Hey Mikey
I have been reading your site for a long time man and you really are the best of the bunch. I like your common sense and your responsible approach to things.
I have been a fan of adult entertainment since way back in the days when everything was shot on film, even the old “loops”.
Lately I have found that I am just not interested in porn anymore and the reason I have come up with is because it isn’t adult entertainment anymore, now what the industry passes off as entertainmenmt is like watching monkeys fucking at the zoo, it’s entertaining for a few minutes and then it’s just boring.
It isn’t about being erotic anymore and instead of performers it’s more like the people participating are combatants. They aren’t trying to have erotic sex, they are trying to see who can be the most aggressive and while the boxcovers still clearly indicate it’s about the girls the product puts more emphasis these days on the guys and so does the industry.
Somewhere along the line it has been forgotten that average guys make up the majority of the people who spend money on adult product. Speaking for myself I can’t identify with the males characters in adult anymore, they all either look way too effiminate or they look like the steriods they are taking made their necks disappear, I can’t identify with those guys. When I hear that some of them are making six hundred or more dollars per scene I am shocked. These apes should be paying the director to be in the scene.
I remember guys like you, Ed Powers, Randy West, Rodney Moore and Max. You all had identifiable characters, you had opinions and personalities, you were likeable. Ed and Randy are long gone, You and Rodney don’t release product except on the web and Max took a turn towards mysogeny that left me behind years ago. Porn doesn’t have anyone for us average guys to identify with anymore.
The girls have gone downhill too, they aren’t identifiable anymore either and the ones who are like your friend Jesse Jane are manufactured. I know you like Jesse but there are much prettier girls in the business as well as much better performers. I remember when girls like Ginger Lynn, Annette Haven and Traci Lords got to the top because they were pretty, they were good performers and they had something about them that made them special. They were feminine too, the girls in the business now are just interchangeable bodies who don’t have much resemblance to girls. Can’t a girl be feminiely passive and still enjoy sex?
Suppose someone did create a good video or a good series, how would people find it? There may be some gems out there but with over a thousand releases a month how are we suppossed to find them in the sea of dreck that passes itself off as “gonzo”, it all looks the same; no creativity, no passion; no characters, bad camerawork, bad editing (that whole MTV style went out with the 90s) nothing special at all, just a couple of automated bodies in some sort of weird sexual combat.
I think it was Bill Margold who told a congressional hearing that if the government would just leave the industry alone it would destroy itself. Bill is a wise man, at least for me, porn has destroyed itself. I suspect I am not alone.
Ken makes some very valid points and I am sure it made him feel better to get it off of his chest but I expect it has fallen on deaf ears. The industry has never given the consumer what the consumer wants, instead it has told the consumer what it would get. There has been a saying for years in the biz that an educated consumer is porns worst nightmare, and indeed how can the consumer educate himself with so much product coming out.
I would love to ressurect the old Mike South’s Southern Belles series. It was fun and I had fun doing it. Apparently though there’s no market for it anymore.
