Cine porno trans

The New Wave of Trans Cinema
The latest transporn breaks down both boundaries and inhibitions
by Tristan Taormino
April 8th, 2008 12:00 AM

I spent my weekend watching transpeople fuck on film. A lot. OK, a lot is a relative term. I mean it took up a chunk of time, but there’s not exactly an abundance of independently produced tranny porn around. In fact, there’s a big disparity within the genre that breaks down by (what else?) gender. Most porn featuring transwomen is slick, heterocentric, and all about fetishizing “chicks with dicks”—it occupies a comfortable, profitable niche in the mainstream adult-film industry. Most porn featuring transmen and other genderqueers is homemade, do-it-yourself, grassroots fare that’s rough around the edges and self-distributed. (Buck Angel is the major exception to this rule—much of his work has mainstream distribution and acknowledgement.) It’s queer, genderfucking, community-based, and political. That’s what was in my DVD player.

Couch Surfers is the second movie from San Francisco–based Trannywood Pictures (trannywoodpictures.com), a project of Brazen Garage Squad, which also owns Eros, the Bay Area’s well-known sex club for men, and one of the few bathhouses in the country that welcomes transmen. The film was shot at Eros, and about half the people involved are current or former employees. As soon as you open the DVD case, it’s clear that this company is working on an entirely different model: How many pornos do you know that come with educational literature? Trannywood’s first production, Cubbyholes, included a well-written booklet on safer sex for transguys; Couch Surfers comes with A First-Timer’s Guide to Playing With Transguys, a succinct, helpful little missive with tips on how to get down with a transmasculine person.

Cómo follar igual que una estrella porno

How to have sex like a porn star
You too can have glamorous porn star sex; Violet Blue gets techniques from the pros

Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate

Thursday, January 10, 2008
Several years ago I heard about this book by some porn star that was yet to be written: It was “How to Make Love Like A Porn Star” by Jenna Jameson. The brainchild of Judith Regan and Jameson, the book was, at first, going to be a sex guide from the most famous porn star in the whole wide world. A big hit, for sure.

At the time, I worked closely with a number of other sex educators and sexologists, and we all felt the pain when the book was announced. Here was yet another porn performer, one of those who do athletic and unsafe sex for a living, telling the world to use spit instead of lube (which Jameson did, notoriously).

The book then had, I suppose, an identity crisis; from what I heard it chewed through a couple ghostwriters, yet came out as one of the more fun, trashy, tabloid-style bios I’d read in a while. A sex guide it wasn’t (phew!) but it was like a year’s worth of Defamer-lite and a bag of chips, so I enjoyed it. I read it in three days.

While Exotic Erotic East … I mean the AVN Awards, is gearing up for its expo in Las Vegas this weekend, don’t you wonder what it would be like if someone really wrote that book? I mean, how to really “do it” like a porn star. It’s so glamorous, and men’s magazines are always trying to teach the fellas how to trick their girlfriends and wives into being more like porn stars in bed, and kids these days … well, where else are they gonna learn about sex?

I hate to break it to you, but first, the title would be a misnomer. Porn stars don’t “make love” — except maybe to the camera. They make the sex, and they get the paycheck.

Porn performers occupy the small end of the gene pool: They don’t look anything like you or me, and that’s why they got the job. They don’t need to cuddle before or after sex, they are extremely limber and can withstand holding difficult positions under hot lights for extended periods of time. They wax their balls, asses, vulvas, chests and backs. They get surgeries you’ve never even heard of to plump or sculpt everything from labia to breasts to calves. They have sex with total strangers every day, and the successful ones make it look like it’s not a job. Studios like local Kink.com know that what their models do is an extreme sport (and at Kink, accent on the “extreme” part), thus they treat their performers and models like Olympic athletes.

El negocio de la adicción sexual

Addicted to love?
Debate simmers over whether sex addiction truly exists
By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 9:51 a.m. ET Nov. 8, 2007

Hello. My name is Brian and I am a sex addict.

It never occurred to me that I might be addicted to love. But then Marty Klein, a sex therapist in Palo Alto, Calif., and author of the book “America’s War on Sex,” asked me to take a Web screening test created by Patrick Carnes, the best-known popularizer of the “sex addict” idea.

I answered all the questions as honestly as I could, but some seemed awfully vague — “Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts?” — or rather commonplace — “Have you subscribed to or regularly purchased or rented sexually explicit materials (magazines, videos, books or online pornography)?” But then Carnes’ definition of sex addiction itself can be vague: “Sexual addiction is defined as any sexually-related, compulsive behavior which interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones and one’s work environment.”

That may seem specific but it all depends on how one defines “compulsive” and the effects on others who may or may not be disturbed by another’s sexual proclivities.

Anyway, here is what I was told: “We have compared your answers with people who have been diagnosed with sex addiction. Your answers HAVE MET a score on [the] basis of six [of] the criteria that indicate sex addiction is present.”

Don’t feel bad, Klein told me. He often asks professional audiences to take the same test and a lot of them come up sex addicts, too, which may say something about therapists, but more, perhaps, about the test.

Sexo y pornografía

El lema del nuevo EL PAÍS es “querer comprender”. Me pregunto si el blog de sexo de Eva Roy cumple ese objetivo. De entrada, llama la atención esa reducción colosal que supone equiparar el sexo con el cine porno, contenido sobre el que tratan la mayoría de las anotaciones. Ahondando, leo (y no es irónico) que un famoso actor porno es “un verdadero visionario y un filósofo”. A esto hemos llegado: ni Bataille, ni Masters y Johnson, ni John Money… ¡Nacho Vidal! ¿Hay que abordar la pornografización de la sexualidad de un modo tan acrítico y promocional? Como sexólogo, acepto que hay otros estudiosos de este campo… pero no todos son actores porno. El PAIS lo sabía cuando publicó en los noventa su muy estimable “Libro de la sexualidad”, coordinado por Elena Ochoa y Carmelo Vázquez. Realmente ¿se quieren comprender las complejidades del sexo o solo interesa captar lectores jóvenes con su versión pornográfica?

 

(Carta enviada al director de EL PAÍS el 21/10/2007)

Necesidad de besarse

Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitated
Kissing moves up the sexual pecking order
by Tristan Taormino
September 25th, 2007

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany recently published the results of their study about kissing in Evolutionary Psychology. Many of the findings reflect gender differences and back up common stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Women emphasize kissing more than men; men like tongue- kissing more than women. Women are more likely than men to kiss their partners after intercourse. Men feel that kissing should lead to sex more often than women do. The researchers posited that one of the functions of kissing is to “promote, maintain, and assess the status of bonding.” Citing two other sources, they wrote: “If kissing serves to create a bond between two partners, one would not expect to see kissing in situations where bonding is not wanted. . . . For example, prostitutes often refuse to kiss clientele . . . [which] is thought to be an emotional distancing technique.” There is this notion out there that kissing is seen as “too intimate” by sex workers, but is it truth or misconception? What do people who have sex for a living really think about kissing?

El mito del porno

The Porn Myth

October 20, 2003

In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.

* By Naomi Wolf

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?
She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Ceremonia del porno (II)

«Porno ergo sum»
Por F. Castro Flórez.

La primera frase de este magnífico ensayo escrito a cuatro manos es reveladora: «Hablar de pornografía sigue siendo difícil». Como estos jóvenes y lúcidos ensayistas añaden, lo complicado es encontrar el tono sin entrar a tomar postura, esto es, sin caer en los «vicios» de los pornófobos o de aquellos para los que el material «excitante» lo es todo.

Barba y Montes, un novelista y un crítico de arte, no entran, afortunamente, en disquisiciones etimológicas o metafísicas en torno al origen del término pornografía, ni escriben un texto al uso plagado de anécdotas (tamaños de los miembros viriles, cantidas de polvos, proezas felatrices, etc.), sino que adoptan una serie de perspectivas interpretativas que destacan por su sobriedad.

Lo más interesante. Tiene algo este texto de aproximación antropológica al fenómeno pornográfico como algo que tendría una dimensión «institucional» en un cauce análogo al que formularon Danto o Dickie al abordar el arte. Lejos de la jerga, particularmente del cóctel lacaniano-heideggeriano que emplea Zizek, por ejemplo, en Mirando al sesgo, revisan lo más interesante de la bibliografía, deteniéndose en los planteamientos de Linda Williams o Walter Kendrick.

Chicas a las que les gusta el porno

El Mundo, Viernes, 18 de mayo de 2007. Año: XVIII. Numero: 6361.
CATALUNYA, suplement de cultura Tendències núm 116

‘Girls who like porno’

En la red cabe de todo, incluso relatos de mujeres que cuentan secretos de cama inconfesables. El ‘blog’ de agueda y maria ha bajado la persiana, pero sus historias han despertado reflexiones para la posteridad.

ROGER BERNAT

Han decidido cerrar y, sin embargo, era uno de los centros de discusión sobre posporno, queer y nuevo feminismo más emocionantes de la Red. Durante dos años estuve leyendo sus posts en www.girlswholikeporno.com (todavía en la Red) y, poco a poco, sin darme cuenta, como realmente ocurren las cosas, adentrándome en un ámbito del pensamiento que se me ha acabado revelando indispensable.

Al principio me conectaba con la ilusión de que fuera un blog ideado para levantar los espíritus, esperaba encontrar links de páginas de culos y tetas tomados desde ángulos inimaginables, pero con el tiempo fui acostumbrándome a leer y olvidarme de los links. Leía apasionado porque la sola idea de que unas mujeres se plantearan que otro universo sexual era posible me animaba a repensar el mío propio.

Estudiando el porno

Unstable boundaries: sex, academic research and conceptions of normalcy

by Susan Ericsson

Williams, Linda, ed. Porn Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP. 2004.

Church Gibson, Pamela, ed. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute. 2004.

It seems academic tectonics may be moving once again, this time shifting around conceptions of sexuality studies. Just as women’s studies programs around the country began changing their name to gender studies in order to place emphasis on systemic and interrelated aspect of gender relations rather than focusing on a particular group (woman) and reifying notions of (wo)man as a fixed category, so too the scholarly intersections of sexuality may soon be realigning. Several recent scholarly publications are continuing the challenge of how we partition the discourses of sexuality and confront what we think of as normative and non-normative sexual practice.

One such example of realignment comes from Michael Warner in his book The Trouble with Normal (1999) where he argues that queer politics should move away from defining its borders by LGBT issues to include marginalized heterosexual practices that are similarly de-legitimated and regulated by the state, such as sex work and other forms of non-marital, non-monogamous sex. Another example is Laura Kipnis’ Against Love (2003) in which she debunks the myth of heterosexual marital monogamy through a combination of statistical and ideological proofs of sexual dissatisfaction with current socially defined ideals. Together, such works as these push at standard ways that categories of sex have been divvyed up and congealed.

Practices of consuming pornography and the understanding of such behavior are also being further reconceived. As Jane Juffer argues in the anthology More Dirty Looks,

“Pornography consumption, it would seem, is becoming a ‘normal’ practice in the US, an accepted part of home entertainment, a domestic technology” (45).

La ceremonia del porno

La ceremonia del porno
Andrés Barba y Javier Montes, a vueltas con lo prohibido, presentan el premio Anagrama de Ensayo

Andrés Barba (Madrid, 1975) y Javier Montes (Madrid, 1976) conquistaron el premio Anagrama de Ensayo con La ceremonia del porno, un recorrido por las distintas miradas al consumo de pornografía a lo largo de la historia y la cultura, de Sade a Martin Amis. Escrito a cuatro manos (“partíamos de la base de un interés común por el asunto. Y contrastar puntos de vista sobre una experiencia tan personal como la pornográfica resulta imprescindible si se quiere llegar a conclusiones de carácter general”, dice ahora Montes), el libro analiza “quizá el más exigente de todos los géneros que tientan al lector, y a los que pueda aproximarse”. El Cultural ofrece los mejores fragmentos del libro, así como breves entrevistas con los autores.

Búsqueda de sexo por internet

Sex and the internet

Devices and desires
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Is lascivious online content, traditionally on top, losing its lustre?

WHEN the internet took off in the 1990s, it was demonised as a steaming cauldron of porn. It has certainly made pornography more widely and easily available than ever before. The online porn industry is difficult to measure, but was valued at $1 billion in 2002 by America’s National Research Council. Google, which publishes its “zeitgeist” list of top search queries, redacts sex-related terms from the rankings for fear of causing offence. But the popularity of pornography is clear from figures compiled by companies that track user “clickstreams”. Last year about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature, according to Hitwise, a market-research firm. For comparison, search engines account for about 7% of site visits.

Yet the Hitwise data suggest that sex sites are now being dethroned. In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise. In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see chart).

Pornografía online

April 29, 2007
A Disciplined Business
By JON MOOALLEM

Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,” Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. “So I basically just ripped off that idea.”

Acworth has since built what is arguably the country’s most successful fetish porn company, Kink.com — a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. Kink has 60,000 subscribers; access to each site costs about $30 a month. Acworth founded Kink’s first site, Hogtied, while still at Columbia. He purchased licensed digital photographs for content, many of which were simply old bondage-magazine spreads, torn out and scanned. Almost immediately, Hogtied made several hundred dollars a day — then, with a few ads in place, more than a thousand. In 1998, Acworth dropped out of grad school and moved to San Francisco, which he had always regarded as the world’s “fetish capital,” to run Hogtied full time. His mother worried that the lifestyle of a self-employed Web master might get lonely.

Porno en el móvil (II)

El sexo se ‘moviliza’

Los contenidos para adultos llegan al móvil de la mano de la nueva generación de telefonía

RAMÓN MUÑOZ  -  Madrid

EL PAÍS  -  Sociedad - 19-03-2007

“Nadie va a comprar un móvil capaz de ver vídeos para bajarse un trailer de Walt Dinsey. Pero sí lo comprará para ver un video erótico tranquilamente”. La frase es de Harvey Kaplan, presidente de Xobile, la mayor empresa de contenidos para adultos de móvil. La pronunció hace dos años en una entrevista a The New York Times y ha sido profética. Xobile.com suma 20.000 nuevos suscriptores mensuales.

Y no está sola. Las compañías clásicas de contenidos eróticos como Private o Playboy se han volcado en adaptar sus contenidos a las especificaciones y usos del móvil, que forman una parte cada vez más importante de sus ingresos. Y al tirón del negocio ha comenzado a aparecer una industria cinematográfica, con directores y actores especializados. Y las películas eróticas para móviles, antes meras traslaciones de las películas de cine, comienzan a independizarse y a tener su propio formato.

Literatura erótica femenina en Indonesia

Beneath the burqas

The world’s largest Muslim country is ground zero for a fledgling literary movement whose topic is sex and whose practitioners are women.

 

By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer

 

Bandung, Indonesia — TEACHING high school chemistry, she was the picture of propriety, not an inch of flesh exposed except her hands and a cheerful face framed by a tightly pinned head scarf. Her students were separated according to the Islamic school’s strict rules: boys on one side of the class, girls on the other. Lessons stuck to dry theory, like rote explanations of the periodic table and how atoms and molecules bond.

But during the school break for the holy month of Ramadan, Dinar Rahayu was free to indulge her fantasies. At a desktop computer, in the middle-class home where she lived with her parents, she wrote a novel whose two main characters think they are incarnations of the god Apollo and a Valkyrie, a Nordic deity. Theirs is a world where women dominate men with abusive sex.

It is an explicit story from the start, conjuring scenes of strippers, child rape and sadomasochism. In one of the opening chapter’s tamer passages, the skillful strokes of a transsexual named Dinar persuade her lover Jonggi to put down his can of soda and the TV’s remote control.

“I like to be with him,” Dinar says of Jonggi. “I do everything to make him happy. And I bet he’s happy. I’m sure of it. In fact, he lets my hand slide inside his underpants toward that bulge.”

Rahayu, 36, is one of a small but bold group of female writers exploring the transgressive edges of sexuality in Indonesia, home of the world’s largest Muslim population. The country got a global reputation for prudishness last year when Playboy’s debut on the newsstands sparked protests and prosecution. But far edgier work by the country’s most provocative female authors is printed without fuss by mainstream publishers, including some of the biggest names in Indonesia’s book industry, and widely available in bookstores. Instead of banning or burning the books, government and religious leaders have largely ignored the erotic works, even as some of the best-written race up the bestsellers list.

El porno para mujeres no convence a las lesbianas

Comment: girlie porn fails to impress lesbians

7th March 2007

Quiver Books’ latest offering by Jamye Waxman, Women Loving Women: Appreciating and Exploring the Beauty of Erotic Female Encounters, promises to capture for the reader “the warm and enlightening approach of exploring erotic possibilities with other women.”

Promises, however, get broken, particularly concerning soft pornography masquerading as art, explains Rachel Charman.

At first glance, the description of the book in Quiver Books’ latest catalogue is almost believable.

“Women are beautiful” it begins. Quite so.

“Same sex attraction is only natural”. Here here!

I was almost enjoying myself until I read: “The photographs tell a story of three beautiful women who leave their partners behind for a ‘girls’ weekend’ and discover a new dimension to their friendship.” Oh, god.

Surely, when producing porn and trying pretend that it isn’t, it would be logical to avoid cheap, straight-porn clichés.

Or, if using these clichéd storylines, at least dress them up a bit; flesh them out with semi-believable characters and context.

Women Loving Women does not even attempt to hold up its tenuous storyline.

The book, although centring on sex between women, somehow tries to skip nimbly around the idea of homosexuality, as if it is a topic to be avoided.

Asfixiofilia

Hard to Swallow

The debate surrounding choking as a sexual practice

by Tristan Taormino

March 2nd, 2007 2:55 PM

A friend recently said to me, “I love being choked during sex,” and she said it as casually as I’d say I love being fucked in the ass. Choking as an erotic act seems to be more popular than ever. And I don’t mean just among kinky folks, rough sex fans, and porn stars. It has made it onto the pleasure-menu of everyday couples who indulge in what they call “regular sex,” which is surprising since cutting off your loved one’s air supply is not just risqué—it’s risky.

What’s the turn on? During suffocation, the body is deprived of oxygen; it floods with endorphins, making the person feel high, and those endorphins can intensify sexual sensations and orgasms. People who practice BDSM (who know a thing or two about endorphins) use the term ‘breath play’ to describe the different ways one can control breath or deprive someone of oxygen (choking is only one). Some practitioners combine it with bondage or sensory deprivation; use a hood or a gas image: mask, or simply a hand over a partner’s mouth and nose. Breath play scenes also have a significant psychological component; they can be a way to eroticize dominance and submission, fear, danger, or control. Among kinky players, these scenes are universally considered edge play (risky or fringe activities).