January 5/06: Fantasy vs. Reality

You can read this as a sort of continuation of my last rant about funny porn (see here). I ended that post by saying that I take my fantasies very seriously. I don't really care how funny porn is, because I'm not looking for a laugh.

Truth be told, I'm also not that interested in how real it is. Now I'm sure half the people reading this (which is maybe one person) are now saying "Whoa! I sort of agreed with your rant about the funny stuff. But what's wrong with keeping it real?"

Well, nothing. It's just that I'd like to see a little more balance.

First some historical background. Remember before there was such a thing as Internet porn? In those dark ages all the porn you could watch was on VHS, which meant "feature" films with lame storylines and really, really bad acting. Oh it was awful. I remember sex-starved alien women, something about Jenna Jameson on a pirate ship, and even an XXX re-make of Streetcar Named Desire (honest! it was called Skin Hunger!). The Internet sank these features almost as totally as it sank the glossy porn mag market. Yeah, they still make the odd budgeted porn feature, but not as much. And no one is making them as Internet exclusives.

Good riddance? Not so fast.

The main thing the Internet did was open up porn to more varieties of expression. Fetish ruled in the billion-channel universe, and instead of generic pornstars and centerfolds the girl-next-door (the real girl-next-door) got a chance. I think this is all great. But I think we lost something too.

You can see what's missing by noticing how much emphasis paysites put on the reality of their material these days. It's not just reality porn I'm talking about (which isn't real at all), but amateur sites and voyeur/exhibitionist sites, and even individual performer sites. You keep seeing the same come-ons about how the content is "100% Real!" Nine times out of ten it isn't, but I understand how these people have to pitch it. What bothers me is the implication that material that is 100% Not-Real is somehow not as good. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Whatever happened to fantasy?  To be more specific, whatever happened to story-telling, scripts, acting, girls in costumes, and sets? The current emphasis on reality just strikes me as a cop-out from people who are too (a) cheap; (b) unimaginative; and (c) without talent, to produce interesting feature-style porn. Even the sites I've been to in the past year that do advertise this kind of an experience usually muff it, settling for the usual music-video style vignettes. 

Paysites these days are offering us longer and longer movies of better and better quality. But the kind of stuff we're getting is all the same. It's either stupid reality shtick or an artsy striptease to canned music. Where are porn's dramatic filmmakers for the Internet generation? I've had enough "real" porn. I want the pirate ship back!

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