Would someone tell this “expert” that Greg Dark hasn’t made a porn movie since maybe the mid-Nineties?
From www.seemagazine.com- If you like the idea of enjoying porn with your partner but aren’t sure where to begin, Cory Silverberg, sex educator and one of the founders of Toronto sex shop cooperative Come As You Are, has some suggestions.
When straight couples come into the store wanting to buy or rent porn, the first thing he asks is what level of explicitness they are looking for. If they want something tamer, for example, he might point them to some of the female directors like Candida Royalle or Deborah Shames, whose films avoid genital close-ups and money shots.
As for the stereotype that women prefer their porn to have a plot, Silverberg responds, “Women have not been part of the market long enough to make generalizations about what they like. Wait 10 years, and we’ll see where things are at. I do think that women want videos where the women look like they are enjoying themselves.” I actually think men would probably prefer this too.
Silverberg does admit that couples tend to go for plot when first venturing out. And in this department he recommends videos by director Paul Thomas. He’s the main director for Vivid, the largest of the three biggies in adult video production. They rely on high production values and professional actors, which at least make for more consistent quality.
Andrew Blake’s videos are very stylized and, to his benefit, he does away with most of the dialogue. Because let’s face it: porn actors may be good at having sex onscreen but delivering lines — and usually bad ones at that— tends not to be one of their strengths. And people who have political issues with porn’s exploitative nature can take comfort in the fact that Blake’s actors get paid decently.
If you want something a little raunchier, Gregory Dark’s videos are more hardcore. Patrick Collins, Rocco Siffredi, and John Leslie all produce stereotypical male-perspective hardcore porn. John Leslie used to be an actor in the business. “Imagine your basic leering man and you get a sense of where his films come from,” Silverberg notes.
Private is a European line, which means you’ll see real boobs (80 per cent of North American porn starlets are surgically enhanced), hairier people, sweatier action, and more anal sex.
Amateur porn has become increasing popular thanks to the Internet (it could also be a backlash against all the polished sex you see in professional porn) and the fact that anyone can turn a webcam on themselves while doing it and post it on the Internet. Things like the Buttman and Seemore Butts videos have turned amateur video into a professional genre where the directors use a point-of-view camera and film themselves having sex with women they “casually encounter.” Safe to say, plot is not a priority here. Shayne’s World videos, from a woman who worked with Seemore Butts, are targeted to young people and feature young, buff, tattooed and pierced actors who go snowboarding and have a lot of fun.
Some people still have a bit of a soft spot for ’70s porn. There is something more playful about many of these videos. It’s almost like they knew the plotlines were cheesy and they played it up. Plus they’re shot on film, so the lighting is better and the bodies are less plastic. Classics here include Boogie Down With John Holmes, Deep Inside Ginger Lynn, Behind the Green Door (star Marilyn Chambers recently died at age 56) and Café Flesh. Oddly, says Silverberg, many ’70s videos were raunchier in content and included incest and rape scenes which have been edited out of the versions
now available.
As with any cultural product you’re developing a taste for, the important thing is to figure out what you like. “It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing,” Silverberg says. “You can like some of it; you can find some of it bad or even offensive. Or you can find it offensive and still get off on it. You also don’t need to feel like you should be watching porn, like it’s the cool thing to do. You can have a happy sex life without it. It is not required.”
To see the winners of this year’s Feminist Porn Awards, which were held in Toronto on Apr. 18, go to joseyvogels.com and click on My Messy Bedroom.