If they are doing porn for entirely mercenary reasons, that is sad. Just as it is more pleasant to deal with a shop assistant who genuinely enjoys interacting with people, porn is more enjoyable when performed by people who really enjoy having sex on camera.
For instance, I never understood the appeal of Jenna Jameson - she looked like she was figuring out if this scene was the one that would put her in a higher tax bracket.
It goes both ways. In the doc Inside Deep Throat, the production assistant claimed Harry Reems got hard hearing the sound of the camera motor.
Wait a minute. My wife has a gorgeous face, a great body and hair down to her ass. And even though I’ve been bonking her for years, I always have the lights on.
David Foster Wallace visited the AVNs and in his research he met a police detective. Older, churchgoing family guy who watched porn every night.
The cop told him that he watched one or Teri films every night because he was consistently intrigued. Acting or in real life, people are displaying emotions. Doing porn most porn actors strive to sublimate their normal saves snd their faces become masks while their bodies do the job. They hide their real selves away. The detective watched for those moments when the mask fell down, a glance at the camera, a flicker of disdain at their costsar, real passion. He said if you watch you can occasionally see those real moments, and it reminded him of investigations where suspects were being interviewed, and trying to hide their real feelings but occasionally those real feelings would flash through.
Yeah, the typical US porn starlet mask features a ton of dark eye shadow, heavy eyeliner multiple pairs of fake eyelashes, obviously lined lipstick and this attempt at a “sultry” expression that utterly fails. And they all they all have this, for lack of a better term “square” mouth shape where their upper and lower lips are separated, but straight - a mouth shape that appears nowhere else in the real world.
I’ve tried and failed to find a linkable image, but it can easily been seen in any production from the Porno Valley and it is utterly repulsive it it’s own way as that terrible high-pitched, whiny “mmmm-YEAH!” noise that they are trained to make, that again has no analog in the real world and no connection to a woman actually experiencing pleasure.
I captured a completely clean screenshot that features the expression that I loathe. It’s not the most egregious example, but one that didn’t have any penis in the shot.
In the context of this thread “by definition” concerns porn.
If you disagree with that or I didn’t make that clear, okay. But this whole thread is about unrealistic in porn. Not unrealistic in anything else.
Teeth straightening is a medical procedure. It’s why decent dental insurance covers at least some of the cost.
Straightening your hair is not a permanent, surgical alteration to the body.
Working out is natural and is doing what your body will do. Your argument-in-the-absurd would be like saying that any muscle building activity is unrealistic because it builds muscles you didn’t have. What are you going to try next? Suggest that educating yourself is unrealistic because you’re altering your neurons in a way they weren’t before?
While you are probably technically correct in everything you said, I kind of feel that you miss the spirit of Mijin’s argument.
While many of the procedures that are commonly used to enhance porn stars and such are available and used by the general public, I think it’s safe to say that in the former case, these are often taken to… Extremes.
My thinking is that these extremes probably are not positive or healthy ones to be installing either at the personal societal levels.
What you said was “[plastic surgery], by definition, is unrealistic. It’s trying to achieve an unrealistic body type.”
Even if we add the clause “in porn” it is incorrect. It is not by definition.
Even in porn there will be many that undergo surgery attempting to look sexier but still natural-looking. Even if the failure rate for them were 100% (which I doubt – there’s obvious observational bias here), and they all end up looking freakish, that wouldn’t mean they were trying to achieve an unrealistic body type.
Or cosmetic.
And my medical insurance doesn’t cover it at all (also note some plastic surgery would be covered by my insurance)
I’d be interested to hear a principled distinction between someone straightening their crooked teeth and someone straightening their crooked nose.
So?
Well it’s on you to say what exactly you mean by unrealistic. You’ve already conceded that someone having surgery might end up a shape that is absolutely typical. So what do you mean by saying plastic surgery is unrealistic?
On the other hand, there’s a lot of amateur stuff that sort of reflects on reality vs entertainment. Much like the “Why don’t people have to hunt for parking spaces on TV?” and how you’d never want to watch a show featuring real forensics work where it takes six weeks to get a lab result, I don’t need twenty minutes of heavy petting before he gets her shirt off. Likewise, ten minutes of side-view missionary humping is probably awesome for the two people involved but not very visually stimulating. Porn is an entertainment medium and that means exaggerating and distorting reality for the sake of keeping the audience interested.
But, back to the OP, this means porn is about as reflective of a real sexual relationship as CSI is of how criminal investigations operate.
Yes. But, I have another question. Like I wrote in my op, do you agree that the way relationships are portrayed in mainstream films and TV shows is unrealistic? I’m not only referring to romantic relationships but also to parent-child relationships and friendships?
I think the difference is that relationships in mainstream film and TV are all unrealistic in a variety of ways, sometimes with different aspects unrealistically idealized, sometimes unrealistically whatever the opposite is of idealized, sometimes it’s done for artistic/stylistic purposes, sometimes for practical ones, sometimes because of a failure of the artist to accomplish their goal.
Porn, on the other hand, is pretty consistently unrealistic in the same way most low-end sedans end up looking the same no matter who makes them–they are all trying to serve the same purpose working with the same materials and dealing with the same constraints. So, for example, there is the issue of sexual positions–porn is always going to select the position that is visually most interesting to a 3rd party, which is often not a position that is the most pleasurable for the parties involved. So unrealistic elements can be so consistent that someone who watches a lot of porn but has little experience would really think they are just normal.
