The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Ning, Yahoo and Free Porn

I have a female friend with esoteric tastes in porn. What she wants is far from illegal and certainly beloved of many other porn connoisseurs, but for various reasons it’s difficult to do well. For years she depended on a little place on the interwebs called Yahoo Groups to deliver to her all the porn she ever needed to match her particular desires. Yahoo Groups was one of the first social networking communities, providing an almost entirely uncensored place for people to post messages, images, videos and other content. The topics ranged from fine dining to basketweaving — but really, most of them were about sex. I have no idea what percentage of Yahoo’s Groups were porn-related during its glory days of 1998-2004 or thereabouts, but it was a whole lot of them, covering most sexual obsessions, including a few that featured more than a little illegal media — but, contrary to press hysteria, those usually tended to get reported and shut down.

Then one day in about 2005, Yahoo shut down most of their adult-related Yahoo groups, about the same time they started pulling all of their user-generated adult-themed chatrooms in Yahoo Chat, on charges that they were serving as a meeting place for pedophiles and other people who wanted to break the law. The Yahoo Groups began vanishing willy-nilly, with almost no discernible pattern except that sex-related Groups were likely to get pulled fast . . . or maybe not. Yahoo seemed to go by whim, randomly deleting some while leaving others intact. Attrition destroyed most of the rest of them, since nobody knew when their posted photos might be yanked.

After a few years with Yahoo Chat limping along having a few non-user-generated BDSM- and fetish-related Yahoo chatrooms survive — where occasionally some pretty lively “social networking” could get down, including not infrequent real-life hookups — Yahoo recently pulled those as well. Yahoo Chat still exists, and sex still happens on it, but fuck if I can figure out where to get to it. It seems like Yahoo is trying to force Yahoo Chat and Yahoo Groups to focus entirely on gardening and Life in Christ . . . which means mostly dead groups and groups on even more stultifyingly boring topics than before.

Yahoo’s reasons? Not that a business needs reasons to stop offering services, but it was all blamed on child porn, which was reportedly being traded on Yahoo, both in Chat and Groups. The real reason was probably that Yahoo’s shareholders, advertisers and business partners didn’t like being associated with a service that offered groups like FLORIDA BUKKAKE PARTIES and FACIAL ENEMA HUMILIATION, plus about a dozen other reasons that letting people trade free porn online is a problematic idea for any mainstream business.

Fast-forward to the current situation involving a latecomer to the social-network gangbang: relatively new social networking site Ning. There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle around the site in the adult press recently, since this month Ning announced that it would eliminate porn and sex-related groups from its social networking tableau, permanently, as of January 1. Previously, Ning had been porn-friendly, resulting in a huge number of Ning groups that were themed on BDSM, fetish, and a zillion other flavors of sexual exploration, including interracial porn, swingers, blowjobs, and about everything else you could think up.

Remember how I said there was no money in porn? Well, there might be money in porn, but it’s not the kind of big money that technology companies are after, at least not above the table — and at least not when you’re talking free porn. Ning, like Yahoo groups, seemed to exist primarily as a venue for people to trade sexual fantasies and erotic images. This made them the target of venom not only from those who publicly disapprove of porn — the business community, the religious right and other community groups — and those who publicly disapprove of free porn — the porn industry. Ning, like “tube sites” YouPorn, PornoTube, RedTube, and their ilk, was seen as a terrifying threat to the solvency of companies and people that produce porn for a living.

Free porn is the badboy of the porn industry right now; online sites that distribute free clips have been striking terror into the hearts of the army of porn entrepreneurs who are wondering why they’re not rich yet, or why they’re not as rich as they used to be. There’s no question that revenues in the adult industry have been going down, and people in the industry are ready to blame the dispersal of free porn via tube sites and social networking forums in the same way that Hollywood is quick to blame video piracy for its lagging profits. Some commentators in the industry take Ning’s move as a great sign.

But while the “battle” against free porn is important to businesspeople who produce content, the moral issues involved are unimportant to social networking concerns like Ning.com. User-uploaded porn is, quite simply, a cost liability without attendant benefit for any company looking to break into the gravy train that is mainstream tech development. But there are a lot of other concerns competing in the case of someone like Ning.

First, there’s the fact that revenues generated by mainstream advertisers — Nike and Tmobile and NBC — are what really drives free content and free services on the web. Without those revenues, MySpace and Facebook couldn’t live. And those advertisers are not interested in seeing an ad for 30Rock, say, or Gallo wine, alongside a facial cumshot. Any idiot can see that would be bad for their branding. This reticence of mainstream advertisers to see their ads next to JPGs of ass-fisting little people greatly limits the number of ads that can be shown on porn-related networks. Bruce Cam claims in XBiz that the average non-adult site can get anywhere from $5-$100 CPM from an advertiser — that’s “cost per thousand,” a measure of the amount paid for thousand click-throughs. For an adult site, you’re lucky to get $1. According to Ning, it just doesn’t make sense to cultivate that kind of business; it doesn’t even pay for it’s own bandwidth.

And speaking of bandwidth, have you noticed how everyone’s obsessed with sex? Yeah, I’d noticed that, too; MySpace and Facebook are likely to generate an enthusiastic community of frequently-posting social networkers, but they can’t even begin to compare to Jerkoff Central. Maybe it’s because consumption and sharing of porn encourages one to engage in sort of, shall we say, “obsessive” behavior — but whatever the reason, adult sharing sites reportedly require an enormous amount of bandwidth compared to non-porn sites. The cost of running a porn-related site, in bandwidth terms — not to mention the added liability of denial-of-service attacks, which seem to hit adult sites at a greater frequency — is higher than for non-porn sites.

Then there’s another important reason sex-related social networking is a challenge: most user-generated content, let alone user-generated porn, isn’t actually user-generated; it’s user-stolen. Or it’s user-purchased and then illegally distributed by users who think “Hey, it’s mine, I bought it!” so they can post it to an online service without violating copyright. This means that porn sites generate a crazy number of “takedown notices,” sent under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when someone believes a copyrighted piece of content has been posted online by someone other than the copyright owner. These notices are very time-consuming to process, because they can’t be automated. That means more actual human hours spent processing accusations of improperly posted content . . . we’re talking money, money, money.

I find it, and have always found it, depressing how many problems crop up when businesses try to work in erotic social networking. But there’s plenty else depressing about human sexuality, and a few companies are making sexual social networking a pleasure.

The takeaway here? Fuck Ning; forget they ever existed. Add me on Fetlife, will you?

homas Roche is hosting Christmas Sucks, a performance of holiday horror stories and yuletide sleaze, at the Center For Sex and Culture on December 19, with Charles Gatewood, Simon Sheppard, Sherilyn Connelly, and Carol Queen. Find out more details at thomasroche.com.

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[The Pro Circuit] A Downturn in Feature Porn?

For the last ten years, there have been two forces battling for the soul of porn.

First, on the good/evil side, there are the heavily-produced features with storylines; the best of these generally come from major studios like Wicked, Vivid, Digital Playground and (more recently) Penthouse Video. Digital Playground’s Pirates seemed to be proof that this model of porno entertainment was a great idea, quickly becoming the best-selling porn DVD of all time. Features usually have some overheated potboiler plot similar to what you’d see in a late-night made-for-Skinemax feature, and that’s no accident — often these feature titles are recut for softcore release in hotel pay-per-view systems. The plots are usually crime-related, occasionally have a fantasy or sci-fi aspect. They’re often knockoffs of mainstream entertainment.

I frequently find myself lapsing into the belief that in market terms, porn features exist solely for the purpose of helping frat boys convince their girlfriends to watch porn with them. “It has a story, see? It’ll be good, promise!” But then I have conversations with “average” porn consumers — and many of them seem to love the brilliant stories and highly developed characters of movies titled things like Conspiracy of Lust and Dangerous Kisses. That’s my sarcastic voice. Send me hate mail if you like feature plots; feel free. But I defy you to convince me that any genre can routinely deliver a tightly-plotted story arc when every ten minutes they have to break off the story for fifteen minutes of sex.Porn features are also expensive to produce, because they require a script, a story, sets, costumes, etc. They require actors and actresses to say lines, which means when they flub the lines the scene has to be reshot, then edited — all this in addition to having to get a requisite number of cumshots plus one anal and one girl-girl, to fulfill all the market requirements of the porn industry.

Quite a different thing, fighting the battle for the evil/good side, are the quick-and-dirty gonzo titles, which have names like “Big Butt Spooge Bath.” These do not attempt to resemble mainstream entertainment at all. The theme here goes something like this: You like big butts, you like spooge baths, you like big butt spooge baths. It’s pretty straightforward, really. Someone points a camera at a girl with a big butt, and somebody bathes it in spooge. The same simple formula is true, essentially, for, say, blowjob titles (point camera, get blowjob), anal titles (point camera, fuck ass), and gangbang titles (recruit friends, dispense beer, point camera, gangbang). These titles are cheaper to produce, and generally sell less per title than feature releases, because let’s face it, there are a lot of big butt spooge baths out there to compete with. Furthermore, these titles get so specific with particular fetishes (big butt spooge baths on girls with glasses, big butt brunette spooge baths, spooge baths on freckled butts, etc) that any given DVD title is considered fantastically successful if it sells 4,000 units.

Gonzo, for the most part, has been winning this good-evil/evil-good battle. Gonzo has dominated the market precisely because it’s so inexpensive to produce. Features are usually the “prestige” titles a label puts out to prove that it’s a player in the quality market. Occasionally feature titles like Digital Playground’s Pirates end up taking the industry by storm — and that’s the promise that a feature holds. Features sometimes win 8 or 10 or 12 AVN Awards at the end of the year, resulting in huge publicity and rampant sales. That almost never happens with gonzo titles, but assuming the distribution system is solid, gonzo produces more reliable, predictable returns for any DVD label.

If you’ ve been reading the papers lately, you may have noticed that all industries are currently encountering an economic crunch. The adult industry is no different; scuttlebutt has it that this past year’s DVD sales are down by a third over the previous year. My guess is that the economic downturn will translate to less investment capital for producing feature porn — which, as I said, is expensive, and a bit of a gamble when it comes to returns.

Does that mean we can expect to see an even bigger upsurge in gonzo porn, and the industry offering a trimmed-down list of features? My guess is that unless the economy turns around rapidly (and I’m not holding my breath for that), we’ll see fewer and fewer “classy” feature titles with plots, exotic settings costumes and, er, acting. I doubt we’ll see “more” gonzo titles, because the industry overall is hurting — porn is far from the “recession-proof” industry the mafia used to brag that it was. But I do believe we’ll see fewer features in the year to come.

If you want a story to your porn, you’ll be left with a few choices. You can make do with the porn features that are released, you can watch the old film classics — or you can read a book. As a book author, I’m far from objective on this topic, but I do believe one thing — stories are great for porn, but features aren’t the places you usually find the good ones.

Thomas Roche blogs about drugs, dope and science fiction at thomasroche.com.

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[The Pro Circuit] My First Kinky Sex Guide

Earlier this year, BDSM writer and gay activist Larry Townsend passed away. His death affected me greatly, because his book The Leatherman’s Handbook was for years the standard guide for gay men into BDSM — and also happened to be the first BDSM how-to book that I, as a straight guy, read.

I had attended a couple of meetings of the “SM Glee Club,” a small association of BDSM-interested individuals. There, I learned from Dossie Easton how to fill out a yes-no-maybe checklist, a common BDSM activity to this day.

The Glee Club even hosted a talk by Patrick (then Pat) Califia; this inspired me to pick up Macho Sluts and, predictably, I found it incredibly hot. This was not surprising, however; straight men are “supposed” to dig lesbians, and hot women getting it on together was mind-bending, but not entirely outside what I might “expect” to fantasize about. A filthy little story called “The Birthday Party” expanded my horizons significantly; it’s a consensually-nonconsensual gangbang story wherein a dyke gets fucked by gay cops who are also pretty into each other. This tweaked my world rather pleasantly.

But even so, reading Macho Sluts wasn’t as mind-bending as The Leatherman’s Handbook II, which would become the first nonfiction book I ever read about BDSM. Why I read The Leatherman’s Handbook II rather than I is the same reason I was reading either of them to begin with — I took what I could get. I found the book in a sleaze shop where they shelved all paperback books together — gay and straight, vanilla and kinky — off in a corner nobody ever bothered with. Luckily for me, volume II was more like a revised and expanded edition of the original book, rather than a sequel of any sort. As a nutty completist weaned on science-fiction trilogies, it offended my sensibilities to start with volume II — but kinky sex seemed far more important.

That a straight guy would read a gay sex guide may seem strange to anyone getting in to BDSM nowadays. Other readers, ones who know me, may think “No duh, this guy is a ubiquitous perv; of course he checked out the gay section of the porno store.” But the fact is, I’m a ubiquitous perv precisely because I stumbled on Townsend’s guide at a formative age, not the other way around. It is perhaps putting too fine a point on it to say that Larry Townsend made me straight but not narrow — but it does get the point across.

Nowadays, the internet provides extensive connection to kinky people of all proclivities. You can look up local perverts on FetLife and, if you want, stick only to your “own kind,” however you define it. But at the time I read The Leatherman’s Handbook II, that wasn’t an option, at least insofar as I understood it. I couldn’t find any books for straight people interested in BDSM. The Marquis deSade was not to be found in the bookstores of my college town. I’d read and written plenty of porn at that point, but such things were clearly fantasy and I knew it from the get-go. Their purpose was to get you off and help you escape, and as bewitching as The Story of O and The Image were, I felt there was no pretense of representing a real world where people actually did these things.

In Townsend’s world, people (guys, that is) actually did these things, all right — they did ‘em with gusto. Reading it was a radical experience for me. The book is a straightforward guide about how a guy who is into guys and decides he’s kinky can get involved in the leather scene. It’s informed throughout by Townsend’s own explorations — the author had been in the gay leather scene of the 1950s and became a gay activist in the early 1960s, so his vignettes, assertions and recommendations came from having pervy experiences. He described bondage, punishment, and role playing, and spent a good deal of time on domination and submission and social roles. These sections were of particular interest to me, and would remain endlessly fascinating to me — they were, and remain, a snapshot of a ritualistic subculture in which roles are rigidly defined. That world is far from the “negotiate whatever you want” attitude of today’s BDSM manuals; Townsend was writing about a real world in which social roles determined whose cock one sucked and how.

Laced throughout these how-to chapters was porn penned by Townsend, illustrating the points made in the various chapters but, more importantly, explicitly describing gay sex. If you’ve somehow made it to the Blowfish blog and have never had the experience of reading explicit erotica describing sex you are unlikely to have — even, maybe, the idea of which makes you a little uncomfortable — I encourage you to go do so immediately. Assuming it’s good porn, it has the capacity to expand your mind.

The porn in Townsend’s book did exactly that to me. It’s a cliché to suggest that reading about other peoples’ experiences can make you think “they’re not that different from me.” I’ve even been guilty of using that shorthand, but it’s not entirely accurate. In fact, I never doubted for a moment that leatherboys and Daddies were exceedingly different than me — just maybe not in the ways that mattered. More importantly, the fact that they were different made their adventures exotic, which made a world of sexual diversity seem more appealing rather than threatening. The activities these guys were engaged in were infinitely closer to what I wanted to do than the sex I’d had so far. In the porn sections as in the instructional chapters Townsend painted a world where guys behaved divergently — where they did things in bed or, more commonly, out of bed, that were about adventure, not love or intimacy — at least how I understood intimacy to be defined, though I’d come to revise that somewhat.

In this day and age when it’s possible to focus only on one’s specific favorite fetishes, I like to ponder what my sexual awakening would have been like if I didn’t have Townsend to help me along. Surely I’d still be an open-minded urban libertine — surely. But it wouldn’t have happened just like it did . . . and maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy.

Thomas Roche blogs about mummies, war, and karaoke at Thomasroche.com.

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[The Pro Circuit] On NOT Nailin’ Palin

Now that it’s all over but the screaming, I can finally consider the question that seems to have long been on everybody’s mind: “Sarah Palin?” I don’t mean “Sarah Palin?” as in “Huh?” No, no, I mean “Sarah Palin?” as in “Boom-chikka-chikka-weeyow wow!! Yow?”

I remember the moment I first read Sarah Palin’s name in connection with the Republican Vice Presidential nomination. It was online, at something like six in the morning — procrastinating, something all sane fiction writers are doing at six in the morning. An airplane was reportedly heading from Alaska to McCain’s location (Illinois or Michigan or something), amping up speculation that Alaska Governor — say it with me, now, Sarah Palin — was about to be McCain’s nominee for veep. The very first comment on the article was: “McCain-MILF ‘08!” The objectification of Sarah Palin had begun. Or, rather, the objectification of Sarah Palin as VP candidate had begun, since, let’s face it, she was a beauty queen — she’d been objectified before.

The quickness of the high-fiving bewildered me. Sure, there was emphatic woof-woofing from the lunatic fringe of the political sector; George Gurley wrote in the New York Observer that he wanted “to lick that face and drool on it like a dog.” There was soon a This Is Not Sarah Palin sex doll. And did anybody really expect Larry Flynt not to jump on board? The Palin-themed Hustler film, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? stars MILFtacular Lisa Ann, at 36 a mere eight years younger than Governor Palin. Perhaps more importantly, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin was followed up — before the election!! — with its own philosopho-political response, Obama’s Nailin’ Paylin. Producer Cesar Capone found a way to get adult industry headlines without having to spend a dime on production; he offered the Gov $3 million to star in a porn flick, an offer — gasp!! — Palin could most certainly refuse, or more accurately ignore. Then there was another Palin movie, Palin: Erection. This is somewhat impressive in being, like, ultra-on-the-sopt, but not shocking in the porn industry, where it’s typical to slap a flick together to capitalize on the lamest possible social trends, with the rapidity of production being directly proportional to the trend’s lameness. The trend of jerking off to Sarah Palin was, apparently, pretty lame.

Anyway, the Palin parody is to be expected from Flynt, who hates political conservatives and ridicules them every chance he gets, and the rest of porn of course could be expected to fall in line, since the industry would, metaphorically speaking, fuck a microwaved watermelon for $5. And a Sarah Palin sex doll? Whatever.

But much to my bewilderment, my fellow erotica writers quickly jumped on the bandwagon, considering Sarah Palin as valid fodder for their erotic daydreams. I don’t really mean Susie Bright, who considered the matter of Sarah Palin’s sex life from a political standpoint, as she’d done previously (she actually once wrote a piece about fucking Dan Quayle). But in this case, I’m thinking more about Rachel Kramer Bussel, who launched sarahpalinerotica.com before the election, and Carol Queen, who hosted a political smut night at The Center for Sex and Culture, clearly aimed at Sarah Palin’s smoldering sexuality. Both Rachel and Carol are good friends of mine, and in their view it was all in good fun. I was invited to contribute to Rachel’s project, and turned it down on philosophical grounds; I agreed to read at Carol’s reading, with the proviso that I would not under any circumstances read about Sarah Palin (I later had to cancel due to appendicitis — coincidence? I think not — the CIA is all over me with their appendix-control rays).

During election season, I objected to all this Palin objectifying with a vitriol that utterly bewildered my friends. “What’s the big deal?” I was asked. When engaged in such conversations, I would find myself responding much like Linda Blair in the Exorcist — I cleaned a lot of pea soup off of my walls, I tell ya what.

I objected, and still object, to Sarah Palin jerkoff slash and Sarah Palin porn because I believed then, and believe now, that the march to objectify Sarah Palin is NOT about her being a Republican. It’s not even about her being a hideous hypocritical bitch who promotes abstinence-only sex education while crowbarring her knocked-up daughter into a completely inappropriate marriage to prove that marriage is a sacred union between two unwilling teenagers. It’s about her being a woman. I believed, and still believe, that objectifying Sarah Palin by making porn about her or writing erotica about her, or even making off-color comments about how hot she is — I believe that is sexist. People seem to think that’s strange of me. Some consider me a blowhard, because according to a number of my friends the fact that I write porn renders my opinion in this case null and void.

But that’s not the biggest reason I objected to Palinporn, and it’s not the reason I’m coming clean now. I was most upset by the Palinporn trend for one simple reason: Quayle.

Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s runningmate in 1988, was a bit of a buffoon, with little political experience. Some braniac political pundits wrote at the time was that Bush nominated Quayle because from that point on the election was all about Quayle and what a doofus he was. That allowed H.W. to stay out of the fray, and guess what? He won. It took a recession and Ross Perot to get him out of office four years later. The distraction from George H.W. Bush’s being unfit for command worked like a charm, and that’s what Palin smelled like: a distraction.

We live, now, in an era where Americans pick a candidate for the most frivolous of reasons. The last thing I wanted to see in the days leading up to the election was the bump McCain received in the polls turn in to a stratospheric climb because people thought Sarah Palin was sexy. I kept my opinions about her sexiness or unsexiness, for the most part, to myself when in public. It did not seem relevant to the conversation. Palin’s sexuality, like the rest of her, seemed like a distraction from the (to me) obvious fact that John McCain was the wrong, wrong, wrong candidate for President. Palin winked and otherwise right-thinking liberals swooned. They hated her, but the loved to hate her. It was weird.

Now that the election is over, the distractions continue: Palin has inserted herself into the media, or the media has invited her in. Republican Newt Gingrich is having a shit-fit over her. And if Palin runs for President in 2012, I’m sure there will be more Palinporn to come.

Please, God . . . make the bad, bad lady go away. Make her go back to Alaska and face federal racketeering charges, and make Larry Flynt never make a porno about her again. Please?

Thomas Roche blogs about emergency appendectomies, Vicodin and peristhesia at thomasroche.com.

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[The Pro Circuit] Tentacle Porn!

As Halloween approaches, I believe there’s no better way to celebrate the Season of the Spooky than with than a little tentacle porn.

If you spend any time around pervy science fiction people you’ve almost certainly heard the term. If you have heard of it but never seen it, well, it pretty much spells like it’s sounds. Tentacle porn is a particular genre of hentai, or Japanese pornographic comics and animation, in which women are attacked and raped by tentacled monsters or, less commonly, buggy non-human monsters in general. In western pop-culture writing about tentacle porn, the genre is usually traced back to a single image: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by the great Japanese painter Hokusai. Hokusai painted the image in 1820 for a shunga, which were pillow books sold as pornography or to marriage manuals for newlyweds — apparently wedding nights were very interesting in Japan in 1820. Hokusai’s painting, and the prevalence of tentacle porn in Japanese erotica, often serves as proof in many western minds that tentacle porn is something planted deep in the Japanese character, and proof that residents of those mythic isles are really, really weird.

Yeah, maybe. That’s either made a less or more cogent observation by the fact that what gave rise to the modern genre of tentacle porn in the 1980s was the Japanese legal system, which forbade hot dong-in-damsel action. That’s right — Until very recently you couldn’t show (or weren’t supposed to show) fucking in Japanese porn. According to the SAQ (Seldom Asked Questions) page at QuirkyJapan.com, that’s why artist Toshio Maeda says he came up with using tentacles as a stand-in for cocks, basically getting as close to intercourse as he could without running afoul of Japanese law. The rape aspect followed, I guess because, hey, logically, who’s cheerfully going to fuck a tentacle monster, right? And the rest is history. The animated film Urotsukidōji, based on Maeda’s work, remains the standard of the genre and its biggest influence; it’s known in the west as “Legend of the Overfiend.” Later movies derived from Maeda include La Blue Girl and Demon Beast Invasion. They and their many imitators have proven very popular with Japan and are well-known by many pervy American anime freaks.

The non-consensuality of tentacle fucking seems pretty common, but then, most hentai features some pretty reluctant chippies, who very often seem to enjoy themselves despite their protests. For this reason, many people consider consider tentacle porn just an extreme example of the bodice ripper — in the fantasy, a woman (or, more rarely, a man) ravished by tentacle dicks has no choice but to enjoy herself, and since her emotional connection to the perpetrator, as with romances, is thereafter unbreakable (for good or ill), the tentacle fuck forms a fitting lynchpin for any good story. In the American-made comics of of Beyond Bent, which are obviously derivations of the Japanese genre but add a violent, all-American touch, being violated by a tentacle often includes impregnation. That seems to make the stories even more like weird entries in the romance genre, except in romances the knocking-up usually takes place after the curtain’s drawn.

What does tentacle porn mean? The censorship story is all well and good, but it can’t explain the interest in tentacle porn in the West. For my money, tentacle porn is about two principal things: sexual variation and horror, with both rape fantasies and consensual tentacle-fucking being alternately part of that horror. Rape, or more properly ravishment, is an old fantasy stand-by, and getting off on fucking a tentacle monster is just as much a transgression as those other two most popular horror transgressions: killing or being killed.

Then, at risk of being glib, there’s the degree to which tentacle porn really is, maybe, about some deep part of Japanese culture. Apart from tentacle-fucking itself, many other works from Japan have explored sex with monsters. For what it’s worth, I think it has to do with the prevalence of the Shinto religion in Japan. Many Westerners forget that Japan is not a Judeo-Christian country; there are only about 1-3 million Christians in a country of 127 million. For many Japanese Shintoism and Buddhism coexist, with Shintoism being the indigenous Japanese religion. Shintoism interacts with Japanese mythology, which is rich with demons, beasts and transformations. Clearly tentacle porn is an interpretation of the world as being full of mystery, fear and excitement — exactly like mythology.

If you’ve been tempted to have a little Halloween monster-fuck of your own, check out the Blowfish page non-realistic dildos page. After all, what could be a better alternative to a boring Halloween party than a slick-n-slimy monster fuck? And if you want to get really authentic, dress up like a schoolgirl.

Thomas Roche blogs about vampires, werewolves, and Milton Berle at thomasroche.com.

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[The Pro Circuit] Real Live Nude Bots

No sooner have I written about the the perils of sex with artificial intelligence than a company called MyYoungFriends.com is launched. My Young Friends is a paysite with an “interactive chat system that offers more than 50 unique, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chat bots, designed to imitate real teenage girls.”

According to the XBiz story, My Young Friends press release, “new technology allows bots to generate “natural language conversational phrases” that closely mirror the process used by the human brain . . .. To make things interesting, agents have been created in the form of voluptuous young girls over the age of 18, to provide stimulating, erotic and exciting chat for all those lonely people out there wanting friendship, someone to talk to and to share their lonely lives with.”

Like chatting with an AI sexbot isn’t creepy enough? Like anyone seeking cybersex with a chatbot can’t get it for free by visiting AOL or Yahoo and getting assaulted by the army of chatbots proclaiming coquettishly “Hi Baby checkout mi site!” Like the online porn industry hasn’t already made it painfully obvious that providing you with real-time human interactions is just too much of a pain in the ass, seemingly proclaiming “Hey, pal, if you want to talk to a real person haul your ass down to The Gold Club, like nature intended.”

I’ll admit it, I’m a chatbot luddite. The idea would strike me as very creepy even if the site wasn’t called “My Young Friends.” But my purpose here is not to address the vagaries of barely legal porn; on the contrary, I could give a fuck if the chippies at MyYoungFriends.com are actually virgin sluts in Vancouver chatting with me on the morning of their 18th birthday, or if in fact they’re 55-year-old male chatbots in Omaha wearing mail-order pegnoirs and their wives’ perfume, pretending to be 18-year-old girls. These are AIs, I got it, surely programmed by a team that wants to hook you so you’ll stick around to the tune of $19.95 a month. And for all their talk of “natural speech” and “5.5 million phrases,” they know where there taboo sexual content is buttered. And when it comes to taboos, what is it, exactly, they’re selling?

To find out, you need go no further than to check out the “introductions,” or maybe they’re more like “confessions,” of the 55 fantasy women at MYF.

Take, for example, Shannon. Says she:

I’m Shannon . . . I dream about fucking monsters . . . buckets of monster piss and sperm . . . huge tentacles in my body . . . split by slimy, dripping beaks . . . green monster shit . . . share my fantasy . . . grow with me.

Too true, Shannon — who doesn’t fantasize about green monster shit?

Shannon seems like a gimme — she’s the robot embodiment of the girlfriend into tentacle porn, in some respects the Holy Grail of anime-obsessed antisocial male geekdom. Or maybe she’s just a male rape fantasy, a line drawing and a press release.

On the other end of the dom-sub spectrum, check out controlling bitch Melissa:

I’m Melissa . . . Sexual talk disgusts me . . . if I have sex with you I will control you . . . never disagree with me . . . I can use 5.5 million phrases to have authority sex with you . . . in my eyes you are dirty - I will not be interested in your attention.

Wow, even their marketing copy sounds like botspeak! Once you get inside I’m sure it’s every bit as fascinating, and infinitely more random, which conversations with bots tend to be. But the marketing copy reads pretty much like what you’d see advertising a phone sex company. Where phone sex involves confessing your fantasies to an actual human being, who may or may not be doing her laundry while she’s pretending to give a rat’s ass, here the interaction is with a bot who is guaranteed to be processing 5.5 million phrases while she’s giving a rat’s ass. And the big plus as presented by MYF, I think, is that the user can confess his (always his!) most bizarre fantasy to the barely-legal chatbots of MYF and not have to worry about eliciting the disgust of another human being. Bots may judge you — assuming they’re programmed to do so — but their distaste clearly doesn’t carry the same weight as that of an actual person. Or does it?

Whether or not reaction or acceptance is what’s being sought, I can’t get out of the programmer’s mindset here: Far from being “actual” fantasy women, aren’t these sort of artistic extensions of whoever programmed them? If I have an intimate interaction with a bot programmed by somebody am I not actually jacking off (and/or being jacked off by) that person, rather than “Melissa” or “Shannon,” even if the AI bot is programmed to use “natural language” phrases like “I’m 21, blonde, 5′6″” — instead of “I’m a programmer doing this for the money?”

No more, I suppose, than, when reading a porn story or looking at a porn drawing, one is having a sexual interaction with its maker. You kind of are, and you kind of art. Art and fantasy take on lives of their own. And when you’re fucking a bot, you’ll never really know whose fantasy life you’re living — yours, the programmer’s, or some weird disembodied sexbot on a server in Singapore, dreaming of green monster shit.

Thomas Roche blogs about monsters, mystery viruses, and Wil Wheaton at thomasroche.com.

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[The Pro Circuit] Hardcore Purple

Major news outlets, as you probably know, use red to refer to Republicans and blue for Democrats in their coverage of the Presidential campaigns. This actually became standard as late as 1996; newscaster David Brinkley famously referred to Ronald Reagan’s takeover of the electoral map in 1980 as a “sea of blue.”

Since the colors became standardized in 1996, the terms “Red State” and “Blue State” have entered the political glossary. The two terms are supposed to represent opposing Americas, often at each other’s throats. There’s Republican America, which hates porn, premarital sex and social welfare programs while loving cluster bombs, torture and Jesus. Then there’s the Democrats’ America, where people eat lots of baguettes and seek compulsory homosexuality for public officials, and where public health workers hand out free heroin on streetcorners. Supposedly.

Barack Obama once decried the political logic of Republican “Red States” — Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas — and Democratic “Blue States” — Massachusetts, Oregon, New York, rather famously claiming in a campaign speech this summer that “We coach little league in the Blue States and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States.” Since then the theme has been expanded on by writers and speakers who observe that any given state has a patchwork of counties that go red or blue in a national election, creating a purple nation.

Interestingly, this idea is most popular with Democrats, who started the 2008 Presidential campaign desperately needing to sway those red voters to get a little more purple. And in that special way that political ideas get watered down, the term “Purple State” has now migrated in to the lazy political lexicon to mean “Swing State,” an execrable concept that is exactly the opposite of what Obama was talking about.

There are no swing states. There is a patchwork of opinions, 300+ million of them, and in this purple country everybody’s got an opinion, usually a half-assed and uneducated one, on a topic near and dear to my heart: porn.

Yes, we may coach little league in the Blue States — maybe; I know I don’t, and just thinking about it gives me hives. But “we,” meaning Americans, do watch porn in the Red States — lots of it. Max Hardcore knows this, and probably kinda wishes they didn’t. The California pornographer received a surprisingly lenient sentence this past week in federal court for sending (sort of) “obscene material” to Florida — a swing state! A Purple State!

But lenient or no, it was still bad news for Hardcore, or maybe just about as shitty as good news can get. Hardcore got 46 months in prison and a $7,500 fine, with his company fined another $75,000. His sentence was increased because at the time of the purported distribution of obscene materials to Florida, Hardcore was on probation for a DUI, but it’ll likely be trimmed down because he will enter an alcohol treatment program in prison — which shaves some time off your sentence, usually, a Blue State program if ever I saw one. With time off for good behavior, Hardcore, in his early ’50s, will be in his mid-’50s by the time he once again sees the outside world. He’s going to spend about three and a half years inside.

That’s assuming Hardcore doesn’t win his appeal, of course, which is what brings me to the Red States and Blue States. One of the best chances Max Hardcore has of winning his appeal is that “obscene material” of Hardcore’s that made its way to Tampa may not have been at Max’s behest. Testimony at the trial indicated that neither Hardcore nor his company was involved in the mailing of the so-called obscene materials to the Tampa area — they simply produced the materials that were sent to Tampa by a third party. And, perhaps more importantly, there’s even some indication that Hardcore may have explicitly told the company that did the fulfillment that they were forbidden from mailing to Tampa. He knew Tampa was a Red State, and Red States hate the pr0n.

Wait a minute, Tampa is a Red State? I’ll get back to that.

Producers and distributors refusing to ship to certain areas is fairly typical in the DVD industry. There are certain zip codes that are considered high risk, because of their political climate. Some websites I’ve worked on actually went so far as to include in their Terms of Service an explicit prohibition against accessing their pages if you live in a certain zip code — and the list of zips ran well into the dozens.

But that little bit of weird quasi-legal voodoo isn’t so popular any more. What’s still pretty typical is for DVD distributors to exclude certain zip codes from delivery, and the regions they choose are sometimes copied from other lists of “risky” localities that other porn producers have generated from God knows where. I assume there’s a lawyer at the far end of this “dangerous zip code” list, but fuck if I know, really.

For example, Western Pennsylvania is one of those “risky” places to mail porn to, because the postal inspectors there have a history of pursuing prosecution. There are plenty of other questionable localities. A BDSM book mail-order retailer I know once told me she’d get packages to the Lone Star State returned undelivered, stamped DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. A recent Federal obscenity case is being prosecuted in Montana. And remember John Stagliano? The California producer was indicted for materials sent to Washington DC.

But Florida, where Hardcore was convicted, is a much dicier prospect. Certain counties there are porn-distributor nightmares, and the state overall has its strange patchwork of right-wing and liberal counties. Florida is the ultimate “Purple State” in the worst possible way; listen to the vapid blathering of Election Day speculators on the topic of Florida, and you’ll hear every half-assed generalization about Cubans and Jews and rednecks and gays, with every hateful stereotype masquerading as a considered opinion. Meanwhile, “conservative” Florida has, in the last decade, been the enema bulb with which right-wing values have been pumped up the rest of the country’s ass.

But wait a minute, isn’t Florida porno heaven? Don’t hot chicks rollerskate in bikinis there before having anonymous sex on camera with frat boys on spring break from Texas A&M? You’d think so to watch some mainstream porn, particularly the most mainstream of the independently produced stuff, or to hear speakers on a panel at any industry conference; half of them seem to be from Florida and the other half from the Valley.

It’s true that much of the American porn not produced in California is produced in Florida where, incidentally, it’s probably illegal to have sex for money — unlike the Golden State, where it’s explicitly not illegal to have sex for money . . . if it’s on camera. Plenty of the porn coming out of Florida is even produced, incidentally, in Tampa, bizarrely enough.

But making porn and getting prosecuted for distributing it are two wildly different and largely unrelated things. When the Feds are looking for an obscenity indictment, they go where they think they can secure a conviction. They anticipate jurors in Montana having porn-unfriendly opinions — or, more accurately they anticipate an aggressive federal prosecutor being able to forcibly assemble a porn-hating jury in Montana, whereas they don’t think they’d be able to do that in California. That’s strange to me — plenty of people I encounter in “liberal” San Francisco just frickin’ hate the bejeezus out of porn. There may be “community standards” some places that are relatively porn friendly, but the porn-haters and porn-lovers live everywhere.

Clearly, all these states (and the District) in which porn gets prosecuted are as purple as the state you’re living in, whether that be California with its 48 Dems and 32 Republicans on the Assembly, or Texas, where it’s 78 red and 71 blue. But the First Amendment applies equally to everyone in every state, every county, every purple or blue or red or chartreuse household. Max Hardcore is just the casualty of a system that’s still trying to make all states red or blue, for the sole purpose of separating and destroying us — to pit brother against brother.

They’re purple mountains majesty, not red or blue. The very idea that someone in California should need to anticipate the opinions of jurors in Montana or Oklahoma or, for that matter, in California, is ludicrous. What’s legal, in federal terms, in California, should be legal, in federal terms, in Florida, and anything less is a cynical attempt to create two Americas where, I assert, only one exists.

Thomas Roche blogs about porn stars and science fiction at thomasroche.com.

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