It’s now clear that digital photography has irreversibly changed our relationship with pictures. I would add that Photoshop (on which I’ve written before, also here) has intensely changed that relationship as well, from adding captions to making fake celebrity images, right up to extreme photoshopping. Take this one (found in the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.oral Newsgroup) for example.
(click to enlarge)
It looks like an early ’80s picture “revamped” in Photoshop. I find this mirror-image extravaganza almost physically unpleasant: the overall color tone, the girl’s expression and hair, the dizzying frame – multiplied a thousand times, some kind of nausea-inducing porno-fractal. And I wonder: why did someone create this image (which I believe took some time to make)? Is it sexually arousing (for blonde fetishists or fractal nerds)? Is it decorative (perhaps an impossible wallpaper)? Is it a devotional image of The Secret Church of the Holy Double Penis (in many traditions, from Roman Catholic to Tibetan, symmetry is considered divine)? As usual with me, too many questions and no answers (that’s why I don’t call myself a theoretician).
The purpose of this page is to present examples of smut that describe some aspect of Realcore and have some of that special, often involuntary, quality that struck me the first times I found this stuff online – and still does. Take this picture, posted some time ago in a foot fetish newsgroup (I can’t remember which one – there are dozens):
It’s a Point-of-view shot, taken by someone visibly concentrated in something else. Still, not only it’s a perfect photo, but depicts the joys of an act that wouldn’t have occurred to me, but of which I can see the point. If you’re a foot fetishist, or a lube enthusiast, this must be heaven. It could even be that this is the first photo ever taken in this position, from this angle: it’s certainly the first one I’ve seen – and believe me, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe”.
As usual, I can’t help noticing the actual beauty of the photo itself, in glorious lo-res (it could even be a video frame): a maybe blasphemous, contemporary, absurd, digital (but very fleshy) Lingam.
I haven’t been posting here lately, sorry about that. But I’ve been searching for pictures as usual, also because my Rolling Stone Italy column on Alt Sex (in italian) is changing. Starting with the january issue it’ll be called Alt Sex 2.0 and it will be just images, perhaps 4 or 5 per issue – one page. This is great for a number of reasons: it makes sense conceptually, it’s gonna look great, it isn’t language based (so you can enjoy it too) and it will hopefully follow the excellent photographic tradition of the magazine. Obviously I cannot publish everything. There are some limits: erect penises and spread vaginas. I’m told this is where the world draws the line as to what is porn and what isn’t. I can certainly live without them, but my readers will miss fantastic images such as this one, or the one below (found in the bestiality newsgroup; note the very tiny horse vagina picture placed right in the middle).
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.
Perhaps the biggest strength of my Realcore show is the carachters that are onstage with me. I call them my allies, but they are the real protagonists. I play the entertainer, trying to tie all these beautiful pictures – and people – together. I deeply respect them all, of course; but over the years I’ve come to love some of them, like the man hanging by the balls in the last image of the show. Or this guy, for example:
How can you not love his courage? He might be funny to someone (and I suspect he knows this, as many other Realcorers do) but he doesn’t seem to care. He might have an underwear fetish, or know someone who does, but to me he represents the porn of the future: fearless, personal, fetishistic and sometimes not porno at all, as in image on the left. I found a few of his pictures (all in the same pose with various outfit combinations) in the Oldermen Usenet Newsgroup.
The contribution of the Anime/Manga culture to pornography is well known, and there are fine books out there on this fascinating subject. There’s very little I could add, but I can contribute with this image:
I found it in the newsgroups, but I guess it comes from one of the millions of related websites. But related to what exactly? Fancifully operated transexuals? Shemale fantasy freaks? Manga mythology? Please note that this image complies with the japanese pornography regulations, as the tip of both penises is blurred out.
Interracial porno is disturbing for a lot of people, and I can see why: race based porn, especially of the Realcore flavor, tends not to be very PC, and quite often is downright racist. Still, the language seems to be agreed upon, so it’s ok if a white slut calls an african american male nigger, and viceversa. They even look for each other (for example in personal ads) using this terminology: “slut4niggers ISO well hung mandingos”. This type of racial interaction is almost always connected to another genre, not as rare as one would think: the cuckold hubsband (consenting, and often initiator of the game). This is so common that there are clubs, such as the Southern California Mandingo Club, “hosting the most extraordinary and electric swing parties for people that are in the Lifestyle, and who enjoy the contrast that the Interracial aspect brings about. These parties bring together upscale Couples and select Singles.”
I found this image in the interracial Usenet newsgroup; I’m not sure if it’s the Socal Mandingos or some other organization, but this team caters to yet another variation, one that’s even more bothersome (if seen as a fetish): interracial pregnancy.
PS: An excellent reading on this topic is Meet the Mandingos. Thanks to Mark Dery for the link.
One of the trademarks of classic Hardcore porno was the genital closeup shot; sometimes it looked horrible (especially when prints or movies had too much red in it, giving the image a butchery quality) but it was always there. Realcore porn, and new porno in general, seems to be more concerned with the ambience than with certifying that penetration is taking place: shots have a much wider angle, and details have a meaning within the context. But of course there are exeptions, sometimes quite remarkable.
Justnips.com is a commercial website (one-time billing, $79 subscription for 180 days). Is it all devoted to nipples? “Although our site is JustNips.Com we photograph & videotape most models nude from head to toe (& everything in between)”. I haven’t visited the website but it looks kind of plain. I wouldn’t say the same of this image, posted a few weeks ago in a nipples Usenet Newsgroup. Notice the “repost freely – no modifications” disclaimer, almost a CC license.
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.
