While I hardly think Mike South is a beacon of logic and insight, I recently read an insightful quote on his site from an adult video store owner.
he says that porn sucks these days and it has alienated most of its core audience because it has become more about the guys in the video than about the girls.
Apparently the porn viewing public isn’t really into gay male performers in straight porn…and that’s most of the male performers these days, he thinks the guys watching can tell. Combine that with the way it’s shot and its all very boring.
I couldn’t agree more. This is a conversation I’ve had countless times with friends, but I don’t hear it discussed much in the porn community. Before the late 90s, porn scenes were almost 100% about the girl… the guy was simply a prop. Aside from John Holmes and Ron Jeremy, most casual porn consumers couldn’t tell the different between Peter North and T.T. Boy. Why would they need to or want to?
With the rise of wall-to-wall/gonzo production in the late 90s, a few factors contributed to the rise of the male performer. Companies like Anabolic pioneered the birth of a harder-style of gonzo, which featured more multiple-guy-on-one-girl scenes than ever before, and the rise of "circus acts" like double penetrations that were a rarity a few years before. This new culture created an almost fraternity vibe in the movies. It was now about what the guys could do to the girl. It was no longer about a girl performing pleasurable sex acts. It was about Lexington Steele’s cock or Erik Everhard’s ferocity, instead of the new girl’s ass or tits.
If you watch just about any Red Light District/Platinum X release from 2003-2006, it was almost entirely about the guys. John Strong and Michael Stefano were basically promoted as the stars: the girl was the scenery. As long as you had two strong male performers in a scene, the girl didn’t mean much (as long as she would submit to the guys). As much as I like John and Mike, I don’t want to think about them while jerking off.
