Quote: (10-31-2018 09:53 AM)questor70 Wrote:
I really do miss porn with complete plots.
I first encountered porn in the mid 80s which was when Nina Hartley was in her prime. It was the video era but they still had plots. The plots were typically like the 80s sex comedies that were out then, only with hardcore sex instead of brief nudity and simulated sex. This kind of stuff is still out there I suppose but it's fading away.
Today, the reality-TV aspect of porn kind of leaves me feeling some degree of disgust and despair over humanity. You know how they sit these girls down and give them an interview where they mechanically rattle off the sex acts they like. You get to see how empty and vapid these people really are. At least when porn involved real acting they could manufacture a fictional character that led a more normal life with more normal motivations, so they felt more relatable than these lost soul bimbos staring at the camera at the foot of a hotel bed with their dead-eyes.
This is true. The fantasy aspect is gone, and now porn's transactional, mechanical nature is so evident that it cannot be ignored. As you've noted, the whole casting couch genre embraces this lack of artifice, emphasizing that they really have distilled female sex performances into their raw components, cheap and efficient.
Something I find interesting is that the old stereotype of porn starlets (from say the 70s-90s) was that they'd all been molested/abandoned/abused, and that trauma was the basis for separating herself from the act of sex for money on film. But they hid it well, i.e. they acted, and seemed to love what they were doing (even though in hindsight we know they definitely didn't). Something inside of them made them able to sustain the viewer's fantasy.
Most porn girls today seem to come from a run of the mill, middle class family, possibly neglected or raised by weak fathers, but probably not raped or abandoned, and certainly not forced into sex work. So it seems that, as the decades have passed, the not-that-fucked-up girls (compared to the drug addicted rape victims of past generations) have been increasingly willing to perform in porn. Perhaps it's the general lack of shame and laid back attitude toward sex that has made them more willing/able to perform in porn but less willing/able to sustain the fantasy, e.g. that the woman whose car or cable you're fixing really really really wants you, as opposed to being a student who enjoys recreational sex and has decided to make a quick buck off of it.