Porn: Classic or Dud?

there are some sites that give hope (ifeelmyself etc), but then again , i only like that site after becoming boed with 80s / 90s hardcore stuff. as someone that grew up with magazines, i'm interested in how 80s kids think about their pron v. sex habits...?

I don't need porn. I just undress, arrange my games, guns and ammo on my bed and I take pictures while posing with them.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/06/at-least-16-previously-unpublicized-hiv-cases-in-porn-film-performers-public-health-officials-say.html

:/

'i used to have dialogue'

I have a really weird relationship with pron. On the one hand I totally defend anyone watching it and I also read about it, but watching it seems less interesting to me. I will once or twice watch a shitload of clips (per year) but after that I stop for a year or so. Overall though I am not really that fascinated by the pron itself, but I have a keen interest in the discussion.

Alson Joey Stefano=/ Joe Delassandro. Christ, I thought the former was Dellassandro so I picked up his bio. hahahahahahahahaha My fatigue resulted in reading about a gay porn star (who appeared in Madonna's Sex book!). Not that bad really. Well, the bio was, but still an interesting read somehow.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1293165/Nanny-30-died-sexual-arousal-watching-pornography.html

A 30-year-old woman's death as she used a sex toy while watching pornography was probably due to her state of sexual excitement, an inquest heard today.
Children's nanny Nichola Paginton was found dead in bed naked from the waist down last October with pornographic material running on her laptop. A sex toy was discovered next to her.
A Home Office pathologist told the inquest in Gloucester that Miss Paginton died from a sudden heart arrhythmia, probably brought on by her state of arousal.
Gloucestershire coroner Alan Crickmore agreed it was likely that 'her activity before death' contributed to the fatal arrhythmia.
The inquest heard that Miss Paginton, of Cirencester, was found dead in October last year.
Detective Sergeant Gavin Webb said police had been called by her employer Sarah Griffiths who had visited Miss Paginton's home when she failed to turn up for work.
When there was no reply at the door she enlisted the help of neighbour Michelle Grant and they saw Miss Paginton through the curtains, lying on her bed with her cat lying on her chest.
'After they broke in they realised Miss Paginton was dead,' said Sgt Webb. 'She had a computer on her lap and when they moved it and lifted the duvet, they found she was naked from the waist down and there was a vibrator in the bed.
'The laptop was still displaying pornographic material.'
Home office pathologist Dr Richard Jones from the University of Cardiff said: 'There is nothing to explain why she died in this way but I suspect sudden cardiac death.'
Returning a verdict of death from natural causes, Mr Crickmore said: 'I am satisfied Nichola Paginton died of a natural disease process - sudden cardiac arryhthmia.
'It is not always possible to determine an exact cause of death but it is likely that her activity before death contributed towards it.

'so sad, lets tell everyone'

"ironic porn purchase leads to unironic ejaculation"

― Jordan

Ironic ejaculation: your sperm looks less like a comma and more like a quotation mark

porn: classic or DEATH!

William Donaldson died the same way, except it seemed sort of awesome and appropriate in his case.

In Austin, in the mid 90's there were a lot of photographers trying to get porn (their own, original work) on discs to sell at a few shops in town. I worked ten hours a day at a place across from the train tracks on the east side of town, before it was gentrified, with one of the more successful pornographers. He did videos and photographs and operated an online website. I helped with scenery, costumes and set design for the videos and lighting and posing the more inexperienced models for photographs. It was really interesting job, sometimes. I was in my early 20's and was happy with the pay and that lunch and dinner was always provided and we could pick take-out from any place in town.

What sucked was how the actors and models were talked about when they came in. They were just bodies and their bodies were under heavy scrutiny all the time. A woman came in once and no matter what we did with the lighting or the angles there was always too much cellulite for my boss. He kept talking about her and her flaws as if she didn't exist. At one point he said she couldn't even pass for sexy in the amateur videos he would stage. I saw that she was ready to just cry and gave her a robe. All that criticism and then naked on a rug. My boss then said good idea, paid her for an hour and told her he couldn't use her. UGH! There were plenty of desperate men and women who were willing to do anything for not much money. I stuck with the job until my boss closed shop to move to California. It is hard to watch porn and not think of a set up like the one I worked at. It has served to ruin porn for me and I do notice the lighting and sets and the high thigh area where my boss would say shows a woman's age more than anything.

Lack of marketing acumen, imho. Rule 28 etc...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/13/free-trade-organic-porn-on-the-hunt-for-ethical-smut.html

i think in sweden the government subsidizes feminist porn. this seems like a good idea to me. there's no reason for sexists to dictate what our culture's erotica looks like.

There are some really smart women in porn - read some interviews with Taormino (Thomas Pynchon's niece!), Camille Crimson - but when the curtain is pulled on any sort of so-called "feminist" porn collectives time and again we hear the same stories of abuse and mistreatment. It's such a delicate line, I suppose, given what drives so many performers to porn in the first place. It takes a certain strength to go down that road, but a certain wounded weakness to set you on that path. I imagine that any female-run companies treat their female performers a lot better than the male equivalents, though of course a lot of the women on the business side of the business have seen the other side and are trying to counter their own experiences.

I wonder if I'm developing a porn addiction. I've been watching it more than ever – almost every day – and feel more compelled to do so. On the other hand, I feel more comfortable with it, and enjoy it, more than ever, versus the time when shame and self-criticism stopped me from it. I'm not, and have never been, in a relationship or having sex with anyone, but not out of a lack of serious desire for both of those things, so it's not getting in the way of my life, but I can't imagine this indefinite cycle of porn and compulsive masturbation is good for me (possibly including my ability to pursue intimate relationships with people).

I don't know why I'm writing this here, since I'm already seeing a sex therapist, but my health plan is nearly out of psychotherapy money, so maybe I just want to verbalize my problems. Anyways, tell me about all your borderline addictive porn habits.

you said you don't feel like it's getting in the way of your life, but you are worried it is impacting your ability to pursue intimacy & relationships? what's your therapists take on what you've been talking about w/ them?

EDB, if you have never been in a relationship or had sex at all, focusing on porn may be a cart-before-horse thing imo. It may be that fear or something else is stopping you from pursuing the relationships and porn is a crutch.

Especially if you've only come to feel addicted to porn recently but have avoided or not pursued intimate relationships for a longer time.

fwiw i think "addiction" is a fraught term when used to describe sexual behavior, there was a period in my life when i identified as a "sex addict" and felt like a 12-step/addiction model of approaching sex/porn was helpful for me but i really don't feel that way anymore. it took a number of years of therapy and hard work to figure out what healthy sexuality meant for me and i now feel like the addiction model is really damaging. i know a number of people who do find it helpful but i just don't think sexuality is the same as drugs or alcohol. growing up in a sexually repressed catholic family had a lot to do w/ shame i felt about various aspects of my sexuality and the addiction model was a convenient way of dealing with that shame but ultimately didn't work. i think there are a lot of conversations worth having about the effect of porn on our lives but really i dont see porn as a wholly negative thing. if you are enjoying it and feel like it is a healthy sexual expression for you then i'd be wary of describing yourself as an addict.

Good point. If I can expand on that? Addiction has a medical definition. It's also a useful word to grab for in order to name, and so make a start on tackling, various other types of problem, that are not addiction in the official medical sense. Especially if that problem resembles medical addiction in one or more ways. However, the things you'd do to beat an addiction might not help you with an 'addiction'.

I'm not, and have never been, in a relationship or having sex with anyone, but not out of a lack of serious desire for both of those things, so it's not getting in the way of my life, but I can't imagine this indefinite cycle of porn and compulsive masturbation is good for me (possibly including my ability to pursue intimate relationships with people).

^ Here I've struck out the bits of what you said that seemed less important, and left what seemed to be the key point (to my eyes). I have no pro qualification whatsoever and this is just my take on it, one person's.

how old are you, edb? i think marcos is kind of otm about addiction/sexual behavior. i think there are red flags, if it goes beyond jerking off and watching a lot of porn and you're getting into dangerous/compulsive behavior around it, like looking at illegal things or sinking money you can't afford into watching girls in eastern europe suck on stuff.

looking at porn is one of my earliest memories. i was about four years old and i can still remember pages of the magazine, the smell of my parents bedroom, the smell of the magazine, the light in the room. actually, lots of vivid memories of porn. i can still remember pages i cut out of magazines, folded up, put in my top drawer, the smell of the medicinal ointment i received for some skin condition on my ankles and that i used to beat off with. i can remember scenes downloaded from limewire over a decade ago. there were times when i'd spend maybe an hour looking at porn but it was... still okay, i think? the, like, worldview of the porn i was consuming was no worse, i think, than what you'd find in an updike novel or a z-ro album. still look at pornography maybe every day or every couple days, but it's become more utilitarian, find a video, thirty seconds, beat off, and maybe "academic," where i check xhamster 7 days most viewed/commented out of interest in the same way i keep up on literature or whatever by reading like the paris review blog. internet porn is a topic that i know a lot about. i've watched thousands of hours of pornography. i don't have any shame about it and i don't think it's fucked up my relationships with women, which have been kind of fucked up but always due to other things.

lol i remember reading some bob mould interview about his first experience using the internet, here i found it

Bob Mould

Do you remember your first time using the internet?

Yes

Where were you?

My office in Austin, Texas

How did you access it?

AOL 14.4K

What did you search for?

Porn

What was your first impression?

Slow

otm imo

http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9520-our-bandwidth-could-be-your-life/

i don't have a ton of pre-internet memories, though the ones i do have are super vivid definitely. i remember feeling like really nervous hanging out w/ a friend who had a bunch of playboys he took from his dad, and some matchbooks he had w/ nudes on them lol

i like the story about the guy getting obsessed with 19th century awls. and much respect to owen pallett for his serious old school cred.

my dad loved porn. loved loved loved. this was pre-internet, and in fact he could never get a computer to work right because the first thing he did when he got on the internet was look for pregnant rubber nuns and get his computer full of all kinds of viruses.

so he spent money on it, which i've only done once in my life (a friend came over with japan with some hentai, which was a novelty back then, so i bought one of those off him). i'm perversely proud of not spending money on porn, though i'm not sure exactly why i should be. he had all kinds of catalogs come to his house under assumed names, which kept going for years and years after he left. we would look through the catalogs and laugh at the bizarre stuff they had in there.

occasionally he would, either through guilt or just being sick of clutter, junk his porn. one of my brothers has a story about taking a trip to visit him and spending the whole trip throwing out his old pornography.

i wasn't sure what i would find when i went to visit the home he was staying at after he died, but he kept things pretty light. no porn. just a railway catalog, a couple bibles, and a copy of "spanish for dummies". he'd found jesus a couple months before, but one never knows what that means. i guess it's more that the circumstances he was living under didn't give him the opportunity for clutter.

i get nostalgic for porn of the past. i don't know, maybe i just like old shit, when i was young i was listening to all that classic rock so i guess it makes sense that i'd be into '70s porn. which actually reminds me that i did pay for porn one other time, i bought this giant box set of the old "something weird" porn loops. they came on dvd-rs and a bunch of them won't rip but i don't really watch them, or much of anything, anyway.

but i also get nostalgic for the old porn sites, the sort that were just set up by one or two weirdo entrepeneurial types and had 640x480 pictures. by today's standards they look like shit, but i can't relate to any of the kids today and their approach towards sex. i'm kind of sad that those things are all gone now. nobody has anything remotely like an archival approach to old porn like they do towards, like, aphex twin. i guess that's the future of all the present, when the curatorial instinct fades, just random unlabelled pictures popping up on tumblr or wherever.

what i miss most though is just being able to talk about sex, openly and honestly. maybe you still can and i've just become old and repressed, but being honest on the internet seems a lot more dangerous than it used to be. all the crap i said twenty years ago, nobody cares, nobody will care unless i somehow get mega-famous, which, spoiler alert, isn't going to happen.

When I was a teenager in the mid/late '90s, the sites with stills or short clips of movie nudity were mind-blowing. Showgirls and the movie where Neve Campbell and Denise Richards make out topless and etc.. The filthiest stuff I was exposed to was via Penthouse Forum, so the orgies and stuff were written rather visual and looking back relatively tame. I don't think I even saw filmed penetration until the Pamela/Tommy Lee video.

I can't imagine being a 14-year old boy in this environment.

"sinking money you can't afford into watching girls in eastern europe suck on stuff."

ha, that Wild Things scene is very much a generational touchstone, isn't it? I think you could also mention Anna Nicole Smith in Playboy to men my age and you'd definitely get a reaction.

I taught a few short stories last spring with some explicit sexual material in them, to 19 year olds. they seemed less impressed with this than I was...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/making-sense-of-modern-pornography

every time i read something like this i always come away feeling like for something which is undeniably a huge part of our contemporary lives (arguably a far bigger part than other forms of "culture" for which we have endless thinkpieces and trend spotting) there's comparatively little said about it--seemingly so little to be said about it. it's like the dark matter of culture, or the iceberg under the water line.

what a weird article. why was it written? felt like the writer got a very broad brief to write "about porn" and make it a certain number of words

I wonder a lot how much culture conditions boys to be obsessed with nudity vs how much of it is just "innate" or whatever. I mean I remember stealing the victoria's secret catalogs that came to my house when I was 11/12, even the National Geographics if they had topless women from some amazon tribe or something. I have a strong early adolescent memories is getting the measles on vacation and getting to stay in the hotel room and watch Lethal Weapon 2 (or maybe the original, that part I'm not sure of), and the excitement at just getting a few-second flash of breasts in a sex scene, and thinking that the breasts looked pointier than I expected.

I guess I mean that the level of obsession I had probably would not be brooked by a lack of internet porn, in fact maybe it would have been worse for longer.

i can't remember the entire argument, but there's a bit in Julian Jaynes' "Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (one of my favorite books but also possibly/likely 100% fanciful) where he theorizes that humans are the most sexually obsessed of all animals (which only seem to care about it during breeding periods) and that this obsession emerged at the same time as human consciousness. (this is a distinct idea from saying we fuck all the time, it's more that we think about it all the time...)

slightly less fancifully, you might look to Foucault's notion that sexuality as a kind of constant cultural obsession began much later. the idea being that the increased attention to sexuality was hand-in-hand with the emergence of modernity--and i guess you could say that the saturation of pornography is the culmination of that.

I guess I mean that the level of obsession I had probably would not be brooked by a lack of internet porn, in fact maybe it would have been worse for longer.

I have this vague idea that having to work harder to get hold of their porn (secret glimpses of playboy, sneaking into adult movie theatres etc) may have made teenage boys of yesteryear slightly less entitled when it came to real sex, but I don't know if there's anything in that.

new yorker article wasn't v good imo, apart from talking a little about mindgeek and the tube site near-monopoly it really could've been written in 2005? though i guess it was also a book review?

every time i read something like this i always come away feeling like for something which is undeniably a huge part of our contemporary lives (arguably a far bigger part than other forms of "culture" for which we have endless thinkpieces and trend spotting) there's comparatively little said about it--seemingly so little to be said about it. it's like the dark matter of culture, or the iceberg under the water line.

― ryan, Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:26 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but yea ryan i totally agree, it is kind of weird to see things with like 157,000,000 views on a tube site and it's one of many with view counts in the millions and yet porn isn't really talked about at all in casual conversation, i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about but the fact that it is core part of our media culture but not really outwardly acknowldged is weird

what a weird article. why was it written? felt like the writer got a very broad brief to write "about porn" and make it a certain number of words

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:52 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i mean it like talked about "we're not in the golden age anymore" "dozens of porn categories exist now" "amateur and amateur-style production has proliferated" "oh look there is some 'ethical' porn too like the organic food movement" but didn't really do much of anything as an article that hasn't been said in the past 10-15 years

also i don't really understand her saying "the porn industry is in decline" ... the industry is changing obv and it is a different industry than 70s-90s but ... there is a porn industry that has millions and millions of consumers ... it is not in decline

i don't really understand her saying "the porn industry is in decline" ... the industry is changing obv and it is a different industry than 70s-90s but ... there is a porn industry that has millions and millions of consumers ... it is not in decline

The industry is definitely in decline. If 90 percent of those millions and millions of consumers are getting the product for free, you're in trouble. And this isn't just trouble for the production companies; it's a problem for the performers, whose pay rates have gone down sharply. Getting your Twitter followers to buy you things from your Amazon wish list isn't gonna make up for that.

^ And the point about how they increasingly do other sex work to supplement the money they get from filming

^ And the point about how they increasingly do other sex work to supplement the money they get from filming

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Thursday, September 22, 2016 3:53 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hasn't that been the case for a long time though?

Could be? I got the impression from the article that there was a period like so -

The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors.

where they were full time doing porn, could be wrong tho

the piece doesn't mention it but one thing there's been a huge rise in, what with higher quality cameras and broadband etc, is 'cam' stuff. which is to say amateur (and some times pro) performers doing personalised scenes live on camera for $10 a pop or whatever. i mean i'm guessing that barely existed a decade ago. i'd imagine that's where a lot of this is all heading; people paying the performers direct for one-to-one stuff based specifically around what they want to see. it all seems pretty healthy and safe too. i mean comparatively.

yeah um I've heard from a friend that cam sites are popular these days

i've never gone to a cam site, they kind of weird me out tbh

i've never gone to a cam site, they kind of weird me out tbh

Agreed. (I've never been to a strip club either.)

ha me neither

Doing porn to drive your escorting fees is the new touring because Napster stole all your sales?