The Encyclopedia Of Smut: The Extreme Porn Appendix

What's harder than softcore porn? Hardcore porn! What's harder than hardcore? Things that can get you arrested even though they take place between consenting adults! Yes, even though the relative depravity and kink factor of any given sexual activity is completely subjective, some pornography is more likely than others to get people in trouble--both with the law and with their own bodies.

Extreme Sex As Extreme Sports

What makes some sex extreme and not others? Why can't we consider an extremely good blowjob to be extreme porn? We can't exactly say why there's a difference, but we define extreme sex as any act that is done for sexual pleasure that involves pushing the body to its limits. Extreme performers push themselves with feats of endurance, flexibility, and strength much in the same way that extreme athletes do. Fisting, various forms of double penetration, gangbangs, and bukkake all fit in this category because they all represent sex acts that challenge an individual to work with an excess of something, be it fingers, dicks, humans, or fluids.

We realize that this isn't the most elegant definition for extreme sex, but we're sticking with it. It leaves room open for questions like, "How many fingers until it becomes fisting? How much jizz is needed to make a bukkake scene?" and so on. No one can say exactly at what point excess becomes extreme, but people have tried, and people have been tried because of it. This leads us to our next section...

[Above: No explanation necessary for "Fisting and Pissing Power Action 3"]

Itty Bitty Obscenity Committee

In order for something to be deemed obscene, as extreme porn acts often are, it has to rub some "community standards" the wrong way. We know that's vague, but that's how Chief Justice Warren Burger laid it down in 1973:

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

These guidelines are known as the Miller test or the Three Prong Obscenity Test, and you'll notice that they are kind of really super vague. Who is "the average person" and what is their "contemporary community" like? These questions pose a lot of problems for both pornographers and obscenity prosecutors. Not only are they painfully subjective, but it's nearly impossible to establish jurisdiction in the age of internet porn; hence, you have squirting as part of the obscenity trial of John Stagliano (although that specific act was deemed not obscene) and Californian porn producers getting tried by the standards of western Pennsylvania.

[Above: Yume Kimino isn't doing anything obscene, she's just having a bit of a squirt with a couple guy friends. Via "Mikado 11: Yume Kimino"]

Do The Extreme Get Extremer?

Every now and then (read: all the damn time) anti-porn activists will point to some piece of extreme porn and say, "This is evidence that porn consumers become desensitized to depictions of vanilla sex and can only find pleasure in increasingly hardcore acts and dangerous situations." It's absolute bullplop.

For one, the idea that "porn makes you numb to X" is only based on anecdote and nonsense. On a basic level, yes, too much of anything will exhaust you, but no one ever claims eating Jolly Ranchers leads to snorting powdered sugar. Second, there's a limit to what bodies can do, and if porn were actually escalating depravity, there wouldn't be very far to go before the end of extremeness were reached.

Last, extreme porn is on the decline (at least in the United States). This is partially due to the chilling effects of the recent rash of obscenity trials as well as the growing plot-based and couples' porn markets. Maybe in a few years we're see a bunch of romantic porn films about highschool sweethearts who overcome all odds to fist each other senseless, but even then we won't accept that as evidence of the corrupting qualities of porn. There's nothing inherently bad about extreme acts, only arbitrary value judgments can make the extreme seem obscene.

[Above: In the future, widespread porn addiction will cause everyone to have a fetish for being shocked during sex. Get ahead of the curve now with "A Guide To Electrical Play." All videos courtesy of AEBN Porn Pay Per View Network and Video On Demand (theater.aebn.net)]

[At top: Justine Joli, Beretta James, and Audrey Rose for ElectroSluts]