Monk

“Do you come even though your clit isn’t being worked on?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I have an orgasm every time I get screwed in the throat.”

-- Linda Lovelace, “Ordeal”

This porn confessional was my bedtime fun-read. I remember when I first laid my hands on the book. I was in high school and spending the night at a friend’s house. It was the first time that I got caught with my dick in my hand, so to speak. I was only racing through for the hot parts back then. Thirty years later and I have finally given it an honest cover-to-cover read, and I was delightfully surprised by how absorbing the story is. It really takes you into that twisted relationship between Chuck Traynor and Linda, the sexual sadist and the corruption of a good Christian girl, as she tells it, and the story of how a supposed sex slave becomes the darling of the porn world and a guest of honor among the mainstream celebrities, becoming a regular at the Playboy mansion as well as a regular at Sammy Davis Jr.’s feet.

The way it ends makes me think of Nabokov’s Lolita and Humbert. According to Wikipedia, “Traynor died aged 64 of a heart attack in Chatsworth, California on July 22, 2002, three months after Lovelace died from massive trauma and internal injuries as a result of a car accident.” Of course, Humbert is repentant at the end and Chuck Traynor is not, but I guess that is the difference between high literature and real life.

It's an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by "hooking on the side". It's also called "doing privates", as in private bookings. The official industry line is that it's dangerous (because clients aren't tested the way performers are) and irresponsible (because the women could then infect the closed community of professional performers). But the women can make far more money having sex behind closed doors than doing it on film and, in fact, the practice is widespread. For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.

-- Louis Theroux at The Guardian

The thesis of the larger article is that the Internet is killing the porn industry, which can sound counter-intuitive, since that is what most of us use the Internet for. However, as the music studios and movie companies will tell you, there is a difference between enjoying entertainment on your computer and whether the producers and artists are getting paid for it. I know I have yet to pay a single dollar for porn on the Net and I've been at it for nearly ten years now.

A porn producer and distributor, Mr. Ira Isaacs, was convicted in California for a little known film titled “Hollywood Scat Amateurs #10”. Apparently nine is fine and ten is too much. But all joking aside. I recently mentioned that I do not care for blood-play in sex (nor for blood-play in anything, frankly). I can now happily report that I have even less interest in people playing with feces. I cannot imagine the thrill myself, and I trust that this fascination will forever remain a nauseating mystery to me.

Nevertheless, I do love the argument that Michael Stabile makes on behalf of fetish porn. I know what it is to be on the wrong side of majoritarian tastes. It was a perfect little hell for me back in the early and mid nineties, when rape scenes were effectively verboten in this country. A lot of people may find scenes of forced sex to be as sickening as blood-play or scat-play, perhaps even worse, but that was one ban that I could personally feel the sting of. The authorities have apparently loosened up a bit on that one, thankfully, as a lot of people, both men and women, enjoy rape fantasies, but the experience of that prohibition only strengthened my appreciation for a more absolutist position on free speech. And Stabile makes the case as well as anyone.


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Obviously Hollywood Scat Amateurs #10 was never intended to be art, and that’s the real problem with the art argument: it covers up what’s truly valuable about these films, which is that they allow us to critique of the notion of obscenity itself.

The California obscenity statute defines “prurience” as “a morbid, degrading, unhealthy interest in sex.” But this sells all sexual minorities down the river. Is it more degrading to see a representation of your desire, or be deemed “perverted” by the state? In 2012, should the state still be passing judgment on the consensual sex lives of others?

[...]

Isaacs’s attorney, Roger Diamond, may have failed to argue anything other than “artistic value” in his client’s defense, but in his closing argument, he made a point that had barely surfaced in the trial.

“People watch these movies and know that they’re not alone in the world,” Diamond said. “If people want to buy these movies, they ought to be able to.”

This is the community standard that we should be fighting for: a standard that proclaims the “deviant subset” has the same right to watch what it wants as does any average member of the community, as long as the production itself is not crime. It's a recognition that sexual speech is covered by the First Amendment, regardless of whether we think it has “serious” value.

-- Michael Stabile, "If Porn Isn’t Art, Does It Still Have a Right to Exist?" at The Daily Beast

"Hustler" magazine has its own style guide on the sensitive question.

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Copy editor Eric Althoff] said that the magazine prefers “come” as a verb and “cum” as a noun in references to ejaculation. But on the magazine’s cover, it would allow “cum” in either situation to get the attention of potential buyers. “‘Cum’ is going to jump out at consumers,” he said.

-- The Dish

I bet you didn't know that porn is passionately popular on the Internet.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn.

While it’s difficult domain to penetrate — hard numbers are few and far between — we know for a fact that porn sites are some of the most trafficked parts of the internet. According to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which tracks users across the web with a cookie, dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites. Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. LiveJasmin isn’t much smaller. YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the internet.

[...]

The internet really is for porn.

-- Sebastian Anthony at ExtrmeTech.com

A biopic on Linda Lovelace should be coming out soon, having finished filming. So, we are getting some buzz in the media.

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‘When you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped,’ she baldly told an official inquiry into the sex industry in 1986. ‘It is a crime that movie is still showing. There was a gun to my head the entire time.’

For her old friends in the business, though, she was a traitor and they sneeringly coined the term ‘Linda Syndrome’ to describe former porn stars who later try to disown their seedy careers.

But it wasn’t long before Lovelace turned on her feminist allies, too, complaining bitterly they had ‘used’ her.

‘They made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else,’ she moaned. Lovelace told friends the final insult was when Steinem did not invite her to her wedding (to David Bale, father of British actor Christian Bale). Poverty and a series of health crises blighted her later years.

-- Tom Leonard at The Daily Mail

Here is a top ten list of the most ridiculous anti-Internet porn commercials, and these are a couple of my favorites:




Ah, I miss J-TV already! But I swear there are too many viruses floating around there, and after staying up until the wee hours restoring my hijacked Norton and my crippled computer, I just don't feel it's worth the risk. Heh, that might even be a more effective ad against Internet porn: Is it really worth crashing your computer over?

"Dead or Alive Xtreme 2" came in yesterday, a day ahead of schedule. In the first minutes of running the game, I was so excited by its sex appeal, I even fancied that if I could only keep one game, I might actually prefer to keep this one instead of "Grand Theft Auto 4." However, before the day ended, I was preferring "BioShock" and "World Series of Poker," with Dead or Alive only beating out Father's unused hunting games.

I don't know if I'll ever master the controls when it comes to this game or "Rumble Roses." I imagine I should be able to master them with a little application, since it doesn't seem to present a problem for average gamers, but the problem may be that I cannot feel motivated to become better at volleyball or making wrestling moves.

The fundamental problem may be that these XBox games can only be so sexy. It doesn't even allow me enough control over the camera to enjoy those prurient, extended crotch shots; one has to be happy with the quick glimpses they give you, which may be understandable in real life, but I paid for this game, and I got it principally for my pervy pleasure, which is understood to be the only real reason why anyone would buy this game - that's what it's for!