Porn and liberation

In my opinion, porn is all porn. If it is meant to turn me on, and arouse me, it is porn. Now, that doesn’t mean it all does a good job of this, some of it is my style and some isn’t. And so long as the subjects are consenting, I don’t have a problem with its existence.

People need to lighten up and get out of the business of making other people have the same sexual opinions as themselves. In fact, the FBI has begun raiding written erotica authors. ( http://freeinternetpress.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4723 ) I’m still not sure how they can consider written erotica to be exploiting children.

Anyways, I digress, I just wanted to generally agree with your comments and say hello. I came across your journal from a posting on lj’s polyamory group and find you to be a really fascinating person. I’m married, we’re poly, and I work midtown. Unfortunately I don’t think we’d travel in similar circles. For the moment, I plan on keeping tabs on your journal, though.

Fine points made! As an intelligent, sensitive and intuitive (and married!) man who also greatly enjoys his collection of hardore porn, I appreciate your notes outlining the positives in the porn community. The 2257 law and this administration have just become porn-obsessive in a terrible way, to help distract from their continuous blunders and to appease the Christian right that they’re “cleaning up America”. It makes even us sane, adult, decent, good-hearted porn lovers feel dejected and misunderstood.

I also find it ineresting with the growth of “altporn” that it shows how parts of our society are expressing and defining their sexuality in their own language, not adopting an existing framework in which to place it. This is encouraging. We are then able to explore the variety in sexual expression, as honestly displayed by adults of different races, creeds and social groups.

Here in the States, most people still have the knee-jerk reaction of attacking or dismissing porn as ever being a valid part of an adult’s sex life, something which I hope will change in time. Not that everyone is expected to like everything that the porn community creates, but many people must be able to see the individuals who produce, what they are like, how they contribute, what role the performers play and such, and then applaud what is worthwhile.

But then, this still might be very subjective. It could be a long time before I can openly discuss in mixed company what I consider well-shot, well cast anal porn and what is bollocks…

Interesting editorial.

altporn as you refer to it is, I believe, more of an offshoot of the whole “alt” movement than an outgrowth of porn itself. The underlying ideas conveyed by its producers or perceived by its viewers or have less to do with the content and more to do with method of delivery.

Personally, I like the whole thing (altporn). As much as I like altporn though, I don’t believe it means our society as a whole has embraced pornography in a larger context and I am reluctant to agree altporn legitimizes porn as well.

I think it has more to do with aspects of the “alt” lifestyle being embraced by a wider percentage of the population. Things once considered deviant, fetishistic or alternative are certainly more prevalent within society than even a decade earlier - the increasing popularity of piercing and tattooing come to mind.

Porn in the last 50 years, has changed to mirror advances in technology. These advances have affected many areas of daily life, porn does not exist in a vacuum. Over the last five decades porn moved from seedy b/w super 8 shorts and glossy pinups of Playboy, to theatrically released films and more explicit “hardcore” magazines, to video and cable distribution and finally the internet. Each development mirrored an advance in technology which made distribution cheaper and put tools to produce pornography in the hands of more people.

A growing number of amateur websites evidence this trend - digital photography means people no longer need suffer through finding a lab they can trust to develop pictures of an intimate nature.

The underlying changes in technology have implications for society (and consequently the porn industry) not anticipated or foreseen.

Women coming of age now are also very different than their predecessors. In American society the role of women has metamorphosized over the last twenty years. Women are very different in how they’re raised today, in their expectations and goals. Imagine, girl’s sports almost entirely absent from the lives of girls growing up in the seventies, is today the rule rather than the exception. How can a societal shift such as this not be reflected in porn as well?

The whole issue of porn and it’s role in our lives will ever be a delicate one. There will always be promoters as well as detractors partially because the underlying nature of pornography is to titillate and entice in part by displaying the taboo.

Bearing this in mind, we must acknowledge porn is a refelection of the society producing it. As we witness other advances in technology and science and how society grapples with each new advance trying to come to terms with the change. Porn we find becomes no different than (for example) something like stem-cell research or human cloning, something which challenges the moral and ethical framework within which it exists.

Of course that being said, it doesn’t mean we can’t have fun along the way.

It always made me sad to see the naive models on SG who would get so offended when people would call what they do porn. Somehow “erotica” and “pin-up” are seen as liberating and porn is just shameful. Personally I don’t find photos arousing enough to get off to, but its still porn.

For me the liberating thing about modeling is that it is something I choose to do because I enjoy it, not because I feel I have to.

The ‘no pussy’ thing in alt always puzzled me from an aethetic point of view, but never from an economic one. Showing pussy takes you and your work across a boundary that cuts you off from the larger share of money there is to be made from your efforts.

I am glad that you understand the point I am making. As internet porn is starting to face blow back from having a decade of unprecendented growth, the people that produce and participate in the industry needs to be unapologetic about what they do. Granted, being a pornographer is not a favorable term, it would be best to embrace the term and make it positive. A sensible, thoughtful pornographer would do much better than the clowns who are running suicide girls or girls gone wild.

A disturbing (re)new(ed) trend:

The New War on Porn

(click on my name, below, for the link to more information about the FBI’s renewed attacks on porn)

I always thought that one of the interesting things about porn is that it it one of the only industries where women dominate the pay roll and get paid much much more than the males they work with.