True confession: I have a serious yen for no-frills, retro, antiquated porn that, I guess, falls somewhere between kink and social study. Plus, I am intrigued by anything that is strange, original, and a few degrees left field of what one degenerate friend calls "the conventional licking and sticking."
I can only guess that this taste is driven by the innate bohemian in me who finds the majority of current North American and Western European porn/erotica just a tad too slick, and a little too lip-gloss stained, planned, and produced. Hair, makeup, piercing, and tattoos all seem groomed, gussied, and—dare I say it—too corporate. The production quality on some of today's porn approaches that of a moderate-budget TV commercial. Even moving out to the highly publicized and federally indicted extremes, the supposed shockers seem creatively contrived—exactly as gross, crazy, and brutal as a producer who knows his or her audience wants them to be.
Early in 2006, I wrote a column in which I warmed to a new wave in porn/erotica—a post-punk, glamour-burlesque getting down typified by the highly effective SuicideGirls.com operation and all the other Goth-chick chic, tattooed-love-girl sites that followed in the Suicide Girls' wake by attempting to emulate the site in both style and profits. I was hoping a trend might actually be a revolution, but no such luck. As the months passed, the magenta hair, black nail polish, and labia rings were easily co-opted and filed under "alternative content" to be processed and marketed (and pirated) just like the mainstream.
In another column, I mentioned I had observed a massive, Eastern European-branded influx of crude and violent material, an especially grim and elaborate sub-genre of downloadable bondage videos that looked as though they were shot in either a derelict tractor factory or the ruins of Chernobyl. For a while, this kind of out-there material was sufficient enough to cause a degree of comment; but after a while, it too, was absorbed into the mainstream, even though some of it remained close to the fringe.
Three or four years ago, Japanese hentai also was something of a novelty, but it's now regularly featured on any full-service website, right between the barely legal teens and the lipstick lesbians in clear heels.
While I'm rarely, if ever, shocked by anything sexual, I do take positive delight in being surprised. And, while the Suicide Girls rock the raunchiness, the Russian post-industrial nastiness and the big-eyed hentai from Tokyo have become just extra items on the standard adult menu. Far weirder and decidedly more esoteric material has moved in and replaced them on the niche fringes of the online sex business.
Once upon a time, a keyword fishing expedition on Google would yield two or three odd or interesting items before I grew bored and went back to what I was supposed to be doing. Today, however, just a couple of simple keywords will open the floodgates and offer access to sites featuring anything from reproductions of what were once grainy 8mm loops from the 50s and 60s, to unsophisticated DIY CGI. On one idle afternoon—while surfing between the homepages of a retro-kink enthusiast's collection of Victorian fucking-machine designs and lovingly restored frames from porn-inspired graphic novels from the Spanish comic book mills of the 1960s and 1970s—I discovered these brilliantly executed Japanese bondage animations that, instead of using the cartoonish hentai style, attempted to look like something that might have been exquisitely drawn in Kyoto in the 18th century.
Even the most cursory research reveals a wealth of niche content out on the fringes that is growing in quantum leaps. This is the domain of the porno-geek, the adult online equivalent of Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. These dedicated "obsessives" often are dismissed by the conventional mainstream as being of little importance—but they are out there, in constantly growing numbers, and they are not going to go away.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
