, didn’t I already write a post about that? Or three of ’em?
For whatever reason, I’m definitely still finding novelty in the transsexual porn from TS Seduction. Old fashioned “tranny porn” (conceived and presented as a freak show, with transsexuals as the freaks) is hardly novel, but it was always presented with the emphasis on “ZOMG, freaks having sex!” and never a care in the world paid to whether the sex was hot sex.
Of course we expect (and get) better from a Kink.com franchise. We see models like this, and we want to see some sex:
Of course, without some advance warning we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see those two sucking each other’s dicks, but when it happens, at least it looks like they mean it. And if that’s not sex as Bill Clinton would define it, surely this is:
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Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I’ve gotten in minor trouble in the past for not participating in various efforts to “reclaim” derogatory words traditionally applied to various classes of women, words like “slut” and “cunt” and “whore” and the like. In particular, I’ve condemned low-imagination pornographers for calling porn models “sluts” far too often. I’m really condemning their business sense as much as anything; although some men surely fantasize about hooking up with a slut, it’s hardly universal.
So in a post like A Spammer’s View Of Porn Stars, my jeering at “old-school bitch-slut-whore porn marketing” triggered this comment:
You know, generally speaking, I’m all in favor of reclaiming these sorts of words. I call myself a slut happily, and while I’ve never had physical sex for money, the people I know who have done so call themselves whores (or retired whores) with no problem.
To which I responded:
Reclaiming is a whole ‘nuther issue, and frankly I don’t think it’s something that a second-person labeler can participate in. A woman with the qualifications can call herself a bitch or a slut or a whore and not mean anything bad by it, but I don’t think some random guy selling pictures of her has a prayer of pulling that off.
Which remains my position. There’s nothing wrong with being a slut, but I can’t get away with applying the word to any particular woman unless she does so first, because a man saying that word is tarred by association with a million other men who’ve tossed it around lightly as a synonym for “woman”. And standing behind that million men are another million women who’ve tossed it around just as lightly as a synonym for “woman who fucks too readily, and thus may pose a competitive danger to me”.
Of course, that doesn’t prevent me from quoting women like Kaya who cheerfully adopt the label:
I know that slut is supposed to be an insult. I hear my daughters refer to other classmates in that way. With wrinkled noses and disdain dripping from their voices. “Oh she is SUCH a slut. Look at her. Oh. My. Gawd.”
I asked Jes one time what criteria would get a girl labeled as a slut. I’m not sure if I have the formula down correctly but it was something along the lines of if you’ve slept with more than 3 people, you’re a bonafide slut. I guess I can see that, when applied to a 15 or 16 year old. I did not tell her that her mother was a certified slut though. Some things a child just doesn’t need to know about her mom’s activities. ;-)
…
I know without a doubt, without a millisecond of hesitation, that I AM a natural slut. Jezebel, a hussy, a tart, a tramp. I dressed the part, I acted the part, I performed the part.
I never associated the emotions with sex that other people do. It was always just sex. Not a commitment, no deeper hidden meaning. I wasn’t waiting for a proposal or a second date and it didn’t bother me in the least to have feelings for one person, and sleep with another. The two were entirely separate.
…
I like sex. The raunchier the better. I like to cock my ass up and wiggle it in the air. I like to spread my pussy lips wide and taunt whoever is looking. I like the wetness, the sloppiness, the grunts and slaps and other rude, raucous noises that emanate from between our two joined bodies. And I like it best when some pink part of mine is screaming in pain, pain that fiercely combats with the pleasure, until the two sensations meet and mix and become a tangled mass of exploding nerves that leave me abandoned in a puddled lump of used slut.
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Monday, August 20th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Well, dang if my jaw didn’t drop to the floor when I discovered that legendary porn star Ginger Lynn has come out of retirement to shoot a bondage scene with Mark Davis for Kink.com’s Sex and Submission:
It’s fun for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Ginger is old enough to have developed that whole soft, well-rounded, mature / MILF-y look. Rode hard and put away wet? Sure. But don’t say that like it’s a bad thing. This is a woman who knows how to have fun:
From the Kink.com marketing copy:
Sex and Submission proudly presents pornstar legend Ginger Lynn in her first real BDSM sex scene with boyfriend Mark Davis. With much excitement and anticipation she explores her submissive side in great depth. Mark is tough with her at times and brings her to that breaking point where she struggles to fight through the pain and discomfort. But the pleasurable rewards and lovingness displayed throughout makes Ginger a very happy submissive. The chemistry between the two and the genuine reactions from porn celebrity Ginger Lynn is really something special!
Googling around for more information about the shoot, I found this, including some great quotes by Ginger:
“I’ve fallen madly in love. I have finally met a man who can keep up with me, who is my match in bed, and that man is Mark Davis. We met at a fundraiser for Nicki Hunter and have been inseparable ever since,” Lynn told XBIZ. “I figured if I was ever to make a comeback, I would do something I have never done before, show something I have never shown before, to express myself the same way I do at home. Very few men – none – have been able to bring that out of me the way Mark Davis has.”
“I’ve always been known as the girl next door, naughty-but-nice. At home, I’m sick, twisted, kinky and I have no boundaries. I don’t want to go into detail, but I will be living out my fantasies on film that I have only been able to do in my private life up until now. I may alienate some fans. They may be scared off, they may be fabulously surprised. At this point in my career and my life, it really doesn’t matter to me. I am going to do something I want to do.
“I’m a naughty girl.”
Ready for more? The Submission of Ginger Lynn is a 48 minute move, for members.
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Sunday, August 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
From OMG Blog:
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Friday, August 17th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
This is fun: Susie Bright interviews Chelsea Girl and publishes part of the transcript on 10 Zen Monkeys. (Alas, the complete interview has apparently not been transcribed, and is available only in that brutally slow and notoriously linear 20th century format, audio.)
SB: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to talk about your oral sex discussion.
CG: The “deep throat” post.
SB: I learned so much from that. There are all these people writing “deep throat this” and “deep throat that.” And there’s even porn how-to films. But it never gets beyond the sort of Linda Lovelace fanfare of deep throat. Until you, no one talked about how you really get things…
CG: Down.
SB: How the nature of your saliva changes once you get in the right… You call it the viscous stuff.
CG: Yeah, the viscous, porn star-y spit.
SB: How did you learn how to give spectacular deep throat sex? Who taught you?
CG: My pediatrician.
SB: Oh, come on! No, stop!
CG: I had strep throat a lot as a kid. And I hated tongue depressors. And every winter I would have my throat swabbed over and over again. And so I learned how to control my gag reflex so that I didn’t have to have a tongue depressor in my mouth when they swabbed my throat. That’s essentially the same technique I use when I deep throat. I had no idea it would come in handy. But seriously, the first time I gave head, it just went down.
SB: Well, did you realize that the nature of one’s saliva and mucus would change and that you’d get more lubrication?
CG: Oh, that came from Jenna Jameson – I was reading Jenna Jameson’s book, which was ghostwritten by Neil Strauss, of course. Anyway, Jenna sort of articulated how, once you start, your gag reflex is your friend. And once you start to have the gagging happen, that’s when you get that nice thick viscous spit.
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
As you all know, I filter the comments aggressively. Anybody with a blog knows about automated comment spammers who drop various text nuggets designed to pass as real comments.
I thought this one was worth pulling out and sharing, because it appears to be human-written rather than purely machine generated (which is to say, it isn’t just random keywords slung together), and because its narrative is classic old-school bitch-slut-whore porn marketing, the sort of thing this sex blog exists in reaction against:
When it comes to porn bitches with big tits getting their cunts and asses stretched and stuffed by huge dicks and getting their faces and jugs covered by hot spunk, Ava Devine has almost no equal. A regular on [url deleted] and [url deleted], Ava is one cock loving, cum loving, fuck loving slut. Whether she’s getting double penetrated or just getting drilled by massive meat, I swear this girl’s pussy has seen more action in the dirt and taken more of a pounding than a U.S. Marine. What a whore. I really think that she, along with wonderfully like-minded souls Carmella Bing and Shyla Stylez, are among the leaders of the pack when it comes to no-frills, low glamour, raw, hardcore porn. Ava Devine loves fucking and really doesn’t give a fuck what people think. This bitch should be a hero. See the action for yourself at [url deleted].
I cannot deny that Ava is sexy, but whence the leap from that to bitch, slut, and whore? I always wonder what these guys are thinking. Is this how they really feel about porn stars? Or is it merely how they think their intended audience feels?
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Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Why do people pay for porn on the internet, when you can get so much for free?
It’s a fair question. But before you can answer it, it’s important to understand that there are two different kinds of pay-for-porn sites on the internet.
The first kind, the kind that I find most interesting, is the kind that has exclusive, unique content. These sites either shoot their own pictures and video to get the stuff they want to sell, or they work with a producer who is willing to sell porn to them (and them only) for the paysite’s exclusive use.
Paying for that kind of porn is pretty much a no-brainer, if it’s the kind of porn you like. It only comes from one place, and if you pay, you get it fresh and served up complete, at the best available resolutions, properly labeled and with any supporting prose that may come with it. Sure, all that content will be everywhere on the internets next week, but you’ll have to hunt it down piecemeal, deal with short clips and incomplete photosets and generally have a lower quality experience. Lots of folks have the money to get what they want, when they want it, in the best available format. Subscriptions make sense for that, and that’s the target market for the paysite ads and affiliate links you’ll usually find some of on ErosBlog.
And then there’s the other kind of paysite, the cookie cutter kind. There are a metric buttload of these out there. These sites buy non-exclusive photos and video from all kinds of porn distributors, throw them up behind three or four custom “tour” pages, and start selling subscriptions. These sites may or may not ever get updated, but your credit card rebills will continue until you cancel (not always a smooth and easy process).
Why do people sign up for these? Really, two answers. The first is instant gratification — they generally do have a small pile of porn behind the pay gate that matches what’s on the tour. If you just want to see that, your seven dollar trial is no different than buying a magazine based on liking the cover. Assuming you are good about canceling after the trial, it could make sense.
The second answer, of course, is lack of market sophistication. You could be confusing the cookie cutter sites with the “real thing” — and hope, or imagine, that you’ll find an updated supply of quality porn inside once you’ve ponied up. A lot of the cookie cutter sites market themselves very aggressively, and there’s real potential for market confusion.
The purpose of this post is to share with my readers a revealing Ebay auction, which is marketing the remnants of an adult webmaster business featuring those cookie cutter sites. (If you don’t have access to the adult areas on Ebay, the seller references “full details” on the adult webmaster boards, and a quick search turns up this alternate link.)
Basically, what’s for sale is an affiliate program and the mostly empty shell of fourteen cookie-cutter paysites, only one of which is being sold with the dirty pictures that make it a going concern. The real assets are the domains (mostly pretty poor quality from an investment standpoint, like hungarianxxx.com), the email lists (emails of former and current customers, emails of former and current affiliates), the traffic to the domains, and a flow of “rebills” from existing customers.
What makes this auction interesting to me is the implicit admission in several places that the sites themselves are worthless shit. The quotes below give you the flavor:
Here’s some info about EZA Cash. After a decade in the business, I want to get out of owning adult sites and focus on my freelance writing and other ventures. I’m not looking for a fortune for these sites. The exclusive content that comes with CumFacedAsians cost around $10k to shoot and the design of that site was another $2k by one of the top designers in the biz at the time (Michael Alden/Zaynee Creations). It converts very nicely when the tour is updated regularly.
[I believe that’s code for “If the tour pages are changed regularly so that folks don’t realize this is the same site they harvested all the dirty pictures from four months ago.” — Bacchus]
EZA Cash is a CCBill affiliate program that was opened in 2003 with the launch of CumFacedAsians. More sites were added on a regular basis until the current lineup of 14 paysites was reached. The affiliate program currently has over 3,000 webmasters signed up, and we haven’t e-mailed these affiliates with hosted galleries or encouraged them to send traffic since 2005. Still, there is plenty of affiliate traffic coming to the sites and that would greatly increase with a couple of mailings and some fresh promo material. CumFacedAsians, the flaship site, has 10 exclusive 30 minute bj videos and 10 exclusive photo sets (all of the content used in the design elements of the tour is exclusive, so this site wouldn’t need redesigned to be usable).
[The guy has been operating for four years with just five hours of video and ten photosets. Such a value for members! — Bacchus]
The rest of the paysites on EZA Cash are non-exclusive and I do not have the rights to transfer that content, nor do I wish to try to negotiate those rights. I am selling the domains and traffic ONLY, no content or designs. To summarize, the only designs included with this auction are CumFacedAsians and ezacash.com. You do not get designs or content for any of the other paysite domains I’m including. The buyer will have to use their own content and designs to quickly throw up new hosted galleries and paysites on these domains in order to keep from losing traffic.
[Translation: Any old shit will do, that’s all that’s ever been there. — Bacchus]
There are 70 active members on the CCBill account right now rebilling at $19.95-24.95 a month, plus new members still sign up on a daily basis. The retention of these new members is very low (most cancel their trials), so a new members area should increase revenue by quite a large margin.
Gross sales (not including upsells, ads in the members area, cross-sales, pop-ups, etc. – base CCBill memberships only):
2007 Sales – $13,508.70 (so far)
2006 – $36,057.40
2005 – $50,548.30 (Stopped updating and working on the sites in 2005)
2004 – $65,388.11
2003 – $50,935.71 (Year the sites were opened)
Basically, you are buying some nice domains, some traffic, a CCBill account with rebilling members, 10 exclusive Asian videos and photo sets, and a nice amount of existing affiliates.
I find the economics fascinating. Stopped all work on the sites two years ago, still has seventy poor suckers whose credit cards are rebilling monthly, still gets new suckers signing up every day, but the cookie cutter sites are so obviously stale and dead that most cancel immediately.
And yet, this is funny, too, because of the small-scale thinking. It’s not dishonest or a scam, exactly, but it’s a line of work akin to direct mail advertising; sell something cheap and almost worthless for quite a bit more than it’s worth, pocket profits, work like hell to find new suckers because none of your one-time customers turn into regular customers, which as every businessman knows is where the money is. In that kind of business you have to swim hard just to stay even, and if you ever stop swimming (rounding up new suckers) you sink like a rock. Real paysites, with real exclusive quality content, make money on an entirely different scale.
Note that the owner is getting out of the business to “focus on his freelance writing.” Which is the employment equivalent of a federal cabinet member resigning “to spend more time with my family” or a pretty girl turning you down for dinner on Friday night because she “has to wash her hair.”
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Monday, July 23rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any gay porn here. But I’d say these menacing fellows definitely qualify:
From Bondage Blog.
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Sunday, July 15th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Remember my post arguing that making sure your porn is ethically produced is no harder than doing the same thing for your salad dressing or your cheap manufactured goods? (You’d think this was obvious, but as I documented in that post, some in the rabid anti-porn crowd dispute it.)
Anyway, Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked remains one of my favorite pieces on this blog. In support of my argument, I chose some of the scariest Eastern European spanking porn I could find and then did some basic consumer research, quoting spanking model Niki Flynn at length on the professional conditions at a Lupus Pictures porn shoot.
 
Well, now from Spanking Blog comes a link to spanking model Adele Haze writing on the same topic: Why I Modelled For Lupus Pictures.
This was serious business — you can see her welts here — but she had her reasons:
I don’t process pain as pleasure. I knew my caning would hurt a great deal, possibly more than any of my previous experiences. I did briefly wonder whether, caught up in the moment, I would find pleasure in my real-life flogging in a way I couldn’t enjoy some other girl’s filmed experience — and, pre-empting an upcoming post on the topic, no, I didn’t get any enjoyment out of the pain until it was all over — but, on the whole, I was prepared for a thoroughly uncomfortable several minutes over the famous bench.
And that was OK, because I knew – from studying the films, and from talking to Niki Flynn, who’d gone to that scary place before — that the rest of the shoot would give me the sort of pleasures that would make a few minutes of acute pain worth going through. For somebody who has a separate fetish for artistic suffering, working with a production on the scale of Lupus’s would be worth every stroke.
I had never before worked to a script, and I’d get that. I had never had somebody else think through the costume and make-up for me — I’d get that too, and in the end even the hideous pieces of reformatory wardrobe would turn out charming in their appropriateness. I had never before taken detailed direction, or shot completely — and confusingly — out of sequence, or acted in sets built for the purpose in every small detail; in short, I had never been a part of a spanking shoot run on such a professional level — and I knew that all of these experiences were mine for the taking.
Thanks, Adele, for the eye-opening account!
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Just doing what I’m told, here. I found this graphic over at Renegade Evolution with the caption: “Say Hello To Postfeminism.”
I think, as captioned, that this is a snarky attack on post-feminism from a traditional anti-porn feminist perspective. But what do I know? It could be a straightforward celebration of a post-feminism that doesn’t automatically equate a little friendly facial cum-shot / bukkake action with subservience and degradation.
Well, it could be. And running with that theory, this young lady could be exploring personal empowerment through post-modern alternatives in beverage dispensing:
Or, for reasons known only to herself, she could be symbolically trying to suck the dick of a man who is (symbolically) busy trying to pee on her face. Yeah, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so maybe she’s just thirsty? Er, but she’s got a sealed beverage in her left hand.
Oh, hell, let’s go all the way and zoom in on that shot, just to celebrate the the triumph of branding that Miller Light has achieved by giving away free pitchers at this particular beach party:
Update: My bad. After reading a little more Renegade Evolution, I’m now leaning toward the “straightforward celebration” theory.
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Monday, July 2nd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Fans of the leading edge porn from San Francisco’s Kink.com have been looking forward for weeks to today’s grand opening of the new “reality BDSM” site, The Training of O. According to the promo material, The Training of O documents real, gritty, multi-day training sessions with submissive models, who “earn their stripes in erotic servitude” and “prove their determination to train by enduring grueling tasks of initiation.”
“Grueling tasks”, indeed! I am delighted and amused to see an old BDSM print-fiction trope come alive: namely, the huge and pointless dirty job for the naked slavegirl to perform, an endless round of weary nude labor with no earthly hope of completion in time to avoid punishment. This is grit you would not be seeing in your typical San Fernando Valley “omigawd, I might break a fingernail” posed-and-phoney BDSM porn. Here’s the glamor shot (from this introductory shoot) of a poor naked girl who’s been handed a shovel and pointed at a very large pile of dirt somewhere in the bowels of the awesome Armory shooting location:
Indeed, I was so entertained by this earthmoving project that I grabbed a few screen captures from the video. Those white heels and frilly sock-stockings are never gonna make it through this day:
Adding insult to injury, our unfortunate submissive is being made to haul that dirt quite a ways, which is real work when you do it with a shovel, as any former day laborer knows:
But the life of a slave can always get worse! Now the poor thing has lost her shovel privileges (my guess would be for excessive whining):
Does she look sufficiently put-upon yet?
Try not to look so abject, m’dear. Cheer up, we haven’t even gotten to the chaining-and-caning part, starring about eighty pounds of steel chain and your pretty bottom! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; a girl who gets that dirty has to be very thoroughly washed.
A detailed story at Xbiz.com sets out the new site concept in even greater detail:
“It’s a startling site,” director James Mogul told XBIZ. “It’s ‘reality BDSM’ so that elicits a lot of reactions, and I think the content is super-strong. I would say it’s realistic in terms of what you might expect to see in an actual BDSM exchange.”
The basic premise of the site involves models videotaped over a weeklong course in submission training. “I’ve actually developed a training program,” Mogul said. “We take applicants and interview them and develop a curriculum based on their experience. Some girls we worked with are very experienced and some girls are brand new and I think we’re hitting a wide range of the scope. We are going to mix it up. The plan is to go with about 75 percent fresh talent and about 25 percent of the content will be experienced, known talent that we can kind of push boundaries with a little bit.”
Shot at the company’s new production facility, the massive San Francisco Armory building, Mogul is able to utilize several different sets to create a gritty, authentic atmosphere.
The spaces are beautiful. The decay is beautiful. It’s like walking onto a movie set all made for you,” Mogul said. “There’s really nothing that needs to be done in terms of the aesthetics, but there is a lot that needs to be done in terms of making production practical and that’s coming together very, very quickly.”
As always, it’s the aesthetics of the production that will set The Training of O apart from what’s been done before. Just one more example: Here’s Sarah Jane Ceylon in the handiest-ever slavegirl head box, complete with portable glory hole and cork:
Just the thing for punishments or blowjobs, or even for providing the peace and quiet a weary slave needs after a hard day’s training.
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Sunday, June 10th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
If your grasp of mythology is sub-par like mine, you might sometimes wonder “What is it with all these images of naked women and swans?”
For all the answers you might want, there’s an extended discussion (with many many images) at Silent Porn Star.
All you’re going to get for an answer here is a Yeats poem and a strangely menacing rear-entry swan:
Leda And The Swan, by William Butler Yeats, 1928
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Thanks is due to Fleshbot for attracting my attention to some old news about Kink.com. I’m talking about this article in the New York Times, which, except for one token sentence filled with gratuitous slams (“wince-inducing grisliness”, “morbidly eccentric”), is a perfectly normal and quite interesting business profile of one of my favorite porn companies.
Having commented repeatedly on the pleasure and the significance of Kink.com’s smiling models, I particularly enjoyed reading this passage, in which we learn that running a photoshoot that leaves the models smiling, and then making sure to catch them doing it, is indeed the explicit company policy:
[Kink.com’s Peter Acworth] describes the company as having a certain social mission. Too often, he told me, B.D.S.M. is conflated with rape or abuse. He realized early on that building a respectable company devoted to the fetish could help “demystify” it. People who felt conflicted about their kinkiness, as he once had, “would realize they’re not alone and, in fact, that there’s a big world of people that are into this stuff and that it can be done in a safe and respectful way. Loving partners can do this to each other.” Kink’s required pre- and post-scene interviews, like the one I watched Wild Bill and Adams tape, for example, are meant to break the fourth wall, assuring audiences that, as in real-life B.D.S.M. play, everything is negotiated in advance and rooted in a certain etiquette and trust – that everyone is friends. The company actually requires that each model be shown smiling during the segments.
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Friday, May 25th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
This song is a song about Alice.
No. Wait. I mean, this post is a post about Hitler’s dick. Not quite the same.
But, the post does come with a soundtrack.
Yours is the dubious obligation of constructing the soundtrack in your mind. Remember The Colonel Bogey March from Bridge On The River Kwai? Good. Whistle a couple of bars quietly to yourself to bring it back to you. Then start again, while reading the words:
Hitler has only got one ball,
Goering has two but very small,
Himmler is somewhat sim’lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.
Repeat as needed. Your seven year old son could probably go on for an hour, laughing with glee between repetitions. Even though he’s probably never heard of most of the people whose genitalia he’d be mocking.
OK, enough rambling. Now I have to live up to my title. What, you don’t think I can do it?
Oh ye of little faith! You should know me better than that by now:
No, of course it’s not real. It’s British propaganda. Nobody beats the British at the game of penis propaganda. Not, at least, when they have the balls to actually publish the stuff:
An old army colonel – he had served a lifetime in Poona, an experience which had not failed to leave its mark on him – had found it on the table of my secret printer whom he had visited with a view to acquiring some of our latest philatelic counterfeits. When he saw this particular piece of pornography he was almost beside himself with indignant fury. I did not want to hurt the old man by challenging him to battle over an item of pornography to which in any case I attached no great importance. So I immediately withdrew it. But it was not really all that bad.
The German army’s propaganda unit had been putting out a series of leaflets purporting to expose how the enemy was retouching photographs and faking them to convey untruths. By this time my “Black” printer was an expert at counterfeiting german documents, using the same type, the same paper, and the same size as the German original. So I got him to put the same title on our counterfeit. ” Wie sie falshen”, it said ( How they forge ). Then with a suitable text we exposed a palpable forgery of a Hitler photograph, which we attributed to the despicable treachery of an internal enemy. The genuine original photograph showed Hitler in his usual saluting posture, right arm upraised, his left resting on the buckle of his belt. The forgery however showed a huge penis under his left hand. Our caption read: ” This is a most appalling forgery, Everyone one know the Fuhrer does not possess anything of the kind”. Well, I don’t really blame the old colonel. As pornography this item was not attractive. In fact, it was revolting. All the same, I would have been interested to have seen what effect it had on the German propagandists.
See also Leon Trotsky Whipping Two Nude Girls.
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Saturday, May 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Sometimes, in the middle of a noisy room, you’ll hear something fun. I overheard this at Naked Loft Party:
“Now that I’m getting married,â€? I was telling Porno Jim, “I need to have adult relationships. No more girlfriends for me – they’re my mistresses now. Doesn’t that sound so much more sophisticated?â€?
Sunday, May 13th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
If you’ve seen Warm Water Under A Red Bridge, you’ll know the Japanese understand their shio.
If you haven’t, you’ll be going “Shio? What’s shio?”
Apparently, that was Momo’s question also. Fleshbot has a skilled cross-cultural operative to explain it all to us:
Fleshbot operative KokuRyu … reports:
“I came across an unknown Japanese word today in a YouTube video that appeared to be a high school chemistry lesson conducted by a sexy Japanese porn startlet named Momo (Peaches) wearing nothing but a frilly pink bra, perhaps from Peach John.
“I knew the word, shio, means “tide” or “salt water” in Japanese. But what was the shio in the glass beaker? I asked my wife, who’s Japanese. Instead of getting angry with me for looking at porn, Mrs. KokuRyu smirked and said, ‘It’s when a woman, goes puri puri, like the spout of a whale. You know, shio fuki. It’s when a woman squirts.’
“Suddenly the YouTube clip made sense! Glowing with post-orgasmic serenity, Peaches admires the clear liquid–her liquid — collected in the beaker. Peaches then decides to analyze her shio. She sniffs it, reports it doesn’t smell, and proceeds to tests its consistency; Peaches says her shio feels silky smooth. When litmus paper is produced, shio is determined to have alkaline properties.
“Next, gripping an elaborate, slightly phallic spoon, Peaches measures the salt content of her shio. Apparently, it’s less than 0.6%. Peaches then delicately inserts her slender index finger, moistened slightly with the liquid contents of the petri dish, between her lips. She finds that shio is basically tasteless, and not a little slimy. Peaches concludes by saying she enjoyed the opportunity to investigate her shio.
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Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Time for another vintage photo from Usenet:
Classic wallet porn, complete with folds.
The smile and the non-commercial posing make me wonder this might not be a genuine amateur “my wife with no pants” picture.
Sunday, May 6th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I am jealous to learn that the pornified krewe at has outsourced its comment moderation to a magic comment bunny:
Every first-time comment is sucked through teh tubes to our underwater IP farm, where it is read by an adorable little bunny who lives inside our databases and eats rainbows for breakfast. If the bunny is pleased by your offering, your username, password, and comment are approved….
Here’s the thing, though: the bunny does not like silly, pointless, or generally uninteresting comments. In other words, you gotta bring something to the table. It’s hard to say exactly what it takes to get your comment approved–let’s just say we know a good comment when we see one–but it’s much easier to pinpoint the strategies that are virtually guaranteed to keep you on the wrong side of the velvet rope.
So we’ve broken them down for you here, so that you will stop wasting your bandwidth trying to concoct the 547th iteration of that old chestnut, “I’d hit it.” If you’re reading Fleshbot, it is assumed that you “love girls,” “love cock,” “love sexxxxx,” and/or “like to fuck,” so it isn’t really necessary for you take time out of you busy schedule to fill out a comment form and tell us that fact.
If you follow the link, you’ll see sample comments that have displeased the bunny. Those sample comments are real, I see similar every day so you don’t have to.
I need a bunny.
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
People keep sending me videos (mostly YouTube) and links to podcasts, videoblogs, all that stuff. And I almost never post them. Why not?
Because they are so inexorably linear. I love the internet because the data flows at my speed. I can skimread, jump around, consume the bits I like and move on (next!) when I’ve got boring bits in my face. For that, I need text. Audio and video, compelling as they are, require me to slow down, focus on one thing on one of my three computer screens, and wait for the information to flow at whatever glacial pace the creator chose. That’s fine for porn clips, but for pretty much anything else, I’ve already got 180 channels of narrowcast video programming on a big screen eight feet away that I never watch.
Some people say that my distaste for audio and video blogging makes me a crusty old fart who just doesn’t “get” the cool new thing. Me, I say I’m a hypermodern info consumer, moving too fast for linear data modes of the old twentieth century. I’ve been known to argue that audio and video blogging are reactionary trends, vain attempts to rescue the doomed and tired viewer/listener audience model. Whatever, maybe I am just an old fart. Doesn’t matter. Vlogs and podcasts are dead to me, I just don’t have the patience to sit through ’em.
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I’ve commented before on the strange labeling and odd packaging of transsexuals in the porn industry. And I’ve shaken my head at the odd ways guys use transsexual porn in internet games of oneupsmanship. But for all of that, I don’t claim to understand the “tranny porn” genre. And my bafflement is surely compounded by the fact that most of what I’ve seen has been poorly produced and badly marketed by pornographers who don’t seem to have been very engaged with the content.
Well, that last problem, at least, seems to have become ancient history, now that Kink.com has announced its new site: TS Seduction – Where Straight Men Take TS Cock For The First Time. It ought to be very interesting to see their special brand of San Francisco values applied to a historically neglected, traditionally crappy porn genre.
From the press release:
Leader in fetish entertainment leader, Kink.com announced the launch of their 11th all exclusive video and photo content site, TSSeduction.com, featuring hot transsexual women seducing straight men in the first site of its kind. With a new weekly video shoot update, the site boasts the hottest TS girls in action, dominating, seducing and enticing men into first time TS adventures.
Webmaster of TSS, Isis Love has been in the adult entertainment industry for over 7 years. She has worked on both sides of the camera and has been a model and guest director for Kink.com’s woman dominating men site, MenInPain.com for over 3 years.
“With one foot already in the door, I took this opportunity to join the team at Kink.com. After talking to the crew, I came in and directed some test shoots for the developing site,” said Isis Love. “I am totally excited.”
One thing’s for sure, when they advertise (to use their terms) hot transsexual women, they aren’t kidding about the hot part:
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
It’s nice to know that some of today’s young people are studying and practicing for their adult responsibilities. From a tabloid:
A Romanian teenager had to have emergency surgery after swallowing a toothbrush while she practised performing oral sex.
Andreea Vlad, 16, from Falticeni in eastern Romania, initially told doctors she had slipped and swallowed the seven inch toothbrush.
But when medical staff carried out examinations they realised she had no scratches or cuts on her throat backing up her claim she had fallen.
When questioned further she admitted she and some friends had been watching a pornographic movie and that she had swallowed the brush afterwards while practicing the technique for oral sex and imitating the women in the film.
A spokesman for the county hospital in Suceava where she was treated said: ‘This girl is very lucky. She did not suffer any internal damage because of the toothbrush, but things could have been much worse for her.’
Thursday, April 12th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I am laughing at myself a little bit. This winter got a little grim around the edges, and I wound up with one of those badly out-of-control email boxes with a thousand messages in there that all need minor attention. While storming through it today with a weed eater and a flamethrower, I noticed a very grumpy almost-flame I sent somebody who was using one of those templated automated link-exchange-request-spamming tools. It was a fairly sophisticated template, but clearly an automated request generated by someone running one of those “hire me and I can get you a thousand link exchanges” scams. My editorial snide remarks are in {curly} brackets and I’m munged out identifying information of the hapless client-victim:
Hi Bacchus,
My name is Sabrina {Hi, Sabrina, you’re real purdy for a robot} and I represent [Client-Victim] of Xxxx Xxxxxxx Blog. I have reviewed your website at https://erosblog.com/ and noticed that both sites have related content. I’d be thrilled if you would add our link to your site. {I just bet you would be!}
About our site:
Xxxxxxxxxxblog.com gives free dating and sex advice for men. It is NOT a porn site, {Oh, darn, now I’m losing interest} but rather a site for articles on sexual and social improvement. {And what is ErosBlog, chopped liver?} We currently receive approximately 45,000 unique visitors per month. {In your dreams, you do.} Exchanging links will help both of our search engine rankings, {Yours considerably more than mine} and help more people find our blogs. {Especially yours.}
If you would like to exchange links, please put a link leading to http://xxxxxxxxxxxxxblog.com on your links page. {Ooops, the “review” your link harvester did apparently missed the fact that ErosBlog doesn’t have a links page.} The anchor text (title) of this link should be:
The Xxxx Rxxxxxxx Blog: Xxxxx Xxxx Xxxxxx Xxxx Xxxx. {Sabrina robot darling, I know you scanned a bazillion links before you found mine, but how many of them had a nine word anchor text?}
If you are webmaster to any other related web sites, it would be great to exchange links there, as well. Please respond to this email with the URL of the page(s) containing our link so that I may then add your url, https://erosblog.com/ {Oooh, I’m glad you said that, I didn’t know my URL until you told me} (and any others that you may wish to include), to our links page.
Thanks for your cooperation,
Sabrina {the robot}
Now, I get several of these a day, but for some odd reason I decided to reply to this one. Read the reply for yourself, and judge: I think perhaps I was having a bad day and needed to snark at someone. Also, there was an email provided for the client-victim of the spamming scammer, so perhaps I thought I was doing him a favor. I really don’t remember; like I said, it was a hard winter, and some of the minor details are murky.
LOL, if you are going to mass mail for blog link exchanges for your marketing “blog”, you ought to pay more attention to the customs of the blogging community. Some tips:
1) When communicating with a blog that celebrates porn, emphasizing that your site is not one of those stinky porn cites is, shall we say, off-message.
2) When asking for reciprocal links with blogs that put all their links on their front pages in the sidebar, it’s unwise to bury your own return links on an interior page. It’s not fair to your link partners, and they won’t bother with you. It also makes your site look less like a blog.
3) When specifying desired anchor text, be reasonable. A nine word keyphrase is not reasonable, especially when you are asking for sidebar links where more than three words rarely fits.
4) When your blog is predominantly a marketing blog, you’re facing an uphill fight to get free reciprocal links. When facing an uphill fight, you’re way better off linking first and then asking for the reciprocal. Too many bloggers have been burned by reciprocal link requests that are never honored.
5) Lastly, mass mailing is bad, m’kay? If your request makes it clear you haven’t bothered to look at my site (see #1 above), you’re just another damned spammer, so why should I pay attention to you? And if you can’t be bothered to read the prominantly-displayed linking guidelines of the sites you want link trades with, why should they be bothered to trade with you?
Good luck with your marketing project, you’re going to need it.
Saturday, April 7th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I’ve got a disturbing drawing for everyone to enjoy. Don’t worry, it’s art, you can tell by the disturbance.
First a detail from the drawing. Not too disturbing, unless you wonder why she seems to cower. You could hope she’s just shading her eyes from the awesome and majestic sight of her lover’s manly prong. But why’s he got her in the empty corner of an empty room? It’s potentially worrisome:
It gets a lot more worrisome when you see the whole sketch, which is by one Czech illustrator named Alfred Kubin, and dates from 1902:
So, is this beastiality porn, or not? And what is that furry critter, anyway? A thousand-pound harmless little flop-eared doggie? I guess it’s safe to say he’s a “beast”, anyway.
You can tell it’s art by the way it grips you with implications, but gives you no way to tell which of the things you infer were actually and deliberately implied by the artist, and which were really just the product of your own fevered imagination.
(This is what happens when you send somebody to a liberal arts college and then don’t make him take any art history or appreciation classes. You wind up almost twenty years later with tiny little art criticism essays that feel like they were block-printed in crayon. Does anybody have the “Flesh” one? The girl in the corner looks a little pale.)
Friday, April 6th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Since ErosBlog doesn’t do politics, I haven’t posted about the current scandal involving a lying attorney general and the eight U.S. Attorneys fired — as CNN so delicately puts it — for being “insufficiently partisan.” But I’ve thought it odd that the television news has consistently covered this story without reporting, or even speculating, on exactly what it was that these prosecutors did — or didn’t — do, that caused them to incur the wrath of the president at whose pleasure they serve.
The reason, it turns out, is porn. Specifically, mainstream commercial porn involving consenting adults. The common thread binding these eight prosecutors is their refusal to prosecute commercial pornographers (often because they lacked the resources to prosecute the much uglier child porn cases on their desks, or because they understand that prosecuting mainstream porn is a great way to lose cases in today’s America.)
I toyed with the idea of a post with all the details, but it felt too much like work, and I’ve been busy. Fortunately, Susie Bright’s a lot more industrious — and a much better and more prolific writer — than I am, and she’s done the work. Sample:
Do you know what the eight fired prosecutors have in common?
All of them declined to press obscenity charges on cases that the DOJ was desperately running up a flagpole without success.
Now, why? – since we know these prosecutors are Republicans who would love to win a solid case– why would they frown on pursuing such charges?
Bush’s DOJ Porno Task Force told the prosecutors to go after X-rated entertainment companies who make adult, consensual productions–grown-ups with contracts! This time, the focus was supposed to be on subject material like piss, scat, bestiality, and… S/M. They were counting on a big “ick” factor!
But the Super-8 aren’t all that stupid, and they know what happens in obscenity trials when you go after the 1st Amendment. They could paper the White House with case history. They won’t chase these clown cars, because, as Paulie Walnuts might put it, “they’re weak, they’re out of control, and… an embarrassment to yourself and everyone else.”
What the hell is an “S/M” video, after all? Are you going to go after Hollywood for releasing 9 1/2 Weeks? Any defense lawyer worth his salt is going to bring in Pasolini’s Salo, portraits of Abu Gharib victims, and documentaries on cattle insemination to pose the question: What is context? What about taste? What crime has been committed? Legitimate film producers, be they “adult,” mainstream, or hybrid, are not going to take it lying down.
You know when President Reagan went after porn in the 80s, he told his Attorney General, Edwin Meese, to focus on gay sex, anal sex, and black-white couples– and to charge them in Texas. And it still backfired.
Better yet, Susie’s got links to the pertinent investigative reporting.
Comments Off on The Hidden Porn Scandal
Saturday, March 31st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I was slow to notice that the folks at Kink.com (for whom I have enormous respect) released a new bondage site this month, which looks incredibly rich in texture. (Heavy wood, and heavier iron — these are textures, right?) If you like your bondage heavy (literally!) and heavily invested with a “Resistance is Futile! Escape is Impossible! Why do you struggle so hopelessly?” ethos, Device Bondage may be for you. Medieval methods wrought and crafted in an updated industrial steampunk sort of way make for an unforgettable combination. Don’t miss the (very!) pink closeup of the cast iron speculum in the same shoot this picture comes from:
And then there’s the heavy horizontal pillory found here:
We’ve come a long way from the “two bored porn starlets, a suede flogger twirling in a light circle, and a hank of clothesline lightly tangled” that used to be bondage porn.
Monday, March 26th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
From a sex basics article for “guy virgins” about the practicalities of sex you don’t learn by reading, or by watching porn:
Messiness
You probably know this already, but overall sex is messier than what you see on TV or in porn.
- You’re going to get hot and sweaty of course.
- The woman’s lubrication is going to dribble all over the place and possibly stain the sheets. Someone is going to get semen on them at some point. Condom wrappers are going to litter the ground. You may kiss passionately and slobber all over each other.
- Sometimes when you’re doing a girl she’ll fart. I heard it has something to do with the thrusting pushing air into her abdomen but don’t quote me.
- Sometimes when you pull out and she changes positions she’ll fart out her pussy (queefing).
- If you have sex when she’s on her period, well use your imagination.
- If you have anal sex you may get some poo on your dick.
- If you have a good session, when you’re done you’re going to be sweaty, red faced, tired, and a bit out of it. Your hair will be messed up, gross stray hairs will be stuck to your skin, the girl will have a bit of white goop running out of her cootch. You’ll have a bit of cum dribbling out of your dick. There will be at least one condom wrapper on the floor, the sheets and pillows will be all over the place, and the bed will have a wet spot on it. If you cuddle after you’ll start to stick together and it’ll feel gross when you pull apart. It’s great.
Link via Sexoteric.
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Monday, March 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
It’s Monday, so please allow me to brighten your day with some vintage girl-on-girl hippie action:
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Sunday, March 11th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Long time readers know my views on the stupid NSFW flag that too often accompanies any link to adult material on the American bits of the internet. I was delighted yesterday (after linking to Susie Bright) to discover that she’s written a long and thoughtful rant against NSFW nonsense. My favorite bit:
NSFW has no meaning in print– in paper journalism or publishing. It has no place in a newsroom or the bookstore. It only exists on the Internet– which is ironically notorious for its libertarianism. NSFW, whoever dreamed it up, is a Bowdlerization of the Web, a Scarlet Letter. It exists because fearful people believe in it, like a bad fairy. It says more about the psychological fears and prejudices of the person using it, than it does about the content in question. Why do web authors put up with it?
The “W” in NSFW seems to imply that the “workplace” is an environment where all must be defended against impropriety and loss of efficiency. But surely clock-watching bosses have noticed that employees can just as easily daydream about online seed catalogs as they can about porn.
If said it before and I’ll say it again, there’s no such thing as a website that’s not safe for work. There’s only work that’s not safe for web surfing. And if that’s the kind of work you have, you need better work, not more NSFW ghetto badges to sew on the links that will get you into workplace trouble.
Saturday, March 10th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
This bit of vintage strap-on porn is here to serve as yet another in the constant series of necessary reminders that there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun, or under the pornographer’s lights either. If you’re from the generation that thinks Susie Bright and her merry band of On Our Backs lesbian wenches invented the strap-on dildo, you’ve got another think coming:
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
OK, friends and kinksters, don’t pay any mind to the electric cattle prod. Sure, it’s in the picture, and you can’t put it completely out of your mind, any more than you can ignore the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in your china closet. But, as the man said in Airplane, that’s not important now. No, the picture is for all you dirty feet fetishists out there:
But what are you gonna do? How are you gonna keep a model’s feet clean when you’re shooting bondage porn in a boiler room? Short answer: you’re not.
Picture credit: Chanta’s Bitches — which is now a Kink Unlimited channel.
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Friday, February 23rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Outside of the hentai realm you don’t see a lot of science fiction pornography, and what you do see is usually hilariously awful. I’m not sure exactly why that is, given all the fun you could have with big hard shiny implacable stainless steel sex robots and lustful tentacle-y aliens and autonomous anal probes and mind control rays and force whips and … oh, wait, am I talking out loud here?
Moving rapidly along.
Anyway, the folks at FuckingMachines.com may not be making science fiction, but they do understand the attraction of cruel implacable hard steel sex robot machinery and the considerable advantages of the indefatigable electric motor. Nor do they shrink from restraining mere human flesh when it might otherwise flinch away from and thus miss out on the intense mechanical pleasures of the machine age. In space, it is said, no one can hear you scream. But why go all the way to space when you can achieve the same effect with a high quality latex vacuum bondage bed?
Princess Leia in chains was cute. Han Solo in carbonite was novel. But this, I submit, would have been a better fate for either one of them, and would have immensely livened up the movie theater of my youth. Besides, wouldn’t old Jabba the Hut have enjoyed the heck out of a implacable robotic tongue-saw?
Science fiction this may not be, but it sure is entertaining!
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Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I got this story from Boing Boing, but I was surprised to see Xeni report it straight, without the least hint of commentary. Seems a fellow overheard the soundtrack of a woman screaming and pleading for help, so he grabbed an antique sword and rushed to the rescue. Alas, what he was hearing was the soundtrack from a porn DVD, and now he faces three criminal charges and the chance at close to three years in jail:
Man mistakes porn DVD as woman’s cries for help
He faces charges after entering apartment with sword in tow
Oconomowoc – Instincts took over, James Van Iveren says, when he rushed out his door to the sound of a woman being raped in an apartment above.
“It was a woman screaming,” he recalled Tuesday. “She was screaming for help.”
Sword in hand, he bounded up the stairs, kicked in the door and confronted a man who turned out to be alone – watching a pornographic movie.
“Now I feel stupid,” Van Iveren said.
Worse yet, police seized his sword – a family heirloom – carted him to jail and referred the case to a prosecutor who charged Van Iveren with three criminal counts.
“This really is nothing,” Van Iveren insisted, “nothing but a mistake.”
Van Iveren’s “mistake” unfolded on the morning of Feb. 12 when Van Iveren, 39, of Oconomowoc, was listening to music in the apartment he shares with his mother behind Red & Bunny’s Diner on S. Main St.
Suddenly, according to Van Iveren, the distinct cries of a woman pleading for help could be heard coming from the apartment above him. He tried putting them out of his mind at first, but when they persisted, Van Iveren decided something had to be done.
“I don’t have a telephone,” he said. “I couldn’t call the police.”
The cries seemed to be coming from the apartment of a tenant he barely knew, but that, Van Iveren said, didn’t matter.
“It had nothing to do with him,” he said. “I didn’t even know if he was there. It was the woman. I thought there was a woman.”
The woman, according to a criminal complaint, was on a DVD being watched by the neighbor, who later played part of the movie back for police to point out what he figured Van Iveren heard downstairs.
To Van Iveren, the neighbor’s film sounded like a rape in progress.
“So I grabbed the cavalry sword and ran upstairs,” he said. “I intended to hold it behind my back and knock.
“But I froze and instead, what happened happened.”
According to the criminal complaint, the neighbor told police that Van Iveren pounded on the door and kicked it open without warning, damaging the frame and lock in the process.
“Where is she?” Van Iveren demanded, thrusting the 39-inch sword at the neighbor, according to the complaint. “Where is she?”
The neighbor told police that Van Iveren became increasingly aggressive as he repeated the question, insisting that he’d heard a woman being raped. With the sword pointed at him, the neighbor led Van Iveren throughout the apartment, opening closet doors to prove he was alone, according to the complaint.
Van Iveren said it wasn’t nearly that dramatic.
“I walked in the front room and looked around,” he said. “When I saw there was no woman, I left.
“I went downstairs and when I looked out the window, I saw the police had come, so I went out to tell them what happened.”
Van Iveren insisted that he never threatened the neighbor with the sword.
“I had the sword extended,” he said. “But that was all.”
The neighbor wasn’t home when a reporter visited the building Tuesday, and he could not be reached by telephone.
For his effort, Van Iveren was charged with criminal trespass while using a dangerous weapon, criminal damage to property while using a dangerous weapon and disorderly conduct while using a dangerous weapon, all criminal misdemeanors that carry a maximum total penalty of 33 months in jail.
“All of them are going to be dismissed,” he predicted. “They have to.
“This was all just a big mistake.”
I find this a troubling story. On the one hand, I’m all for the rights of people to the peaceable enjoyment of pornography in the security of their own homes. But on the other hand, I’ve seen some porn DVDs that had pretty disturbing soundtracks. I can imagine this being an easy mistake to make.
That said, the sword and the forcible entry seem a bit over dramatic. There’s a certain lack of judgment on display. But what do we want people to do when they hear a rape in progress? I’m just old fashioned enough to think that, had events been what Van Iveren thought they were, he would or ought to have earned himself a good citizen’s medal and the thanks of a grateful populace.
Fortunately, I think the prediction of dismissal is likely to come true. There’s something called “the defense of necessity” which exists for any crime, and in most jurisdictions all you have to do is convince a jury that a reasonable person would have believed the otherwise criminal acts were necessary to save a life or avert a serious injury. Given that hurdle — and Van Iveren’s arguably heroic motive — I think the prosecutor would be insane to push this to trial.
Monday, February 19th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Lately, as I’m sure some of you have noticed, I’ve been giving in to my evil nature by posting pictures that are, if not designed to stir up trouble, at least likely to do so. (Like the man said, art is either plagiarism or revolution; me, I’m with the re-mixers, who are trying to prove it can be both at once.)
This picture of a man in chains, from Bondage Blog, is another one:
Some of my readers are going to enjoy, as Rope Guy puts it, “the very buff dude, in chains.” That’s all the reason I need to publish this picture.
I’m aware that some folks are likely to condemn any suggestion that we might find eroticism in a still photograph of an actor getting paid SAG scale for standing around sweating attractively in Hollywood during the production of a movie adaptation of a lurid fiction that, at least one one level, mocked long-dead racist bastards by suggesting that their women were fornicating lavishly with the buff guys they were trying so hard to oppress and exploit. Oh well, have fun with that.
But be nice about it, or I’ll move on to my ultimate weapon. Do you really want to see the cartoon drawing I’ve got of a sweet young lady making a mouthful (and what a mouthful!) of a horse’s cock? You’ll need Johnson’s Extra Strong Eye-and-Brain Soap after seeing that one!
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Saturday, February 17th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Thanks to an old friend and alert reader, I am this morning pointing you to the Marginal Revolution blog, in which George Mason economics professor Tyler Cowen wonders a bit about the porn industry. I don’t want to pick on Professor Cowen unduly, inasmuch as he’s asked the question politely and has attracted a lengthy comment thread that is mostly free of the usual anti-porn ignorance and bigotry (although the porn-is-an-addiction idiocy rears its stupid-head, and commenter Clayton Cramer does drop in to trumpet his longstanding kink-is-evil bigotry — but I repeat myself). However, Professor Cowen did disclaim having much knowledge of the porn industry, and he expressly invited his readers to call him clueless. With due respect, I’ll bite.
Professor Cowen, your post was a little bit clueless. I left a comment there, but it’s worth more discussion here:
[post title] Why Is Pornography Scarce?
Er, it’s not. Not even in the sense in which Econ professors use the word. It’s a glut, a golconda, an exploding cornucopia, it’s everywhere, it’s easy to find, it’s cheap, it might as well be free, it’s easy to get and cheap to store and anybody who wants any and isn’t terminally lazy or stupid already has lots, more than they can ever hope to look at. Unless they’ve recently suffered a house fire or a porn-hostile woman.
So, what’s actually scarce? New porn, fresh porn, different porn. It’s scarce because it doesn’t stay new for long, it’s scarce because ninety percent of everything is crap and so lots of even fresh-made porn isn’t fresh, it’s scarce because (short of stacking fetishes until you’ve got one-legged panty-sniffing midget girls mud wrestling with shaved sheep) it’s tough to make porn that’s new and different. “New and fresh” requires art, craft, skill, all the other things that are in short supply in any industry. And, oddly, unit volumes are so low in porn that art, craft, and skill tend not to be rewarded.
After noting with interest that Playboy is selling its entire set of back issues on disk for about six hundred bucks, Professor Cowen writes:
Have you noticed that storage is really, really cheap these days? Have you studied the durable goods monopoly problem? Once you’ve accumulated a stock of durable material, at some point you will sell off successive units very very cheaply. Have you noticed that costs of electronic reproduction — call it marginal cost — are really, really low these days? Have you noticed there is a massive stock of accumulated pornographic images?
…
Call me clueless, as I have very little direct knowledge of pornography. But I don’t understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material. Why don’t they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um…busy…for many years? I believe also that fetishes are fairly stable and predictable. You don’t need to see “the new porn” to know what you will want to get off on.
First of all, Playboy is unique in the industry. Most porn sellers don’t offer “a single dense disc of images”, or when they do, they don’t price it attractively. In my comment at Marginal Revolution, I speculated as to some of the reasons for this apparent market failure.
Second of all, there is some fetish drift. People’s tastes do change over time. Guys don’t view pornography so much to see the movie on the screen per se. Rather, they view it in order to use the images on the screen to stimulate the somewhat different movies in their own heads. Those movies grow, and change, and shift, over time. Some of the change is stimulated by the porn that’s been seen lately. But lots of the change happens because of what’s happened in the guy’s sexual life, or the new woman he’s been lusting after, or a random comment the hot co-worker made, or any of a thousand other non-porn stimuli. As the internal movies change, most guys find that the external movies need to change also.
But the real confusion comes next, when Cowen reveals that he’s really only talking about a tiny fraction of the overall porn market:
As I observe the sector, buyers cough up new money all the time, and they buy relatively small units of output, and at relatively high prices.
Please “splain” it to me, as they say…
Um, “as I observe the sector”? I know it wasn’t intended to be, but that’s side-splittingly funny.
The “porn sector” is notoriously difficult to observe. Nobody even knows to within an order of magnitude what the gross revenues of the sector might be.
But that’s not what’s so funny. What’s funny is an Econ professor confusing the tiny “observable” fraction of a huge and largely furtive market, with the market itself.
The people who buy new porn are relatively visible. They have credit cards, they make people semi-rich, you can observe the money even if you can’t see the transactions. Porn marketing — which is splashy and observable — is directed at them.
The people who buy “a single dense disc of images” — or who would, if they could find one on the market — aren’t as observable because they account for fewer transactions and less gross money.
And the vast, huge, horde of people who don’t buy porn at all — but who use porn, collect porn, save porn, horde porn, most of which they get for free over the internet — they are part of the market too. Hell, they define the market. True, they are mostly paying a price of “zero” (or, rather, zero-plus, the “plus” being the not inconsiderable cost of a good internet connection), but they are still market participants. To be honest, they are the eight-thousand-pound gorillas of this marketplace, stomping around crushing the dreams of the naive newbie pornographers who think “hey, everybody loves porn, how could I not get rich?”
So, to sum up, Professor Cowen looks at a tiny fraction of the people in the porn marketplace, notes that it’s the most visible and most lucrative set of porn consumers (the part of the market he can see), and wonders why that tiny subset with a market preference for fresh porn in low volume isn’t buying stale porn in high volume. And the answer, of course, is that people who want stale porn in high volume — and there are lots of ’em — can already get it in job lots, for a price of cheap-to-free.
Postscript: To the folks who are happy with their massive collections of older porn (whether they collected it the hard way back in the day, bought it on “one dense disk”, or, like most folks these days, hoovered it up off the internet), it’s often a mystery “why anybody pays for porn”. In Professor Cowen’s comments that question came up, and to answer it, several folks trotted out that tired old war-whore, the “porn is an addiction” theory. That deserves its own rant, but I did point out over there, and want to say here, that it’s a silly explanation for why people are willing to pay money for new and fresh (and scarce) porn. Wanting fresh porn, and paying big bucks for it, when you could have stale porn for free, is no more a sign of addiction than wanting fresh food, and paying big bucks for it, when you could have canned food for pennies from Wal-Mart. Are people who pay big bucks for greenhouse-grown vine-ripened tomatoes in January “addicted to food?” Naw, they just like fresh tomatoes, and they think Del Monte canned stewed tomatoes suck, even priced at three bucks a case at Costco. They have what the economists call a market preference, not an addiction.
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Generally when I post vintage photos, I have to delete half a dozen comments bitching about body hair. Kids these days, you’d think their fashions were some sort of natural law. (Anyway, my solution to that is to post more vintage photographs; eventually maybe the lesson will soak in that fashions change, and that history is not automatically gross. Never mind the more subtle truth that fashions in body hair vary along demographic lines, even today. In short, your mom may have more pussy hair than your favorite waxed-and-plucked porn starlet, and your dad still thinks your mom is hot. Exercise coping skills.)
Moving rapidly along: but what is a body to do when the notable vintage hairdos in question are on heads?
For help in pondering that, I offer up this taxonomy of hairdos from a 70’s Ebony magazine. Enjoy!
Thursday, February 1st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I hate to just dump a picture post, so here’s a picture to make you think:
The interesting question is, what does it make you think? Discuss among yourselves.
For me, it raises all sorts of questions. Is it supposed to be funny, in a mock-heroic Great White Hunter sort of way? (Obviously not very* funny, but I think I found it on Urod.ru, where the humor tends to run low. You can’t entirely blame those low-brow Russki misogynists, though, because that truck is an American classic or I’ll eat the hood ornament.)
Or is it supposed to be a deep feminist commentary on the treatment of women in porn? Or on the treatment of women, in general?
Or, contrariwise, might it be a direct reminder message from the Patriarchy on the supposed equation between women and meat?
We might know more if we knew who the photographer was. Which says a lot, all by itself, about the difficulty of finding meaning in a context-less photograph.
Have fun, but be nice.
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
A while back I noticed a Bondage Blog post called Hanging Like Ripe Fruit. The post (illustrated by some bondage porn from Hogtied.com) featured a suspension tie reminiscent of a scene from The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, a famous BDSM novel by Ann Rice. Unfortunately Bondage Blog only posted one picture, so in a moment of boredom, I went back to Anne Rice to help flesh it out:
“Double her, for punishment,” said Lord Gregory. “I think a real punishment is in order.”
Princess Lizetta gave several high-pitched groans. They seemed both anger and protest. She seemed not to have bargained for this, and as she was carried ahead of Beauty and Lord Gregory into the Hall of Punishments, the Pages quickly affixed leather cuffs to her wrists and ankles, each cuff with a heavy metal hook imbedded in it.
Now she was raised, struggling, to a great low beam that spanned the room, her wrists hung from a hook above her head and then her legs brought straight up in front of her so that her ankles were fixed to the same hook. The was, in fact, bent double. Her head was then forced between her calves, so that Beauty could see her face clearly. And a leather strap was bound around here, securely pressing her upturned legs against her torso.
But the most cruel and frightening aspect of it for Beauty was the exposure of the Princess’s secret parts, for she was hung so that anyone could see her full sex with its pink lips and its dark hair even to the tiny brown orifice between her buttocks. And all this just below her scarlet face. Beauty could imagine no worse exposure and she looked down timidly, glancing up again and again to the girl whose suspended body moved slightly as with a current in the air, the leather links at her wrists and ankles creaking.
…
The man in velvet had begun to stroke Princess LIzetta’s sex with a small instrument that was, as so much here, covered in smooth black leather. This was a three-pronged rod that somewhat resembled a hand, and as soon as he teased the helpless Princess, she began to struggle in her bonds.
Beauty understood at once what was happening. The Princess’s pink sex, terrifying to Beauty as it hung so unprotected, appeared to swell, to ripen. Beauty could see tiny droplets of moisture appear on it.
…
“Lord Gregory,” the Lady said, “you must think of something special.” Then to Beauty’s horror, the lady reached out delicately and fastidiously and pinched Princess LIzetta’s pubic lips hard so that they exuded moisture. Then she pinched the right lip and the left, and the girl winced with pain and misery.
Lord Gregory had meantime snapped his fingers for the Lord with the iron clawlike hand, and whispered something Beauty could not hear. “It will strengthen her punishment.”
And now the Lord appeared with a little pot and a brush and as the Lady stepped back, he took the brush and bathed Princess LIzetta’s naked organ in a heavy syrup. A few droplets fell to the floor, and the princess again made known her misery. She sobbed softly behind her gag, but the Lady only smiled rather innocently and shook her head. “It will attract any flies we have about,” Lord Gregory said, “and if we have none it shall produce its inevitable itching as it dries. It is quite uncomfortable.”
The Lady did not seem satisfied. Her pretty and innocent face was smooth however and she sighed. “I suppose it will do for now, but I wish she were bound with her legs apart to a stake in the garden. Then let the flies and the little insects of the air find her honeyed mouth. She deserves it.”
Although there are no dramatically better views in the short trailer and sample views visible for free without whipping out your credit card, a membership will get you rather a lot more!
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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
OK, I used that title just so I could pick on it. But first, the vintage porn:
Now, what’s wrong with my title? In general, there’s a number of reasons why I don’t normally throw the word “lesbian” around loosely when characterizing what Rick Santorum might call “woman on woman” porn.
First of all, there’s the moron factor. Thirty years of greasy-idiot pornographers shouting “Hot Lesbo Fucking!” every time they get two naked ladies in the same photographic frame has sort of polluted the swimming pool.
At a deeper level, even when you’ve got two women actually doing sexual things to each other in a photograph, it’s never clear to me that you’ve got enough information to attach that “lesbian” label. Yeah, lesbian women have sex with each other (by all reports, anyway, I haven’t witnessed it with my own eyes) but even with my dim and primitive grasp of gender politics, I’m reasonably confident that there might be greater depth to lesbian identification. I don’t think you can reliably attach labels like that based on photographic evidence alone.
And finally, there’s the fundamental deceit present in all posed photographic art. Porn models tend to do what they’re paid to do, and it doesn’t say much about who they are. Calling a woman a lesbian because she poses sexually with another woman is like calling an author a Catholic because he writes a story with a priest in it.
Which is really my point about this picture. The suggestive touching is one thing, but I’m not seeing any enthusiasm in the faces of the models. Which would make this bad lesbian porn, if lesbian porn it were.
Over-analyze much? Why, yes thank you, I don’t mind if I do.
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
I don’t usually post hardcore sex pictures here, but to me this is more of a hardcore smiling picture. You don’t usually see porn starlets looking this gosh-darn happy about the sex they are having:
This is from one of those adult BBS CDs, which are turning into a vintage porn genre all their own. The white lace says “wedding night sex”, but the ballerina slippers make me wonder. And that doesn’t look like wedding undies wrapped around her ankles, either.
Update: It turns out that the original ur-source on this is a 1991 Color Climax porn magazine starring Alicyn Sterling, Peter North, and Jon Dough in a shoot titled “Dance Lovers.” Alicyn plays a dance student who needs some intense personal instruction for a new role…
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Monday, January 15th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Because there can never be enough Smurf porn:
From Spanking Blog.
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Saturday, January 13th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
When you’ve been blogging for years the way I have, it can sometimes be hard to find something new to write about, or even quote. So, as you might imagine, I spend a lot of time on the search engines. Pick a slightly funky key phrase, type it into various search engines, see what sexy stuff turns up.
What turns up, in overwhelming volume, is “splogs” — spam blogs, stuff that uses blog templates but is just random junk designed to attract search engines.
The fascinating thing is that these splogs are universally obvious in the search results. The “snippet” invariably doesn’t read like anything a human wrote, and often even the URL is so obviously a throw-away that you know there’s no real site there.
I’ve gotten very good at spotting these things in the search results and not wasting my clicks on ’em. But, frankly, it’s not very hard. Case in point, not the worst URL I’ve ever seen but one that screams “not a real website”:
http://lesbianjailsex.pornyblogs.info/
I guess “porny” is to “porn” as “truthiness” is to truth. No kidding, here’s some of the search engine honeytrap “content” to be found at that URL:
She like bone with strapon and genuine love muscle togethershe is teen, but acts like a professional whore. Like the lesbians in this photograph much time is spent tongue bathing and slurping the clit. If you like the photos then surf further & check out the free lesbian sample clips that are on the smut-site. See this hottie work a honey pot like she never knew she could.
Now that’s sales copy!
Sunday, December 31st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I imagine that tickling girls is probably the first experience most little boys get with anything remotely like power exchange or BDSM. Annoying critters like big sisters, powerful people like mom, those fascinating but dangerous girl-creatures at school — sometimes they can be disarmed, discombobulated, annoyed, whatever, it doesn’t matter, they are affected by a tickle, by just a little half-innocent touch. The result can be out of all proportion to the strength of the touch, and what’s more, the “victims” often laugh and seem to enjoy themselves, even as they are powerless to resist or ignore. Heady stuff!
Of course tickling is a fetish in its own right for some people, with commercial tickling porn and everything. But I sometimes have trouble imagining that the pro bondage pornographers (who usually seem to produce oh-so-serious tableaux featuring anguished faces, strained positions, and whistling whips) don’t tickle their models now and again, if only to produce a smile when they need one.
And, indeed, they do tickle, if this tickle-bondage photo from Hogtied.com is any indication:
That’s the lovely Veronica Jett getting tickled in her ropes, and you can see more of her here.
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Monday, November 20th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
It’s been well over a year since I last linked to Naked Jen, and I’m not sure why I’ve let it go so long. Jen has one of those life blogs, I’d guess you’d call it; or, if you’re old fashioned, it might be considered an online journal or diary. Content: Jen, writing about what happens to Jen.
Except for the special sauce: every so often, Jen takes off her clothes in public and posts the picture. Frequently without any commentary at all, like it was the most ordinary thing. It’s really quite delightful.
Just fer instance, here’s Jen discovering damage to her Honda Element:
Luckily for us, she recently posted an uncharacteristically detailed account on the “Why naked Jen?” question, which I think is worth quoting in detail:
It was a really lovely party, a gathering of some folks who I already knew and many that I did not, with amazing food and laughter and beautiful children who were quite busy adorning themselves with sparkly things and glittery paint and just the right balloon animal.
At one point, Gwendomama mentioned to someone at the party that I was Nakedjen. As in THE Nakedjen. From the Internet. The one she talks about all the time. The one who just gets naked whenever. The one who got naked at the Mexican restaurant when she was there and she missed the opportunity!
That Nakedjen.
But then it didn’t stop there. She loaded this blog. On her very large flat screen monitor that was sitting right on the buffet table. There was a smorgasbord of food and behind it was me, upside down on a bed, naked. Well, I suppose it’s not a party until someone gets naked, as I always say, and it was probably a good thing that it was me.
Anyway, everyone was, as you might imagine, quite curious about exactly what it meant to be Nakedjen. Why I did it? What was the purpose? What was it all about?
So I happily explained that I am quite comfortable in my body. That being naked for me is a celebration of my body and of myself. I also explained that I was very tired of the distorted images of women that we are constantly fed by the media that make women feel that they are imperfect. Or not quite good enough. I was upset by a media that was constantly shoving the photo shopped perfected Barbie Doll images at us from the cover of magazines and television and billboards and was doing its best to create a very large population of women who absolutely hated everything about themselves.
I wanted to change that. And I was going to start with me.
So I started writing Nakedjen. It was my very subtle political platform. Because obviously I chose to be naked about my entire life, not just that particular agenda. Once I really started writing Nakedjen, I decided to write completely from my heart and soul. Bare it all. To be truly naked. And raw. And very real.
I also decided that I would post naked pictures of myself. That, I will admit, came more from my job at the time than from anything else. I was the product manager for an on-line sex chat community. Basically I was working in the porn industry. And I didn’t like what I was seeing at all. Because the women who were being served up to the men were not REAL. Men were paying lots of money for the fantasy of these women (and there’s nothing wrong with fantasy!), but I decided that I would give them a bona-fide, genuine, absolutely 100% real naked woman.
Now, let me reiterate that for me it wasn’t about being sexual. That honestly has never been my intention. I’m just me. I realize on an intellectual level that there are plenty of men (and women) out there that find my naked body attractive. Or even, gasp, HOT as they like to tell me. But for me, it honestly was just about saying, “Look, here I am! Nakedjen! This is my body. I love every inch of it and think it’s beautiful. And I think your naked body is absolutely perfect and beautiful, too!”
Thanks, Jen!
(Previous links: Naked Jen Goes To Washington and Naked At Disney World.)
Saturday, November 11th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Found this classic Tom Of Finland illustration over here at BJ’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings:
But what caught my eye, and made me smile, is that if you look very very closely at the illustration, you can see that the fellow on top has already lost the rowel from his right spur. Doesn’t it make you wonder where he left it?
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Friday, November 10th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a vintage erotic image (perhaps a French postcard or salon card) that’s rare because of its subject matter (female masturbation, rarely treated in the early porn) and because of the delicate hand-tinting it received:
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Sunday, November 5th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I love the vintage porn. And here, from Bondage Blog, is a premium sample of it: nice hot rear-entry sex on the bed, with a blindfold to add just that little extra touch of kinky spice:
Saturday, November 4th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
From time to time people have asked me my opinion on the question of what makes a good sex blog. I’ve spent some time toying with the question, and I’d like to write a detailed post sharing my opinions, but it’s a big job. It’s on the to-do list, but don’t hold your breath while waiting for it.
In the meanwhile, however, Violet Blue has written and posted what she describes as her own personal blogging style guide. It’s got lots of good stuff in it that would be of value to any blogger on any topic. However, Violet being Violet, it’s also got sex blogging tips at the end, disguised as ethical notes. The two money paragraphs:
My ethics about readers: Never insult the reader, call them a freak for liking anything you think is strange, or suggest the reader is not smart. Never judge anyone’s sexual preferences or orientation. Let people think things are weird all by themselves — don’t assume the reader will agree with your perceptions about what’s right and wrong in any context. When I run Fleshbot, my line is this with the writers: no one cares if you think trannies are freaky or fat chicks are gross; the reader who’s into it (and there’s a lot more than you think) is a reader just like anyone else. If you have something to prove about your sexual orientation, this isn’t the place to make your point. If it makes you uncomfortable, or you’re more worried about what people will think of you for posting it than the fun things you can say about it, don’t post it — give it to me!
My ethics about content: Avoid racist and sexist content. If it’s “interracial” but really hot, say something about how lame the titles are or how stupid racial sexual stereotypes are, but how nasty and hot the sex is. I link to christian anti-porn sites when I slap them, hard, and want them to see who is sending them traffic. No one is ever ‘stupid’ or ‘sick’ for liking sex, no matter what kind. I make fun of stereotypes and pastiches; I won’t endorse a “how to pick up chicks” book, but *will* make fun of it. I’m all about irony (especially of sexual stereotypes), making smart commentary, finding hot things to wank to and strange things for people to look at.
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 -- by Bacchus
A friend of mine, a real-world meatspace friend going waaay back to my mis-spent youth, sent me a brief email note and a link the other day. This friend of mine is, I’d say, amused to find himself acquainted with an internet pornographer, but I do not think he’s convinced I’m making the best use of my talents and education. The email said, in its entirety but for salutations:
Of the various virtuous roles you might occupy in the greater human scheme, defender of the public peace didn’t come to mind first, but perhaps it should.
Yeah, he talks like that. It’s one of his many charms.
The link he sent was this one, to an article in Slate: How The Web Prevents Rape.
I’d seen previous references to the research documented in the article, but nothing so cogently written. A few excerpts:
First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.
The bottom line on these experiments is, “More Net access, less rape.” A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.
Well, duh.
OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that’s a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It’s hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.
I said “Well, duh” because, as I wrote back to my friend:
To me, that’s one of those studies with a result that’s intuitively self-evident. (Not to devalue it; so much that is self-evident is also wrong.) The crux for me is in the sentences “It’s hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.”
In the canonical feminist view of rape, the brainless chant is that “rape is not about sex, it’s about violence and power.” I’ve always thought that to be arrant nonsense. Rape *is* violent, but that’s a statement about practicality and means, not motivation. It’s always seemed to me that rape must be about sexual frustration. Reduce the frustration, reduce the incidence of rape, quod erat demonstrandum. About as controversial as arguing that feeding people reduces hunger.
(If I had been writing the above for this blog rather than in email shorthand to someone who knows me well, I’d have been more cautious. Specifically, when I wrote “rape must be about sexual frustration” I’d have disclaimered it a bit; “many rapes are”, perhaps, rather than “rape must be”. And I would have been more tactful in my description of the opposing view.)
My own belief is that the internet porn effect is broadly beneficial, whatever its debatable effects on the rape statistics. Peeping Toms in the bushes used to be a staple of the suburban police blotters, but when was the last time you heard of one? Didn’t we used to get more high street raincoat flashers, before the internet came along and offered the sending of unsolicited dick pictures as a safer alternative?
I don’t have numbers to prove any of that, of course. Which is why I find the research quoted in Slate to be so interesting.
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
OK, so there’s a lot of bad porn out there. But sometimes — accidentally or on purpose — you find pure art. This picture looks like a scene from a morality play I might almost watch. If Norman Rockwell had been just a little bit pervier, he might have painted it, and given it a pretentious title. “The Unwelcome Invitation”, anyone?
Picture is from some Lupus Spanking porn found on Spanking Blog.
Friday, October 27th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
As long time readers will remember, whenever the subject of female ejaculation comes up, we hear from people wedded to their belief that female ejaculation is a myth and that female ejaculate is “just pee”. As I said last time, “Erosblog is NOT going to be a forum for spreading sexual ignorance and doubt on this topic.”
For any lingering doubters among my readership, however, I submit a couple of posts from Giardino del Piacere: Wet Emails and More Wet Emails. Lots of intimate details from women who have no reason to dissemble:
First, I’d love everyone to know, normal women like Eva and me ejaculate. I can’t speak for Eva, but I’m no porn star. I’m a woman rapidly approaching menopause. I have history, boobs that sag some, squishy thighs and a drooping bottom. Nope, not porn star material at all, but I can sure squirt like one.
Second, I believe and as she indicated in her messages, Eva believes, that any woman can learn to ejaculate. It takes only a willingness to let go when the urge to ‘let go’ hits. If you’ve ever experienced a screaming urge to pee while having great sex or bringing yourself pleasure, you are probably a squirter waiting to be born. You’re never too old or young to learn. Eva has a long history of ejaculating, mine is something I’ve discovered within the past year.
Third, squirting not a bad or dirty thing. It is not urine. No, I’m not a physiologist or a physician. I’m the owner of the coochie that drenches the bed. At my age, I truly know the difference between urinating and the sensations I have when I ejaculate. Often I have to visit the bathroom shortly after sex. Logic tells me if I were urinating and not squirting I would have relieved myself.
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Over at Making Light, there’s a complete roundup of the tale of one Fred Head (D – Texas). With a name like the hero of an Ogden Nash comic ballad, he decided to live up to the name, attacking his Republican opponent for having once written “pornography”, aka a tame romance novel. Tame, I tell you:
Ross gave a quick tug and her pajama bottoms slid away with a quiet rustle. Suddenly she was bare. He thrust his leg between hers, and a deep heaviness throbbed in her belly. He was hard, pressing against her, and she moaned.
She needed him to fill the aching void at her center.
With devastating slowness, his hand cupped her completely before he slowly slid a finger into her warmth…
Oooh, suddenly she was bare! Bare, I tell you!
It gets better — once this escapade started hitting the blogs, someone sounding a lot like Fred went around posting comments in support of himself, referring in the process to “Absence Only” sex education policy when he (presumably) meant “Abstinence Only”.
Needless to say, the righteously justified ridicule continues to accrue.
Sunday, October 8th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Although most of the sex commentators I like and respect appear to have climbed on the “Fortuny Is Evil” fleshpile in connection with The Great Craigslist Sex Personals Massacre Of 2006 (I include without limitation Violet Blue (who started out thoughtful but is now namecalling), Mistress Matisse, and Dan Savage), I’ve been disappointed that their united condemnation of Fortuny has been intensely personal, without really coming to grips with the interesting question of what, in a rigorous ethical sense, his great crimes seem to have been. OK, so he’s a “prick” and what he did was wrong” (Matisse), but what moral obligation did he violate? He “sucks” (Savage) and he’s a “creepy guy” and a “jerk” (Violet) — all of which may be true, I don’t know the guy, but what does it have to do with what he actually did?
The more I think about this, the more I come around to thinking that what he did to get the howling mob after him (and by howling mob, I refer more broadly to others who have weighed in on the controversy; the folks I’ve quoted here are the calm and thoughtful ones) was he violated outdated and unreasonable social expectations.
Savage talks about “privacy violations”, Violet about “basic privacy and communication rules of conduct”, but neither of them come to grips with my point, which is that it’s not inherently reasonable to expect random strangers to preserve your privacy. You don’t have any expectation of privacy in an email you send to a stranger; or, if you do, there’s something wrong in your thinking. At best, you’re relying on their social graces — I’ll go so far as to agree that it’s polite to protect the confidences of strangers — but how many random strangers exhibit the manners you’d prefer? Not enough, never enough, especially not when something important — like your privacy — is on the line.
I am heartened to see some understanding of my other point, which is that a lot of responders to sex ads are misbehaving in various ways, and thus are exposing themselves (heh) to more risk than they are comfortable accepting. These miscreants (and I refer specifically to the virtual flashers who slammed the comments on my last post with “the slut was asking for it” self-justifications) seem to be the most outraged, because (like virtually everyone else except me, it seems) they feel their misbehaviour ought to be cloaked by the privacy-protecting practices of their intended victims, and they aren’t happy to learn that their expectations of privacy aren’t as reasonable as they’d hoped.
To which I say, “Waah.”
Violet seems to get this part, writing:
Think of it like this: when you upload a porn photo to Flickr, you are in violation of their Terms of Use rules and they take it down. When you use your work email address to answer an explicit sex ad, you are essentially in violation of your employer’s TOU. If you cheat on your wife, you’re in violation of your marriage’s TOU. In his “experiment”, Jason Fortuny violated several ethical and social TOUs that many of us accept as basic privacy and communication rules of conduct.
But not everyone outed in The Craigslist Experiment was violating one of life’s TOUs — I’ll even argue that the majority of the people who had their personal info revealed didn’t care, or notice.
I don’t, obviously, agree that Fortuny violated any TOUs — if anything, he merely ignored one of those meaningless and overreaching shrinkwrap EULAs on boxed software, one that others are attempting but failing to impose on him, one that he never agreed with and which consequently has no moral or ethical juice. (There’s a huge difference between breaking a promise and failing to behave as expected. The ad in question did not say “All replies kept confidential.” If it had, this argument wouldn’t be happening. Then Fortuny’d be the obvious jerk everyone says he is.)
But I do agree with Violet that folks who were using Craigslist in an ethically appropriate way — which is to say, folks who were ethically free to be looking for rough kinky sex, and who weren’t simply using their response as a vessel for their virtual self-exposure kink “because the slut was obviously asking for it”, folks who weren’t violating any of life’s TOUs, folks with nothing to be ashamed of — these people couldn’t be hurt in the Massacre, and weren’t.
Leaving my sympathy for the remainder muted at best.
Why, exactly, is everyone in favor of a social privacy rule that primarily benefits adulturers, virtual flashers, and other people who engage in online sexual behavior that they can’t defend, proudly and publicly, in their own lives and communities? Why is it so hard to understand that all online behavior is public?
Thursday, September 14th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Editorial Note as of 2015: This FAQ is obsolete in many respects. My apologies. — Bacchus
I get asked a lot of questions (both by email and in my comments) and some of them are Frequently Asked Questions. So, for ease of future reference, here’s a FAQ. Comments are welcome.
Erosblog FAQ Table of Contents:
Linking Questions: How do I get an ErosBlog link?
Moderation Questions: What happened to my comment?
Attribution Questions: What’s the source of this?
Advertising Questions: Can I buy a link or banner?
Press Queries: Can I interview you?
BLOG LINKING
Question: Would you like to exchange links?
Answer: Sorry, but almost certainly not. I don’t “trade” links. No, really, I almost never do. I link to sites I think my readers might like, and I encourage you to do the same. As Guy Kawasaki puts it:
I don’t get this “exchanging links” thing. IMHO, you should link to a blog if you believe it’s good for your readership. The other blogger should link to back your blog if she believes it’s good for her readership. In a perfect world, linking is about quality, not reciprocation.
A link trade offer translates to: “I don’t really like your site enough to link to it. If I did, I’d already have your link up. But, even though your site isn’t worth linking to, I’ll do it anyway… if you’ll link back.”
Sorry, but if that’s how you feel, I’m not interested.
Question: So, if you don’t do link exchanges, how do I get my new blog listed on ErosBlog?
Answer: So sorry, but you probably don’t. So many new blogs start strong and promising, but they fade after a few posts, or after a few weeks, or after a few months. Most of the “new” blogs I add to my blogroll have been going strong for a year or more. Otherwise, the link maintenance chore of deleting moribund blogs gets completely out of hand.
An exception to this is if I catch myself doing multiple posts about a newer blog. If I like your blogging enough to link it a few times, your blog will probably wind up on my blogroll. No linkback required, although it never hurts — nobody’s immune to flattery.
Question: OK, but I’ve been blogging for awhile. If you don’t trade links, what do I have to do to get a link on ErosBlog?
Answer: The honest answer is that you have to tickle my fancy with your blog. But I can’t define how to do that. I can, however, offer some “Do” and “Don’t” tips. This is not some dictatorial manifesto, these are not hard and fast “rules” I pulled out of my ass, these are just advice, heavily colored by my idiosyncratic blogging tastes:
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DO send me an email linking to a recent blog post you made that you think I might like, with a sentence about what it’s about. I probably won’t answer your mail, but I frequently do look at these, when I have time. It’s the best way to get me to look at your blog, much better than just sending a link and saying “Please have a look.”
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DO link to me. I know that sounds hypocritical, when I don’t do link exchanges, but it’s really not. A link is a compliment, whereas a link trade offer is a veiled insult. Compliments work, and flattery will get you everywhere. Plus, I do read my logs with great curiosity, so having traffic coming from your blog is guaranteed to get me looking at it.
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DO participate in the ErosBlog comments. Write substantive comments, ones with multiple sentences or even paragraphs, to distinguish yourself from the drive-by “Hot pic!” link droppers. If your comments are valuable, they will be noticed, and I’ll be clicking your link to see what else you have to say.
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DO make sure your site looks like a blog. Too much advertising (as in, I can’t find your blog posts for all the flashing banners, or the first post appears “below the fold” because of your “above the fold” advertising) discourages linking. So does not having a blogroll. As the adult blogging tips at Spanking Blog put it: “I get tons of link requests from ‘bloggers’ who don’t link to anybody. They use blog software, and they write something every day, but they don’t participate in the blogging community. They don’t link to anyone and they don’t have a blog roll. I don’t understand this mentality. I mean, why would you ask other people to link to you, if you can’t be bothered to link to anyone else?”
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DON’T (oh, please don’t) “ask permission” to link to my blog. Everyone in the world should already know that the fundamental root reason for putting something on the internet is to invite people to link to it. If I didn’t want links, you couldn’t link to me. If you can see me, you already have permission to link to me. And so, after the first thirty or so, these “May I link to you?” requests begin to look and feel like a sneaky passive-aggressive way of saying “please look at my blog.” If that’s what you want, you’re way better off just saying so.
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DON’T hope for a link if your ‘blog’ is a spammy porn blog with no content. I don’t have anything against porn, but most porn blogs are boring. If all you’ve got is generic porn thumbnails, tired porn marketing text (“look at this hot bitch fingering her slut mom”), and links to pay sites, don’t bother. Of course, if you’ve got entertaining commentary about the porn, that’s a whole different ball game. Blogs featuring high-quality carefully-selected porn in an intelligent way also have a shot, if the advertising is kept to a reasonable dull roar.
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DON’T ask for a free link if you know you should really be inquiring about advertising rates. Do you have a marketing program and/or an advertising budget? Is your site or blog principally for the purpose of selling something or drawing attention to your products? Are advertisements or marketing materials the most prominent thing on your site? If so, you should be asking me about ad rates.
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DON’T be a drive-by link-dropper. Link droppings are not attractive, and we try not to step in them. By link dropping, I mean leaving comments like “Hot!” or “Nice pic!” or “Cool!” — stuff that’s shorter than the URL you so carefully typed into the box provided. Lots of new bloggers do this; it’s the lazy spam version of the “Do participate in the comments” advice above. Trouble is, once you are in my head as a spamming link dropper, the odds of me ever visiting your site (much less linking to it) decline toward zero. Good comments usually take the form of short paragraphs, not sentence fragments.
COMMENT MODERATION
Question: Why did you delete/moderate my comment?
Answer: Most likely because you weren’t nice. I ask ErosBlog commenters to be civil, friendly, polite, nice. And I enforce that. We don’t welcome flaming, aggressive debating style, snark, or even strong sarcasm. Yes, I do break these rules myself, sometimes. But I live here.
You may also have been moderated for substance (or, more usually, lack of it.) If your comment was condemning any sexual practice or kink, suggesting that anybody or anything is “sick”, calling anybody names, saying something rude about someone’s physical appearance, inviting people to visit your own website, or saying anything at all that’s got nothing to do with the post the comment is made under, that would explain why you don’t see it.
Sharing your fanciful sexual intentions (“I’d like to jump her bones, heh heh”) is another good way to get your comment moderated, especially when done crudely. (Explanation) Also, we don’t play the “Is it real or is it Photoshop?” game here, because (a) comments that a photo is not real tend to expressly or implicitly imply that the commenter is smarter and more perceptive than whoever posted the photo, which is rude, and (b) such comments lead to flamewars because everybody has an opinion, but nobody has any data. Even a friendly reservation (“I’m not sure if that’s real, but if it is…”) will often get moderated, because it invites twenty-seven unwelcome comments on the “real or Photoshop” topic.)
Here are some posts I’ve made over the years about my moderation policy:
Don’t Be A Dick
Condemnators Redux
Crapping All Over Beauty
Sure Cure For Spammers
A Note For Our New Spammers (by Aphrodite)
Blogging Without Comments
Cracking Down On Handcrafted Comment Spam
Spam Robot Finally Rolls 00 Versus Turing
Trying Harder At The Turing Test
Civilization, Assholes, and Internet Communities
ATTRIBUTION QUESTIONS
Question: Where did you find the picture you just posted? Is there a link? What’s the source of this?
Answer: I actually get a little offended by these questions, and they usually don’t make it through moderation. Since October of 2002 I’ve been faithfully posting and linking. If I know the source of something, I post the link. Without fail. Either the link where I got it, or the original source (if I know it) plus a link to where I found it. Every. Damned. Time.
You don’t see a link? It’s because I don’t freakin’ have one.
How is that possible? Well, let’s see. First of all, people mail me stuff and ask not to be credited. Or, there’s the fact that I’ve been downloading dirty pictures from Usenet and the web since about 1994. Right-click-and-save-to-hard-drive has been a reflex for more than a decade. These days, if I think “I’m gonna blog this” I’ll make sure to save source info too, but that doesn’t help with the half million images I accumulated before I started blogging.
If there’s no link provided, it’s because I don’t have one. OK?
Question: Do you know where I can find more pictures like the one you posted?
Answer: No. If I did, there’d probably be a link. Otherwise, Google is your friend.
Question: Will you please email me some porn?
Answer: Hell no. Use Google. Sheesh! (I actually get this one at least once a week.)
ADVERTISING INQUIRIES
Question: Can I buy a link or a banner?
Answer: Sure! Just drop me an email with the site you’d like to advertise, and I’ll send you a rate sheet. Or just check the sidebars for “your ad here” style links — more and more of my advertising space is being sold through brokers these days. The exception is probably text links. For these, please be prepared to buy at least six months of advertising at a time, and to pay in advance at rates that exceed the cost of brokered banner space. If you’re selling sex-negative or dangerous or worthless crap — herbal penis pills, breast enlargement creme, porn for the audience that despises women — please don’t bother. And don’t even ask if you want to buy generic “keyword” anchor text; I don’t blind link my users to random destinations for any price, and “sex toys” or “free cams” doesn’t tell them enough about where they are going. You’ll probably need to put your brand somewhere in the link, so the link looks like the kind of links human beings actually post and use.
Question: Would you like to join my affiliate program and then put up my banner for free?
Answer: Almost certainly not. Most affiliate programs suck, especially the cookie-cutter ones that use “standard” affiliate software. The stats reporting is bad, the percentage paid is bad, the affiliate program software is rude or clueless or tailored for non-adult sites, the terms of service are ridiculous and one-sided or unfit for bloggers, or the product is bad.
On the other hand, there are a handful of adult businesses that have unique products, great customer service, a sex-positive attitude, a strong brand or reputation — if that describes your company, and you have an affiliate-friendly program too, by all means let me know about it. If, however, you’ve already asked and the response you got was a link to this FAQ, it’s because your program is covered by the paragraph above.
Question: Can I buy a blog post talking about my site / product / event / whatever?
Answer: Email me. It’s possible. But it’s not cheap, and there’s always an identifying “sponsored post” banner so readers will know what’s going on. I won’t shill for your product and pretend I’m just blogging normally; that’s not an advertising service that ErosBlog will provide.
Question: Would you like to review my product?
Answer: If it’s a virtual / downloadable thing, no. There’s just no time, and it amounts to unpaid work for me.
However, if it’s a physical thing (a sex toy, DVD, book, or whatever) you might have a shot. The Nymph and I enjoy getting free stuff in the mail. Reviews are not guaranteed, but if you do get one, you can count on it taking forever. I’d guess we (eventually) review about twenty percent of the stuff that gets sent for review, so you’re taking a chance. Email for the review item shipping address. [2012 update: We do almost no reviews now. But we still like to play with free sex toys if they are sufficiently unique. And there’s always that chance that you’ll get a mention if your product is sufficiently impressive. So, sending review stuff is almost certainly a losing game, but if you’re an optimist or really confident about your product, it might be worth a try.]
PRESS INQUIRIES AND INTERVIEWS
Question: I’d like to interview you for my blog or publication. Is that possible?
Answer: Sure. Email me. But before you contact me, you might want to have a look at the interviews I’ve already given:
Interview With Bacchus (Sunni’s Salon)
The Buccaneer of Bacchanalia (Susie Bright)
Understanding Humankind (Atrocidades)
Revision History:
9/14/06 – FAQ first published
10/16/06 – added sentence about moderation of feedback on photos
10/24/06 – added sentences about prohibition on “real or Photoshop” game
7/20/07 – added Guy Kawasaki link exchange quote
3/6/12 – numerous updates
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
When I first saw this model, I was struck by her unforced beauty — a sort of semi-amateur look to go with a really pretty face:
But why, oh why, in this next shot, is her face all squeezed up like she’s eating a lemon?
Ahh, here’s why. Mystery solved — she’s getting a spanking!
Found on Spanking Blog.
Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Wow, is this kinky or what?
On wednesday, I will walk up to one end of a long line of men. Sometimes there are women, but it’s always mostly men. They are there to watch me, and I am there to be watched. I start at one end, smile at the first man I encounter, and begin. Slowly. Carefully, I take off my glasses and fold them neatly, just like my nighttime bedroom ritual. Then I lean over and unzip one long black platform boot, and then the other. I present each piece of footwear as proof — as if the sudden shortness in my height, and its message of vulnerability isn’t evidence enough. I am now smaller, more feminine, and a little more helpless. I take off my earrings, my necklace, deliberately placing the girlish silver with my glasses. I’m usually still smiling now, because it’s time to take off my belt. I know what’s going to happen. I unbuckle the metal and leather, sliding the belt through its loops around my waist, which serves to loosen my pants and move the denim to and fro as I work the belt free. The top straps of my g-string always peek out; I can’t help this. I unzip my hoodie and peel it off, revealing the light cotton tank top I always wear. And even though it makes no sense, I always take off my stripey arm warmers, because if I don’t, they *make me* take them off. So I do it in a subtly slow demonstration, one opera-length glovelet at a time. Next, and last, I unclip my hair, letting my almost waist-length black and blonde locks down over my now-bare shoulders and arms.
They all watch. Then I wait for their commands, and their approval. I do what they say, unconditionally, and this is an unspoken agreement between me and the men. Hardly a word is said, and I make sure to smile as I softly pad past all eyes, which are on me, even if just for a flicker or two. Then at the end of the line, I slowly dress — I like to take my time putting my clothes back on.
That’s Violet Blue — well, anybody, really — going through airport security. As she explains:
[W]hat I related to you above is very much my experience when I go through security…. [W]hen you think about it, the modern process of going through pre-boarding security has far more kinky sexual elements than it should. Here’s why:
* You have to undress.
* While you undress, you are being watched and sized up.
* It’s a power-exchange scenario.
* Lots of uniforms.
* You are totally vulnerable, and it is humiliating.
* You are exposing intimate details of your person and dress in front of dozens of strangers.
* Your submission is unspoken, it is a rule, and it is unconditional. Your submission is for public consumption.
* There is a constant threat that a stranger will touch you. They can touch you anywhere, and in your most intimate places if they want to.
* There is an undercurrent and tension that they will open your posessions and touch your private items, such as your underwear, clean or dirty.
* It is nonconsensual. And in garden-variety BDSM practice, even this is forbidden territory.
As well it should be, in BDSM and at the airport.
Friday, August 25th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Yes, I know, enough with the pictures already, but for some reason I’ve been on something of a visual surfing jag lately. Text isn’t grabbing my interest, but the pictures? Mmmm, yes. And so, here’s another vintage “wallet photo” bit of illicit porn from days of yore:
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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I do so love porn that tells a story, don’t you? Here’s the lovely bondage model Star, looking at a Hogtied.com photographer with what can only be described as gentle scepticism. I imagine he’s telling her what they are going to do on today’s shoot:
Fast forward several steps — hey, look at porn your own self if you want the whole story — and we find lovely Star on a soft bed in her ball gag and head harness. Very peaceful, very calm, only… does it look to you like she might be a little wide-eyed? Is that a bunny-in-the-road look, would you say?
It turns out, she has good reason to stay very still.
There’s a rope, you see. (Could this be bondage porn without a rope?) One end’s tied to the back of her head harness. The other? Well, turns out it’s tied to, um, er… well, I’m afraid there’s really no way to put this gently. It’s tied to a stainless steel butt hook. Which goes… exactly where you are afraid it goes. See for yourself. See?
So now, a great many of us can go on about our daily duties while knowing more about the depths of human kinkiness and perversity than we knew when we woke up this morning. And if you get bored sitting at your desk today, just nod your head a little bit and try to imagine how it would feel at the other end of the rope.
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Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve blogged before about the peculiar phenomenon of women who melt down and throw a tie rod end when they “catch” their men enjoying pornography. Commenter Alana over at Pretty Dumb Things shares an anecdote that summarizes the matter very nicely:
I had a semi-friend in graduate school who happened upon her husband jerking off to Internet porn, a girl’s webcam or something. Don’t remember the specifics just know this friend found him out and became completely upset. She told me she was offended he’d jack off to Internet porn.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked me.
“You didn’t join him,” I said.
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Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Violet Blue threatens:
If I have to sit through another body-by-Barbie production where the chicks’ boobs look like those Alien face-huggers about to burst out and kill me…
She’s not just making that up, it’s a real risk, and not just in bad porn movies. Don’t believe me? I have proof:
Monday, July 31st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Dominant women smoking cigarettes (and doing mean, mean things with them) are a frequent theme in “femdom” porn, especially from places like Japan where smoking seems to remain a bit more “cool” than it has become in the United States. Here’s a fragment from a manga comic panel featuring a vulnerably posed naked man and a domina poised to extinguish her smoke:
You can see the whole panel here, but don’t click unless you’re prepared to wince and shudder.
Found in the alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. cartoons newsgroup on Usenet.
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Monday, July 24th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a link to an interesting (if a bit over-academic) interview with standup-anthropologist Sergio Messina, who documents and expounds upon the participatory amateur voyeuristic/exhibitionist modern internet porn genres he terms “realcore”. A sample:
Realcore seems to be more satisfactory than porno because it isn’t passive, it’s interactive.
In my lecture (which isn’t exactly a lecture;it’s more of an edutainment show, a cross between stand-up anthropology and an X-rated Discovery Channel feature), I talk about “tributes.” A woman posts her picture, some guy downloads it, prints it, cums on it, takes a photo of the results—the tribute—and posts it back into the newsgroups. She gets comments, requests to wear specific items—her home suddenly becomes public.
It’s a whole game, involving mostly two or more people, where the first post is only the opening move. Once the tributes are made, the person portrayed in them collects all these images and makes Photoshop collages that also end up online, on the person’s website or in the newsgroups. The more tributes he/she gets, the greater the glory.
You don’t do this with just any image: tributes tend to involve portraits of faces. And there are often specific requests for “tributes.”
What a digital, complex, multi-stage way to please each other! Real, then virtual, then real again (and sticky), then virtual again, then sticky again…
Although I’m in full agreement that porn is created, used, and shared in new and different ways in this internet era, I’m not convinced that a new term like “realcore” is all that useful, because I’m not sure it’s the porn that’s different so much as the nature and scope of its creation, distribution, and feedback mechanisms. All quibbling over names aside, the interview offers an interesting window into twisty porn subgenres you may find interesting.
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 -- by Bacchus
These old wallet-porn black-and-whites are too posed to be candid, but a nice shower scene is timeless:
Thursday, July 20th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
In which Rollertrain, who works for a major porn purveyor she calls Sexyland, discovers the limits of workplace humor:
Cleaning house for the arrival of the entirety of my siblings, all six of them, and my second mother. In an effort to save money, I send out one of those work-wide emails asking if anyone has spare air mattresses, as we have two actual beds.
“Do you mind years of sweat, shit and semen stains?” emails one of the gays.
“So long as you clean off the AIDS,” I reply.
Apparently homophobia and AIDS still aren’t funny at porn companies.
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’m entertained by the juxtaposition in this image of a classic-but-crass pussy-in-your-face porn pose with the “classy” touch of the gloves and shoes. Of course this image (from alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. vintage) is from the era when people like your mother wore spike heels like that:
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Lots of yummy female perspective on the sensation of deep throating, from Pretty Dumb Things:
The art of deep-throating lies in two things: creating enough high-quality viscous porn-starry spit, and relaxing your throat to accommodating proportions. Both take time. The gag reflex is my friend, I know, and so I court it with a wily coquettishness. I take the dick in as far as it just uncomfortably will go, and I wait, holding my breath, until I find my throat begin to relax and until I need to breathe. Then I’ll slide my mouth to the tip, do a little do-si-do with my tongue at the end, and slide back up until I just barely begin to gag and hold again, swallowing the tip.
At these moments what I feel is a mixture of challenge and trust and pride. I trust the man not to thrust and fuck up my prep time. I challenge myself to see how much I can put in my throat, how long I can hold it, how easily I can get ready. And I feel pride in a blowjob well begun. When a guy does thrust and fuck my face before I have properly lubed my throat, it hurts. It feels a lot like when you swallow very hot soup or too big a piece of lamb shank. It sometimes makes me gag a bit, and other times it makes me gag a lot.
After a few minutes of warm up, I can feel my throat begin to relax. Usually then I find an angle that will work for sustained deep-throat with this particular cock — and all are different. Sometimes I like to control the blowjob, and sometimes I like to be face-fucked. And other times, like when I’m tied up, I don’t really have a choice but enjoy being face-fucked. In all cases, finding a comfy spatial relationship is key. Bad angles make for bad fellatio– it’s simple human geometry,
When I’m in control, I feel like I’m choreographing an elaborate underwater ballet with my mouth, my hands, and the dick at hand and mouth. The slurpy noises, the imagined visual, the occasional eye contact, the hushed bated breath, the timely exhale, the fingers sliding the mix of saliva and pre-cum, the cock that pauses, filling my mouth and my throat, my throat fluttering little swallows around its tip. I love the feel of having my mouth full. If I’m really into it, it makes me wish that the guy had two or three other dicks to fill me with simultaneously. This strange feral compulsion washes over me and I wish I could take him into me everywhere all at once, even as I’m trying to keep my head while I’m giving head.
When I’m being face-fucked, however, the sense of control is lost and in its place comes a wild ride. When face-fucked, I feel like I have to keep a delicate balance between my breathing, my relaxed throat, and this relentless pneumatic cock that is drilling my mouth. Much of my experience then is completely wrapped up in my submitting to the moment, of finding my slender balance in this overwhelming crash of sensation. It, too, is pleasurable, though rhythm is important, for if the man isn’t aware of what he’s doing, he can make me gag, and then I have to fight to control that urge, to will it to stop and to find my calm center in his pheromone storm. My throat is almost always sore the day after a rigorous face-fucking.
Saturday, July 1st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’m on record as thinking that colorblindness, even willful colorblindness, is a good thing, and as being baffled by people who want to sort their porn by the race of the performers. So you can imagine my distaste upon seeing Audacia Ray — a smart political sort with whom I’m often in agreement on matters of porn — characterize my commitment to colorblindness as a sort of liberal ignorance.
Hint: It’s not “ignorance” to reject racial classifications as a basis for your worldview, and it’s certainly not liberal in a world where affirmative action is an icon of liberal political correctness. If you can’t see a person without having a racial classification for them pop into your head, you’re part of the problem. Worse yet, every time anybody slaps racial tags or identifiers on anybody else, this whole sordid business of “race” is reinforced and strengthened. I don’t refuse to participate in that out of ignorance, I refuse to participate in it because I’m adamantly convinced it’s a bad business.
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Saturday, July 1st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Hey, folks, if you like to read Susie Bright’s blog (and why wouldn’t you?) you’ll know she publishes interviews with various people (mostly writers) from time to time. I’m proud to say (since I’ve been a big fan of Susie’s for a long time) that she recently interviewed me, and put the interview up today:
The Buccaneer of Bacchanalia
Highlights include how I choose which dirty pictures to publish, a bit of the politics I don’t usually mention here, my youthful sexual influences, and why porn sites on the internet are better than they used to be.
Sunday, June 4th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Almost two years ago I posted my controversial opinion that blogging services suck, citing an incident where LiveJournal killed a vibrant vintage erotica resource and concluding:
Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
I still feel this way. Latest evidence, from LiveJournal again: apparently they are threatening to suspend users who dare to display the dreaded nipple, even when it belongs to the Virgin Mary and is being suckled by none less holy than the Blessed Baby Jesus:
Picking to the bottom of a huge flapdoodle with many nuances, the bottom line is that LiveJournal recently changed a FAQ explaining its TOS; the TOS prohibits “inappropriate” imagery, and the FAQ change nerfed a “graphically sexual” interpretation of “inappropriate”, replacing it with a “nudity” interpretation. In short, the prudishness got kicked up several notches. Obviously, folks object to the idea that all nudity is inappropriate by definition, because it’s such a fundamentally silly and stupid idea.
LiveJournal owner Six Apart has issued the classic corporate non-apology, stating in effect (I’m paraphrasing, and not with sympathy) “We’re sorry our new no-nipple policy makes us look stupid and bad, but we’re really not stupid and bad, so we’re not sorry for doing stupid bad stuff to our users, and we’re gonna keep doing it, neener neener, thank you for your support.”
In the Making Light post cited above, a commenter offers up a potential explanation of the corporate business pressures that might be responsible for all this anti-nipple stupidity. He then concludes with a version of my point from two years ago:
But the one thing this whole debacle proves is, you should never trust a public corporation to hold your blog or social network, because they will always try to place the interests of their shareholders ahead of the desires of their customers.
Exactly. Get your own domain, and get it hosted by somebody smart who knows he’s selling bandwidth, and that you’re the customer. And if you want to show some nipple, make sure your host has customers who sell real pornography on their sites. I promise, a web host with customers selling Street Blowjobs or Cum Fiesta is just going to laugh like hell at anyone who emails to complain about your nipples, whether or not there’s a baby attached.
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Friday, June 2nd, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Just to mix things up a bit, here’s a bit of vintage gay porn from BJ, who sells this sort of thing on Ebay when he can get away with it, and distributes free samples on his blog:
BJ wonders about splinters, and I’m convinced there’s a stupid pun in here somewhere involving the word “wood”, but I’m not going to stretch for it.
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
…and writing, erotica that is, moreso. So sez Chelsea Girl:
I’m accustomed to reading books and finding my girlparts moist. The act of reading, after all, has a kind of inherent eroticism. A generally solitary activity, reading is just you and your quiet hands and the fantasy that the words play out in your mind. It’s just one swift hand below your waistline away from masturbation.
The eighteenth-century birth of the European novel was heralded with all kinds of fear that reading would unreasonably inflame the senses of the young with what one critic has termed ‘one-handed reading.’ And justifiably so — by the middle of the century, John Cleland wrote the first piece of English pornography to help him get out of debtor’s prison.
To get out, and one might suspect, to get off, because let me tell you that writing porn makes a person seriously body-needy.
I’ve been writing a couple of commissioned porny pieces: the first for an American soldier stationed in Iraq narrates a soldier’s wife’s experience of her husband’s return and her waking up from a long sexual nap. The second, for an international poker player, gives the story of a secretary being anally punished for habitual lateness.
Who knew that in a pinch binder clips work as impromptu nipple clamps? Me, that’s who.
I’ve found it incredibly hott-making to get inside these character’s heads and bodies. To inhabit the life of a woman who has by necessity put her sexuality on hold and then to find it smacking it upside her fanny was incendiary. It was hard, literally, a hard little wet knot in my g-string as I sat on my desk chair typing, typing, typing this story of this woman’s learning about what she wanted and how she wanted it.
When I finished, the story a crescendo of simultaneous orgasm and multiple penetration, I felt as if I knew her.
And now, immersed in this office fantasy, the rolling chairs, the drawers of pointy staples and rolls of tape, the shredded gossamer of good-girl pantyhose and the imminent threat of discovery, I find my delicate sensibilities inflamed. (Today, while writing, I had to take a break, discover the painful joy of my nipple clamps and come hard and long with my bullet vibe, groaning louder than I’d expected.)
Ah, the joys of literacy!
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been accumulating a little file of the oddest and most disturbing spam subject lines from amongst the zillion porn spams a day that I get. It’s time to share:
Olga gets butt hole rammed and facial blasted
Ouch! Poor Olga! Is she a porn model or a very unfortunate quarry worker?
barely legal perverts gangbanged by wild bears
Zoophilia with bears? Gangbanging bears? Who’s the target demographic here?
watch hot chicks get smacked around
Uh, no thanks. Also, please die.
correct penis oil
Important to get this right, because incorrect penis oil makes your dick fall off.
lesbians piss and smoke
They do? Why yes, I suppose some of them do. Your point is?
Urgent Notification #34419569771119606167
Er, if you’ve already sent out 34 quintillion notifications, you’ve been at it quite awhile. How urgent can this one really be?
Do you want killing sweet viirgin girls ?
That would be a big negatory, Bob. Geez, what a waste of sweet virgin girls. A few other useful projects for them I can think of, if they’re of age and willing, but killing them? Piss off.
Wait, are you the same guy who wrote to me about smacking hot chicks around? You must not have got the memo about women and sex. You know, sex, the fun stuff? Where nobody gets hurt unless they asks very nicely?
Ultra Allure Pheromones will kill her
I guess they don’t work so good then. Have you considered toxic waste disposal rather than direct email sales? Wait, did you buy this stuff from the guy who claims his penis oil is correct?
Jasmine burn anal pumped and cum blasted
Does she work with Olga? Has anybody thought to call OSHA?
Young Bitches so refined and charming!
Which is it? Are they bitches? Or charming? I don’t think I’ve ever met a charming bitch. For that matter, I mostly try to avoid bitches. Don’t you think you’d get better response if you omitted the “bitch” descriptor from your advertising for these refined and charming young women?
Thursday, May 11th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Snippet of overheard chat conversation in a random MMORPG:
R0N JEREMY > my brother said it would be a funny name…some porn star or something.
R0N JEREMY > he said i should tell people when i blew them up that they had been fucked by a pro.
Saturday, May 6th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I differ from the usual run of sex bloggers in that I’m not as urban as seems to be the norm. My roots are rural, and I don’t freak out when the only coffee in the county is called “coffee” and costs less than a buck.
So I can tell you with some authority that there remain, in this vast country of ours, a fair few young men whose entire ambition is to get some land, plant it, find a good farm wife, and settle down to a life of endless unremunerative hard labor. The good farm wife, as you can imagine, is a very important factor in this bucolic vision of paradise.
Thus I can well imagine the reaction of some young rural swain as he spies this Venus arising from the stock-watering tank:
And the reaction is this: “Yup, she’ll do.”
Hey, at least he knows she knows how to ride a pitchfork.
Picture is from Usenet.
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I tell you what, if they conducted women’s boxing in the manner shown in this vintage picture, it would be a lot more popular:
The picture (from a postcard most of a century old) also proves that the “pay models to fight with their clothes off” porn concept was not invented by Ultimate Surrender and its ilk.
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Friday, April 21st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I found this posted without an author credit on an adult webmaster board. It was presented as if it were supposed to be funny, and acclaimed as such by a chunk of the online-pornographer audience. Me, I didn’t find it so — it encapsulates a lot of the reasons I never could find much value in the strip club experience. Of course I know of folks in the blog community who’ve stripped (or who are still stripping) and who present a much more nuanced view of the profession. But still. Strong and unpleasant stuff, it seems to me:
1) Hey you over there, holding that one dollar bill in your hand with a death grip and waving it around at me like it’s the fucking deed to Trump Towers… what the fuck do you want me to do, grow another pussy?!? It’s a fuckin’ dollar, put it down on the tiprail and blow my world away already.
2) You losers that come into the club for a lapdance with NO underwear or boxers and thin-ass, nylon shorts, so we slip and slide on your hard-on (which always feel like a sharpie pen ~ fine point)…fuck you.
3) You with the thick-ass jeans, this was an impromptu visit, eh?
4) Don’t pull my thong up during a dance and ask me if it felt good. IT DOES NOT FEEL GOOD.
5) Hey you, Loser, the one counting out the 20 bucks in one dollar increments, rubbing your fingers between each one to make sure you are giving me just that one dollar. Yes, you.
6) No I will not just let you “slip it in real quick” for $50 more bucks.
7) Yeah, my tits are real. As real as my affection for you.
8)If you cum in your pants, you have to tip me an extra $100 for being a lame-ass who can cum in their pants from a lapdance.
9) Stop asking me out. You’re a smelly, fat loser and the only reason I’m smiling and cooing at you is because I want your money. Outside of the club I wouldn’t even fart your way.
11) Stop bitching at me about the goddamn two drink minimum. First of all, your breath ranks (what’d you have for dinner, garlic and shit?), you’re about 172 lbs. overweight, and you look like Jay Leno. More importantly: I don’t give a shit.
12) Don’t bitch at me about the $10 non-alchoholic beer either. Hide a bottle of Jack in your coat pocket next time like everyone else does.
13) My horniness is in direct proportion to your income.
14) No, you CAN’T SMOKE. Dumb. Ass.
15 )Boys, don’t sit in the front row with your “homies” and act all engrossed in some deep conversation during a girls performance because you want to look like you’re too “cool” to notice the hot, naked girl in front of you. It’s a clear sign that you ain’t getting any.
16) DON’T SIT IN THE FRONT ROW IF YOU ARE NOT GOING TO TIP. Fer chrissakes!!!!!!!!!!!
17) “So what do you guys do when you’re on your period?” Answer: I lap dance with guys in dark pants.
18) STOP trying to grab my tits!!!!!!! That’s extra.
19) SHOWER FIRST, you nasty fuck!
20) I had a feeling you weren’t going to tip me, so I took extra care to rub my lip gloss on your collar and wear extra glitter lotion and obnoxious perfume before our dance.
21) Hey cheapasses: please don’t come to my work. Just stay home and jack off to “Desperate Housewives” instead. It will save us a both a lot of unpleasantry.
22) Stop asking me why I do this job and try to get all psychologically analytical on me. For the money, you moron, that’s why.
23) No seriously, my real name is Sparkle.
24) NO, I will not take a dime sac for payment. I can tell it’s oregano anyway you stupid mutherfucker!
25) Sorry, I don’t do that. Ask the ugly girl at the bar with the black roots and overbite.
26) I can see it’s your first time at a strip club. Let me explain the dynamics to you. If you want a fuck or a blow-job, go to the ugly chicks. Hot girls don’t have to do “extra services.” I can give you some recommendations for a small fee.
27) It is not okay for you to bounce me on your cock like a baby on a knee. Not okay.
28) Stop complaining about how short the song was. It felt like the fucking maxi-single to me.
29)Yes I will fuck you, but only for 10 grand. More if you’re ugly. So basically, more.
30) DO NOT come into the club looking for a girlfriend/date. It’s like me going to PETA looking for a steak.
31) Girls–what’s with the pole smell? Can we do a little hygiene check? Nothing than worse than twirling around the pole and getting a whiff of stale pussy.
32) Girls–stop lip-syncing to the song you’re dancing to on stage. Especially if you don’t know all the words.
33) Girls–if your toes curl and hang over your platform shoes a la’ Fred Flinstone, you need to go up a size.
34) Girls–drowning yourself in Angel perfume is just as bad if not worse than the BO you’re trying to cover. Take a goddamn shower, you smell like lapdance funk.
35) Hey DJ! You suck!
36)Girls–may I suggest complete sobriety before getting tatted up? Tattoos should be meaningful, or at least semi-meaningful, or at least semi semi-meaningful. That fucking dancing llama on your ass is so lame.
37)Girls–some songs just should not be stripped to. Please. No Disney soundtracks (you know who you are, you fucking weirdo), Sade, Boys II Men, or Bjork. For the love of God, Please.
By the way, if this was ripped from a blog or website and you know the original source, please drop me an email so I can credit it properly. No links in the comments, please.
Friday, April 21st, 2006 -- by Aphrodite
J and I both have the whole weekend off, yippeeee! The weather’s supposed to be good, so I told him I’d come over and help with a big project of his (he’s the friend I mentioned here). You know I’ll be doing my best to work on my “big project” too, which is his lovely cock. So far J’s been a darling, pretty much what I said I wanted, so it’s more than just good great sex.
And that’s the thing. I’m ready to move beyond the regular sex, I want to experiment some, I want his eyes to roll back in his head and to hear him say “That was amazing!” What I don’t want to hear, or for him to think, is “What a slut.” Like Steff said in a post on titty fucking:
There’s an interesting dichotomy in the sexual world. One aspect is the woman who enjoys almost any sexual act. She’s often portrayed as lewd, slutty, easy, or loose, just because she’s an enthusiast. And that’s bullshit, my friends. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the activities you enjoy surrounding sex should not judge who you are as a person.
But then there’s the flipside. If you’re hesitant to do some of the so-called edgier/pornified things, you get painted a bit as a vanilla lover, or someone who’s “conservative” in the bedroom, which is also bullshit, my friends.
How do you find that happy in between? Can somebody who’s a sexblogger avoid the slut tag?
J’s still going through the divorce dance, so it’s too early to say what will happen between us. I don’t want to rush him but I do want to explore some sex stuff. God, what a minefield this is!
More…… J just sent me some beautiful flowers! They’re those curvey tulips with the pointy petals, and the card says “Looking forward to bucking rivets – and more – with you!” Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Thursday, April 20th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
From time to time in porn towards the gonzo end of the spectrum you’ll see someone reach forward from behind the performer and hook his fingers into the corners of her mouth, pulling it into a grimace. This is called “fish-hooking” and its intended erotic significance is opaque to me.
Fingers are one thing. Feet are another. Here now from Wired Pussy comes a photograph that takes fish-hooking to a whole new toe-fetish level:
As my father used to say, I don’t know too much and I don’t understand all I know.
Sunday, April 9th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Although I linked early to Ethnorotica because of its general high style and because it’s the not-so-secret project of Lex from the excellent Naked Loft Party, I’m not fundamentally sympathetic to its “shine a light on the best in ethnic erotica” mission. I guess I’m still old-fashioned enough to dream of a world where a pretty naked woman is judged not by the color of her skin, but by the contents of her birthday suit. When it comes to ethnicity in porn, I myself am frequently oblivious; I’ve posted pretty pictures on this blog and been taken aback by comments that mentioned the color of the models, because that was not one of the features I noticed. Frankly, people who do notice make me a little nervous; I have a hard time imagining benign reasons for categorizing people by color in any context.
All of which is by way of lengthy introduction to this vintage postcard beauty, which may not be exactly the sort of ethnorotica Lex has in mind:
This postcard (which is probably pre-1970s, judging from the scalloped edges) appears to be a fairly late entry in the 120-year-old category of “ethnic nude” postcard photography. I’m not generally inclined to post these vintage postcard pictures, because their focus on “ethnic” identity strikes me as a poor reason to take or display nude photos. But beauty is beauty, and sometimes good art (or good porn) happens for bad reasons. I find this young woman’s picture just too pretty not to share.
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Saturday, April 8th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a sort of fun link, courtesy of Violet Blue. The Taste Tester: One Woman’s Attempt To Help Men Taste Better chronicles Ava’s attempts to make her boyfriend’s semen taste better through dietary changes. Should be fun to see what she learns.
Fair warning, though: by the sex positive standards of this audience, Ava’s a bit porn-negative and quick to call her boyfriend an idiot for wanting to come on her tits. On the one hand, she’s being a fine sport about the whole semen-in-the-mouth business; but on the other hand, a man ought to be able to express a fantasy without having his lady want to “smack some sense into him.” Hint: When a man tells you he’s “horrified with himself” and “acting like an idiot”, he’s most likely backpedalling furiously and regretting his moment of honesty, rather than feeling actually repentant. Good luck getting the next fantasy out of him!
Friday, March 31st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve mentioned before the odd pathology of pornographers using ugly language to describe and market the porn talent, and cited with approval pornographers who speak out against the practice. Here’s another citation: Sam Sugar, in an article cataloging the big lies told by pornographers, says:
3. Sluts. Despite what it says on the box, if you call a woman — even a porn performer — a nasty cum-drinking bitch when you’re not having sex with her, she’s probably going to knee you in the nuts. The tubby mommies-boys and misogynists who market porn want you to think that the way they view women is how women in porn see themselves. Try calling a performer a “dirty cock-socket” at a trade-show if you think it is, in fact, true. Watch your head.
Friday, March 24th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Steph broke out the manifesto pen the other day, and I like the results:
I have sex as often as I’m able, within the constraints of my own sense of morality. I’ve given blow jobs. I’ve taken it backwards and forwards. I’ve used birth control of more than one variety. I’ve had sex in public places. I own sex toys. I’ve watched porn. I’ve tried to become better and better at sex every time I have it. I own bondage gear.
And I am not yet on a first-name basis with Satan. Shocking, I know, but true. I, in fact, (gasp) have gone to church in the last six months. I donate to charity. I do not have a criminal record. I do housework. I pay my taxes — honestly. I don’t lie on my resume. I call my parents regularly. I’m always punctual. I’m a model employee. I treat people with respect. I ride a cute scooter and obey the laws of the road.
Nonetheless, right now, I’d like to get fucked silly and sideways, and if that makes me amoral, then sign me up, baby.
Sunday, March 19th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve commented before (most notably in the comments to this post about the production of spanking porn) that I don’t have much time for so-called feminists who can’t respect a woman’s sexual decisions. When feminists stop standing up for the choices women make, I stop recognizing them as feminists, it’s that simple.
Thus there’s some interest to be found in this Spanking and Feminism thread over at Spanking Blog. The post itself chides kinky men who won’t take ownership of their kinkiness, who can’t admit they want to spank and dominate for the fun of it, so they instead pretend (to themselves and to the world) that the women they are spanking are weak inferior creatures who would be lost without the “guidance and discipline” these ever-so-benevolent dudes are offering.
As discussion simmered in the comments, ranging wider and wider as discussions of BDSM and feminism tend to do, along came someone claiming to “respect individual choices” while simultaneously arguing that “it’s really hard to seperate out cultural expectations and personal choices.” Which, translated, means something like “You say you chose to do that, but I don’t believe you, and thus I’m free to condemn your choice.” I enjoyed the response:
No, it’s really not hard to separate out personal choices from cultural expectations. When someone says “This is my choice” you respect that, absolutely, or you just became part of the problem. If you retain niggling reservations, if you’re willing to question the individual’s self report of her choice, then you are failing to respect her personal choice and you are claiming, in effect, that you know better than the individual. Viewed charitably, the claim is still a version of “Your society has made it impossible for you to act as as a self-actualized individual adult human; you’re so messed up that you can’t even correctly determine or report what you want.” That’s an infantilizing, disempowering, patronizing claim and although it’s often made by folks who claim the badge of feminism, it’s no part of a true feminism that I could respect.
Just so.
Saturday, March 11th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
One feature of vintage pornography, now mostly vanished, is the anti-clerical, anti-papist depictions of Catholic clergy. Early erotic novels, which mostly tended to be contraband anyway, were chock-full of priests, nuns, and monks run sexually amok in orgiastic golcondas of kinky sex, rape, and flagellation involving each other, whatever innocent children they could seduce or kidnap from their flocks, and sundry nearby farm animals. One doesn’t see so much of that in modern pornography, but there was a bit of it remaining in the hardcore porn of the 1960s and 1970s, which this appears to be:
One could almost surmise, from the hopefully expectant expressions on the nuns’ faces, that they are praying for (and working for) a sudden shower of manna. Nun bukkake, anyone?
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Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
ErosBlog is upgrading sometime soon to WordPress 2.0, and I’m in the market for a designer who can build me a nice custom template for a reasonable rate. I’m not looking for anything radical; really, I want something that looks and works pretty much the way ErosBlog already looks and works, only more modern and with colors and fonts and such that weren’t selected in 2002 by a color-blind design ignoramus. (Yes, that would be me.)
If you do WordPress template design, don’t mind getting paid with filthy porn money, and are available for an immediate commission, I’d like to hear from you, with a pointer to your design portfolio. Please send an email (to bacchus@erosblog.com); please do not leave links in the comments. All such will be deleted in self defense, to prevent the creation of a festering spam farm.
Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
From Rollertrain comes the depressing observation that “In the backward world of porn genres, female orgasm is a niche – not a given.” Supporting text:
Sativa, freshly waxed and moaning, looks lovely on the screen. The vibrator is buzzing at a low hum, making soft little surging noises as she pushes its tip against her clit. Sativa has beautiful skin, luscious tits and the kind of lips that cost hundreds of dollars. She’s awesome to behold so close up, but this isn’t anything I haven’t seen before.
“What’s awesome?” I ask. Isabelle turns up the sound. “Watch,” she says, and I listen. Sativa, movie-sized tribute to blessed Pussy, fills up all forty-two inches of Isabelle’s TV. Her face starts to look far away. She bites her lip and her cheeks flush. Her moaning falls into short pants of air and whimpering. The vibrator is working. Sativa’s entire vagina contracts six or seven times, like a giant heartbeat. Her pussy is shimmering. Sativa is clearly having an orgasm.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve actually seen a girl really cum in a porno,” says Isabelle.
Friday, February 17th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve always thought it silly when I see folks referring to the prostate as “the male g-spot”. To my mind, that usage only perpetuates woeful anatomical ignorance. Rabbit has a slightly different objection:
As a person fascinated with words and phrases, I always find the reference to the male g-spot a little bit humorous. After all, the g-spot literally means Gräfenberg spot and refers specifically to a gynaecologist’s discovery within female, not male genitalia. I’m not certain when the male g-spot became a term used to describe stimulation of the prostate, but I’m running across it more and more frequently on sexuality sites. One part of me immediately thinks, jeez, can’t guys find their own term, or, like early Christians taking over and replacing pagan rituals and festivities with their own celebrations, must dominant cultures constantly turn things into their own personal and empowering definitions? From a feminist point of view, there is a sense of male ownership over female sexuality in their use of the term to describe a man’s pleasure point.
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Over at BJ’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings, he’s put up a startling picture of a dick ready to shoot.
Monday, February 13th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
So I got a link exchange request from a porn blog. I get these every day. They are usually boring.
Usually.
So, I look at the porn blog du jour. Right at the top of the page there’s a large picture of a Japanese woman having her pubic hair burned off with a cigarette lighter.
She didn’t look happy about it.
You know that thing Dilbert used to do, where he’d raise his eyebrows so high they’d leave his head? I could feel my eyebrows trying to do that.
I think I sprained my scalp.
Er, pass.
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Yet another unforseen-but-utterly-unsurprising consequence of the mad stampede to give more and more surveillance cameras to the oh-so-benevolent and trustworthy police:
From this news story via Rabbits Porn Blog, where it’s explained like this:
One normally assumes those candid up skirt sites are often times staged. However, it’s not so difficult to suspend one’s disbelief to enjoy some voyeuristic soft-core. Besides, pursuing the real thing might get you the reputation of a pervert, or even arrested. However, if one was one of the people normally doing the arresting, one might expect to get away with it.
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Saturday, January 21st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
The realist in me knows that most “public nudity” photos floating around the internet in places like alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. voyeurism are commercially produced porn; no matter how hard the photographer tries to sell “I just snapped this shot of my girlfriend being playful on the way to Dennys”, I’m generally not buying. But every now and then the pornographer’s art creates a shot that invites belief. Something about this girl’s absolutely brilliant smile makes me want to believe that she’s (a) having the time of her life and (b) more interested in the photographer’s arousal than in his checkbook.
Saturday, January 21st, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been seeing these references to some kind of internet funny thing, a musical machinima video of vast hilarity entitled “The Internet Is For Porn”. Bah, ho hum, who has time? And besides, I write a sex blog, I already knew that’s what the internet is for, how do you make funny out of a truism?
Then I saw it:
I can’t stop laughing.
Thanks to the commenters for letting me know the actual song comes from the comedic and theatrical musical Avenue Q.
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Thursday, January 5th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
If you’ve ever seen the print version of Hustler’s Taboo magazine (edited by the modestly legendary bondage king Earnest Greene, spouse of hugely legendary porn star Nina Hartley), you’ll know that it’s a cut above the usual newstand fetish fare. Sure, it’s got your basic bleached blondes in crotchless red latex catsuits piddling into clear glass salad bowls, and sure, it combines handcuffs, riding crops, and blowjobs in ways that are hardly novel (although perhaps a bit prettier and a bit edgier than is common these days). But it’s also got some of the slickest fetish photography around, from famous photographers like Suze Randall, and some of its kinkiness borders on genuine high-concept:
Any fool can order a pony girl outfit and deliver photographs of some cute filly high-stepping across the carpets of an LA hotel suite, but where else will you see a porno-blonde in latex boots and corset hauling a manure wagon around some dirty farm in the dark? It’s gotta be art, I tell you!
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Monday, December 26th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Perhaps if you were very good (or very naughty, but in a good way) you found a video iPod in your stocking yesterday morning. Lucky you! It’s a nifty toy.
However, in that case you’ll looking for “stuff” to watch on it, so I wanted to remind you of some of the porn resources for the video iPod that I’ve stumbled over in recent weeks. I did a long post about using GUBA to find iPod porn, plus I’ve mentioned (here and here) that two of the kinky sites I sometimes promote have started putting iPod-ready video content in their members areas.
A few more sites where iPod porn is now available to members:
Sex And Submission: (Real bondage sex)
Whipped Ass: (Female/female spanking and domination)
Fucking Machines: (Heavily modified power “tools”)
Men In Pain: (Female domination of men)
Water Bondage: (Just what it sounds like)
Ultimate Surrender: (Nude girls wrestle; winner dominates loser)
Fair warning: Most of these sites have just begun offering their movie clips in iPod format, and they haven’t (yet) converted their archives. So you won’t find hundreds of iPod-ready movies, just the ones from recent updates.
Enjoy!
Update from the future: Hi, this is the future. We have smartphones now. Video iPods? What the hell were those? The good news is, Kink.com now has everything in .mp4 format, in five different sizes. If you’ve got a screen the size of your thumbnail on your watch, or or a TV the size of your living room wall, they’ve got you covered. Ain’t progress grand?
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 -- by Bacchus
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody come right out and argue for the merits of online porn memberships as Christmas presents before. Sex toys? Sure, every major web publication seems to have a sex toy buying guide. But sex toys are way last week in the gifting universe; getting hard goods in your hands (…um) at this late date is gonna be a neat trick. As Spanking Blog points out, porn memberships are virtual goods that are perfect for last-minute shopping:
All it takes is a credit card and two minutes, and you can write the password and userID on a nice hand-made certificate and put it in a stocking. Instant delivery, no hassle, no muss, no fuss. What’s not to like?
…
What’s more, giving the gift of porn makes a strong statement to your mate that you love them, that you feel secure in their affections, and that you want their erotic fancies to be tickled to the fullest. Of course, giving the gift of spanking porn (especially to a spanker) may also be hazardous to the smoothness of your unspoiled derriere. But what’s life without a little delicious risk?
One more benefit: when choosing a porn site to give as a gift, you get to conduct “research” behind a closed door, and when your spousal equivalent asks what’s going on, you can say in all truthfulness “Just some last minute online Christmas shopping, Honey, give me a minute to hide my windows before you come in here, OK?”
Saturday, December 17th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
If you thought Red made playing with a cattle prod sound like fun, you might also like this shoot from the first and best electrosex porn site, Wired Pussy:
Saturday, December 10th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
What’s better than porn for your video iPod? Why, bondage porn, of course:
I’m delighted to announce that the last couple of recent updates in the member’s area at Hogtied.com make the video clips for members available in 768 Kbps .mp4 format (iPod compatible) as well as the site’s usual .wmv and .rm formats. The movies look sharp on my iPod, too!
The Hogtied folks say they plan to continue to support the iPod format going forward, and they hope to add .mp4 video to their older archives sometime in the future.
Still photography of a well-tied woman is all very well and good, but sometimes you just need to see her wiggle and squirm in the ropes. On the subway, or in the park, or wherever you happen to be. If that’s you, Hogtied.com has got your back!
Update from the future: Hi, this is the future. We have smartphones now. Video iPods? What the hell was that? The good news is, Kink.com now has everything in .mp4 format, in five different sizes. If you’ve got a screen the size of your thumbnail or the size of your living room wall, they’ve got a device-independent format that will work. Ain’t progress wonderful?
Saturday, November 26th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Wow. I just got the new video iPod. Of course I didn’t get it just for viewing porn, but I’ve got a sex blog thing going on here, so I had to try that out.
Unfortunately, the iTunes store doesn’t sell any worthy porn. No worries; like lots of folks, I’ve got a ton of accumulated little porn clips on my hard drive that I’ve downloaded over the years. Lots of it is 320×240 (the dreaded “postage stamp” size) and doesn’t look like much on a computer screen viewed from twenty-four inches away, but on the stunningly vivid iPod screen held a comfortable distance in front of your face, it ought to look real good. So I’ll just bung my video clips into my iTunes library and get busy viewing, right?
Alas, no. There’s a slight flaw in that plan — video formats. The iPod accepts only two formats; video on the PC comes in many different flavors, virtually none of which match what the iPod wants. You want a good explanation for that, talk to a video geek; I don’t pretend to understand it. There are ways to convert, but they don’t sound easy. I Googled the problem and the “best” solution seemed to be to buy expensive conversion software and then expect to wait a long time as each bit of video gets converted properly. Sorry, but I don’t want it that bad.
So how am I gonna get porn for my iPod?
Fortunately, inspiration struck. You’ll have noticed I’m always posting pictures here that I downloaded from the alt.binaries erotica newsgroups on Usenet; the service I use for that is GUBA, a cheap and friendly sort of search appliance for the Usenet visual content that’s otherwise very difficult to find and download. (If you know how to download dirty movies from Usenet without GUBA, you probably already know how to convert all your files into iPod-friendly formats too, while baking a savory peach pie with your other hand.) Maybe GUBA (I thought hopefully) would have some iPod-friendly dirty movies?
Ding ding ding ding ding! Jackpot. It turns out that GUBA is riding the crest of the iPod porn wave; they have recently added a filter that converts almost all of the video on Usenet into iPod-friendly format, so if it’s been posted to Usenet in the last couple of weeks, you can download it iPod-ready. That’s a LOT of porn, folks; the bigger groups (like alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica) can have 2,500 or more video clips (or even whole movies) at any one time. And there are a metric buttload of different porn groups — one for every imaginable fetish.
When it comes to finding and downloading, nothing could be easier. Just pick your flavor (say, nude celebrities from alt.binaries.multimedia.nude.celebrities) and browse the videos — they make it easy with full-screen “contact sheet” style previews, or you can watch online with a nifty streaming Flash application. Here’s a clip of Halle Berry getting naked and nasty (in a good way) in Monster’s Ball (members-only link, will expire in a couple of weeks):
All you have to do is hit the “iPod Download” button. Once the file’s on your hard drive, import it into iTunes and it will be added to your iPod the next time you synch up. Easy as pie!
Better still, every newsgroup on GUBA has a nifty “subscribe to Feed in iTunes” button at the top of the page:  When I clicked that, I downloaded a .pcast file that loads into iTunes and sets it up to download new movies from the selected group as fast as they appear (bandwidth permitting, and you can eat a lot of it this way). An endless gusher of porn, shooting from the hose faster than you could ever hope to consume it. (I could dirty up that metaphor if you liked.)
None of which would matter much, except for the fact that (just like everyone says) watching video on the iPod is an unexpectedly pleasurable experience. The screen is bright and vivid, the details are sharp, and when the iPod’s in your hand, it naturally gravitates to your most comfortable viewing distance. In many cases, it’s actually quite a lot better than watching the same movies on your computer screen. Plus, you can take the iPod somewhere more comfortable (or more private) than your computer desk, if you are so inclined….
I bought my video iPod to have an iPod, thinking the video would be a mostly-worthless gimmick. Boy, was I wrong. The Nymph (who loves music videos) took one look over my shoulder and began pleading with me to let her play with it — the video is that pretty. At this rate, I may have to buy her a second one!
Update from the future: Apple invented smartphones, killing video iPods deader than the Dodo bird. Meanwhile GUBA pulled a #pornocalypse and got rid of all its porn, trying to compete with YouTube; it was dead and gone in eighteen months. Now this post is nothing but a quaint historical artifact. But The Nymph enjoyed that video iPod for many years, in truth.
Thursday, November 17th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Since Violet and Xeni are both going mad for Timothy Archibald’s new book on Sex Machines, I figured it might be time once again to honor the visual innovators in the field, namely, the mechanical geniuses at Fucking Machines. They build (beg? borrow? steal? I don’t really know) some of the best-looking sex machines in the porn world, and put ’em together with hot models. I particularly like this mandroid they’ve been featuring lately — it’s like high-camp erotic horror, only the girls are smiling:
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Monday, November 14th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Although the softcore centerfold style of mainstream American magazine porn can sometims get old, it’s got just enough class to get some of the prettiest women in pornography, revealed in all their glory at a newstand near you. For some reason, I’ve always enjoyed the photos (like this one from Penthouse.com) featuring all-American girls taking off their blue jeans and revealing that they’ve been running around all day without any undies. Gina Austin does this very well:
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Sunday, November 13th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I’ve linked to the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository since the very first day ErosBlog went online. The sheer volume of free sex stories available there is mindboggling, and the diversity of subject matter is unlike any commercial text porn ever published. Last week, I noticed that the Kirsten Archives (one of the many collections hosted in the repository) featured ErosBlog as its “Momentary Link”. The traffic and recognition are appreciated, and so I’m returning the favor.
Here’s an excerpt from one of the Kirsten Archives stories, a little food fetish number called “Laura’s Banana“:
“Take your pants off,” Laura breathed. “Let me see your hard cock.”
With the two bananas sticking out of her snatch, Laura handed me a third, unpeeled this time.
“Stick it in me between the others.”
With one hand on my rock hard cock, I stuck the banana in with my other. Inch by inch, Laura’s cunt accepted it.
Laura was now calling for me to fuck her with it.
“Push it in farther; then pull it out, oh yes, that’s it, only harder.”
Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Over on Donny’s Ramblings, softcore porn producer Donovan Phillips makes some suggestions for hard-core porn producers about things to include in hard-core porn. This one set me to to musing:
Kissing – doesn’t have to be lovey, dovey kissing. Some firm, “Oh my God I want to fuck you!” type kissing helps get the women I know going. The male shows some aggression but in an “I really fucking want you!” way instead of a “You’re my cum bucket” type way. Know what I mean?
I think that distinction between aggression and contempt is important. What’s with all the contempt for the talent in American porn, anyway? It’s possible, perhaps even normal, for people to enjoy depictions of sexual aggression, but I don’t really know all that many men who buy into the “cum bucket” contemptuousness and distaste. In my life to date, I’ve heard only one man actually utter that phrase in all seriousness, and he’s widely known to be an exceptional asshole. When I see pornography that buys into the whole adolescent large-talking locker room “bitch/whore/cunt/slut” foulness, I’m always tempted to assume that the pornographers in question are letting their own personal issues cloud their understanding of their market. Most men (all real men) can readily distinguish between sexual aggressiveness and sexual contempt. The former is good dirty fun in appropriate contexts, and often quite well appreciated by the women in question. The latter just leaves us thinking “What the fuck?!”
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Bad bogus school girls have always been one of the funniest things in porn (especially in spanking movies) — hard-edged (or just very “grown up”) women in pigtails and short skirts, presented as student-aged with laughable implausibility. It’s a healthy joke in one sense, as it allows producers and consumers of “school girl” porn to do their thing without anyone having to worry that the ladies might actually be underaged.
All of which is by way of pointing out Spanking Blog has recently found two especially hilarious examples of the “laughably bad schoolgirl” genre:
Very Grown Up “Schoolgirl”
Obvious Porn Starlet “Schoolgirls”
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 -- by Bacchus
One of the common mostly-false slams against porn in this era of globalisation is that the performers are mostly coerced sex slaves, or at least impoverished scared young girls with few options. (I’m not making this up as a straw man argument; see, e.g., the Biting Beaver (her term): “You CANNOT know if the girl you are masturbating to is, in reality, a sexual slave from Austria who has a gun pointed at her head just off camera.“)
Yeah. And you cannot know that the bottle of salad dressing you pour on your salad isn’t full of stale unpasteurized jizz from bored wanking food factory workers, either. But that doesn’t make it likely, or stop you from eating creamy salads. Why not? Because of branding. If you worry about funky jizz in your dressing, you buy a reputable brand from a company you trust, one that’s got white-coated vat inspectors and security cams all over the factory floor. And, if you really worry, you do research. You get a tour of the factory, or (more likely) read the article in Consumer Reports by the reporter who worked there for three days undercover. The point is, you check into it a little bit.
This is perfectly possible with porn. By way of local example, these issues came up in a peripheral way in this post about real sex in BDSM porn, where a couple of readers suggested in the comments that making such porn was degrading and unsafe for the models, only to be confronted by other readers who were able to vouch for the porn company in question based on personal acquaintance with the models and producers.
And that’s how you check out your porn brand. Research. You look for accounts (which are all over the web, since many models have blogs) of what it’s like to work for a particular porn company, how they treat their people, how the sets are run, whatever you’re worried about. Of course you can’t disprove sensationalist claims about porn factories full of enslaved Eastern European beauties this way — folks who want to cling to that fantasy will continue to do so, brandishing their “news” stories from The Weekly World News, National Enquirer, and Reader’s Digest — but you can satisfy yourself, along with any other reasonable people who might be curious, that the porn you buy is sex slave free.
To pick another flamboyantly outrageous example, how about the notoriously severe spanking and caning DVDs produced by Lupus Pictures? They are often cited as an example of a company that must abuse and exploit its models, because what right-thinking innocent girl would voluntarily consent to an ass-whipping that leaves her in tears with flaming red welts on her bottom? (Short answer: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreampt of in your philosophy.)
Here are couple of a relatively mild screen capture samples so we know what we are talking about, courtesy of Lupus Spanking [2014 update: now defunct]:
And now some samples from an article by and an interview with Niki Flynn, who went to Prague to make a movie with these “evil werewolves from the East”. From the article (link broke awhile ago, see this .txt mirror):
I never thought of myself as a girl who could survive a Lupus-style caning. I cringe and wince when I watch the films and say, “There’s no way I could take that!” I’d heard the internet rumours, of course — about the innocent, impoverished Czech girls who are seduced by the money into being abused by the evil werewolves from the East. But I’d look at the “behind-the-scenes” pictures on the website and see everyone having a good time, laughing and horsing around, even after the canings. So the rumours never seemed to have any substance. Besides, the same girls turn up again and again to do films; they clearly know what to expect.
…
The thing that impressed me most of all was the consummate professionalism of everyone involved. This was not a group of pornographers making dirty pictures, nor was it a cruel band of misogynists delighting in taking advantage of girls who couldn’t say no. This was a real film crew working on a real film. In addition to the director, producer, script supervisor, makeup artist, properties and wardrobe mistress, caterer, cameramen, boom operator, still photographer, actors and (ahem) stunt girls, there were people on hand to offer us refreshments, comfort or anything else we needed.
…
Did it hurt? Of course. Did I enjoy it? Absolutely not. Do I regret it? Not for a moment. In fact, I had the time of my life. So did William. I knew exactly what I was getting into and I did it because this is what I like. And when it was over and I lay sobbing over the desk, I felt what mountain climbers must feel when they reach the peak. I was so high on the feeling of accomplishment and so lost in the roleplay that I nearly wished I could have some more! And when I look at the marks now I have a sense of pride and achievement. I savor the marks. No one who isn’t into this can ever truly understand. Boxers and footballers suffer broken noses and concussions. No one criticizes them or calls their sport unhealthy. What we do is so much safer. It’s really a shame so many people misunderstand.
Hmm, she doesn’t sound helpless or exploited, does she?
From her interview:
David: There are many rumors about the girls who perform in Lupus productions. Some believe that they attract poor, starving, drug-addicted Eastern European Girls. Now I know that this isn’t true. Prague is often referred to as ‘The Paris of the east”. The Czech Republic is not a third world country. What myths about Lupus would you most like to dispel?
Niki: (Sigh) Yes, the famous urban legends. I think that those rumors are insulting to the girls actually. It’s true, some people think of the Czech Republic as a third world country and that the girls are all uneducated and bullied into it. Or, they have no choice because they are so desperate for money they will do anything. The truth is that the Czech Republic isn’t a third world country; it’s a middle income country that has just joined the European Union. Most of the Lupus crew are friends on the Czech BDSM scene. Some of the girls do it because they are genuinely kinky — they come back again and again. Some may do it for money, but it’s not a crust of bread. They are paid a professional rate. On the set, they are treated as professional actors. The production team at Lupus couldn’t have been more professional or more concerned for my safety — for all of the performers’ safety.
And that’s how you know that the girl in your favorite video doesn’t have an off-camera gun pointed at her head.
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Thursday, October 20th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
There’s something fascinating about watching an articulate fetishist of ordinary objects describe his (or her .. but it’s usually “his”) fetish. When the fetish is common enough to be deliberately recognized, acknowledged, and sexualized in mainstream media or porn (as with leather, rubber, shoes, pantyhose, and the like) the effect is lessened by our own recognition of the fetish; we can see a pretty lady rubbing a foot against her nylons and go “Mmm, a two-fer” even if we aren’t foot or nylons fetishists our own selves. But when the fetish is more uncommon (balloons, casts), there’s less sexual “noise” when the non-fetishist witnesses the fetishist in action. For me, at least, it offers insight into what fetish is and how it works.
But wait, I hear you saying. Did I say “casts”?
Indeed I did. Confessions of a Cast Fetishist [link broken and removed] is just what it sounds like; or, as the author of the blog puts it, “a description and continuing exploration of my erotic and aesthetic obsessions with leg casts, female feet — especially toes — and footwear.” No, really:
[The film] does happen to feature one rather important detail: a significant female character with a leg in a plaster cast. This might not necessarily be of great import to the vast majority of the movie-consuming public but, to the connoisseur fetishist, leg casts are not altogether common in cinema history, and so any one that may occur is something to be savoured. And, should the person sporting the leg cast happen to be quite as attractive as Famke Janssen, as is this particular instance, well, now we’re talking. Anyway, as a result, I’ve recently invested in a copy of the DVD of the film, to enjoy, again and again, the relevant scenes at my leisure, as it were.
…
I love to see a plaster cast being customized like that, in such a typical way — it’s what people do when they see a cast, and why not, who could blame them? I know that were I actually to be in that scene, I’d be snatching her crayons and pens from the kid and elbowing her out of the way in order to have my turn, and how I’d hog that plaster cast to my heart’s content, decorating it in my own special way, adding my very own personal dedications and hymns to its wonder and beauty. I should add that Famke spends a sizable part of the film wearing a skimpy, tight little vest top that is also hardly unbecoming to her charms. Here’s another little peek. How lovely it would be to keep her “entertained” under the circumstances.
Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Well, or at least not so bad. That’s The Agitator’s take [title: Why Porn Is Good for America (Or, at Least, No So Bad)]on the way the porn explosion is affecting the United States:
But if you look at demographic and crime data since the rise of the Internet — when most people could for the first time access pornography at any time, from any place, completely anonymously — there’s little evidence at all that it’s having any widespread negative effects in any of the areas people like Bozell and Shapiro worry about. In fact, trends in just about every concievable area are moving in directions you’d think Bozell and Shapiro would favor, desptie the widespread availability or pornography. Hell, given that most of the bad stuff seemed to peak just as the Internet took off before trending downward, you could arguably make the case that porn is helping matters a bit, by giving the sexually frustrated a harmless outlet to relieve sexual tension (how’s that for a euphamism?)
I tried to think of all the areas in which someone like Bozell might conclude pornography is having negative effects, and looked to see what the trends in those areas have looked like since the early-to-mid 1990s, the onset of the Internet age. Perhaps I’ve overlooked something, but my guess is that just about any other category you could come up with would point in the same direction: Things are getting better, not worse. Despite Janet Jackson, Internet porn, and Desperate Housewives.
Thanks to Daze for the link.
Sunday, October 9th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Just how big was it? Please hold still while our lovely volunteer from the audience gets a quick measure:
Vintage porn star image from alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. pornstar.
Friday, September 30th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
From Usenet:
Update: Added sardonic “not” to the post title because people were not catching the sarcasm.
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
After having wallowed in BDSM-and-porn hatred in the last couple of posts, it’s time for some good old fashioned unapologetic girl-on-girl bondage porn, with some toilet dunking to push a few more buttons:
From Wired Pussy. And there’s nary a patriarch (nor even a dick!) in sight. (Unless, of course, you count the electrified stainless steel butt plugs in the shoot this picture came from.)
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I don’t think there’s much chance I have anything philosphically in common with the woman who writes Den of the Biting Beaver. Indeed, her views strike me as horrifying and repressive; she hates pornography, reveres Andrea Dworkin, and slammed her own 14-year old son for having the temerity to suggest that fighting and dying in a war might be worse than being raped during one. (In her own words: “I stomped out that little glimmer of Patriarchal nonsense before it had taken a real root in his tender little psyche.” Nice parenting, yo.) Worse yet, she actually believes in thought crime; she’s got a detailed theory of why it’s wrong and bad to fantasize about things you shouldn’t or wouldn’t actually do.
So why the attention? In a word, quality. Her posts are entertaining-tending-toward-rants, well-written, considered in the sense of acknowledging and addressing obvious counter-arguments, and fun to read. If everybody in this multi-sided culture war we’re fighting came to battle in the same spirit as she does, we would all be having a lot more fun.
Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I’m a small town boy at heart. Setting aside the sometimes-amusing literary conceits of porn sites like Street Blowjobs (sorry, boys, but the young ladies sucking on “Bob Incognito’s” prong are recruited in the usual porn industry fashion and they know they are on camera), I would normally assume that even low-end commercial sex transactions are unlikely to occur in broad sunlight within feet of beer-swigging pedestrians. And so, it’s possible this photograph is not what it looks like:
Although that posture is hard to explain, it’s possible he’s just trying to give her a discreet hit on his device for incinerating illicit chemicals. Heck, maybe she’s trying to help untie the tangled knots of his friendship bracelets, using her teeth to worry the strings loose. It’s possible….
But then, it’s also possible (and perhaps more likely) that more things happen on the mean streets of the big city than I’d previously imagined.
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Thursday, August 18th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
A while back the folks from Hogtied rented a sumptuous villa in Cabo San Lucas and took a bunch of equally-sumptuous models down there for a little working vacation. No, friends, this isn’t some trendy stretching exercise to follow one of Madonna’s Qabalah classes; it’s more in the nature of spring break bondage porn, complete with palm trees and azure swimming pools. And willing, flexible girls. And rope:
My spring breaks were never like this.
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Thursday, August 11th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
The Girl With A One Track Mind recently got asked “What’s BDSM?” by her mother.
And it triggered a horrifying memory of an episode I had otherwise forgotten.
I grew up in a very small town a long way from anywhere. Social options were … limited. And girls? Forget about it. There was only one my age, and she didn’t like me. Hell, I didn’t even like her much. But she had brothers I got along with OK, so I hung at their house a lot.
Which is how, one day when I was perhaps fourteen, I found myself sitting at their kitchen table playing UNO with about six people ranging in age from littlest sister (age 9?) to The Mom, whose oldest kids were long gone from home. The Mom was a “fun” adult, tolerant of kids and never angry, made awesome chocolate eclairs and always with a kind word for everyone. She was also pretty for her age, blonde, and a devout, bury-all-her-problems-in-the-joy-of-Jesus fundamentalist Christian. Not preachy, but completely lost in belief, with no room in her worldview for other answers and no other way to cope with her many problems.
So one of the brothers made a particularly boneheaded move (hard to do while playing UNO) and Sister My Age made a derisive remark that concluded with “…you stupid dildo!”
Of course Littlest Sister pipes up from inside her cute little halo of blonde hair (these folks were all blonde Scandahoovians from Michigan): “What’s a dildo?”
Crickets.
The Mom got a curious look on her face, and in a completely friendly tone (no guile possible, just motherly interest) asked Sister My Age “Yes, dear, what’s a dildo?”
She meant the question honestly. She had no freakin’ idea.
I dunno how much Sister My Age knew. In that house, it’s possible she didn’t know any better than Mom. But she obviously knew it was something “bad”, because she stammered and blushed a bit, and then she protested that she didn’t know, it was just a name she’d heard someone call someone else in a movie (which she named).
And then, for my sins, The Mom turned her gaze on me. “[My Name], do you know what a dildo is?”
Did I mention my sins? My big one, here, was the sin of being smarter than any of the many children The Mom had ever popped from her loins. I was the big reader, the guy with the huge vocabulary, the guy who knew it all and (at fourteen) never failed to let everyone know it. The Mom knew I’d know, because she knew that I’d read every piece of printed matter that had every fallen under my eyes, whether I understood it or not.
Now it was my turn to blush and stammer. For indeed, I did know. I’d read The Joy Of Sex. Hell, I’d had to volunteer as librarian in our town’s little public library, just so I could smuggle it out of the place without having to write my name on the little paper slip in the front while being watched with basilisk eyes by the normal little-old-lady volunteers who’d known me since I was five. Also, there was an Older Brother of this family who used to hide his three porn magazines in the woods in a treehouse fort constructed for that very purpose. I’d invaded the fort and viewed them. I knew what was what.
And I was stuck. Claiming ignorance wouldn’t work. I had never been seen to do it. Nobody would believe me. Nor, looking back, do I think I was capable of it.
What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t very well look this nice eclair-baking Christian lady in the eye and say “It’s a big rubber penis.”
So I hemmed, and I hawed, and said I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a very nice thing to call your little sister; I knew it was some sort of thing for married people, because wherever I had read the word (and, pious me, I could not remember where) it had also been called a “marital aid.”
That was the magic phrase; The Mom obviously knew what those were, because I saw the light dawn in her eyes, and then she said to Sister My Age “Don’t be calling your little sister that” and jumped up to offer some more eclairs.
Sunday, August 7th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
There’s a great sequence from a comedy routine by Ron White, where he shares a bit of dialogue he supposedly had with one of his blue-collar buddies:
“We’re all a little bit gay.”
“Naw man, I ain’t gay!”
“Sure you are, and I can prove it to you.”
“Hell no!”
“Well, do you watch porn?”
“Of course man, you know I watch porn.”
“Do you only watch two women?”
“Naw, I like to watch a woman and a man make love.”
“Do you like the man to have a tiny, flaccid penis?”
“Naw! I want to see a big hard throbbing cock!” {pause} “I did not know that about myself!”
Monday, July 25th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Have you ever used a color laser printer to print a dirty picture? Or photocopied some porn on a color photocopier? If you’re male and have had routine unsupervised access to such devices, you know you have. No point in trying to deny it.
But did you know that the spiffy new porn steaming in your output tray is secretly encoded with your printer serial number and other info that could be used to identify you?
That’s a function your government got snuck into your hardware, ostensibly to catch counterfeiters. But nobody knows what else they are using the secret markings for. If you print subversive fliers or protest literature, it might be smart to worry.
And if you want to know more, what do you do? Which machines are spying on you? And what data are they writing on your documents? Is it just color laser devices? The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is trying to find out for you. And they need help. Money is always good, but they also need more data. Details here.
Me, I don’t like the very idea of having government agents pressure tech companies into putting sneaky “features” into their products. Does your DVD burner secretly encode every disk you burn with its serial number and the name you gave Windows when you set up your email account? Does your video camera secretly encode your treasured first-person footage of your girlfriend’s cum-covered face with date, time, and the camera serial number that’s in your customer records at Best Buy? Probably not. But in a world where things like this happen, is it paranoid to wonder?
Thursday, July 21st, 2005 -- by Bacchus
An email from Sam Sugar of SugarBank has prompted me to create a new category on the blogroll: Adult Industry Blogs.
Sam’s is only the most recent entrant into the category of well-written blogs by porn industry participants: photographers, movie makers, adult webmasters, and pornographers of every stripe. These folks are often extremely knowledgeable, literate, and passionate about sex-related topics, but the ones who don’t blog about their own sex lives (or who don’t post so many free samples of their product) have never been a great fit in the Sex Blog category. The new category also gives me room for creative people like Tony Comstock and others whose blogs present as marketing devices, but interesting ones. (I say “present as marketing devices” because any blog by a person in commerce is a marketing device, whether or not people notice it as such.)
Back to Sam Sugar. To give you the flavor, he recently debunked nine anti-porn myths:
6. Porn is for perverts
With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyone’s a pervert.
Paul Fishbein (founder of AVN magazine) said that anti-porn protestors want us to believe that the porn industry serves 800 guys who each rent a million movies a year. He’s right.
People want to enjoy sexual material in every city and state, they spend more on porn in hotels than they do on drinks from the mini-bar. Whatever your thoughts about it, porn’s not a niche interest.
Indeed.
Saturday, July 9th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
If you liked the tranny porn post, you might also enjoy Blog Travestis, which bills itself as “world’s first transblog”. It’s not in English, but there are visual aids….
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 -- by Bacchus
If you’re anything like me, at some point in your life you’ve wondered “What in the hell is up with all the tranny porn? What’s the market for this stuff, anyway?”
Now, “tranny porn” in this sense is a politically incorrect marketing label, roughly synonymous with the more descriptive if no more euphonious “chicks with dicks”. And it’s a big porn genre in its own right, not (apparently, and judging by the shelving arrangements at your average video store) some odd little subgenre in the gay porn section. We’re not talking about something you can only buy under a rainbow flag in the Casto District. No, you’ll find plenty of this stuff in the plywood building with no windows, the one that’s two blocks down County 99 past the travel plaza, just before you get to the grain elevators.
So who’s watching it?
Can’t say. In all my life, I never yet came across anybody who admitted to watching the stuff or being attracted to pretty women with “the meat between the legs”. Until now: Yeah, I like transsexuals, what are you gonna do about it?
Sunday, June 19th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
In case you thought tentacle sex was a modern Japanese kink, this vintage shunga image ought to disabuse you:
The artist is the famous Katsushika Hokusai, who died in 1849. What’s more, there’s a link at Tentacle Porn to a putative translation of the script surrounding the image. No warranties, express or implied:
OCTOPUS MAXIMUS: My wish comes true at last, this day of days; finally I
have you in my grasp! Your “bobo” is ripe and full, how wonderful! Superior
to all others! To suck and suck and suck some more. After we do ot
masterfully, I’ll guide yo to the Dragon Palace of the Sea God and envelope
you. “Zuu sufu sufu chyu chyu chyu tsu zuu fufufuuu…”
MAIDEN: You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me
gasp for breath! Aah! yes… it’s… There.!!! With the sucker, the
sucker!! inside, squiggle, squiggle, Oooh! Oooh, good, Oooh good! There,
there! Theeeeere! Goood! Whew! Aah! Good, good, Aaaaaaaaaah! Not yet!
Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! Ooh! Whew! How
are you able…!? Ooh! “yoyoyooh, Saa… Hicha hicha gucha gucha, yuchyuu
chyu guzu guzu suu suuu….”
OCTOPUS MAXIMUS: All eigth legs (arms?) to interwine with!! How do you like
it htis way? Ah, look! The inside has swollen, moistened by the warm waters
of lust. “Nura nura doku doku doku…”
MAIDEN: Yes, it tingles now; soon there will be no sensation at all left my
hips. Ooooooh! Boundaries and borders gone! I ‘ve Vanished….!!!!!!
OCTOPUS MINIMUM: After daddy finishes, I too want to rub and rub my suckers
at the ridge of your furry place until you disappear and then I’ll suck
some more, “chyu chyu..”
Monday, May 16th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I admit that it seems rather churlish, but if I had paid the large sum of cash it would take to get Tori Stone and her “sister” Tawnee Stone to come to my house and wash my car, I think I’d be going “Ladies, ladies, you look real nice and all, but how about sponging some of those suds onto my actual vehicle?”
“Girls, you missed a spot….”
Monday, May 9th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Ron Jeremy tells the world how to make it as a male porn star:
It sure ain’t rocket science. I hide the bacon, squeeze the weasel, shoot the sherbet, and then the girl says, “Thank you”, and then I go off home.
What? Being a porn star is no harder than drinking with my good buddy Jose? Any fool can do that! You just drink the salt, bite the lime, lick the tequila….
Er, run that by us one more time, wouldja Ron?
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Sunday, May 1st, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I’ve repeatedly railed against porn sites that are all “slut” this, “cunt” that, and “whores and bitches” over there. In my experience, guys who talk like that aren’t getting any, and no wonder! I doubt it’s any different for guys who enjoy their porn labelled in that ugly fashion.
So imagine my delight in discovering a pornographer who “gets it”. Donovan Phillips writes (in his blog Donny’s Ramblings: Diary of a Pornographer):
I fucking hate going to websites that use words like whores and sluts. There’s nothing at all wrong with a woman showing her sexuality. The way our society encourages women to repress the evidence of their sex drive really bothers me. Men are encouraged to boast about their strong libido, but a woman with a strong sex drive who agressively goes for what she wants is labeled with one of those words I so hate.
And you know what else? There’s nothing at all wrong with a man being aroused by a woman showing her sexuality, even to the point of masturbation. Why do I mention this? Because I’m sure that you, like me, may have a background influenced by religious individuals that tell you anything pleasant in life is a sin of some sort. Masturbation’s a sin, ya know. Fuck them.
Preach it, Brother Donny!
Friday, April 29th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
It takes only the most minimal exposure to Japanese porn to understand that the Japanese sexual culture is very unusual to non-Japanese eyes. You may not understand much else, but you’ll understand that much very quickly.
Other little hints present themselves from time to time. Example: Japanese Kids Are Perverted. Excerpt:
Let me introduce you to a game Japanese kids like to play called “Kancho.”
Actually, it’s not so much a “game” as it is kids clasping their hands together, sticking out their first fingers, and shoving them up your butt. I’m really not joking.
You know, before we come to Japan, they tell us a lot of ultimately useless stuff. What kind of computer to bring, if our DVD’s will work, clothing sizes, that kind of nonsense. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, in the 3-4 months of orientations did anyone ever mention that at some point, a Japanese kid may try to stick their fingers up our butt. That’s something I would have liked to know, personally.
It’s called Kancho, and just about any kid can be a Kancho Assassin. Even the sweetest little girl may be prone to jam her fingers up your ass the second you turn around. This happened to one of my friends, which just goes to show – don’t trust anyone. I’d say the little girls are the most dangerous cause they have natural ways of lowering your defenses.
Thursday, April 14th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
So I was looking at this random adult blog, trying to decide whether to do my usual link-and-quote. The blog itself was mostly a porn blog, with a list of affiliate links six times bigger than the blogroll, plus a lot of random porn pictures. Some of the articles were interesting, but many of them had a fakey “this-reads-like-it-was-written-by-a-man-even-though-the-author-name-is-female” feel. Then I got to an article which purported to be a how-to on the fine art of fingering a woman.
It looked promising. Started out strong, with several hints and tips I’ve used myself to good effect. Lots of advice on finding her G-spot and making it go all bumpy-happy. So far so good.
In the middle part, the advice got a bit questionable. Not the substance of it (obviously if she’s dry, you’d better stop rubbing like a madman, unless you are trying to give her a burn) but the tone. (Was it really necessary to call the reader a moron?)
And then I got to the punchline. After paragraphs and paragraphs of how-to material, the breezy warning (paraphrased): “Of course your lady won’t ever get an orgasm from this, but who cares? She’ll love it anyway.”
Gasp, sputter. She’s not supposed to come when I do that? I must have been going about it all wrong.
It must be true: them as can’t do, teach.
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Friday, April 8th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
The quality on this vintage oral sex picture may not be the best, but I had to share it anyway. Isn’t that just about the happiest smile you’ve ever seen in porn?
From Usenet.
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Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 -- by Bacchus
After that post last week featuring frat boy buttocks, it only seems fair to give equal time to the callipygean delights that sorority girls (or, at least, the young ladies who masquerade as sorority girls while making soft-core pornography) have to offer. This fetching tableau spotted over at Spanking Blog ought to do nicely:
Cute cute cute!
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Thursday, March 31st, 2005 -- by Bacchus
There’s a long article about porn in Time Magazine that I haven’t read. And why didn’t I? Because the first paragraph pissed me off:
“In hotel rooms where pornography is available, two-thirds of all movie purchases are for pornos; and the average time they are watched is 12 minutes. The image instantly summoned is of the traveling businessman who wants a smidge of sexual exercise before retiring, but who is too tired, timid or cheap to summon a call girl.”
The image instantly summoned in my mind is one of pity for the hypothetical wife or girlfriend of Time columnist Richard Corliss, who wrote that last squalid sentence.
Horny travelling men who don’t “summon a call girl” must be “too tired, timid or cheap”, eh?
It must surely suck to be married to that man.
Friday, March 18th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Porn Publisher Rask can be funny as hell, and today he has a question for his readers:
When I go out, I often wear a leather Harley Davidson cap with a long brim. It keeps the sun out of my eyes and it keeps my hair from blowing into my mouth. And it advertises the fact that I’m a biker and ride a big Harley. When I was at Lowes last week, I found some cute little flashlights with clips on them. Perfect to attach to the brim of my cap. Now I can see in the dark, hands-free. When I wear the cap now, the slave gives me a Look. The vibe I’m getting from her is like, “I can’t sleep with a man who wears flashlights on his head.” Now my question is this: Doesn’t the machismo of wearing a Harley Davidson cap offset the geekiness of wearing flashlights on your head? I need to know, just in case I want to have sex again someday. For now, though, being able to see in the dark is gratifying enough.
A tough call, I’d say….
Wednesday, March 9th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Charges from RollerTrain apparently likes sticking her face right into the bee hive to lick the honey straight off the honeycomb frames, because she’s taken on the “angry young feministas” who disapprove of porn:
In the American porno bizz, blame pushing pisses me off like nothing else. … I don’t buy into victimhood when it boils down to American porn. Not here and not now. I have little sympathy for anyone who tries to score a profit without learning how to score it, especially when you’re trying to score off anything other than your mind.
When your goal is money, you better be damned sure of three things: You know what you’re getting into, you like what you’re getting into, and if the first two things don’t apply, you learn from your failures. Porn or not, we’ll always fuck up. But if you decide not to learn from your own mistakes, especially in something as simple as porn, you choose your victimhood.
Arguing that “porn victimizes the women who appear in it” disrespects and belittles the freedom of choice exercised by the women who appear in porn. I’d say that sort of infantalizing argument does more damage to women than porn could ever dream of doing.
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 -- by Aphrodite
It’s nice to see others improving their sex lives, it gives me hope that I’ll have one again someday. Starting in February, the Burbman over at Suburban Sex Blog resumed more regular posting, with the good news that he and his wife seem to have turned their sexless marriage back into something fun for both of them. He’s also offering to help others in similar situations. Good on ya, Burbman!
A few people have written me regarding my preference for hairy men. At this point my only preference is for a live, decent man, but it is true that I don’t like a guy who’s artificially smooth. I was trying to figure out how to say exactly what I don’t like about overly bare guys, but the Dirty Talking Girl beat me to it:
I love male body hair.
I can’t imagine him shaving or, god forbid, waxing, and I don’t understand women who require smoothness in a man.
I think they’re afraid of the animal.
Maybe…..or maybe all the glitzy porn images have led both men and women to expect silky smoothness everywhere. Sure, hair can get in the way or be inconvenient sometimes, but I’ll never forget the guy who got me soaking wet by just playing with my pubes…..pulling gently on a few hairs beginning near my ass and working his way up, sometimes twirling or tickling, but never touching my skin until I was begging him to bury his cock in me. Mmmmmmmm……
Friday, February 25th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Rask writes on his Diary of a Porn Publisher:
For Valentine’s Day, I bought some used tires for the slave’s Mustang on eBay. It has been suggested in the past that I am romantically-challenged, but I’m sure that this extravagant gesture will put those claims to rest.
I’m sure, I’m sure.
Friday, February 18th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I think the sport of tennis would be far more entertaining if this became the standard uniform:
Picture is from Pretty Tight porn links.
Sunday, February 13th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Tell me how, how in the name of Hera’s humongous hotbox, did I manage to miss Rollertrain for more than a year? The engineer of the train calls herself “Charges”, and I just love her foul-mouthed ranting style. Example, from Top 10 Reasons Why I Hate Fake Lesbian Porno:
Answer me this, bitches: If a dick devotee like myself can figure out that all clitori pretty much require the same kind of stimulation that mine does, then why – you eighteen-year-old Californian cretins, with your sexual boundary issues and your ass tattoos and your daddy deficits and your navel rings and those cheap plastic stripper shoes – shouldn’t you? We’re watching you.
If you don’t know how to eat a pussy, why are you trying to eat one? And why don’t you try a little harder? It’s your JOB. That girl’s dirty crotch is bringing home your bacon. If you want to do porn without eating pussy, there’s no shame in that! But please, just go straight to the 5-man gang bangs. Skip the snatch. I am tired of watching you pussy amateurs trying to act like you enjoy screwing around with girls.
Or how about this observation about porn stars?
I’m critical of pornstars, especially the high-school graduates who jump into their Jenna Jameson fantasies without any prior research. It always amazes me to catch stories about these dodo birds showing up at gonzo studios without any idea of what to expect. I mean no idea. When I hear little gonzo bitches bawl over what happened to them in Golden Guzzlers #17, all I can think is didn’t you at least rent Golden Guzzlers #1? How could you decide to start doing porno without doing any homework?
Being a pornstar is probably the easiest way for unmotivated young girls to make a lot of money. All they have to do is show up. Being a good pornstar, however, is a very hard job that takes endurance, intelligence and a lot of balls, and the few women who do it well should be commended and highly compensated. I am still critical of good pornstars; once your privates become part of public domain, the images no longer belong to you. But I deeply respect women who succeed in the sex industry, because they have bigger balls than me, and because they’re fucking beautiful.
Too much fun!
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 -- by Aphrodite
This is the best link advertising an RSS feed I’ve ever seen:
“Click here to have my big hard blog stuffed lovingly up your RSS”
Who can resist that? So get yourself over to Rentboy Diaries and assume the proper position already! :D
[And, Bacchus, the photo wasn’t found on a gay porn site, despite my terminology suggesting otherwise. Would you consider a nude shot of yourself (your smile can match his any day, you know) “gay porn?”]
Thursday, January 27th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
I don’t like looking at ambiguously-gendered asses any more than Aphrodite likes spider porn, so I have to bump her latest down the page with something. Why not some innocent food photography?
This reminds me of a scene from the notorious Japanese food movie Tampopo.
Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 -- by Aphrodite
I am so not a porn writer, just to warn anybody who hasn’t read the first two parts yet…..but some readers are still interested in this tale, so I’ll continue to tell.
Part 1
Part 2
R called my folks’ house Thanksgiving evening to tell me that some problem had sprung up and he’d need to go back to Washington sooner than he’d planned…like, tomorrow. I agreed to meet him early Friday morning, even though I was unsure of what I wanted out of our re-established relationship, and less sure of what he wanted.
Over breakfast, R tells me that it’s been alot of fun, reconnecting with me, and especially venting some of those teenage fantasies…..But…..the pause draws out uncomfortably. Finally he looks up from his coffee and finishes, “But that’s not how I am now. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to show you how I am now.”
Intrigued, I reply, “Well, how’s about you tell me how you are now?” His glum face furrows into a frown. “Telling is even harder. [another long pause] If we lived closer, and if I didn’t have to travel so goddamn much, it might be worth trying…..”
Trying what? I wonder. Instead, I say, “You know me R, I’ll try anything once, and if it doesn’t kill me, I might just try it again.” Expecting him to smile at that, I’m instead baffled by an expression of thoughtful pondering, followed after another long pause by, “Mmmm…..yes, you’re still adventurous…..”
Finally R emerges from his thinking and says, “If you’re game, I’ll put on my thinking cap and see what I come up with.”
My curiosity is just about killing me at this point, so even though some small corner of my brain is going, WTF is this all about?, I reply, “Hell yes I’m game. Just give me enough notice to juggle my work.”
The conversation then turns to other topics. As we’re leaving the restaurant, R asks me to say goodbye to my family for him. Then, he pulls me to him, opening his leather jacket as if to enfold me in it. Our goodbye kiss starts innocently enough, but quickly becomes passionate, and almost involuntarily I hungrily press my hips forward. R shifts slightly, still kissing me….brings a hand up to my breast….and tweaks my nipple, hard. My gasp of surprise and pain breaks the kiss, and I see a glint of something far beyond impish in R’s eyes. He pulls away, saying, “I’ll let you know what I come up with.”
As I watch his SUV move away I realize I’m soaking wet, and desperate for a fuck….almost as if R hadn’t slaked my hunger at all.
Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 -- by Bacchus
This is absolutely huge good legal news for the adult industry, and an astonishing win for unsympathetic defendant Rob Black of Extreme Associates (also known as the gonzo spitting-and-insult-screaming-and-shoving-dick-down-her-throat-until-she-vomits pornographers). The federal government has been toiling away at putting together a huge obscenity show trial against Mr. Black and some associates of his, with the apparent goal of putting him in jail for a lot of years and then using that conviction to scare the more-responsible mainstream pornography business back into the shadows.
Well, it didn’t work, because the trial judge threw out all the obscenity charges on constitutional grounds, saying:
“We find that the federal obscenity statutes burden an individual’s fundamental right to possess, read, observe and think about what he chooses in the privacy of his own home by completely banning the distribution of obscene materials.
Usual disclaimers apply: trial court, likely to be appealed, ain’t over yet, yadda yadda yadda.
Ironic twist worth noting: Supreme Court Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas are owed a vote of thanks for their participation in this outcome. When the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case (the one declaring that whatever legitimate interest a government may have in trying to impose a moral code, it’s not a good enough reason to intrude into personal and private sexual lives) was decided last year, these justices dissented with the rather sour but extremely accurate observation that the decision “called into question” laws against obscenity — an observation upon which the judge relied heavily in the Extreme Associates case.
Monday, January 17th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Hey everybody, I’m pleased to announce that ErosBlog now has the oft-requested RSS feed. (If you don’t know what this is, or why you should care, don’t worry; let’s just say it’s a tool for hard-core blog readers so they can read more blogs faster.)
I’d been stalling on this because I had wrongly understood that I would have to hack some .cgi files to implement a feed in Greymatter. I now owe an enormous debt to Sunni Maravillosa, who Googled up a neat little easier way and then wrote it down for me in simple plain-English sentences of instruction. Sunni, thanks a million!
Although it validates, the feed’s not perfect for all purists, because it can only include the most recent two items (rather than the fifteen or so I’m told the RSS spec calls for). Also, I’ve deliberately chosen to restrict the feed to post titles plus a fifteen-word excerpt. I know there are lots of good reasons why readers prefer full-content feeds, but unfortunately that won’t work for an adult blog. The reason is, there are some bogus porn blogs out there that have zero original content. What they do is subscribe to some RSS feeds and slap posts from other adult blogs on a page that’s absolutely buried in aggressive advertising, complete with popup hells and autodownloads and such. In effect, they use our text to lure in search engine visitors, and then abuse them mercilessly. By limiting my feed, I can limit the effectiveness of that tactic.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled erotic programming.
Thursday, January 13th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
OK, since we are still in a compare-and-contrast mode from the last post, can anyone explain to me why it’s art when this woman “dances and acts” while 22 bottles of olive oil are poured over her naked body on a public stage, but it’s porn when these young ladies get into an inflatable swimming pool and pour a similar quantity of canola oil over each other?
Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Do you like toe porn? If so, you’ll love Celebrity Feet — the blog in which “the bored pothead” is carefully accumulating the best pictures he can find of bare-footed celebrities. These are the piggies of Julia Roberts:
Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Almost thirty years ago, equality of the sexes had a different flavor than it does today. Somehow this doesn’t seem like the sort of think my mother’s Ms. magazines would have gotten, er, behind. From the January 7, 1976 Newcastle/Tyne Evening Chronical:
School Girls Get Equal Chance To Be Caned
The schoolgirls really felt liberated when the headmaster asked the boys to leave the assembly hall. The teenagers listened proudly as the he told them that from now on they would be treated exactly the same as the boys. But the girls of Heaton School, Newcastle, were stunned when he added: “And that means you will also get the cane!”
The girls have never been caned before and today there was growing apprehension behind the scenes. A 16-year-old girl said: “We nearly died when the headmaster said that we will now get the cane. I know it’s women’s lib year but we think this is taking it too far.”
…
Headmaster Mr. Henry Askew was adamant that what’s good for the boys is good for the girls. He said at the school today: “We simply told the girls that from now on they will be punished the same as the boys.” He said that the decision had been taken as the result of pressure from the school’s women teaching staff who had had enough of the behaviour of some girls.
…
It is understood that girls will be caned if they are put in detention twice in a week.
Thanks to reader Randi for passing along the Caned Girls porn site link where she found this, and to Google for confirming, at least, that Caned Girls didn’t fabricate the newspaper story from whole cloth as a work of salacious fiction.
Monday, November 29th, 2004 -- by Aphrodite
Home again, tired but happy. Definitely worth putting up with the “when are you going to settle down and get married?” and other nosy questions the relatives toss out, to have an unexpectedly sex-filled weekend with a highschool flame. :D
I’m still digging through email, but found an interesting one from a friend (who doesn’t know I contribute to this blog, making his question even more amusing). He’s wondering about shaving himself. He’s noticed that alot of the porn pix have bare or nearly-bare girls, and that some of the guys shave their balls. So, he’s thinking of doing it to himself (or maybe asking his wife to help), and wondering if he does, how far should he go? Just the testicles, or off with all the pubes? What about maintenance? Does it make oral sex more interesting or fun, as Vikki at Her Desires says it does for the girls? Would it be better for both partners?
I just don’t know about all this shaving stuff. I’m seriously squicked at the idea of bringing something so sharp so close to such sensitive places. When I had the money to spend on such things, I was a wax girl. But the woman who did it never would take off as much as I’d request on my labia, I guess because she thought it would hurt. And I liked the way it looked, and felt, just fine anyway. So I’m asking y’all to pipe up with your experiences if you want to, and I’ll point my friend this way. It’ll be a nice surprise for him in lots of ways. :laugh:
And, just because it’s nice to feature a change of pace from the nearly-bare girlies, here’s a totally hot photo of Hiromi from Brett and Hiromi’s blog at Indecent Blogging:
[photographed removed at request of the subject]
Sunday, November 7th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
From Diary of a Porn Publisher:
I have to spend a few hours each day reviewing the new adult websites submitted to the adult search engine I bought last July to see if I will accept the sites or not. Today, I ran across a description for a site that gave me pause. “The girl in black stockings receives pleasure and satisfaction from tickler inside a clitoris.” Is it possible that there could be adult webmasters out there who lack a basic understanding of female anatomy? It doesn’t seem credible.
I should think that would hurt….
Monday, September 20th, 2004 -- by Aphrodite
I imagine this is all over the pornblogosphere already, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t wish Belle de Jour a fond farewell, give her ass a firm caress, and wish her all the best. Her final entry closes with words of wisdom for us all:
… don’t ever turn down pleasure because you were afraid of what other people might say.
Thursday, September 16th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Speaking of human-looking facial expressions, Comstock Films (the folks who made Marie & Jack) are casting for another production:
Comstock Films seeks real people in real relationships for sexually explicit documentary style films.
Comstock Films is launching a new project to produce a full-length film. We are looking for real-life lovers of all sexual persuasions who want to share their unique erotic nature with the world. This feature will be pansexual in nature, and we are especially interested in people and erotic practices not usually seen in mainstream porn. People of all ages, genders and transgenders, races, body-types and sexual interests are encouraged to apply!
Sunday, September 12th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s one of those silly stories that makes you marvel at human diversity:
Man burns porn magazines in midair
A Brit became so offended by the pornography magazines he had purchased that he tried to burn them to ashes on board a Braathens flight from Bergen to London.
David Mason told the court Tuesday that he lit several pages from his porn magazines on fire because he was offended by them.
…
According to Prosecutor Roger Booth, Mason first asked one of the stewardesses on board if he could burn some papers in the oven in the plane�s kitchen, a request that was turned down.
Shortly there after, two passengers reported that they smelt smoke in the cabin. Staff managed to locate the fire and extinguished it with water.
According to Booth, Mason became so offended by some of the pictures in one of the porn magazines he had with him on the plane that he had an immediate need to destroy them at that very moment.
Unfortunately, the journalist did not see fit to share with us the nature of the offending imagery.
Thanks to NSFW News for the link. (Have I mentioned lately how much I despise the “NSFW” meme?)
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 -- by Bacchus
From an anonymous poster on Craig’s List comes a rant styled as “TOP TEN REASONS WHY YOU CAN’T GET LAID (OR, NO NOOKIE FOR YOU, ASSHOLE!)”. The harridan author is full of vitriol in the following style:
YOU JUST DON’T GET IT. You haven’t a clue. You don’t understand women and don’t even want to try. You’d rather be bitter, misogynistic, lazy, sloppy, smelly, frustrated, selfish, mean, vain, crazy or just plain stupid than make an honest-to-God, real-live attempt to connect with the opposite sex. Enjoy your porn movies because that’s the only naked woman you are ever going to see.
And that’s only one of the top ten reasons. The author claims she has “a great social life with smart, confident, funny, and sexy men.” Picture me smiting my forehead with my palm and saying “What are they thinking?”
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 -- by Bacchus
This comes from a mostly-bogus news story about the alleged outrage generated by frolicking fruits on a candy wrapper. You can go to Boing Boing if you need the journalistic details all straight, but you can enjoy the image right here:
When all is said and done, though, I have to admit that the Fleshbot candy is better.
Sunday, August 15th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
From Diary of A Porn Publisher, this made me laugh:
In the past, I have always eaten barbecued spareribs from the smooth belly of a naked slavegirl, using her thighs and breasts to wipe my messy hands. Tonight, for the first time, I ordered spareribs in a restaurant. I normally avoid eating any kind of finger foods in public because, well, I guess I’m too civilized. The ribs were delicious, though, and I gave them my full attention. When I finally did glance up from my plate, people were staring at me. I noted then that my hands were completely covered in barbecue sauce and gobbets of fat, encroaching up my wrists. I had to make do with napkins.
Wednesday, July 28th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
The government porn trend continues. Now, according to the Toronto Sun, Canada is getting into the act, demanding the submission of naked pictures as part of immigration applications. It’s not quite as crazy as that summary makes it sound, but still:
Foreign strippers must supply nude photos to officials
TORONTO – Immigration officers are having to pore through naked pictures of hundreds of exotic dancers to keep imposters out of Canada, the Toronto Sun reported Tuesday.
Foreign strippers planning to table dance in clubs must now provide photos of themselves with no clothes on to qualify for a visa for Canada, said immigration officials.
“Stage photos during performances are required,” said Sergio Mercado, of the Canadian Embassy in Mexico.
…
The potential dancers have to prove they can dance in the nude, immigration lawyer Mendel Green said Monday.
“They can’t be partially nude,” he said. “If they don’t have pictures in the nude, they are not going to wiggle their bottoms in Canada.”
My question is, does Canada have a public information law similar to the Freedom Of Information Act? And if so, are these immigration applications public documents available to the public? Just think, free dirty pictures from the government, for the cost of a stamp!
Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.
Sunday, July 25th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
No man can resist a woman who likes her food this much. It’s such a refreshing change from the “I’ll have the odor-of-lettuce salad” girls:
The dessert menu announced donut holes, and we had ordered them before I could even consider how full I was. They came in a basket, wrapped in a piece of cloth, still warm, made of the lightest dough, with the crispiest exterior coated in the best cinnamon sugar ever. A bowl of strained strawberry sauce was put out to dip them. When I broke one open, I found inside a piece of melted bittersweet chocolate. Melted. Bittersweet. Chocolate.
“I’m going to stick my tongue in it.”
“No,” he taunted me.
“Oh, I will you don’t believe me?”
And I did. And the gooey warm chocolate ran all over my mouth. The warm dough clung to my tongue. The strawberry sauce made me roll my eyes back. I was somewhere else.
When I came to, he was staring at me as if I were a specimen of unquantifiable mystery.
“You think I’m weird, don’t you!”
He smiled.
I flushed with angst, “You think I’m crazy! You think I’m cuckoo. You can’t believe I just jammed my tongue inside a donut hole in a restaurant. You ordered a girlfriend of the non-whackaloon variety and you got stuck with me. You want to trade me in for a sane model. You ”
“I think you’re adorable.”
And so I stuck my tongue back in it again.
From Smitten.
Wednesday, July 21st, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I missed the fun when Fleshbot launched a counterattack in the War On Pornography. But with that link, I’m doing my best to make up for lost time.
Sunday, July 4th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a porn site that seems to do a better than usual job of showing sex that looks like real sex, with smiles and attractive-but-not-plastic bodies and backgrounds that aren’t obviously porn sets. I quite enjoyed this bit of backyard nookie, courtesy of Real Fucking Couples:
This is a scenario any humble citizen can place himself into. Just hangin’ with the wife in the backyard on a sunny day, when she smiles over real nice. One thing leads to another…
And so forth. A bit more honest than the over-produced stuff, and a lot hotter!
Note: Real Fucking Couples is defunct and no longer exists, but it was an early effort to go mainstream by the company that became Kink.com.
Thursday, July 1st, 2004 -- by Bacchus
There’s a certain irony to this, given the way Fox commentators tend to froth away about porn. Notice the balls and cock entering a pussy there in the middle of the screen, under the text that says “slut chat”?
But what’s really funny is, the producers blurred out her left nipple.
Friday, June 25th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Although uncut penises are just about as rare as real breasts in American porn, you have clamored and I have found one — by going overseas, of course. Coincidentally, several of you have reminded me of the National Penis Day recently celebrated in New Zealand. Naked Protesters has the pictures:
That’s a fellow named Alex Behan.
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004 -- by Bacchus
If you look at very much internet porn, you cannot possibly have avoided stumbling across an electro-sex site like Wired Pussy. If you ever wondered what e-stim was all about, Dan Savage explains it all. Since it’s Dan, dicks are involved. However, I am reliably informed they don’t have to be. For the ladies, electrically charged huge gleaming steel dildos are not unheard of:
Thanks to Matisse for the link.
Friday, June 18th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Have you ever seen a more shameless attempt to trawl for search engine hits?
So sue me.
I had missed it, but apparently dirty old men everywhere are now celebrating the fact that the Olsen twins are finally legal. Fleshbot has the story covered. And how! They’ve even come up with fake morphed Olsen twins porn.
Sorry, no penises in this post. Patience, my sweets, the day is young.
Wednesday, June 16th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I once visited Russia during the late Soviet period, at a time when cheesy propaganda posters were still the second-most prevalent form of public art (after statues of Lenin, of course.) At that time, the Five Year Plan was still an official priority, which means that posters saying “You Need To Fulfill The Plan” could be seen on every wall.
The Communists may be gone, but the bureaucratic Russian soul endures. Evidence? How about this story (sent in by a friend) from the Moscow Times, regarding the publication of the Russian edition of Playgirl? The article devotes most of its ink to a concern about whether Russian women will approve of circumcised American penises. Anyway, down near the end, we get this gem:
Chermenskaya and the publication’s founders, whom she refused to identify, studied Russia’s confusing pornography laws before registering Playgirl as an erotic entertainment magazine. As erotica, Playgirl cannot publish photographs depicting sexual intercourse and has a quota for the number of large pictures of penises in each issue: six, Chermenskaya said.
A penis quota! Only in Russia.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Wednesday, May 26th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a huge open directory of porn featuring all your favorite cartoon characters. I’m not going to name any names because (1) I don’t want searching kids to come to this page by mistake and (2) I don’t want aggrieved owners of the characters in question to send feral lawyers to hound me into an early grave. But imagine everyone’s favorite friendly ghost teaching a little witch in a red cape what his trailing tendril of protoplasm is good for. Or, say, that notorious spinach-eating sailor taking advantage of a certain young mermaid when she appears on his hook.
Sick, evil, mostly harmless fun. Check it out fast before it goes the way of all open directories.
Thursday, May 13th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been tempted. Yes I have. I can’t deny it. When the government gets into the porn business, and makes a product that looks like surprisingly high-quality femdom and/or gay porn, it’s tough for a sex blogger to avoid comment. But I’ve been holding back.
I’ve written before about the reasons why “sexual atrocities are featured much less often on this blog than they might be.” Matisse makes the point much more succinctly. She has a wise policy: “I don’t eroticise non-consensual violence.” And this blog is, for the most part, supposed to be erotic.
Troll my archives, you might find a few places where I arguably have eroticised sexual atrocities. What can I say? Mistakes were made. I take full responsibility.
Whuh? No, I don’t think so. Of course nobody is going to lose their job over this. Are you nuts? Resign? Why bother, I already took responsibility, didn’t you hear me?
Saturday, May 8th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I suppose it comes as no surprise to anyone that Old Nick is sexually depraved, although I doubt the young upstart could hold a candle to good old Zeus back when He (Zeus) was in one of his heifer-raping moods. And I’m aware that artistic depictions of devils and demons cavorting in obscene fashion became something of a pornographic tradition way back in the day when anything else so graphic could get an artist in a lot of trouble. But it was still something a shock to come across this detail from a scene by Fredillo, circa 1880:
Via Demon Bondage.
Friday, April 23rd, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a quick digital snapshot of a portion of a Scotch whiskey ad from Forbes Magazine. Ignore the damned deer for a second. What’s your first impression? Pot stills? Or a vigorous butt-fucking?
There’s no way you can convince me the photographer didn’t frame this shot with lust in his heart.
Monday, April 19th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
If you look at very much porn, you’ll know there’s a sort of extreme genre out there these days that involves a lot of over-the-top aggression and degrading grossness, including in various mixes things like face-slapping, spitting, shoving girls’ heads in toilets while shoving other stuff up their orifices, and so forth. It’s mostly not for me. So I was entertained when Eden wrote:
I’ve been forced to gag by having a cock pushed down my throat during rough sex and BDSM scenes. It was unpleasant, but that was part of the mood of the moment, and as such it was incredibly exciting. But a whole site (and there are several now) devoted to fucking a woman’s mouth so hard and deep that she vomits around the cock… and he keeps going? I certainly won’t say it should be banned — to each his own — but I’d pay to see those women allowed to force cucumbers down the throats of the men who had just been using them.
So would I. “Max Hardcore Vegetable Revenge” anyone?
Friday, April 16th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
There’s a new book out based on an undercover penetration (er, accidental word choice but I’m leaving it) of modern sorority life. And no, there isn’t an account of naked twister in there; I made that up. But the book does contain reports that the rampant sorority lesbianism (or, if you want to step back from the rough characterizations of male pornography and refer more to practices than orientations, we could call it “hot naked sorority girl-on-girl foolin’ around”) that features so largely in the lustful male imagination is, to an extent, real:
I really hadn’t expected to find the level of “Animal House” campiness that I did in some groups. They had a tradition called boob ranking where pledges had just a limited amount of time to strip off their shirt and bras to examine each other topless so that by the time the clock was up, they were basically lined up in order of chest size in order of the sisters to inspect. Some sororities hold what they call “naked parties,” during which after a few drinks sisters and pledges strip off their clothes and basically run around the house naked, some of them hooking up with each other before they let the boys in.
I must therefore deeply apologize for ever believing that the hard-working photographers who produce the LightSpeed Sorority site were doing anything but the most serious documentary work.
Thursday, April 15th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Real smart and conspiratorial guy Eugene Volokh comments on likely outcomes of the coming war on porn.
Wednesday, April 14th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s an interesting article in which a single mom talks about balancing her family life with her profession (pornographer). It caught my attention because, in response to the usual “How would you feel about your work if your daughter became a pornstar” hand-wringing, she writes:
My response is that in my house, there’s no such thing as a slut. I did not raise my daughter to believe such outdated claptrap. If an adult woman wants to make a living shoving bananas up her ass, then that’s her choice and her right. If my kid decides to become a porn star and she’s happy with that choice then who am I to complain? I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years that weren’t porn yet still made me feel exploited and dirty.
Right on.
Thanks to Dubberly for the link.
Monday, April 12th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Ok, now listen up, all you furries with a submissive chicken fetish: Burger King wants you to have it your way. Not news? No, really, it is.
Here’s the deal. There’s a flash website where a man (well, perhaps a man) in a rooster suit will do pretty much whatever you tell him. The Boing Boing crowd has a couple of posts that will help you get the most out of your slave chicken. Apparently, you can get him to do a startling variety of things.
What a strange and wondrous world we live in!
Friday, April 9th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Daze has a very succinct set of links to everything you want to know about the coming War On Porn.
I guess I’d better go buy some ammo.
Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I couldn’t make that up. The news story:
Monday, March 29, 2004
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
State police have charged a 15-year-old Latrobe girl with child pornography for taking photos of herself and posting them on the Internet.
Police said the girl, whose identity they withheld, photographed herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She then sent the photos to people she met in chat rooms.
A police report did not say how police learned about the girl. They found dozens of pictures of her on her computer.
She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.
Yup, she was charged with abusing herself by taking self-portraits.
Tuesday, March 30th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I’m quoting this appeal for the light it sheds on international variations in pornography. Sending pornography, if you bother, is up to you. Me, I think I would insist on trading for some of that perverted Frenchie stuff, if I still bothered with dead tree porn:
“I don’t know if any of you are aware of this, but I’m in a real mess. As some of you may know, I happen to be in France. And in France, it’s really hard to get a decent porno magazine, that doesn’t cost 20 bucks and doesn’t have horses and shit in it (French people are perverts!!)
This is what I humbly ask, and whether you agree with it or not, please just try to pass the word around:
I’d really like it if somebody would mail me a Playboy. A Hustler even, or one of those mini-magazines that don’t cost as much to mail….”
Thanks to Harvey at Bad Money (that infamous den of rum, buggery, the lash, and pirate pickup lines) for calling this poor expatriate’s plight to my attention.
Sunday, March 28th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Carly at Pornblography quotes Earnest Greene:
Thirteen is the new eighteen, and has been for a decade. By 18, most young adults are already sexually active and have been for some time. Better nutrition and pediatric medicine have been steadily lowering the age of first menstruation among American girls to the current record-breaking average of age 11. It’s just preposterous to expect young people to remain sexually inactive for SEVEN YEARS after the onset of puberty.
Preposterous indeed, as I noted some time ago in a discussion about the merits of porn.
Thursday, March 25th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Lately Fleshbot has been all over (if you will pardon the expression) the fake celebrity facial photos genre. First they linked to Project Barkley, and now they’ve found another resource (which alas seems to be staggering under the load just now).
Although semen on a woman’s face is not really my thing, I’m enough of a fun-minded pervert to understand the appeal of the fake celebrity angle. After all, doesn’t Willow seem more approachable when you see her with “your” own cum dribbling from her lips? And who wouldn’t enjoy those gorgeous eyes and that smile under similar circumstances? A man would have to be dead.
I do have to wonder, though, how the celebrities in question feel about it. Yeah, I know, they are well paid and richly compensated in other ways by the popularity which nominates them for this particular indignity, but these are still real human beings with husbands and boyfriends and maiden aunties and little brothers and other such folk in their lives who might find this sort of imagery disturbing.
I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, but we now live in a world where your face and mine and Britney’s are all equally fair game — raw material for whatever digital mix might amuse a fickle public. Already you know that high school boys are circulating “photos” like this in the locker room, starring the homecoming queen and the entire cheerleading squad kneeling in a sticky row. How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?
Sunday, February 29th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
This is pure porn, but it’s new and different: Aquafan: Underwater Sex. Pictures are pure sex, but arty too:
Blub blub!
Thursday, February 26th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a little bit of tasty toe porn:
Ticklish feet, whipped cream, and an active tongue, what could be sweeter than that?
Friday, February 20th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Over at Diary of a Porn Publisher, I found this account of a clever attempt to evade the laws against prostitution:
“So, I’m walking down the sidewalk and a woman asks me if I want her to tell my fortune. When I pause, she tells me that she can tell my fortune from the taste of my cum, for $50. I ask, “just how does that work?” It turns out that she’ll give me a blow job and after I cum in her mouth, she can tell my future. It wasn’t a good time to dally to have my fortune told, but I’ve been thinking about this. Is it fortune-telling then, instead of prostitution? If it’s not illegal, maybe I should try to put together a stable of psychic cock-suckers for a new business venture.”
That could almost work.
Monday, February 9th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a funny picture in the best tradition of found pornography. Doggy style tree sex at its best! (Or should that be “puppy style”? Somebody recently called it that in my comments, and there’s a case to be made for the proposition that it sounds even more fun when you put it that way.)
Thursday, February 5th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
OK. This link gets a disclaimer, because it’s way more explicit than I’m in the habit of posting. I mean, like, WAY more. But it’s so unusual, I cannot resist. Proceed at your own risk.
What we got here is a gallery of very close-up shots of a… what’s the non-judgmental word I’m searching for? Ah. Capacious. Yes, this link [now broken and gone, sorry] ought to lead you to pictures of a wide open and very (VERY!) capacious pussy.
Let’s see if those FleshBot weenies have the cojones to pick up this link! (Just kidding, Jonno!)
Gentle reminder to commenters: Be nice. Or keep it to yourself.
Sunday, January 25th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a little hands-on (well, mouse-on) fun: Touch Me.
Update: The link was emailed by a friend, but Jonno from Fleshbot wrote to point out that there are lots more spiffy/sexy animations on the site. Numbers 4 and 5: Yummy!
Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here’s one of those wonderful pornographic wallet photos from the old black-and-white days:
There’s nothing new under the sun!
Via alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. vintage on Usenet. See also Vintage Lust.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Friday, January 9th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
So many ways to look at this. So many possible explanations, all coyly withheld by the website. But oh-so-undeniably cool, this pink tank:
And I like it a lot better than the last piece of artillery porn that got mentioned here.
Wednesday, January 7th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
When I first got an email from D about his new “Cock Under Lock” BlogSpot blog, my first thought was “eh, that’s about 180 degrees backwards for a sex blog, isn’t it?” But as it happens, the device appears to come off fairly frequently. Apparently D’s lady merely got tired of sharing him with his extensive porno collection. Except on her terms:
I was making a joke referencing a porno I owned, and that E found somewhat repulsive, called “Ass Cream Pies“. At one point describing the kind of cum eating some of the girls do in that movie (read the description if you want to know) . E was so abhorred by this, she said, “that’s it! I’m tying you up and making you drink a shotglass of your own cum. So you can know what it’s like”. I was both turned on by this but also knew that I would not want to drink it after I came. But I was mostly turned on, and looking forward to getting some sort of release.
True to her word, when we got home I was promptly tied down again. She then decided as part of my punishment I would have to watch the Porno in question whilst I was imobilized. This went on for about 45 minutes. I was excited but unable to do anything to further my enjoyment. While this was going on E just sat on the computer doing online shopping and emailing. Eventually she proceeded to unlock the chastity device. I was already semi-hard, but once freed, became almost instantly erect. She started teasing me with light strokes, making me increasingly more rigid. I was as swelled up as I’ve ever seen myself. If that wasn’t enough she inserted the “Tristan” butt plug into my ass. She left the room for a moment and returned with a glass….
Wednesday, December 31st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
There’s been some nice feedback at FleshBot on my Unlimited Free Porn article. Glad I could help!
Saturday, December 27th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
You might think that for a guy running a sex blog, I’m oddly reluctant to link to actual porn sites. Of course, there is a reason for this; too many porn sites treat surfers badly. Popups, hostile downloads, link skimming, and blind/misleading links abound. It’s a jungle out there.
But: Isn’t it my job to guide you, my readers, to the few places in the jungle that are actually worth visiting?
As it turns out, there are sites on the internet that specialize is linking to huge piles of free porn. Called “TGPs” or Thumbnail Gallery Posts, these sites consist of link lists to advertising pages for pay sites. The pay sites themselves may suck, and often do, but the advertising pages (called galleries) usually have an enticing collection of free photographs or movies.
Now, most TGPs treat surfers like dirt. The worst offense is link skimming; these TGPs will list an enticing collection of galleries, but when you click the link, a script grabs you and dumps you on some other page entirely (usually another TGP, sometimes somewhere in pop-up-hell land). Links which lie about their destination are another common problem. Popups are also common, as is deliberately-bad page design so that you’ll click on the ads because you can’t find the content.
Fortunately, there are exceptions. The Hun’s Yellow Pages is the most, and most justly, famous: it’s a huge daily list of descriptive text links to free porn pages. The Hun has been at this since the internet was a puppy, and his page is as clean as a whistle. And there are others. I look for TGPs with frequent updates, an honest text link or thumbnail picture that shows you what you are getting, lack of popups on the TGP page, and, of course, a good selection of links to free porn. But most of all, I look for TGPs which respect their visitors and are surfer friendly.
Having found a few such over the years, I’ve decided to list half a dozen over in the blogroll bar under the heading “Piles of Free Porn”. The list may grow, and it will likely change from time to time. Enjoy!
Friday, December 26th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
And now, back to business. The anonymous link contribution of the day: Tentacle Yaoi. And what is yaoi, you may ask? Indeed, you may:
What is yaoi? Yaoi is a woman’s genre of manga (comic books) and short stories, produced by female artists and writers for the enjoyment of female readers. It’s a fantasy form which focuses on the romantic, emotional and above all sexual relationships of guys together.
Huh? That’s right. M/M. Men in Love. Homosexuality, homoeroticism, platonic love. Whatever you want to call it. Two Guys.
So it’s gay porn for women? Nope. It’s a female fantasy of what’s sexually attractive, not a gay male one. Yaoi embodies the (surprisingly common) female notion that m/m relationships are the stuff of high romance and beauty and true love and angst and impossibly wonderful sex five times an hour. Not surprisingly, yaoi gives real gay men the giggles.
For a start, the first requirement is that all the men be better-looking than any real man can possibly be, like the heroes of Japanese cartoon series (anime). The relationships are given a highly romantic slant that appeals to a lot of women, but rarely to men. Yaoi emphasizes the emotional side of things as much as the physical, and the stories happen in a very unrealistic version of the real world. Yaoi men tend to have impossible anatomy and very unlikely psychology. Silver hair, purple eyes, and a tendency to self-mutilation as an expression of love are not uncommon.
I learn something new every day. Who knew this sex blogging business would turn out to be such a tremendous broadener of the mind?
Monday, December 22nd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Is your Christmas season shaping up to be merry and, er, gay? If so, you won’t want to miss this Christmas greeting from BJ’s Gay Porno Crazed Ramblings.
Wednesday, December 17th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Women who don’t like typical crappy porn being quite common, ErosBlog has from time to time recommended atypical, non-crappy porn as being of potential interest to such women and to the men who want to watch porn with them. Don Lobo Tiggre reviews Candida Royalle’s “Stud Hunters” in the latest issue of Doing Freedom!, and recommends it as just such a movie.
The review is also noteworthy for the following observation, which might have been cribbed from the ErosBlog Credo, if there but were one:
“I also think the world would be a healthier, happier place if more people could relax about sex, if more people could remember (or learn) that sex is good, clean, healthy fun.”
Just so.
Tuesday, December 16th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Because their link sleuths work while I sleep. How could I have missed elf porn (dead link removed)? Missing the hardcore Japanese gay bondage art is perhaps a little more understandable.
Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Rask the Porn Publisher isn’t living quite the wild life we expect from people in the sex industry. Instead, he works. Plus he has a very dry sense of humor (I hope it’s humor). On Pearl Harbor day:
My ex-wife called today to see if I was coming to my daughters’ birthday party. I didn’t go. I worked. I selected pictures for nine more websites and wrote the copy for them. I did take time off long enough to fuck the slave. As usual, she walked around afterwards, saying “I got fucked today.” Wondering whether such a response is really warranted, I did a search on this blog to see when she got laid last. I guess she may have just cause to think of it as something special.
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
I want to share an interesting set of comments I found over at Steve Gilliard’s News Blog. I’ve commented before on how most of the sex blogs I link to are written by women, and how male voices in the sex blog community are so vanishingly rare. When you do find ’em, they are guys like me ‘n Daze who talk about other people almost exclusively. Or we just link to porn pretty pictures. Now, why is that, exactly?
Steve says:
There’s a new spate of sexually oriented blogs. Some are fascinating, some droll, but they are mostly an outgrowth of women expressing themselves online. Not exclusively, but enough to make it an outgrowth of more political and social expressions of opinion.
But what a lot of feminists and their fellow travelers do not understand is this: it is incumbent upon men to be discrete.
The social code of men doesn’t encourage the sharing of sexual secrets with other men, forget women. Which is why Clinton lied, which is why my toes curl when I’m asked about women I’ve dated. One of the big tenets of an adult masculinity is not bragging. You don’t have to do much to let your friends know you’re sexually active. And that’s all that is required.
He also says:
[M]en are judged when they talk about sex. Yes, men tell sex stories, but they leave out the details. Sure, they’ll tell you what happened, but they leave out the details. Most men do not want to know what other men do in bed. Men do not usually hunt down old boyfriends to get details of what they did before. And, no, most do not want to be friends with the guys you’ve slept with. In fact, they like to ignore them. They won’t think they’re good guys or any such nonsense. It’s physics: two bodies cannot share the same space.
Men withhold details to prevent being judged by their peers. Guys do not say “yeah Bob, I really like sucking her toes and brushing her hair after sex.” That’s not anything a guy wants to know about another guy, ever.
Most of which strikes me as pretty much right on the money. There’s a class of guys who tell graphic lies in the locker room, but real men mostly ignore and avoid that, as the crass adolescent posturing it generally is.
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Aleksander at Naked Loft Party thinks there’s a more prosaic reason for the lack of male sex blogs:
I agree it is rather hard to find male sex blogs that don’t revolve around pornography, commentary, sexual frustration, or sucking up to women for the sake of getting dates. We men are poorly represented. But I think the explanation is more prosaic than Bacchus and Gillard realize. Women are socialized to take an interest in discussing sex and relationships, in the same way men are socialized to take an interest in sports or politics. Women are more likely to keep journals in the first place. They are more likely to be involved in sex work. They have no other outlet, seeing as female promiscuity is still viewed as aberrant. And finally there’s that ingrained notion that male sexuality is primitive, one-dimensional, not worthy of exploration; that men who talk about sex are pigs, which is only reinforced by attitudes such as Gillard’s.
He’s also got some interesting things to say about the pressures men face not to talk about sex. Thanks, Aleksander!
Thursday, November 27th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Shell is reprising her food porn turkey day utterances. Don’t miss her Things To Say At Thanksgiving:
Tying the legs together will keep the insides moist.
It’s a little dry, do you still want to eat it?
Just spread the legs and stuff it in!
You still have a little bit on your chin.
And so forth. It’s makin’ me hungry and I haven’t even had my morning coffee!
Monday, November 10th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
From all the buzz about Fleshbot lately, one would think it was a revolutionary new thing. They describe themselves as “a frequently updated web magazine” that “showcases all the porn that digital technology and distribution has made possible.”
In fact, it appears to be a sort of stylish cross between the ancient and venerable linksite and an illustrated sex blog like this one – except, of course, that unlike ErosBlog, Fleshbot was clearly put together by someone who knows how to design websites (as opposed to sticking them together with cargo cult HTML, voodoo CSS, stale bubblegum, and cussing, the way ErosBlog was built). With Fleshbot’s high volume of quality links (15 so far today – obviously this is a business venture and no mere hobby), keen eye for quality porn, and intelligent text descriptions, the site’s bound to be a smashing runaway success. Good work, please keep it up!
Wednesday, November 5th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
I have been ignoring the Naomi Wolf antiporn article as utter nonsense. No need to rail against it for this crowd.
But I simply must link to Eric Raymond’s cogent comments — they are too blunt and too true to ignore. I’ve excerpted heavily, you need to read the whole thing:
You show me a young woman who makes herself sexually available but has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and I’ll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.
…
Show me a young woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn for a man’s attention and I’ll show you one of two things. Either (a), she’s having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn’t notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she’s not having sex with that man.
There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in Ms. Wolf’s informants’ reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don’t deliver.
…
Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is “no”, then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill.
On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this.
This is pretty basic stuff. Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
The site where I found this picture of nude young lovelies playing twister has already gone to the great happy bandwidth hunting ground in the sky. However, by a strange twist of internet serendipity, I’ve discovered the cheerleader porn gallery the pictures came from. And by gosh if it doesn’t turn out that naked twister is hard work! Here the poor girls are shown all tuckered out and resting:
Resting up, as it happens, before getting into the hot tub.
Thanks to LightSpeed Sorority for the photos and galleries.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Friday, October 31st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Well, folks, it’s Protection From Pornography Week. I think Protection From Pleasure Week is scheduled for February, and Protection From Freedom Week starts shortly thereafter. That one’s gonna be a long week.
Anyway, I’m doing my bit by linking to this picture of two ladies at their bath. At least one of them, I can assure you, is very clean. And pink enough to make Larry Flynt proud.
Thursday, October 30th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Would you believe it? An annual smurf orgy. Because after all, Smurfette is the only female smurf in the smurf village. It goes like this:
Cradling his head to her crotch, Smurfette’s hips begin to slowly grind and twitch, for Papa Smurf’s tongue has unerringly found her S-spot, and Smurfette begins the slow, hot, agonizing rise to ecstasy.
“Oh, make me smurf, baby, make me smurf!” she pants, each stroke of his tongue causing her to throb and clutch.
As Smurfette’s moans and cries rise in pitch higher and higher, the crowd gazes in amazement at the mighty mound of meat struggling to escape from Papa Smurf’s pants. This, then, is the legendary Trouser Titan….
Hey, I didn’t say it was a well written smurf orgy.
Update: I am informed that Smurfs have become a valuable industrial input.
Tuesday, October 14th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Carly at Pornblography knows the most interesting people! Recently she asked her readers:
MILFs.
I don’t get it.
What’s the big deal?
Which generated the most amazing response in Carly’s comments from the infamous Skeeter Kerkove. This is like the “Greed is Good” speech Gordon Gecko delivered in “Wall Street”. This is worth reading:
MILF!!! Why? Mothers I’d Like to Fuck is the number one money maker on the web currently!
The DVD’s are flying off the shelves. MILF is making more money then any other niche on the market worldwide on the web!
MILF Hunter is getting more traffic then any other sex website in the world.
MILF Hunter is averaging over 2 thousand sign ups per day at $24.95 per membership! No other site in the world is making this much money!
Alexa rankings, god bless the Alexa rankings, the lower the number, the more people are going to the site.
go to: www.alexa.com, type in the website, then you will see the traffic people are getting. This will give you an idea.
Samantha Sterlyng 271,371
Nikita Denise 182,133
Gauge 131,310
Jade Marcella 91,601
Jill Kelly 54,652
Briana Banks 36,117
Tera Patrick 34,555
Bridgette Kerkove 30,417
Penthouse 4,285
Hustler 4,016
Playboy 535
Milf Hunter 441
MILF Hunter is # 1, that is why MILF is all the rage! Money! Money! Money! Boatloads of money! The American dream! MILF Hunter has 3,269 sites that link to it.
So that is your answer, we are all in porn to make money! We love money! MILF Hunter is processing over 16 million dollars per month, that is why MILF is selling, now everybody gets it! Money, lots of money!
If Carley or Quasar would have started MILF Hunter 12 months ago, they would be worth net over 40 million dollars. They could buy a 4000 square foot home in Malibu inside the colony for 13 million cash. Invest the other 27 million in commercial property, pay for it outright, collect the leases which would be 89% profit and take home at least 487 thousand dollars per month.
Sometimes we do not understand other peoples art, freedom, sweet liberty, however we quickly learn there is a sea of money out there for YOU to have, it is yours for the taking. You just have to figure out how to get it, MILF was one of the many ways. Will a person get rich shooting regular porn these days? Not if you are just starting out.
There has always been hundreds and thousands of men and young men, fantasizing about fucking somebody’s mother, somebody was smart enough to make millions off of it.
I have already shot 2 MILF style movies that are in the can, I will be shooting more also. Love is in the air, God Bless the United States! It is so easy to make lots of money in the U.S. without an education! Hooray for the United States! God Bless Pornography, sodomy, America and MILF Hunter. “Don’t tread on me”
Skeeter Kerkove
Damn if that didn’t make me want to jump up and salute the flag. No kidding.
Monday, October 13th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
It’s not at all unheard of for me to post BDSM-ish stuff on ErosBlog. However, I’m not sure I’ve ever posted any femdom (women dominating men) pictures. Why not? Well, what little fem/dom porn I’ve ever seen has had always had an extreme case of the common porn problem, namely, that the people shown in it too often aren’t smiling or appearing to have any fun. I’m a huge believer that porn in any genre is ten times as hot if the performers look like they are enjoying themselves.
Thus this rather cute drawing caught my eye, because it shows three lovely young blonde ladies having fun with a hapless but perhaps-not-unhappy young man. Two of the three ladies have pleased-looking smiles on their faces, and the lady with the whip looks more intense than mean:
There’s a slightly larger version over at the “free” (lots of affiliate links, but no pop-ups that I saw) porn site where this turned up.
Update: Reader Melissa let me know that the artist is Sardax (at sardax.com ).
Sunday, October 12th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Vikki has just discovered Fucking Machines — and she’s fascinated. This is a porn site that’s taken “fun with power tools” to a whole new level. (They also have a site featuring guys using the same machines – the bluntly named Butt Machine Boys.)
Vikki, where were you when I first posted pictures of some of these fucking machines? Just think, if you had been a faithful ErosBlog reader back then you would have known about them seven whole months ago!
Not that the idea is new. I’m sure this steam powered model (complete with carefully filed rivet heads for her pleasure) was a big seller in the 1903 Sears Catalog:
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, October 12th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
We at ErosBlog (that would be me, plus the woodland nymphs who are kind enough to inhabit my active fantasy life) are not above having some fun with images of dubious probability. Why, back in February I posted and got a lot of positive comment on a public bondage picture that was just too good to be true…and indeed, it wasn’t true.
Another example I’ve sometimes wondered about is a photo that’s been floating around the internet for ages. It’s usually entitled “Stumpy” and it features a naked quadruple amputee. I’ve always assumed it was a cruel Photoshop job, and felt a bit sorry for the model pictured.
It turns out I was right. This side-by-side shows the doctored photo beside the rather pedestrian porn picture that was used as source material. Presented (but not displayed unless you click) for your education, and as a reminder of the value of skepticism.
Friday, October 3rd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Because Fusilier is looking for a few of ’em. Knowing how to spell “bukkake” is a plus:
A Cargill TV ad about the quality of baby food ends with a slo-mo gray spoonful of said product splashing on Mom’s smiling face. Some really twisted mind could take that video clip and run with it. Not me, though.
I’m sure there’s a whole new porn niche in there, sort of a fusion of MILF and splosh, with aesthetics informed by bukkake. Wow. Anybody?
Friday, August 22nd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
A while back I reviewed the excellent sex documentary Marie And Jack: A Love Story from Comstock Films. My review copy was on VHS, but they’ve now released, and were kind enough to send along, a DVD version. The DVD is notable for including as an extra the entire hot lovemaking session around which the documentary was made, only this time, it’s in a “choose-your-own-camera-angle” format and is has none of that documentary talk going on. So if you liked the documentary but wished you could watch the sex as pure porn, now you can! Only it’s still the good kind of married sex, which makes it hotter than most of the porn in your collection.
I do so love getting goodies in the mail!
Saturday, August 16th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Much as I hate to link to pure porn sites, every now and then I find one that strikes my jaded eyes as being new and different. Here’s a bondage site with a twist: At Water Bondage, the moistly restrained models are ducked, dunked, squirted, splashed, hosed down, and generally subjected to large volumes of water in addition to their strict bondage. Lots of steel cages, shackles, and what look disturbingly like electrical play toys can be seen in the promo thumbnails:
This sure looks like your one-stop for all you firehose interrogation fetishists, dunking fans, and aficionados of really damp dungeons. And the marvel of it is, outside of a few bathtub bondage pics, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it!
Similar Sex Blogging:
Saturday, August 9th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Why yes, I guess it is.
Debra Hyde just posted this essay in which she makes the point that the Culture War is back on, and sex blogs are in it whether we like it or not.
And I realized that she’s right. In fact, Debra reminded me that I had said as much the other day in email, to a gentleman who asked for a link. I had to refuse him, regretfully, because his site was all broken. Clicking any of his links took me to some sort of nasty ActiveX or JavaScript pop-up box with an “I Agree” button. There was some sort of waiver or disclaimer in eight parts, all about promising to be an adult and that I live somewhere where it’s legal to look at dirty pictures.
I didn’t click, and I didn’t link. I just won’t go there. You may have noticed that ErosBlog rarely links to a warning page, even a simple html one. If I can’t link to the content, I usually won’t link at all. But I hadn’t thought much about why. Partly it’s because warning pages are, from a technical standpoint, cruft – a useless excrescence that interferes with the natural linkage from one web resource to another.
But mostly, it’s political. When my correspondent wrote back he explained that he only wanted to protect surfers and webmasters. He mentioned that some surfers live where they could go to jail for surfing to a dirty picture. He mentioned that some people work for companies where a dirty picture on their screens can get them fired. He spoke of laws against letting minors see dirty pictures. He mentioned avoiding the possibility of his own arrest when traveling to repressive foreign lands. And last but not least, he mentioned Ashcroft and his rumored new team of crusading anti-porn prosecutors. Finally, he inquired what my proposal was for dealing with all these risks, if I didn’t like his solution.
This is an excerpt from my lengthy rant response:
It’s getting to the point where even the Saudi princes can’t forbid all access to the internet, because it’s economically essential. By keeping adult material in locked ghettos at the fringes of the web, we make their repression easier — not something I wish to encourage or cooperate with.
…
Most of the folks who share your concerns use a simple entry page, with appropriate warnings, and links deeper into their sites. This demonstrates your good faith to any prosecutor, while allowing hardcases like me to link directly to the “meat” of your site and ignore the warning page.
…
If that doesn’t seem secure enough for you, I don’t know what I can say. Each of us decides which battles are worth fighting. I’ve decided this one is worth fighting, and I take what opportunities I can to encourage other people to fight it with me. You might have good reasons why you can’t take what I see as a very small risk, and that’s your business. But when your web resources won’t load in my browser, I’m not going to link to ’em.
…
Meanwhile, I’ll carrying on linking to the folks whose sites are visible, and who are (given the nature of the sites I link to) helping me fight the culture war I’m trying to help fight.
Thanks, Debra, for reminding me of having written that.
Sunday, August 3rd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
From Pussy Ranch, this exceedingly useful item of vocabulary:
Porn Shui: noun, refers to the art of positioning oneself in one’s office or cubicle so that one can surf porn undetected. Usage: “I have great porn shui; I face the hallway and the desk behind me is vacant.”
When I “worked” an office job, I was all about the porn shui.
Saturday, August 2nd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
This paragraph from an essay over on Pornblography (the essay topic being the vital question “are the male performers in double anal penetration movies gay?”) made me laugh a lot:
Not two minutes later I had failed male porn star Dick Tracy asking me why I didn’t hire him. I told him it had nothing to do with the fact that he made gay porn and everything to do with the fact he couldn’t keep wood. I reminded him that I once watched him furiously masturbate for nearly an hour straight, sweat pouring down over his obvious hair plugs, face beet red, before emitting a girlish squeak and two drops of milk of magnesium from the head of his cock that could easily have been mistaken for spit. Oddly enough he, too, seemed deeply insulted by my observations and honesty, and openly contemplated giving me the ass whooping I so desperately crave. Ultimately he laughed, shook his head and walked away, while I proceeded to get drunk and use dumb pickup lines on women who, prior to my insinuations, used to think I was funny and clever.
Tuesday, July 29th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
The Dirty Whore has a post up about why she uses such an edgy name, along with an email address that starts “filthy cumslut”. She writes:
I want you take a small risk when you come here. I want you to think and feel when you read my blog. I want you to be provoked sometimes. I want you to disagree with me. I want you to learn something about yourself and the way you feel about sex – that’s more important than what you absorb about me.
We got a lot of guys in this country who are scared of sex. It makes them feel sick, it makes them feel dirty, it makes them feel vulnerable which in their minds is only one step away from being gay, and yes they have a problem with that. And so, in their minds, any woman who likes sex, who revels in it and has fun at it and squirts joyously at the finish, is a cunt, a slut, a whore. And they use these words, in daily conversation and with considerable venom.
In my experience nice guys, guys who love sex and love women who love sex, don’t use these words much, don’t even think them except with an ironic smile or while recreating bad porno for the fun of it. Guys who own these words, who use them as basic vocabulary with all connotations accepted, who address them to women as titles, these are bitter guys, scared guys, angry guys, unhappy guys. Guys with an axe to grind and no loving woman to grind it with. Guys who lie in the locker room.
For reasons still unclear, Dirty Whore is telling us all, by exercising her natural monopoly over her own namespace, “if you want to talk to me, or about me, you have to pretend to be one of those bitter angry scared broken guys.”
Well, OK, she’s interesting and often worth talking about. If that’s the risk premium she charges as the price for addressing her namespace, I can pay it. Them as knows me know I’m not one of those guys anyway, and I’m not a huge believer in worrying about other people’s opinions in the first place. Nor did a little role-playing ever hurt anyone.
But I worry that she might also be saying “I think every guy is one of those guys, and that’s what I want you to learn about yourself.” In which case, sorry, no, but it’s not true, the shoe doesn’t fit and I won’t wear it. And I’m very sorry if her experiences have made her come to feel that way.
Sunday, July 27th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
You’ve seen spit bubbles, right? Well, apparently the American porn industry thought that was an idea worth borrowing, with an appropriate transformation into the realm of bukkake. Another image that you must affirmatively click to view. We have our standards here at ErosBlog! (Namely, low and variable.)
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, July 20th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Here’s an image cropped from one of those old naughty postcards that were the first wave of mass market hard core visual pornography:
Her expression is ambiguous; she could be having fun or she could just be a good sport getting paid to be there. But the grin on his face is downright infectious! Porn would be three times as hot today if everybody in it could manage to look that happy.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Tuesday, July 15th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Since I’m already in trouble for posting a story about the degradation of women without including a bunch of condemnatory hand-wringing, this might be as good a time as any to share these disturbing images from a scanned Japanese video tape wrapper. When it comes to porn, the Japanese do some very strange things:
And a slight variation on the theme:
In case anybody is wondering, no, I’m not hugely turned on by the paint-ball escapade, nor with these grotesque images of a distorted female face. However, the common theme (and I shouldn’t think I’d need to say this on a sex blog, but from time to time it seems I do) is that what consenting adults do to get hot is their own damn business. ErosBlog isn’t in the business of condemning anything in that category, although there are some things you won’t see here simply because your host has a weak stomach.
Saturday, July 12th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
A while back I got a couple of emails offering to send me sex-related goodies for free, in the hope that I would mention them here. Well, that’s a deal I can get behind! Just email me me and I’ll tell you where to ship the loot.
So last night I got my first chance to sample the plunder. I watched Marie and Jack, A Love Story. This is a very nice 27 minute documentary style sex movie from Comstock Films. I’m not sure how else to describe it, but it’s very hot.
It starts with Marie and Jack, two adult film actors, having a chat about sex. They talk about the difference between “work sex” and “personal sex” and what it’s like to make movies together, and to be married to each other while doing adult movies.
As they talk, it’s clear they are deeply in love. And then the movie starts cutting to scenes of them making love. No porno music, no weird positions, just plain old missionary style sex between two reasonably attractive people who are obviously really hot for each other. This is comfortable sex, familiar sex, real sex, and it’s hotter than hell.
And what’s to say after that? She gets that soft look, huge smile, and incandescent glow about her that a woman gets when she’s having an orgasm, and that you never see in a porno flick. She comes, he comes, they laugh together and cuddle with huge grins on their faces, end of movie. Wow.
Men, I’ve got to say I think this would be an awesome movie to show your lady. It’s tasteful enough to be an art film, it’s got a real relationship in it, it’s sexy enough to get both of you aroused, and it’s short enough that you’re going to want to continue on your own after the movie finishes. I’ll bet it would go well with a tub of these, too.
Wednesday, July 9th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Whilst surfing blogrolls I found the promisingly-named blog “Pussy Ranch” engaged in the ever-popular sport of berating the wierdos who generate some of the more, um, unusual search word combos in the log files. Pussy Rancher Jon had this to say:
To our friends searching “Amish Pussy” — good fucking luck. There are NO sites out there which feature nude photos of Amish girls. Quite what’s so fascinating about some woman named Jubal-Cain splaying naked in her log cabin I don’t know, but hey — neat that it gets you off. Try branching out — maybe Baptist girls? Hell, the Mennonites are even more likely to spread ’em on the internet than the Amish, they don’t have the anti-technology thing.
Er, Jon, I hate to burst your Minneapolitan bubble, but as the lieutenant said to the emperor, that turns out not to be the case. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” To wit: not just Amish pussy, but Amish bondage porn, complete with a menacingly brandished corn-cob.
Please, no quibbling about whether these models are “really” Amish. I doubt the original searcher was unduly concerned about the spiritual purity of the Amish pussy he was seeking….
Monday, July 7th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Dirty Whore is doing one of those endurance blogging things for a good cause, and she wants sponsors. Like all good pledge drives should, she provides premiums. In this case, she’s posting excerpts from her porn collection. And quality excerpts they are! Especially noteworthy are a couple of raw pics that combine sex and bondage. This was a near absolute taboo in porn until recently, and hot bondage sex pics showing penetration are still quite rare. So go, and look, and pledge if you like so we can see more examples of what is clearly an eclectic porn collection.
Sunday, July 6th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a new-to-me porn blog with a cool name (FlufferSmut: The Porn Blog That Cares) and an even cooler manifesto:
We are human miracles. Each one of us perfectly unique.
We can pick our clothes and our hairstyle…and choose the way we look.
But we have NO control over what turns us on. That’s why porn is good. It connects us with our pure impulses.
We will consume it. So lets not make it a source of shame…lets make it a place of honesty and positivity.
(Missing apostrophes in original.) Anyway, lots of nice porn links and none of the ones I clicked on took me to pop-up hell, which is refreshingly unusual.
Sunday, June 29th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Violet Blue has a cool idea:
But still, if it weren’t for the hugenormous price tag, I’d love to roll around with both a male and female Realdoll for a weekend, even with an added real live person, and if anyone wants to sponsor me doing the deed and writing an article about this scenario (and will ship screener dolls), I’m up for the challenge. Hell, if people can get rubes to pay their ridiculous charge card debts via their web sites, and solicit donations to help them get dates or boob jobs (pop-ups, no pun), then there’s hope for my “Pervert Porn Reviewer Has Realdoll Orgy Article Fund.”
C’mon, it would be ten gees well spent. Anyone?
Saturday, May 31st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
It’s tres chic to criticize pornography; probably every literate person does at some time or another, despite the shooting-fish-in-a-rainbarrel nature of the enterprise. But few manage to do it with such elan:
I find almost all porn to be insufferable. The inflated breasts, the blond hair, the absence of the merest trace of thespian ability. But the thing that repulses me most of all, is the stupidity. I’m not talking about the inane dialogue that is written to give porn films a plausible scenario. I’m talking about the insipid direction, lighting, cinematography. The men’s gym-tits and deli-window dicks. The women’s gonfle tits, cookie-cutter measurements, greasy sheen. Their interchangable clonedness. The repetitive and unimaginative scenes in which the same buttons get pushed over and over and over and over again. It’s like a printing press that prints out the same newspaper day after day, and we’re supposed to be interested.
Thanks to Madame G.
By the way, anybody know what “gonfle tits” are? It sounds like a dessert to Bacchus….
Wednesday, May 28th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Courtesy of Porn-Stash we have [had] a gallery purporting to be the Brazilian Women’s Soccer Team. Dunno if that’s true or not, but there is one hell of a lot of deliciously callipygian beauty on display. And the shower scenes (one of which is pictured here) have enough nubile soapy goodness to power a small country, not to mention make a grown-but-dateless man weep.
Exit weeping….
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, May 18th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Dirty Whore doesn’t use the word “slut” the way the assholes in the SoCal porn business do…and that’s a good thing:
First, a hearty bravo to the gentleman who wrote the following in an e-mail to me today, “If the freedom to comport yourself in the way that makes you happy is sluthood, then Lady Liberty should always be portrayed on her back with her legs in the air.” Hear hear! And don’t even get me started on uses for that torch.
Any graphics designers out there who can make her a graphic?
Sunday, May 4th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Said to be from the north of England, your agrarian aphorism for the day is “Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.” Referring, of course, to the idea that a woman who is old enough to menstruate is old enough to have sex.
There aren’t enough fingers and toes to enumerate all the ways in which that aphorism strikes modern sensibilities as politically incorrect. But this sex blog is on record as being, at least, concerned by the fact that our society attempts to condemn sexually adult young people to years of sexless frustration. It’s worth remembering that this attempt is not universal, nor even particularly common, across a greater spectrum of human societies.
Thursday, May 1st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
This is only marginally on topic for a sex blog, but the headline was impossible to resist. And it does appear that the ridiculous and puppy-fatal rule in question may be related to AOL’s overall attempt to look family-friendly (i.e., anti-sex). If nothing else, this serves as a demonstration that failure to get on the Clue Train is fatal to puppies and other living things. From this web page (which probably won’t be there much longer):
AOL has a rule in the fine print that says that we must NOT put a web link into any email!! Yep – it’s there in the fine print. Take a look.
Well I had our website ( www.amrt.net ) on the bottom of my email and someone ratted me out – saying they found the amrt.net website “offensive” – this is the site for dogs and cats in animal shelters – not a porn site.
So AOL went in and changed my password. Oh yes they sent me an email explaining why they had changed my password. But I never got that email – because they had changed my password. And I never got the email that told me a litter of puppies needed out of the Downey shelter NOW. And thanks to AOL those puppies died that night.
Ouch.
Friday, April 25th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
First it was Halley critiquing porn spam, now Meryl Yourish is getting into the act with a creative deconstruction of a spam she got that was pushing arousal gel for the ladies:
Hooray! Uh a what?
Climatique is a specially designed gel that was created for women who wish to experience, restore or enhance the pleasure and joy of great sex.
Oh. It’s a gel. Not a guy, a gel. Wait a minute, let me think. A gel. Nope. Um, I want a guy to do those things for me. So far, no sale.
There’s lots more.
Monday, April 21st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Poor Halley. A worldly woman, there can be no doubt. But when she set out to critique the porn spam in her mailbox (a hilarious and worthy idea) she inadvertently revealed a slight…gap…in her pornographical education.
The spam:
Stacy is a starving biology student. She said the reason she would take two huge cocks inside her was because “I need the money!”
Halley proceeds to impugn both Stacy’s biological and her business sense:
And WHY is this alleged biologist-wannabe putting these two cocks in her vagina — and this makes, I’m telling you, NO SENSE — the writer tells us “I need the money!” Because she needs the money? Who, exactly, is paying for this transaction?
Let’s posit for a moment that, in fact, she is a bio major who moonlights as a common whore — a stretch of the imagination dear readers, I know, but stay with me on this. If she were propositioning guys to fuck her with huge cocks — why on earth would any reasonable man pay to compete with another customer’s huge dick for space in Stacy’s cunt? It just does not make solid economic sense. Stacy is no business major. So instead of getting two guys paying to fight over what is essentially one parking place, shouldn’t she reconsider the whole scenario and take them on one at a time?
Halley, Halley, Halley. You’re reading too much into this. “One parking place?” “Inside her”, yes, but there are ways, and there are ways.
Perhaps some visual aids are in order. Fair warning, gentle reader: like any good visual aids these links leave nothing to the imagination.
First, using the modest, time-honored, and maiden-aunt-approved device of substituting carrots for actual male members: Perhaps Stacy meant she wanted two cocks inside her not this way, but instead this way? It makes simultaneity much less implausible.
The skeptical reader will observe, with some justice, that those two carrots in the latter picture are not attached to any actual fellows, and might further observe that, were they attached to actual fellows, the angles involved would be problematic.
And perhaps that’s so. But the problems, if any, are not insurmountable. And guys have been reported to greatly enjoy this sort of sharing, which supposedly provides many of the alleged joys of bumping penises without any risk of catching homoerotic cooties from each other, thanks to the thin protective barrier of female flesh. Bacchus, however, cannot confirm that claim from any first-hand knowledge.
At this point, however, we may safely conclude that more time has been spent analyzing the porn spam in question than ever went into its authorship.
Sunday, April 20th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Saddam Hussein starred in gay porn films when he was a student. Really. Well, “really” according to Yahoo:
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been caught with his pants down – literally. A shocking 1968 porn film has surfaced, in which the flamboyant strongman appears performing raunchy homosexual acts!
The image quality of the grainy 16mm film, uncovered by the Kuwaiti secret police, is poor — but experts who’ve taken a close look at the hairy-chested actor are “100 percent certain” it is a younger, trimmer Saddam.
…
“Saddam appeared in as many as 85 of these films under a variety of stage names, most frequently Omar Studdif,” reveals the researcher.
…
In the newly uncovered 86-minute prison flick, Saddam, then just 34, plays a naive young peasant who is wrongly convicted and sent to jail. He is initiated into homosexuality by a series of older and more experienced cons.
“Saddam’s acting in the picture is actually quite good,” al-Sabah notes. “One scene, in which he buries his face in a pillow and cries, is so touching you almost can forget you’re watching a low-budget sexploitation film.”
Yahoo reports it straight with an April 10 dateline from Kuwait City, but this reads like a pure April 01 prank piece. Odds are it first appeared in a Kuwaiti paper on April Fools Day.
Saturday, April 19th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
EverQuest Porn? You betcha!
Setting the scene:
The morning in Kelethin was crisp as always. High in the treetops the temperature was much cooler than down on the forest floor. Sunshine speared it’s way into the lofty wooden structures in narrow rays and sharp angles. Bird chirps and wolf cries filled the air in a gentle cacophony.
And occasionally, a mysterious song could be heard.
It took skill to hear it; you could only listen for it among the other sounds of nature if you knew precisely what you were listening for. Visitors to the vast Faydark never gave a second thought to the melodic wailing which seemed to whisper through the trees on occasion, the quiet cry never lasting much more than a minute or two, and always blending as though it were nothing more than the call of an owl, or the howl of a wolf.
But the Elves knew the sound and when one of them listened carefully, paid very close attention, they would hear the infrequent melody. A quiet, high-pitched tune, different every time, like a long feminine sigh that varied it’s pitch just enough to distinguish itself as musical. Then they would smile knowingly and go about their business.
And then getting down to business:
“Take me ” she whispered. “I will warm you both ”
With only a few languid strokes, she felt them grow hard at her touch. She briefly wondered why Barbarians never seemed to freeze in the arctic when they nothing beneath their kilts, but the thoughts were wiped from her mind as she suddenly felt their hands upon her. Big, strong hands, grasping her bare shoulders, their huge palms and fingers nearly covering her entire upper arms. She felt herself laid on her side.
…
“AH!” she cried out. He was so huge, his cock filling her delicate elven body completely. He was as hard as wood, and glided easily within her moistness. Tremors of pleasure rippled through her body.
At the same time, she finally felt the warm, nude body of the second Barbarian pressed up behind her. Joe’s body nestled against her own, his warm chest finally covering her back, chasing away the chilling air. His thighs rested just beneath hers, warming her even more. His arm draped over her hip, holding her steady while Gregor rhythmically slid in and out of her, his thick cock stretching her nether lips tight around it. “Yes Yes ” she grunted with each of his thrusts. Behind her, she felt Joe’s finger slide further back along her bottom, gently spreading her wetness along her tender flesh, pressing gently between her buttocks, into her tender hole.
“OH . OH TUNARE!!!” she cried out as she felt Joe slide his finger gently inside her forbidden region. She felt so very filled by the both of them, and they moved in time now, in and out, in and out. Gregor’s cock from in front, Joe’s finger from behind. It felt so perfect, her body was awash with sensations, the nipping cold still stinging her skin wherever and whenever it was uncovered, the fiery warmth of the two strong Barbarians around her, the wonderful sensations coming from her filled wetness and her behind. Her body shifted with each stroke, moving in time with each of their thrusts, over and over, the pleasure inside her building, and building…
Wednesday, April 16th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
BJ isn’t a token gayblog anymore. Welcome, GayPornBlog!
Sunday, April 13th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Yup. Your eyesight is fine. Pork Rind Porn:
Enjoy!
Wednesday, April 9th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
No, really.
Tuesday, April 8th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
For a sex blog, ErosBlog is pretty inexorably heterosexual. But, um, like, that stuff that they do, that’s sex too, right? Doesn’t seem fair to just ignore it.
As a token gesture, then, here’s a link to bj’s gay porno-crazed ramblings. It’s a quality sex blog.
Tuesday, April 8th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
A spiffy online magazine sorta thing called Wrong Way Go Back has published Three Unerotic Tales. One is too scientific, one is too euphemistic, and one is just downright over the top. The scientific one reads frighteningly like what John Norman would sound like if he tried to write hard-core straight porn:
His penis slid into her vagina and she secreted more vaginal discharge. Luckily the discharge was not irritating or blood-stained, nor did it have an unpleasant odour, the cause of which is usually foreign bodies, cervical erosion or cervical polyp.
Luckily, too, she was on the pill, a type which built a wall between the cervix and fallopian tube that prevented sperm from entering her uterus and impregnating her ovum upon ejaculation.
She was simply having sex with him for the pleasure of it, having successfully passed through her oral and anal phase of psychosexual development to fully centre upon exploration of her genetalia.
There’s also a snarky article about how web logs are nothing new, nothing special, and nothing revolutionary. Which is fucking hilarious ironic coming from a website that is slavishly imitating a dead tree magazine, right down to page numbers and two-page advertising spreads for sport utility vehicles. [It’s also ironic that all the links in this post died and had to be removed.]
Friday, April 4th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
You will have noticed that ErosBlog doesn’t dwell on the war. You want warnography, there’s plenty better places to find it. But this is on topic.
A Fox News clip that’s been aired frequently over the last few days shows the firing of some large artillery pieces, of the old-fashioned (meaning not self-propelled) variety. The camera briefly zooms in on the barrel, where (if you look sharp) you can see white writing: “$ SHOT”.
Money Shot. Noun: In pornography, the moment when the male performer pulls out so that his ejaculation may be captured on film. Allegedly so called because of a perceived need to convince the buying public that the sex was “real”.
So it would appear that we aren’t just killing Iraqis — we are subjecting them to a gigantic involuntary bukkake with long range flying globs of supersonic red hot metallic high explosive fragmenting semen.
Yippee.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Yup. It’s that time again. Here’s an animated .gif of a happy smurf getting a blowjob from Smurfette:
Saturday, March 15th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Hokay, so this post is about an honest-to-goodness porn site. Boys gone wild, if you like — adapting power tools to their highest and best use. That’s right, me hearties: we present Fucking Machines.
If you follow that link (no popups, which is generally a good sign in a porn site) and then click on “Machines” you’ll be presented with an amusing list of fucking machines:
The Intruder
The Monster
The Fucksall
The Crane
The Sybian
The Trespasser
The Probe
The Jetaime
The Double Jetaime
The Loving Chair
The Hammer
The Drilldo
The Double Crane
The Goat Milker
The Tit Sucker
The Snake
The Portafuck
The Cathedral
The Toolbox
The Crystal Palace
The Antique Intruder
The Twinserter
The Airstorm
The Lighthouse
The Concrete Vibrator
The Fucking Chair
The Predator
The Reactor
Complete with horsepower ratings.
But of course any dweeb in his basement can glue a dildo to a power tool and claim it’s a sex toy. Where the rubber meets the, er, road, however, is actually using them for sex, or at least a well-photographed facsimile thereof. And that’s what makes this a porn site. Lots and lots of good looking models playing with these toys and managing to look like they are having fun doing it.
And finally, for the guys out there who think such fine machinery is wasted on women, there is a sister site (brother site?) called, with all the subtlety of a brick: Butt Machine Boys. This may be the true target market for these ambitiously mechanical porn purveyors. After all, why let the girls play with the cool toys and spoil all that raw male power tool fun?
Saturday, March 1st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Back in December ErosBlog discussed a linux package called porn-get. Now from Jenny comes word that it works, and works well:
Porn-get does nothing else than download "sexual education material"[1]
found on the internet more effeciently than you would manually
with a browser.
The thing is it really works, well. I've heard of people downloading
more than 100 GB porn, pity my hd had not enough space to get every-
thing, neither is my internet connectivity too good.
[1] bad mouths call it porn
Yours
Jenny
--
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance?
Sunday, February 16th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Here’s a really odd article on Christian porn. The odd thing is that the author of the article seems to be really offended by the stuff. Debbi Does Sodom is an “appalling artifact of contemporary decadence”:
Take a peek at Debbi Does Sodom, a 35-minute VHS opus distributed by Saviour Video, complete with a rendering of the “Christian” fish on the logo.
Debbi, played by Tanya Yorke, is an American tourist in the city of Sodom who goes to a bistro, where she meets several men who invite her to a private party at their clubhouse. Debbi accepts and relocates to a seedy ballroom where techno music is throbbing relentlessly. She takes a tablet of Ecstasy and falls into a drugged trance, dancing seductively to the music, then having wild sex with four men at the same time as the copulating group undulates in rhythm with the music.
Suddenly this exceptionally erotic tableau is shattered by the appearance of a police assault team, which bursts through the doors with guns drawn. Debbi’s paramours are brutally beaten, and she is marched nude from the clubhouse into a waiting van. There she encounters two “Christian” evangelists who do their best to help Debbi regain the road to righteousness, by preaching to her and quoting Scripture as the van speeds away through the night. The film ends with Debbi, who has been saved and is now a born-again “Christian,” wearing a choir robe and plastered with lots of cosmetics, singing the glories of Jesus.
Unless Bacchus is misremembering his literary history, this is nothing more or less than a classic morality play, updated for modern viewers and recorded for broader distribution. It’s a video tract with a bit of flesh to draw and keep the eye. In poor taste, perhaps, as is much of the rest of the “body” of popular evangelical artistic and literary material throughout history. But “appalling artifact of contemporary decadence”? Someone is missing the point.
Update: Daniel Radosh kindly wrote in to point out that this article appears to be a fraud of some sort or a badly failed attempt at humor. He reports that Googling the mentioned personages is fruitless, which strongly suggests they do not exist. Thanks to Daniel for the info, and apologies all around for the gullibility that Bacchus substitutes for actual reportage.
Wednesday, January 29th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Here is some more sex writing that uses the up-front “this stuff doesn’t turn me on and by the way I’m a feminist” disclaimer. Come on, guys, ball up, find your nuts, and write about sex without all the wussy disclaimers!
It’s right here in paragraph three — this guy wanted to get it right up front:
But I never quite recovered from the blow to my libido, going from interested to bored to downright queasy within an hour. It’s a shameful confession for a sex-positive feminist to make.
From an otherwise fairly decent article on porn.
Tuesday, January 28th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Daniel Rodosh of Rodosh.net was kind enough to send along this Study Guide to the Complete Porno Films of the Bard of Avon. Example: “Finally, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew for everyone who thought Ten Things I Hate About You was too cleverly written.” Ouch!
Friday, January 24th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Carly at Pornblography has posted a 25-step program for conducting a porn spring cleaning. Take special heed if you have cats, because they will resent the elimination of the dunes and piles of porn tapes over which they were wont to clamber:
Step 1: Take a look around your house. Do you have so much porn that it’s bursting from your hiding places, no longer fits in the 300+ videotape holder that you bought from Ikea or causes your closet doors to frequently jump from their tracks because of the sheer force of the massive amount of smut tapes crammed in behind them? Well then, friend, it’s time to clean out your porn collection!
Step 2: Start by removing all of your porn from wherever you keep it and place it in a central location so that you may accurately survey how far your perversion has progressed.
Step 3: Once you have finished struggling with your Catholic guilt, sort through all the titles and make three piles: Keepers, Givers and Trashers. Keepers are for yourself, Givers are for your friends, Trashers are to be disposed of accordingly.
Step 4: Marvel at some of the titles you’ve acquired over the years. What were you thinking when you picked up You’re Never Too Old To Gangbang, you fool?!?
Step 5: After sorting everything into appropriate piles, grab a garbage bag or six. Do so quickly so that your cats don’t knock over the pile you’ve carefully cultivated.
Step 6: Curse your cats.
Step 7: Repeat steps 3 and 4.
Step 8: Take the Trashers pile and start loading up your garbage bags. If you’re like me, you’ve got about 10 bags to fill.
Step 9: Stand back and allow yourself a moment of silence as you fully absorb just how much porn you’re about to dispose of.
Step 10: Curse yourself for having bought white trash bags rather than the customary green or black. Now everyone can clearly see you somehow wound up with more than one copy of Lex The Impaler!
Step 11: After convincing yourself that even though the titles are clear as day nobody will actually make the effort to examine the bags, get help from someone who is strong enough to lift half of the bags you’ve filled to the dumpster so that you don’t have to make more than one trip, therefore increasing the potential of neighbors spying you in the halls or elevator of the building carting around enough porn to make even the likes of Skeeter Kerkove blush.
Step 12: Open your front door and look into the hall. The coast is clear. Go for it!
Step 13: Hurriedly run back into your home when you hear the single mother down the hall exiting the elevator with her young son.
Step 14: Have your stronger companion check for other residents milling in the hall, then have them retrieve the elevator and lock the controls so that you can load your porn trash quickly and peacefully without interruption.
Step 15: Upon arriving at the basement level where the dumpsters are, look around and make sure that nobody is right outside the elevator doors. If they are, don’t panic! Just hide the bags behind you and hold their eye contact. If someone is just pulling in and unloading their groceries, no worries there, either. They’ll be too consumed with not cracking their eggs to pay mind to two individuals running for the garbage bin with 10 see-through Hefty bags full of porn.
Step 16: Have one person stand watch while the other starts throwing the bags in the bin.
Step 17: Throw a mild fit when one of the bags explodes, throwing numerous tapes across the concrete floor of the parking lot into mucky puddles and underneath cars.
Step 18: Ignore the grocery shopper’s offer to help.
Step 19: Dispose of the rest of the porn in a discreet and timely fashion, making sure all of the loose tapes from the explosion are accounted for. If possible, arrange some other garbage over top of the porn booty so that others aren’t alerted to your viewing habits.
Step 20: Cackle maniacally as if you’ve just done something really sneaky and clever, when really you haven’t.
Step 21: Make care packages for your friends across the country out of the givers pile you made, ensuring that you’ve packaged them in plain brown boxes so that nobody will know what you’re sending, helping for maximum impact when they arrive at the receiving end.
Step 22: Wait for the joyous and thankful phone calls and e-mails to roll in.
Step 23: Grow tired of waiting and instead organize what’s left of your collection, making sure that the tapes match the boxes and everything is alphabetized.
Step 24: Enjoy one of the titles that you found while doing your purge. (What happens during or after viewing need not be explained.)
Step 25: Call the City and thank them for the bouquet of roses that were left at your door the following day.
Monday, January 20th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
The Reverse Cowgirl is back with actual words on her blog (Yay!) and she links to a story from a college newspaper that’s sort of an overview of the bukkake thing, with a review of a specific American Bukkake title.
All of which is reproduced here because, as noted previously, bukkake is one of those fringe porn things that doesn’t get written about much with any degree of honesty. There are a bunch of wierd, odd, unusual, or downright gross things happening out on the fringes of porn, and folks with the courage to discuss them (perhaps thereby making them more comprehensible to the rest of us) should be encouraged.
However, all that is by way of disclaimer, because the article itself is exactly the sort of sex writing that ErosBlog usually avoids like the plague. When nominally pro-sex authors take great pains to mention and then reinforce that they are not aroused by the subject at hand, and then digress several times into discourses on the feminist implications of their topic, all while maintaining an intellectualized tone intended to remind everyone that they are, ya know, serious… well, the result tends not to be very interesting to anyone who is more interested in sexual topics than in academic pretension.
Having said all that, however, this particular article also contains the history of bukkake according to a director thereof, presented with all due skepticism:
Director [of the American Bukkake series] Jim Powers says, “Bukkake is about discipline.” He also provides background on the practice’s mock Asiatic name. “Bukkake is an ancient Japanese custom where if a woman cheated on her husband, the rest of the village men would take her off to a cave somewhere and jack off on her face and in her mouth. And usually what would happen is the woman would kill herself afterwards,” Powers says with an earnest expression and voice that make you eventually realize he actually believes what he’s saying.
Monday, January 6th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
After the spot of adolescent fun taken with Armed Liberal’s benevolent prescription for Kenneth Branagh, he (that would be Armed Liberal, not Kenneth Branagh — someday we are going to hire a writer!) pointed out an old post of his about porn.
Turns out he’s agin it. In part because it makes us passive consumers of our lives instead of active participants. It’s better, he tells his sons, to “hold hands and smooch with a real girl than to jerk off to pictures of someone you’ll never meet, much less get to go to bed with.” Or, as he explains:
“So instead of buying p0rn[sic], go meet someone and ask them out. Instead of watching the NBA finals and tying your identity to a team of mercenaries, go down to the park and play some hoops.”
This is great advice, for normal folks. But it’s very exclusionary of the fringes of society — the folks who aren’t athletic enough to play hoops down at the park, or the guy who isn’t attractive enough to get a woman to go out with him. Do we say that professional basketball is bad because playing basketball at the park is more fun and better for you than watching hoops on television? If so, that’s pretty hard on Crutches Boy. “Basketball on television is bad, because it keeps you from getting so desperate for sports fix that you’ll go down to the park and try to play basket ball with the kids who can walk, even though they won’t pick you for their teams and you’ll go home humiliated and frustrated every damn time you try.” Great advice. Thanks. Crutches Boy will be back for more good advice later, bank on it.
On the sex side this problem is worse for younger people, who often don’t have the perspective or maturity to figure out exactly why they can’t get find anyone willing to touch them, much less have sex with them. Most people figure out how to get laid eventually, but it can take a while and a fair percent don’t manage it until fairly deep into adulthood. (There’s also the unfortunate percentage who have genuinely unfixable strikes against them, like general ugliness or unresponsive obesity, that make the project even longer and more painful than it is for the kids who are merely callow and clueless.)
Worse yet, we tell our young people, for lots of strong reasons, that for the first five to seven years after their bodies are sexually mature, there is absolutely no socially acceptable way for them to have an orgasm with another person. Is it really better, for that long span of time, to “kiss and cuddle” without orgasm, than to masturbate and fantasize, which is what porn is mostly about? Perhaps a balanced life has room for both.
In short, Bacchus thinks that there are a hell of a lot of people for whom porn makes the world a better, brighter, or at least more tolerable place than it otherwise would be. This is arguably quite sad — Bacchus finds women a lot more fun than porn, when he finds them — but it’s still true.
Friday, January 3rd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Here’s some hardcore stick figure porn from The Petting Zoo:
Don’t miss their unique version of the hamster dance.
“Recycling” is also…special.
Other people’s children…what can one do?
Wednesday, January 1st, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Alert readers will note that ErosBlog does not link to a lot of actual porn sites. Mostly this is a reader protection measure. Commercial online porn tends to be hideously abusive to its potential customers, punishing them for their curious visit with endless loops of browser-killing pop-ups, browser modification scripts, spyware installers, dialer programs, and other malicious treats.
However, another reason porn sites aren’t discussed more on ErosBlog is that commercial porn tends to be boring. There’s a fetishistic focus on distorted plastic boobs, fake blond hair, and shaved oiled surfaces that frankly don’t look like anything ordinary folks generally manage to have sex with.
Via a link found at Totalitarianism Today, we learn the hopeful news that folks trying to break with the oiled shaved plastic blonde tradition are making money. Good on them; perhaps it will catch on.
Monday, December 30th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Bukkake is one of those hard-core porn concepts that you either know about or you don’t. The Reverse Cowgirl mentions it all the time, but she’s not much help to the clueless. When the word comes up in conversation (yah, as if that happens every day) the folks who aren’t familiar with it look puzzled, and the folks who know what it means refuse to elaborate. Because how could one define this word in even semi-polite conversation?
Carly the Pornblographer gives it a shot, so to speak:
Bukkake is something that I have only a small amount of knowledge on, so some of the more learned members of our industry might want to chime in with some history. But as I understand it, the practice originated in Japan before rising to some popularity in the States. A Bukkake video usually features one of two things: either a girl getting spunked on by numerous (usually) anonymous cocks, or numerous (usually) anonymous cocks spunk into some kind of receptacle, and the girl guzzles it. This is what taking the Atkins Diet too far does to you.
Now if only someone could explain why this is sexy. Yah yah yah, different strokes for different folks, one person’s fetish is another person’s gross out, your kink is not my kink but that doesn’t mean your kink is not OK, et cetera, literally (in this case) ad nauseum. Bacchus still doesn’t get it.
That said, ErosBlog is going out on the cutting (shooting?) edge. If you really really want to know what bukkake is, here is a picture. Publishing a bukkake picture may be a blogging first. If it grosses you out, tough shit — you knew where you were going when you clicked the link.
If anyone feels this is a new low for ErosBlog, you may perhaps be right. Perhaps mixing a Long Island Iced Tea in the one-liter beer mug was not such a good idea. Alas:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
— Omar Khayyam
Friday, December 20th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Alert readers will have noticed the recent appearance on the sex blog list of Pornblography, a fun new blog [since gone defunct] that’s all about the movers and shakers in the porn biz. Frankly, to an outsider it’s just a bit bewildering — these people are not most of them household names, although they will be familiar in some cases to heavy porn consumers and regular readers of Adult Video News, the New York Times of the adult entertainment industry. But it’s a delightful and eye-opening read all the same. Do you know what a suitcase pimp is? Nope, neither did your humble scribe. It turns out:
A “Suitcase Pimp” is the industry term for any boyfriend or husband of a porn chick. They are often, but not always, jobless….
Suitcase Pimps can usually be seen carrying the bags of the actresses when they arrive on a set (hence the term Suitcase), and they are often to be found on the cell phone handling the business affairs of the girls (i.e. “pimping” them out to whichever producer will pay the most money for a scene). This activity takes place much to the consternation of various film producers and directors, who would MUCH rather deal with the porno chicks themselves, for various reasons.
Carly, who writes Pornblography, also has great taste, having averred that ErosBlog “fucking rocks”. Thanks Carly!
Thursday, December 19th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Someone much smarter than Bacchus will have to evaluate this resource and report back. There’s a page here advertising “Lesbian GNU/Linux” — a pretty obvious parody of the Debian package, right down to the photoshopped logo. However, the apparent actual purpose of the page (which purpose is only apparent, and not certain, because when linux types make jokes it’s not unheard of for the rest of us mere mortals to miss the point) is this bit: “It comes with a superior package management system called porn-get…”. Which is followed by several tarballs (furballs? salty balls? Something like that, anyway) and man pages and similar related penguin-head paraphernalia, all of which looks pretty authentic even if it does contain oddities like the following:
(__)
(oo)
/------\/
/ | || * /\---/\
~~ ~~
...."Have you mooed today?"...
The interesting thing is that there does appear to be some sort of functional software for obtaining porn (a linux pornograph?) buried in here…because this artifact was revealed by the discovery in the ErosBlog log files of the following unique user agent ID: (www.linuks.mine.nu/porn-get).
Are there any penguin-heads out there who can tell us what this software does, and whether it is any good?
Tuesday, December 17th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
A minor link from the Reverse Cowgirl to some of her more literate critics turned up this gem of an idea:
“People are always talking about how great this pornography is, I need to break down and purchase a pornograph so I get see what this is all about!”
Bacchus is all on board this excellent plan. Everyone should get a pornograph for Christmas. Joy to the World!
This post has been brought to you by Highland Mist, the cheap blended Scotch Whiskey that gives Scottish distilling a bad name. “Fine texture through the finish” indeed! (Assuming pumice is a fine texture….)
Thursday, December 12th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Debra Hyde at Pursed Lips has an important discussion [link has unfortunately vanished] about the difficulty of discussing appalling abuses that have a sexual component. It’s a real problem for this blog.
Anyone who has a rich fantasy life can find an erotic component in almost any tale of sexual atrocity. And, since horror is often an unwelcome emotion, the temptation to eroticize horrific stories by translating them into more palatable fantasy terms can be overwhelming. The downside is that the story itself is often trivialized in the process — if one gets too busy picturing Uday Hussein’s pony girls in the mind’s eye, one could forget to empathize sufficiently with their terror, shame, and humiliation. Worse, one could forget to be outraged by Uday’s behavior.
For this reason, sexual atrocities are featured much less often on this blog than they might be. It’s unseemly, at best, to treat actual human suffering as mere fodder for an erotic fantasy — and almost any discussion of real world sexual suffering in the context of this blog is subject to that risk. And yet, having a category of stories about sex be off limits to a sex blog is, itself, rather perverse.
Debrah’s article suggests a path through the maze. She acknowledges, first, the impossibility of discussing such events without the discussion having a pornographic quality. But then she points out that pornography is not always erotic, having a long history as a protest and propaganda tool aimed at political change. And she suggests that we not shrink from such uses of pornography, but rather embrace its power to incite moral outrage. She’s a wise woman.
That’s a lot of preamble for a short block quote about a professional government rapist. Perhaps if Jonah Goldberg had read Debra’s blog, he would have managed a little less flippancy in this story:
There are some professions American colleges simply don’t prepare you for. Consider Aziz Salih Ahmed. He works for the Iraqi government. His technical specialty? He’s a “violator of women’s honor,” according to his Iraqi identity card. In other words, he rapes women. Presumably he likes it. But he does it on the government’s dime so whether he likes brutally raping women or not, he’s probably good at it or at least he’s good enough for government work.
Thursday, December 5th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Dang! This is one sexy ear!
And that’s a nice tattoo, although one would think the feather would tickle. Especially when kissed.
Sexy ear, you ask?
Well, why not? If Acidman can link to toe porn, what’s wrong with ear porn?
Besides, have you ever seen such a kissable ear vicinity? Bacchus thinks not.
Only trouble is, this genre-defining bit of earotica arrived (earrived?) by email; its provenance and owner are unknown. If this is your ear, please step forward and become known to the vast ErosBlog readership! Linkage, modeling credits, photographer credits, tattoo artist credits, whatever — all will be cheerfully added in this space. Heck, we might even be able to round up a couple of ear groupies!
Thursday, November 28th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
This picture is offered up as a warning to women who feel that powered woodworking tools are a perfectly acceptable default gift for Father’s Day:
Seriously, guys who get these things at a time when they don’t have a burning desire to build a gazebo will just dream shit up!
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, November 10th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
If there’s a defining theme to the dirty pictures that get linked and posted here, it is that they are different in some way from the “shaved and oiled genitalia in brightly lit living color” photography that comprises 98% of net porn. For the most part, “different” doesn’t necessarily mean explicit — but faint heart never won fair lady, so Bacchus won’t shrink from posting strong material if it meets the standard of being unusual enough to titillate this blog’s urbane and sophisticated readership.
With that fair warning, and without further ado, consider visiting The Clinic of Dr. Farrel. This looks like scans from a French language bondage and torture comic, and it contains harsh scenes of painful forced body modification and breast enlargement. You’ll like this, if you like this sort of thing.
Monday, October 28th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Mexican porn comics? Who knew? Nobody tells us Norteamericanos the stuff we need to know. Until now:
Pocket-sized comic books called historietas have been available for decades on every corner newsstand, but in the past seven years they have been overrun by a fresh and lurid genre that’s part noir melodrama, part Tijuana bible–what Mexico City writer Alex Giardino dubs the “ghetto libretto.”
These nasty funnies are less graphic than their Japanese counterparts but make up in operatic depravity what they lack in plumbing. Page through Heat Between Her Legs, Secret Temptations, or Carnal Sins, at the Las Americas supermarket on East Lake Street, and you’ll find every variant of anguish on the characters’ faces. My favorite artist, who signs his name Galvez and inks boldly with crude strokes, tells sweaty tales of poor women who endure class browbeating, male predation, incest, and long nights of hot, guilty sex–all before hacking their tormentors to pieces.
Monday, October 28th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
This story is a few months old, but it’s about something that’s been buried for a couple of thousand years, so what’s the hurry? It seems that a trove of ancient Chinese bronze dildos was discovered. Speculation as to their use seems, ah, imaginative:
Archaeologists in China have uncovered seven ancient bronze dildos in a Han Dynasty tomb.
This is the first time so many have been unearthed from that era (206 BC – AD 25).
The dildos were cast from a mould, suggesting they were made by a specialist artisan.
Archaeologists say the dildos uncovered in Xian could have been used by eunuchs.
They also say palace maids may have used them on sexually-deprived imperial concubines.
They expect to find more dildoes in the city in north-western Shaanxi province.
If China today is anything like as sexually repressed as European communist countries typically were, I guess this sort of fevered speculation is as close as the archaeologists can get to actual porn. I wonder if psuedointellectual cheap little treatises like “Some Suppositions on the Usages of Bronze Dildos During the Han Dynasty, with 17 Fully Engraved Plates” are sold as pornography in China, the way “Medical Sex Manuals” were sold in the US and Britain back when porn was still a felony?
Thursday, October 24th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
I just stumbled across an amusingly-written weekly sex advice column called Love Bites that comes from Toronto’s weekly, The Eye. Here’s a sample:
Q. I have a girlfriend who would like to have anal sex, but she is afraid it will hurt a lot. We were wondering if there is any kind of cream or some product that would relax the sphincter, allowing an easy penetration? Any collateral negative effects if this is used?
A. There are several products on the market designed to numb the sphincter, but they are generally considered a bad idea by ass-fucking authorities. One of the things your ass does when you’re doing something it doesn’t like is warn you in a way that’s hard to ignore. You do not want to Roofie your sphincter. You want your sphincter on red alert. If your ass is numb, you might do something that can really fuck it up, so to speak. Best to take things slow. Tristan Taormino’s The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women (the book, not the film, which is awesome but really just a jazzy porno) is a much wiser prelude.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2002 -- by Bacchus
Classic bondage porn from the days of the line printer! Hogtied slave girl rendered entirely in parentheses, asterisks, and the odd backslash! Real geek nostalgia!
UPDATE: You thought that was fun? OK, here’s a fetish girl wearing a gas mask and leather bondage harness. ASCII porn? Who knew?
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