It's The Little Things That Bother Me

Let us consider the title Backdoor to Buttsville for a moment. Now, even if we ignore the illogic of there being a back door for an entire town, there's still this to chew on: If you're going to Buttsville, doesn't it logically follow that you will be taking the back door? Considering that, isn't the title awfully redundant? I mean, nobody talks about taking the front door to Pussy City, or the mouth-door to Blowjobton-on-the-Moor, do they?

This is why porn companies need to hire professional copyeditors.

Are you listening, porn companies?

Erotica Contest!

A quick note: I'm co-judging a (written) erotica contest over at Shay's. The details and specs are all over there, so take a look! There's a prize package and everything! Exclamation point!

Division of Labour

As most of you, the teeming throngs* of my readers, already know, I also blog every now and then over at The Sex Carnival, and sometimes I have trouble figuring out what should go here and what should go there, and whether I should crosspost. Is that shameless self-promotion? If so, is there anything wrong with that? And what do readers here want to see vs. readers there?

Anyway, I wrote a little something about a South American sex-based reality television show that probably takes things a step beyond what it ought over there, but some of you may want to read about it. The article itself is SFW, but the banner ads on that site tend not to be, so caveat lector.

* Where a throng roughly equals a dozen.

Two Items Gleaned From The NY Post

1) It's a very slow news day.

2) Every day, Jenna Jameson moves closer and closer to resembling a poorly-crafted inflatable sex doll of version of herself.

But Would Fabio Pose For The Cover?

Oh man. While justly lionized for his defining work, the famous Life of Johnson, some of Boswell's earlier writing was strictly third-rate romance novel stuff. A first-person account of his tryst with an actress, written in a letter to a university chum:

I came softly into the room, and in a sweet delirium slipped into bed and was immediately clasped in her snowy arms and pressed to her milk-white busom. ... In a moment I felt myself animated with the strongest powers of love, and, from my dearest creature's kindness, had a most luscious feast. Proud of my godlike vigor, I soon resumed the noble game. ... Sobriety had preserved me from effeminacy and weakness, and my bounding blood beat quickly and high alarms. A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary in human nature.

It seems our young Bozzie was rather full of himself, hm? Of course, it sounds like by the morning, Louise was a little full of him as well. *rimshot*

But wait, there's more. After coming down with (yet another) case of the clap after this little tryst, his breakup letter with dear Louise was just as remarkable. Here's just a taste:

I have been very bad, but I scorn to upbraid you. I think it below me. If you are not rendered callous by a long course of disguised wickedness, I should think the consideration of your deceit and baseness, your corruption of both body and mind, would be a very severe punishment. Call not that a misfortune which is a consequence of your own unworthiness.

Damn. Just... damn.

Both quotes are from Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950).

Plus Ca Change...

I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl's maidenhead, I would make her squeak.

The pillow talk, it never changes.

From Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950). Yes, that Boswell.

Apropos of nothing...

... this might be the dirtiest thing I've ever seen*.

* Except for that granny gangbang movie. Some things should just not be.

He Said, She Said

Well, I was going to post about the new 2257 regs that came out last week, but I think that my post over at Viv's linked to an article which did as decent a job as I could have, and has input by an actual lawyer, so instead I'm going to fan the flames of Porn Valley gossip instead.

Back on Friday, ill-loved porno yenta Luke Ford posted a letter that he had purportedly received from Bessi, formerly ultra-filthy* pornstar Bisexual Britni. In it, she described a life of oppression and abuse at the hands of her ex-, Dennis. It's an upsetting, tragically plausible tale.

But.

About a year ago, a West Coast friend of mine mentioned that he had been propositioned by a woman on a popular internet classifieds site in response to a picture of himself that he had posted. After assuaging my initial disbelief**, he told me that woman in question had mentioned that she was a pornstar, in an open relationship. He gave me the name that she had given him and after a little bit of digging, I confirmed to him that a woman with that name was better known in the porn world as, you guessed it, Bisexual Britni.

Now if Bessi-formerly-Britni is to be believed, she "never even SAW [her] emails", which would mean that it was probably abuser Dennis propositioning my friend and pretending to be Britni. I find that... creepy. But even if you accept Dennis arranging seedy anonymous hookups between Britni and strange men posting mask-wearing pictures of themselves on sleazy hookup sites, my friend also reports that he spoke to Britni on the phone, and she sounded distinctly female. In his own words:

My thought is that either A: Dennis does a much better job imitating a woman that you'd believe or B: she's exaggerating a bit. Mind you, I'd never take away from the horror of an abusive relationship, but ... at least a year ago she was more free to talk than [her letter to Luke] would lead you to believe.

Of course, thanks to the anonymizing power of the internet, any of all of this could be complete bupkus. The woman that emailed Luke might not be Britni. The person that emailed and spoke to my friend might not have been Britni***. Bessi-formerly-Britni could be lying. My friend could be lying. I could be lying. But hell, isn't that what internet gossip is all about?

* And I don't use that descriptor lightly.
** "A woman!?"
*** Though she did have the last name that Britni used, which may not prove anything, but definitely adds a soupcon of veracity to the tale.

Vote Zombie Reagan!

Monday evening, I had the privilege of attending a reading and QA session by Audacia Ray as she swung through town on her book tour. Also in attendance were Meg, recently of the late, lamented Tales of a Teacher (and Slut), and Antonio Rodickuez, one of the stars of The Bi Apple. It was nice to catch up with Antonio, who I hadn't seen since the shoot, and Meg and I and we had a lovely discussion about blogging our personal lives, and why she did it, but doesn't anymore, and I don't do it at all.

The reading itself was held in a bookstore that started out as a communist council, but has since shifted to an leftist-anarchist collective shop. Leftist propaganda and radical pamphlets abounded. I was, to steal a turn of phrase, a pilgrim in an unholy land*. That morning I was this close to wearing my Reagan T-shirt just to piss off the management (or whatever you call the people that run a socialist-anarchist collective), but eventually better sense got hold of me and I decided not to.

Sometimes I hate my better sense. It can be such a coward.

* No, I'm not a Republican. Yes, it's complicated.

Bubbles of Market Inefficiency

It is fact and accepted custom in the straight adult pornography industry that male performers make considerably less than female performers do. Generously, in a 1-on-1 scene, a guy can expect to make 60% of what his female co-star does, and often considerably less. Various factors affect this figure, of course. A marquee name will make more, and a total rookie less. Still, a massive inequity exists.

It's equally factual that being a male porn actor is much more difficult than than being female talent. Both sexes encounter some psychological hardships, of course, and there might be an argument to be made that women have more physically strenuous roles (depending on the scene), as men are unlikely to experience cervical bruising or anal fissures as a result of a shoot. Still, it's "wood failure" that's the bane of directors everywhere. People often ask me why so many old, ugly men keep showing up in movies over and over and over again, and the answer is simple: Relatively few men can do what it takes to make a scene work. Getting hard on set, staying that way and then popping on command is incredibly difficult.

Cordon bleu pastry chefs make more than burger flippers. Doctors make more than paramedics. So considering that there are more female straight porn performers than male straight porn performers out there by at least an order of magnitude, due to the disparities in the relative skill-based barriers to entry of each profession, why is it that female pornstars make so much more?

My guess? It's a combination of two factors. The first is simple Keynesian "sticky" pricing in action. In many cases, wages are slow to change with the vagaries of supply and demand. The market does adjust, but it adjusts slowly. In a small and incestuous community like the porn industry, where you have some male performers doing the same job for thirty-plus years, guys are just used to being paid less -- it's an artifact, a legacy of the past. The new guy only make two hundred a shoot because because the director paid the last new guy two hundred bucks, so why should he pay this new guy any more? Short of union action, it's going to take a while for pay to rise in a situation like that.

That leads us indirectly into the second factor: The fickle nature of porn consumers causes the supply-and-demand figures to skew in a way that may not be obvious at first blush. Consumers simply get bored with a girl they've seen over and over and over again, and thus the industry has an insatiable appetite for new female talent. Most of the time*, a woman that winds up on too many boxcovers saturates the market and loses her value and hireability. Male talent, on the other hand, are typically not the central attraction of a scene. Reduced to the status of anonymous meat puppets, often serving simply as a surrogate penis for the viewer's own fantasies, they usually exist on the fringes of the consumer's consciousness. Viewers don't get bored with them because they don't focus on them. Consequently, the demand for new male talent is relatively low compared to the demand for the latest fresh-off-the-bus teenage starlet.

To put it a bit more succinctly, while the number of male performances shot in a year is roughly equal to the number of female performances shot in a year**, the market allows each female performer to do less of those performances, and thus demands a much higher number of female performers to do those shoots. Consider: According to IAFD, porn workhorse Lee Stone has 1370 titles to his credit in his eight-year career, which means he does about 170 titles a year***. Inari Vachs, a successful pornstar by any reasonable measure, had an extra year to work with and did only 370 total. Even the ubiquitous Aurora Snow does less than half of Lee's number, with an average of about 70 movies per annum in her five years on the meat market.

Hmmm. Lee does 3-4 times as many movies as a full-time, successful female pornstar, and makes about 1/3 - 1/4 of what they can make on each shoot. Maybe the disparity isn't as big as I originally though.

---

*Exceptions are rife, of course, but consider how many Jennas, Janines, Shanes and Asias there are out there, and how many anonymous teen starlets have passed through the industry meat grinder after a few months on the job.

** Figure that girl-girl scenes balance out gangbangs, approximately.

*** Not accounting for compilations.

Mmmm... Contempt

Firstly, in an item totally unrelated to the subject line, congratulations to The Bi Apple for winning Best Straight Sex Scene at the 2007 Feminist Porn Awards, which are held annually in my hometown. Go us! Go Toronto!

Secondly, if I didn't think Audacia Ray was the bee's knees before (though I did!), I'd certainly think it now, for calling Suicidegirls the "Walmart of alt-porn" in her speech at C*lick me in Amsterdam. I haven't finished reading her book yet, but what I've read so far is cracking good stuff!

Not Again...

Well, it looks like Max Hardcore, scumbag cum laude, is being indicted on federal obscenity charges. I hate it when this happens.

Extreme pornographers like Max Hardcore or Rob Black function as the canaries in the figurative coal mine of the adult film industry. They are the first to be prosecuted and persecuted when the feds start to crack down. This puts people like me in an awkward position: On the one hand, I despise Max's work. His pornography is degrading, violent, angry and everything that the anti-porn nutcases say that all porn is. I find it personally repugnant and I hate that he and I work in the same industry.

On the other hand, Max isn't doing anything that ought to be illegal. He uses adult actresses who let him do what he wants to them in exchange for payment (and yes, I've heard all the stories as well, but until someone can prove in court that he illegally coerces girls into making his movies, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt). He sells his product to paying customers that presumably want to see the content that they have purchased. There's no unwilling victim here, no children despoiled or houses burnt down. He has a right to his freedom of expression, and my personal tastes shouldn't affect the limits of what he can do.

So people like me are forced into a bad spot, where they have to support people like Max despite their personal feelings because of the very real slippery slope that threatens us if Max and his ilk get taken down. Once the federal government decides to arbitrate what does and does not constitute illegal content, who knows where they're going to draw the line?

Faugh. I have to tolerate necessary evils, but I don't have to like it.