Review: RazorDolls.com

RazorDolls isn’t pretty. It’s kinda hard to read the text much of the time because of the brightly colored, busy backgrounds used. Figuring out the navigation is sometimes a lot harder than it should be. And the site sometimes acts a little funky: asking for login info at odd times and other little glitches. Some might find this endearingly punk rock, sorta like the shitty photocopying and chopped-off text in your friend’s hardcore zine from back in ’92. Ultimately, though, Content is King, and RD has some really, really good content. The 50 or so models on the site are featured in a similar number of photo sets, mostly solo pinup-type softcore work. There are also about a dozen videos, and these are the crown jewels of the site: gorgeous, sexy, naughty punk rock girls getting off by themselves and each other (and the occasional punk rock boy). Girls like Alley, Stilla and Amber drip (literally!) with a carnal sexuality that I’ve very rarely seen. The camerawork and technical aspects are pretty amateur, but that added a strong sense of realism for me. These videos are by themselves worth every penny of the membership fees. Nearly every site that would fall into the “altporn” genre has stuff like a discussion forum, model blogs, and the like, and RD is no different. I can’t say that the activity in the forums or the blogs blew me away, but we’re reaching a saturation point here, and I wonder if sites like RD are doing themselves a disservice by throwing up big forums that just can’t maintain a respectable level of participation. The most expansive audience that’s out there for this kind of content already has their MSN groups and Myspace and Yahoo 360, and they’re probably not looking for another one. That’s not to say that there’s no value in models, photogs and webmasters interacting with their audience from either a marketing or user experience standpoint, but I wonder if every altporn site should be trying for a vibrant social network. I really like RD, despite some issues with usability. It has hot hot hot content, especially the vids, and is well worth checking out.