realblog

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).

One of the good things about Realcore is humor, almost completely absent from regular porno. What’s more, fun images often have an iconoclastic quality, like flashing in churches, tying up Barbie dolls or this:

I have a few different variations of this image, and it’s always perfect. After all, this statue was devised for pictures (and the raised arm is a strike of genius). But Ronald’s expression leaves no doubt: he’s lovin’it.

The word Amateur in connection to Porno has always been used. But in the early days of Netporn it was popularised along with another one, Action. Amateur Action (AA) has been the most popular porno BBS ever, and it has an interesting history. Launched in 1991 by Robert and Carleen Thomas, for a few years AA has been the prime source of fetish porno online (this was before the browser was invented). So, in this case, amateur didn’t mean unprofessional (in a good or derogatory way), but it referred to non mainstream practices such as fetishes, bestiality and BDSM (although AA also carried mainstream pornography). Interesting, because today, as you can see in this blog, amateur porno (what I call Realcore) still often deals with fringe sexualities. AA distribuited scans from european mags in GIF format (Jpeg was introduced in 1994); at the peak of its fame it had over 18.000 images in stock, and over 3.500 members at $ 69 per year. It was shut down by the police in 1994 (using a controversial setup described here), and the Thomasses were sentenced to three years of prison. It’s the very first porn bust of the digital age, and it was widely commented upon by many civil liberties organizations, including the prestigious Electronic Frontier Foundation. In this page you can find several links about the trial; this is the EFF archive on the case. In 2000, Robert Thomas (who apparently earned over $ 800.000 with AA) lost another legal battle: he was denied the right to the domain name amateuraction.com (that today belongs to a fetish DVD dealer), as well as to the expression itself, now a registered trademark.

Since the shut-down, AA scans have been countlessly exchanged and redistribuited by users and commercial sites. Today, to find original AA GIFs (none of which, I suspect, were authorised by the actual © owners) is very rare. Not only the expression Amateur Action has become an omnipresent tag in porn sites (making searches very difficult), but credits on images seem to change constantly as they move from site to site. They are still occasionally exchanged on the Usenet, especially in the vintage groups. The image on the right (cropped in order to protect this site) is still in the original format, and follows the traditional AA naming system: AA-, followed by the progressive number (to respect the DOS 8 character limit for file names).

A few years ago, posts like this were common in the Usenet:

Today, due to the restrictions on nudity that many “free spaces” impose, they are much rarer. If you follow the link you’ll find a very basic thumbnails site with many images of this woman: mostly soft, some hardcore and even a few rough photoshop jobs – to simulate bestiality. Note the dutch server (the Netherlands have very liberal laws about pornography) and the “Repost Freely!” disclaimer: planetary exhibitionism must be a huge kick.*

* There is always the possibility that someone stole these images and reposted them there (the email address on all images has been corrected). But the anonymous layout of the website and the absence of banner ads suggest that this place is authentic.

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.