Sex in Pornography

I have long had a very low opinion of pornography depicting explicit sex, and a much more positive opinion of softcore. It has always seemed to me that hardcore sites never match the quality of most softcore sites. While there is a massive amount of excellent tasteful soft-core erotic photography available from famous photographers such as Petter Hegre and Grigori Galitsin, you would be hard-pressed to find hardcore porn of similar quality. I can think of only one or two minor exceptions to the rule that hardcore porn is produced by unskilled photographers/videographers and very unconvincing models.

Why is this? I think there are a few reasons. First of all, it has long been accepted for skilled photographers to work with nudes, but it still seems to be taboo for any famous photographer to portray explicit sex. Secondly, I think sex is much more difficult to portray convincingly and artistically than the beauty of the female body on its own. Perhaps this difficulty arises from the complexity of sex. It is not beautiful in itself- only in certain contexts and situations, which are ignored completely in hardcore porn. And all of this might lead one to feel that sex, at least on the internet, is not a beautiful thing, but a dirty shameful act. Yet it is not, and it is extremely unfortunate that internet pornography has made it seem that it is.

Thankfully, Abby Winters has once again provided the exception, producing images and video of quite explicit activity that is tasteful, honest, and never digusting. The vast majority of their couples are girl-girl, but they have been shooting some girl-boy stuff as well, which I will post in the near future. Here are three sample girl-girl galleries from Abby Winters:

Galleries of the Week 11/26

Here are six new free galleries for this week, from Hegre Archives, Galitsin News, Whitfield Journals, Met-Art, and MPL Studios.

Abby Winters

Porn has a reputation for being low-class, cheaply made, and generally unsavory. As stereotypes go, this one is unusually accurate. This is why the sites I've reviewed here have tended toward erotic photography rather than pornography. However, I am very happy to announce that there is an exception to this rule.

Abby Winters is literally the only porn site that I have found which has both explicit content and integrity. Unlike most erotic photography sites, it does not attempt to be incredibly artistic or sophicticated, and unlike most porn sites, it has a moral standard of respect and honesty. In fact Abby Winters is all about honesty- there is a noticable lack of posed shots and a refreshingly realistic variety of girls. Don't go to Abby Winters looking for glamorous women with bodies so perfect that they look fake (and probably are). Come to Abby Winters if you want to see girls of all shapes, sizes, and personalities take a day off from their normal lives and have some fun in front of Abby Winters' camera.

There is a lot more I'd like to say about Abby Winters, and I certainly will in future posts, but I'm sure by now you want to see for yourself what I've been talking about, so here are three beautiful sample galleries from Abby Winters:

Galleries of the Week 11/19

Here are six new free galleries for this week, from Hegre Archives, Galitsin News, Whitfield Journals, Met-Art, and New Nude Mag.

New Nude Mag

New Nude Magazine, run by the same people as Hegre Archives and Gallery Carre, is a large and varied collection of nude photography by dozens of photographers. The focus of this site is on nude art, not softcore porn, and not 'simple nudes'. Having said this, however, New Nude Magazine comprises the work of so many photographers that there is wonderful variety in the photographic styles. Some of the images lean more toward DOMAI style simple nudes, others are more similar to the glamorous photographs of Met-Art, and some are similar to the work of Didier Carre or Rene Whitfield. There are certainly lots of very erotic images here, but that is not the purpose of the site. Whether you like looking at great photographs or just pictures of naked women, New Nude Mag will have something for you.

Galleries of the Week 11/12

Here are this week's free galleries, from Galitsin News, Hegre Archives, Met-Art, and DOMAI.

Variety is Beautiful

One thing that has always made nude photography exeptionally fascinating for me is the incredible variety of the female body. There are so many tiny little things, for example the shape, size and color of nipples and breasts, the size and shape of labia and so on, which can be completely different for each woman. And for some inexplicable reason this fascinates me more than anything else in nude photography. What surprises me- horrifies me actually - is that I think a lot of people, (both men and women) who don't look at a lot of nude women, photographed or otherwise, have no concept of this amazing variety. They think the one or two bodies they may have seen are the only possibilities, or even worse, they have adopted as fact societal ideals of perfection in the female form.

What I find most wonderful of all is that there is no specific combination of these millions of factors that make up the perfect body. Beauty, I wholeheartedly believe, is an incredibly complex and flexible thing that can never be reduced to a formula. In fact for me, beauty lies not in perfection, but in the wonderful variety of shapes and sizes of the female body. And unfortunately, I think that a lot of people who don't spend any time marveling at the female body in person or in photographs never come to this realization. Here are some galleries that I think highlight the beauty of variety:

Galleries of the Week 11/5

Here are six new free galleries for this week, from Hegre Archives, Galitsin News, Whitfield Journals, and Met-Art.

DOMAI

A long time ago, when I first discovered internet porn, I was completely indiscriminate about what I looked at- if it involved a girl with little clothing it was good enough for me. But in the years since, I have learned a lot, not only about pornography, but about my own taste, and I discovered that what I enjoyed looking at the most were just good photographs of naked girls. The site that made me realize that porn does not have to be tasteless, poor quality, or oversexual was DOMAI. What struck me most was DOMAI's philosophy: "The beauty of woman is valuable, and not only is it okay to admire beauty, it is a sin not to." The other porn sites I had been looking at seemed to suggest that looking at porn was a morally bad thing to do.

After looking at DOMAI's free content, I found that I agreed with them that the female body is so beautiful on its own that it doesn't need any sexualization at all to be incredibly wonderful to look at. For many weeks I visited no other site but DOMAI, and I was somewhat embarrassed about how much time I had wasted with the terrible stuff I had been looking at previously. DOMAI revolutionized my perception of female beauty, and although I have explored many other sites since then, I have always kept DOMAI in my mind as the basis of my understanding of female beauty. It's definitely worth taking a look at their site- they have lots of free content on the photos page, and in their newsletter (which is really worth reading by the way).

I've put together 3 sample galleries for you to look at, loosely organized into these styles, respectively: outdoor nudes, artsy studio-type photographs, and indoor shots.