You're Getting Super High-Def Porn Whether You Like It Or Not

A small porn studio in Southern California betting the fuck-farm on a new technology that promises to make the art of filming various body parts and things entering various body holes so graphic that you can practically smell the crotch sweat and feel the chafing. “Super high definition porn” that makes you feel like you’re there! The American dream!

A piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal details the next ultra-realistic in-home entertainment frontier at Vegas’s tech mega-show CES. It’s television so real that you feel like you’re there. It’s only a matter of time before it’s front-and-center on Best Buy pull out ads attempting to convince you that you need to buy it for your loved ones during this upcoming 2014 Holiday Shopping Season™: It’s called Ultra High Definition — or 4k, for the number of pixels of horizontal resolution it features — and consumers of expensive toys for grown ups will soon be able to enjoy it porn shot using it, thanks to a substantial up front commitment from a company called Naughty America. Here’s the WSJ:

In spite of the costs, [Naughty America CEO Andreas] Hronopoulos is convinced that the investment will be worth it, because 4K hits at one of the most important selling points for his clientele: giving viewers the ability to feel like they’re really there.

“Yes, you need a lot of computing power,” he says. But given the demands of his customers, he added, “the closer we can come to making it feel like you’re there, the more successful we are.”

Let the last part of that quotation sink in: “the closer we can come to make it feel like you’re there, the more successful we are.” This is a porn company.

Now, I admit that I’m far from a pornography connoisseur, and I’m sure I don’t speak for all dabblers in skin flicks when I say this: but when I watch pornography, the last thing I’m thinking is, my stars, do you know what would make this sad solo masturbatory experience even better? If I were actually inside the soulless McMansion where this sex was filmed, nostrils full of the scent of crotch and lube, face like 2 inches from smacking flesh. *orgasms super hard just thinking about it*

No, Naughty America. I do not want to feel like I am there.

Secondly, adult film actors need to put up with enough aesthetic demands as it is; we have hi-def to thank, in part, for genitalia shaved and waxed to the point of irritation, for extra sessions in the spray tan booth, for extra trips to the plastic surgeon’s table, all in the name of preserving sexual fantasy in the face of technology that promises endlessly more realistic images. My bikini line winces in solidarity with what fresh hell this ushers in for social expectations of female genitalia.

But this isn’t the first time the media has presented us with a bleak, high def future for porn; witness 2007’s mini-freak out over the advent of hi-definition TV, a technology so unwanted by some that the New York Times wondered if it porn was doomed. It wasn’t. However, for the sake of adult film actresses’ personal grooming regimens, I hope dudes who watch porn decide they like 70’s style bush again. And soon.