
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 porn industry may be supersaturated with crap, but I’m hardly noticing. Much like any other medium, I ignore what doesn’t interest me and concentrate on the good stuff.
Too many don’t realize that there are quality producers out there. Companies like Adam & Eve and Vivid aren’t doing bad work.
But as for something different, try the videos of Tristan Taormino or Kimberly Kane’s “Live in My Secrets”. I’m also a fan of Jack the Zipper and Andrew Blake. Outside of the Porn Valley, there’s European porno (Viv Thomas) and the non-porn, yet explicit, documentaries of Tony Comstock.
As a selective consumer I don’t get too worked up over the industries’ flaws. Sure, the instances of female degradation and terms like ‘interracial’ upset me, but I don’t watch those videos.
On that note, as long as it’s consensual, I don’t see why extreme porn should be stopped. Someone once said: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” Obscenity is a vague legal term that leads to censorship.
Also, Slippy2 is being too subjective. He writes, “We NEVER want to see the guy’s face, and we RARELY need a close up of a woman’s face.” Actually, I enjoy looking at the girl’s face, and I bet some women and men enjoy looking at the guy’s.
The whole rant read childish to me.
THANK YOU!!! I totally agree with everything you wrote and I appreciate you distilling it for me.
I too have always been baffled that anyone in the industry would even allow a close-up shot of a mans’ face in their porn. No straight man ever wants to see a mans face. We want the man to be as anonymous as possible at all times. How can you retards in the porn industry not know that? Also, leave out the extended close-ups of men’s asses, buttholes and bouncing balls. Let me make it really simple for you morons; as soon as i see a close up of a mans face or butt, I immediately reject your product and anything else you put out.
Angelo – Tony Comstock’s making porn. Good porn, but porn nonetheless.
Sybatra – You’re welcome
James – I don’t subscribe to the ‘men must not be seen’ school of thought though, for those who do “Virtual Sex” titles take that approach. That said, the sexual content of a video aimed at men should be female centric. Placing a camera at a balls eye point of view has always left me a little confused.
Angelo, you nailed it… “childish”. That’s a ridiculous straw man argument by someone who sounds afraid to figure out what they really believe.