realblog

I came up with the definition of Realcore because reality seems to be central in this new kind of porno. in the past few years we’ve seen many sex websites advertise “real models”: Suicide Girls and Burning Angel are only the most popular (and Hippie Goddess is the funniest, to me): it’s like we’re living in some sort of porno neo-realism.

Recently I discovered another similar paysite, interesting because of the name: Nofauxxx.com. One nice thing is that they don’t have the usual categories and keep everything mixed; the images seem to be the usual assortment of goth/punk/queer, with a pleasant mix of genders. Its claim is “Hot radical porn made by ladies, queers and artists from all over the world! No Fauxxx is artistic, political and all-inclusive. Featuring models of all genders & sizes.” Nice phrase, but it could be applied to many Usenet Newsgroups, to most authentic amateur porno, as well as to all the images in this research. Despite its claim, and some nice looking people, it doesn’t even come close to the now defunct Ssspread.com, “hot femmes, studly butches and lots of genderfuck”, the very first, and yet unsurpassed (probably because it was really porno made by artists, including the smart and fabulous Barbara Degenevieve), mixed gender porno site.

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!”

BJ and her partner Ariel have been online ever since I can remember (mid 90es, that is). They used to post their images in various newsgroups and, for a while, they had a Yahoo! group (that might still be running); then they moved in their own domain, bjsextremesex.com (warning, strong images), and started a small business. This is the big step amateurs take when they realize there is interest about their “unique propositions”. That, in the case of BJ, are capacity and enthusiasm.

This might seem more like a simulacrum or a totem to you, but BJ can actually have fun with this and other unearthly plastic penises of similar caliber. I guess they have these toys made to measure, or perhaps they make them. Their pic and video material features mostly BJ and Ariel (both in their late forties, I’d say), defying the laws of anatomy and having a hell of a good time while doing it. Their faces are always hidden: either cut out of the images or they wear sunglasses, that hide very little and make them look like CIA agents searching for evidence in very unusual places.

Another interesting anthropological side effect of roaming the fringes of porno, is that you get a feel of what works where. Despite the Internet, there are some differences between the porno made by italians and, say, germans or americans. Italians, for example, tend to blur every possible detail that might lead back to them: faces, tattoos, rings, skin marks, furniture, etc. Germans seem to have a taste for messy situations, like foodplay or mudplay. Americans talk a lot to the (video) camera.

But the most exotic porno imaginable comes from Japan; not only they film and photograph very radical stuff, perhaps the most extreme I have ever come across (not just sex: almost tribal, ritualistic and alien practices also involving sexual elements), but they have dozens of genres that simply don’t translate in other cultures. One big japanese kink revolves around shame, and generates all sorts of porno subgeneres, industrial and homemade, from Bukkake to this:

What is it? I’m not sure. I found it in a nose fetish (a subset of Japanese BDSM that involves nasal practices) website, but none of the images were BDSM: nice japanese girls whose features are distorted in funny expressions by other japanese girls. The image is a screenshot from a video (that I haven’t seen) produced by Aroma, a known japanese indie pornomaker specialized in stuff I usually try to avoid.

Tonight I found out that the word Realcore was used before, in another very interesting context: it’s the most common misspelling of Relacore®, “A Natural Feel-Good Pill That Might Be the Perfect Answer to Belly Fat”. It’s such a common mistake that even Yahoo! wonders:

While Relacore.com is registered by the Carter-Reed Company™, maker of Relacore®, some online pill pusher bought Realcore.com, “for resources and information on Relacore”: Get a free bottle of Relicore, Relecore at Amazon.com and all the other possible misspellings of the sole, real Perfect Answer to Belly Fat.

In my presentation I talk at lenght about the low resolution of Realcore; how it warms up the image (or the movie) activating audience partecipation (because we tend to integrate ourselves what we don’t see clearly), and how it’s evidence that what you see has really happened. But sometimes it goes too far:

This is one of the clearer images (I am not joking) of a series I found in the exhibitionists newsgroup. It’s supposed to be a screenshot of some movie, but there were only these images, so blurred and burned out that you can see anything in there. Like in the clouds when you’re a kid, or in a Rorschach inkblot…

This is slightly off-topic but interesting. We’ve all heard that one can buy used underwear online. We can also guess that the most sought after used underwear could be a not very clean pair. A few years ago I found this image somewhere:

Please note the name “gift shop” (order in time for Christmas), the price of a one year membership, the pizzeria menu language and the sublime idea of a personal audio message, for just three bucks. Some things might be priceless (like working in the laundry business?), but for practically anything else there’s Mastercard, or PayPal.

PS: The japanese, that know their shit (and other fluids as well), sell similar items with an attached Polaroid of the event, to guarantee a direct and honest relation between producer and consumer.