Interesting article! I thought about posting a reply there but then saw it was turning into a bit of a troll fest so thought I’d reply here instead.

It certainly does seem to be the case that the exaggerated “porn star look” is very widespread. So much so that a lot of SoCal models seem to have plastic surgery to look scarily interchangeable. I don’t know why, although I do wonder if a sort of hyperstimulation thing is going on, a bit like the cuckoo’s gape.
( http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/Animal%20Behavior/driving_parents_cuckoo.htm )

The porn star look certainly seems to over-exaggerate typically feminine traits (like big boobs, small waist, pouting lips and small nose).

I would point out that market forces among the punters are far from the only forces at work- plastic surgery costs money, and the models who are spending all that money may be doing it more from insecurity than for cold-blooded evaluation of their earning potential as a model.

But… there does seem to be an awfully big market for trashy stuff.

I wonder whether there’s actually more of the attainable amateur stuff he seems to prefer around than he realises? Anecdotally, the low-production-value amateur snapshot magazines were alleged to be vastly more profitable than the high glamour of Playboy and Mayfair, and he may just have been looking in the wrong places.

Or he may just have unreasonable expectations of how easy it is to look effortlessly relaxed and natural in front of the camera day in day out.

He and some of the subsequent posters go on quite a lot about wanting “realistic” photos of “attainable” girls.

“Attainable” is almost the opposite of what I personally want from erotic photos. If you hadn’t already guessed, I’m much more drawn to princesses 😉 “Aspirational” would be more like it I guess. But I try to encourage a more natural makeup look for our shoots and generally photoshop a lot less than the plastic porn producers do. I’ve always want to make the girls look like themselves, but looking at their very best, if you see what I mean. The full-on porn star look doesn’t do much for me, generally.

The industrial-setting bondage sites may not be so aspirational. I think they may a bit more “girl next door” in their model selections than “porn star” though. They certainly don’t photoshop much, indeed they sometimes want to see the girls looking at their worst (which I can see from a BDSM humiliation point of view, it just isn’t to my taste).

Some of them are pretty trashy, but I’d have to say that the biggest of the bunch, Kink.com, seem to work with a really lovely cross section of girls of all sorts of size, shape and look. For the record I think pretty highly of Kink.com’s stuff, it just happens not to be my personal taste. And I do wish their sites were a bit less interchangeable: they ALL seem to have the same photographic style which gets damn monotonous after a while. It does feel a bit mass-produced.

Maybe it is easier to imagine yourself in the scene of a modern industrial setting, although I’d never describe any BDSM erotica as “realistic”. Maybe it depends how big your ego is, because I have no problem at all imagining myself as a billionaire playboy, a criminal mastermind or a cruel sultan 😉 🙂 🙂

I don’t mind if the industrial bondage is where most of the market is, or if the biggest customer base would be for the proper porn star look. RE has always been an intensely personal project. Although it is was very surprising and absolutely LOVELY to be able to make a living out of it, I don’t run the site purely, or even mostly, to make money. I do it because I love making RE-style images and no-one else was really quite doing it the way I wanted it. 🙂

Cheers, Hywel.

wow, now I see proof that at least some people are actually thinking about what they view and why I’m very impressed.

And a bit unnerved.. thinking of the occasional set “banged out” against the clock, usually at the end of the day and perhaps lacking the usual degree of thought.. 😕 eek

Some of the comments are telling, I can *actually hear* the uhhh-huh-huh-huh 🙁

M