Elf Sternberg

Emma Lindsay has a long post entitled Porn Makes Men Terrible in Bed, in which she talks about how porn is a terrible teacher of the things women like, that much porn shows women not in physical pleasure but in either a workaday mode or actually disliking what's being filmed. She talks about how the messaging for women is terribly fucked up, and she talks about how the message "Women don't care about looks" is fiercely anti-woman because it basically messages that women don't care about pleasure.

Maybe that's the point.

I left a comment on this quote:

When I think about wanting to have sex like a man, I think about wanting to enjoy sex with reckless abandon the way men enjoy sex.

The phrase "reckless abandon" there is really the money quote of the whole article: It's "reckless" because the men she's describing don't care about their partners; it's "abandon" because the men she's describing aren't actually enjoying it; they're seeking something other than pleasure. I go with the Marquis de Sade on this: the men she's describing are not interested in pleasure, they're interested in relief. Relief from their sex drive. Relief from this bizarre urge that hit them during puberty, the most confusing time of their lives, that drives them to associate with "gurlz."

Lindsay finishes with this gem:

If you are not actually receiving pleasure in sex, you are the one in power; your partner will always crave you more than you crave him. This gives you some degree of control.

Exactly. And in this patriarchal society, I have yet to be convinced that it's physical, sexual pleasure that most men are after. It's power. It's the power to get the relief they want and need. The frustration she talks about, when marriages go celibate because the woman isn't getting her needs met, the anger she hears from men, is the anger that their power isn't working, their relief isn't coming anymore.

That's why the "women don't care about looks" meme evolved. Lindsay begs men to at least try to care about their looks, to communicate "I care about your pleasure, even your visual pleasure." But let's face it: most men don't.

If you want to know why porn evolved into this marketable resource primarily depicting women doing uncomfortable acts, your answer is simple: that's what the market wanted. Not women in pleasure. Not women expressing their own pleasure. It wants to sell the viewer on the idea of women who'll grant him the relief he wants, regardless of the cost to their own bodies.

An acquaintance of mine commented over the media, while wringing its collective hands over Zootopia and the furry community:

One interesting thing I also noticed when media does decide to talk about furry porn: the gay stuff doesn't exist.

I had a very similar reaction to an (otherwise pretty good) Marie Claire article about porn, Porn is today's Sex-Ed, in which the author wrote, "Porn sanitizes sex. Nobody has hair. You never see lube, even though they go through gallons on set."

I wondered what porn she was talking about. Almost all of the porn I watch has gallons of lube in every scene. Most of the people have hair. And then I realized: I don't watch mainstream heterosexual porn. I watch kink porn. I watch amateur porn. I watch gay porn. In all of that porn, lube is critical. Sports bottles loaded with j-Lube; paper picnic bowls of Crisco. Even the much-vaunted for-lesbians, by-lesbians Crashpad series has megafrackloads of lube.

But for most people, the gay stuff doesn't exist. The amateur stuff doesn't exist. The most "realistic" porn, in the sense that ordinary people do their (extra-)ordinary kinky things, and don't edit out the details, on camera, is basically the porn that has no marketing budget.

I think that's sad for the obvious reason that, unlike other kinds of movies, we do have sex, and when we watch porn it's often for the kind of sex we want to have but, for some reason or other, we just aren't. And I don't think we want lube-free, laughter-free, sanitized sex.

I could be wrong. The coming twin forces of Presence and Sexbots will probably prove me wrong. I think I'll stick to people.

The other day, I stumbled upon Extrapolated Art, which uses machine learning to assess the contents of an image and extrapolate out from there what the image would be like if the canvas had been bigger. The results are often convincing, although sometimes not so much.

This reminds me greatly of Scene Completion using millions of photographs, which purports to "fix" damaged images by analyzing millions of similar photographs, finding one that would fit into the damaged portion of the image, color-matching the image within a given range, and producing a new image.

Why can't we do this with movie frames?

So, my startup idea is simple: Many guys who were college age in the 80s have a strong nostalgia for the porn of that era, most of which is utterly inaccessible due to the loss of original, the utterly crap quality of VHS formats and the slow degradation of VHS tape.

So use the algorithms available to fix it all. Various detection algorithms could identify "damage" in any given frame (including black-box and pixelation censorship). There is a library of zillions of hours of High Definition porn out there. Porn films don't typically have that many scenes and don't typically move the cameras around much; a human would have to vouch for just the very first frame of any given scene, and may have to do some tuning, and then the algorithm would "repair" the movie using each previous frame as a weighted source of quality, turning all those old "classics" into modern, HD versions with balanced colors and crystal clear genitals.

So, all I need is four million dollars, and a couple of other programmers to help me stitch this thing together, and maybe we could tolerate a manager of some kind, and we'll rake in billions, people, billions!.

"It is important to most male viewers that the women really do seem to be enjoying themselves, that they are utterly involved in the sex for their own pleasure too, and not just serving the interests of the male actors and onlookers". -- Loftus, D. (2002). Watching sex: How men really respond to pornography.

This explains why I never did like Sasha Grey. It was obvious that she so utterly served the actors and onlookers that she seemed barely human. The sex robots in my fiction have more humanity than she projected on the screen.

Nicholson Baker writes three kinds of books: non-fiction, literary fiction, and porn. It's odd that although he's known for the phone-sex masterpiece Vox, the only thing I'd ever read by him was The Anthologist, a wonky first-person slow-moving story about a poetry writer and editor with a near-fatal case of writer's block. It's well-written and has a solid voice. So when his latest porn novel, House of Holes was released, I had to buy a copy.

House of Holes is an homage to the Golden Age of Porn that began in 1972 with Behind the Green Door and ended, thirteen years later, with New Wave Hookers. In it, Baker reveals three secrets about porn from that era that we should all be aware of.

First, there are only two kinds of women-shaped creatures in porn. But neither are really human women. The first are almost human women, but they lack a terribly deep inner life. They attempt to go about their daily business, but they all have a kind of attention-deficit disorder where the suggestion of sex may overwhelm their attention at any moment, turning them into happy, cock-hungry fuckbunnies. A rare few are fuckbunnies in potentia, but this can be resolved within a day or two. If no cock is available, at least an orgasm must happen and another woman will do. When all else fails, she can do it herself. The second kind are man-eaters, always on but exhaustingly dangerous to know.

Secondly, the men in porn are ordinary men. Most of them are confused about sex, confused about what women want-- even when said women are simply cock-hungry-- and confused about their place in a world full of maneaters and fuckbunnies. They're just trying to get along and get laid. Some are well-hung, some aren't; some can last a long time, some can't. They like a little variety, but can be tempted to a long span of monogamy by a particularly beautiful or wonderful woman, and sex doesn't really enter into their motives for a relationship. It can, however, tempt a man to do wrong.

Third, Golden Age Porn is absolutely full of magical realism. For no explicable reason, and often with an "it happens" shrug of the shoulders, clitori move to unfamiliar parts of the body, men swap penises, penises and vaginas develop minds and voices of their own, various accessories (hats, scarves, belts, shoes, watches) give people unusual powers, usually to either spy on people having sex or increase the user's chances of having sex. And over all there is just a sudden increase in people having sex: the pornoverse is a localized phenomenon, inconvenient but hardly tragic.

House of Holes is written like an acid-trip magical realism porn film, only put into the hands of a respected literary writer. The book opens up with Shandee who, while walking in the woods, comes across an arm. Just an arm. It waves at her, and she takes it home. Giving it a piece of paper and a pen, it introduces itself: "Hi, I'm Dave's arm." They have a conversation about how Dave's arm came to be independent of Dave: It turns out that, at the House of Holes, if you want a bigger dick, you have to give up another appendage to get it. You can get the arm back, but you have to fulfill a contractual obligation. The owner of the House, an ancient wise woman named Lila, knows exactly the right obligation.

There are all sorts of weird, arbitrary rules at the House, and a thousand and one different ways to have fun. Thousands of men, in quest of a great orgasm, have chosen to give up their penises in order to let the "jizm" build. The Hall of Penises has all of these, poking up, sagging down, all waiting to be re-united with their former owners. If someone else wants an especially large one, he might get it from that Hall, but only in exchange for a finger, or an arm, or something.

But it's 70's porn: nobody is mean, everyone says "please" and "thank you," and the banality of the porniverse is that, for these people, it's a pleasure as ordinary and as mainstream, and as separate from real human sex, as any porn film ever can be. It's blissfully a long way from the cruel gonzo porn that's fortunately fading away to a low roar.

If there's a weakness to the book, it's the way the literary form shows just how much the women of 70's porn were like William James' Automatic Sweetheart, "a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her." Books take us where movies cannot, into the mind of a character. For most of the women in House of Holes, there's no "there" there. To me, that expectation often ruined my suspension of disbelief.

Some reviewers, I think, read too much into the "horror" nature of the way Shandee has a loving relationship with Dave's arm, or Reese gets off with a "sexbody," a male body who's head is in cold storage, waiting to be reunited with the rest of his studly, getting laid, but generally mindless anatomy. For all we know, Baker was analogizing the way we compartmentalize our awareness that the food on our plates comes from cruel factory farms, or that our sexy life-conveniencing iPods are put together with slave labor. He's not saying.

There are some moments that come across with authorial voice, such as the character of Hax, whose mission is to convince women that their nakedness is beautiful-- and Hax has a long soliloquy about how both tattoos and shaved pubes are often forms of hiding one's self. Or the character of Dune, who says that all of the House of Holes, and its concentration on variety and fetish, is "too much," and that what one really needs for good sex is a man and a woman, "not too fat."

There are a lot of short scenes, set-ups of people doing it or planning to do it or getting ready to do it, with titles like "Shandee finds Dave's Arm," or "Dune takes a walk on the Boardwalk." They follow a small cast of people through this weird, psychedelic landscape.

House of Holes is sexy, inventive, and funny. It's also exhausting, full of a kind of humanity that is as distant from us as the New Soviet Man or the Randian Hero. It says things about human beings and about sex by showing wonderfully, creepily inhuman people having sex. But if you like really well-written, witty, and genuinely inventive erotica, I strongly recommend House of Holes. It has set a new standard, and if you're going to write erotica from this day forward, it is a standard that will challenge all of us.

I've always wondered why my brain insisted so strongly that the characters in Sterlings wear glasses. I mean, sure, girls with glasses are cute, but why was my subconscious so strongly insistent that the dickgirls wear glasses?

I found a collection of dickgirl porn on the net recently, and it was organized by "costume." Note the standout:

• Angel: 5
• Armor and War: 5
• Beach/Swimwear: 95
• Bondage Futa: 71
• Business/Work: 3
• Dominant: 16
• Glasses: 464
• Goth/Punk: 8
• Latex: 1
• Lingerie: 2
• Maid: 55
• Nightwear: 4
• Nuns: 18
• Nurse: 2
• Nylons: 8
• Royalty: 1
• School: 35
• Witch: 1

Either I'm not the only one who makes this connection, or my subconscious has been hard-wired to conflate futanari (dickgirls) and meganekko (girls in glasses) by exposure.

Hmm. Sasha Grey as Case?

I can see it.

So cute! So Not Safe For Work, but still, so cute!

Oh, if only I were still young and cute enough...

In a previous post I relayed the conclusion to a paper that claims that the widespread availability of pornography on the Internet has been accompanied by a strong drop in rape.

What fascinates me most about this is the (thus far) anecdotal counter-claim that the growing body of "extreme" pornography cheapens relationships and encourages men and women to try acts they normally wouldn't and that don't contribute to a sense of intimacy, just because it's in porn. Sodomy and bukkake come to mind as two of those things that, unless you're really curious about it, don't contribute to intimacy. (On the other hand, if you are into sodomy, it can contribute much to your understanding of yourself and your partner. As they say in Nigeria, email me for more details. Kidding, kidding...)

I can't help but wonder if we're seeing both a broadening and a narrowing of sexual expression in this country: on the one hand, people who have the personal and intellectual framework to consciously explore their sexuality have a huge buffet of materials from which to draw inspiration. On the other, people who would otherwise have had mundane but satisfying sexual lives might feel more compelled to experiment with outrageous sexual activities, either by their normalization in pornography (I remember when anal sex was a big freaking deal in porn and nobody shaved anything, but these days, having pubic hair is the kink and most porn shows women taking cock in all three orifices as if that were expected and normative) or under pressure from a partner who has pornography-encouraged expectations.