?Empower Porn?
by Halcyon
?
When Jack approached me about writing for this project, I knew it would be fun. Consider this article is less of a ?how-to? and more of a
?what if??
What *could* the adult internet be?
I know that many people come to porn because they hear about the easy money.
But just like the gold rush days in California, these borderlands have treasure much more significant than the financial.
Woah, whoa, woah?.
Many reading this are probably already turned off. ?I just wanna know how to make money.?
I?m going to ask you to bare with me and hold off on that concern for just a moment. The great people in history -- and the great men of business -- allowed themselves to think bigger. And became bigger.
There is and will always be a market for traditional porn. By traditional, I mean, the business of pornographic imagery/video/audio packaged and sold to consumers who are hungry for (or addicted to) stimulating the primitive sex urges in their brain.
But we are on the cusp of a new type of ?porn.? I?m not even sure porn is the right word. Because it is more than a business.
If I wasn?t afraid of being burned at the stake, I might even say that this emerging model is more ?church-like.?
I?ll explain?
The adult industry has always been a borderland. A place for outlaws. Porn lives in the grey area where legality and morality intertwine. It is this unstable nature that makes it so exciting and fertile.
We all know that technology has always had an interesting relationship with the adult industry (see printing, see VCR, see?). But the adult-INTERNET relationship is something profoundly different.
This is because the Internet does 3 things:
1) It connects us.
Loooong ago, people knew they were connected. We have all heard stories of ?primitive? people who feel a connection to the earth and each other. But technology has slowly been pushing us apart. Making our lives more and more ?convenient? but also more and more solitary. In houses with 4 people, there are often 4 TVs. Think about that.
The Internet is an amazing tool to *RE-teach* us about the connections between all people. The internet is the first time we?ve been given a tool that actually allows us to see and hear people all over the world. Not movie stars on the screen. But our peers world wide. Live. This tool allows us to start visualizing ourselves as a part of the
One. This is a Big concept, so I will just let it sit and continue.
2) It allows people to find their tribe.
The internet has allowed people to learn that they are not freaks. Whether you are a Furry, balloon fetishist, or golden shower enthusiast, the internet shows people that they are not alone. This cannot be over-stated. This is huge. Imagine the life of shame that a stuffed animal fetishist would endure if he thought he was the only one. Imagine the inner torture. The awareness that ?I?m not broken? is profound.
Now, one could argue that by erasing the traditional lines of traditional sexual desire, we have opened a Pandora?s box of depravity. I would argue that we are still early on in the pendulum swing response to our years of institutionalized repression and ?morality wars.?
3) It gives us our Community / Congregation
This is really an extension of number one. After you have the awareness that you are not alone, you slowly realize that you are a part of a group. Of course you have always been a part of a group. You?ve been an ?American.? Or a ?Catholic.? Or ?New Yorker.? Or whatever.
But generally, those groups are not chosen by you. And even though you did not CHOOSE to be an American, your socialization molds you into the image of an ?American.? I don?t want to get bogged down into the principals of sociology, but lets just say that sexual attitudes are definitely something that are given to you by this massive ?group? that you are a part of.
The internet has allowed us find geographically independent micro-communities. (GFY is an example of one.) And these micro communities allow us to re-define ourselves by new rules.
Rules that WE choose.
This is a round-about way to say that the internet has given us the tools to break free of our socialization. We can reject the shame. We can reject anything that doesn?t come from within us.
And this is where the beauty of porn comes into play.
Porn is the one of the last outlaw territories. As I said, porn is the overlap between morality and legality.
In this grey area, things are less ridged.
In this grey area, people are ripe for consciousness change.
I see the self-run ?single girl sites? as the infant model for a new type of sexual congregation. It already is happening. People join Vanilla?s site or Sammy or Allie not because they are traditional consumers looking for a product. But because they are PEOPLE looking for a CONNECTION.
The ?model? is the pixilated pastor who gives weekly sermons in the form of sexual videos or webcam chats. Instead of consumers who are disconnected from the manufacture of a product they consume, the members are a part of something human.
(I mentioned that this was "church-like." Members of a church put in money to support the growth of the church and the salery of the leaders.)
The word will turn many off, but I believe that the secret ingredient in this connection is
LOVE.
As I said, I?m not talking about the existing business of porn. I?m talking about something new.
My art/sex/love experiment into this realm is a site called
Pinkgasm.com that I create with my soulmate tASSy. It is a blog. It is a forum. It is a pay site, too.
With pinkgasm.com, tASSy and I have tried to present our sexuality as merely one part of a life philosophy. We see the website as something that chronicles a journey. And it?s a journey that we invite anyone to come along on.
If the journey is one that people respond to, they will join. Not ?join? like join a website??join? like
?alter their life path in the direction of the journey.? (Kinda like how people start joining Rocky as he runs down the streets pf Philly.) In a traditional porn site, you have thousands of members who are essentially isolated. But when the members are all part of a communal journey (including communal support) it builds a sort of spiritual inertia.
Whoa?Spiritual? I thought we were talking about sex?!
Exactly. Our sexuality is a source of massive power. It is no wonder we have been taught to be ashamed of it. To keep the volume down. To keep it out of sight.
The truth is we all are born with a massive
sexual reactor inside us?a god-given mechanism for generating personal and spiritual power.
And I think that porn
?could be?possibly?maybe? a way to empower the masses. This money-making smut could be the tools for social change and consciousness evolution.
...
We as humans are much bigger than we know. And while our sex is just a part of the ?repressed power? we have inside us, I believe it is the easiest to access.
People that would never walk a labyrinth or meditate can understand the transcendence of sexual climax. Through this micro-communities, people can embrace their sexuality, and gain the momentum to embrace every aspect of their true selves.
I know this is a bit lofty for a conversation on porn. But that is exactly my point. We need to re-train ourselves to think more lofty. And there is no better landscape for this evolution than the potential-filled online porn industry.
Unfortunately, there is no list of steps, or content guidelines that will tell you how to do this. It can only happen when those in the pulpit are genuinely on the journey themselves.
So regardless of what you do to make a buck?see yourself on a journey. If you walk with righteousness and love, your story will be epic and your bounty beyond words.
p.s. I love you. ;)
p.p.s. check out
FLASHCA$H for making CA$H in the current porn world.
