The very glamourous Micki. It is a testament to trickiness that I was wondering whose image to post, because I didn’t want a model saying “Oi are you saying I look old?”

We’ve got a few ideas in the air for new projects. Some will develop into RE updates, some into ES movies, and one or two might even end up as new websites.

One idea Ariel suggested a while back is a website featuring older women in bondage, because eventually she is going to be one and she still wants to enjoy bondage and modelling.

This is something I could really get behind, and after a flurry of fun discussions on Twitter I thought I’d mutter a few thoughts.

In the entertainment industry attractive women are generally written as aged 30 or less. There is a serious under-representation of older women unless they are playing someone’s mother. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/apr/30/julie-walters-older-actors.

Erotica and porn is no different. Most of the attractive women in mainstream porn are represented as under thirty, and if your physical age is older than that, you might have to fib to get cast. I know many models whose profile age stopped incrementing at some point, because they were worried that the work would dry up.

There are certainly sites featuring women older than 30, but they’re no longer described as “women” (without qualifier). In porn, “women” means “women below the age of 30”.

Porn sites do feature older women, but they are described with various terms which seem to me to be a bit derogatory and unsatisfying.

There’s MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck) which has a certain enthusiastic gusto but which has that same “someone’s mother” stereotype and also defines the person solely by their relationship to other people (their offspring, and the person who wants to fuck them). There’s cougar, which implies a rather predatory older woman making out with younger men, and her cousins the fox and the vixen (not to mention the Black Widow). Then there’s the granny stereotype, the trophy wife- again defining in terms of other people!

Sadly a lot of the sites which use these words are not respectful, sex positive or celebratory in tone.

I don’t think “STILL looking good for her AGE“. I think “Looking Good“.

So can we just celebrate all women? (Please let’s leave aside issues of conflation of attractiveness with value for now, OK? I’m already over-analyzing myself into a tizzy). In an ideal world we should just celebrate everyone’s sexuality equally and every sexuality should co-exist. But individual people have individual preferences, and that’s OK, too.

To build a business, you need to be tightly enough defined to be able to offer value for money to your members. So a certain degree of focus is essential to getting anywhere. It is fine to pick one thing and go for it.

Why not just broaden the model pool for Restrained Elegance?

Good question. We have worked with models from ages ranging from twenties to fifties, but the average age is solidly in the mid-twenties. RE already features a broader range of BDSM activities than many bondage websites.

Frankly in a recession I am wary of mucking about with Restrained Elegance. I know that’s a bit timid. RE does a good job of what it does right now. So let’s spare my worry beads and not muck around with it, let’s do something new.

I’d like to run a website which glories in how awesome and fun BDSM is for women outside the default porn age range. To do so will necessarily mean confronting and contradicting the “sexy leading lady = younger than 30” stereotype. Which probably means positive discrimination in favour of models whose physical age is 30+.

I hope our prospective models will not regard it as insulting if we invite them to model for a new site where the average age of the characters, and hence of the models we book to play those characters, is 30+.

(It will not preclude their appearing on RE too).

I hope prospective customers will agree that the sexiness of women in their thirties or more is well worth celebrating and that it sounds like a fun thing to watch and be part of.

My personal taste has always been for elegance and sophistication rather than wide eyed innocence and ingenue-ness. Power exchange seems much more interesting when there’s plenty of power to be exchanged, and what 18-year-old innocent has power?

So writing roles for older characters would be right up my street. My photographic style is glowing and flattering because of the way I like to light. The way we approach photoshopping is not intended to make the models look younger, which in the circumstances would be nothing short of insulting. It is just intended to make her look like herself on a good day, so there’s truthfulness there. And I hope it is something the models would find fun to do.

I hope I’m not letting go of trade secrets by saying that the lady I find sexiest in the world is not in her twenties either 🙂

All of which is why I think the idea could be an exciting one for me, because I think I could do it WELL. For me that’s the most important thing.

Is it something you’d like to see?