It’s hard to make money with porn these days: there’s a glut of it online and even if you succeed in cornering a niche, it’s hard to cash in. But Nick Stone wants to change that and he’s taking a page from Scott Bedbury to do it. His new venture, SnapGirlz, is a portal that enables a limited number of people to sign up to receive private media daily from porn stars and other women in the adult industry. Basically, SnapGirlz is reshaping commodity into experience.
Calling something the “fill-in-the-blank” of porn has become so commonplace that it’s difficult to read press releases without injuring the optic nerve from eye-rolling. That said, recent changes in the distribution of adult content stand to make things much better for the user — and the studios — and for that, sometimes you do need to reference the platforms and services outside of the adult industry that revolutionized the way we do things.
On Valentine’s Day, the Duke Chronicle ran a piece about a Duke freshman who spent her breaks in Los Angeles shooting porn. The student, who was given the pseudonym “Lauren”, told reporter Katie Fernelius that the idea to go into the adult industry first came to her while grappling with the question of paying for her education. This is the story of what happened next.
The fashion portal nss has a fun little quiz site called “Fashion or Porn,” where you’ll be served small sections of a larger image and asked to determine whether it’s a fashion ad or a porn still. I watch a lot of porn and I was surprised I couldn’t get even 20 out of 40 right on this thing. nss has effortlessly made a point that people have been trying to make for years: that fashion advertising sexualizes models as much as porn does.
Sex sells, goes the saying, but that isn’t applicable to unabashed sex destinations; unless they’re caught in some kind of legal issue, news outlets are not likely to report on porn sites. But Pornhub’s very clever — they’ve taken a page from the dating site OKCupid, and are running a blog that looks at the trends in people’s porn browsing habits. This Super Bowl Sunday, their insights team sat down to work. What they found was obvious but absolutely fascinating just the same.
The intent to make the subset of men interested in the revamped My Little Pony franchise acceptable to the mainstream has ignored a very real — and often vilified — aspect of “brony” culture: sex. The outlet for self-expression created by this fandom is vast and, as with other fandoms, this will necessarily include the natural biological aspect of sex. The reaction to this, however, has been overwhelmingly negative. A whole new word has been created for them to set them apart from brony culture: they’re cloppers.
The mad rush to create porn that would interest women predates the runaway success of the Fifty Shades trilogy. Finally, people are realizing that women aren’t less visual than men, less interested in sex, less filled with desire and fantasy. The problem, for many, comes back to a question that’s over a hundred years old: what do women want? Two guys in the Netherlands think they have the answer: porna.
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale, acknowledges that there’s some support for the belief that viewing pornographic images results in objectification — that is, that the person being viewed (or the group of people that person represents) is not a subject capable of autonomy, but a thing to be acted upon — but he argues that images of naked people also cause viewers to recognize that those portrayed are capable of experience.
Last month, a California man initiated a petition asking the Obama administration to erect filters that automatically block pornography online. “We are asking for greater protection and responsibility from Internet Service providers and our country,” wrote the author. “We are asking that people who are interested in porn should have to seek it and choose it.” You’ll be glad to know that the petition failed miserably.
Everyone you speak with in the adult industry is fast to spell out the evils of copyright infringement online. Everyone except Farrell Timlake, that is. Timlake is the founder of Homegrown Video, a 31-year-old company with over 800 videos in its main series. Timlake thinks there is something to be gained from the sort of community free helps to build — something he learned while selling tie-dye shirts on a number of parking lots as he followed the Grateful Dead around the nation.
