Better Porn

I was discussing a compare/contrast of gay porn with some friends at a Christmas party when the topic of straight porn surfaced. The two men I spoke with mentioned that lately they have started watching straight porn, as I have. Like them, I fumbled upon it while looking for gay porn, and decided “sure, what the hell.” Also, like them, I somewhat enjoyed it.

We all seemed to agree that whether its for novelty or theatre, there is some entertainment value to watching straight porn, for both the guys and the girls. While much of the fascination comes from watching talented actresses (who are nothing like the ladies in my office) get pummeled by often compelling man-bulls, I’m lead to believe that perhaps part of the fascination is that gay porn has become so boring that we’re looking for other sources of stimulation.

Granted, the problem may be that we're oversaturated. I’ve recently learned that most of my friends have much more porn than I do (I thought I was doing fairly well), with one friend of mine recently revealing that he had over 800 hours of porn on his computer. Perhaps we're so steeped in virtual flesh that we've lost something, but I’m not convinced that's the entire story.

I know of at least one gay site that splits itself in two, with one half featuring guy-on-guy, and the other half guy-on-girl, tapping into the fantasies that gay men have of watching straight men have sex with men. There are also numerous sites that use and market “straight” men as their primary carrot for luring gay men to their site. This seems to imply that gay men not only crave straight men, but an unobtainable fantasy and perhaps a more authentic masculinity (the latter is for another post entirely).

Watching the straight guys can be enjoyable, but I would like to see porn rely less on the easy option and truly blossom as a medium. Why not increase the theatre? If we want unobtainable fantasy, challenge us. I want to see sci-fi porn, where astronauts have to fuck there way through an alien race. I want historical porn, with orgies on a pirate ship. I want developed narratives, elaborate set-up, and costumes.

Most of all, on some level I want to connect with the actors. Xtube has a constant feed, where users post their home videos in real time. I bookmarked one particular video for jerk off material, but the next day, it was gone (the video was removed by the creator). The video was of straightforward sex, and it was creative and “real” in a way that you could sense an interesting undercurrent of context (a good video, in my estimation), but I was most intrigued by why the video was taken down. Was the tape made without the knowledge of the guy getting fucked? Did the guy getting fucked object? Did one of his friends find it online and tell the guy? Who is this guy who posts videos of his tricks? There’s a story here that we will never know, and it’s probably just as interesting (if not more so) than the sex itself. My point is that the mind is the greatest sexual organ, and personalities, stories, scenarios, and context sets it off as much as dick+hole visuals do.

With the amount of creative capital in our community, surely we can raise the bar, and maybe even give the straight boys a break. At very least I would expect a recurring porn soap opera.