Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

AltPorn.net interviewer Beda Hoydenish writes:

“Everyone knows Amelia G runs the Blue Blood empire and also does some of the photography and writing for it. Here on APN, we’ve featured photographs she has shot for Blue Blood many times and we’ve mentioned her writing once or twice. (You can also see the interview we did with Amelia G five years ago — Ed.) I write for APN and I have all the old Blue Blood print magazines from the 90’s in plastic bags with cardboard backing, so I thought I was pretty aware and I still found a lot on Amelia G’s new AmeliaG.com site to both inform and entertain me. In addition to running the business end of Blue Blood and working as an editor for many projects, Amelia G has had hundreds of photo sets published and thousands of articles. Amelia G has done writing and/or photography for all the major adult publishing houses including Playboy, Penthouse, Flynt, Crescent, Magna, and AVN, plus niche magazines including Marquis, On Our Backs, Skin Two, Tattoo Teasers, Fetish, Extreme Fetish, $pread, and of course Blue Blood. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica, Best S/M Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica and dozens more books. But she still took time out of her busy schedule to give APN this exclusive interview.

APN: Blue Blood magazine in print was really ground zero for jump-starting the whole altporn genre and you’ve managed to maintain a top ranking for Blue Blood for more than sixteen years. To what do you credit your remarkable success and longevity?

AG: Thanks. I always hope the universe will smile on me for hard work and doing the right thing, and sometimes it does. A big advantage Blue Blood had in coming to the web is that the magazine was always subscription-driven and we had free sites for the community for years before we launched our first membership site. We actually had paid members before we had even actually launched the first pay site because we tested out a banner rotation for a few minutes and people saw it. I really appreciate the support we’ve gotten over the years and try to really put a lot back into the scene and into having . . .

Cool promo pic of yours truly by Forrest Black. Read the whole interview by Beda Hoydenish on AltPorn.net.

New issue of Tattoo Teasers is on newsstands now. This issue features two super long layouts from BlueBlood.com shot by yours truly and Forrest Black. The set we shot of Bella Vendetta which graces both the masthead page and a seven page layout was at the home music studio of good friends of Bella Vendetta’s. The current issue of Tattoo Teasers also includes a second huge seven page layout Forrest Black and I shot of Rachel Face at the most excellent bar Plan B in Portland.

This edition of Tattoo Teasers includes an interview with my fellow Wesleyan University alum Tristan Taormino. Long time Blue Blood readers will probably recall that we published Tristan Taormino’s erotic fiction and wrote up her delightful tome The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. Although she and I have sometimes, alas, had missed connections, Tristan Taormino will always have a soft spot on my heart for getting me my first book deal when she worked at Masquerade Books which published my Backstage Passes: Rock and Roll Erotica from the Pages of Blue Blood Magazine anthology.

The cover of this issue of Tattoo Teasers, along with a five page feature inside, features pornstar Joanna Angel from web site Burning Angel, which I mentioned here before in my AltPorn Rankings article . Joanna Angel also appears in various photos here and there on Blue Blood and she got her Escalade stolen at Erotica L.A. this past weekend. I guess I am pretty glad Blue Blood chose not to exhibit at Erotic LA this year. What a messed up thing to happen at a convention with thousands of people around. I hope she gets it back undamaged.

There is some filler in there too, but there is so much cool stuff because the Tattoo Teasers magazine is edited by his Satanic Majesty Bob Johnson, editor of Old Nick Magazine and author of Corporate Magick: Mystical Tools for Business Success. I actually first met Bob Johnson at an adult internet industry convention back when he was at Playboy and had taken note of Blue Blood’s early forays into satanist erotica over on BarelyEvil.

If you live on the West Coast like me, it is not too late to get free ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s today. Southern California has been having a crazy heatwave. I confess to worshiping at the alter of frosty central air conditioning, but I had to leave the house yesterday to get espresso beans for iced lattes and was stunned at how fast it has gone from chilly to insanely hot this year.

I guess this is the part where I should probably deconstruct the ways in which all strata of counterculture are marketed to disingenuously most of the time. I could talk about how people think there are these two hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield who built an ice cream empire subsisting on a shoe-string budget, making strongly flavored ice cream according to their own personal quirky stoner tastes, and serving it in an old gas station. I could talk about the ferocious rivalry between Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs and how Häagen-Dazs attempted to keep Ben and Jerry’s out of their distribution channels and Ben and Jerry’s repeatedly sued Häagen-Dazs and started a whole PR campaign with the slogan, “What’s the Doughboy afraid of?” If you are wondering where that slogan came from, the answer is that Häagen-Dazs is owned by Pillsbury, or at least was at the time, and Ben and Jerry’s was this indie force fighting The Man. Of course, Ben and Jerry’s sold to Unilever in 2000. The multi-billion dollar Unilever is the largest ice cream manufacturer in the world and owns, not only Ben and Jerry’s, but also Breyers, Popsicle, Slim Fast, Klondike, and dozens of European subs of Heartbrand. Hippie Ben and Jerry’s now are to corporate ice cream what marketing tool female mascots are to corporate so-called “altporn”, in that they make public appearances and do the occasional press junket, but it’s just for show and they don’t actually have any, ya know, business role in the company. Oops, I digress. I mean, FREE ICE CREAM!

The original founder’s of Ben and Jerry’s purportedly marked their first anniversary of struggling to stay in business by giving away free ice cream cones for a day. Today the company turns thirty-one years old and almost all Ben and Jerry’s locations are giving away free cones. I’m guessing they really have celebrated their important anniversaries by giving away free ice cream cones.

So, really, the point here is just a public service announcement: free ice cream, free ice cream, free ice cream!

If you want exposure for yourself or your projects or you are seeking expertise, then it matters how busy or influential a web property is. There are many third party tools to assist internet professionals in ascertaining a site’s true size, beyond its hype. As a site surfer, most people respond to how interesting the site is to them personally, taking into account aspects such as ease of use, subject matter, quality, wit, visual appeal, production values, and just how generally entertaining or informative a site strikes them as being. For getting the word out there and for believing what you read, it is important to consider the source, not just for agenda, but for overall accuracy and reach. The bigger a site’s audience, the more I feel it has a responsibility to present quality journalism.

When I hear a new idea, I like to familiarize myself with the source, so I can assess the extent to which I should integrate that new idea into my own worldview. Every time I’ve been a guest speaker at the SXSW festival, I’ve also attended a ton of other speakers’ interactive media panels because I love learning and part of the point of professional conventions is to become even more expert in one’s field. SXSW is fun for me, not only because a lot of friends of mine are there, but because it has exposed me to a lot of interesting new ideas and people.

When there was a panelist speaking or site mentioned I was unfamiliar with, I felt the itch of a phantom limb, wanting to check out the stats on sites he or she was presenting as examples. When I work online normally, I have an array of professional tools at my fingertips to research a source and assess how popular and influential a particular site is. A lot of people do SXSW with laptops or extremely web-enabled cell phones (I just have a regular Blackberry I am not a power-user of.) and look stuff up online constantly and this is probably one of the reasons why.

Now none of the dozens of tools for checking how popular a site is are perfect. Each one is helpful to a point and they tend to each weigh different factors. While none should be taken as gospel, utilizing multiple benchmarks tends to give an excellent ballpark metric for size of audience. Realistically, even if you had a login to a particular site’s stats, you still only get a ballpark idea because different log analyzers parse unique visits, raw visits, types of data viewed, and referrals differently. Back in 2006, Beeker the StatsNrrd, over at AltPorn.net started doing an Altporn ‘A’ List Alexa Rankings chart. Over time, as some sites went under and some were added to the chart, that list grew to twenty-some-odd sites. It is not precisely the list I would select in a Sesame Street game of “Which one of these things is not like the others?”, but it is a pretty good resource for comprehensive accurate measures of sites within the altporn genre. Sometimes I wish APN would count all of Blue Blood’s sites aggregated together because I feel that would better demonstrate Blue Blood’s market position, but the way APN does it is certainly reasonable. I wish a site like BrokenDollz were higher up in the rankings because I like chatting with webmaster Judas, but the numbers just are what they are.

As a longtime reader of the Fleshbot sex blog, I know that, like me, Fleshbot is familiar with the AltPorn.net list because they have referenced it. So I was surprised when new Fleshbot editor, and former That Strange Girl webmaster, Lux Alptraum picked up the most bizarre toplist of altporn sites by someone named Sean Adamz whose site ranks . . . well, the numbers just are what they are and the site Fleshbot pulled the list from ranks low. Honestly, I was surprised that anyone at Fleshbot would use such a poor source, but I was shocked that Lux Alptraum would. Although I understand Lux Alptraum’s major at Columbia was urban studies, Columbia does boast one of the finest journalism schools in the world. So Lux must know better than to source information that way and she either, having recently started a new gig, didn’t realize how seriously people take Fleshbot, thought everyone would read the fine print and just view it as humorous, or, as some disenchanted Fleshbot readers commented on this article, maybe she was having an off day. Perhaps she was busy packing for her trip to Vegas and just had a word count she had to meet; Fleshbot’s increasing focus on quantity over quality may be reducing . . . quality and accuracy.

The term altporn didn’t come about until 2001, nine years after Blue Blood launched. I believe the expression was coined by SuicideGirls CEO Sean Suhl and some porn video director, who had shot for SG and for Killshot’s EroticBPM, or perhaps an unheralded PR rep of theirs came up with the altporn term. I prefer the term counterculture erotica to altporn because I founded Blue Blood in print in 1992 and I feel the cohesive lifestyle aspect is larger than the sex aspect. (What I like is erotica; what the other guy likes is porn.)

So I hesitate to call anything I do altporn, but, if everything were still on dead trees and a magazine distributor asked me what publications to shelve Blue Blood with, I would be familiar enough with the marketplace to know the answer is to rack Blue Blood with SuicideGirls, EroticBPM, GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and Burning Angel. A funny thing about web browsing vs. bookstore or newsstand browsing is that, although a journalist writing on the topic of altporn should be aware of all these web properties to be credible, many BlueBlood.net readers may have never heard of any of those sites.

I am not classifying these sites necessarily as a recommendation but as simple basic understanding of genre. From an artistic or punk or feminist activism standpoint, I feel Blue Blood is the polar opposite of some of these sites. There are a few sites by individual photographers I might like more and prefer to recommend, but a photographer site is simply a different niche, in the same way a photo book would be shelved in a different part of the bookstore, and, like it or not, this is what the same shelf holds from a marketing standpoint. A Blue Blood print reader would have most likely also been familiar with On Our Backs, Skin Two, O, Tattoo Savage, Taste of Latex, Future Sex, Propaganda, Ghastly, and the various other demographically similar mags, such as boing-boing or Axcess, likely to be shelved next to Blue Blood. The structure of print caused related products to be viewable together.

If there were not enough magazines in a genre, then there was no rackspace for them, so it was desirable not to be the only one. If an adult newsstand or liquor store didn’t really stock alternative press, then Blue Blood got shelved with the Hustler publications, Swank, Club, Penthouse, Playboy, and suchlike. But it sold through best in locations where the other magazines had more in common. Fast forward to the online world and there seems to be a bit of a Highlander mentality where many people who run sites seem to believe there can only be one site of any particular sort. Because of the way web media is structured differently from printed media, it is actually possible for someone who loves one “altporn” site to be utterly unfamiliar with another. Coming from a magazine background myself, I have a decidedly inclusive and non-destructive bias in my approach to the marketplace.

Some of the impetus for this feature article on web traffic rankings in altporn stemmed from what should have been a really minor interaction Forrest Black had on Twitter. Having been involved with Blue Blood from the beginning and actively involved since the third print issue, Forrest Black is familiar with the reasons for being aware of genre. Feel free to call Forrest Black Blue Blood’s CTO or Art Director, but he is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and he sometimes plays on Twitter when he doesn’t feel like working on all that. So, because someone named Sean Adamz had friended Forrest on Twitter, Forrest noticed the initial flawed toplist authored by this Sean guy and immediately pointed out that he had only included one of the Blue Blood sites and had entirely left off GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM. Sean replied that he counted Blue Blood as a network (even though he had only listed the stats for GothicSluts), continued to leave serious players GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM off his list, got surreally aggro, and then messaged Forrest asking for instructions on how to do the stats on aggregating a network. Apparently Forrest had been generous with answering questions from this guy in the past, but I really don’t think someone should put together a purportedly definitive list if they just don’t have the skills or expertise to do so.

Speaking of Twitter, one of the people I first became acquainted with at SXSW is Weblogs entrepreneur Jason Calacanis who has pretty much the most entertaining Twitter on the site. Now I don’t need to see the specific benchmarks to have an idea that any project Jason Calacanis is involved in is probably influential. He is best known for selling the blog network he co-founded to AOL for $30 million. But, lest anyone think that the world of “altporn” is somehow more bitchy or petty than other areas of internet business, some of his recent Tweets regarding quantifying site popularity read:

“techcrunch please stop using Comscores bulls$%^t numbers. Quantcast Quantified numbers speak–everything else is sample based garbage. can people please stop quoting comScore’s b.s. numbers–they are garbage. Quantcast’s quantified program is the only accurate one out there. Alexa, Comscore, and Compete are sample based,gamed & totally inaccurate–do NOT use them please. put Quantcast on your site or zip it! :-) also,why doesn’t google analytics let you publish/certify some of your stats like Quantcast does? that would put an end to comscore nonsense.”

Full disclosure: I do not feel I am biased by Jason Calacanis having plied me (and a lot of people) with beer and pizza. I think all of this would be a lot more fun if everyone got together more often for beer and pizza. Or water and sushi for the carb-conscious. Or just more things which are IRL and friendly or at least professionally cordial. People get all spun out and just plain wrong on the internet 24/7. Then again, I could be at the adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas right now, but I decided that the ROI, on $9,000 worth of beer for the press coverage and affiliate marketing teams and business associates, wasn’t really good enough.

At any rate, the initial Sean Adamz posting nonsense to Twitter would have just been a situation where one expresses an informed opinion, has a 140 character conversation, and/or removes a troublemaker from the Twitter read list and forgets about it, except high traffic website Fleshbot reprinted the flawed list as Your Definitive Guide To The Web’s Top Ten Altporn Sites. The source list was so poorly-researched that it failed, even from a data entry perspective, transposing digits on the SuicideGirls ranking to make SG appear to be a few hundred slots less popular than it is. Now Fleshbot’s Lux Alptraum was quick to point out that she thought this was in no way a definitive list and, unlike the original author of this inaccurate list who had no words or explanation with his chart, Lux, being an actual writer, wrote something about each site and included sample pictures she selected from each one. (One slightly off-topic note on this is that (a) there is no period after the G in my name and (b) although Forrest Black and I did shoot the particular image selected, Blue Blood has published dozens of awesome photographers and I wouldn’t want anyone to think Forrest Black or I were trying to take credit for all photos Blue Blood ever put out, when Blue Blood has published practically a who’s who of such work, including Chad Michael Ward, Kelly Lind, Lori Mann, Christine Kessler, Justice Howard, Gunter Blum, Ashley Fontenot, Jim Hancock, Carlos Batts, Roman Sluka, Richard Kadrey, and many many more.)

I asked the folks who were left out for their thoughts on the matter, as well as the folks at AltPorn.net. APN could not be reached for comment, possibly because they are all getting drunk doing business at the aforementioned adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas this week. Scott Owens aka Killshot of EroticBPM was somewhere between resigned and sanguine, saying:

“It’s no big deal. I see it kinda like how kids these days try to make lists of all time greatest bands but don’t include anything before 1990. Ebpm is just like the classic rock of alt porn”

Chad Grant of DeviantNation hadn’t seen the article yet and thus had perhaps a bit more of a visceral gut reaction, as he initially said some rather unprintable things but expressed a desire to avoid “drama” with the potentially unbalanced. I would generally agree with him, but I had dismissed the original Sean Adamz altporn toplist as not worth a lot of attention and then it got picked up by Fleshbot which, according to web traffic benchmarks mentioned here, appears to have a lot of readers. I’m a big believer in education and sometimes I feel it is important to bring accuracy. DeviantNation’s Chad Grant made the important point that the concept of alternative is going to mean different things to different people, saying:

“i dont really see those other sites even remotely relevant because they’re so late to the party and non existant in terms of an actual site (community, members and content) . . . we all have very different interests though, we’re in a very wide group of “alt porn” but that means different things to everyone . . . DN obviously conveys what we think “alternative” should stand for, but that doesnt mean we are better than anyone else that wants to have their interpretation of it. its a very all encompassing word . . . The author it is attributed too Lux … that’s the old owner of “That Strange Girl” that claimed her alt site never made [it] for every reason under the sun except her or it’s own shortcomings”

In initial response to the Fleshbot piece, annaliese nielsen of GodsGirls had feelings largely similar to my own, telling me:

“i did see the article and i think it was pretty irresponsible of fleshbot to post that piece. i know that godsgirls is still the new kid on the block in the eyes of many long time producers such as yourself and maybe i am being a conspiracy theorist but i felt that that list was nothing but an attempt by sean to make himself look far more relevant than he is and to make us look irrelevant. i saw that the editor wrote that the title was intended as comedy and if that is truly the case i don’t think that was clear at all. as a long time fleshbot reader who often links to their articles i feel a little bit insulted that sean’s piece was published there, to be frank.”

As I actually do have the skills to aggregate traffic data to ballpark a network, I’m going to share the actual rankings with you all here. Keep in mind that these are rankings which are current this week but likely to change if you are reading this article in 2010. The web is always shifting traffic patterns. An “altporn” entity generally consists of a number of component parts, including a members area with photos and sometimes video and sometimes erotic writing. There is also a community, a news section of some sort, a way for models and possibly other contributors to apply, one or more tours, an affiliate program for professional webmasters to use to get paid for linking, and sometimes a merch shop. It is possible for all these components to be on one domain or spread out across many domains. For example, GodsGirls might put their model application on their primary domain, while Blue Blood has it on BlueBloodPhoto.com. Burning Angel might put their community and entertainment news on the same domain with their primary adult content, while Blue Blood splits the non-nude news and community aspects off to BlueBlood.net and keeps the NSFW stuff on other domains. GodsGirls keeps all their video on their primary domain, while BurningAngel breaks it out onto multiple domains. Although Blue Blood and EroticBPM both run solo girl sites distinct from the primary membership areas, I did not include those in the overall stats for Blue Blood or EroticBPM, but I did count the Joanna Angel solo girl site in benchmarking the BurningAngel network because I feel like that is more integral to their branding. Because it would not be possible to isolate just the relevant data, I did not count billing processors such as CCBill or MerchLackey in these stats. I also did not count personal portfolios or sites such as SpookyLinks (produced by Blue Blood) or MakeOutClub (produced by 3Jane) which may have some of the same ownership as what is being benchmarked, but are really distinct web properties.

According to Alexa Reach rankings, the serious players in this currently rank as follows:

1. SuicideGirls .00913%
2. Blue Blood Network .006866%
3. BurningAngel Network .005989%
4. GodsGirls .00203%
5. DeviantNation .00066%
6. EroticBPM Network .00062%

Alexa Reach numbers are an extrapolated percentage of all global web traffic, sampled from a combination of ISP data and toolbar users who have visited a site during an average day. To give you a couple of comparatives, according to Alexa, MySpace gets 5.717% of global internet users in an average day. Google receives 28.092%. Or to put it another way, Lux, who had a certain journalistic responsibility writing for a site with a reach of .0198%, sourced the egregiously misleading list she posted from a site with a reach of .0003%.

Another measure I like to use of a site’s importance is how many other sites link in to it, according to an aggregation of data from most popular search engines. I prefer to combine data from all major SERPS, but Yahoo appears to be in crazy flux today, and I don’t want to drown you all in numbers, so I’m only going to attempt Google which is not currently dancing and counts links the same with or without the www. This ranking is an example of how quickly the web changes. Last time I ran these numbers the Blue Blood network was solidly in the #1 position and by today, January 9, 2009, when I am running these numbers, it has slid down to the #3 slot. Here are the current rankings by this measure for Google:

1. SuicideGirls 2,220
2. BurningAngel Network 713 (Good job, Alex Chechs!)
3. Blue Blood Network 620
4. GodsGirls 406
5. EBPM Network 88
6. DeviantNation 42

Blue Blood’s server stats show no major difference. If anything, traffic is up, but that doesn’t matter because this is just an example of how third parties can benchmark website traffic. Blue Blood could stay exactly the same for number of visitors and links in and another related site could go up and that would change the rankings. That seems obvious to me, but I felt it needed to be spelled out if anyone could attempt to make a definitive list which left off kind of more than half the major players. A more comprehensive list than this is possible and AltPorn.net has done many of them, but this is a list of the top of the field in terms of traffic. I do not feel that anyone else’s success diminishes my own, so feel free to point out if you think there are any serious players I forgot. I want to stress that I am using standard industry tools to measure who the players are and I am not leaving anyone out here.

Aside from truth and accuracy, why is it important how many visitors a web property gets? I know that, whenever someone wants to publish my writing or photography, unless it is a heck of a paycheck, it is more important to me, as an artist, to know that my work will be seen. Even for mainstream models, modeling is very much about exposure, about the joy of being fabulous in front of the right people, about being remembered in great photos. For anyone who cares about either exposure for something they do, or responses from the most basic acknowledgement to of course real fame online or IRL, it really does matter how many people are looking. Sending a book or CD for review to a site with three visitors a month isn’t going to be very helpful to an author or a band, but a positive write-up from a site with three million readers can make a real difference. Modeling for a site with a lot of eyes on it can lead to magazine covers, television appearances, dating rock stars, and various other enjoyable activities, desired by people with mohawks, tattoos, multi-colored hair, and unusual modes of dress. Experience points and paychecks count too, but a well-informed creative person also wants to know who is watching and how many people are watching.

To recap, it is grossly inaccurate to leave certain sites off any definitive list of web properties in the goth, punk, altporn, counterculture erotica or whatever-you-want-to-call-it genre. If such a chart in 2009 does not include most of the Blue Blood network and does not include EroticBPM, GodsGirls, or DeviantNation at all, it is simply a defective chart and one has to wonder about either the expertise or the agenda of whoever created it. Even if calling a defective list definitive in the title is intended to be facetious, it is irresponsible for a high traffic site not to perform due diligence on the facts it presents. It would also behoove anyone attempting to start a site to learn to crunch these sorts of numbers. It would be a plus if those, with no idea how to quantify site data, did not mislead audiences by putting out toplists, before learning how to do so. Numbers are not a matter of opinion.

I did this interview with the wonderful Scott Owens from EroticBPM a while back for the esteemed Thomas S. Roche back when he was editing Eros Zine. Eros Zine was unfortunately not able to post it permanently before they lamentably stopped updating. As yesterday was EroticBPM’s nine year anniversary, I felt like now would be a good time to post it here.

Scott Owens is the founder of and mastermind behind EroticBPM. BPM stands for Beats Per Minute and is an electronica term for how fast the musical percussion is thumping to get your booty shaking. The site initially grew out of the rave culture which Scott was active in. Hence the moniker “Erotic Beats Per Minute.”

Partiers who have had a blast at raves will enjoy the site, but it also appeals to a more general taste in unique young women — and occasionally men. Those who like partying teens will find EroticBPM has a lot of hot stuff to fit that taste as well. And there is a special forum for photos of models and members showing off their elbows. MistyB, one of the star models on EroticBPM, posts, “Elbow fetish is the only fetish.” She might be joking. Then again, the site features a plethora of fine examples of elbow photography.

Scott Owens is creative and always pushing the envelope in terms of how erotic content can be presented online. Although blogging is less of a focus now, EroticBPM was one of the very first multigirl erotic membership sites to feature model journals and structured profiles and the very first in his niche. The site features a thriving community where members and models and Scott and company interact in a friendly and positive way. Scott and his trusty coder Anti are always thinking of new features. Members can post party pictures and such in the members area and you can just feel the fun looking at them.

One of the most striking things about Scott is that, even in the face of trials and tribulations, he manages to remain warm and friendly. He is a genuinely nice guy, enjoyed by those around him.

Fun fact to know and share: The famous, down-to-earth, and very beautiful Bella Star got her start modeling for EroticBPM and still stops by from time-to-time to say hello to members and everyone else. Beauties featured in our exclusive free EroticBPM preview photo gallery include Bella Starr, Seattle, Sky, Genesis LaVey, Charissa, MistyB, Krystal, Zia, Bailey, Tanya, Gwen, Cadence, MerriCat, Jamie, Haley, Faye, Wish, Nails, Bonnie, Hel Inferna, Bubbles aka Bella Vendetta, the always enjoyable Athena Hollow, and birthday celebration girl Money.

Amelia G: How would you describe the theme or themes of EroticBPM?

Scott Owens: EroticBPM started off primarily as an adult site focused on the rave subculture and community. But it has since evolved to include other subcultures as well.

Amelia G: What motivated you to start an erotic membership site? What motivated you to pick the themes you did?

Scott Owens: Well back in 1999 I thought that doing an adult site would be a fun summer project to teach myself photography and web design all at once. Only most of the websites out there at the time did not appeal to me. I decided to start a site with a community focus and use raver models since that was the subculture I was involved in and familiar with at the time.

Amelia G: Was a membership site your first web site?

Scott Owens: Yep, I had never tried to make a website before this.

Amelia G: EroticBPM was originally called RaverPorn. What prompted the name change?

Scott Owens: Several reasons. Many people felt the name was misleading, although we have a variety of content many people described the photos as erotica more than porn.

Also, the rave scene was in decline and so I wanted to keep an electronic music focus while still leaving it open for other subcultures.

Amelia G: What do you look for in models?

Scott Owens: What I look for the most is the right attitude and interesting personality.

As far as looks go, I don’t have anything specific that I look for, but models who have a unique look definitely get noticed more.

Amelia G: How would someone go about getting to appear on your site?

Scott Owens: There is a link on the site for the model application. Just attach a couple photos and tell us a bit about yourself and we will get back to you if we are interested.

Amelia G: You had a lot of buzz early on. What magazines, newspapers, TV, and other press outlets have covered your projects and how did you hook up with them?

Scott Owens: Spin magazine, Wired, BBC, Sex television, CMJ New Music, Mixmag, BPM, to name some. All of them got in touch with me after hearing about the website and checking it out, they thought it was fresh and interesting enough to talk about.

Amelia G: Is it easier or harder to get press coverage now?

Scott Owens: I would say it is harder. My site and others have been covered pretty extensively, so it is harder to attract attention just based on site novelty.

Amelia G: I understand you have done fairly extensive club promotion. What sorts of events have you created? Did you do event promo before the web sites or did that come later? Do the two things go together for you?

Scott Owens: I had done some event promotion previously, and once I started the site it made sense to promote at clubs and raves since that is what I was familiar with. I’ve done several site sponsored events with fun themes, great music, and always involve some of our pretty models. One event in particular involved a lot of chocolate and photos can be seen on the site.

Amelia G: You’ve lived a number of places while publishing to the web. Where do you think are the best places to do what you do? Do you like to move?

Scott Owens: I started in Wisconsin and then moved to Hawaii where I have been the last five years. And now I am getting ready to relocate to Portland. Hawaii has been a difficult place to do what I do because so much has to be done remotely through other people I work with on the mainland.

I think that Portland will be much better for business, they have a good music scene, and a lot of alternative culture allowing me to have much more of a hands-on approach with things, including being able to start doing events again.

Amelia G: Do you consider EroticBPM to be alt-porn?

Scott Owens: Yes, for lack of a better term.

Amelia G: Do you consider EroticBPM to be feminist?

Scott Owens: I prefer to say it is feminist-friendly.

Many women who consider themselves feminist approve of and participate in my website, but people have different ideas on how to define “feminist”. So I would rather let people decide if they think it is feminist rather than try to convince people it is.

Amelia G: Do you think it is easier or harder to do what you do now than it was when you started?

Scott Owens: It is definitely more challenging, there is a lot more competition now. I think it is much harder for people starting out now than it was when I did.

Amelia G: What are your favorite party accessories? Glowsticks, kegs, a certain kind of music?

Scott Owens: My party mood changes constantly, sometimes I feel like a keg party in someone’s house with a local band or DJ, and sometimes I feel like dressing up and drinking martinis at a big club.

Amelia G: Who are some of your favorite DJs?

Scott Owens: One of my current favorites is DJ P, check him out at Studio 54 in Vegas I also like Z-trip, Richie Hawtin, Yoda, Woody McBride, Sasha, John Digweed, Tiesto, Chris Liberator. I could go on, but I will stop

Amelia G: What do you think your members enjoy most about EroticBPM?

Scott Owens: Definitely the community. Everyone is very friendly and interesting to interact with.

Amelia G: Anything I didn’t ask you about which you are dying to tell the world?

Scott Owens: Not that I can think of.

Amelia G: To recap: interactive community of rave and other music fans, unique girls, tattoos, feminist-friendly, altporn. Join the party at Scott Owens’ place at EroticBPM.

So I guess this is just weird sex trial coverage week at BlueBlood.net. First Max Hardcore gets convicted, then Ira Isaacs gets a stay, and then R. Kelly got acquitted. Now it appears that notoriously litigious, Hot Topic-esque, altporn, membership site SuicideGirls (aka SG) has settled their most recent lawsuit. It is hard to keep track of all their legal scuffles, but this was the one against their former contractor fetish photographer Philip Warner and his collaborator altmodel Apnea.

The initial dispute between SuicideGirls and Apnea appeared to arise because she modeled with a girl named Katie for a forthcoming site, which had offered her and Katie disproportionately large sums of money for a simple nude photo shoot. Even though this new site had not launched yet and most planned sites never do launch, SG was particularly bent out of shape about the Apnea and Katie photos because Katie had also reportedly worked as SG’s accountant. This presumably meant that she was privy to very proprietary information. SG went so ballistic over this that they not only took away Apnea’s complimentary site membership, but they put a stop payment on a check they had already written to her.

The dispute between comically psycho-competitive SuicideGirls and their staff photographer Philip Warner appeared to arise when Philip posted on the internet that he was going to be adding community features to his own web site, basically making it a lot more like SG. According to AltPorn.net’s exclusive interview with Apnea, SG handed Philip a new and more exclusionary contract one day after he announced his web site intentions. He refused to sign the new more controlling contract, so one day later SG made a public break with him. SG then apparently had the hubris to inform Philip that “alternative images of beauty (dyed hair, piercing and tattoos)” were their sort of trademark and therefor his work was a violation of his noncompete and he fired back publicly saying that the images

“you describe reflect the same style that I photographed [Apnea] in prior to our participation and awareness of the suicidegirls.com site. SG has no ownership of this broad genre, it is clearly in the public domain and has been around on web sites like BlueBlood since before SG was created.”

Five weeks later, without bothering to reply to his publicly-posted letter, SG filed suit against Philip Warner.

Here is where it gets weird. First of all, Philip did not stop working with SG when they put a stop payment on the check to Apnea, but, as soon as he had a problem with them, he started asking other people to donate to his legal defense. As far as he was concerned, while Apnea’s problem might not have been his problem, his problem was apparently supposed to be everyone else’s problem. The second weird thing was that Philip presented like SG was trying to take away his livelihood, yet the gossip sites claimed he actually made his living by owning and operating rental properties in Texas and court documents assert that SG, over all the years he worked for them, paid out a bit over ten grand total. This works out to a little over $2,000 a year. That is not exactly enough to live on. The third weird thing is that the court documents for the initial complaint nowhere mention that Philip appeared to have been planning a competitive site targeted directly at SG’s slice of the marketplace. Instead they named Apnea’s solo girl site in the suit as what they were concerned about competing with. Yes, the Apneatic site domain was registered to Philip and he shot a significant portion of the content on it and he probably ran it in partnership with her. But why mention her site, especially when Philip claims his contract specifically permitted him to shoot for solo girl sites, and not mention the planned multi-girl site which seemed to trigger the falling-out? Somewhere in here, SG also licensed a bunch of their own unretouched photos of Apnea to a number of adult internet companies with the condition that they were not permitted to use a name Apnea wished to be called. Eventually SG apparently also named Apnea in their suit which was initially just vs. Philip.

Here is where it gets really weird. For the past year and a half, Philip and Apnea have been aggressively campaigning for charity and donations from the creative community for their legal defense. Photographers have been told they are not allowed to participate in art shows unless they promise to donate any proceeds from their own work to Philip’s defense. Models worked for free to make anti-SG legal defense posters. Philip made T-shirts and prints promoting his lawsuit and asked people to buy them in support of his legal defense. Site owners and other clients all felt like maybe they should pay Philip and Apnea slightly higher rates to help with their legal plight. Every time Philip or Apnea sold an unwanted piece of photo equipment or an old dress on eBay, they reminded everyone that all this was to pay for their legal defense and that everyone who hates SuicideGirls should contribute to their legal defense fund. I do not know exactly just how many people gave them money or exactly how much money they were given because, unlike what one would expect from a charity, there has never been any kind of public accounting of donations nor the expenses those funds covered. Certainly, a lot of people championed Philip and Apnea’s cause and tried to be as supportive as their personal situations permitted.

Here is where is gets really really weird. Today, Philip Warner and Apnea issued a joint statement, apparently written by Philip but signed by both, which said in part,

“We want to make it clear that we 100% have no hostilities towards SuicideGirls in anyway anymore, we all came to a really fair agreement over this dispute, and there were no bad people here, just mistakes and misunderstandings. If you’ve boycotted SG on our behalf, you helped us come to this agreement, so thank you but the battle is over, and we’re all friends again.”

They state that there will be new SG product authored by Philip and they include a link for anyone who wishes to join SuicideGirls. The link is an affiliate link which they explain saying,

“To help offset our legal expenses, when you sign up with SuicideGirls, please use this affiliate code so that we can use the money to pay off our lawyers and focus on Apnea’s modeling and my photography!”

Did they seriously keep beating the dead horse of their legal expenses, while asking people to join the very site they were fighting and telling everyone to boycott for its evil ways and lameness just one day ago? The very reason Philip and Apnea were able to get so much support for their legal defense was that a lot of people truly believe that SG is an evil company.

According to Apnea’s MySpace, she is currently, in 2008, twenty-two-years-old. The first nude photo set featuring her posted to the SuicideGirls site in 2003. I think people should take responsibility for their actions, no matter what their age, but I do have some sympathy for a teenage girl who entered into business with a predatory corporation. Philip’s MySpace, on the other hand, puts his current age at thirty-nine-years-old. He is a grown-ass man, and he knew what he was getting into with SG, and he still chose to lie down with dogs, and then ask everyone else to help with his flea problem. He supported SG aggressively when many other people complained of all manner of mistreatment. He asked for a hand-out when he had a problem, and now he is telling everyone it is all good because he is getting back in bed with SG. I can’t find it in my heart to have the same sympathy for him that I might for Apnea. They are still supporting SG, which is still an organization that is a blight on our scene.

I believe that SG head honcho Sean Suhl is pretty much personally responsible for most of what has gone horribly wrong with the counterculture in recent years. He helped collect alt demographics for secretive data mining corporation Experian, and they sold that info to Hot Topic, so Hot Topic could effectively shut down all the independent punk rock stores which were the cornerstone cultural centers of so many local scenes. And don’t even get me started on how Sean Suhl’s projects have made every effort to inhibit the creation of art, disempower men, and turn women into jokes.

Now, to be fair, despite the fact that I feel this way, I actually think SG had a totally legitimate complaint if they signed a photographer and a model to an exclusive agreement, promoted that photographer and model, made that photographer and model privy to a lot of proprietary information, and then the photographer and model both violated their contracts. Then again, SG was unable to win a legal case against hacker Chad Grant, even when he admitted to hacking SG’s server and having every intention of competing with SG in the marketplace in a way which he hoped would put them out of business. The court transcripts from that trial are truly hilarious and maybe SG settled this case to avoid creating another laugh riot at their own expense.

Now Philip and Apnea are having their joint statement with its affiliate link spam posted to all sorts of sites which generally never allow that sort of blatant commercial promotion. The responses so far indicate that SG may have laid off on a case they could have won, but they also managed to give Philip enough rope to hang himself. Here are a few of the responses Philip and Apnea’s incredibly sell-out and self-centered statement has received so far.

On MM, photographer Chris Keeling sums it up nicely, saying,

“wtf? I thought we had been trained over the last year or so to Hate SG? Now the OP is spamming the Forums to get us to go join SG to go see his earlier work with them? It makes me think this whole fundraising thing was just a carefully orchestrated piece of shit! I’m pissed off. They are either vile despicable people or they are not. Just because the OP can make money again doesn’t make them okay now.”

The beautiful blogger Baby Sinead adds,

“Seriously, I didn’t even send money or anything but I feel like a tool. I guess everyone has this time where they choose to sell out or keep up the fight.”

Photographer Carl J Speed II says in part,

“I’ve been a staunch defender all over the internets and my social circles, spent a lot of time convincing people to stay away from SG (members and perspective models alike), wore my Vive La Picnic shirt (that I bought) , and this just feels dirty. Lying in bed with the bad guys now doesn’t give any sense of justice about this scenario … I’m still angry. I don’t care what arrangement was reached of “what had to be said”, SG are not “okay”, this wasn’t just a fucking misunderstanding, and maybe I have no room to point a finger as I’m not in the position, but going back to those that bent you over for the last two years, where’s the principle? HOw could someone lay back in bed with the bad guys?”

Photographer Visions Of Excess posts,

“I was one of those folks who hosted an LP fundraiser – money that it seems could have been more well spent paying my rent. The OP aside, I am reminded of the charge that SG is still selling its content to porn sites. Now why would I want to support that?”

Shortly after this, because MM mods always hide SG spam threads if they get too negative about SG, the thread got locked down.

Over on LJ, there is some energetic conversation going on still where people like Baby Sinead are able to visibly post, “Honestly if it was all a “misunderstanding” people should be refunded,” without having her words immediately locked. User bunnie_page writes,

“Realistically, I’m thinking it’s part of the settlement that they had to retract all of the bad things they said about “Worst Website Ever”…all of that shiftiness with them not able to say WHO was suing Apnea really makes it seem like SG was suffering from all of LP’s support, and had a gag order (which obviously didn’t help), and now their trying this. If the agreement *was* actually fair I would think SG would’ve ended up covering all of his legal bills. I’m sure there’s more here that we will just never get to know. But whatever, I still hate SG.”

In Apnea’s personal journal, mxa_photo writes,

“After all the crap you guys have claimed to have been through with this case it sure looks like you are now pimping out sign ups to SG??? Congratulations on suckering everyone in with your superbly run publicity campaign and congratulations on your seemingly total lack of moral fibre.”

My favorite LJ post about the settlement so far comes from user slutbunwalla, who wrote,

“Maybe it was just a long con and there was no real lawsuit to begin with! They all drummed up a bunch of business and donations and support and sympathy but the whole time there was already an implicit agreement between everyone to keep the drama going!!! Or maybe I just watch too much LOST.”

The most tragic posts come from redchickpoet who writes,

“Me (who couldn’t afford it in the first place, but thought I was helping to support a worthy cause) —–> BIG FOOLISH IDIOT … The funny thing is, me and my guy JUST got our “Free Lithium Picnic” shirts. Well, at least I can sleep at night knowing we helped to pay for their new tattoos. *kicks myself and becomes just a bit more cynical*”

This last post breaks my heart because it gets to the core of why Sean Suhl’s projects like SuicideGirls have been so damaging to the soul of counterculture. Everything he touches seems to spew out a lot of rhetoric about things people want to believe in, yet everything he is involved in seems to end up being a disillusioning smoke and mirrors sham. Once someone like redchickpoet is disillusioned like this, she may just walk away from the whole scene. Heck, I’ve been a part of this world since before I founded Blue Blood fifteen years ago. And this sort of disillusioning nonsense gives me pause.

My father is an attorney who has never lost a single litigation, yet he still always says that the only people who win lawsuits are the lawyers. I don’t know who won the $G vs LP lawsuit, but I know that all of us in the larger community are the ones who really paid the price.

There are a few porn movies which most people have heard the names of — Behind the Green Door, The Devil in Miss Jones, and Debbie Does Dallas. Add Cafe Flesh and maybe Caligula to the list if you are a science fiction dork fan like me. You can enjoy smut without ever having seen any of those flicks. You can make smut without ever having seen any of those flicks. But, if you have not heard of them, then you are missing a piece of the cultural zeitgeist that most people are in on.

Adult industry professionals and critics have a number of theories as to why the original Debbie Does Dallas movie was so popular. Some people think it was because a lot of people are hot for cheerleader porn and the Dallas Cowboys (and their cheerleaders) were practically America’s team at the time. I’m not really a football person, so I can’t comment on the veracity of that claim. Some people think Debbie Does Dallas was just a really catchy punchy title that was fun to say. Kind of like Snakes on a Plane, but with, you know, naked people. Some people believe that Debbie Does Dallas rode the initial wave of Betamax production, being one of the very first adult titles available on that videocassette format. Yes, I said Betamax. For those of you who are like “WTF is Betamax?”: It was a videotape format which competed with VHS to be the industry standard when VCR’s or video cassette recorders first came out. Betamax was generally considered to be a higher quality format, but VHS embraced the porno market. Guess which one ended up more popular? A VCR was expensive when Debbie Does Dallas first came out, so being one of the only options for an underserved and overpaid market was probably an advantage. Some experts on adult video opine that Debbie was just really really really incredibly hot. Whatever the reason, Debbie Does Dallas was one of the best-selling skin flicks of all time.

So what happens when a director or producer has the hook-up to make a movie with a decent budget, but they don’t actually have anything much to say personally as an artist? That’s right, they do a remake. Don’t get me wrong. Some remakes are enjoyable. I liked the Dennis Quaid-starring version of the classic thriller movie DOA better than the original, and the more recent one was probably able to have a more interesting and less Hollywood ending because the creative team could excuse it by pointing out that they were staying true to the original. In general, though, I am a fan of artists trying to do something new. I do understand that there are some people in the movie business and in the adult video business who just want to make a dollar and their only question is ROI. I can respect someone who is purely about business, so long as they don’t try to convince me they are something other than what they are.

I’ve never seen the original Debbie Does Dallas in its entirety. By which, I mean I may or may not have walked through a room where it was playing while at a party at some point. I’ve never even seen a boxcover for the — yep, you guessed it — remake of Debbie Does Dallas, the over-heralded recent release of which provided the impetus for this article. Although the current crop of Porn Valley faux auteurs often ask people to praise their films sight-unseen, I feel unqualified to review something I am totally unfamiliar with. So I’m going to let America’s beloved porn journalist Gram Ponante do it for me. Here are some excerpts from his Fleshbot review of the DVD:

“An altporn reimagining of the 70’s porn classic “Debbie Loves Dallas”, [Emo McCry]’s version is not going to make any converts to the altporn stable of stars, all of whom do an amazing job of telegraphing how not seriously they take their jobs. The eye rolling, gum smacking, and bad posture, the delivery of every line as if it had a question mark at the end of it, and the relentless irony of the performances made me think less like I was watching a porn movie than I was substitute-teaching an eighth grade class . . .

Back at Debbie’s place, Cassidey makes James Deen fuck Pixie as punishment for not cleaning the apartment. I don’t understand Altkid anthropology; if Deen had cleaned the house, would he have got to fuck Pixie twice? . . .

In the end, Cassidey gets her man. Punky, played by Alex Gonz, and Cassidey provide a sweaty and messy ending to the movie, real porn as opposed to metaporn, which is a welcome relief. Still, we could hear an offstage voice yell “Two minutes!” as Gonz worked up to his pop shot. I asked [Emo] if things other directors might smooth over – like stage directions – were included purposely in this movie.

“Truth to materials,” he said, quoting the architectural fad that prohibits gussying up building blocks. If that is true, why not have a split screen at all times showing what the crew is up to? What about a CNN news ticker or real-time L.A. traffic reports that would give insight into conditions on the set? Sometimes I think Altporn means never having to admit you’re phoning it in.”

Okay, having seen one other movie (on fast forward) by the same emopompous (I’m inventing words, but only good ones) director, I am inclined to think Gram’s review is probably right, but I’m not really the market for vanilla porn, so it doesn’t much matter if this sort of movie speaks to me. Sometimes Fleshbot runs reviews which are humorous and not wholly positive. Heck, Fleshbot poked fun at us the same week for being excited about award-winner Funkatron wearing a shirt for Blue Blood’s SpookyCash at the Adobe Max 2007 show for the future of the internet. Guess what I did when I read that? I laughed because it was well-written. I said, “ouch,” because it was well-written. I asked a co-worker if I should read anything into the fact that Fleshbot never links BlueBlood.com when they mention it, although they will link BlueBlood.net. We decided it probably didn’t mean anything, but I could always sacrifice a goat later and read the entrails, if I really felt the need. Then I got back to whatever I’d been working on at the time. I definitely did not do what the emopompous director of Debbie Wants a Mulligan On Dallas did.

That kind, friendly, sweet, sensitive (to his own needs), gentle soul who always remembers anything good anyone has ever done for him . . . Okay, I don’t think I can maintain a level of sarcasm here which could remotely communicate Emo McCry’s hysterically overblown ridiculous overreaction. Keep in mind now that Gram had given Emo McCry a ton of positive press in the past and that, although Emo McCry would like to get a discount for being all indie, he, in point of fact, works for a one hundred million dollar corporation. So, as the representative of a hundred million dollar a year business, one of the most established companies in adult, Emo McCry apparently shrieked in a completely juvenile way at Gram, calling and texting Gram’s cell phone over and over again to swear and indicate that he was owed a glowing review whether or not he bothered to make the slightest effort to do a good job. Emo McCry rounded out his businesslike presentation by adding harassing emails to the mix. Oh yeah, and he tried to get Gram fired. Mistakenly believing he actually had the juice to force Fleshbot to fire a popular writer like Gram Ponante over one review the director of a DVD didn’t care for.

The absurd but typical overreaction to the mildest slight is comedy gold. Apparently Emo McCry was under the impression that Gram didn’t even need to view the movie to proclaim genius, which, in all fairness, I know other people have done for this guy. I’m certainly long past tired of theoretically creative people, in this age of hype, who want to be congratulated on their brilliance without having to actually try. I’m sick of being asked to praise (or dis) projects I have not yet seen. How fake is this hype going to get before it entirely kills journalism? How un-American is it for publicists to try to run what journalists say down to the last semi-colon? The most annoying thing to me, as a creative person, is how hyper-sensitive these corporate sell-outs are. They whine hysterically over the smallest imagined insult, even though they are totally insensitive to anyone else’s feelings. Have they never heard that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones? And, if they are going to take money from big business, I think they have an obligation to do a good job. A remake might not be art, but it ought to have good production values and be a quality product. But these emo manchildren seem to think it is their raison d’etre to lash out and try to damage everything and everyone around them. Guys, you are not “sticking it to the man” by taking corporate money and giving, both your corporate masters and the viewing public, laughably amateur productions in return. What are you people spending all that corporate dough on anyway? And, incidentally, companies do not usually grow large by having stupid people at the helm, so they are going to eventually notice you are excusing laziness and poor performance as irony and hipness, whether or not you can convince journalists to say you rock. Sometimes I worry that a small crew of disingenuous ripoff artists have fed the whole scene figurative luminous toxin and it is going to kill everything which matters, but at least we have time to figure out who the murderers are.

At any rate, after all was said and done, Gram Ponante is, of course, still writing in the same humorous style for Fleshbot and the emopomous director of Debbie Does Derivative is still hilarious too. Only Emo McCry is solely unintentionally hilarious. I don’t usually pull aside the curtain, but, if you feel like reading the entire email barrage from an apparently grown-ass man who is very very sensitive, then you should check out where Gram Ponante posted the entire exchange on his site. Perhaps the truth of Emo McCry’s materials is just very painful.

I was super psyched to see notable writer Gram Ponante join the Blue Blood forums this week. His writing cracks me up. I was also super psyched by his recent press mention of Blue Blood where, among other things, he said:

“Part of the 1300th photoset hosted on pioneering punk erotica site Blue Blood.com, the photos of Sara X remind me that I really need to watch my diet.“

Gram made the interesting point that he feels labels have to constantly be defined and re-defined because of the human “tendency to aggressively misunderstand.” This was primarily apropos of whether or not I could talk about feminist issues which matter to me and not have my existence become unmitigated hell.

But Gram has, for quite some time now, been promoting the notion that the annoying altporn terminology should be changed to steveporn because steveporn is a term which comes without the baggage. Now, it is my impression that some of the support for the steveporn terminology comes from the same divisive, art-destroying, and scene-damaging camp which coined the altporn terminology in the first place, and that the main point of using the term steveporn is in the hopes of mollifying famous director and writer David Aaron Clark. DAC’s objection to altporn is complex. I should probably have him explain it here some time, but perhaps his view can be summed up as generally feeling that, as an adult video genre, it is neither an alternative to anything, nor particularly quality pornography, nor generally being produced by the best that industry has to offer.

I’ve known David Aaron Clark for many years and I adore him and I respect his opinions. I agree with him on many things and enjoy debating the topics on which we do not agree. And I feel qualified to say that dressing up the same problem with a new name is not going to fool DAC.

Nonetheless, I am entertained by Gram’s blog and his suggestion that perhaps altaltporn could be termed steveporn. Sadly, a rose by any other name and all that.

In recent years, I realize I have shied away from talking about certain topics such as feminism or sexuality or even actual products. This is kind of odd as these were certainly pretty cornerstone issues which were, not only covered in Blue Blood in the past, but were instrumental in why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I feel like feminism on the net, particularly when associated with the site genre dubiously dubbed altporn, is pretty much a mockery. The language has been so co-opted by people who don’t mean it, or even understand it, that the whole thing pretty much makes me sick. It definitely makes me want to disassociate myself from the whole thing, but do I really want to change my life and who I am because someone fake pretended to be like me? Probably not such a good idea.

One of the difficulties involved with feminist politics in 2007 is that it seems to be in vogue to attack people on a personal level, rather than to debate the issues. I see that most people deal with personal attacks by either defending their personal lives or correcting misimpressions about their personal lives. I think that people should pay attention to and debate the actual point and not deconstruct details which are merely specific to the person bringing a broader feminist or other issue up.

I think any artist has to give of themselves, to a certain extent, in order to create. But the global communication networks we live with today make it so difficult to maintain the slightest shred of privacy. Reality show programming and tabloid journalism put into the zeitgeist the notion that the world is entitled to know really personal things about anyone remotely famous. This makes me want to, not only avoid being famous, but move to a farm in Montana. The main thing which prevents me from doing this is the knowledge that it is terribly cliche for a Los Angeles person to buy a spread to get away from it all. That and the simple fact that pretty much no place today is really remote enough to truly get away from it all.

But it is difficult to talk about sex in this type of media climate while maintaining one’s personal privacy and avoiding becoming a public figure. But sharing any private moments in this world is like entering into a BDSM relationship with a room full of strangers who don’t believe in safewords. Sometimes, I believe a person should be entitled to say, hey, this is just for me and not the public. I believe in a fundamental right to privacy.

Lastly, various marketers have disseminated the notion that, if anyone you’ve heard of either endorses or slags a product, then they must be corrupt and inaccurate. These are marketers who of course utilize something called WOM or word of mouth marketing. Just one example of what this often boils down to is a solitary lonely dude posting two hundred reviews on Amazon, with sixty different usernames, of a dozen books, not one of which he read. But, if someone with an actual journalistic pedigree gives an opinion, it is often dismissed as envy because they also wrote a book or some such nonsense. Note to the world: known journalists really do tend to have more valuable opinions than anonymous posters. For real.

I could probably have written three long treatises in place of this article. My primary point here is that feminism, sexuality, and pop culture products news and reviews used to be the main things I wrote about. The current media environment is one where the producers have become cynical and manipulative and the audience has become jaded and betrayed. It is difficult to express true and heartfelt opinions, knowing that marketers may be rushing to either pirate or discredit what is said and readers may be looking for spin in all the wrong places.

So, if I sounded like a feminist, would you hold it against me? If I talked about sex and sexuality, would you feel compelled to pry beyond my comfort zone? If I reviewed products I like, would you assume it was just for the advertising dollars? If I reviewed products I don’t like, would you believe that I was just envious?

I used to be above it. Now I’m down in it. But I don’t really want to lose my voice.