Porn, Described
Looking at porn is one thing. But, to state the obvious, porn is pictures, commercial pictures. Everybody who makes porn wants to sell it. Specifically, they want to sell it on the internet. Which means they need words about their pictures.
What’s strange is the way people write, commercially, about their pictures. Every nude is a “scorching hot teen beauty!” or a “filthy cum-covered nasty slut”. Every penetration is a deep dicking, every orgasm a screaming fountain of some hyperbolized fluid or other. It’s rare to find anybody who writes honestly and descriptively about erotic imagery.
It is so rare, in fact, that after seven years of sex blogging I sometimes fantasize about creating a porn blog or review site that allows people to market their own stuff, but only to the extent that their posts can survive some sort of Slashdot-style community moderation on the sole criterion of honest and non-hyperbolic descriptivity. The trouble is, I’m not sure anybody would participate.
Sometimes, I’ll even catch myself imagining what bits of porn — especially in some of its more specialized or unusual forms — would sound like if neutrally and fairly described, in sentences of standard English, without emphatic punctuation.
An unusual post on Bondage Blog triggered my lastest “porn, described” reverie. The linked gallery contains the following descriptive prose, mostly in all caps before I standardized it:
“Gorgeous babes and teens bound, tied, gagged, probed and submissively serving their master and misstresses [sic]. Real bondage. Real torture. Real pain. Real tears. Click here for more erotic fetish action! Submissive slaves bound in rope, chains, and leather. Domination. Discipline. Sadism. Humiliation. Hard sex.”
The picture displayed on Bondage Blog? Here’s my best shot:
A nude woman with a shaved head (think Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta) is tied with rope, in a squatting position, inside what looks like a wrought-iron basket. The basket, and she, are on top of a bale of hay, next to a ladder with a rusty chain hanging from it. She’s looking nervously at a reasonably-buff man wearing leather pants. He’s approaching her, and in his left hand is an old-fashioned wooden blueberry-picking scoop with metal tines.
I know my description wouldn’t sell porn the way “bound, tied, gagged, probed” presumably does. But I’ve got some sort of defiant, lingering attachment to the idea that words ought to be deployed usefully. Maybe a list of fetish-triggering words is useful in the sense that it encourages more credit cards to be deployed, but in the sense of actually painting a useful mental picture of the thing described, it’s full of fail.
Even more interesting is the fact that nobody sees the same things when they look at a porn picture. How would you describe our basket girl?
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The biggest difference I noticed between what you wrote, Bacchus, and what appears on the website is that you described a single image, whereas the website text is about the general theme of the site.
If I were assigned to write a general description in plain English of a bondage website, I’m not sure I’d write anything significantly different from the original example. Perhaps I’d write “young women” instead of “gorgeous babes and teens”, and I’d use sentences rather than fragments. But other than that, words like “bound”, “tied”, and “gagged” strike me as being perfectly good, accurate, plain-English words.
Your realistic version is rather like the simple photo descriptions on http://malesubm....com/, actually, although I suspect the goal there is more searchability and web-usage standards.
Have you ever heard of Porn for the Blind? People volunteer to “narrate” pornographic clips, and other than being rather spot-on with their descriptions, they are completely hilarious. When I have more time I’ll try to dig up the link, but if you’ve got some time on your hands, you should check it out.
Erotic stories get like that.
I’ve been posting my stories at ASSM but I might try out a blog again. The stuff posted at ASSM is almost entirely fetishistic or deviant – absurdly hyperbolic. I’ve noticed similar trends at other sites, but ASSM is the worst.
I love the specificity of your identification of the blueberry scoop.
A blueberry scoop? I thought it was one of those combs you drag conditioner through long hair with.
Agreed, tho, the hyperbolic text doesn’t match the pictures, which are slightly silly. I’ve done that kinda thing which might be why I find most pictures of it somewhat ridiculous. Not all, some that you’ve linked to, like the one with the pic of all participants smiling at the end, works.
I used to write porn. She did this, he did that, she felt an erotic thrill of anticipation. Unlike most other forms of writing, it got boring pretty quickly, but not before I’d ‘pumped out’ some reasonable pieces.
My dirty little mind actually preferred your description rather than theirs. I like the quite specific erotic image you conjured rather than the emphatic, generalized one from the overuse of buzz words.
Fuck, *I’d* participate. It’d be honest, sexy and bound to damned funny in places.
While your descriptions are certainly more utilitarian in nature, I can’t help but, instead, be tempted to imagine the meaning of her facial expression. “Are you serious?” “What’s wrong with that guy’s face?” “Did his piercing get infected?” A combination of uncertainty and vague dislike, but not complete horror, either…
I have felt the same way about this for a long time. I really dislike many of the descriptions that pornography producers market their products with. It’s the epitome of false advertising in a lot of ways. What’s striking to me is that the more differentiation they try to inject into their product, the more monotonous the damn things sound. I don’t get it…. Why is honesty, which is not inherently unsexy, so difficult for pornographers?
@ryonne: For what it’s worth, the simple photo descriptions I write for MaleSubmissionArt.com were inspired by a combination of these things. I wanted a way to give non-visual readers a way to picture the image, but I also wanted to provide both seeing and unseeing readers insight into the picture being described without undue judgement, since the remainder of the text is often loaded with my own editorializing. :)
In any event, thanks for the mention. I’m actually hoping that one day I’ll see a few other people begin to describe pornographic content with a level-headed and objective view, since at least that way I’ll have some kind of reference I can use for the task.