Cultural niche markets in porn and frowning friends .... (PG18)

When I mention to my friends that I intend writing about the different kinds of porn favoured by different nations ... some frown, others shake their heads and the writer Vince declares loudly and somewhat too angrily (in my view) that he will only read my blog if I stop writing "about shit and sex".

I try to point out to him that porn and sex only have an incidental connection, in that it involves nudity, but he is having none of that ... so OK bye Vince.

I suppose I am not an ordinary tourist. When I go to a new city, I want to know how ordinary people live there. Thus I spend most of my time in bars trying to connect to the locals. I will take in the odd museum here and there, but that would not be my main aim. No ... strolling the streets of New York, Paris, Budapest or where-ever and stopping for a beer here and there is more my scene.

In these wanderings I often land up in the seedier parts of whatever city I am in. Here one normally finds the brothels, stripshows and porn shops. I normally skip the brothels and strip shows, not out of any kind of prudery, but because my budget would not allow for it.

But as a consumer of porn, I do go into porn shops and this is where I learnt that different nations have different tastes in porn. I am not talking about the normal 'sucking and fucking' porn that you get everywhere ... it is more what I would call cultural niche markets in porn.

The careful observer will notice that certain types of porn would be given a more prominent place in the general display.

I begin with the Americans, not only because they're the biggest producers and consumers of porn, but also because their porn is so true to form. I may be mistaken, but it is my impression that the US is often trying to fuck the world up the arse with the best technology available to mankind ... and so is their porn ... clinical, high definition and anal.

The French prefer things to be au naturel and it is not surprising that they like amateur porn. They also have a little penchant for lesbian porn but I think amateur is their thing.

The Dutch and the Spanish have a surprising connection in porn. They seem to like animals. I suppose it must have something to do with those long sea voyages undertaken by their forbears ... you know that goat winking at one in a cute kind of a way after the third month on the open sea...

The Germans ... in a probable rebellion against their ordered existence, like it messy. Real messy ... like in scatological ... pissing and shitting ... OK let's move on.

The Japanese, in contrast, like it clean. For them it is pantyhose, short plaid tartan skirts, light bondage ... They are also not so obsessed with shaving off the last pubic hair in the world as the Americans are.

Surprisingly the Eastern Europeans seem to like public nudity. I is surprising in the light of the amount of it on display in say Budapest on a hot summer's day.

And South Africans? Well the darkies seem not to be interested at all and they probably think the whiteys are crazy for furtively sneaking into the shops where they man the cash registers in a bored kind of a way.

My own friends frown on porn, but they are not average South Africans. My own view is that South Africans like the emotional porn that is to be found in the twin magazines You and Huisgenoot.

A multi-billion dollar almost global media empire, Naspers/Media24, was built on the back of the schmaltz peddled in the form of 'human drama' by those two, the one in Afrikaans and the other in English.

Myself personally ... ? I like my porn soft. No penetrations, no spread-em wide, no insertions ... just beautiful naked women.

OK Vince, you can come back now ...

Meanwhile I dropped a 1.5l bottle of red wine on my big toe ... fortunately it did not break ... the bottle I mean .... my toe well ... let me put it this way: I am not as mobile as I was yesterday.