Archive for the ‘Discussion’ Category
by KittyTwo : September 11th, 2009 : Add a Comment »
I made a post the other day saying that there were a lot of hot girls named after the angel of death and that Burning Angel even had two girls named Azrael. The Azrael I have been admiring so much on Burning Angel is actually all one person. She is just super talented at pulling off different looks, so she looks beautiful but different in different sets. I’m excited that Azrael tells me her full model name is Azrael Arden and she also appears on CrazyBabe and Burnt Film. Check out how different, but still super hot, she looks in her different photo sets.
 
by AltPorn : March 20th, 2009 : Add a Comment »
Idealistic concepts get thrown around a lot in the world of AltPorn, ethical standards, feminist ideals, creative freedom, participant rights, standards of respect, etc. and a lot of the sites that have been around a while do deserve their merit badges in these categories, some more than others. Recently, Killshot of EroticBPM shared some of his thoughts on the perception of ethics in altporn and we’re happy to have the opportunity to share his insights here too. I’m looking forward to some of the likely discussion of some of the issues he brings up, so please, we’d like to hear your thoughts as well.
Killshot of EroticBPM writes:
I recently started reading LuckIsBack.com to keep up on what is happening in the mainstream porn industry.
I read a series of posts about Michelle Avanti’s story on being a troubled young girl who gets into porn, gets addicted to drugs and alcohol, is tricked by her agent into doing scenes she didn’t want to do, is injured, beaten, catches multiple STD’s and finally finds Jesus, gets out of the industry and is currently getting ready to have a baby.
Read the whole story here
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
This got me thinking about ethics in porn and the perception of Altporn being more ethical than mainstream porn.
When I started this site, I did not sit down and think about ethics. It was just a creative project started from a silly idea. There was no plan with rules and a code of conduct, but as a person with strong personal ethics and ideals, what would become my full time job and business would be a direct reflection of my ethics.
Aside from their appearance, how I represented the models would arguably become one of the biggest marketing gimmicks for the alt porn industry. However, at the time it was more out of necessity than any big ethical choice.
I found rave & club girls attractive, I figured other people found them attractive, and in building a porn site around a community based on that scene. It only made sense to let the girls express themselves and let them be who they were in the photos. Girls who had any modeling experience found it refreshing to not need to take out their piercings, cover their tattoos and wear stupid outfits.
Along with this came models ability to choose how much or how little they wanted to show.
The little known ethical choice I soon made in connection with this was paying models the same no matter how much or how little they decided to display. The girl who doesn’t spread her legs gets the same amount as the girl who has anal sex with her boyfriend. This ensured that models were never being coerced into doing something they were not comfortable with, simply because they needed or wanted the money.
The expressive freedom and choice enjoyed by the models created content that was appealing to not just men but also women, and not just women, but feminists. Getting the seal of approval from feminists was not too common in the porn industry and the media loved this angle. Women were taking off their clothes because they wanted to express themselves, not because they were troubled young drug addicts being coerced into doing unspeakable things. Thus, altporn became ethical porn. Or so it appeared.
As the altporn scene began to take shape, appearing feminist was a priority among new sites and any females involved became the face of new sites with male partners taking less public roles. I think that people felt it was essential in order to get press and credibility. Oddly, it seemed the sites which were actually run by women got less attention for being feminist because they didn’t get involved in the contest of running around declaring that they too are women. I too failed to play this game and probably lost out on some attention because of it.
As droves of amateur models came out to participate in these altporn sites, many quickly found that their experiences varied widely with each site having its own set of rules, expectations, pay rates, even penalties. Many models somehow expected that a good experience on one alt site would equal a good experience on another alt site. Alt porn it turned out, was not homogeneous.
With alt porn growing closer to mainstream porn just as alternative subculture finds its way into mainstream culture. The importance of appearing feminist has died off. Instead, more and more hardcore alt is making an appearance and more sites are being started purely as a business choice and less as a DIY project.
When it is no longer a collaboration between model, photographer, and creator. The model simply becomes a product. This is not inherently bad, but it leaves far more opportunity for ethics to be thrown out in favor of maximum profit.
The same booking agent that got an unwilling Michelle Avanti to do a 75 man bukakke scene 2 weeks into her career could tomorrow be pressuring a fresh alt model to do a gangbang scene for an alt film.
At this point, what even defines alt?
I honestly don’t know.
Lux Alptraum said goodbye to alt on fleshbot last year. Maybe she is right, but Ebpm isn’t going anywhere yet. So get your altporn here like it’s 1999!
I’ve continued to make what I feel are important ethical choices over the years, like not selling out to a mainstream company because I didn’t think it would be fair to the models, and even today deciding to keep my pay rates the same despite rates falling through the floor on numerous other sites.
I have a feeling that the other good alt webmasters I know are not going to change their ethics, but new up and coming models should be aware that Alt does not automatically mean ethical, it does not automatically mean feminist, and just like in mainstream porn, you should do your research. Separate the good from the bad, and choose who you work with carefully.
by AltPorn : March 1st, 2009 : Add a Comment »
Here is a roundup of interesting reading (and viewing) brought to us by our friends over at Sugasm. I recommend at least checking out the 20 question interview with sexy Syd Blakovich, but these all have some good stuff in them.
by AltPorn : February 15th, 2009 : add a comment (2 so far) »
San Fransisco Bay Guardian’s intrepid Juliette Tang continues her journey into the altporn world, to paraphrase their description. In her endeavor to explore the world of AltPorn, she has been conducting a series of profiles and interviews, and we really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with her about our favorite genre. Her latest interview with AltPorn.net’s own Cutter Smith covers a wide range of issues and topics. Cutter did have input on a number of questions from a lot of us over here, but we do agree about his ‘veritable encyclopedia of altporn knowledge’ and we’d love to hear your feedback on the interview too.
We’d like to give credit and thanks to Athena Hollow and her GeekGirlsOnline as well at sexy and talented model/photographer Mette Th13teen, as they chose photos from our features on you two and your sites to illustrate the interview.
San Fransisco Bay Guardian writes:
Recently, I chatted with Annaliese of the famous altporn site God’s Girls about nudity, tattoos, and DIY photography. In this installment of altporn interviews, I got the chance to talk to Cutter Smith of Altporn.net, the blog to read if you’re a fan of altporn. We literally talked about everything — Cutter is a veritable encyclopedia of altporn knowledge, and his site reflects his thoughtful, intelligent, and knowledgeable obsession with observation of his favorite genre of porn.
SFBG: First, what is the story behind Altporn.net?…
by Truant : February 7th, 2009 : Add a Comment »
APN is proud that our man Cutter Smith was recently interviewed and subsequently quoted in an article in the San Fransisco Bay Guardian, titled Hipsters and the emergence of altporn, which was written by Juliette Tang. It’s an interesting article that brings up a number of issues and gets perspective from several people involved in the genre and we recommend you take a moment and check it out. It’s an entertaining and hopefully informative read. If you have any thoughts, we’d love to know, either here or there. Here is a little excerpt, from Cutter’s portion:
San Fransisco Bay Guardian writes:
Most people involved in altporn view their work as fundamentally different than mainstream pornography. Cutter, of AltPorn.net, explains, “AltPorn makes the trends and porn-porn tends to follow them. Traditional porn is conservative in a weird insular way. It tends to copy outside things.” Cutter doesn’t think that altporn appropriates or copies from existing subcultures. He and others view altporn as being organic, DIY, independent, and fundamentally authentic…
Smith (Cutter) elaborates, “All the originators in this genre were driven to create sexual media that appealed to their own community and their own communities’ aesthetics. So, the goths created goth erotica and the punks created punk erotica and the ravers created raver erotica. So, on an aesthetic level, altporn offers an alternative look, as well as the community interactivity, to prove it’s authenticity.”
by AltPorn : January 30th, 2009 : add a comment (2 so far) »
Killshot, altporn O.G. and long time friend of APN, who has been running EroticBPM for nearly a decade, worked with Fatal Beauty, and also launched SpicePlay in 2004, shared his thoughts on the latest heavily funded venture in the altporn user generated content adult membership site category, Zivity. His points on PayPal and the inherent issues of unfair competition raise some real questions. A lot of people, particularly in the DIY adult site community lost a lot of money when PayPal suddenly radically changed it’s rules on adult sales and many of them are still reasonably bitter on the point. We have some questions as well about how models and photographers can get excited to contribute for free to a site that might eventually give them a potential payout based on traffic and popularity they have to generate for themselves by spamming their friends for ‘votes’ when they could easily make more money simply joining the affiliate programs of nearly any other altporn site and promoting just as hard. Killshot also points out some interesting similarities Zivity has with his Spiceplay site, which we miss a lot. It had some great interactive features and some really innovative ways of sharing the wealth with it’s participants.
Killshot of EroticBPM writes:
Lately I have been hearing more and more about Zivity, a new adult site that pretends not to be an adult site. I largely ignored it even after seeing a few mentions by some members here at Ebpm. Then I heard some more details from a friend and started to check into it more.
I signed up for a beta account and got access a couple days later. I looked around a bit and was not really impressed because parts of it as even fleshbot noticed seemed pretty similar to what I did with spiceplay. (Sharing revenue with models based on members giving credits to models or each other.) And they even have a patent pending on that.
Yeah there are some pretty girls, some of them are naked, some of them are not, and there is all the basic social features you can expect to have. But nothing else really notable.
The thing that caught my eye the most was the fact that they take paypal. Most people wouldn’t think twice about that. But talk to anyone in the adult biz and you will probably hear the same story about their account getting banned. Or you may even hear stories about paypal once upon a time courting the business of adult websites (myself included) only to ban them all a few months later when Ebay bought them out.
So why does Zivity get a free pass?
Well, it turns out that Founders Fund and Blue Run Ventures put up the $8 Million in VC funding to get Zivity started. The same people behind paypal and numerous other tech startups. And the people behind Zivity is quite impressive.
Jon Elvekrog – CEO
According to his bio on Zivity, he has worked for HP, TIBCO, Volex, and helped build LinkExchange
Scott Banister – Chairman and Co-Founder
Founder of ListBot which sold to Microsoft
VP of Idealab – sold to AOL
Co-Founder of Ironport – Sold to Cisco for $830 million
Cyan Banister – Co Founder and Editor in Chief
Scott Banister’s wife – Details on her background are lacking
*edit* Cyan was kind enough to link me to her linkedin profile. She was a senior manager at IronPort and has had a successful career in recruiting for bay area startups. */edit*
Jeffrey Wescott – Co Founder
Former Ironport engineer
Jordan Ritter – CTO
Napster Co Founder
Cloudmark CTO
Columbia Music Entertainment CTO
John Manoogian III – Director of User Experience and Product Design
Worked at Organic Inc
Designed Yahoo’s homepage and UI
Claims to have invented social bookmarking
So why is this a big deal to me?
The fact that they can use paypal and no other adult company can is only a minor annoyance.
The fact that they are attempting to patent something that is neither new or innovative is a little more concerning and makes sense coming from an industry that is increasingly patenting anything obvious just for the sake of having a large patent portfolio and then suing people.
Non Obvious innovations that took hard work to develop certainly deserve to be patented for a period of time. Obvious patents only serve to stifle innovation and end up doing far more harm than good.
However, the biggest thing that has me going is why are they doing this? Why would all these people decide to get into the adult business? If the VC investors hope to see their money back. Zivity would likely need to maintain a paid membership of over 100,000 users. I really don’t see them lasting long.
However, if they are successful. I feel that it will be another sad day for all the creative people out there who don’t have access to piles of money but have plenty of amazing ideas.
Part of what makes the internet great is the ability to share ideas, art, and collaborate with other people to create new things. When big companies and big money comes along and lock down ideas with patents and further stifle creativity by throwing so much money at their project that other people do not even get noticed. Well, it makes the internet less diverse, it puts a lot of money in the hands of a few people, and it certainly takes away a lot of the fun.
Maybe I would feel better if Zivity had come along and done something truly different. But I just don’t see it.
by Truant : June 19th, 2008 : add a comment (32 so far) »
I caught this hilarious post by Lux Nightmare on Fleshbot the other morning and thought it was just too funny not to share.
The underlying story of how Philip Warner, AKA Lithium Picnic is back to cheerfully promoting and defending SuicideGirls however is really disappointing. When he found himself at odds with his exclusionary employer SuicideGirls, he cried far and wide, pleading for everyone in the scene to take up his cause with his ‘Free Lithium Picnic’ merch machine and calls for benefit art shows and donation drives, etc. There wasn’t a place on the internet that someone could mention that they kind of think maybe altporn bully SuicideGirls is a ‘blight on our scene’ or whatever without at least a handful of LP supporters and questionable sock puppets interjecting ‘Free Lithium Picnic’ at every turn. Yet somehow the rhetoric seemed mismatched with what few facts had emerged about the $100,000 breach of contract case SuicideGirls had brought against Philip. Although we have been supportive of getting the facts out there as best we can in the past, we’ve never really bought in to the ensuing hype, despite the well intentioned efforts of sites like DeviantNation, who went so far as to pass along a neat little ‘Free Lithium Picnic’ chipin donation flash widgets that they wanted sites like APN to to run so that Philip could generate more funds.
One of the main reasons we do not cover SuicideGirls more often here at APN is that we’ve seen SuicideGirls notoriously controlling contracts and frankly, they don’t look that difficult to find yourself in breach of. I could see participating in legal fee fund raisers and other charity events once the court found Philip Warner not guilty, but if he was guilty of breach, then giving him money would just be a waste. APN attempted to interview Lithium Picnic about what the fight with SG was actually over, but we were informed that we would only be able to interview Apnea instead, as he was not supposed to discuss legal issues pertaining to the case. Not that we ever mind talking to hot and adorable Apnea and she was very helpful and informative in every interaction. However if, like APN, you have been wondering about the actual details of this legal battle, Lux Nightmare’s Fleshbot post links to where Amelia G over at BlueBlood.net wrote SuicideGirls vs Lithium Picnic Lawsuit Settled, which is an excellent deconstruction of the lawsuit and the community’s response to it. The feeling over there seems to be that Apnea is innocent, but LP is at the very least guilty of selling out the principles he asked so many to sacrifice for and support. Not that we mind if ultra sexy and cute Apnea turns out to be the only good guy in the whole legal mess.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve never been 100% convinced Lithium Picnic was actually innocent. He worked for SuicideGirls for a long time. He was there when they we’re pulling all sorts of shady business with their models. One falling out among a clan of bad people doesn’t suddenly transform someone into being the good guy. It would be nice if he were innocent, but there was a strong chance he actually wasn’t. We were looking forward to the court’s decision to make everything clear.
Fleshbot writes:
“Free Lithium Picnic” boybeater tank top: $25. Limited edition print benefiting Lithium Picnic lawsuit relief: $450. Total Lithium Picnic lawsuit relief: $20,000. Finding out the whole thing was just a “misunderstanding”: priceless. (warnermediagroup.com + sglawsuit.chipin.com + community.livejournal.com; more @ blueblood.net)
by AltPorn : May 12th, 2008 : add a comment (1 so far) »
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve gotten our grubby mitts on the AltPorn LiveJournal Community and resurrected it from the dead. So, site owners, models, photographers, artists, and anyone else interested (and age appropriate) are all encouraged to join us and participate. We’ll be rolling out some new rules and guidelines, but we’ve very happy to hold a good general venue for people interested in all aspects of the creative Alt universe. On the downside, all the previous historical posts were unfortunately lost before we were able to take control, but we have confidence that new works will breath life back into the group again.
AltPorn LJ Community: http://community.livejournal.com/altporn/
by Cutter : December 2nd, 2007 : add a comment (5 so far) »
When you are browsing your favorite AltPorn sites, what size images to you enjoy most? For vertical or portrait images, lately we’ve seen sites running all sorts of different sizes, 1000px, 900px, 800px, 640px high, and for horizontal or landscape we’ve been seeing 1200px, 1000px, 900px, 640px wide. Take a look at your favorite site, with what you feel are the most enjoyable to look at and let us know the picture dimensions you like best on your screen, both for vertical and horizontal shots.
by Truant : October 26th, 2007 : add a comment (13 so far) »
At what point is it ok for a site to make their name become part of the girl’s name? Is it a certain number of sets and/or videos? Is it only ok for the first one she was on? The last one she was on? Is it exclusivity? What happens if she then appears on another site? Does she get a divorce and change her name? Some sites seem to feel like their girls really belong to them, and some even seem to have contracts that amount to just that. Others simply pressure girls with threats of disinclusion and hostility. A surprising number of girls even take on certain site names and site initials in their MySpace profile names and other social network services. I’ve even had girls introduce themselves to me, using their site surname. “Hi, I’m Becky Starbucks” That would be weird, so why has it become such a trend in Alt? Some sites are more pushy about this than others and some don’t seem to do it at all. Isn’t branding a girl with a product name kind of the opposite of what this is all supposed to be about? A girl could be Penthouse Pet of the Year, but nobody would expect her to go around calling herselve Ivana Penthouse. What’s up with that? When should it be ok?
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