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which_chick) wrote2004-12-07 10:27 am
which_chick) wrote2004-12-07 10:27 am
(no subject)
Two things have been holding my attention for the last couple of days. The first is the decline of the dollar against world currencies. There have been more than a few portentious rumblings from people who are surely more informed than I, and this week's issue of The Economist has a pretty hefty article on the subject. The problem is that I have a great deal of difficulty taking any sort of financial disaster-forecast seriously. My dad owns what appears to be every single The Coming Crash of 19xx and The Real Estate Bubble and Obscene Stock Valuations Can't Last Forever (I'm making these titles up, but not by much) book that has ever been written. Now, maybe it's just me being cynical and all, but from where I sit, predicting total financial collapse is, for finance guys, a lot like writing Deus ex Hypothermia for a slash fanfic author. (A bit confused on the term? See here for a fine example of the genre.) But I dunno... these rumblings sound... disturbing.
The second thing that's been sticking in my mind is the transgressive nature of porn. I sometimes get the feeling, considering various forms of porn, that part of the kick, the delightful frission of the stuff, is that it's dirty. I don't know if this is just a Merkin thing or not. I don't *think* it's just a me-thing. I don't know if this is a valid assessment of porn. There's not a lot of discussion out there in the real world about how porn works and actual science-research (see here) on the subject appears to be on the verge of "discovering" continents well known to the folks who already live there. But anyway, I'm seeing a definite transgressive element in porn and it appears to be getting... worse? It looks like people acclimate to transgressiveness -- it's a moving target.
While we were waiting for the movie to start the other day, Roy mentioned that the general run of porn has been getting kinkier than it used to be. There have always been outliers, stuff that's really disturbing -- that's not the stuff under discussion here. The stuff we're looking at is the "average" porn film, the "average" romance novel, the "average" fanfic. Roy's point was that porn films for straight folks used to depict blowjobs as pretty much the ultimate nasty act. After a while, though, watching women go down on guys apparently got old (Hunh? How can this be?) so they added anal sex. Lots of it, these days. It's pretty commonplace in modern straight porn films, and not in a tastefully-implied, fade-to-black way. It's in a glorious-living-color, gaping orifice way. (Don't ask me what the appeal is, I don't watch the stuff.) Along similar lines, I mentioned a while back that I thought average romance novels for straight chicks were getting more interesting. (Okay, what I really said was "Now with blowjobs!!") I've seen the same trend line in slash fanfic, which you can damn near radio-carbon-date based on the breadth of practices depicted therein. I'm exaggerating, but not much. These days I regularly run into stuff with rimming, which is a fairly specialized area of interest and certainly not something I'd have *thought* cheerful squadrons of fangirls were up to speed on. (Damn, I'm getting old.) I didn't think it was a practice that had gone mainstream in real life hetsex... I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. Anyway, authors don't offer warnings on rimming like they would for NCS (non-consensual sex) or Shota/underage (sex with minors) or character death. You get warnings if the author is killing off a major character. You get warnings for big chunks of BDSM. You get warnings for Mpreg. You do not get warnings if character A sticks his tongue up character B's butt -- I think it's not a huge stretch here to say that it's a normed practice within the genre.
The trendlines on all the forms of smut that I have any tracking data on are towards more kink. So what's next for straight porn films? Roy asked me that, too. I don't know. There's some definite potential to strap-on reverse fucking (a la Bend Over, Boyfriend) which would not only be entertaining, it'd be safer sex. I'm not seeing a downside here... *sigh* As there is a good reason I'm not in marketing, there is also a good reason I'm not in the making of porn films.
The second thing that's been sticking in my mind is the transgressive nature of porn. I sometimes get the feeling, considering various forms of porn, that part of the kick, the delightful frission of the stuff, is that it's dirty. I don't know if this is just a Merkin thing or not. I don't *think* it's just a me-thing. I don't know if this is a valid assessment of porn. There's not a lot of discussion out there in the real world about how porn works and actual science-research (see here) on the subject appears to be on the verge of "discovering" continents well known to the folks who already live there. But anyway, I'm seeing a definite transgressive element in porn and it appears to be getting... worse? It looks like people acclimate to transgressiveness -- it's a moving target.
While we were waiting for the movie to start the other day, Roy mentioned that the general run of porn has been getting kinkier than it used to be. There have always been outliers, stuff that's really disturbing -- that's not the stuff under discussion here. The stuff we're looking at is the "average" porn film, the "average" romance novel, the "average" fanfic. Roy's point was that porn films for straight folks used to depict blowjobs as pretty much the ultimate nasty act. After a while, though, watching women go down on guys apparently got old (Hunh? How can this be?) so they added anal sex. Lots of it, these days. It's pretty commonplace in modern straight porn films, and not in a tastefully-implied, fade-to-black way. It's in a glorious-living-color, gaping orifice way. (Don't ask me what the appeal is, I don't watch the stuff.) Along similar lines, I mentioned a while back that I thought average romance novels for straight chicks were getting more interesting. (Okay, what I really said was "Now with blowjobs!!") I've seen the same trend line in slash fanfic, which you can damn near radio-carbon-date based on the breadth of practices depicted therein. I'm exaggerating, but not much. These days I regularly run into stuff with rimming, which is a fairly specialized area of interest and certainly not something I'd have *thought* cheerful squadrons of fangirls were up to speed on. (Damn, I'm getting old.) I didn't think it was a practice that had gone mainstream in real life hetsex... I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. Anyway, authors don't offer warnings on rimming like they would for NCS (non-consensual sex) or Shota/underage (sex with minors) or character death. You get warnings if the author is killing off a major character. You get warnings for big chunks of BDSM. You get warnings for Mpreg. You do not get warnings if character A sticks his tongue up character B's butt -- I think it's not a huge stretch here to say that it's a normed practice within the genre.
The trendlines on all the forms of smut that I have any tracking data on are towards more kink. So what's next for straight porn films? Roy asked me that, too. I don't know. There's some definite potential to strap-on reverse fucking (a la Bend Over, Boyfriend) which would not only be entertaining, it'd be safer sex. I'm not seeing a downside here... *sigh* As there is a good reason I'm not in marketing, there is also a good reason I'm not in the making of porn films.