Tag Archives: porn industry

Expo

The porn industry is constantly changing. As a result of technological trends and the current global economic shitstorm, it’s changing faster than ever. It’s at times like this that performers must fight to keep their autonomy, both in business and and body. As a dominatrix, I’m lucky. I get to sidestep most of the chaps who assume I owe their erection my attention because of what I do for a living. The BDSM world is not perfect by any means, but the majority of those who approach me as submissives tend to have a sense of respect and consent. This is often lacking in men who stumble into my world via more traditional mainstream titillation.

Here’s part of a brilliant and slightly heartbreaking article by Amanda Hess for Slate Magazine about the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas:

“…When David Foster Wallace chronicled porn’s biggest fan show back in 1998—at the height of VHS and DVD sales—he observed a sweaty, trembling mass of shy guys who appeared both thrilled and ashamed to make first contact with their favorite pornographic actors. But the Internet crumbled all that, and last year I watched a man wait 30 minutes to grope a porn star’s breasts and announce, “That’s going on Facebook later!” Another languished in line to see if his favorite star was nice; act too aloof, and “I’ll never want to see her again,” he told me. “Not even in porn.”

In an age when every conceivable permutation of pornography is immediately accessible for free online, the power dynamic between viewer and star has shifted. Most porn viewers are still quietly accessing the material from the privacy of their own homes, but because it’s so easy to get, the reverence has faded. And when a man actually uses up his vacation days, books a plane ticket to Las Vegas, secures a hotel room off the strip, and drops between $35 (one-day access) and $325 (the VIP treatment) to celebrate porn in person, he is no longer content to gawk at a porn star standing on a pedestal. He expects an intimate affair…”

I recommend reading the full article here.

Vine-Ripened, Fairtrade Porn

Here’s a little chunk of an article I wrote for Sabotage Times this week:

“There’s a lot of pornography out there. From the moment one of our ancient ancestors thought to scrawl a picture of a spunking cock on his (or her) cave wall, humans have sought to depict their sexual desires in paintings, prose and any other medium that science has since progressed to make possible – after all, the porn industry has always been at the sweaty, panting forefront of modern technological advances. Some people like to be aroused vicariously, while some people like to exhibit themselves as the masturbatory muse of an unseen audience. Some people like to do both. This has been the case throughout the history of every known civilisation. From high art, through niche kink, to raw, basic wank-fodder, porn takes a whole spectrum of forms. Why, then, is the modern debate about porn reduced to a binary argument about whether porn – any porn at all – is a good or bad thing?

Again, there’s a lot of pornography out there. Some is exploitative, depressing and degrading for both those involved in making it and those doggedly struggling to bash one out in front of it. Yet some porn is quite the opposite – some porn can be a deeply satisfying experience, both to create and to view. Good porn exists for you, whatever your gender identity, orientation and personal peccadilloes may be. This is rarely addressed in any mainstream debate, however.

One such debate occurred recently on BBC2’s Jeremy Vine Show. I must point out that, without exception, every Jeremy Vine Show discussion and phone-in I’ve ever heard has resulted in my descent into immediate, weeping, face-clawing despair. Aside from the comments section of the Daily Mail website, the demographic that contributes to Vine’s discussions is the one that most shakes my faith that the human race has advanced at all since the times of those cock-drawing cavemen…”

Read the rest here, and please do rate it 5 stars to make me feel all warm, snuggly and thoroughly validated.

Boys on Film?

2 Replies

There was a thread on IC today where someone asked why, after decades of Feminism, depictions of bondage in the mainstream market and elsewhere are still predominantly of women. Many people came up with excellent arguments as to whether this is the case, and if so, why it is. It got me thinking.

Amongst other things, Mistress Tytania wrote:

Most porn is run and managed by men. Most women in porn haven’t much say in the end product, of what kind of eroticism is represented and sold to the horny masses. While I’m all for porn as an important part of human expression, I have serious problems about the bullying often behind the sex industry, and the way it tends to prey on the vulnerable into its ranks. Many, many women in porn would much rather do anything else (if it paid so well), and when asked, have a lot of hang ups about sexual shame.

I agree wholeheartedly, though the internet is changing the industry. Over the past few years, I’ve met an increasing number of women who produce and sell quality porn online, especially within the Femdom genre, in a way that values and empowers the models involved. In the past, exploitation of women in porn was rife, and in far too many cases it still is, but I think that things in the industry are changing for the better.

The internet has proved that porn’s end-user demographic is no longer a heterosexual male who likes to see brainless big-titted bimbos, but something far more diverse and complex. Mainstream producers no longer have the monopoly, and so we now have the choice to purchase fair-trade wank fodder.

The majority of porn produced by either gender does feature women, in both dominant and submissive situations, but – and this is by no means an objective viewpoint, just my own opinion – they are much nicer to look at. Whether all bound up, or doing the binding, women are aesthetically pleasing. Men can be beautiful too, of course, but the market is driven by consumer demand, and more people who buy porn seem to like looking at ladies than looking at gents, and so there are more images out there of women, just as there always has been.

The thing is, the men are out there to see in all their glory too. The internet has given us the choice to see images that would have been too “niche” for financially viable publishing twenty years ago, and so ultimately there’s more variety now than there has ever been. Cyberspace is still young but, both for better and for worse, it’s changed the face of porn more in the past decade than anything else since the invention of the printing press. I suppose we should just wait and see what happens next.