How social media is affecting the porn industry
Abella Anderson
Social media has obviously affected how people interact with each other.
For better or for worse things are different now.
There is one positive change though and interestingly enough it’s for pornstars.
As the Sex.com Blog points out:
“…social media has made expressing yourself in 140 characters (Twitter) or putting a shitty filter over a shitty picture of some shitty food (Instagram) a lot easier. Social media has also given personalities to pornstars and a way to interact with their fans that wasn’t there before.
Pre-social media, the only things we knew about your favorite pornstar was what she would say in interviews or the beginning of a porn scene, which isn’t an accurate depiction of their personality. Now the connection between fan and pornstar is there, which is great because girls can use social media to accurately market themselves. I don’t know about you but I think knowing details about a certain pornstar helps me decide which pornstars I like. Without these details, there are so many babes coming in and out of the industry that it would be impossible to keep track of who I liked and who I didn’t.
Take for example Abella Anderson liking the Miami Heat. Even though I hate the Miami Heat, the fact that Abella Anderson is a passionate basketball fan makes me more attracted to her.
However, with this power to communicate their personalities there is also the responsibility to let them know when it’s over.”
That’s one way of looking at it.
The Girl’s Porn Parody
By now you’ve heard that there’s a Girl porn parody in the works.
You’re either excited for it because you think Alison Williams is going to be in it or you’re upset by it like Lena Dunham or you’re indifferent because porn parodies is just what happens to things that have entered our cultural consciousness.
Though not really an opinion, this was the Sex.com Blog‘s reaction was to reflect on the cumshot that was laid on Shiri Appleby by Adam:
People weren’t sure if they were witnessing the first-ever TV-rape or TV-cumshot. Either way, this sex scene is not erotic or arousing in any way. It’s disturbing because Adam behaves in an aggressive manner that’s only really shown in pornography.
I’ve heard people (mostly feminists) describe cumshots as aggressive and humiliating to women before, but I had trouble seeing it from that perspective because it’s never really framed that way in porn videos (I’m not counting bukkake videos by the way because that’s just plain crazy and gross). However, after watching this scene I realized that it is aggressive and humiliating though we’re not shown that in porn videos. This is how pornographic sex exists in the real world and this is exactly the skewed idea of sex created by the proliferation of porn and that Lena Dunham was tweeting about.
“When I first started kissing boys,” she told Frank Bruni, ”I remember noticing things, certain behaviors, where I thought, ‘There’s no way you learned that anywhere but on YouPorn.com. There’s no way any teenage girl taught you and reinforced that behavior.’”
I thought maybe that meant we would never see a Girls porn parody because of how the show has juxtaposed pornographic sex with real intimate sex. But hey, I guess I was wrong.
Maybe it’s just me, but for me I really think it’s cool that they are willing to speak so frankly about pornography despite being a porn site. If you guys aren’t already all over the Sex.com Blog, you’re missing out.
Pinterest, Sex.com, and Gender Views on Porn
“Because our site is based off a system that mostly appeals to women and the content traditionally appeals to men, I’ve been wondering after a year of Sex.com, who uses Sex.com more, men or women? Is Sex.com‘s pin and board style finally attracting a strong female audience to porn? Or have men learned to nest with the content that they find, debunking Jerry Seinfeld‘s theory?”
via The Sex.com Blog.
It’s true. Sex.com is styled for women but the content is all for men.
Vote to let them know if men are nesting or if women are watching porn!
The Next Jenna Jameson?
Jenna Jameson is the undisputed Queen of Porn, but there are 10 possible heirs to her throne…
Pornstars and Makeup
Found this cool 10 minute documentary on pornstars and makeup on The Sex.com Blog.
Be careful! Some parts are NSFW.
Porno Makeup from uri shwartz on Vimeo.
Keri Sable
The Sex.com Blog has an interesting post about the circumstances surrounding Keri Sable’s retirement.
Once touted as “The Next Big Thing” in the adult industry, Keri Sable retired shortly after receiving a lucrative contract from a major studio.
SpongeBob SquarePants & Rule 34
Finally, we can watch a squirrel blow a sea-sponge in this porn parody
Woodrocket.com announced today that they will be releasing a SpongeBob SquarePants porn parody as a free five-part series called SpongeKnob SquareNuts. Director Lee Roy Myers, who you may remember from such porn parodies as The Simpsons Porn Parody, Family Guy Porn Parody, and The Big Lebowski Porn Parody, described his latest work as, “something much funnier, sexier, and we’re going to hell-ier.”
The good people of WoodRocket said they are proud to present a movie that fully embraces Rule 34, one that proves even the weirdest porn parody can still be filled with hot sex.
For those of you who don’t know, Rule 34 is the concept that if something exists there is a porn of it. This is especially true nowadays with the whole parody genre. But do we as pornographers have to obey Rule 34?
Parodies do their best to recreate their source material. It’s the attention to detail that makes them successful. Case in point: Axel Braun. He just won pretty much every award he could for his Star Wars XXX parody because his sets, costumes, and casting choices were as close as possible to the real thing. This then poses a problem for anyone trying to direct a parody of an animated TV show or movie because recreating the animation-style with live actors is bound to fall into the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis applied to robotics but we can make it work.
Basically, the uncanny valley occurs if you were to chart a person’s emotional response to an anthropomorphized thing. More often than not the human observer’s emotional response to the anthropomorphized thing will become increasingly empathetic until a point is reached where it resembles a human but is not fully human. A feeling of strong revulsion replaces the feeling of empathy, which is the uncanny valley. Look at this graph if you’re lost:
Now let’s apply this hypothesis to porn parodies, specifically porn parodies of animated shows.
Scooby Doo Porn Parody is one that works because the show uses a real world (although slightly spookier) color palette and character design. Because they are fully human animated characters their transition to being portrayed by fully human porn actors is seamless.
The gang
The porn parody gang (minus Scooby, thankfully)
They are human characters that as a cartoon we can empathize with and thanks to the show’s real world aesthetic, a transition to being portrayed by humans is accomplished. It does not fall into the uncanny valley, it is a delightful little sex romp.
Now let’s look at America’s favorite homemaker, Marge Simpson.
Marge!
As you can see (you should already know this however), Marge’s skin and hair tones do not occur naturally in humans. Though she her character is human we know that by design she is not. Still, Marge’s character is human enough that in spite of the askew color scheme, we can still empathize with her. Marge in the porn parody however passes the point of empathy and falls into the uncanny valley (sorry Andy San Dimas, who played Marge in the parody).
Andy San Dimas as Marge
The porn parody pays attention to detail but that is its failure. Marge’s skin and hair transposed to real life now becomes unsettling because she resembles a human (because Andy San Dimas is a real human) but the colors keep her from being “fully human”. This then evokes the sense of revulsion and Andy San Dimas/Marge falls into the uncanny valley.
Now back to SpongeBob.
SpongeBob SquarePants is an anthropomorphized sea-sponge in the original show. So already he is not human but acts human but it’s a cartoon so it’s ok.
We as an audience can empathize with SpongeBob (unless you’re that old grump Squidward). But in the porn parody, you have Anthony Rosano (a human) portraying an anthropomorphized sea-sponge, which immediately puts it into the uncanny valley because an anthropomorphized character now portrayed by a human makes the character too human yet not full human. A feeling of revulsion is evoked almost instantly.
Lee Roy Myers and Woodrocket have pushed Rule 34 to the limit but in doing so they’ve made something that can only trigger revulsion in the viewers because it was taken from the wrong source material. SpongeBob is not meant to be portrayed in live-action because the aesthetic and the character design can’t be empathized with unless he’s animated. Otherwise, it’s too deep in the uncanny valley.
So in conclusion, Rule 34 is true. If you have money, cameras, and actors, you can make a porn out of anything…but it’s not always a good idea.
Of course, this is just my opinion. If you think otherwise, please feel free to comment.
I will say this though, Skin Diamond is great in Part 1.
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