Big Ed's Place

Back in the day when I first became able to buy porn legally in the 80′s, Penthouse was the gold standard. Playboy still had cachet, but the girls were so obviously airbrushed they weren’t particularly sexy. The ‘girl next door without her clothes’ had lost the allure it must have had earlier and so much of the style seemed completely out of touch. Meanwhile, on the other end of the scale, Hustler was just crude. There’s only so much ‘pink’ one can see before it becomes a gynecology exam instead of a sexy allure. Penthouse admitted it was about sex, but remained classier than the usual porn. I bought, and even subscribed for a while.

Penthouse ran couples pictorials then, and by the nineties, they were explicit. I remember being shocked the first time I saw one that had explicit penetration. Of course, I immediately bought it too. But as my youth-addled hormonal impulses died down, I started noticing that my favorite pictorials all had one thing in common. They were photographed by Earl Miller. Furthermore, the pictorials I’d liked before they became hardcore were also by Earl Miller.

So I decided to check out EarlMiller.com. Here’s my review.

First, the site is huge. There’s an update of one form or another every day. That’s good value. There are multiple sections, including amateurs, centerfolds, threesomes, girl-girl, hardcore, and some small behind the scenes sections and a spot for guest photographers. Within each section are pages and pages of shoots. In addition to still photo galleries, there are plenty of videos, a blog (which is not updated very often–hasn’t been since February), and outgoing links.

Next, the photography is of course high quality. The angles, the lighting the makeup all are truly ‘centerfold’ material. This is indeed what I used to drool over in the 80′s and 90′s. Examples are provided below.

But that of course is when it hit me–the models are overwhelmingly in the Southern California Porn Star genre. They’re very big breasted. They’re heavily made up. The acting is what I’d expect from a Southern California porn film. It was far far too easy to become saturated and remember why I’m no longer a fan of the porn Southern California produces. It’s far too artificial to turn me on the way it used to when I was younger.

The other minor complaint is that the layout makes it easy to hide things. The search by model feature is not complete and won’t pull up all pictorials by that model. The toolbar across the top doesn’t list all the options that are on the main page. This meant that on my first visit, I didn’t find any of the old pictorials from Penthouse that I’d fallen in love with, but did on a subsequent visit. That made all the difference, since it was what attracted me in the first place.

So, check it out. I recommend it if you like traditional porn actresses and centerfolds, simply for the volume of quality pictures and videos. Those viewers who don’t care for Southern California styles won’t be as impressed. You can see it for yourself here or by clicking on the pictures below.

Recently, an Italian documentary attacked Italian TV for dumbing down the women it displayed, turning them all into near-parodies of womanhood. Remittance Girl had a very nice post discussing how statistics, marketing, and aiming for the low common mean is likely the cause of this, more than any conspiracies. There’s also a great discussion in the comments section of that post.

But I want to extend RG’s thesis that statistical marketing is driving the homogenization of desire by addressing one key question–why go along with it?

This is not an ‘other’ question in which we discuss how ‘other’ people behave. I’m going to make it personal and say, “why do I go along with such marketing–be it watching the TV shows that dumb down social interactions, buying Playboy and other airbrushed porn, and reading books so full of tropes as to be ridiculous? I do this because I think it’s unfair to talk about how ‘other people’ are stupid, or sheep, or whatever. Aren’t we all guilty of going along from time to time? Foisting it on ‘others’ not only creates a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ with the associated snobbish air of superiority, but it also eliminates the ability to change things. I have damn little influence on how ‘other’ people live. I can influence the world through what I do, and perhaps therein make a difference.

So why do I go along with the dumbing down? Sometimes it’s simply laziness. It’s much easier to turn the TV on and accept what’s there than to spend the time looking for something good. Particularly when I’m tired or feeling low. Sometimes I want lowbrow. This is true, for better or worse, in my own porn consumption. Yeah, I like great production values, but sometimes all I want is Penthouse Letters. I’m not sure there’s any way to explain it, other than, even though I’m a foodie, sometimes I want McDonald’s. Maybe it’s the Thanatos impulse at play.

But… if I’m honest with myself, there’s another emotion at play besides laziness, and that is fear. It’s hard to buck the trends when ‘they’ are telling you what’s good and what you want. Popular culture peer pressure is in many ways just two steps away from junior high. I say two steps, because one’s adult peer group (however that is self-defined) is more influential than ‘they’ (one step) and it’s easier to deal with peer pressure as an adult than as a teen (second step).

Am I ‘as good’ or ‘as worthy’ as my peers if I don’t have a hot woman hanging off my arm? Am I a ‘real man’ if I don’t get all hot and bothered when looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? Am I ‘weird’ or ‘queer’ if I think big breasts are overrated? There’s all sorts of self-esteem issues that swirl around and can be abated by conforming to the peer-pressured norm.

Now of course it is possible to resist that peer pressure. One could disengage and try to escape pop culture. One’s personal peers could provide a countervailing pressure to the dumbing down of ‘they.’ Or one could be extremely secure in one’s person.

I’m not. Or at least, I’m not all the time. Sometimes, I’m quite capable of stepping away from the pressure to have my desires conform and sometimes… it’s hard.

But what helps, for me, is to reframe the personal question not in terms of peer pressure, but in terms of alpha and beta males. When I remember to be an alpha male (or Dom, if you want those terms), the temptation to conform is laughable. I am the one setting the standard.

But I don’t always feel like the alpha male. And… dirty little secret, the beta male in me (and in men I know) is less envious of the alpha male than scared to death of being the omega male. If I conform to the pressure, make the innuendo laced comments about the Hooters girl and laud the airheaded newscaster with the deep cleavage, then I know that I’m just like the other beta males. I’m not the omega.

Buying into the homogenization and the dumbing down provides a secret emotional boost that I, beta male, am just a member of the great average crowd. Not the best, but thankfully not the worst.

There’s emotional security in being just a part of the herd.

Getting men to step up into healthy alpha male energy is hard. It’s hard for me, and I’m more conscious of it than most, and even know some tricks to help (it’s amazing how putting on a suit helps me slide into that headspace).

But honestly, I think that’s what it takes, on an individual level. A greater sense that the mean is just that–the mean. And believing that being part of the mean carries no judgment on whether I’m (or any man) an alpha or an omega.

I’d like to think there’s hope in that, for both myself and us as a society. Because the only way I know how to shift the mean is for all of us individual data points to start heading our own direction instead of trying to squeeze toward the security of the middle. We’ll just have to see.

A fellow author recently teased me that it wasn’t fair that I’d had so many more [erotic] experiences that I could write about than he. Well, to a certain extent, he’s right–I have had a wider variety of experiences than what seems to be the norm (something I wrote about here). But he’s also overestimating my experience because some of the stories that I take and twist and expand aren’t originally mine. I got them by listening.

Ya see, I’ve found that if I listen, truly listen, nonjudgmentally, people will tell me all sorts of things. Now by truly listen, I mean that I am intentionally not thinking ahead to what I’m going to say or mentally dissecting their words or engaged in any of the other monkey mind chatter that too often prevents us from actually hearing what others are saying. And by making it clear that I won’t pass judgment on their stories, people are willing to open up more. It doesn’t take too many open-ended questions, such as “what do you mean?” to hear fascinating stories.

For example, I was once talking with a woman about parties of the past and she joked about how much coke she’d done at a party in LA. I said, “Really? Why were you doing so much coke?” Her flippant response was “it was part of the scene,” but instead of me replying by telling her about my own party past, I asked her about the scene. As she realized I wasn’t going to look down on her, she slowly grew more serious and eventually told me her story about how the coke had been provided to her by a customer… and that she’d been working as a call girl. Needless to say, once it became clear that I didn’t consider that to be a stigma, she started telling me many other stories that have found their way into the Compassionate Courtesan Universe.

Aside and trivia: There’s a scene, for those who can find it, in F&B where Sherri describes being paid to masturbate in front of a client while his wife was sitting next to him also masturbating. Absolute true story, told to me by a stripper. It was too amusing to not include, even if it was just a single line.

However, my stories aside, I think the best one on the power of listening comes from Michael Korda, published in the March 1985 issue of Penthouse. He tells of an early assignment where he was sent off to England to negotiate the selling of a “hot” book his firm had acquired. His bosses had told him to ask for $100,000, but made it clear that was a minimum. So when it finally came time to discuss the price, he asked the publisher how much he’d be willing to pay.

He sighed heavily. “I’d go to a hundred thousand,” he said at last. “Certainly not a penny more.”

Rather than responding immediately, Korda fell silent, thinking hard about the offer. Then the host repeated it:

“One hundred thousand pounds, dear boy! That’s a lot of money.”

Astute readers may have just noticed–by not talking, by not saying ‘One hundred thousand dollars it is.”, Korda made a ton of money. At the time the pound to dollar exchange was 3:1, so he basically tripled the price by not saying a thing.

And the story has stuck with me. Keep your mouth shut, pay attention to what the other person is saying, and listen, and you might come out much further ahead.

In Dawn on the Third Day, Jen comments on Spider Robinson’s book Callahan’s Lady, and the concept of sex as Art. I happen to like the idea, though ultimately I think there’s a better analogy.

The main thing I like about the concept is that it captures what sex can be. Often, sex is a performance, yet because it is something that has been demonized in the Western cultural traditions (I can’t speak for the Eastern cultures), we don’t recognize or pay homage to the greatness that can be attained. Tantra, as adapted for the West (and possibly perverted, but more on that in another post sometime), does see the greatness, but tends to wrap it up in the mystical or religious. I don’t think greatness requires those overtones.

And of course, by greatness, I mean not just the ability to emotionally connect the participants, but the ability for sex to be something that connects period. We laugh at a good dirty joke. We roll our eyes, but often secretly admiring, the tales of sexual feats we hear about. Phil Foglio even managed a great cartoon about when sex is an Olympic event.

In essence, sex can do many or all the things that Art can do.

But I think the analogy has some major limits, and one of those is simply stroke porn. Let’s face it, a lot of sexual material is poor quality crap, but it still finds an audience. A lot of the times sex between two people can be pretty unconnecting, uninspiring, and not particularly fulfilling. There really isn’t a good “Art” equivalent.

Instead, I think the better analogy is that Sex is like Cuisine. A lot of the time, you just want something that’s reasonably good and can sustain you. At the same time, really great sex, like a really great meal, can go someplace deeper, into the realm of Art. Heck there are even aficionados of both, though there is no positive equivalent term to “foodie.”

And at the opposite end, there are times where you just want the greasiest, nastiest, most unhealthy fast food you can find and slide across your tongue (what, you don’t?  I certainly have those cravings from time to time).  It’s not good food.  It’s not particularly good for you food.  But it’s easy on the tongue, it pleases the senses, and it’s quick to get.  Just like good old Penthouse Letters and other stroke porn.

I like to think that I’m wiser and enough in control of my cravings to not stoop to a fast food equivalent sex diet.  Or a fast food equivalent porn diet.  But I gotta admit that I don’t want Art all the time.