porn

The founder of the porn Pinterest clone Pinsex doesn’t think anyone has been successful at making porn social. But if you ask any porn star on Twitter or person running a porn tumblelog, you’ll be laughed out of town. Hell, you can even find private communities on anti-porn platforms like Facebook and Plus. Porn has long since become social. What it’s never had is a place it could call home without fear that it would be removed for some seemingly arbitrary infraction.

I saw some of the photos that Kendall Jenner posted for her 18th birthday blur past during a cursory glance of Instagram last night and my first thought was “oh, God, here comes the avalanche.” Sure enough, this morning, the celebrity gossip site TMZ is reporting that at least six adult companies have pinged this young member of the Kardashian clan with offers. Of course, Jenner isn’t the only one to get pinged by porn studios this year. Can you guess who? Bet Paula Deen isn’t the first person who comes to mind.

From tentacle porn to the success of vampire romance, inter-species sex has slowly made its way from the unspeakable corners of our minds to the spotlight. Today it occupies a place almost as mundane as nurse and teacher fantasies. But how did dinosaurs (and pterosaurs, which are not technically dinosaurs) get into it? Science goes deep into the most perverse corners of two authors’ minds and a decade-old porn flick-turned-shock video.

Kickstarter’s guidelines make it very clear that any “pornographic” project is not allowed on its platform — they feel so strongly about adult content that they lump it with hate speech and political mudslinging. Indiegogo, another very popular crowdfunding service, limits projects that feature “obscene or pornographic items, sexually oriented or explicit materials or services.” They lump those in with bullying and harassing items. Basically, if you had an adult-themed project, you’re out of luck. And then came Offbeatr.

Pornography is work that deserves to be safe. Like nursing, boxing, and other bodily-fluid-intensive jobs, that safety is going to be complicated. What I do know from my brief time as the Nancy Drew of dick identification is that a lot of the laws that get proposed to make porn safer have unexpected side effects—some of which are just as bad as the original problem. We’re far more likely to help porn performers if we treat them less as victims in need of protection and more as workers with a stake—and an interest—in their own safety.

Over the summer, the Pentagon put those American tax dollars to work and took a long hard look and determined that girlie magazines were not, as a whole, explicit material and could still be sold on military bases. Unfortunately for the magazines, they were removed anyway due to an 86 decline in sales. This is a roundup of what’s going on at the parent companies of some of these American adult classics: Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler. It smells like the end of an era.

“Why is there porn explicitly only for women?” adult performer James Deen asks. “By saying there needs to be porn for women, you’re basically isolating women as a gender, and saying, ‘This is how women should think. This is how their sexuality should be.’ It’s counterproductive (from what I understand) to the equality movement. Who says that one woman’s take on sexuality is the right way to think?”

I’m hard-pressed to think of anything which works the same in movies as it does in real life. Movies are, first and foremost, narrative art: they’re trying to tell a story, which means that everything which isn’t part of the story will be stripped down, which means that meaning and structure will be imposed on the sequence of events that you’re watching. Yet there seems to be a particular perversion that porn sex needs to be “real.”

Last month, the judge presiding over the challenge to Section 2257 ruled it constitutional under the First Amendment. Opponents will fight on. In the meantime, the adult industry is really pissed that no one else seems to care about complying with 2257 regulations. Gawker had a five-minute preview of the Sydney Leathers porn this week without 2257 labeling. And in a recent post on AVN, one of the industry’s go-to news sources, there’s an oblique bit of whingeing about how few blogs at the porn amplification machine that is Tumblr really bother to comply with 2257, either.

Think AVNs — with all the adult talent, porn flicks and products you’ve come to know and love — only instead of being a bystander in the destiny of the adult industry, you’re at the wheel. That’s the Sex Awards, a ceremony that will award stars, films and products based on what the fans love. Crowdsourcing is the way of the web and AVN Media, has teamed up with cable network X3Sixty and online on-demand site HotMovies to bring it to porn. Come play!