Gimp in the Age of Woke

[petelobo]

Like, apparently, a significant percentage of the more active members of this Forum, my experience with gimp porn began around 1970 and has continued into my own 70's. I was around during the heyday of Blakemore and the various companies that showcased his work, first in magazines then in super-8 and other video formats, carefully testing the limits of censorship. His stable of models were largely housewives and students he found who were excited by his fantasies. They underwent whipping, stripping, suspensions, occasional burning, cruel penetrations, needles, generally nude with the natural hairy bushes accepted at the time. No fucking, no blow-jobs, not much in the way of vibrated to "endless" orgasms until the shooting was over and Blakemore himself (according to him) paid them with his cock. A much younger Jac started Red Feline and made a number of simple films with girlfriends that continue to provide images for people who get into this "kink" even today.

There were plenty of other small companies making their own versions of BDSM material, some of it not very good, and some pretty well-done. Anyone who has spent time looking at more recent websites and groups like this has seen hundreds of images and clips from those days.

In the next decade or two, as with the rest of business in the US and western world, the companies got larger, with P.D., Paingate, Whipped Women, Paintoy and others cranking out decent material a couple times a week for target audiences. The production values improved and some pretty decent stuff could be found among the constant flow, but (in respect to the girls, and to show that it was all in good fun, they were book-ended by videos of the girls talking about how much they enjoyed the experience and the de rigueur fake screaming vibratory orgasms.

In the past few years, as in pretty much all of western culture, everything has become pretty much increasingly fake, the models specialize and are convinced to get tattoos and piercings, shave off any hint of natural body hair. And, thanks to the internet and computer tech, the rise of the citizen pornographer has occurred. Many of the artists, the Roberts, Quooms, Bazzells, Mr. Kanes, and many others who came up through the new "magazines" began to produce really powerful BDSM images, freed from the reality of working on real human beings. Their stuff as well has become a mainstay of what appears on current sites like the GIMP, CruxForums and Deviant Art. But as they have died out or retired for various reasons, they are being replace by people who take someone else's image and touch it up and present it as their own work. Some are quite skillful, others just dab some red coloring onto an old pic. Some simply cap material from one of the few remaining producers (in Russia or Ukraine and still a few in the hotbed of Japanese port) and present it--not infrequently asking for monthly fees to see it.

Over the past few years, since Amy joined then left Red Feline or whatever it's called now, Jac has become enamored of shooting (but never managing to release) the short torture films which were his bread and butter during his heyday. He's now an artiste who only wants to make small big-budget films, searching for locations, testing actresses (by having them perform for him in the unreleased short films) planning costumes and needing increasingly expensive cameras and editing computers to release one extravaganza every couple years to be run in the nearly defunct theater network.

Today, the growing tips of BDSM or Cruel World in Russia, which allows people to pay to have their own scripts shot with (generally untatooed) models, and the nearly-defunct Ukrainian ElectricCity which keeps cobbling together new titles using material shot for previous films. Granted there are a few other companies in the west who produce porn of girls in bikinis, with or without tops. I've made maybe 8 torture videos with Cruel World over the past few years with gorgeous models who can act, generally effective make up and stories covering the range of torturers acceptable to the girls (whipping, burning, electro, suspension). I see caps from these appearing now on the various sites I visit.

The hot new thing now--with even Oz, one of the best of the realistic BDSM artists, trying it out--is, of course AI. The images that are presented are of naked women in positions that suggest GIMP possibilities. But apparently AI won't really do anything truly nasty, so the artist may go back into post and splash red (that is supposed to look like blood) onto the body here or there. An image of a woman who's been whipped unconscious or who is arching under electrical torture simply can't apparently be done. But more and more "artists" are shifting away from actual ability to draw to the ease of just typing in a brief description of a woman and considering that a finished piece.

I know that one of the oldest jokes about us elderly (even if our imaginations and dicks still work) is that the new is always worse than the old, but I hereby challenge any of my (mostly silent) GIMP members to make a case for any of the new "manips" or AI images as being as nasty and exciting as stuff from 10, 20 or even 50 years ago. I'd love to see some examples, but I won't hold my breath.

[Gray8059]

Well said indeed. My experience mirrors yours almost exactly - I remember back in the 70s ordering bondage slide sets from ads in the back of camera and photography magazines. As you said, over the next decade there were the magazines, 8mm, VHS and DVDs.

What I miss most is the variety that existed back then. I enjoy a range of content - most of it less intense than the majority of this forum - and what is being produced now seems more cookie-cutter. Cruel World seems to me to be in a rut of repeating content; most likely driven by the custom requests they get from a small group of customers. C4S has some decent producers, but not many.

I am in the unusual position of having a small window into the modeling world - I am a hobby photographer shooting glamour and a little light bondage looks (nothing even remotely GIMP) and I have worked with some of the popular US fetish models (Rachel Adams for example). The vast majority of them make most of their income from custom video orders, just like CW.

Not sure what all that means but I miss the "old days"....

[Laura]

Thank you both for bringing up this interesting topic. I am of that age that can recall the time when all that was available were "dirty" magazines and books and if lucky enough could afford an 8mm projector and be able to buy grainy "adult" films. There is just so much available now that it is almost overwhelming and I wonder what AI will eventually evolve into. I suspect that someday, barring some government intervention in this increasingly fundamentalist Christian theocracy we are heading towards anyone will be able to conjur up there deepest desires and have them fulfilled in seconds. I am not sure I am ready or will still have enough libido in my old body to enjoy it but it will be interesting if it comes to pass.

[cluseb]

Like, apparently, a significant percentage of the more active members of this Forum, my experience with gimp porn began around 1970 and has continued into my own 70's. I was around during the heyday of Blakemore and the various companies that showcased his work, first in magazines then in super-8 and other video formats, carefully testing the limits of censorship. His stable of models were largely housewives and students he found who were excited by his fantasies.


The hot new thing now--with even Oz, one of the best of the realistic BDSM artists, trying it out--is, of course AI. The images that are presented are of naked women in positions that suggest GIMP possibilities. But apparently AI won't really do anything truly nasty, so the artist may go back into post and splash red (that is supposed to look like blood) onto the body here or there. An image of a woman who's been whipped unconscious or who is arching under electrical torture simply can't apparently be done. But more and more "artists" are shifting away from actual ability to draw to the ease of just typing in a brief description of a woman and considering that a finished piece.

I know that one of the oldest jokes about us elderly (even if our imaginations and dicks still work) is that the new is always worse than the old, but I hereby challenge any of my (mostly silent) GIMP members to make a case for any of the new "manips" or AI images as being as nasty and exciting as stuff from 10, 20 or even 50 years ago. I'd love to see some examples, but I won't hold my breath.

With regards to the limits of AI. I feel compelled to remind people just how young AI. generated art is, and how much it has progressed in a very short period of time. When I first experimented with it all I expected of it was innocent faces looking scared, ( that I could cut and paste on to photos of bodies of porn stars ) and it delivered.


Last year I re-published an image I made years earlier that depicted Anne Frank getting a haircut upon arrival at Auschwitz, which is 100% cut & paste manip, with all individuals sourced from 3Dsk

as well as the same scene from a different perspective, this image is 100% AI. but it's also a cut and paste manip as each girl was generated separately

The first image took about 35 hours the second about 3 1/2

I cant draw for shit, and I seldom post an image that is not unique, I relied mostly on manipulating what is put up as consensual bdsm eg: Kink, Insex into non-consensual torture porn ( you won't see my victims sitting around in housecoats giggling " sure I'll come back and do it again ") the current limited AI. has become indispensable and I can't see my self going back to Czech Casting for faces that don't look like porn stars. But we have to give AI. time, it draws darn well for a two year old. But it doesn't yet understand all the ramifications of a bondage pose, for example the difference between hands over head and shoulder joints bearing ones full body weight, it will get there, If I prompt hanging from a rafter, it doesn't get the shoulders right but if I prompt " suspended by her arms from a trapeze bar" then its going to use gymnastic references with much more realistic results, I have every confidence it will continue to improve, But for now it's mostly going to contribute parts, faces and backgrounds, but every now and then I get a gem...

The girl, tree and shack were all in one prompt I only added the man, this was done on an early version of Stable delusion (no longer available ) as was most of my plantation work.
What I like best is I can get a consistent face through multiple images as long as I request a subject the model has been trained on, actresses work great because they get photographed a lot.

More examples of manips using AI. click blue ----> viewtopic.php?f=3&t=767&start=10

View counter .JPG (4.14 KiB) Viewed 11804 times

[theelectrician]

I really look forward to what AI can do, to play around with it and let it bring my visions "to life". The mentioned visual artists are great, but rarely produced the material I was looking for. Almost no films have replicated my imaginations closely enough. The same with written material. As I have zero artistic skills or talent myself, I am really betting big AI. I am not slagging off anyone's talent here, just my tastes are fairly narrow and I am fussy about details. AI will give me exactly what I want, or, and that is my biggest hope, will give me what I want while retaining some of the element of surprise that I enjoy with "real art".

The new woke puritanism will mean less and less people will dare to put out hardcore GIMP style art. Just too many ways to ruin your life. Are you going to risk your career so other people can have a good time? In my real life circle of BDSM friends and acquaintances I have 2 photographers and 1 painter, very talented people who occasionally combine their art and passion. None of them will publish or distribute digital copies of their art. One of the photogs will strictly shoot BDSM stuff on film and polaroid. We're all in our 20 and 30s and no one is even sharing nudes with sexual partners anymore unless in committed long term relationships. People have become much more careful over the last ten years or so.

[localroger]

Woke has nothing to do with it. For almost all of our entire lives, porn and other transgressive materials have been regulated by authorities who frankly don't want us to have what we want because they are afraid we will be having too much fun. There are only a few windows past that in all of modern history.

The pamphlets and stories of deSade, the Victorian porn novels, and the porn photosets and early pre-code movies got away with a lot because it was either impossible to regulate them with the technology of the time, or the "threat" to those authorities had not been recognized.

When porn came into the semi-open in the 1950's with magazines like Playboy and adult bookstores and theaters the producers danced around an uncertain gauntlet of obstacles to create things that would not be seized or prosecuted. In the 1960's a coalition of porn producers (most of which had been actual organized crime people until the semi-legality was established) created a framework of what was permissible and what was not. This was meant to minimize losses from seized shipments and raided shops and theaters, and mostly it worked for that purpose.

When porn got onto the internet in the mid 1990's the producers mostly kept following that standard out of habit. They had after all been following it for over 30 years.

It was Brent Scott aka PD of Insex who realized that on the internet at that time, there was no enforcement mechanism possible. He could do whatever he wanted and nobody could do anything about it. So he proceeded to do whatever he wanted, and nobody living had ever seen anything like it.

The other producers followed Insex warily knowing that a shoe might eventually drop. When it did it came from an unexpected direction. Since obscenity prosecutions had always turned out poorly for DOJ, they elected instead to misuse the PATRIOT act to go after the credit card servicers, since internet business wasn't really possible without credit cards. This shut down Insex, and forced Peter Acworth of Kink to get with his bankers and formulate a new set of guidelines. They were a bit different from the ones that ruled print in the 60's through 90's, but there were similar holes where you would never see an image of a certain type.

This is the reason that since 2010 or so nearly all BDSM porn has looked a lot like Kink's output. Providers who want to do something different have to either give it up for free, rely on sketchy credit providers in eastern Europe or the Far East, or ask for payment in things like bitcoin or Walmart gift cards. That keeps such operations small and transient.

And increasingly there is pressure to ban the wrong kind of images entirely by more fundamental means. It doesn't help that the web has almost disappeared, absorbed into a few "social media" providers all of whom use the most advanced techniques they can muster to ban those wrong kinds of images.

None of this is fundamentally about "wokeness." There is a distressing coalition between the far left and far right on this particular topic, first seen in its true starkness in the "porn wars" of the 1980's as this coalition tried to ram through porn bans through city ordinances using nefarious political techniques. For awhile this split the political left in half, but then Gen X and to even a greater extent Gen Z seem to have accepted alternate sexuality as an acceptable thing and the old Dworkin / McKenna arguments don't get much traction on the left any more.

But anyone who wants to produce an image or a movie has to be aware of how if ever they will get compensated for going to the trouble to do so. Often that puts us back into the 1970's where they will leave the otherwise naked model wearing panties, even though no realistic villain would ever do that, or take other shortcuts to protect their potential to be able to distribute their work.

[bakerboy]

I love Cluseb's work... just need some Mistress/ slavegirl angle to be prefect

[cluseb]

I love Cluseb's work... just need some Mistress/ slavegirl angle to be prefect

My first AI. female protagonist
I wanted Summer Glauas as a victim,

but Stable Diffusion always made her look like the good terminator from
"The Sarah Connor chronicles", so I cast her as a Russian

Same with Christina Ricci, AI. always puts too much Wednesday Addams in her

[La Reine Margot]

Like, apparently, a significant percentage of the more active members of this Forum, my experience with gimp porn began around 1970 and has continued into my own 70's. I was around during the heyday of Blakemore and the various companies that showcased his work, (...) A much younger Jac started Red Feline and made a number of simple films with girlfriends that continue to provide images for people who get into this "kink" even today.
(...)
Over the past few years, since Amy joined then left Red Feline or whatever it's called now, Jac has become enamored of shooting (but never managing to release) the short torture films which were his bread and butter during his heyday. He's now an artiste who only wants to make small big-budget films, searching for locations, testing actresses (by having them perform for him in the unreleased short films) planning costumes and needing increasingly expensive cameras and editing computers to release one extravaganza every couple years to be run in the nearly defunct theater network.

It's interesting to find Jac included in the world history of BDSM. It's nice.

However, somethings must be cleared.

Before Jac's and Camille's creation of Red Feline Pictures in 1998, Jac was already a known, young, director. His first feature film, a docu-drama about Haiti, was premiered at the Cannes film festival, that was 1988, 10 years before the creation of RFPIX. That first film went on to be screened all over the world in festivals like Telluride, London Film Festival and a host of others. It sold to TV all over the world, including a Network in Germany, Channel four in England, PBS in the US and many others. Long story.



Because of that film, that took Jac all over the world, passing through my home town back in 88, where we met, I joined him in his crazy world.

In 1992 we went from NY to Bolivia with the intention of making a feature film. Before going to the South American country, we registered a new film production company in NY, we named it Pachamama Films, which is the company that produces the big production values movies.
We ended up making a TV miniseries, The Man From The Moon, where Camille, aka Carmen, had the leading female role. The series was made in 1994, when Camille was 18 years old. I had a good role too.



The TV miniseries was very popular and it was shown on Network TV and on early cable in NY. It was nice to see our faces in the covers of TV guides and in large articles.



We made some documentaries after that, about ecological issues in the Jungles of Bolivia. Most of them at the end of 96, which became a very adventurous year.



In 97, before returning to NY, Jac and Camille were playing with a concept of crucifixion for an idea that Jac had for a feature film. Using a VHS camera first and later the more professional U-matic 3/4 inch Sony camera Jac had at the time, a 30,000 dollars camera, by the way. The idea was to shoot a couple of scenes involving a crucifixion, without any story line. With that idea, Jac and Camille worked on something like 20 short performance videos Camille went through the obligatory passion steps in a crucifixion. Floggings, scourgings, nailing, the agony of the cross.

The last of those videos, which by then were shot with the more professional camera, were coming out very nicely.

Jac commented to Camille one morning. "if we made one film like this, just the two of us, I bet it could make some money". Her response was "Let's do it!"

Jac and Camille made Red Feline on The Cross, the first of many crucifixion movies.



The success of that first film led them to make the inquisition series with Gabrielle joining the tiny production team, and soon after that Jac decided to make Martyr or The Death of St Eulalia.

Good money was coming in from the release of RFOC and the Inq series so it was easy to plan a big production values film like that, with French actors flown to NY, the rental of professional lights, the purchase of a brand new camera with better definition, the best at that time.

Before the production of Martyr, Jac worked with Gabrielle in the four part series Seven Days on the Cross, and after Martyr was made, the two worked on Crux Bride and that film with the new camera.

Martyr went to film festivals and when Amy saw it at a festival joined our team to begin a new cycle of films, all kind of films, including documentaries in the jungles of Bolivia, one for NatGeo where we recreated a town in Bolivia where an epidemic killed half of its population in the late 50's early 60's.



I bring this up because the impression that Jac went from making the Red Feline movies to the big production value films is mistaken. It's the other way around.

From the beginning of RFPIX, in 1998, until now, we made and released over 50 films. Maybe more, I have to check. Of those, over 40 are in our stores. We have at least 10 films in the works to be released during this year, and more to come until next year. That's a lot for a small company. Really.

In 25 years we released an average of 3 films per year. A lot of them big production value films like Maleficarum, Olalla, Dead But Dreaming, Barbazul and Justine that went to multiplexes and festivals. That is not easy to do.

We're working on the world release of Seditiosa, Pygmalion, CruXtreme V, Crux Simplex and others. And I won't go into what are the production plans for this year because it's totally exhausting just to think of it.



When I look back to all the work we did, I realize that we're not slow in releasing the films, I think, given the conditions of our work, we actually do a lot, huge a lot, with little, really, it's practically a miracle that we release the movies at the rate we do.

Every few of years we find ourselves needing to upgrade our equipment, buying new cameras, new computers, upgrading our apps... because that's how the world of high technology works and we have to get to the level everyone else is. That's another story.

And finally, our work includes the maintenance of this site, where you are reading this brief account of our history. At least the few of you who are taking the time to read it, if any one.

Hmm.... where did I get the time to write all this? I must be nuts. I'm sure maybe one person will take the time to read it. What a waste of my busy time.

[localroger]

Thank you for that historical recap, La Reine Margot. I knew bits and pieces of it but it's fascinating to see the whole thing put together in linear order.