This Josh Simmon’s piece is currently for sale in my local comic book store, Secret Headquarters. I’m not sure that one of the greatest pop bands ever would appreciate being reduced this far and I’m pretty sure Frida was more lino than shagpile.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Over at Xbiz slippy2 has posted a rant that’s getting attention:

Porn is a very strange industry. It seems to operate in its own universe, with no oversight, few laws, and no direct customer feedback. Couple this with the fact that all you need is a handycam and a couple grand to make a porn video, and it’s no wonder that 95% of the content is garbage, made by completely unqualified amateurs.

I have consumed a lot of porn over the years, and put money in a lot of your pockets, so I thought I would provide some feedback that you can take or leave.

I see very disturbing trends in porn, and it’s made me seriously consider giving it up completely, for the rest of my life. It’s not that I’m religious, right-wing, or puritanical in any way shape or form. It’s just that I have a conscience, unlike many of you apparently.

Let me just list my critiques of the state of porn, and please take it in the spirit it was intended:

Extreme Porn: this will be your downfall, as the vast majority of normal people find this stuff disgusting and disturbing, and would be likely to support legislation to stamp it out. Why can’t you guys police yourselves? Why the fascination with all things disgusting and degrading? Do you really need to simulate rape or have sex with animals to make a dollar? Where is OSHA? How is it that it’s legal to physically assault your employees in this industry, and no other?!

Violence Towards Women: More than any other thing, this has made me feel that I simply cannot continue to support this industry in good conscience. The slapping, spitting, choking, strangling, degrading, it’s sickening. Shoving baseball bats up women’s asses, making women suck the feces off of the guy’s dick… Only sick, demented, woman-hating losers like this stuff, so why do you produce so much of it??? At the current rate of escalation, it won’t be long before the guy is just punching and kicking the woman as he has sex with her.

The ATM trend: While I’m on the subject, what the hell is up with this???? Why does EVERY video have to feature this despicable act that only a few psychos actually enjoy?

Total Lack of Originality: It seems that the ideas are all dried up. Every single porn produced these days either A) looks like every single other porn, or B) tries some retarded gimmick to compensate for lack of creativity. Oh gee, let’s put this retard in a face mask and that will make the video exciting and kinky! I know! Let’s shoot the video in a mechanic’s garage!!! That will make it totally fresh and creative!

Technical Craft: I hardly need to mention this, as it’s obvious to everyone. Why can’t this industry ever seem to employ QUALIFIED camera operators, gaffers, sound men, directors, and editors? It’s as if you just let your buddies fill in on all these jobs after a 5-minute orientation. The quality of most videos is absurdly low. This is the only business I know of where someone with zero training, experience, or talent as a photographer, can….make a living selling photographs! Ridiculous! The editing in this industry is so awful it makes me wonder if the video is even edited at all.

Ugly, horrid male talent: Man its hard to get it up these days watching porn because of the moronic male talent. Is there not a single male porn star without 40 shitty prison tattoos? Seriously, why all the awful tats? They are so distracting and stupid it’s unbelievable that you would hire these people as MODELS. These guys all look like ex-cons who couldn’t make it in any other field. Many of them are straight up retarded looking, and behave like violent, woman-hating assholes in their videos. The few guys who don’t have shite tattoos make up for it by wearing ridiculous bling or stupid clothing. The idea is to NOT BE DISTRACTING!!! Is that really so hard to comprehend? I don’t want to be distracted by the guy’s shiny silver watch in the foreground when I’m trying to look at the WOMAN. Good god, this seems so obvious, why don’t you get it? And by the way, you can’t tell me that there aren’t thousands of better looking, qualified male actors available. Since Viagra, almost anyone can do it. It’s clear that you just engage in nepotism by hiring the same losers over and over for decades.

Face Shots: We NEVER want to see the guy’s face, and we RARELY need a close up of a woman’s face. Every time the action starts to get good, the moronic cameraman feels like he needs to zoom in to the talent’s FACE. ARRRGH.

Formula: It’s official – every single porn video produced follows the exact same formula, but with different actors. Solo tease, blowjob, ass licking, fucking in the usual positions, a little anal, facial pop shot. BORING. We’ve seen this a million times.

Running time: We do not need to see a mindless, viagra-fueled drone mechanically pumping away at a girl for 30 full minutes. Your ploy of trying to make up for lack of quality, with a long running time, is very transparent. I would bet that almost all guys would rather jerk to a high-quality, 10 minute scene any day, instead of having to work the fast forward so often.

Extremism to compensate for lack of creativity: Rather than create sexy scenarios or actually use your brain to come up with more stimulating ideas, most porn directors simply default to making all of their material more extreme, and including more slapping and choking. I want to puke when I see this, or crawl into the screen and beat the living shit out of the male “talent” for committing heinous acts of abuse against women.

Gonzo: soulless, mindless fucking just doesn’t create a thrill. There is no set up or any type of scenario created any more, just straight to the mindless plowing.

High Cost: Guess what? We know that you are cheap and you didn’t pay your crew or talent very much at all, as evidenced by how ghetto your material looks. So why do you think a DVD is worth 50 bucks??!!!

Kitchen Sink Approach: Rather than segment videos out according to people’s different tastes, you try to cram every conceivable fetish into every video you produce. The result is utterly annoying: way more time spent skipping scenes than actually watching video.

Quantity over Quality: Making 100 videos a year doesn’t make up for the fact that none of them are any good. People would rather pay more for higher quality, and not need to buy so much of it to find the good stuff.

Most of you will sneer and blow this post off. Fine. But I’m not just some Joe out there, I’m a professional video producer myself, and I recognize crap when I see it. I have never seen an industry more ripe for a competitor to come in and just absolutely dominate, simply by observing the above criticisms and doing it right.

peace out

He makes a number of good points. The industry appears to be more focused on the competition than the customers.

It’s a common business trap. Currently every social website’s trying to rip-off Twitter because that’s easier than thinking about what people want. The copying is mindless and in the porn industry the same thinking has taken hold. What Max Hardcore once shocked us with (A2M), is now mainstream. It wasn’t demanded, just copied by companies too lazy to innovate and too deaf to listen.

Watching porn movies starring people who were only entering adolescence in 2004, means adjusting to a sexuality which has little in common with anyone who had a pre-web childhood. Customers like slippy2 are either dinosaurs, extinct as others rise to take their place, or tigers, killed off prematurely by a world hunting them with technology they don’t understand. Time will tell.

Popularity: unranked [?]

The AVN Industry Directory 2009

For the first time in my life I’m getting AVN delivered. Living in the US has its advantages and, criticisms aside, AVN’s still the most significant jizz-bizz publication. A digital subscription would be even better but until there’s some way to send words down a wire we’ll have to put up with print.

Preceding my first issue I received a copy of AVN’s subscriber gift, the “AVN Industry Directory 2009″. I’m surprised to report it’s pretty useful. Along with lists of suppliers, service providers and manufacturers, there’s good information on filming in LA, the adult ecosystem of charities and foundations, and a glossary of terms. All information you could Google, but only if you know the right questions to ask to start with?

It’s not perfect of course. Some of the tech definitions are flaky, the financial statistics are fiction, and, if you’re not interested in making porn films, much of the industry info’s redundant. AVN still stress the V in their name as hard as the A, it would be nice to see them admit it’s all just bits now. That said, it’s free, nicely presented and has been researched by people with a professional interest in keeping you out of jail – unlike many websites.

If you run an adult website or blog you probably qualify for a free AVN/AVN Online subscription. They make money selling ads, and the more porn professionals they have on their lists the more they can charge. Industry insiders are worth more to them as readers than buyers so ask and you’ll probably receive.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Bacchaus, who correctly concluded being a pornographer would garner more respect than being a lawyer, is close to closing ErosBlog.

At Wired Bruce Sterling is incorrectly hailing the change as a portent of doom for porn in general. You and I know porn’s weak because it’s mostly rubbish. It will be strong again when it stops losing ground to non-porn-sexy-stuff which doesn’t assault you with ugliness and stupidity.

Bacchaus’s full, pro-chicken, rant is here. He gets it exactly right when he pegs his problem as having nothing to sell. I worked that out at the beginning of 2008. Now I’m working to fix that.

If you’re a sex-blogger without a product, how are you making money? Anyone clearing four figures on ad links alone?

(Apologies getting to this embarrassingly late. Wired’s uncomfortably thick RSS feed has lain neglected by me to the tune of 300 posts.)

Popularity: unranked [?]

The utterly predictable stunt of mixing nudity and pop videos still works if you’re smart enough to make it interesting. Make The Girl Dance took three women, sans clothes, and had them walk through the center of Paris miming along to a cutsie boombox.

It’s all done in one take but most people will be too focused on the nudity to notice the artistry. For some reason they flopped the images too, I un-flopped the still above because French written backwards seems foreign to me.

In London the crowd behind them by the end of the street would number hundreds and be turning violent. In America they’d have been arrested. In Paris – as any Francophile knows – people smile, glance and get on with their day.

Compared to porn’s take on exhibitionism you can’t but wonder where all the style, taste and fun has gone. (The only kink they understand at Kink.com is BDSM. Why can’t they produce anything that’s not a BDSM scenario at heart).

One day, I’m gonna live, in Paris. I promise. I’m on it.

Popularity: unranked [?]

You can follow me, on Twitter, here @SugarBank. (47)

Don’t panic – I was using Twitter before Oprah was. (52)

I don’t really understand the appeal. (38)

As someone who never got into IM, super-public IM seems like a step back. (74)

As a micro-blog Twitter makes more sense, but I find it hard to say hello in less than 140 characters which is awkward. (120)

Most of all I find the volume of shite problematic. (52)

I open Twitter, it vomits tweets all over me, I close Twitter and wonder why I’m involved. Most of it’s not that interesting. (125)

All that said – I do post occasionally and I’m sure it’d be more frequent if I new more, better, people. (105)

See you in 140 (it’s a fad). (28)

Popularity: unranked [?]

A fantastically sweet clip from the best newspaper on Earth New York Times, detailing the $1M a year sexware manufacturing business of two Pakistani brothers.

Link

Popularity: unranked [?]

I thought that sticking your dick in a vacuum cleaner was an urban myth. Probably because I have a Dyson that’d rip it clean off. This gent has turned a love of double insertion, a graduate degree in electronics, soda bottles and old vacuum cleaner motors into the future.

Wii Do It. I see it now.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Now Jenna Jameson’s no longer pretending to be in the adult industry the media’s having to decide on a new face for porn. Tera Patrick has always wanted to be as big as Jenna, but the zeitgeist is so far from massive implants and guitar based Rock ‘n’ Roll that she seems quaintly out-of-touch. The story now is slight, pale, body-mod free women who can claim to be everything the last generation weren’t. Ironically they’ve come full circle. No longer independent and business focussed, they work for other people and tell themselves that doing what the public demands is proof of their freedom, not a failure to set the agenda.

Enter Sasha Grey.

Cast in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience she’s enjoying a very intense 15 minutes. She’s a pretty, 21 year old, proud autodidact starring in a film people can admit to being interested in without shame. The LA Times, Backstage, Tyra Banks and others are all dusting off their favorite porn fable. Someone’s escaped the pen, Sasha Grey’s going mainstream, porn’s no longer in the closet.

The problem of course is that porn’s not been in the closet for over a decade. Everyone under 30 experienced an unlimited, porn-fueled, puberty. Their experience and attitudes to sex are so radically different to those even five years senior that it’s hard to communicate across the gap. They’ve seen everything and are looking for ways to process what they know, experience what they’re attracted to, and stand apart from the past. For the first time in America it’s possible that people claiming no sexual shame are telling the truth. More likely they’re just ashamed of what they haven’t done.

Sasha’s a prime example. Her real name’s all over the web. She’s too young, and too libertine, to guard her non-porn future the way performers did back in 2005. She makes her money in other people’s movies and is becoming famous for being visible, where her predecessors became famous for the money they made becoming visible, then walked away rich and anonymous.

Is she cracking the mainstream? It’s easy to measure. Crossing over means being seen as a talent outside the field you came to prominence in without being boxed in by your past. When a comedian like Jaime Foxx appears in an all-black comedy movie he’s just a comedian who got an acting gig. When he plays a boxing trainer in a serious drama he’s crossed over. Casting a pornster to play a prostitute is not breaking the mainstream. If Sasha goes on to play roles with her clothes on, in which she isn’t being used as a sexual lure, then she might have made the jump. Sadly for her, while no-one cares if Jaime Foxx does the odd stand-up tour, until the first internet generation of American adults is in charge, it’s doubtful the public will welcome a working actress who makes the occasional scud-flick.

No one sane would want to, but in case this is it Sasha will have to pretend that working as an autonomous body-part is as rewarding as the art, music and acting she’s allowed to dabble in.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Want to know what I’m doing with the 99.9% of my time which doesn’t involve writing this Blog? Click here and become one of the hand-selected alpha testers/users of my dating/friend-finding/hooking-up site.

Why? Well:

1. As an early user you can secure an account name that doesn’t contain hyphens, numbers or other random noise. You can even put spaces in it because it’s 2009 and I like spaces.
2. I’ll give you $10 against anything you might be able to purchase through the site in future (it’s all free and will remain so, but there’s a business model on the way which will provide opportunities to spend money on stuff).
3. Recording a profile now gets you an invite to the beta later (the site’s not fully open yet).
4. The only people who know about this dating site right now are my friends. I have very hot friends. They might date you.

Worried about getting killed on Craigslist? Give this a try…

Popularity: unranked [?]