Pornucopia

I like porn. Maybe you don't. Maybe you do. Maybe you don't even know it yet.

(Maybe if you're rabidly anti-porn, you should skip this post. Bye!)

Here is the thing, though - it's hard to find the good stuff (referring here to video, written good stuff is much easier to come by... no pun intended). And by good I mean all kinds of things, from actual (gasp!) acting to non-standard gender roles to just a clear sense that the performers are actually enjoying what they're doing - this last being a basic requirement for me to enjoy watching, at all.

And here's the other thing - it's even harder to find the good stuff for free on teh internets. Well nigh impossible. Which means, and I am ashamed to admit it, that sometimes I watch crappy porn. It feels sort of like eating cheetos, you just try not to think about it too much, and don't peek at the ingredients. Mostly I get to this stuff through the porny blog fleshbot, which helps me avoid the really sick shit. Fleshbot is witty and such, and less self-involved than violet blue's open source sex (although that is closer to my tastes sometimes), but ranges all over the porn map, and definitely talks bigger about porn inclusiveness and non-normative stuff than actually pointing the way to it. But I guess I should cut them some slack, since it really is like finding tiny little islands in a big big sea...

Anyways, that's not the point. The point is, I recently had the completely ridiculous experience of partaking of three very different media - a book, a graphic novel, and a movie - that all took classic fairy tales and twisted them around, and threw in a bunch of sex. Hilarious! And what an odd situation to find oneself in. At first I wondered if this was some new trend, and then it occured to me that perhaps there was something that appealed to me about alice-in-wonderland porn in particular. Which is maybe disturbing. But I think what it comes down to is that these things presuppose a sort of creativity and tongue-in-cheek (or tongue-on-cheek?) humor that appeals to me, more than that they are childhood associations, per se.

Anyways, the first of these was the book Wicked, which is in no way, shape or form pornographic, but does have a few little spicy scenes between the wicked witch of the west and some blue dude. It only really fits in this post in the context of the other two. As for the book itself, it's ok... beach reading.

The graphic novels are the beautiful, amazing lost girls trilogy, based loosely on the characters of dorothy, alice and wendy, all growed-up and staying in this indulgent art deco hotel in Austria just before world war one. I own these ones - I bought them with a christmas gift certificate from an old family friend last year, grateful that they never followed up and asked me what I picked out at the bookstore. These books definitely have some humor in them, but mostly they are beautifully drawn and written, and do a really nice job of easing you across boundaries that may have been rigid before you read them, and are the kind of thing that I can read over and over and get new things out of every time. And even though they center around sex, the stories are about more than that. Like in life, sex itself is about more than just sex. Highly highly recommended, except maybe if you have very particular taboos which you don't want challenged even in a thoughtful, fictitious setting (for example, child sexuality).

And then, oh most hilarious of all, was the classic porn musical version of alice in wonderland. Made in 1976, I loved this shit out of this movie. So goofy. It's not super-hardcore, and really, the sex was not really the good part for me (although it wasn't bad, either). It was the sheer, utter ridiculousness, and the girl who played Alice being soooo perfect. Here is a youtube (sfw) clip:



This one, actually, I paid for. Goodvibes has online payable-watchable video, and I bought all these minutes thinking I could watch the crash pad (hot, feminist, queer porn, which I still haven't seen!) but then it wasn't in the online library. Second choice to seriously ground-breaking indy porn? Why, a musical, of course! I would hesitate to say it was worth what I paid for it, but for those of you who live in portland, it seems like the kind of thing that would probably be available at movie madness for a definitely-worth-it two bucks.

And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that. Other than that it is posts like these that keep me from sending this blog address to my mom.