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The unending frustrations of an ethical porn consumer A porn consumer's manifesto.

Porn is a very strange industry. It seems to operate in its own universe, with no oversight, few laws, and no direct customer feedback. Couple this with the fact that all you need is a phone to make a porn video and it’s no wonder that 95% of the content is garbage, made by completely unqualified amateurs.

I have consumed a lot of porn over the years, so I thought I would provide some feedback that the porn industry can take or leave.

I see very disturbing trends in porn, and it’s made me seriously consider giving it up completely, for the rest of my life. It’s not that I’m religious, right-wing, or puritanical in any way shape or form. It’s just that I have a conscience, unlike many of you apparently.

Let me just list my critiques of the state of porn, and please take it in the spirit it was intended:

Extreme porn

This will be your downfall, as the vast majority of normal people find this stuff disgusting and disturbing, and would be likely to support legislation to stamp it out. Why can’t you guys police yourselves? Why the fascination with all things disgusting and degrading? Do you really need to simulate rape or have sex with animals to make a dollar? Where is OSHA? How is it that it’s legal to physically assault your employees in this industry, and no other?!

Violence towards women

More than any other thing, this has made me feel that I simply cannot continue to support this industry in good conscience. The slapping, spitting, choking, strangling, degrading, it’s sickening. Shoving baseball bats up women’s asses, making women suck the feces off of the guy’s dick… Only sick, demented, woman-hating losers like this stuff, so why do you produce so much of it??? At the current rate of escalation, it won’t be long before the guy is just punching and kicking the woman to a bloody pulp and skipping the sex altogether.

Total lack of originality

It seems that the ideas are all dried up. Every single porn produced these days either A) looks like every single other porn, or B) tries some retarded gimmick to compensate for lack of creativity. Oh gee, let’s put this retard in a face mask and that will make the video exciting and kinky! I know! Let’s shoot the video in a mechanic’s garage!!! That will make it totally fresh and creative!

Lack of technical craft

I hardly need to mention this, as it’s obvious to everyone. Why can’t this industry ever seem to employ QUALIFIED camera operators, gaffers, sound men, directors, and editors? It’s as if you just let your buddies fill in on all these jobs after a 5-minute orientation. The quality of most videos is absurdly low.

This is the only business I know of where someone with zero training, experience, or talent as a photographer, can….make a living selling photographs! Ridiculous! The editing in this industry is so awful it makes me wonder if the video is even edited at all.

Related: 10 reasons you should never date a pornstar

Ugly, horrid male talent

Man its hard to get it up these days watching porn because of the moronic male talent. Is there not a single male porn star without 40 shitty prison tattoos? Seriously, why all the awful tats? They are so distracting and stupid it’s unbelievable that you would hire these people as MODELS.

These guys all look like ex-cons who couldn’t make it in any other field. Many of them are straight up looking like cavemen, and behave like violent, woman-hating assholes in their videos. The few guys who don’t have shite tattoos make up for it by wearing ridiculous bling or stupid clothing.

The idea is to NOT BE DISTRACTING!!! Is that really so hard to comprehend? I don’t want to be distracted by the guy’s shiny silver watch in the foreground when I’m trying to look at the WOMAN. Good god, this seems so obvious, why don’t you get it?

And by the way, you can’t tell me that there aren’t thousands of better looking, qualified male actors available. Since Viagra, almost anyone can do it. It’s clear that you just engage in nepotism by hiring the same losers over and over for decades.

Face shots

We NEVER want to see the guy’s face, and we RARELY need a close up of a woman’s face. Every time the action starts to get good, the moronic cameraperson feels like he or she needs to zoom in to the talent’s FACE. ARRRGH.

Formula on loop

It’s official – every single porn video produced follows the exact same formula, but with different actors. Solo tease, blowjob, ass licking, fucking in the usual positions, a little anal, facial pop shot. BORING. We’ve seen this a million times.

Running time

We do not need to see a mindless, viagra-injected drone mechanically pumping away at a girl for 30 full minutes. Your ploy of trying to make up for lack of quality, with a long running time, is very transparent. I would bet that almost all guys would rather jerk to a high-quality, 10 minute scene any day, instead of having to work the fast forward so often.

Extremism to compensate for lack of creativity

Rather than create sexy scenarios or actually use your brain to come up with more stimulating ideas, most porn directors simply default to making all of their material more extreme, and including more slapping and choking. I want to puke when I see this, or crawl into the screen and beat the living shit out of the male “talent” for committing heinous acts of abuse against women.

Gonzo

Soulless, mindless fucking just doesn’t create a thrill. There is no set up or any type of scenario created any more, just straight to the mindless plowing.

Kitchen sink approach

Rather than segment videos out according to people’s different tastes, you try to cram every conceivable fetish into every video you produce. The result is utterly annoying: way more time spent skipping scenes than actually watching video.

Quantity over quality

Making 100 videos a year doesn’t make up for the fact that none of them are any good. People would rather pay more for higher quality, and not need to buy so much of it to find the good stuff.

Most of you will sneer and blow this post off. Fine. But I’m not just some Joe out there, I’m a professional video producer myself, and I recognize crap when I see it. I have never seen an industry more ripe for a competitor to come in and just absolutely dominate, simply by observing the above criticisms and doing it right.

Sorry, Afrunauts! While 85% of you are wonderful people, the other 25% were far too frequently brigades and troll farms. Their abusive comments have traumatized our moderators, and so we can't allow comments until we have built an ethical way to address the troll problem. If you feel the calling and you have familiarized yourself with what is and isn't free speech, you can still email us your scribbles. If your feedback is excellent, we may manually add it!
PS. The A Black Woman Is Speaking mug is a standing invitation to sit down, shut up, and engage in the wisdom shared by Black women. Lord knows the world needs it right now.

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10 thoughts on “<span class="entry-title-primary">The unending frustrations of an ethical porn consumer</span> <span class="entry-subtitle">A porn consumer's manifesto.</span>”

  1. The porn industry may be supersaturated with crap, but I’m hardly noticing. Much like any other medium, I ignore what doesn’t interest me and concentrate on the good stuff.

    Too many don’t realize that there are quality producers out there. Companies like Adam & Eve and Vivid aren’t doing bad work.

    But as for something different, try the videos of Tristan Taormino or Kimberly Kane’s “Live in My Secrets”. I’m also a fan of Jack the Zipper and Andrew Blake. Outside of the Porn Valley, there’s European porno (Viv Thomas) and the non-porn, yet explicit, documentaries of Tony Comstock.

    As a selective consumer I don’t get too worked up over the industries’ flaws. Sure, the instances of female degradation and terms like ‘interracial’ upset me, but I don’t watch those videos.

    On that note, as long as it’s consensual, I don’t see why extreme porn should be stopped. Someone once said: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” Obscenity is a vague legal term that leads to censorship.

    Also, Slippy2 is being too subjective. He writes, “We NEVER want to see the guy’s face, and we RARELY need a close up of a woman’s face.” Actually, I enjoy looking at the girl’s face, and I bet some women and men enjoy looking at the guy’s.

    The whole rant read childish to me.

    Reply
  2. He makes a number of good points. The industry appears to be more focused on the competition than the customers.

    It’s a common business trap. Currently every social website’s trying to rip-off Twitter because that’s easier than thinking about what people want. The copying is mindless and in the porn industry the same thinking has taken hold. What Max Hardcore once shocked us with (A2M), is now mainstream. It wasn’t demanded, just copied by companies too lazy to innovate and too deaf to listen.

    Watching porn movies starring people who were only entering adolescence in 2004, means adjusting to a sexuality which has little in common with anyone who had a pre-web childhood. Customers like slippy2 are either dinosaurs, extinct as others rise to take their place, or tigers, killed off prematurely by a world hunting them with technology they don’t understand. Time will tell.

    Reply
  3. Absolute rubbish post.

    Free market is selfregulating, if someone out there is videoing some crappy video nobody will buy it, they will ran out of money to shoot videos and finally go out of business.

    Extreme porn? Someone buys it because someone likes it. If you feel digusted by it then there is a “Back” button on the browser, feel free to click it and browse to your favourite porn.

    You have no right to tell others what they can or can not watch based on your personal moral values. Is it degradating for porn actors/ress? Anyone who has worked at McDonals knows that you can feel far more degradated there than working in extreme porn.

    Life is easy from the other side of the barrier.

    Reply
  4. “It is indeed a paradox how those on whom we depend for our living are treated so poorly and as if disposable. It will indeed catch up to the industry one day.”

    It will indeed catch up, in a couple ways: increased legislative scrutiny, and increased difficulty in recruiting and retaining talent. Not to mention the pure moral and social costs.

    Pretty soon I guess there will be no one but mentally ill talent to choose from, because who else is willing to be degraded like that for a measly thousand bucks? Web video will haunt you for the rest of your life, it’s not like the old days.

    I really don’t buy people’s arguments that the porn producers out there are marketing geniuses, and that they have a terrific understanding of what their customers will buy. I think they are delusional in fact. They just get lucky once in a while.

    There are many reasons that an adult business can survive for a few months or years without knowing the market. Many small business startups think everything is fine until they run out of cash a few years into it. In this industry, I can imagine there are a lot of self-financed producers who make no profit but do it so they can perv out all day. There are also the people who just squeak by, making 5 or 10% profit – sure they’re surviving, but does that mean they know squat about the market?

    The biggest reason for bad producers to survive is that there are a lot of idiotic men/boys out there who will pay (once) for anything with boobs. You can sucker them in for a minute, but is this really a sustainable model?

    Further, I could produce a video that shows a woman being beat up by a bunch of sadistic guys. Sadly, there are enough demented fux out there that a handful would buy this video and I could claim that since I made a small profit, I have marketing savvy. Why would I want to do this, just because it might sell? There is more to life than money.

    I laugh at the people who taunt anyone who dares criticize them to “do it yourself if you’re so smart”. A lot of people will do just that, and will enjoy watching you whine that “all the big boys came in and took over and now I can’t make a profit”. lol

    Reply
  5. I quite frankly don’t care what nick you hide behind and I don’t feel you have any responsibility to produce the kind of product you feel the market needs. There is no mandate that “if you believe it prove it to us.”

    As the owner of a company who leases and licenses the work of over 100 different photographers and who has participated in the Internet side of the business since its inception I think many of your comments are well-formed.

    While I don’t agree with you on the vitality of some of what you call “extreme porn” I think you are correct that the industry is glutted with pedestrian content in all dimensions.

    One school of operator/producer consciously sees themselves as “trawlers”, operations seeking to net fish, convert them, and toss them away like used condoms. This business model presumes a carny attitude toward the consumer and operates under considerable competitive pressure. Formula productions with low margins are the rule. Branding has little import.

    What you are advocating is product that has more appeal to the intelligence of the surfer/consumer. Good story is expensive to construct, and narrative requires more attention to casting, acting, direction, lighting, and all the other aspects of production. Some of the others who have responded to you suggest that market forces dictate the terms, and that porn customers prefer chum. But in fact the market is very large and the audience has many different agendas, as you suggest. I think you are correct that opportunities exist–especially with the younger segment of society less hung-up on sex–to develop content which is richer in story and production values. One of the problems is that instead of being a rinky-dink $5000 video production that hopes to gross $6K and make $1K (a not bad 20% ROI), one needs to think in terms of a $1 million dollar production that produces similar or better ROI. Or hits a home run.

    Ironically, the magazine business still retains much of the tiering you are suggesting in editorial and product development. And the other model is Hollywood, where virtually every actress of note appears fully naked and performs sex scenes with some degree of verisimilitude. Hollywood knows about product that couples can watch together, and it also knows about how to popularize its stars in magazines and on the web. Whether there is a middle position to evolve remains a big question.

    Reply
  6. If the guy knows exactly how it should be done, why doesn’t he just do it “perfect” and once he succeeds he’ll brush all the other producers away and mob the floor of the adult business with them. He could become a millionaire in just 1 week. LOL.

    I hate people who are using the “Royal” WE when sharing their opinion, just because they believe that it’s looking much more prominent and more important when they’re using the “WE” instead of the simple and correct “I”.

    I also don’t think he knows exactly the difference between a commercial production and a “production” that is using handycams. Perhaps he’d seen too much porntube, xtube or gaytube and he probably believes that this is all the same commercial production what he can see on the tube sites. Get a life, man!

    The adult producers are no idiots (at least not all of them) and they do know pretty well what their customers pay for and what they don’t pay for. Of course there are awful productions and better productions, like it is in any segment of economy. If you like to eat, you’ll find excellent restaurants and you’ll find average restaurants and you’ll find restaurants where you already start to vomit when they are bringing you the dishes. There is the same situation in the adult industry with those who know how to do business and how to produce and those who don’t know. Those who don’t know will fail and the others do the business. It’s not different.

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  7. All this is true, but the business model works to the tune of how many billions of dollars per year?

    No one forces anyone to promote any site – it is up to the webmaster

    No one forces anyone to buy a membership – it is up to the customer

    If the demand for such dies, the offerings will change, or the sites will die

    The consumer is not stupid – he knows exactly what he is buying

    The last time you posted seven years ago… the only other time you posted… you posted essentially the same thing which makes me pause and ask myself if this might be a fake nick – something a few people on this board like to hide behind.

    If so, don’t be a chicken shit – if you believe this, let us know who you are.

    If this is not a fake nick, then you might consider being part of the solution by being an active member of the community – any community – rather than just pulling your head out of the sand once every seven years

    No offense meant

    Reply
  8. Thanks for your support ladies. I honestly didn’t think this would even be posted. I tend to have a rather acidic tone in some of my writing, and this one sounded pretty angry.

    Now for some positives:
    Big thumbs up to the few production companies who actually do it right. You know who you are and so does everyone else. Your high-quality material shines above the crowd, and re-enforces the idea that you don’t need to be degrading or sleazy to be sexy. I love the videos that are hardcore and nasty, without being abusive to the female talent.

    I am sure the rank amateurs and sleazebags that permeate the industry annoy many of you just as much as they do the consumers, because they dilute the industry with a bunch of garbage. There is almost no barrier to entry in this biz, which makes it ripe for this dynamic.

    There are many many guys like me who, surprise, LOVE women, and respect them. We want to see them do sexy things in a safe, comfortable, respectful environment. We appreciate what they do. It’s enough that they are willing to do anal on camera for us…we don’t need them to also do ATM or lick the cum off the floor or suck it out of another girl’s butt.

    There is a growing market for more porn that can be watched with your partner, I believe. I’ve had many girlfriends who would’ve been willing to watch porn with me, but I would be ashamed of my gender if they saw all the violence and debasement that happens in the average modern porno. Someone needs to strike the balance between the boring (IMHO) Vivid and Andrew Blake type stuff, and Gonzo.

    I believe that the spoils of the future will go to companies who focus on the following aspects of their product:
    High technical production values
    Segmented videos that appeal to specific tastes
    Focus on nice-looking talent by paying more if necessary
    Good editing, to eliminate the monotonous long scenes. shorter clips
    Storyline and set up to create erotic situations
    Less ridiculous titles (who wants to bring a video home to their girlfriend entitled “Smack me around and call me stupid” or “Dirtpipe Milkshakes” ?!)
    Focus on hot, kinky sex, without the disgusting factor
    Video that can be watched with a woman, without her being grossed out
    Fit, normal-looking male talent that don’t look like strung out thugs

    I constantly consider the idea of entering the biz myself, because I know that if I applied my mainstream production skills to porn I could make some great product.

    thanks for listening

    Reply

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