Friday, February 25, 2011

Porn Sells (my Blog)

Ever since I posted about photoshopped playmate bunnies in December my blog's audience has increased tremendously. "Kill stretch marks" and "playmate bunnies" are now among the top key words with which people land on my blog. I'm very flattered obviously by all this extra attention, but since I'm not much of a porn expert and actually tend to think porn doesn't really exist, except as a joke people amuse themselves with like wearing hats or collecting stamps, that realization was fascinating to me.

Earlier this month, my fascination experienced a breakthrough when the week I spent in nyc was the week New York magazine's special Porn issue came out. The magazine had three stories on the topic - one on the recent 'arrival' of the web in the industry, a second on how this open to all free content is affecting teens and a third on how porn is decreasing men's libido.

From the first I discovered new astonishing websites and also that Montreal didn't only give Arcade Fire to the world but also the three geniuses behind Brazzers, pornhub, xtube and extrememetube (among many more excellent sites). Apparently they are the people behind the revival of the MILF in porn. Great you say? well they didn't stop at that achievement. They also made millions by making platforms for free porn - free to watch, free to post, free to make, free to stop, free to zap, free to collect, etc. The old porn millionaires hate them, but many thank them, like Liz, 30, who claims "I get excited making them [porn videos], posting them and seeing how people react to them." (p.88)

The second wasn't as exciting. Alex Morris talks to young girls who post images of themselves online, but have boyfriends who may or may not know about this but that anyways are their boyfriends only online because boys don't assume in real life what they are online or something. Basically Morris seems as confused as the 14 year olds he's interviewing except he doesn't post sexy images of himself online. Frankly I'm not convinced facebook has shattered teenage angst at its core: when I was 14, there was no facebook and boys would say things that they knew nothing about but had the terms for, all while looking at boobs, and then would call us to talk about homework. 

The third was about male porn watchers having libido decreases. That could be really bleak or not so much. When I was in Egypt a few 14 year old boys groped me and a friend in Alexandria. It was funny and punishable by Allah. There's three ways to read the situation: either they associated white females to the western porn they saw on xtube 
so they groped us, or they were frustrated that they couldn't wank off to real girls so they groped us, or they were just very confused teenagers so they groped us. Hopefully those kids marched to topple their government and got their cherry popped in the process and/or wank off to xtube videos guiltlessly. Maybe their libido is so low now they can actually go on date without the extra sister or female cousin to look out for his female date.