From time to time, I reflect on my porn tastes. Usually, I do this almost as a sort of review of what’s out there. Sometimes, I take it as an opportunity to reflect a little bit more on my insides. In the next few posts (I hope), I’m going to do that latter task just a little bit.
Over the years, my roster of paid porn sites has swelled and diminished for a variety of reasons. At the moment, my monthly porn subscription budget isn’t zero, but it’s nowhere near as high as it’s been at its peak. There are three subscriptions I pay at the moment, one of which is itself for three different sites, which sites feature a lot in common, including many of the same models.
This family of sites is called MetArt. I’ve written about them before. Their models tend to be quite young, 18 to, say, 25. They tend to be from Eastern Europe. And they are all quite conventionally beautiful. The three sites, MetArt, MetArtX, and SexArt, exist on a kind of continuum. MetArt features photos and videos of these beautiful young women posing in softcore pictorials a la old-school Playboy. The focus is definitely on their bodies. They tend to be positioned in seemingly beautiful landscapes, which reveal themselves on even the slightest closer examination to be green screens. And while the women are beautiful and the nudity is complete, a viewer could be forgiven for imagining that sex, either the sexuality of these women or the act of sexual intercourse or masturbation, is simply not present in this universe. This is a universe of nothing other than beauty.
In some ways, MetArt is my favorite of the three sites in this family. Only in some ways. My general way of consuming the porn on this website is to log on each morning, check out the four pictorials that are added daily, except on the first of the month when it’s either six or eight, and just scroll through them briefly with a purpose. I’m looking for images of these beautiful women in panties or bikini bottoms or trousers with their thighs open. Somewhere between a third and two thirds of the photoshoots feature one or more such images.
The others either are entirely nude or don’t feature panties or bikini bottoms in the sartorial selections. In the case of those that don’t offer me what I’m seeking, I tend to close the window very quickly.
In the case of those that do appeal to me, I open up each image of a woman in panties or bikini bottoms or trousers with her legs apart in a separate tab. And then, methodically, systematically, I click on the little heart at the bottom of each page to add it to my favorites. I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve done this (49.831k is the answer). I almost never go back and look at my favorites. I might if the Met Art Favorites viewing functionality were a little more functional. [Here’s what I see when I do go back and look….:]
But the reality is, the functionality sucks and I am utterly deterred. And I get 99% of what I want simply by scrolling through the images and selecting my favorites. I don’t need to go back and look at them.
That’s it. That’s what I do with MetArt. It raises lots of questions for me.
Before I go further, I will describe some of my frustrations with the site beyond those relating to functionality that I’ve already mentioned. First and foremost, the women are too young. I have nothing against beauty or nubile beauty. I love it. (I even love sites that are scary in just how hard they press against the lower bound of acceptable nubility.) But. In a world of my making, the first adjustment I would make to MetArt would be to make its models be more demographically representative. Both in terms of their age and in terms of their ethnicity and race. I love me a 20-year-old Estonian woman. Sure. But I’d love to see a 50-year-old Mexican.
Or a 60-year-old Greek woman.
Or a 40-year-old Nigerian woman.
Apply MetArt’s aesthetic—crisp, clean, appreciative—to a genuinely diverse population of models? I would be exponentially happier.
Then there’s the question of my thigh-and-panty hunting. Once upon a time, I used to pay a subscription to a family of websites called OnlyAllSites.
In many ways, that was my favorite porn site ever. Like MetArt, it’s extremely soft core. No mention of sex or sexuality anywhere in it. Unlike MetArt, clothing is central to the presentation of the models.
No photo shoot begins with a woman in anything other than full dress, and only a few end in full nudity. In this respect, I love that website, and I wish MetArt were more like it. Outfits and disrobing get me going. Nudity, availability from the start? It’s an affirmative turn-off, depriving me of the narrative that exists somewhere inside of me, that I’m getting something that wasn’t at least immediately available, that something’s being given to me. If the first shot I see is of a nude woman, there’s nothing left for me to get. And what I really want isn’t her nudity, it’s her willingness. Somewhere along the line I got bored with OnlyAllSites – I’m not sure why and, honestly, I suspect I’ll return. The things I don’t like about it are few (poor lighting, monotonous set-ups, fixation on stockings – which I like! – to the exclusion of ever showing bare legs). And the things I like are many. So. I’ll be back.
But this all brings me to my second problem with MetArt: the complete absence of sex and sexuality. When I was growing up, thumbing through my uncle’s old Playboys, my favorite page in every issue wasn’t the centerfold, it wasn’t the unsplaying of the woman’s nude body for me, no, it was the handwritten interview sheet on the back of the centerfold, on which the model humanized herself, answering questions like, what’s your favorite flavor of ice cream, or some such.
I didn’t remember the photos of playmates as kids. Ew!
In my memory, and I might be conflating porn magazines, at some point Playboy added some at least gesturally sexual questions to these questionnaires. Questions like, are you attracted to men, women, or both? I know that other porn sites and magazines like Hustler would ask more explicit questions, like, how old were you when you lost your virginity? And Playboy might have done that too. I like all of that, because it confirms that beauty and sexuality are co-resident in these women. It validates my longing, my fantasy, that women should be sexual, affirmatively, overtly, on their own. That sex shouldn’t be something which, if it occurs with me, is a concession to me, but rather is something genuinely gratifying to the woman in her own right. Where I got the idea that this would be news, or somehow needed to be confirmed, is itself a mystery, but there you have it.
So that would be a change I’d like in MetArt: I would like to know a little bit more about the sexual personae of these women. Truth be told, I’d like to know everything about the sexual personae of these women. When did they start having sex? How? With whom? What are their preferences and desires? What gets them off? What turns them off? How often do they masturbate, and how do they masturbate? What do they sound like when they come? All these questions, the sorts of questions I often ask women I’m dating early on, I’d love to know about these women. Or at least I think I would. I’m not sure, actually, how I would feel about knowing all that information if it were available not just to me, but to every other viewer.
Another change I would make harkens back to my preference for the OnlyAllSites family. I don’t know that I need to see these women nude. I think the occasional glimpse of a breast, preferably seemingly unintentional or not central to the image, would be great. Maybe also the occasional upskirt shot. But I don’t know that I need ever to see pussy in my porn. It’s not that it turns me off. It’s not that I don’t like it. I love pussy, as you know. It’s just that its pornographic presentation doesn’t do much for me. And if anything, seems in some way to detract from some of the narrative in which I’m invested as I look at porn. So, greater variety of clothes, greater variety of poses, less focus on nudity. More demographic and chronological diversity. And maybe locating these women not just in nature or studios, but in real life situations. An office. A restaurant. A bar. Somewhere I might at least plausibly imagine encountering them.
My next task in this endeavor, before I turn to the next website, is to reflect a bit on the psychic meaning of all of these preferences. Turn ons and turn offs. Longings and critiques. To my mind, every single one of them has some psychic significance. Whether it’s my preference not to see pussy, or to see panties. My longing for the women to be humanized in a way that is sexualizing but not too sexualizing. It all points to interesting vulnerabilities in my psyche. And it is to those questions to which I will turn next. I think. Probably.
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