Ever since 2007, I can’t get through this time of year without thinking of my A Christmas Rebellion post, which is mostly a lengthy quote from an article by Mistress Matisse called The Whore On Christmas. In particular, I was struck by her account of a fellow whose wife had made his house an uninhabitable sexual wasteland, so cluttered with Christmas tchotchkes that he couldn’t get a blowjob from a hooker without inadvertently setting off a musical pillow. His effort to strike back by inviting a sex worker into this toxic space — on Christmas Eve — struck me as being both heroic and tragically cowardly at the same time (and please don’t ask me to justify the contradiction, because I can’t.)

If you chose to read that post again, now here’s an interesting contrast — a post on Bondage Blog called Christmas Bondage Blowjob. It links to exactly that — a porny photo of a nude girl in some desultory bondage ropes, giving a man a blowjob under a Christmas tree.

What’s fascinating about the Christmas bondage blowjob photo is that it’s as sterile as the Rebellion household was suffocating. The room is painted white over bad sheetrock, the tree was decorated in twenty minutes by a photography assistant, the packages are empty boxes wrapped by somebody who only had one roll of wrapping paper, and there’s a drop cloth on the couch — which may be intended to protect it from the Christmas porn-fucking, but makes the scene look like it was hastily set up in an on-the-market property using a key borrowed from the realtor.

Which, to me, makes the blowjob photo “just porn”, and not particularly interesting. Interesting would be a photo of a man on a couch in a house obsessively decorated for Christmas, getting a loving blowjob from a woman who was clearly as into him as she was in filling their space with ruffled chintz, nutcrackers, and potpourri. But that’s the kind of scene that’s more likely to exist in the real world than to be available in living digital color for our voyeuristic pleasure.