I’ve never seen something like this for any other Gooogle search:

Have you?

So the last 24 have had me corresponding with a few people in the sex-blogosphere and elsewhere about HD and HDV and focal length and focal plane and zits and razor-burn and genital herpes, and what it all might mean to the collision of sex and the moving image.

Well guess what? It’s time to back up again.

I’m old enough that I can remember when seeing a shaved pussy in a girlie magazine was a still a novelty. I remember thinking, “Wow! That’s so brazen! That’s so hot!” The idea that a woman would purposely remove her pubic hair to afford me a better look at her so secret place was positively captivating. There was wonderful lewdness about a carefully depilated pussy presented for my enjoyment, and sometimes there still is.

Just not as much as there used to be.

Shaved beaver has become de rigor in porn. Women with pubic hair have been come a specialty item, what ‘the industry’ calls a fetish; so much so that that sites featuring “natural models” frequently feature women who quite obviously use a razor on a daily basis. (I guess what that means is that it’s natural to have the pubic hair off your thighs, but unnatural to shave it off your cuntlips.)

Not let’s back up again.

Once upon a time I used to be a food photographer. Not a great food photographer, but not a bad one either. I was good enough at it that my food photos in magazines and books and I got paid decently do to it. Food photography is persnickety. Cheese and chocolate take on a weird look if they’re left out too long, meat looks an unappetizing pinkish grey if it’s not styled and lit properly, and a zillion other little things that can make food photos look positively revolting.

At the same time that I was a food photographer I was also making a lot of rude pictures of my girlfriend. She liked spreading her legs for the camera and I liked turning the Hasselblad on her and making Penthouse-like images of her lovely, uncoy nakedness (Playboy was too tame, Hustler was too over-lit,) and that included taking close-ups of her very beautiful, very pink, very delicately formed pussy (which, rather daringly back then, was sometimes shaved.)

Pussy (and other sex parts for that matter,) are like food. Photographed beautifully and all you can think about is eating the picture. Photographed poorly and you lose your appetite. A beautiful food photograph will change your shopping list. A beautiful pussy photo will give you a boner. But an unflattering, uncrafted image of pinkish-grey meat won’t do either. It’s off-putting, or even revolting.

One of the easiest solutions is simply not to show things that aren’t any fun to look at. That’s why some actors are only show in close-up from one side. That’s why some pornstars forever seem to have something around–a corset, a scarf– around their waist. It covers the c-section scar, or appendectomy scar, or whatever.

Do you suppose the hideous gaze of HD(V) is going to mean we’ll see more pubic hair in porn? Will porn finally turn corner and start experimenting with eroticism of (at least sometimes) showing less?

Bernard-Henri Lévy

“All theoreticians of eroticism know that when there is no distance, there is no border; when there is no border, there is no taboo; when there is no taboo there is no transgression; and when there is no transgression there is no desire.”

All theoreticians? Really? Not me, but then I’m not a erotic theorotician, I’m an erotic filmmaker. At 58 Lévy still has time to discover that transgression is not the essense of desire. Good luck, Bernie!

Okay, so I can’t get ‘romantica’, so I thought I’d try ‘romantic erotica’ and ‘erotic romance.’ Here’s what the dictionary says about these words:

Erotic: 1: of, relating to, or tending to arouse sexual love or desire
2: strongly marked or affected by sexual desire

Romance 1: A feeling of excitement or mystery associated with love.
2: Love, especially when sentiment or idealized.

Sounds like a good match for Comstock Films, no? Looks pretty Relevent right? Not according to the Googlebot:

This keyword has a low Quality Score, so the minimum bid exceeds your current maximum cost-per-click (CPC).

If the minimum CPC bid for a keyword is greater than your maximum CPC bid, your keyword becomes inactive and your ads stop showing for that term. Learn more about monitoring your account performance.

Here’s a site that seems to have a better Quality Score for ‘erotic romance’ than Comstock Films. The Googlebot does think we’d be a good match for ‘cum guzzling sluts.’ Says we’d get a low CPC on that one. Thanks, but we’ll pass.

You know what I think the problem is? I think the Googlebot needs to get laid!

Back to the drawing board…

P.S. It looks like Google is serving anti-porn advertisements onto Violet Blue’s San Francisco Chronical Column. And here’s another site advertising using the Adword keyword ‘erotic romance’ that apparently has a higher Quality Score than Comstock Films. I think the Googlebot is conflicted about sex!

In all that discussion of machine vs. human search, this sort of got buried in the preveious post, so I’m pulling it out for a post of it’s own. Google’s Matt Cutts askes:

I think it would be a great question to open up to your blog. Maybe a good way to do it would be to ask people what their favorite three sex-industry sites are?

Here’s my answer:

Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles
As far as I’m concerned, Violet is the internet’s most passionate voice for sex being treated in an intelligent, adult and fun-loving way.

Adult DVD Talk
ADT is giant repository of viewer-written reviews of all sorts of porn, erotica, and adult films (pick the name you like). I rarely read them. I am, however, addicted to hang out in the ADT Discusion Forums. Purile enough to make things fun, smart enough to keep things interesting.

Blowfish.com
It’s where I shop when I want something new to shove up my ass.

Here’s an answer from Drew Black at ADT:

Here’s three recommendations for quality businesses in the adult DVD retail sector: adultdvdempire.com, xrentdvd.com and bushdvd.com. These three companies are class acts and constantly improve their sites to the benefit of their customers.

We’re still waiting on Matt’s list, but I’m not sure how comfortable he is with sharing his sexual proclivities with the world. But I know lots of you delight in sort of sharing (just as much as we delight in reading it!), so please do – either here, on on a blog if you have one!

A couple of weeks ago I posted a first draft of the cover for our upcoming release MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER. Here’s the final:

Well there it is, a first draft of the cover for MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER. They’ll be some more tweeks and tunes–probably a different image, maybe a different background color–but this is the basic idea. If you want to get the pre-order discount price you’d better do it soon, because MATT AND KHYM is not going to be on pre-order for very much longer!

A few months ago Jamye Waxman asked if I could send over some screeners for an article she was working on for WOMAN’S HEALTH MAGAZINE, the premise being that a couple was going going to explore using erotic videos to give their sex life a boost and report back.

Stacy and Bryce, 32 and 34, of Brooklyn NY were assigned the “homework” of checking out a few titles and reported back in the December 2006 issue. On Saturday Jamye brought me a copy of the just off the presses issue at the CineKink filmmakers panel, and Peggy and I read it the next morning over a proper Hells Kitchen diner breakfast. I’m pleased to say the report is good. In fact, the report is very good!

Following the recommendations of a female friend who enjoys porn, Stacey brought home three movies. At 10 P.M. she popped [DVD #1] into the DVD player, and before long she and Bryce were both laughing and rolling their eyes. “We weren’t into the beefcake/Barbie-doll sex,” Bryce says. “It was weird to see so many fake boobs and unnatural bodies.” The next night, a second title, [DVD #2], got an equally bad review. “We fast-forwarded right through it,” Stacey admits. “The sexual acrobatics were awkward.” The third flick, Xana and Dax by Comstock Films ($25, Comstock Films), was different. “This was our favorite,” Bryce says. “There was no plot; it’s a real couple having sex. They looked like people we would know and be attracted to.” Stacey agrees. “I loved Xana and Dax because they’re a real couple, with genuine orgasms and a sincere admiration for each other,” she says. “We watched it straight through, and even though we were as tired as usual, we had sex right after.” And they changed their usual routine by trying a new position from the video. “Now we’re starting to incorporate more porn in our sex life,” Stacey says. “We even brought some on vacation right after doing this assignment.”

The rest of the article is online at the Women’s Health Magazine Website

Thank you Jamye, for inviting us to lend a disc to this important work (helping couples have more hot sex!) and thank you Stacy and Bryce ever so much for liking what we do! We’re working hard to make more films that I hope you’ll enjoy too!

Yep, it’s yet another unexpected search string from the ComstockFilms.com referral logs.

As it happens, yesterday I was talking to Freddy of FreddyandEddy.com, a website devoted to helping couples navigate the (often intimidating and off-putting) world of commercial sex products. One of the things we talked about was that while the world of sextoys have really come of age, and there’s now a wide variety of truly lovely, truly well-made dildos, vibrators, sex-furniture, lubes and other fun things to use on your or your lover’s body, the world of things to watch is still characterized by videos that mostly range from embarrassing to downright insulting. It’s not hard for me to imagine that the same woman who would be delighted if her husband came after her with a full compliment of Njoy pleasure tools would be disinterested, or even vaguely disgusted by porn.

Overwhelmingly porn simply is not respectful, let alone celebratory of the things that most people understand to be wholesome and pleasurable about sex, and the problem I have with typical pro-porn retort of “it’s just harmless fantasy”, is it always seems laden with the implication that if you, the offended viewer, can’t help but see through the thin coating of “harmless fantasy” spread over top down to the retrograde attitudes about sexuality and shabby production and generally crummy values expressed in porn, then you’re the one with the problem. Time and time again, I see people , especially women, tell other women that the reason they don’t like porn is because they’re prude, uptight, or “not that advanced sexually”, and I just think that’s wrong. I know too many women who are absolutely uninhibited about sex, but are left totally cold, or even off-put by porn.

I will say this to the woman who finds herself upset by her husband’s porn viewing habits: the fact that your husband watches porn that seems as if it was made by a not too bright, misogynistic 15 year-old boy doesn’t mean the porn he’s watching represents his secretly held views about sex and women, any more than a wife fucking herself with a Fun Factory toy means she secretly wishes that her husband was some sort of cyber-vibrator-droid.

(Of course there are a lot more permutations. For whatever reason, plenty of women seem to buy into the idea that they’re most important role in their marriage is as the sexual gatekeeper, slowly starving themselves, their husbands, and their relationships of pleasure and intimacy. A woman like that probably should be concerned about her husband’s porn viewing habits, though likely not for the reasons she thinks. And plenty of guys are insensitive dickheads who don’t think twice about how the the porn they watch makes their spouses feel.)

Judging men by the porn they watch is sort of like judging women by what they had to stuff in their snatches 15-20 years ago. But the only thing the vaguely cadavorous dildos and hard white plastic vibrators that used to characterize sex toys said about women is that when it comes to taking care of yourself sexually, a lot of time something is better than nothing, even when that something is pretty crummy. Thankfully there has been some progress since the days of the white plastic dimestore vibrator. Standards and expectations have been raised, and rather than being silly and embarrassing, today’s best sextoys are beautiful statements about the importance of sexual pleasure.

Will that ever happen with porn? I don’t know. You can’t prototype a movie. All your R&D goes into making the final product, which makes the entire undertaking riskier. And as our recent misadventure in Australia points out, sexually explicit movies still don’t have access to the market place that sextoys do, so while Njoy can put just as much into making tools as a company that make surgical tools puts into theirs, a the budget of a sexually explicit film has to be scaled against market barriers. The result? Even Shortbus, the most lavishly funded sexually explicit film to date, is still a low-budget indie.

Meanwhile, if your otherwise mostly wonderful husband watches porn and it has your panties in a twist, have a little compassion for the poor guy that there isn’t something for him to watch that is as lovely as Eros Bodyglide is for basting your naughty bits. In fact, chances are pretty good that he is embarrassed by what he strokes to.

And if you’re a guy whose wife feels wounded by the fact that you watch porn, take another look at what you’re watching, but this time after you’ve blown your load. Chances are you’ll feel a little more sympathetic to her point of view too.

“Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard to go into print and say: ‘I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection.” — Kenneth Tynan

Yesterday’s post about DESTRICTED drew a post from Ms. Naughty which I’ve excerpted:

“I would say [DESTRICTED’s] definition is fair enough…“If society was OK with porn’s place as a masturbatory tool, we wouldn’t have to talk about art being “disguised” as porn or vice versa.

Certainly attitudes toward sexuality and masturbation have their effect, but in the case of film it’s worth looking at this from a producer’s point of view.

When it comes to dollars and cents, the label “porn” is extremely marginalizing. Witness John Cameron Mitchell’s recent comments RE: SHORTBUS. “No one got a hard-on watching this film” says Mitchell. That’s a way of reinforcing the position that SHORTBUS isn’t porn. And with a budget of $2.5M — more than any porn film ever made — Mitchell and his backers can’t afford to have SHORTBUS shoved off into the porn ghetto, where returns are measured in thousands, not millions.

What I have noticed recently in reading reviews of films like THE DREAMERS, 9 SONGS, etc. is how venomously critics use the word “porn” - derision indeed. Whatever these movies’ failings, they look and feel nothing like any of the porn I’ve ever seen, and it makes me wonder just what sort of porn these critics have been watching that they feel a comparison is appropriate.

In fact it’s not, and in much the same way that “faggot” is used to dismiss a person’s sexuality as inappropriate and as the ultimate and overriding aspect of their humanity, these critics use the word “porn” to dismiss explicit sexuality as inappropriate subject matter and label the director’s interest in making such films questionable, and likely the product of a quirk or defect in the director’s psycho-sexuality.

In that respect, I would say that DESTRICTED’s and similar definitions of porn and erotica are anything but fair. At best it’s a useless construct that doesn’t really tell us anything about the work labeled “porn” or the work labeled “erotica”, save the economic ambitions of the person doing the labeling. (For some reason the phrase “straight looking/straight acting” pops to mind.)

More often such definitions are divisive, poisonous even; perpetuating a sort of Krafft-Ebing continuum for sexually explicit art, only instead of having poorly framed discussions about where the line between healthy and unhealthy sexuality lies, we have no less illuminating debates about where the line lies between porn and art. While this might lead to a lovely academic wank fest, it’s the wrong question, or at least a question I find utterly banal.

Let me lay my cards on the table about hanging the label “porn” on our work:

On one hand I have no qualms with being labeled “porn” because it lets people know in no uncertain terms that these films are absolutely frank in the way they depict sex and absolutely intended to arouse. If Mitchell proudly states that “all of the orgasms and all of the semen is real” but “no one got a hard-on watching SHORTBUS”, I am no less proud of the fact that my films also have real orgasms and real semen. Additionally, I am proud that my films have inspired countless happy erections, orgasms, and ejaculations. I’m please and happy that my films make people feel good about themselves and make them feel good about sex.

But along with the proclamation of sexual frankness, the word porn comes with a wagon-load of baggage and restrictions that I hope won’t be applied to my work. Like any artist, I want to have my work widely seen and widely respected. And like any business, we need to make money off the the work we do. The label porn is an obstacle to wider distribution of our films.

And just as I’m sure that directors who contributed to DESTRICTED don’t want to be lumped in with MEATHOLES, THROAT GAGGERS or CUM DUMPSTERS, I don’t want to be lumped in there, either. These are extreme examples, but by and large porn is cynical and poorly crafted; an insult to both sex and cinema. I am nothing if not sympathetic to filmmakers who do not want their work labeled as porn.

But what’s so very wrong about the the Porn vs. Art/Erotica vs. Porn question is that it supposes that whether or not SHORTBUS has crossed the line from art to porn (or whether our own DAMON AND HUNTER has crossed the line from porn to art.) is a relevant question.

It’s not; at least not if we’re evaluating the work without concern for its commercial potential.

Like Krafft-Ebing’s PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, this porn/art nonsense supposes a continuum where there is none. It separates sex from the rest of life, porn from art, and then tries to draw a line, or at least define a grey area. (Lest we go too far!)

This, of course, is sillly.

Sex is not apart from the rest of our lives, and in this context “porn” is merely an inflammatory, and largely meanless descriptor. (So is “erotica” for that matter.)

Either SHORTBUS is or is not a worthwhile viewing experience; either you are comfortable or take issue with the methods JCM used to achieve his vision. Either you enjoy watching DAMON AND HUNTER and are comfortable with the way it was produced or you’re not. Whether or not you got wet or hard only matters in as much as it helped or harmed your enjoyment of the film.

The rest is marketing spin or sophistry, or both.