devolution
Disclaimer: NOT SAFE FOR WORK. If you're at work, please close this page before your boss murders you in your sleep.
The (d)evolution of pornography. I'm deadly serious when I'm talking about this. And I'm not just talking about... you know, readjusted social values for sex. Hell, sex is great. Lots of sex is even better. And no porno magazine in the last few decades would claim otherwise. (DUH!)
Do I own any? No. Not because I've got anything against pornography, I don't. I just don't find manufactured, airbrushed 'perfect women' on glossy paper worth paying for. Hell, I won't even pay for The New Yorker, despite the fact that I very much enjoy reading it. I think I've maybe bought three magazines in the last year, if that.
However, while surfing the intarweb, as we call it, someone linked on a forum a site where one can purchase back issues of 'gentlemen's publications' all the way back to the sixties. That's right. All the vintage porn you could ever want.
But when I talk about the devolution of pornography, I'm not even just talking about the compositions of the images themselves, which have gone, quite frankly, to tasteful nudity to outright sexuality (with almost no thought to the photographic composition, in many instances... I really wonder where they get some of there photographers). I'm just talking about... the way they've just completely commoditized sex and removed all respect for its beauty. (and no, I'm not sure commoditized is really a word, but it damned well should be)
Take, for example, the first entries in the listing of the contents of High Society magazine when it was first published, and compare it against the first entry of the latest copy. Never mind that the first issue of High Society is selling for $150 USD.
High Society May 1976
Premiere - First Issue
Features
"Blackdrag -- A contemporary Art Folio" by Andy Warhol.
against...
High Society Magazine April 2006
Kate Moss Goes Full Frontal
(And yes, this is another issue that has some more content about Paris Hilton! Whee! Is this what... our high society, our 'beautiful people' have become?)
Look at the full listings yourself. The difference is staggering. Perhaps its the competition, the readjustments to society's new views on sex... but then they are where so many people get their ideas of sex in the first place. How many kids can you think of that HAVEN'T heard of some sort of porno mag or seen them somewhere on a stand? They're sitting right next to the rest of the magazines, after all.
Even Playboy is starting to get the same way, but... you know, Hef's got class. I'd call Playboy the Times Magazine of the porn world. When people say that they read playboy for the articles, I'm inclined to believe them! If they wanted straight up sex they'd go purchase a Hustler or a Penthouse.
I don't know what the point of this rant is, and perhaps there's none. Maybe it's that I just don't like how the beauty of sex is so far removed from us. And I should perhaps be the last one to talk. But I don't... really enjoy sex without appreciating everything behind it, and maybe that's enough.
Who knows. End of rant. Rock on.