May 17, 2010

Porn during tragic vs. trivial times

Returning to the post and comments about what art is like when created in a violent vs. a safe environment, it's worth emphasizing that this difference shows up even in low culture. Take porn. Actors in scenes from movies made before the 1992 fall in crime are sincere, psychologically abandoned, and convey a sense of urgency -- like, let's enjoy this magical act before something does us in. The sounds they make are mostly moans and sighs, with the occasional "do you like that?" and "ooooh, that feels so good." You can't help but notice how much they laugh and smile. Sex was just one part of a larger culture of merriment, and you can tell both the guy and girl are totally into it.

Shot during the height of the last violent crime wave, here are two scenes of wild and crazy young people enjoying the pleasures of the flesh (obviously NSFW): Tori Welles with Peter North and Megan Leigh with Tom Byron.

During the mid-late '90s, as all forms of wildness start to decline, we see a steady transition to the porn that is typical of the past 10 years. The performances are not sincere but so overly exaggerated that you wonder whether in a previous lifetime they were professional wrastlers. They are not mentally lost in the moment but incredibly self-conscious, often hamming it up for the camera. The guy never feels any magic or looks like he's experiencing the full range of emotions that we hear, for example, from the speaker in "Little Red Corvette." The girl looks even less psychologically invested -- she might as well be scrolling through her backlog of text messages. (Notice how often you see this in nightclubs nowadays when a guy grinding her from behind gets less attention than her cell phone.)

And there's no sense of urgency -- it's like, "Well we're both being paid to be here, so I guess we might as well have some sex." It's no surprise, then, that they rarely show genuine smiles or laughter; if they laugh, it's always one of those meta-ironic laughs that just worsens the off-putting self-aware feel of the scene. But these minor visual offenses are nothing compared to the assaults on the ear -- no moans or sighs, but instead a bunch of affected grunting. And imagine hearing this in a clockwork rhythm with a deadpan inflection, aside from a Valley Girl rise at the end: "oh fuck yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahhhhh..? oh fuck my little tight pussy...? oh fuck yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahhhh...?" It makes you scramble to find the mute button. Who knew naked chicks could be such boner-killers?

Thrown together sometime in the past couple years, when wildness has been at all-time lows, here's a scene of some couple of soulless retards (again NSFW). Is it over yet?

While I don't consume much porn, from now on it's pre-'91 stuff only. Oddly enough those are the scenes I first saw as a teenager, even though they were made 5 to 10 years before. During a typical snooping-around adventure, I discovered a VHS tape of my dad's buried within a filing cabinet and that had no label -- wow, hidden treasure! I wonder what kind?! It was a video encyclopedia hosted by Hyapatia Lee with clips from the '80s used to illustrate sexual terms. It even had that scene linked to above between Tori Welles and Peter North -- never thought I'd find that one again. I couldn't begin to guess how many times I rewound that scene (or others on the tape) during high school, whereas the '90s movies that I saw when I turned 18 never drew me in so much that I would grow somewhat fond of them. And of course all the junk I downloaded in college in the early 2000s proved disposable.

Just think of how bad the poor teenage males of today have it -- not only are relations between the sexes a lot less wild than before, they can't even escape to the refuge of quasi-mystical, let-it-all-hang-out porn. Guys of a certain age should feel grateful for at least coming of age during the transition after wild times and not during the doldrums of the past decade and counting.

9 comments:

  1. You have to look to find the girls (and guys) that genuinely like it.

    The fairly 'big' actors tend to be in that catergory (Sienna West, Abby Rode, Priya Rai - essentailly most of the Brazzer girls), as do genuine amateurs (Wifey, a lot German homemade) The superstars tend to look bored and/or fake, and the newbies tend to be too anxious and clammy.

    The ones that aren't become big very fast.

    Also for first timers and 'fake' amateur, FTV and BeautifulAgony tend to be fairly good.

    I do agree though you could find more genuine passion as an overall whole pre-1991, even if it was faked. In fact, I don't think it is 1991 that it went downhill, but 1994 with the advent of the internet, the dot-com boom and the associated porn boom. Girls that used to enter porn were probably nymphos, or at least real relaxed about sex. Now you have far too many girls trying to come in for a quick buck or to use it as a platform to get into modelling or acting (rarely works, and the only girls that I can think of that 'make it' tend to be the geneuine performers as well)

    Damn I know a lot about my porn tastes...

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  2. Priya Rai? I'm going to have to go back and watch her work, but from memory I recall that I thought she was fake. Great body, no doubt, but the sounds she made were just fake and it made me want to surf away to the next girl. But maybe I am thinking of another girl.

    I hate bad porn actresses. It is amazing to me how easily I pick up on the subtle cues they give off. If the girl is not enjoying herself, I don't much care for it. Perhaps it has something to do with ovulation, as of course women tend to enjoy sex more when they are ovulating.

    Some of the more quiet ones are actually alright. I like the way Lisa Ann just smiles and lets the guys fuck her. She doesn't say much or make much noise. But she seems very welcoming and erotic, like she has genuine passion.

    A bad example for me would be Lily Thai. GREAT body, but the way she yells 'fuck me, fuck me daddy' is so fake it is distracting. I'd rather if a girl doesn't enjoy the sex that she just stays silent rather than offering over enthusiastic encouragement.

    Hypothetical: the appeal of Milfs isn't necessarily that they enjoy sex more (it's a myth that women in their late 30's to 40's have higher sex drives, I read, though this conflicts with the supposed higher levels of testosterone they experience as their estrogen drops,) or that MILFs are necessarily better at the physical act, but rather that they are better at giving off the subtle cues of encouragement.

    I think older women may not be any more likely to orgasm from intercourse itself, as an intercourse orgasm is rare in women. But they just enjoy the act of letting a young stud fuck them. They feed on the youthful vigor of young enthusiastic men. So they just encourage the guys to go at it, to service them.

    However, of course, older women are probably more in tune with how to bring themselves to orgasm through cunnilingus or manually using hands or toys. So they are more likely to know what they want, which is an appeal to young men who enjoy a woman who is confident rather than one who 'just lays there'.

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  3. You should also look at sex and sexual tension within films during wild times vs boring times.

    Also, what about the history of erotic art. How does that follow the trends of violence.

    - Breeze

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  4. "You should also look at sex and sexual tension within films during wild times vs boring times."

    I'm doing that for my data blog. Specifically, how many of the top 10 box office movies in a given year showed T&A, from the late '60s (when it became legal) through 2009.

    "You have to look to find the girls (and guys) that genuinely like it."

    I checked those listed, and they all seem pretty fake. Not just the looks (like fake boobs) but the overall exaggeration and self-consciousness. Maybe they like it, but they don't appear to enter a state of ecstasy like the '70s and '80s girls do.

    "Girls that used to enter porn were probably nymphos, or at least real relaxed about sex. Now you have far too many girls trying to come in for a quick buck"

    But just because more mercenary girls are entering the business, that doesn't mean the ecstasy-feeling nymphos will disappear altogether. It looks more like the way people experience sex has changed because their mindset during safe times has shifted away from "life is short -- let's have fun while we can." That shift has affected normal people as well as the girls who go into porn. Actors in general recently seem too self-aware.

    "Hypothetical: the appeal of Milfs [...] that they are better at giving off the subtle cues of encouragement."

    Relative to the over-the-top ear-piercing fake grunts, sure subtle is better. Porn has sunk pretty low, though, if low-key menopausal women is the best they have to offer.

    Or since the business is really competitive, make that the tastes of regular guys have sunk so low -- the producers of it are only giving the audience what it wants.

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  5. Weve been in recession for a couple of years now. There is no telling how many young-to-early-middle-aged women in this country have worked in selling sex in one form or another (2 or 3% of the decent-looking ones?, more?).


    1. Stripping leads to porn
    2. Porn leads to high-end prostitution.
    3. High-end prostitution leads to low-end prostitution and a badly-damaged life.


    Advocatus Diaboli, a blogger, has had some posts in the past dealing with his practice of purchasing escorts. I looked around one night (ended up staying up for hours doing it too) at various sites that had escort-services listed. Guess what I found? I found one service that has nothing but former porn-actresses. They were expensive, some were just south of 2K per hour. Some were only about 1K per hour.


    How I think this information dovetails with Agnostic's point is this: The girls in porn, by the time they've been in the biz for a couple of months, are probably supremely aware of the vocation they are in. They know their flickering-copulation-images will be out there on the net until the apocolypse on various free sites. They know their still images with penises inside their various orfices will be online for earthly eternity and their stage names will be attatched to their faces, and their bios will be on IMBD. They -KNOW- they are flesh-workers and will be regarded as such and probably will be marked on the street in the future, and will likely have to tell a future husband of what they did at some point.

    Back in the VHS era a girl could probably safely get out of porn and finish nursing school and plausibly deny that she was in porn ("Must be some other girl, I just look like her, sorry....not me"), but these days, by merely googling a stage name, her image can be brought right up in mid-fellatio with some guys testicles resting under her chin. That knowledge probably takes a little of the "naughty-fun" out of the equation.

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  6. I think all the stars I mentioned do fake on occasion (and yes, they are all augemented, though Abby Rode is very subtle)

    But they defo have fun.

    As for Lisa Ann - yeah, she just gets on with it and enjoys the ride, pun intended.

    As I said, the 'real' girls (what ever that is meant to mean) stick to the 'softcore' genre. Or amateur. Or independant.

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  7. "Relative to the over-the-top ear-piercing fake grunts, sure subtle is better. Porn has sunk pretty low, though, if low-key menopausal women is the best they have to offer."

    I am still trying to find more information on women's sex drives and how it changes as they age. Dr. Sherrill Sellman is a source I like on informaiton about femal physiology because she is critical of birth control pills. She talks about 'copulins' and how the pill reduces a female's appeal to men.

    An article of hers that might be pertinent:

    http://www.whatwomenmustknow.com/pdfs/MythsandTruthsHors.pdf

    She says that women do not just degrade hormonally over the years but rather they just change hormonally. I read form another source that they become testosterone dominant, but I lost that link.

    I like MILFS and cougars because they are sexually mature. They are less fertile so they are more likely to engage in sex as recreation, whereas young women fall in love so easily, I believe because they are primed to secure a mate for parental investment, as all the ev. psych books tell us.

    But in my opinion there is a window of time, when the woman has retained enough of her fertility to be reasonably attractive, yet she is still less fertile and ready for sex without strings attached.

    Not saying I don't like young ones too, it's just that I find the dynamic with young women different. They are more susceptable to letting their hormonal cycles get the best of them and influencing me to feel guilty for fucking them and not wanting to be their prince charming.

    A lot of young women don't even know how to flirt. Sure you can grind on them at a club, but in public they just don't seem to be game to smile and wink and talk. But that is probably cultural too. I go to Mexico and the women there are so smiley its just grand. Europe too. The women there are very open about sex. So there is probably a puritanical WASP factor here. 'm in California, where the girls also courtesy flirt often, and where a lot of them are also stuck up and only care what car you drive.

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  8. Thrown together sometime in the past couple years, when wildness has been at all-time lows, here's a scene of some couple of soulless retards (again NSFW). Is it over yet?

    If that's not a totally gay video then I'm the next Miss Nude America. I mean, it focuses entirely on a man's tallywhacker, while the woman remains clothed.

    Peter

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  9. A friend confided in me that he prefers BDSM porn because the girls are more genuine.

    I guess you can't fake pain as well as an orgasm.

    Also, from talking with his ex I'm fairly certain my friend doesn't actually have BDSM fantasies.

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