Porn in the 21st century seems to be changing almost as fast as you turn your dial for another TV program. In the old days, naughty girls in slips or underwear was often enough to turn most men on. In back rooms, illegal poorly-lit films of even naughtier girls having sex appealed to the real addict. Of course, dirty postcards had to suffice for some, and for others, just fantasies, since the love of porn was most often kept a secret.
These days, however, you can see porn everywhere, even on your cable TV channels. And a cycle of events has begun to evolve. Whereas the simply nude girl photographed or having sex was enough, it’s now how you photograph the girl and how much you see of her, not to mention what kind of girl she is.
At the most basic level was the Playboy or Penthouse Bunny, tightly airbrushed, and looking lovely and pristine on her pillow. That fled with Hustler, who took a poor gynecological approach. With the onset on the Internet, adult film companies like Vivid and Wicked displayed heavily altered beauties though the wonders of Photoshop, in increasingly naughty poses.
On the other end, new forms arose such as Vintage Porn, much of which wasn’t true vintage but courtesy of photo-altering again. That was a turn back to the good old days but raunchier. MetArt exhibited the most gorgeous girls you could imagine, but started off veiling them in lingerie and coy poses. Then there were the out and out nasty filth sites, where anything was permissible.
With the Australian Abby Winters, and other sites like it, people gave up the airbrushed girls for amateurs, sweeties you could see next-door in their undies or nude. Then there were the rank amateurs: swinging sites, gangbang sites, college girls in their dorms with webcams, and any other variation of regular people you might imagine. Streaming videos, sex programs, sex radio, you name it---they all got their chance at the big leagues before people moved on to cell phones, and their own video cameras at porn conventions.
Currently in trend, and wearing out its cyclical welcome, are “artistic” photographers shooting everything from nature pictures to well-composed raunch making it hard to distinguish between porn and art. Even the venerable MetArt has gone a lot harder, shedding the clothing and showing us everything a man or woman needs to see.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the cycle that produced Anime: big-breasted doe-eyed chicks who were mainly Japanese cartoons. That gave rise to CGI images, soft and eventually hardcore drawings done with Poseur programs or in the rare case of talent, freehand. Pin-up posters became big again; Bette Page was everywhere.
So what does this say about people’s changing interest in porn? I believe it says that porn is now as legitimate a category as motion pictures or novels, where gothic novels are in one season, action pictures and spy novels the next, romance films and books, then horror in books and film.
Porn is becoming a form that every young person has grown up with, and they are longer satisfied with one click of the cycle.
Did I forget to mention Goth? That was another huge swing in porn, and is now getting to the point where one more girl with a pin through her nose or a tattoo on her navel is too much. Biker porn, PWT porn, Latin porn, Black porn, Asian porn, Literary Porn, Art porn: they’ve all had their cycles. Even furries, depicting half-animals having sex with each other.
I expect that as porn evolves even more, new types of photographing, shooting, and presenting it will appear, with nothing but the site or filmmaker’s imagination to find its bounds. And the minute those hits on the website, or sales at the box office, decline, Barely Legal will shift to MILF’s and back again.
The point is that people are stimulated by pornography, no matter how much the archconservatives would like to deny it. Now that they have a choice in what to peruse, they gobble up as much as they can of a given type and then move on to something more exciting. Even fetishes are not locked in any more; recent books have found that people in their twenties’ like to try out different types, from BDSM to furry parties to making their own videos with friends and family. Some find what they like on the first try, others move on, still others treasure several different fetishes.
Of one thing you can be sure — the craze with Porn Stars or Amateurs or Goth, or upskirts or porn dolls or Porn as Art — will eventually exhaust itself with the watcher and a new form will take its place. Or the cycle will go around again. Enjoy your sex watching, and when you’re bored, just know you won’t be for long in this brave nude world.
Mandy (Roberta Morgan) is co-founder of MikeyAndMandy.com.
This article originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe
