By Linda Lords
Special to YNOT
SAN FRANCISCO – These days, you read a lot about “feminist porn” and “porn for women,” and that’s a good thing. It’s always nice to hear about an already popular product getting a new audience as part of the growth and maturation of the market.
Still, when I look around the porn available in today’s marketplace, I see a major gap in niche coverage: There’s a severe paucity of porn available to people who just don’t like seeing a lot of sex or nudity.
This is why I started my new website, HotButNotBothered, the web’s largest collection of porn in which nobody is naked or having sex at any time.
Creating porn with no sex scenes may seem counter-intuitive, but from a woman’s perspective, most of the sex in porn is just gross. There’s usually some guy who looks like his employment should involve not getting laid, but laying tile. Some of them have nice abs, yes, but when the phrase “a face made for radio” was coined, I swear they must have been talking about male porn stars.
Personally, I’d rather watch a good-looking guy stirring a cocktail with a seductive look in his eye than watch Ron Jeremy sweat on some floozy half his age. Judging by the way my non-porn porn site has taken off, I’m not alone in my opinion.
Since launching HotButNotBothered, I’ve received numerous questions about which categories are the most popular. While I don’t like to share precise statistics, I will tell you there has been a major spike in click-throughs to the “Jeans Ads” category. The collection doesn’t display actual ads for jeans — Copyright exists, people! — but perfectly mimics the Levi’s wholesale catalog in a very sexy, albeit not particularly naughty, way.
It’s much easier to find attractive models for non-nude porn than for more conventional kinds of smut. This might sound a little “unethical,” but in some cases I don’t tell the models they’re making porn. Obviously, if any of them were required to perform oral sex or be anally penetrated by a nine-inch penis, the true nature of the content would be much harder to conceal. However, when all they have to do is stand there in a sweater with their mouth hanging open, it’s all good.
At the end of the day, there’s a lot less stigma attached to posing with a book in your hand and a contemplative look on your face than there is in posing with a grimace on your visage and a penis jammed up your ass. As such, I figure a lot more people would turn me down if I approached them about a modeling job in which they’d be doing “book porn” as opposed to asking them for help make reading seem more attractive to young people.
Non-sex porn also offers several major advantages on the legal front, of course.
For starters, there hasn’t been an obscenity prosecution over non-nude images since 1984, when The Commonwealth of Tennessee v. Sears Catalog was tossed out of court on the basis that while parachute pants might be “painfully, ludicrously unstylish by the standards of any era,” their erotic appeal could not be considered “prurient” as defined under existing statutes.
Then there’s the question of 2257 regulations, which is a little fuzzier than the obscenity issue in this context. While you wouldn’t think entirely clothed people would be subject to the regulations, apparently it’s somehow possible to make a “lascivious display of the genitals” even through several layers of winter clothing.
So, while some attorneys have told me I don’t need to worry about 2257, I still comply with the law. This can get a little tricky when it comes to getting IDs from models who don’t know they’re doing porn. For those folks, I follow what you might call a ‘bifurcated’ approach.
I collect women’s IDs by claiming not to believe they’re as old as they claim to be and then demanding their driver’s license as proof. I tell the guys they’re “cute” and collecting ID pictures from cute guys is “a hobby of mine.” It’s a pretty thin line of bullshit, obviously, but the kind of guys who model can’t even spell “gullible,” much less have any idea what it means, so my trick works like a charm every time.
The most important thing to understand about non-sex porn is how profitable it can be, provided you know how to optimize monetization of the content — which brings us to the last major advantage of the genre: flexibility.
As hard as it has been, historically, for people to define porn, “I know it when I see it” still composes the primary test. Non-nude porn is difficult to discern from art — or in this case, from clothing catalog photos advertising shoes, hats or festive Mexican parkas. (In porn these days, you must have some “Latin content.”)
What does the difficulty discerning non-nude porn from any other non-pornographic content have to do with making money, you ask? Simple: Once you’ve maximized the revenue you can generate by selling access to your content on a non-sex subscription porn site, or offering up non-nude PPV video streaming, you can turn around and re-sell the images to entities like the Sundance catalog, or L.L. Bean — or America’s Most Wanted for use as stock footage in their dramatic crime re-enactments.
As you can see, non-nude porn presents a major opportunity, especially for those of you whose “traditional” porn businesses are struggling to make a profit.
To cash in on this rapidly growing trend, all you need is a couple cameras, some good locations, your God-given wits and a clear understanding of what people who don’t like porn want from their porn: Titillation without the “tit.”
Linda Lords is a top producer of sex-free and nudity-free porn. She is also the author of Six Tales Without Words, a collection of “virtual short stories” on entirely blank pages, available at major booksellers for $69.95 in hardback or $49.95 as an e-book.
