Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Bubble Hotties Roundup


filed under: Web Sex Index, Bubble Hotties by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Oh no they didn’t. Valleywag gives aspiring bubble hotties a HOWTO for faking your own hotness, should it have failed to kick in with your series B funding. They’ve got a case study and everything. Amazing. Trashy, yes, and amazing.

A surefire way to score with bubble hottie-chasing scenesters is to gently mock your own bubble hottiness. Pick a blog title that shows how vulnerable yet tragically brilliant you are — “Awkward Things I Say To Girls” is already taken, and has also already beaten you to the “why geeks make good lovers” VDAY post punch, but keep on brainstorming — you know you’re on the right track if what you come up with sounds like it could run in a McSweeney’s list.

The Queen of all Sex Nerds, Carol Queen, blogs this Valentine to Anna Nicole Smith, who I’m tempted to claim as a sainted sex nerd and tragic proto-bubble hottie. It’s true, Anna Nicole had an inner geek, too: of her first Playboy pictorial she said, “The people in [Texas] won’t believe it when these pictures of me hit the newsstands, because I was considered a goody-two-shoes nerd back in high school.” Says Dr. Queen:

“…her death, her details, the great attention paid to her passing isn’t just because she’s America’s Rose (huh?) or our next incarnation of Marilyn Monroe or even America’s Diana. It’s because she’s the girl next door who rose to unexpected (and in one sense unexplained) heights. *She’s* the proof that in America, anyone can make it really big… and that fantasy helps so many people wake up in the morning, it’s no wonder folks are fixated on Anna Nicole.”

Here’s a big-cup-of-trendy-Mission-coffee toast, then, raised up in hope of smarter sex fantasies for all of our tomorrows.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The Sexerati History of Boys in Altporn


filed under: Erotic Elite, Web Sex Index by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

The thing about altporn, the essential attraction (aside from the nudity), was that it claimed to offer something different. And what could be more different than a site featuring naked boys? Naked boys as more than just sexual props, that is.

Over the years, several sites have experimented with boys in altporn, with varying degrees of success. Here’s a quick and dirty guide to some of the standouts:

burningboys Site Name: Burning Boys (a Burning Angel affiliate)

What It Was Like: Similar to the old skool Burning Angel (you know, back when they were BurningAngel.net): same (super hard on the eyes) blue and orange layout, same punk rock models (but fewer of them! and boys!), same band interviews. Launched in 2002, never really updated.

What Became Of It: The original Burning Boys disappeared a few years ago, replaced by a placeholder page promising an “all new” Burning Boys, that was “alt.queer.boys.indie.porno.life” (can I get that newsgroup?). The placeholder is still there. No word on any alt.queer.boys.indie.porno.life.

Site Name: Suicide Boys (a Suicide Girls affiliate)

What It Was Like: Not so much an actual site as redirect to the Suicide Boys group on SG, where male members were encouraged to publish, well, free porn of themselves. That’s right, punk boys: we’d love to see your cock, but you gotta give it to us for free.

What Became of It: The URL seems to be defunct. The Suicide Boys group, however, is still going strong (at least, as far as I can tell without paying for an SG membership.).

Site Name: That Strange Girl [full disclosure: yes, I ran this site.]

What It Was Like: The first altporn site to feature softcore pictures of male as well as female models, TSG divided its photos into “boys” and “girls.” Photo sets of female models went up every Monday, photo sets of male models went up (far less frequently) on Thursdays. Though they were much less prominent than the girls in terms of photos sets, boys maintained equal status in marketing, promotion, and discussion of the site.

What Became Of It: TSG shuttered its doors in February 2005. But that had nothing to do with boys: they remained a strong presence on the site until the very end.

Site Name: No Fauxxx

What It Was Like: A site for “every body, every gender”: and every gender means boys (also transpeople, genderqueers, and anybody else who wants to get naked)! No Fauxxx went one step further than TSG, refusing to segregate models by gender. All models appear on one page, with no division made based on physical characteristics of any knd.

What Became of It: No Fauxxx is still going strong, and still representing all types of models.

Site Name: Fatal Beauty

What It Was Like: Launched in 2003, Fatal Beauty took a TSG-like tactic towards incorporating boys into altporn: the drop down menu of models divides the names by gender, with the girls’ section featuring a much lengthier roster (though it should be noted that the Models page features all models, with no gender division). Fatal Beauty featured some compelling, beautifully shot photos of male models: pure proof that having a penis doesn’t make one any less worthy of a really hot photo.

What Became Of It: Boys may make for beautiful photos, but they don’t seem to bring in the cash. Though Fatal Beauty still updates, there haven’t been any new sets of boys in over six months (though the ones that are up are still awesome, in my book.).

Site Name: Manic Jane

What It Was Like: Though advertised as a site full of pictures of naked girls, Manic Jane occasionally threw a “John Doe” in the mix with all its “Jane Does.” This odd nod to boys in porn has been replicated elsewhere, including EroticBPM (though I’m unsure whether Manic Jane or EroticBPM pulled this tactic first).

What Became Of It: Manic Jane is still around, though it doesn’t seem to be thriving. Nevertheless, the tactic of including boys through occasional sets — thrown in with all the rest of the updates — seems to be one that thrives.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Newsflash: Porn Has Been Mobile Since Day One


filed under: Design for Sex by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

A minor sex ruckus is going down in Canada, between Telus, the first North American mobile service provider to make pay-per-download porn available over their network, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver, who is calling for a boycott.

On the one hand, there’s the Globe and Mail, trotting out as many stereotypes as they can fit into (the first paragraph non-subscribers are allowed to read of) their editorial:

Telus is crossing an already blurred moral line and besmirching its good name in pursuit of a piece of a multibillion-dollar business that is sadly infiltrating every aspect of popular culture. Pornography, once confined to a distinct subculture and available on a limited basis through adult bookstores and theatres frequented by men in trench coats, now reaches a mass market through cable and satellite television, the Internet and DVDs. So what does it say about our world when 24-hour access to porn through so many distribution channels isn’t enough — that people need to get it delivered to their cellphones for a fee as well?

… and then there’s the rare pro-porn editorial, The ethics of porn on the go, that also manages to do a nice little bit of web & mobile sex history spin:

You may not have noticed, but visual pornography has been available in convenient print form for generations. Cellular phones have featured built-in Web browsers for nearly a decade and devices from the wireless laptop to the portable media player are already more than capable of receiving video smut through the ether….

All Internet service providers make money from pornography; search engines, which earn cash from every set of eyes that falls upon them, make money from pornography; the economics of scale that allow commercially-made Web browsers to be distributed for free are possible, in part, because of pornography.

No matter how freaked the Church or porn conference throwers are over this, I’ve been skeptical of the big numbers re: the explosion of mobile adult content, especially as, some of the anti-mobile porn alerts have been exposed as corporate news release pissing matches engineered by mobile device rivals.

Honestly, I’m still holding out for d.i.y. smut I can get on the go. Lucky for me, I’m blessed with some pretty (and) perverted friends in my phone book. Maybe instead of waiting for the corporate pornglomerantes to catch up, we need some some sort of peer-to-peer indie solution?

(Yes, that’s officially me fishing with a start-up concept.)

(phone porn photo: toolmantim, via flickr)

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

The Sexerati History of Altporn


filed under: Erotic Elite, We Are The Sex Media by Lux Nightmare | Leave a Comment

Last fall, while on the set of “The Bi Apple,” waiting to shoot my cameo, I got into a conversation about the history of altporn.

“You were the first altporn site, right?” the boy shooting the behind-the-scenes footage asked me.

“No,” I said, laughing.

“Well, aside from Suicide Girls,” he said.

I laughed again.

I started modeling for altporn sites in May 2001 — months before Suicide Girls reared its tattooed, partially shaved head — and even that wasn’t the beginning of altporn. Altporn, at least as we think of it, pretty much began in 1999 (camgirls, who are in some ways the ancestor of altporn, date back even further: but that’s a story for another post), peaked in 2003, and began a slow, quiet death in 2005.

Here, for your consideration, is a brief timeline of altporn:

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« go back — keep looking »