In which I attempt to discuss P****graphy with a straight face

Some nights ago, while idly surfing on TV I noticed a long-haired guy doing some serious pouting and wiggling. He was fairly well covered, but as I watched, he took his frilly jacket off(well okay, it was FRINGED rather than frilly). Then he took his breeches off. Underneath them, he had a male version of a G-string -- which, if you get my point, had to be more in the way of a G-plus string, since it had to contain its contents in a more rugged way -- and I was quite surprised coz, you know, I believed that American TV was pretty straitlaced. There was a time when 'feminine hygiene' products figured only in a very limited and discrete sense on US networks. So I figured that the stripping was due to stop at the bikini line -- when suddenly, whoops! There was Mr Pouter in the All-Dangly-Together! He wriggled and wiggled and pouted some more until the hot music ended and his place was taken by another masculine lovely ...

And so, in short, I found myself watching an hour or so of porn. Most of it was commercials aimed at getting the panting viewer to pick up the telephone and call up some hard-breathing ladies, whose pictures and moaning squeals we were given fair samples of. As I'm sure is obvious my reasons for watching were entirely virtuous -- sober, solemn, research, right? Right. Believe what you will, I don't care. I am always amazed by visual porn (as against the written variety). It is so ... porny. This channel operates only for a couple of hours in the evenings, apparently, and not every evening. Nevertheless, there's clearly a vast population of gals who while away their time writhing and opening their mouths in suggestive ways and caressing themselves like Lux ads without the suds.

Most of the commercials stopped just short of revealing all that a girl can reveal, though the men were allowed to let it aaaaaaaaaaaaaall hang out, complete with butt shots -- butt, butter, butting? -- including several commercials for she-males who had the upper embellishments of women and the nether-danglies of men. I have assumed they are men who have added feminine accoutrements to themselves, rather than true herms. What I found weird was how ordinary they looked -- as if it were completely normal to see both sets of gender variables on one body.

There were a number of ads for Asian Butterflies -- by which were meant Far Eastern gals, all petite and slant-eyed, not lusty Punjabi Pumpkins or Malayali Milkmaids. It is very odd to see Asian women pumping away -- I realize this is a racist remark, because it suggests that it's quite normal to see their Caucasian sisters bouncing energetically while making ambulance-noises -- but it's just that my porn-education has always been entirely fuelled by Caucasian fantasies. I have only rarely seen anything verging on truly non-Western porn -- in fact, except for classical naughties, such as are carved onto the temples walls of Khajuraho or depicted in miniatures (including raunchy Japanese woodcuts) -- I think I am on fairly safe ground when I say that all current photo-based titillography IS pretty much Western, because it uses Western criteria for suggesting passion. Whatever the nationality or race of the ladies/lads depicted in modern pornography, the expressions, the poses and the situations are the same as they would be for Western participants.

By contrast: in Indian miniatures for instance, it has always seemed to me that lovers are often painted with exactly the same expressions on their faces as when they are posed against monsoon clouds, being attended by serving maidens. This is true however many suitors are poised to enter whichever many orifices of a lustful woman -- you know how some of them look like collective gym-exercises, with one woman servicing six men at once (one for each extremity and one each at the north and south apertures -- I don't remember seeing the third aperture being addressed simultaneously. Perhaps for reasons of faltering imagination and/or challenges at the gravitational level) -- all the participants look composed, dreamy-eyed, mildly amused and even philosophically elevated. No grimacing or panting mouths ...

The Japanese woodcuts I've seen were rather different -- they did at the very least depict the participants snarling in what looked like the transports of some strong emotion -- rather like those pictures of Samurai, come to think of it, with their foreheads wrinkled up and their eyes bulging out of their eyelids -- tiny teeth on view, cherry-red lips parted to show the slightest vestige of tongue -- but nothing even approaching the screaming, gasping, sweating, calling-out-loud of what one sees in the average Western steam-video. Instead, Japanese and Indian miniatures seemed to prefer to suggest passion by showing enormously engorged organs -- some the size of hockey sticks, or elephant prongs -- male organs, that is, not mammaries.

Which are of course, much in evidence in the commercials I saw. The Asian girls seemed to prefer what nature endowed them with, but the Caucasian ladies looked, some of them, like silicon clinic samplers. I mean, the time is long past when we can speak of breasts the size of cantaloupes, but cantaloupes the size of women's breasts -- and anyway, those are only the modest-sized ones. Some of the ladies on view had appendages which looked like they belonged on the basket-ball court, surgically tacked on, rather than filled from within. Bizarre.

Well I suppose that's enough on the subject for the moment ...