Elf Sternberg

This afternoon, I was looking at Fleshbot (yeah, I do that, get over it), and they had a preview stills from some porn film entitled MILF Mania 3. MILF seems to be the term of art, rather than the more appropriate Cougar, although both essentially mean women over the age of 40 being banged by younger men.

The problem with MILF porn is simple: it's all shot in Southern California. And Southern California women, like South Florida women, all have one thing in common: their skin is aged an extra 10 years or so by the relentless sunlight. I've slept with 40-year-old and up women from Seattle, and their skin doesn't look like that. Women in Seattle have smooth and wonderful skin close its original shade, mostly because we don't have that many sunny days (today isn't one, for example). Even the farmer's daughters have lovely skin that shows little signs of sun damage or weather beating.

I think there needs to be a Seattle-based line of porn films: Seattle Cougars I through XXXVI, all with hot women who both have the maturity to know why they fuck, and bodies that have not been abused by endless hours of UV radiation.

You know how I used to bitch and mock the bad porny novels coming out of houses like Samhain and Ellora's Cave? About how all the BDSM novels were either written by people who had never done it, or had done it were all New Relationship Energy with their toy and had to tell you all about how cool it was, or who had done it but couldn't write their way out of a paper bag?

There is something worse, I've discovered: the gay porn written by straight women for straight women. Who've never committed sodomy in their lives. Who have no idea what cock even tastes like. Who are absolutely clueless about what men are like in bed. Prissy, excessively talented cops and cowboys who "discover" sometime in their lives that hey, they like guys like they never noticed before and, miraculously, the right guy is there. It's like, two men who would be perfect husbands if only they weren't gay, which is a mirror for the one man who would be a perfect husband if only he weren't about to marry the female protagonist.

Gag me. No, not you.

A peek into the far right echo chamber:

( Pretty long )

A geek is someone who, while looking at photos of Chloe Vevrier, zooms in on her face, finds no index of refraction in her spectacles and mutters, "Damn. It's just a prop..."

Okay, three things I've seen in either hentai or photographic smut recently that really annoy me:

(1) There seems to be a strong rise in hentai of the theme "A woman who falls in love with another woman deserves rape." I'm really getting sick of that.

(2) Of a certain photographic smut: I don't really care that you've managed to get the model to come out of semi-retirement after two years off-stage. I don't really care that I happen to like the model quite a bit. I don't really care for her "upgrades," but that's her choice. But I'm probably not going to spend another dime if you insist on putting a biohazard symbol on her g-string.

(3) This pose (dude, so not safe for work, kids, or spouses that if you pull this up with witnesses you might as well start running). The last thing I want to see is a woman about to blow her boobs off.

Okay, I confess. I looked at Lindsay Lohan's nude photos, [NSFW] and I have to say that I'm convinced: she has every potential to be a very beautiful woman. I mean, if you happen to like big-breasted girls with hourglass figures, which I do (heck, I married one). Not a bad rump, either. That said, if you look at the third picture on the fleshbot sampler (again, dudes, [NSFW]) there's just something wrong with her eyes. It looks like she's exhausted, or stoned, or recently plastinated^[?]. Which is too bad.

Then again, as most people know, my taste in women runs more toward Camryn Manheim than the Olson twins.

Normally, the intellectual descendents of Andrea Dworkin and I don't see at all eye to eye. After all, I produce erotica; Dworkin loathed it. I celebrate a sense of masculine sex and role that she found abhorrent, a respect for the difference in the sexes that she found incomprehensible, and an appreciation for physical pleasures that require more vigor than mere cuddling. (Oh, I'm all for cuddling, too. Even as the only thing for some ocassions and the appropriate reaction to some people. It just not the only thing, and writing about it would become dull eventually.)

Robert Jensen is considered one of those intellectual descendents. He has an observation in his book Getting Off that I've made on more than one occassion, and for a while I could point at the misogyny of Japanese porn. (I used to think it was patriarchial-- and perhaps it is. But what I've read of women Japanese writers in the original, I can only conclude that when the tables are turned and women have power, they would mistreat men just as readily. It's not about sex: it's about power, and having it, and showing it. It might just be revenge fantasy for them. I have no idea.) But I'm seeing more of it in the United States.

There are two primary strains of pornography: the traditional kind, in which there's a script, and an intent to follow some thin thread of a storyline from beginning to end. And then there's gonzo, in which two people are put in front of the camera and just told to have sex. There's no justification, no emotional connection. Here's your paycheck: now fuck for it.

Over the past three years, gonzo has gotten mean. I can no longer deny this. The epithets fly: 'tramp', 'bitch', 'whore', 'cunt,' 'slut.' Women are slapped, choked, gagged until they throw up. All kinds of nastiness is thrown at women: comments about the way they look, the way they smell, the sounds of their voice. Gonzo these days starts with the assumption that women are stupid and cheap and exist only to be used by cruel men, and often include the subtle message that you're not a real man unless you can use women and throw them away like that.

The alarming fact is that this cruelty-based gonzo outsells all other kinds of hardcore pornography right about now. Jensen's claim, and it's one I'm having a hard time arguing with, is this: We aren't as civilized as we claim to be. This industry thrives because the vast majority of American men who buy pornography, who sit in darkened rooms and masturbate to this stuff, like the cruelty. It's a passive cruelty: we can claim that it's vicarious, and it's on TV so it's "make believe," and the actresses all say they like it. (I know, I know, I'm supposed to believe what they say and accept their empowerment, but the one time I watched a Hillary Scott film I couldn't even watch to the end; she did not look like she was having fun, and she's Adult Video News's "hottest actress" two years in a row.)

Even if that's true, why do men buy it? Jensen believes it is because we do not, as a society, reject cruelty as much as we would wish. We reject the commission of cruelty, but we're perfectly happy to watch it. Degradation and deliberate cruelty are becoming more commonplace even as pornography becomes more commonplace.

This disturbs me on so many levels. If this is the audience, do I even want to write smut anymore? I've tried to make my characters human; the ones who degrade and demean end up unwanted and unloved by the end, served with cosmic justice of the authorial sort. If people are going to engage in "merely friendly exercise," as Heinlein put it, they should at least like each other and treat one another with the kind of respect that wishes they'd come back and do it again.

I don't like what I'm seeing in porn these days. I'm hoping I'm wrong about this. Are my perceptions off, or is the market, as it widens, as men become saturated with it, now appealing to more coarse, vicious, and base instincts?

Maybe this is why I read romance novels instead these days, and ask my women friends for their favorite one-handed girly reading.

I wonder if there'll be any confusion between this Accelerando (SFW) and this Accelerando (warning, NSFW). I don't think I'm going to mix up Charlie Stross with Yuki Seto, and a mash-up seems unlikely.

It's 4:30 in the morning and I'm still awake. Why? Because I'm having an allergy fit and my back is still screaming at me that I drank too much water before going to bed and waited too long to get up and relieve myself.

Godzilla and Lucille, my nicknames for the neighbor's dogs (a black-and-tan half Rotweiller, a black-and-tan half Chihuahua-- you make the connection), are blissfully, finally silent. We're running a fan at night, somewhat to keep the house cool but also to provide white noise to filter out Lucille's shitty little yaps. (And if you know why I've called the Godzilla and Lucille, you are a serious filk geek.)

Our budget has become extremely tight-- so much so that I've had to shut down my Usenet feed for a month or two. This would almost cause serious withdrawal if it weren't for (a) the huge backlog of unsorted movies, anime, cartoons, amateur art and posted porn, and (b) the discovery of bittorrent, which keeps the anime flowing, and fusker, which keeps the porn cache well-topped.

But there is that backlog. I've been using this middle-of-the-night time to clean it up, and as I did so something caught my eye.

( A pleasant discovery. )