February 7/06: On Personality

One thing about porn is, if you like it you tend to see a lot of it. That's in part because there's so much of it out there (especially on the Internet), and partly because it's the nature of how it's consumed. As anyone who has just joined a site offering 50,000 pics and 300 movies knows, you can go through that enormous amount of content in a very short time. And because you see so much of it there tends to be a feedback mechanism working against your enjoyment of it. You see so much and it all starts to look the same.

And that's no illusion. A lot of it is the same. So what saves good porn from a case of the blahs? What's the most important ingredient for a good porn site? What allows you to stand out in the 50-billion-channel Internet-porn universe?

Personality.

It's no surprise. The Internet, what with the blogs and MySpace and all that other shit, is all about personality. It's a highly personal medium; even on the consumer end it's been described as personal-casting as opposed to broadcasting. And this fits porn perfectly. With its ability to target even the slimmest of micro-niche fetishes--who would have thought there was a commercially viable market for balloon fetish sites? Not me, that's for sure--Internet porn can press very exact buttons. And what's more, it has allowed for far greater expression of personality.

Here's what I mean: Remember (well, some of you old-timers might remember) when there were such things as pornstars appearing in porn videos? Remember you would buy or rent a movie "starring" Pornstar X and then she was only in three out of six scenes in the movie? This really used to piss me off. 

You see, porn movies aren't like normal movies, they are more like music CDs. If you buy a CD by Radiohead you don't want three Radiohead tracks and a bunch of filler. You want a whole CD of Radiohead songs. The same with porn. All you really wanted to see was the star perform. She's the reason you picked up the movie in the first place. Porn movies were getting away with murder by having two or three scenes per movie that you really wanted to see and then a whole bunch of shit you had to fast-forward through.

Enter the Interent. Sure you still got a lot of "extras" and "bonus stuff," but nobody bothers clicking on those links anyway. Meanwhile, what you do get with a performer site is more of that performer doing her thing. If you like Sammy then you love Sammy4U because she's in every scene and every gallery! And not only that, you get more of Sammy in other ways, in a diary or camshows or answering e-mails or attending bar meets or posting vacation pics or whatever. Personality was finally being allowed to fully express itself.

Unfortunately, the flip-side of liking performer sites with lots of personality is the disappointment that comes when a performer site doesn't have any, or waters what it does have down. There's nothing more frustrating than visiting a performer site and not learning a thing about the performer in question. Sites that don't even have a simple FAQ page. Or a site like Club Jenna, where you get daily updates of Club Jenna "contract girls" and other filler but only one update a week actually featuring Jenna. I can only assume Jenna is trying to bring the studio model of porn she is still so much a part of with her to the Internet. It doesn't work.

Personality isn't just something you should expect to see on a performer site. It's also crucial that photographers have a personal style, like Hegre or Abby. Their sites reflect a vision and philosophy, a style and a choice of content, just as much as your favourite performers. You're joining the site because you groove to what this studio is doing. And what you are responding to is, in the end, an expression of personality.

Personality is essential for any site hoping to rise above the current glut of generic corporate porn. Luckily there's still a lot of it to go around.

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