realblog

This picture is quite old (in the digital age), if the writing on it is true. Digital photography was first marketed around the early nineties, but of course it took a while before it became widespread. Anyway: happy holidays to you all.

PS: From the january issue (available right after Christmas), my Rolling Stone Italy column now entitled Alt Sex 2.0, will be made of images only. The first issue is about Santa Clauses and festivity-related Porn.

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between Art and Science: this is how I became a Pierre-Joseph Redouté and John James Audubon fan. Recently I came to realize that there is also a relationship between Porno and Science, and Apophallation is a good example:

“Apophallation is a technique resorted to by some species of air-breathing land slugs such as Limax maximus and Ariolimax spp. In these species of hermaphroditic terrestrial gastropod mollusks, after mating, if the slugs cannot successfully separate, a deliberate amputating of the penis takes place.” (from Wikipedia, read the full entry)

When I discovered the word Apophallation I made a little search, and came up with this result. The page, made by Brooke L W Miller in 2004, is called “Home of the Slug Love” and it’s hosted on the UCSC .edu website: “I am studying evolutionary biology and I became interested in Banana Slugs because I feel that they are good organisms to study sexual conflict between hermaphroditic mating partners.” What follows can only be described as Slug Porno – see it for yourself: there are even videos, aptly rated XXX.

There is also a (mispelled) Newsgroup for this, alt.binaries.apophalation, that yesterday had 290 files posted. Mostly .rar files – parts of some movie which I didn’t download (you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, and apophallation seems a bit beyond). But of course, if you’ve been here before, you’ve already seen some Slug love.

One of the aesthetic marks of our times is certainly Photoshop, the most popular photo editing software available. Thanks to a smart distribution policy (that features a somehow weak copy protection system) Photoshop has become not only the professional standard tool, but one of the most ubiquitous softwares on the planet, and most pictures you’ll find online have been edited with PS. Sometimes is just cropping, or the marvelous “save for web” function, but other times there’s more. Like in these commercial pictures I presented here a while ago, or in this case:

This image comes from the newsgroup it.binari.erotismo.amatoriale. Italians seem to love photoshopping for a few reasons, blurring details for anonimity being the main one. But there’s more here: mirroring, extracting (one wonders what happened to the woman’s legs in the center of the image), the BW frame, the huge signature… Applied creativity, or a successful attempt to bring some obscenity to this tame pic?

This kind of image is so common in the newgroups (and in realcore websites) that I’ll devote a chapter to it in my book. The top left image belongs to the “recontextualized images” family; it obviously comes from an hardware website. Among the most popular involuntary porno sources online there are clothing catalogs, celebrity forums and of course school pages. The image below could either have been made for the website (probably an older men pictures forum), or stolen from someone’s page (“my grandpa, the very best in the world!”). I found it in the oldermen Usenet NG; differently from the pornography the world has seen so far, this genre isn’t obviously sexual. It’s porn in the eye of the beholder. And it implies an interesting idea: that no one is out of the loop, and most people have a sexy side to them – wether they realize it or not.

So, next time someone takes a picture of you (or stares on the bus), make a mental note of the position of your belly, your shoe type or the amount of hair on your forearms. Any of these details, meaningless to most, can be irresistible to some.

One of the most popular newsgroup of Usenet is alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.vintage. It contains images from the history of porno, in fact the history of pictorial nudity, from paintings to early photographs, up to scans of eighties magazines. It’s a fantastic gallery of bygone pornography, some still effective today (like the scans of boobies magazines from the ‘70/’80es, very exotic in the age of silicon), while others are of more historical value, such as these.

This is the sort of images you’d find in adult postcard collections, then the most popular form of erotica. These come from the Casino de Paris (at the time the lust capital of the world), feature some of the showgirls who worked there, and were obviously colored by hand. The theatrical setting and the incredible costumes added to the image temperature: dancers were not only attractive for their shapes but also, and perhaps mostly, for their supposed free lifestyle and sexual habits.

I found this snippet about folk rock icon Carly Simon on the alt.binaries. pictures.erotica.spanking newsgroup. It doesn’t seem to be porno, yet it has a distinct (although unusual) realcore flavor.

In the past 20 years the line between fashion and fetish has gotten thinner and thinner. Both fetishists and fashion designer dared more, sex went mainstream, with the result that rubber and fashion shop-windows looked more and more alike. Exactly as it happened in most styles, from Hippie to Rock Chick, designers are one step behind trend-setters; so what was dress code yesterday can be mainstream today. A few years ago I found this picture in a BDSM Newsgroup:

It seems to have been taken in a hotel room (When? The furniture looks fairly recent). The corset looks Gaultier (I am not sure: it could even be home made) but, perhaps for the first time, is used appropriately. Notice the incredible retro make up, behind the mask. No doubt: it’s what you wear, and how you wear it (and accessories matter).

Before late ‘95/early ‘96, when digital cameras became more common, porno on the web was mostly made of scans from magazines. Some of the most active uploaders (in a time when scanners were still rare and geeky) became stars, like Hamish or Jumbo (while the other material came from the BBSs, like the legendary Amateur Action). Much of that porno still survives in the Newsgroups: the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.vintage group is a bottomless mine of retro porn, from ancient b/w prints (often stolen from Ebay) to the early www scans, like this one:

The original photo should be late ‘60es/early ‘70es northern european porn. It’s a Jumbo scan (marked at top right), probably made before 1995. For today’s standards it’s a very unusual image, full of details. This type of scene was de rigueur at the time: the little lesbian show, to arouse the guys for the main course. Today, this pic would be perfect in a vintage clothing website.

We all know you can find a lot of unusual sexual images online; it’s less known that some people actually started whole new fetishes just because they weren’t anywhere else, changing their tastes every week.

This is not the case of the Lifters and Carriers: they’ve been online for ages and are even listed on Yahoo!

It’s usually larger, more muscular women, lifting and carrying smaller girls, although there are many variations on the L&C theme. You can find them all at Liftnet.net, the one stop shop for all your Lifting and Carrying needs: men, women, indoor, outdoor, in groups, on DVD: ” Blond, beautiful and athletic, Pam dressed in a hot pink bikini, poses, flexes and proceeds to lift Jeff in every which way.” ($55)

In the western world (one would say in culturally Christian countries) the concepts of Sex and Forbidden are so deeply connected that some things become sexy also because they are forbidden, or frowned upon. This mechanism works so well that a new, but already very popular fetish has appeared. It’s about a controversial behavior only recently restricted (more or less) in many countries, and frowned upon by millions worldwide.

The smoking fetish, that existed before the prohibition thanks also to people like Bogart and Bacall, is now so popular (2.130.000 results on Google) that, besides many amateur pages like The Smoking Archive, (full of links and incredible images like this or this), there are full blown porno-smoke websites (complete with popups and CCBill) like Draggingladies.com, featuring lovely women (oriental, in this case) having sex and smoking at the same time ($29.95 a month). Cigar Life, the internet cigar magazine, has a free section devoted to nude women smoking cigars. For something more extreme, and yet more forbidden, you can try Sexytoker.com, whose claim is “Bongs, Babes, Buds and Butts!”