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Our Fasciniation with Celebrity Sex Tapes
(05/28/2008) by Petra Zebroff
First Pam, then Paris, now Kim. We really wanted to see Marilyn Munroe’s , but that turned out to be a hoax. And now Jimmy Hendrix?
There is something about celebs showing their most private assets on video that makes us dive into our pocket-books, even foregoing that extra trip to the gas-station to pay for watching them have sex.
Choosing Celebrity Sex Tapes
Originally, I was dead-set against watching celebrity-porn. Even though I confess to being personally titillated by the prospect, I believed that we were invading the most private lives of the already People magazine-invaded divas.
But then a friend gave me some crucial tidbits about the distribution of the tapes that made me realize this was not such an invasion of privacy, after all. In every case, the stars were involved with, or were at least consenting to, their movie’s distribution. They all made lots of money off their tapes, and all of their careers took off as a direct result of the tape's distribution.
The obsession we have for celebrity news is not new. Women, in particular, make up 90% of the people who buy the 60 million celebrity magazines every week. Such obsession with fame is explained by Jake Halpern, author of Fame Junkies, who says that celebs are popular because they are like us -- only better, shinier, slimmer, more suave. They are who we aspire to be. They are always there when we want them. They have what we want. They are the popular crowd. And the internet is making it more accessible to be part of that crowd.
Blame it on how our brains know to socialize. Our brains are hardwired to send off "safe" signals when it recognizes a face, believing a friendly recognizable face must belong to our tribe. (Carlin, evolutionary psychology). We feel good, even getting a high from the endorphin-rush, when we indulge in gossip about our tribe (De Backer, 2007). And lastly, we bond over common happenings. It is fun to discover Paris is upset over going to jail and everyone knows who it is you are talking about.
It is not surprising that the celebrity obsession moves into the bedroom with their sex-tapes outselling even the highest budget adult features. As soon as we announced that we would be carrying celebrity porn on Libida, several of the women in the office who had never shown interest in porn before piped up and offered their services for reviewing these tapes. But there are other reasons that make us even more interested in celebrity bedrooms.
Why do we want to watch celebs having sex so badly?
1. We know and understand the characters. The sex has context.
Women like celebrity-porn, because we know a little bit about these characters already. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, we know ‘em. We know that they had a little too much to drink the other night, that they had a fight with their boyfriend, that they flipped off the camera-man, or that they wore an ugly dress to the opening of their new film.
We know what they like and what they don’t like. It allows us to create roundness around these characters in our minds.
Too often the sex in 99% of the porn you buy today is suspended in a vacuum without any emotion or context supporting it. The characters are stereotypical (i.e. blond bimbo, pizza-boy) and wooden. Sex is about the bodies only, leaving out the sexual intrigue of the mind. Without the mind-sex women are often left feeling flat and bored. Most women come alive when sexual intrigue is introduced.
In celebrity-porn the performers are not bimbos without personality. They are flesh and blood people, who are wealthy socialites, who have stylists, who have strained relationships with their mothers, and troublesome boyfriends. In other words, they have context. Women generally are more likely to get turned on if their sex has “context”, emotion, and substance. We know how these famous characters know each other, and what they like about the other person, and what attracts them. how sexy and arousing...
2. "I am not a freak." What I do is in the normal range.
Most people want to see if the sex they are having is dull and boring, or whether it is too kinky and perverted, compared with everybody else. What better way than to watch someone we "know", to see if what we are doing is "normal". These tapes give us valuable insight into whether Paris gives a good blow-job, or whether Kim fakes her orgasms, or what their bodies really look like without retouching. Everyone will get a kick out of watching these films just to see that even people with exciting lives can have mundane sexual realities.
3. It is a starting point to talk about sex.
Gossip bonds people and gives them something to talk about. Celeb porn is a bonding experience for people to open up about their own sex-lives. Two people who have seen the same film can feel free to talk about sex, because they saw Paris doing it. We all need someway to to talk about sex without looking like a freak.
4. Permission Giving. Try new things.
“If Paris does it, it must be okay for me to do it”. Regular folk feel less self-conscious about doing it themselves. It encourages everyone to try something outside of the regular routine.
5. A Taboo Pleasure.
Our brain has identified the face as being familiar and is tricking itself into thinking it is therefore part of our tribe. We "know" this person, they are not a threat, they are friendly, they are attractive, they are naked. Watching our "peeps" having sex is intriguing, because of all of that. And watching people you know have sex is taboo. And anything taboo becomes suddenly more interesting.
In short, we have plenty of reasons to want to watch celebrity sex tapes.
What to walk away with?
Keep in mind that none of the videos are of the production quality we are accustomed to in porn. The camera jiggles, the lighting is bad, the angles don't show the best parts. These are home-movies -- peeps into the private worlds of other people's sex lives. The participants are NOT performers and in none of the productions do the stars believe there is an audience who will be critiquing them. While it is at times hard to watch, we are getting the authenticity and reality we crave.
The most startling difference between celebrity-porn and regular amateur-porn is the pace of the sex. The sex in these celebrity bedrooms lingers on the sex acts. Rick gives Paris oral sex for over 15 minutes. And we watched it all in real time. This may sound boring, as we are used to the pumped-up, A.D.D., version of porn made today, where the scenes change from moment to moment without the realities of sex getting in the way.
Surprisingly, all of the women involved seemed lifeless when things were being done to them. They didn't move much or initiate anything. But, they all came alive during the scenes where they were active -- the blow-jobs. It wasn't until those scenes that they became animated and engaged. Perhaps because they were too aware of the camera.
I felt great after watching it all. Sex was at a pace that I recognize as comfortable; these gorgeous women were normal in bed, not some unattainable superstars.
Will I watch it every day? Probably not every day. Maybe once in a while, I'm glad I got this assignment. I learned a lot. Especially that my sex life is really quite good, compared to these bigger than life stars.
Source: www.libida.com
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