conclusions
well, okay.
it is july 1st and i have only just now finished watching and reviewing 176 (actually more, but i removed a couple after i discovered that they were reposts of previously-released material) scenes from 39 different sites (actually more, but several of them came bundled together for payment purposes) released during the month of april.
i'm not quite done. i've identified 51 scenes from a further 20 sites that i should probably watch and review in order to be as complete as possible. but because i'm paying for every scene, i'm holding off on those until i can realistically afford it. i do not expect to love any of them; i originally skipped them for a reason. if and when i do get around to adding those in, i will flag them as being later additions, and update this page too.
but before i wrap up, i wanted to try to look at this blog as a whole and see what inferences, conclusions, and recommendations i can draw from the data. that data, i may as well note, is entirely arbitrary. it feels more or less accurate, as in running down my spreadsheet of scenes organized by score i do mostly feel that every scene with a particular score is slightly better than every scene with a score just below it; but after all i'm only one person, and as likely to be wrong as not. and wrong or right, my tastes almost certainly don't map exactly onto anyone else's, so that this has all been an exercise in masturbatory self-regard rather than anything useful like a consumer guide.
still, i was interested to see the results of some of the data, results which i wouldn't have predicted either going into the month or even necessarily at the end of it, if i was just relying on my impressions without having crunched the numbers.
so here are some numbers. it's time to get nerdy.
my top score was 90/100, for endless by director whitney wright on allherluv. my bottom score was 25/100 for a fistertwister scene. as a measure of the distance of my aesthetic response to both scenes, that feels about right, although i was perhaps too harsh on the latter. but if you want to assume that 90 was the top score available and that the grades are calculated on a curve, i have no real objection: that would mean 50 is the pass/fail cutoff rather than 60, and so the median score of 65 would be a C, or average.
in fact, here's a chart showing the score distribution in increments of 5, resulting in a classic bell curve:
the highest-scoring site, on average, was transfixed. of sites with multiple scenes, the top ten is:
that is not my personal top ten, for the record: i would sort it quite differently, and substitute twistys, sexart, and maybe cherry pimps for kink, wicked, and digital playground; but the luck of april's draw didn't do them many favors. by the way, if you count sites that only produced one girl/girl scene all month, babes, trans angels, and elegant angel knock out the bottom three.
the bottom end of the scoring range is occupied by paper street's team skeet and mylf sites, the gamma-acquired 21sextury and 21sextreme brands, spizoo, sapphic erotica, abby winters, ddf, girlfriends, and nubiles. as a guide to what i will almost certainly be ignoring entirely going forward, that's a pretty good list.
the rivalry between the two most prolific corporations, mindgeek and gamma, comes in at exactly a draw, both with an average score of 70; above the monthwide average of 65, but not by much. gamma produced one more girl/girl scene than mindgeek all month; although if you discount trans scenes, mindgeek pulls ahead both in total numbers and average score. but, duh, i'm not discounting trans scenes.
the most prolific individual site was girlsway (17 scenes), followed closely by girlfriends films (15). twistys, sexyhub, and wicked (9 each) round out the top five. wicked would almost assuredly never place again any other month this year; it just happened to be a girl/girl-heavy month in their releases.
i was curious to see if my scoring remained consistent over time, or if i went easier (or got harsher) as the month dragged on, so here's a scatterplot:
by the way, if you aggregate the scores, the trendline goes down; but i'm pretty sure that's because there happened to be more scenes in the first half of the month than in the back half, due to the happenstance of release schedules.
the most prolific performers of the month were kenna james, scarlett sage, and serene siren at 5 scenes each, followed by lacy lennon, kenzie reeves, india summer, and kenzie taylor at 4 scenes apiece. 23 performers appeared three times, and 47 appeared twice. in total, i cataloged 264 performers all month. these numbers are probably more reflective of performer shooting schedules and the vagaries of when things got released than anything else, but it's notable that of the seven i named, only two (scarlett and serene) are exclusively girl/girl performers.
i think that covers all the stats i was aching to get off my chest. now for some less psuedo-objective ruminations on what i think i might have learned here.
probably the biggest thing i learned is just how mediocre most porn is. i'm not sure it's a huge revelation (sturgeon's law would obviously apply here as much as anywhere else), but if consuming porn at a volume far beyond a single person's utilitarian or aesthetic interest can do anything, it can drive home on a visceral level the tedium, repetitiveness, intellectual vapidity, and visual insipidness of the vast majority of porn. even at its best it isn't great in the context of, like, world cinema, although my top twenty or so scenes easily surpass the visual blandness and intellectual feebleness of oh, say, daytime television.
i also learned to a much more specific degree than i think i understood before just what i like in porn. again, this isn't about what turns me on: that's none of your business and has only vague relevance to what i'm doing here. some of my favorite work this month stirred nothing at all below the belt, but engaged me on other emotional and even physiological levels, like making me laugh, touching me emotionally, interesting me intellectually, or overwhelming me with sheer beauty. (which i know makes me sound like the most pretentious fuck ever, and quite possibly i am. but i'm the one who's trapped in here with me, so i try to make the best of it.)
so what, specifically, do i like? i like story, narrative of any kind. it doesn't have to be fictional narrative: documentary-style gonzo like we like girls is far more engaging than almost all of the scenarios, whether scripted or improvised, that clog up the midrange of my scoring table. i like good cinematography, beautiful lighting, interesting sets, fluid camera movement, striking compositions, actual sound design. i like stylization more than verisimilitude unless the verisimilitude is presented in a very polished way. i like grown women: over 21 at minimum, over 25 for comfort, over 30 for trust. but i like experienced performers regardless of age, and performers who can act, who can move gracefully, who can convey passion, who appear to be enjoying themselves. i like more melanin and a wider range of body types and gender presentation than porn tends to average. i like a lot of communication (it doesn't have to be verbal communication, but look at how many words are on this page: it doesn't hurt!), and adore good improv. i like quality over quantity, and a site that produced two or three excellent scenes every month instead of fifteen mediocre-to-good ones would be worth the expense in my book.
and so, ultimately, i learned that consuming the volume of porn this project required is simply unsustainable. i knew it was going to be an intense project, which was why it was limited in scope, but just how wearisome it became to watch hours and hours of porn every day and still fall behind wasn't something i would have predicted. i even ended up taking several weeks off for mental-health reasons, which is one reason it took me three months to watch and write about the output of one month. (also, i have a real job and the usual social commitments). i'm glad to have gotten the bird's-eye view of a single month, because expanded knowledge and understanding about the world is always a net good, but i'm even gladder to have whittled my subscriptions down to the limited number of sites i'm actually interested in following.
i'm going to close out by listing my ten top-scoring scenes of the month. drumroll, please:
1. endless starring avi love, lacy lennon and ana foxx (allherluv)
2. we like girls: cadence and serena starring cadence lux and serena blair (girlsway)
2. behave yourself starring demi sutra and ember snow (sweetheart)
4. the heist starring haley reed and natalie mars (transfixed)
5. through the mirror starring maya kendrick and aspen brooks (transfixed)
6. vagina vendetta starring kendra spade and abigail mac (mofos)
6. a steamy night starring india summer and brandi love (sweetheart)
8. the wakeup call starring ryan keely and kenzie reeves (reality kings)
9. my mistress does not ask starring kenna james and katana kombat (babes)
9. housewife secrets starring sarah vandella and casey kisses (transfixed)
i would say all of them are well worth watching (as is the entire top twenty or so), even if you're not the biggest porn fan. admittedly, there might not be a whole lot there for people totally uninterested in or repelled by watching women having sex, but if you can muster any interest, these scenes represent some of the best current sexual performers shot by some of the best photographers under some of the most well-crafted circumstances that april 2019 had to offer.
but despite those highlights, april was not, on the whole, a very notable month in the girl/girl genre. which i can say because after two months of keeping tabs on what has been released in the interim, i'm eager to catch up on what i've missed since april, and in what i know to be coming up throughout the rest of the year.
that will be happening at my sequel blog, further shebang, where i am no longer attempting to be even slightly comprehensive, just documenting what i've really enjoyed.
it is july 1st and i have only just now finished watching and reviewing 176 (actually more, but i removed a couple after i discovered that they were reposts of previously-released material) scenes from 39 different sites (actually more, but several of them came bundled together for payment purposes) released during the month of april.
i'm not quite done. i've identified 51 scenes from a further 20 sites that i should probably watch and review in order to be as complete as possible. but because i'm paying for every scene, i'm holding off on those until i can realistically afford it. i do not expect to love any of them; i originally skipped them for a reason. if and when i do get around to adding those in, i will flag them as being later additions, and update this page too.
but before i wrap up, i wanted to try to look at this blog as a whole and see what inferences, conclusions, and recommendations i can draw from the data. that data, i may as well note, is entirely arbitrary. it feels more or less accurate, as in running down my spreadsheet of scenes organized by score i do mostly feel that every scene with a particular score is slightly better than every scene with a score just below it; but after all i'm only one person, and as likely to be wrong as not. and wrong or right, my tastes almost certainly don't map exactly onto anyone else's, so that this has all been an exercise in masturbatory self-regard rather than anything useful like a consumer guide.
still, i was interested to see the results of some of the data, results which i wouldn't have predicted either going into the month or even necessarily at the end of it, if i was just relying on my impressions without having crunched the numbers.
so here are some numbers. it's time to get nerdy.
my top score was 90/100, for endless by director whitney wright on allherluv. my bottom score was 25/100 for a fistertwister scene. as a measure of the distance of my aesthetic response to both scenes, that feels about right, although i was perhaps too harsh on the latter. but if you want to assume that 90 was the top score available and that the grades are calculated on a curve, i have no real objection: that would mean 50 is the pass/fail cutoff rather than 60, and so the median score of 65 would be a C, or average.
in fact, here's a chart showing the score distribution in increments of 5, resulting in a classic bell curve:
 |
| yeah, i have a bunch of charts. i'm at least partly a data analyst in my real job. |
the highest-scoring site, on average, was transfixed. of sites with multiple scenes, the top ten is:
- transfixed (gamma)
- sweetheart video (mile high media)
- allherluv (missax)
- digital playground (mindgeek)
- kink
- brazzers (mindgeek)
- fantasy massage (gamma)
- wicked films
- girlsway (gamma)
- lesbianx (xempire)
the bottom end of the scoring range is occupied by paper street's team skeet and mylf sites, the gamma-acquired 21sextury and 21sextreme brands, spizoo, sapphic erotica, abby winters, ddf, girlfriends, and nubiles. as a guide to what i will almost certainly be ignoring entirely going forward, that's a pretty good list.
the rivalry between the two most prolific corporations, mindgeek and gamma, comes in at exactly a draw, both with an average score of 70; above the monthwide average of 65, but not by much. gamma produced one more girl/girl scene than mindgeek all month; although if you discount trans scenes, mindgeek pulls ahead both in total numbers and average score. but, duh, i'm not discounting trans scenes.
the most prolific individual site was girlsway (17 scenes), followed closely by girlfriends films (15). twistys, sexyhub, and wicked (9 each) round out the top five. wicked would almost assuredly never place again any other month this year; it just happened to be a girl/girl-heavy month in their releases.
i was curious to see if my scoring remained consistent over time, or if i went easier (or got harsher) as the month dragged on, so here's a scatterplot:
 |
| the trendline shows a slight increase over the course of the month, so presumably i did get marginally softer. or the scenes got marginally better. |
by the way, if you aggregate the scores, the trendline goes down; but i'm pretty sure that's because there happened to be more scenes in the first half of the month than in the back half, due to the happenstance of release schedules.
the most prolific performers of the month were kenna james, scarlett sage, and serene siren at 5 scenes each, followed by lacy lennon, kenzie reeves, india summer, and kenzie taylor at 4 scenes apiece. 23 performers appeared three times, and 47 appeared twice. in total, i cataloged 264 performers all month. these numbers are probably more reflective of performer shooting schedules and the vagaries of when things got released than anything else, but it's notable that of the seven i named, only two (scarlett and serene) are exclusively girl/girl performers.
i think that covers all the stats i was aching to get off my chest. now for some less psuedo-objective ruminations on what i think i might have learned here.
probably the biggest thing i learned is just how mediocre most porn is. i'm not sure it's a huge revelation (sturgeon's law would obviously apply here as much as anywhere else), but if consuming porn at a volume far beyond a single person's utilitarian or aesthetic interest can do anything, it can drive home on a visceral level the tedium, repetitiveness, intellectual vapidity, and visual insipidness of the vast majority of porn. even at its best it isn't great in the context of, like, world cinema, although my top twenty or so scenes easily surpass the visual blandness and intellectual feebleness of oh, say, daytime television.
i also learned to a much more specific degree than i think i understood before just what i like in porn. again, this isn't about what turns me on: that's none of your business and has only vague relevance to what i'm doing here. some of my favorite work this month stirred nothing at all below the belt, but engaged me on other emotional and even physiological levels, like making me laugh, touching me emotionally, interesting me intellectually, or overwhelming me with sheer beauty. (which i know makes me sound like the most pretentious fuck ever, and quite possibly i am. but i'm the one who's trapped in here with me, so i try to make the best of it.)
so what, specifically, do i like? i like story, narrative of any kind. it doesn't have to be fictional narrative: documentary-style gonzo like we like girls is far more engaging than almost all of the scenarios, whether scripted or improvised, that clog up the midrange of my scoring table. i like good cinematography, beautiful lighting, interesting sets, fluid camera movement, striking compositions, actual sound design. i like stylization more than verisimilitude unless the verisimilitude is presented in a very polished way. i like grown women: over 21 at minimum, over 25 for comfort, over 30 for trust. but i like experienced performers regardless of age, and performers who can act, who can move gracefully, who can convey passion, who appear to be enjoying themselves. i like more melanin and a wider range of body types and gender presentation than porn tends to average. i like a lot of communication (it doesn't have to be verbal communication, but look at how many words are on this page: it doesn't hurt!), and adore good improv. i like quality over quantity, and a site that produced two or three excellent scenes every month instead of fifteen mediocre-to-good ones would be worth the expense in my book.
and so, ultimately, i learned that consuming the volume of porn this project required is simply unsustainable. i knew it was going to be an intense project, which was why it was limited in scope, but just how wearisome it became to watch hours and hours of porn every day and still fall behind wasn't something i would have predicted. i even ended up taking several weeks off for mental-health reasons, which is one reason it took me three months to watch and write about the output of one month. (also, i have a real job and the usual social commitments). i'm glad to have gotten the bird's-eye view of a single month, because expanded knowledge and understanding about the world is always a net good, but i'm even gladder to have whittled my subscriptions down to the limited number of sites i'm actually interested in following.
i'm going to close out by listing my ten top-scoring scenes of the month. drumroll, please:
1. endless starring avi love, lacy lennon and ana foxx (allherluv)
2. we like girls: cadence and serena starring cadence lux and serena blair (girlsway)
2. behave yourself starring demi sutra and ember snow (sweetheart)
4. the heist starring haley reed and natalie mars (transfixed)
5. through the mirror starring maya kendrick and aspen brooks (transfixed)
6. vagina vendetta starring kendra spade and abigail mac (mofos)
6. a steamy night starring india summer and brandi love (sweetheart)
8. the wakeup call starring ryan keely and kenzie reeves (reality kings)
9. my mistress does not ask starring kenna james and katana kombat (babes)
9. housewife secrets starring sarah vandella and casey kisses (transfixed)
i would say all of them are well worth watching (as is the entire top twenty or so), even if you're not the biggest porn fan. admittedly, there might not be a whole lot there for people totally uninterested in or repelled by watching women having sex, but if you can muster any interest, these scenes represent some of the best current sexual performers shot by some of the best photographers under some of the most well-crafted circumstances that april 2019 had to offer.
but despite those highlights, april was not, on the whole, a very notable month in the girl/girl genre. which i can say because after two months of keeping tabs on what has been released in the interim, i'm eager to catch up on what i've missed since april, and in what i know to be coming up throughout the rest of the year.
that will be happening at my sequel blog, further shebang, where i am no longer attempting to be even slightly comprehensive, just documenting what i've really enjoyed.
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