Once upon a time, a sociology professor of mine told me that women shouldn’t be too hard on their husbands, sons or boyfriends if such fellows pick out items of the wrong color when out shopping for clothes or household wares, because “women simply see more colors than men do.”
A bit startled by his assertion, I asked him if he had any proof to back it up.
“Sure – show me something that’s fuchsia in color,” he responded.
As it happened, I had a lovely fuchsia notebook among my stack of books, so I held it up.
“Right,” he said, “that’s called pink.”
While his point was made partially in jest, there’s more than a kernel of truth in what my old prof told me; from colors and sounds to other matters of subjective perception, there are certain subtleties and shades of difference that, by and large, women and men see very differently.
Over the years that I’ve been working in the porn industry, I’ve noticed that a lot of men have a very curious, highly specific and – from my perspective, at least – insanely inaccurate understanding of the definition of the word “hardcore.”
For example, when I was helping a producer promote one of his lesbian porn sites, a number of porn review sites inaccurately reported that there was “no hardcore” on the site. I found this claim to be very confusing and hard to justify, because right on the front page of the site’s free area were multiple pictures and trailers depicting things like women fucking each other with strap-on dildos, fingering themselves, and one particularly oft-clicked gif of one woman pulling out a string of anal beads from her partner’s butthole while her partner quivered like she was made of Jello and riding an invisible horse.
At any rate, when I contacted the review site to correct the problem, I received a reply saying that, “by definition,” there was no hardcore on any site that only includes lesbian (or “girl-girl”) content.
As you might guess, my response was “W-T-F?”
In essence, the reviewer’s explanation was that by the standards the review site adhered to, “hardcore” necessarily involves a penis – a real one – going in and out of an orifice, be it a mouth, a vagina, or an asshole.
Nearly beside myself with disbelief, I sent him a link to a lesbian scene featuring ‘extreme’ porn queens Audrey Hollander and Kelly Wells. Over the course of the scene, Audrey and Kelly don’t just fuck, they take turns penetrating each other anally with objects traditionally used for things like closing off lanes of highways, or knocking around baseballs; they don’t just ‘finger’ each other’s butts, they plunge their hands therein like they had just dropped their car keys in there.
“So,” I wrote beneath the link, “This is not hardcore?”
Unbelievably, the response was: “No – that’s lesbian porn, which we categorize as softcore.”
Look, I get that different people interpret the same words differently, and that sometimes there can be reasonably disagreements about linguistic nuances – but when the porn in question involves something the size of an oak tree trunk being inserted deep inside a person’s asshole, I don’t care if the people involved are women, men, transgender, Klingon or Smurf, that porn is hardcore.
Straight guys, if you still aren’t sure whether the porn you’re watching really qualifies as “hardcore,” here’s a helpful tip that will guide you toward the correct answer: if it’s more explicit than what you can order on pay-per-view at your average hotel (by which I mean real hotels, not the sort that charge by the hour and give out free condoms when you register), then it’s probably hardcore.
And if you’re one of those guys who doesn’t think it’s “hardcore” if it only involves women, try this: ram the business end of a whiffle ball bat up your ass, jerk it back and forth roughly, then pull it out of your asshole and lick down the length of the portion that had just been insider your ass. Repeat this cycle, say, 40 times or so, then tell me that what you just experienced wasn’t “hardcore.”
Given the price of a trip to the emergency room these days, however, it’s probably best that you just take my word for it: lesbian porn can be plenty hardcore, too.
The more you know…..