Why Porn Sucks in ’25
I’m watching far too much porn and forming bad habits around it. I got bored of the last book I was reading so I watched porn while I finished it. When playing a videogame with annoying music, I put a porn video on in the background. Whenever I’m working at home, there’s a porn movie popped out of Firefox in the corner of my display.
I got a little obsessed with a scene yesterday and spent more time than I should have trying to sleuth out more details about it. Like it’s actual title, the performers in it, and who made it. The scene has been uploaded to xHamster as Celtic Intimate Encounter
https://xhamster.com/videos/celtic-intimate-encounter-xhCXlVN
The video is a relatively gentle, softcore affair. The as-yet-unidentified second performer leads Bree into a room of huge, heavy-grey stones, the kind a medieval castle is built from; Bree wears a two-piece gown of billowing white and sits perfectly against her milk-white skin, her partner wears an open shirt of black velvet, breasts exposed, that suits are complexion equally well. Only a table furnishes the room. Our raven-haired performer controls the scene, inviting Bree around the table, and starts to kiss, undress and command her. The scene will play on until both performers are naked, bar a cracking pair of thigh-high boots that the lead keeps on. It’s a scene that’s attracts positive comments from female members of xHamster, which is always a good sign for the type of videos I prefer. There’s no awkward thrusting of dildos into either performer and, more than that, there seems to be genuine chemistry between the two of them. It’s certain a good deal of this is two professional performers being good at what they do, but it makes for a more enjoyable scene when the performance is reciprocal and responsive, natural and flowing, as opposed to one-sided and performative in way that invites the viewer in as another person, somehow putting a barrier up by breaking the fourth wall. No one puts their foot on the other’s head here, neither performer is a stand-in male; whilst a clear example of titillation and not a video of private lovemaking, it is more erotic than pornographic.
From Bree Daniels’ entry on the Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD), I found the trailer for *Service of Venus* on Adult Empire. According to the artwork on Adult Empire, *The Service of Venus* was produced by Bare Maidens. It’s a relatively softcore ‘fantasy’ inspired romp, featuring princ*ss, maidens, nymphs, and a thudding quasi-classical score on the trailer. The film features Bree Daniels and Raven Rockette, who I’d assumed to be the second performer, and host of other performers I’m not familiar with.
From the trailer, it’s apparent ‘Celtic Intimate Encounter’ is not from *The Service of Venus* and the second performer is not Raven Rockette. Daniels has long hair in clips she’s in and the scene is very different from one I was looking for. But the sets were the same as ‘Celtic Intimate Encounter’: large grey stones, the feel of a castle and a fantastical setting; at least one costume has been reused.
It’s well-know that sites like xHamster and the once-dominant (and probably still so, despite it’s legal troubles) P*rnHub have sucked away whatever there was of the porn industry’s modest production budgets. Shooting similar scenes on the same sets and reusing costumes is as more about saving money than building and reinforcing brand identity and a signature look of a studio’s products, though there’s some evidence of a cohesive style in other Bare Maidens productions. The chance exists that another studio would use the same sets, but it’s vanishing small. In all likelihood, the video I sought was a Bare Maidens production.
I’m a firm believer in paying for art, particularly that which you enjoy most and particular from independents. I subscribe to a favourite band’s P*treon and see them live when they tour; I have a repeating remainder to see when other artists I like are touring. I buy books from any reseller other than Amazon Angelica stores when I can. At some point I’ll put more money than I have behind this belief and not just be a hypocrite about it when it comes to pornography. I’ve bought precisely one full length video to date, and I’ll post a similar write-up about that at some point. I really should give my tithe to independent sites, like Vex Ashley’s superbly kinky A Four Chambered Heart, before these places disappear from the Internet. As Bare Maidens appears to have partly disappeared.
All of which is a pity. The scene is excellent. From the way Jenna admires and undresses Bree, to the way she wraps herself around her partner, as sinuous as the snake that tempted Eve. The slow-motion filming, like the subtle moans and kisses that cut through the music, adds to the video, and both performers are invested in the narrative that surrounds the scene. It is delightful and sensuous, and other videos from the Bare Maidens site have similarly high production values: the lavish production of a scene from *The Services of Venus* (called *Two Princesses of the Dawn*, https://xhamster.com/videos/two-princesses-of-the-dawn-xhwYfay), has been filmed if not with multiple cameras, then over multiple days, at golden hour, to get a shots at different angles and distances, including some excellent compositions captured at a long range. The ambition of that outdoor scene is matched by the fair attempt to capture chiaroscuro in the cinematography of *The Black Key*, a video let down by its nonsensical narrative and a less than convincing performance by Jenna J Ross, appearing with Bree Daniels again. There’ll be a great many others behind the crumbling paywall of Bare Maidens, but the site is a relic, an artefact of a bygone era, one we are losing to time. It’s chief creatives are almost entirely missing from the web: Wrex Oliver’s site of nude and non-nude photograph and a workout routine, has not been updated since 2019; any presence director and produce of *Captive*, Maxwell G, had is now overshadowed by an unfortunate overlap of name that confuses searches for them with searches for the ghastly Ghislaine Maxwell.
All this to say that I have spent two days tracking down one porn film with the view to purchase and download it and failed to do so.
At some point, a copyright infringement notice will be issued, and the videos taken down and lost forever. Porn video-sharing sites are killing quality pornography and erotica. We are brought to these sites by sheer volume of “free” porn (even with private browsing, your IP and other details are being tracked; when something is free, you are the product), where recommendations are made and our needs are met. The quantity of choice is as tempting as it is debilitating, but the idea of it, of finding ~exactly~ the scene or film to watch, is far too great a lure. To limit our choice to one or two, or even a handful, of paid-for sites, is to limit our options, restrict that choice, take from us some of the infinite plates from which we have been dining — even if most of those plates have nothing on them but the worst kind of shit and foulness. Despite P*rnHub’s reputation for hosting the worst content, its purchase in 2023 by Ethical Capital Partners, a private equity firm that has an independent advisory board, might make it the least awful of all the adult video-sharing sites. No such controversies have been filed against xHamster, but the site benefits from choosing an innocuous, if random, name: P*rnHub doesn’t just sound like a porn site in news articles: it sounds like *the* porn site; xHamster just sounds ridiculous.
The real tragedy is that Bare Maidens, and presumably other sites, have wedded themselves to a payment processor who appears so far from legitimate I’d give my credit card details to a late-PlayStation 3-era Sony before I gave them to CC Bill. And whether the decision to use CC Bill was made before or after the duopoly of MasterCard and Visa appointed themselves as arbiters of taste and decency, blocking payments to porn sites and, more recently, demanding Steam and Itch.io remove adult content from their stores, the overarching problem is that, in the foul year of Our Lord two-thousand and twenty-five, pornography, like sex workers, is ghettoised. OnlyF*ns considered removing the adult content because of pressure from payment processors, and sex workers have their bank accounts closed and assets frozen by HSBC, a bank with a list of controversies so heinous they would embarrass a Mafia don. In an effort to appease the Christian right, payment processors and banks are ignoring their own sin and actual crimes by blocking access to porn. As is the the UK’s Online Safety Act, a piece of legislation drafted by the previous Conservative Tory government and enforced by the current Labour Tory government that supposedly restricts the access that minors have to pornography, an act that has been broadly criticised by academics, tech companies, and charities as “complex and incoherent” and that has seen an increase in VPN usage and has pushed more people to share their credit card details with payment processors like CC Bill. There’s no question that minors should not have access to a site with content like the majority of dross on xHamster. What kind of access anyone under the age of eighteen should have to a question too academic, broad, and controversial for this piece, but the idea that one should not see any pornography to being able to see literally all of the pornography in the world, over night, is ridiculous.
That isn’t quite the case, but it might as well be. Sexual content in literature has never been age-restricted in the UK, where I write from now; sex on television and streaming services can be viewed without telling the UK Government how old you are; content certified as 15 in the UK, and to a some extent 12A (the equivalent of a US PG-13) can contain a hint of sexual content: *Batman Returns* and Isabella Rossellini in *Death Becomes Her*, both of which I which I saw in the same summer back in Westchester were both PG-13; both left *quite* the impression on young me. That you can have sex at sixteen in this country, with anyone else over sixteen (something a better government should look at), but not see ‘[c]ontent that, when taken as a whole, has the primary purpose of sexual arousal’ until you are eighteen, is nonsensical. But exposure to the kind of near-literal body horror of the landing page of any adult video-sharing site is beyond harmful, arguably for some over eighteen. And while the British Board of Film Classification singles out “images of real sex, strong fetish material, sexually explicit animated images, or other very strong sexual images [to be] confined to the R18 category”, imagery of sex acts xHamster's ridicilous blog engine won't let me descript, despite the description being copied and pasted from the BBFC web (whic I can't link to), are permitted an 18 certificate. By this definition, Michael Winterbottoms 2004 film *9 Songs*, in which the leads, Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley, have unsimulated, actual sex, should be an R18, and is therefore more harmful than all of the content on a porn site. Including the kind of misogynistic shit that the worst kind of people will seek, the type of content that has people agree with the views of rapid and chinless wonder Andrew Tate. And that, as they say here, is bollocks.
Not only is the content that populates the landing page not the sort of porn that I enjoy, it’s typically, from top to bottom, the kind of porn I hate. Much of it makes me want to close the browser window and re-examine my life. The morally correct thing to do is not use xHamster and to support independent performers on their preferred platforms instead, but, see above for my excuses for why I don’t currently do that. Having found a performer whose work I enjoy, I should subscribe to Bree Daniels’ OnlyF*ns for a month or two, maybe a couple of others, and change it up every few months. I should brave the fine print of CC Bill and check out Bare Maidens, — if anyone who read this far has a log in and confirm the payment processor is not as scammy as they appear, do let me know.
Pay for your porn. And I’ll try not to get so obsessed with a video and watch less. And let us all get off this godforsaken site and others like it.
(I hope at least one person recognises where the title comes from)
I got a little obsessed with a scene yesterday and spent more time than I should have trying to sleuth out more details about it. Like it’s actual title, the performers in it, and who made it. The scene has been uploaded to xHamster as Celtic Intimate Encounter
https://xhamster.com/videos/celtic-intimate-encounter-xhCXlVN
The video is a relatively gentle, softcore affair. The as-yet-unidentified second performer leads Bree into a room of huge, heavy-grey stones, the kind a medieval castle is built from; Bree wears a two-piece gown of billowing white and sits perfectly against her milk-white skin, her partner wears an open shirt of black velvet, breasts exposed, that suits are complexion equally well. Only a table furnishes the room. Our raven-haired performer controls the scene, inviting Bree around the table, and starts to kiss, undress and command her. The scene will play on until both performers are naked, bar a cracking pair of thigh-high boots that the lead keeps on. It’s a scene that’s attracts positive comments from female members of xHamster, which is always a good sign for the type of videos I prefer. There’s no awkward thrusting of dildos into either performer and, more than that, there seems to be genuine chemistry between the two of them. It’s certain a good deal of this is two professional performers being good at what they do, but it makes for a more enjoyable scene when the performance is reciprocal and responsive, natural and flowing, as opposed to one-sided and performative in way that invites the viewer in as another person, somehow putting a barrier up by breaking the fourth wall. No one puts their foot on the other’s head here, neither performer is a stand-in male; whilst a clear example of titillation and not a video of private lovemaking, it is more erotic than pornographic.
From Bree Daniels’ entry on the Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD), I found the trailer for *Service of Venus* on Adult Empire. According to the artwork on Adult Empire, *The Service of Venus* was produced by Bare Maidens. It’s a relatively softcore ‘fantasy’ inspired romp, featuring princ*ss, maidens, nymphs, and a thudding quasi-classical score on the trailer. The film features Bree Daniels and Raven Rockette, who I’d assumed to be the second performer, and host of other performers I’m not familiar with.
From the trailer, it’s apparent ‘Celtic Intimate Encounter’ is not from *The Service of Venus* and the second performer is not Raven Rockette. Daniels has long hair in clips she’s in and the scene is very different from one I was looking for. But the sets were the same as ‘Celtic Intimate Encounter’: large grey stones, the feel of a castle and a fantastical setting; at least one costume has been reused.
It’s well-know that sites like xHamster and the once-dominant (and probably still so, despite it’s legal troubles) P*rnHub have sucked away whatever there was of the porn industry’s modest production budgets. Shooting similar scenes on the same sets and reusing costumes is as more about saving money than building and reinforcing brand identity and a signature look of a studio’s products, though there’s some evidence of a cohesive style in other Bare Maidens productions. The chance exists that another studio would use the same sets, but it’s vanishing small. In all likelihood, the video I sought was a Bare Maidens production.
I’m a firm believer in paying for art, particularly that which you enjoy most and particular from independents. I subscribe to a favourite band’s P*treon and see them live when they tour; I have a repeating remainder to see when other artists I like are touring. I buy books from any reseller other than Amazon Angelica stores when I can. At some point I’ll put more money than I have behind this belief and not just be a hypocrite about it when it comes to pornography. I’ve bought precisely one full length video to date, and I’ll post a similar write-up about that at some point. I really should give my tithe to independent sites, like Vex Ashley’s superbly kinky A Four Chambered Heart, before these places disappear from the Internet. As Bare Maidens appears to have partly disappeared.
All of which is a pity. The scene is excellent. From the way Jenna admires and undresses Bree, to the way she wraps herself around her partner, as sinuous as the snake that tempted Eve. The slow-motion filming, like the subtle moans and kisses that cut through the music, adds to the video, and both performers are invested in the narrative that surrounds the scene. It is delightful and sensuous, and other videos from the Bare Maidens site have similarly high production values: the lavish production of a scene from *The Services of Venus* (called *Two Princesses of the Dawn*, https://xhamster.com/videos/two-princesses-of-the-dawn-xhwYfay), has been filmed if not with multiple cameras, then over multiple days, at golden hour, to get a shots at different angles and distances, including some excellent compositions captured at a long range. The ambition of that outdoor scene is matched by the fair attempt to capture chiaroscuro in the cinematography of *The Black Key*, a video let down by its nonsensical narrative and a less than convincing performance by Jenna J Ross, appearing with Bree Daniels again. There’ll be a great many others behind the crumbling paywall of Bare Maidens, but the site is a relic, an artefact of a bygone era, one we are losing to time. It’s chief creatives are almost entirely missing from the web: Wrex Oliver’s site of nude and non-nude photograph and a workout routine, has not been updated since 2019; any presence director and produce of *Captive*, Maxwell G, had is now overshadowed by an unfortunate overlap of name that confuses searches for them with searches for the ghastly Ghislaine Maxwell.
All this to say that I have spent two days tracking down one porn film with the view to purchase and download it and failed to do so.
At some point, a copyright infringement notice will be issued, and the videos taken down and lost forever. Porn video-sharing sites are killing quality pornography and erotica. We are brought to these sites by sheer volume of “free” porn (even with private browsing, your IP and other details are being tracked; when something is free, you are the product), where recommendations are made and our needs are met. The quantity of choice is as tempting as it is debilitating, but the idea of it, of finding ~exactly~ the scene or film to watch, is far too great a lure. To limit our choice to one or two, or even a handful, of paid-for sites, is to limit our options, restrict that choice, take from us some of the infinite plates from which we have been dining — even if most of those plates have nothing on them but the worst kind of shit and foulness. Despite P*rnHub’s reputation for hosting the worst content, its purchase in 2023 by Ethical Capital Partners, a private equity firm that has an independent advisory board, might make it the least awful of all the adult video-sharing sites. No such controversies have been filed against xHamster, but the site benefits from choosing an innocuous, if random, name: P*rnHub doesn’t just sound like a porn site in news articles: it sounds like *the* porn site; xHamster just sounds ridiculous.
The real tragedy is that Bare Maidens, and presumably other sites, have wedded themselves to a payment processor who appears so far from legitimate I’d give my credit card details to a late-PlayStation 3-era Sony before I gave them to CC Bill. And whether the decision to use CC Bill was made before or after the duopoly of MasterCard and Visa appointed themselves as arbiters of taste and decency, blocking payments to porn sites and, more recently, demanding Steam and Itch.io remove adult content from their stores, the overarching problem is that, in the foul year of Our Lord two-thousand and twenty-five, pornography, like sex workers, is ghettoised. OnlyF*ns considered removing the adult content because of pressure from payment processors, and sex workers have their bank accounts closed and assets frozen by HSBC, a bank with a list of controversies so heinous they would embarrass a Mafia don. In an effort to appease the Christian right, payment processors and banks are ignoring their own sin and actual crimes by blocking access to porn. As is the the UK’s Online Safety Act, a piece of legislation drafted by the previous Conservative Tory government and enforced by the current Labour Tory government that supposedly restricts the access that minors have to pornography, an act that has been broadly criticised by academics, tech companies, and charities as “complex and incoherent” and that has seen an increase in VPN usage and has pushed more people to share their credit card details with payment processors like CC Bill. There’s no question that minors should not have access to a site with content like the majority of dross on xHamster. What kind of access anyone under the age of eighteen should have to a question too academic, broad, and controversial for this piece, but the idea that one should not see any pornography to being able to see literally all of the pornography in the world, over night, is ridiculous.
That isn’t quite the case, but it might as well be. Sexual content in literature has never been age-restricted in the UK, where I write from now; sex on television and streaming services can be viewed without telling the UK Government how old you are; content certified as 15 in the UK, and to a some extent 12A (the equivalent of a US PG-13) can contain a hint of sexual content: *Batman Returns* and Isabella Rossellini in *Death Becomes Her*, both of which I which I saw in the same summer back in Westchester were both PG-13; both left *quite* the impression on young me. That you can have sex at sixteen in this country, with anyone else over sixteen (something a better government should look at), but not see ‘[c]ontent that, when taken as a whole, has the primary purpose of sexual arousal’ until you are eighteen, is nonsensical. But exposure to the kind of near-literal body horror of the landing page of any adult video-sharing site is beyond harmful, arguably for some over eighteen. And while the British Board of Film Classification singles out “images of real sex, strong fetish material, sexually explicit animated images, or other very strong sexual images [to be] confined to the R18 category”, imagery of sex acts xHamster's ridicilous blog engine won't let me descript, despite the description being copied and pasted from the BBFC web (whic I can't link to), are permitted an 18 certificate. By this definition, Michael Winterbottoms 2004 film *9 Songs*, in which the leads, Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley, have unsimulated, actual sex, should be an R18, and is therefore more harmful than all of the content on a porn site. Including the kind of misogynistic shit that the worst kind of people will seek, the type of content that has people agree with the views of rapid and chinless wonder Andrew Tate. And that, as they say here, is bollocks.
Not only is the content that populates the landing page not the sort of porn that I enjoy, it’s typically, from top to bottom, the kind of porn I hate. Much of it makes me want to close the browser window and re-examine my life. The morally correct thing to do is not use xHamster and to support independent performers on their preferred platforms instead, but, see above for my excuses for why I don’t currently do that. Having found a performer whose work I enjoy, I should subscribe to Bree Daniels’ OnlyF*ns for a month or two, maybe a couple of others, and change it up every few months. I should brave the fine print of CC Bill and check out Bare Maidens, — if anyone who read this far has a log in and confirm the payment processor is not as scammy as they appear, do let me know.
Pay for your porn. And I’ll try not to get so obsessed with a video and watch less. And let us all get off this godforsaken site and others like it.
(I hope at least one person recognises where the title comes from)
3ヶ月前
