SALT LAKE CITY – Clayton Osmond has been a porn fan his entire adult life, starting when he was a college student at Utah State in the early 1990s. In the 22 years since graduation, Osmond has amassed an impressive collection of what he considers “classic” erotica, from a first-edition VHS copy of The Devil in Miss Jones to what he calls a “nearly comprehensive library” of the works of legendary porn star Ginger Lynn.
It is perhaps understandable, then, why he is so upset about the less-than-stringent standards maintained by PornoVidzVault.ngono — Osmond’s favorite porn streaming site — with respect to its “classic porn” category.
“To me, in order to be considered ‘classic’ pornography, a video should have to be something more than just old porn,” Osmond said. “So while I can certainly understand including some of the early titles from the often-excellent Nineteen Video Magazine series, it makes no sense at all for something like The Sopornos #3 to be in the same category.”
While age of the movie shouldn’t be the sole criterion, Osmond said site operators do have a responsibility to take a film’s vintage into account.
“For God’s sake, the HBO show it parodied didn’t even debut until 1999,” Osmond observed. “How can the third edition of the parody fit any reasonable definition of ‘classic porn’? This isn’t just poor categorization; it’s an egregious insult to the intelligence of porn fans.”
Another protocol employed by PornoVidzVault that irks Osmond is the practice of placing titles featuring certain performers in the classic category regardless when the movie was released.
“It’s inarguably true Christy Canyon is a classic porn star,” Osmond said. “But if she gets tit-fucked on video tomorrow morning by some guy who hadn’t even been born when she appeared in Black Throat, it should go under ‘new releases’ — period, end of story. If the Rolling Stones put out a new record tomorrow, does it get played on classic rock stations? No way in hell. Why should tit-fucking be any different?”
PVV Keith, the manager of PornoVidzVault, said while he understands where Osmond is coming from, it’s unlikely the site will make changes to its classic porn category or how the staff decides which movies belong in it. Doing so would be “too big a pain in the ass and totally not worth the effort,” he said.
“For every obsessed nerdo porn super-fan like this Osmond freak, there’s a thousand other people whose credit cards are getting dinged every month because they forgot to cancel their three-day trial, which they only signed up for because they were drunk as shit at 3 a.m. a couple months ago,” PVV Keith said. “Guess what? I don’t give a shit anymore. The tubes have ruined the subscription site business, so I just buy the cheapest content I can find and hope to hold on to the last few thousand suckers in my member base long enough to pay off my mortgage.”
Osmond rejected the idea correcting the categorization problem would be difficult or costly, instead asserting “a half-trained monkey on Ritalin could write a script that would fix the problem in about 15 minutes.”
Be that as it may, PVV Keith said even finding such a monkey is more effort than he’s willing to put into the site at this point. While it was once a “labor of love,” these days PornoVidzVault feels more like a “the proverbial albatross around my neck.”
“The whole site is run by a team of Filipinos at this point anyway,” PVV Keith said. “These days, I basically just check stats every few days and post on the boards now and again in between getting shitfaced at trade shows.”
Osmond said while he’s not totally without sympathy for PVV Keith (“economic hard times are rough on everyone,” he conceded), he still believes “if you’re going to take people’s money, you have an obligation to do at least the bare minimum.”
Along those lines, Osmond hopes there’s at least one change to the site the PornoVidzVault team can be persuaded to make.
“At the very least,” Osmond said, “I think it would be nice for them to fix the link from Raquel Darrian’s performer profile so it doesn’t point to Raquel Dourado’s videos.”
Image courtesy of copyright holder Arrow Productions.
