The Buccaneer of Bacchanalia

Who among you has not traveled to ErosBlog, where porn flows like good wine, and the Dionysian satyrs grin with quick wit and bohemian spirit? 

Erosblog is actually one man: Bacchus. Ever since he thrilled me with his essay on bondage photography, The Two Smiles, I've been wanting to ask him a lot of nosy questions.

SB:  You manage to wade through a sea of porn and find the best photos, the quintessential plums. What's your secret?

B: You're the first person to explicitly notice that I do this, but you've named exactly the process that I go through in posting pictures.  There's an ocean of mundane visual porn out there, even fairly high quality stuff that suffers only from being not-special.  But every now and then I find a picture that seems special in some way, and that's what I try to share. 

If you leave aside the photos I select because of their humorous or unusual subjects, the remaining common denominator is that the models appear to be engaged in some way. 

So much porn is just pictures of live meat (pretty meat, but still just meat) posed against a background. The pictures that fire my imagination are the ones where you can see people in the picture. We have sex with people, not meat.  And so it follows that people are sexier than meat. (Note: after having said this, I am having to restrain myself from typing the words "meat fetish" into Google Image Search.)

SB: You're a man who digs women, but you're nonchalant about occasionally commenting on a gay erotic issue or photo.

How did you get to this place? Are you bi, just happy and non-defensively straight, an erotic purist who knows no boundaries, or...?

B:  Well, redneck comic Ron White says we're all a little gay, and does a pretty good job of proving it.

But the gay or nude male erotic posts on ErosBlog are pretty rare.  Why do I do them at all?  Because it would be silly to write a sex blog while trying to pretend that gay sex, or sexy nude men, don't exist.

The fact that straight women (a big chunk of my audience) often enjoy gay porn doesn't hurt either.

The trouble is, how do I know what's good?  I'm usually bored by porn that doesn't have women in it. Sometimes I can see (or suspect) special eroticism in a photo that doesn't particularly engage my own erotic imagination. The standards of male attractiveness are a bit of a foreign country to a straight man, but they aren't exactly a secret, and good photography tends to speak for itself.

When I post a bit of gay porn, I'm guessing. I'm  working from an informed suspicion.  And, as a result, I'm usually pretty reluctant to comment, because I hate to go out on a limb.  What you're calling nonchalance may in fact be no more than careful silence, because I don't like to look foolish.

SB: Why did you start a sex blog? Your political approach is unusual for a in-your-face sex blog. It welcomes women, it assumes they're in the audience. I never feel like I'm going to run screaming out the door.

B: One thing that got me started sex blogging was the dire fact that most male-authored sex sites on the Internet (especially 3+ years ago) were "written" by pornographers of that misogynistic old "cunt bitch slut whore" bent— or by long-term customers of theirs who absorbed that leering peepshow mentality before they ever got out of high school, and then never grew up. 

I've tried to be sex-positive and pan-whatever-tolerant as much as possible without suppressing my inner horndog—expressing a male perspective without being a sunofabitch about it.

SB: That's a helluva concept. I think a lot of men act and feel as you do...

B:  In the houses and bedrooms of America, yes. But not in porn. Finding a healthy, friendly male appreciation for women and sex in commercial pornography is hard. A lot of guys in porn— perhaps a lot of guys generally— just seem broken when you consider their views of women.

SB: Well, the two main types of "horndogs" we see portrayed in the mainstream are the guy who's a self-effacing apologist for his desires, the one who's going to get "sand kicked in his face"— or  the "Arnold Neanderthal."

B: The Neanderthal is easy— he's an icon because, nine times out of ten, he's the guy who gets laid. Which means men want to see him because we like portrayals of sexually successful men, and women want to see him (I'm guessing here) because he's the kind of guy they fantasize about. Or, at least, he's the kind of guy that that they want to sleep with until they figure out he's a jerk asshole.

The nebbish icon, sadly, is popular because he's a figure of comic fun. Men like to see him so they can feel superior. Maybe women like to see him for the same reason they make him their "he's just a friend" in real life? Because he's safe and nonthreatening? Just guessing here, I never claimed to understand women.

Once we get past sexual politics, my other views might send you screaming— I used to be a political conservative before I wised up and turned into a complete anti-government anarchist.

SB:  A classic libertarian? (my socialist hairs standing on end)

B:  Nope, nope, nope— a thousand times, nope.  A classic libertarian thinks government is a necessary evil— something to be trimmed to bare minimums and kept on a short chain.  I'm more focused on the "evil" part. If it's evil, we shouldn't do it. End of story.  You don't keep a vicious dog around children, no matter how short his chain is.

And make no mistake, government is evil, because it enslaves us— every dollar it spends is collected at gunpoint. What noble ends can justify that? The answer, for me, is none.

That's one reason I keep non-sexual politics off my blog with a ruthless delete button to the extent they can be separated. Many of the folks in the world who share my liberal sexual politics are fans of enforcing their liberal views, and they tend to get horrified or feel betrayed when they find out I won't go there with them.

SB: So how do you deal with upcoming election fever? What is your most practical strategy to deal with Bush and Co.? Will you vote Democrat? Run for the office yourself? Prepare the spaceship?

B: On my blog, I don't deal with it at all. In private, I alternate between morbid fear of a grimly fascist future and wild optimism that open source software, free networks, radical globalization, and ubiquitous nanotech will one day make us all delightfully ungovernable.   

My strategy for coping in the interim is to focus a lot of energy on taking care of me and mine. As for actual voting, I'm not a big fan. When you see government as a gang of thugs running a nasty protection racket, there's not much percentage in helping to pick the capo de capo.

I've voted defensively, but the guy I thought couldn't possibly be as bad as the other guy usually turned out to be worse. 

Vote Democrat? I'm not a one-issue voter, but what's to pick between Republicans and Democrats on, say, porn or any kind of sex work? Republicans talk big about cracking down on obscenity, sure, and that's dangerous to a pornographer like myself. But the leading Democrat candidate believes that porn is degrading to women and sex work ought to be even more tightly prohibited than it already is. Who is there to vote for who believes in total freedom of sexual speech, much less practice?

SB: What's your own sex history? How did you come to Jesus and find kinky sex?

B: I read Robert Heinlein and John Norman at the same time during puberty. At one point I finished reading Time Enough For Love (enough pure libertarian humanism to choke a horse, well-dosed with good clean dirty-old-man lechery) and started reading Nomads of Gor (moral: if a girl is mean to you, whip her and keep her in a leather sack until her attitude improves). An odd mixture, but I like the way it came out after twenty years of cooking.

More seriously, I'm not sure how healthy my point of view actually is, but I have firm opinions about what a healthy viewpoint looks like and I try hard to represent that on my blog.

I spent a lot of years thinking and reading about sex but not actually doing much of it. I was always pretty hopeless at seduction, and mostly didn't try; nor was I the sort of young man that young women pursue. 

My sexual history before my thirties was pretty much a wasteland of "let's be friends" relationships with desirable women, a few awkward dates, and one lengthy committed living-together relationship with a woman who, it turned out, viewed sex as an unpleasant burden to be avoided as deftly as possible.

So I read a lot of erotic literature. Grad school in San Francisco was a high point; in that town I found dirty books about subjects I never even knew could be dirty. In the process, my own mild kinks came to seem tame and nonthreatening— whatever furtive guilt I'd been nurturing up to that point was demolished by the onslaught of kink the way only San Francisco can do it.

Then the Internet and eBay got invented, and I was able to read and buy even more erotic literature. I became extremely well read.

Eventually I started writing ErosBlog. If you look at the early archives, I was enormously stilted, writing about my Bacchus persona in the third person and saying nothing of consequence. At that point in my life I still had little practical experience of sex, and I wasn't comfortable sharing my opinions for fear that my inexperience would be obvious. Still, I wasn't short of opinions, and I've gradually become relaxed about sharing them with the world. 

Fortunately, my current girlfriend (known as "The Nymph" in my blog posts) found me, harvested my lonely ass, and helped me relax even more.

SB: You mentioned you have a girlfriend... How does she feel about your blog, your erotic interests?

B: We met on-line, she read and liked ErosBlog before we even started ICQ chatting, so I can only say she's in favor of it.

SB: What do you say to lovers who say that their better half goes crazy when they discover their porn interests?

To be blunt, in my experience "lovers" don't go crazy in this situation. It's people (usually women) in committed relationships who are using sex as a tool of control who go crazy. And whatever else that may be, it ain't love the way I understand it.

I've blogged about this, in a very politically incorrect way.

"Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word."

I've owned and enjoyed an astounding array of porn. And I still view and comment on a lot of porn as part of how I make my living. But I've got a woman in my life who loves me and loves to have sex with me. She's not threatened by the porn in my life, because I make it very obvious that she's a lot more fun than porn could ever dream of being.

SB: Most sex sites on the Internet are con jobs. How do you cope with that?

B: Well, to start with, I challenge the premise. There are a ton of "porn marketing" sites on the Internet, and there's no limit to the sleaze and dishonesty some of them will use to convince you to click through to the sites they are advertising.

But the actual sex sites (which, to me, means a site that takes a credit card in exchange for erotic/sex photography or video) are almost always for real. They take your money, they give you more of what you saw on the front page, end of story. The corrupt billing practices that were widespread five years ago (take your credit card, bill you twice, refuse to process your cancellations, that sort of thing) are mostly history now— they still exist, but they are getting rare.

And the "fake tour" stuff that used to be popular (a pretty front page to get you to buy, but only tired photos stolen from Usenet inside the pay-site) are getting quite rare also, though some of the old ones are still operating. Most of the crooks use other sleazy business practices also, such as endless pop-ups, so it's not very hard to spot them.

I cope with it the same way my readers ought to— by reading carefully and by taking advantage of branding. Whatever your fetish, there's likely to be one or two companies out there producing porn for you that's high quality. They will be easy to find using Google, and it's not hard to find user reviews that confirm whether or not a membership is a bargain.

The biggest and best on-line porn companies trumpet their brands, and with good reason. The sleazy ones make hundreds of generic cookie-cutter sites nobody ever heard of. Shop for brand and quality, just like you would in every other aspect of your life.

SB: Do you have a "day" job that would surprise our readers?

B: I did— I used to be a lawyer— but I got tired of being a hired spokesperson for delivering threats. Much of job involved contacting someone and telling them "You better do what my clients want, or we'll sue you." That translates to "Do what we want, or we'll send men with guns around to take your stuff." I'm much happier selling porn for a living, and it's a nice bonus that the money also turns out to be better.

Some more Bacchus Classics:

Crapping All Over Beauty

A Basic Rule For Gentlemen

Markets in Sex

War commentary: Money Shot