I have a question for the het men reading.
I've noticed that several of IACB's comments on porn mention a division or difference between, as he puts it, "fans of girl/girl" and "fans of guy/girl." This surprises me, as every mainstream porn movie I've seen has included scenes involving women having sex with women and scenes involving women having sex with men.
But from the way I read (and very possibly misread) IACB's comments, there are two distinct subsets of audience, and they don't like and want to see the same things. They're described as two camps, sometimes even two feuding camps, in an odd way.
I don't think there's anything odd about preferring one to the other, or even preferring one exclusively, but I can't say I've ever seen or heard this mentioned by any other straight male porn user that I've known. I always had the impression most liked both, and some had a marked or even an exclusive preference.
So... how does this work? Do most men choose a side? Do few people watch, or like, both?
A sanctuary for supporters of sexual free expression and the adult sexual media.
As someone whose favorite scenario in adult films / video is the proverbial "g/g" and who also enjoys female-on-male size queen action, allow me to add my .69 worth.
ReplyDeleteThere is no feud between folks who like g/g with a passion and the rest. There are some het men who don't care for g/g at all and will fast forward through such scenes, and are puzzled as to why any straight men would enjoy any scenario not including a man. But I've never seen such puzzlement translate into verbal hostility (unless a troll ignited into flames), which I think is what is needed to make for a "feud".
I enjoy watching women being sexual with each other where they don't need a man. Who wants to be necessary all the time? That's the kind of unnatural stress and strain that patriarchy puts on men, and it's one reason why men's life span is 7+ years less than woman's (in the US, anyway).
sheldon said:
ReplyDelete"But I've never seen such puzzlement translate into verbal hostility (unless a troll ignited into flames)"
I have, on forums like AdultDVDTalk and RAME. But then again, there was no small element of trolling there, too.
"There is no feud between folks who like g/g with a passion and the rest. There are some het men who don't care for g/g at all and will fast forward through such scenes, and are puzzled as to why any straight men would enjoy any scenario not including a man."
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting. I don't think I've ever met anyone who told me this.
To be fair, the two do overlap in straight male porn, which is why a typical porn feature contains one or two girl/girl scenes in addition to the (mostly) guy/girl content. Its far from an absolute divide.
ReplyDeleteBut porn fandom also has a pretty large contingent of straight male fans that, like Sheldon describes, don't want to see anything that doesn't have a man in it. The most common explanation, for those that can articulate one, is that there needs to be a man, or at least a cock, to "identify" with. There's also a contingent of so-called "hardcore" fans, aka "raincoaters", for whom the only value they see in porn is how "hard" the scene is, and pretty much write off girl/girl by definition.
If you want to get some idea of how widespread this "hardcore hierarchy" mentality is, one only need look at the Internet Adult Film Database, which is the IMDB for porn (mainstream American porn, anyway). An example would be the filmography for Rebecca Lord. If you notice, the "Notes" column has categories like "MastOnly", "LezOnly", "Facial", and "Anal". So if an actress does only a lesbian scene in the movie, it gets tagged "LezOnly", while if she does a lesbian scene and then later has sex with a man in the same movie, the lesbian scene isn't even considered worth mentioning. On the other hand anal and facial scenes are always pointed out. (And BDSM? Not only does that not even have a category, bondage-only scenes are classed as "NonSex"!) That system was dreamed up by Peter Van Aarle when he came up with IAFD back in the 1990s, reflecting his tastes, and he assumed, pretty much the tastes of every John Q. Pornfan.
So this leaves girl/girl porn (and I'm talking about so-called hetlez porn here – dyke porn is barely even on the radar) as kind of a second-fiddle and less respected genre, even though there are some pretty well-known porn actresses (like Justine Joli and Charlie Laine) that only do girl-girl and solo scenes.
Meanwhile, there's a whole set of porn viewers who are mostly or entirely into girl/girl. And they're not to happy with what the mainstream industry is offering, since it falls short for many of the reasons given in the "Clean Sheets" piece, or this thread from Adult DVD talk, or what's been bitched about for years now over on the Lezlove board. And since the mainstream industry views girl/girl as kind of an afterthought, they're not to motivated to change – the mainstream industry occasionally produces good girl/girl porn, but generally, their best efforts don't even get recognition or AVN Awards.
As a result, there's a somewhat non-mainstream genre of hetlez specialty porn that's emerged and is barely acknowledged by the larger industry – producers like Viv Thomas, Sapphic Erotica, Thursday Night Video, Bellezza Video, Abby Winters, Girlfriend Films, and others, whose approaches range from glamour porn to realism, but all of whom show a clear understanding of what fans of the genre actually want to see. (And this is further different from dyke porn filmmakers, like SIR, Pink and White, San Francisco Lesbians, CyberDyke, and the like, which generally have a different audience.) The fact that many of them participate in internet forums, or even maintain their own, is very helpful, as they get a lot of audience feedback that way.
The direction of the girl/girl specialty genre is very different from the way the rest of the industry is going. The mainstream porn industry has been going for "harder" and "nastier" for years now (though I think there are signs that there will be a backlash against that), while girl/girl, at least the specialty genre, generally keeps the sex explicit but "soft".
iacb:
ReplyDeletethanks for that large trove of info!