Recently I was surfing the web in search of Xtreme kink — an activity that's known as "pornographic rubbernecking" — when I found the Neck Brace Appreciation Klub, a small-but-dedicated group of regular folks who just happen to be into "'recreational & artistic' neck and back bracing." From there, I clicked over to "Big Gulp," a collection of homemade porn in which celebrities like Madonna and Lou "Incredible Hulk" Ferrigno gobble up wriggling Lilliputians. Imagine an X-rated Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. Imagine a hardcore version of The Amazing Colossal Man starring gay-porn superstud Zak Spears. Imagine . . . oh, hell, just visit the damn thing yourself.
    This stuff may be dead earnest, but it seems designed for rubberneckers like me. The appeal of fetish sites has begun to reach far beyond their core fandoms to a new wave of subcultural sightseers.

For them, Web porn devoted to midgets, mummylike swaddling in Cling-Wrap, or "furverts" who make it with plush toys (or, better yet, as plush toys) is about shock value, not the pleasure principle. "The point in rubbernecker pornography is sensation," argues Susie Bright in "The Future of Porn," an essay included in her forthcoming collection. "The point is a physical jolt, a thrill, a taboo which until this gross-out moment was intact."
    At the moment, nothing says "gross-out" like bukkake, the porno genre in which a group of men masturbate on a woman's upturned face. Like all S/M, bukkake is ritualized domination and desecration of feminine purity, in this case the purer the better: "They plan to use her for their own sexual satisfaction, then completely HUMILIATE her!," pants a come-on for FacialHumiliation.com. Nothing new here, to anyone familiar with De Sade's gleeful descriptions of virgins flogged, sodomized and worse.
    What is new, in at least one corner of the facial-comeshot universe, is that the genre's De Sadean tendencies are being retouched and reinvented by digital software.

The "best" of these images — produced, or at least peddled, by PrivateGold.com, a domain name registered to Cyprus-based Fraserside Holdings, Ltd. — depict radiantly smiling, impeccably made-up models, glossy lips parted to receive a shot of goo.
    Clearly targeting the American market, PrivateGold's images trade the abject depravity of Japanese bukkake for a pert, Pepsodent-smiling optimism. In the best American tradition, they celebrate technological progress: each model is retouched to posthuman perfection, each cock is enhanced to highlight its bulging glans and knotty veins so that it looks like the ripped, rock-hard arm of a bodybuilder. Like Wayne Newton, Wendy Whoppers and other pure products of American madness, PrivateGold's facials are a monument to delirious artificiality. Their supersaturated aesthetic harks back to Technicolor movies, the airbrushed album-cover art of the '70s, and the paintings of Maxfield Parrish.

    At the same time, they're utterly contemporary, winkingly subverting their own conventions. You don't have to be a kill-your-TV, no-logo type to see that PrivateGold's farcical facials are a squirt in the eye of the inflatable, untouchable goddesses of American advertising. Evoking the happy, shiny irony of Diesel ads, they act out many male consumers' desire, equal parts Freud and Marx, to soil the android perfection of supermodels and centerfolds with a sticky puddle of splort. This is what all the leering couples wrestling with spraying hoses in those Newport cigarette ads would look like, if Newport came clean about its subliminal seductions.
    With their gleaming highlights and strobelike special effects, digitally retouched "facials" are postmodern porn. The hyperreality of PrivateGold's images reaches its dizziest heights in the comeshots themselves: gobs of come, frozen in mid-flight — are both realer than real and hopelessly unreal. Their zigzagging trajectories bend more laws of physics than Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix. In the image I'm looking at as I write this, a jet of jism pulls a sudden right turn, away from the woman's waiting lips, toward another, outstretched penis, as if drawn by a homoerotic magnetism.

In another image, a streaking comet of come appears to loop the loop. In a third, the stream turns on a dime and rockets away from the model's mouth, toward the startled viewer. And then there's the photo that gives new meaning to the phrase "splatter movie:" a triumph of special effects, it features a phallus that simultaneously ejaculates two streams of come in different directions. One spurts into the model's mouth while the other whizzes toward her eyebrow, doubling back at the last minute to carom off her nose, zing past her cheek, and exit stage right.
    Of course, this is porn, so it still has to pack a groin buzz, no matter how weird it looks. But what's the deeper meaning of PrivateGold's fake facials? Are they our first glimpse of a new wave of porn, one that will strike off the shackles of tedious realism?
     If so, it's about time. Plastic surgery and Photoshop have already given us a posthuman aesthetic, in Playboy Bunnies and Penthouse Pets who look as if they've been remodeled by the imagineers responsible for Disney's audio-animatronic robots. And premodern porn is fraught with impossible anatomies and unnatural acts, from multiple-breasted effigies of Artemis to the men with Godzilla-sized units in 18th century Japanese woodcuts.
    In his Panic Encyclopedia, Arthur Kroker theorized that technology (phone sex, cybersex, etc.) had enabled "sex without secretions."

Kroker and his co-authors declared that we had "already passed . . . beyond sex as nature and beyond sex as discourse, to sex as fascinating only when it is about recklessness, discharge and upheaval." For Kroker, cybersex is as distant from flesh-against-flesh intercourse as The Matrix's time-stopping, gravity-defying triple kicks and cartwheels are from pre-CGI fight scenes.
    Then, too, as Lynn Hunt, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, tells John Tierney in his New York Times article, "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress," porn in the modern sense of the word is inherently cyborgian. It "reduces sex to a set of technologies that arouse desire, satisfy desire, create new desires," says Dr. Hunt. "Pornography is about cataloguing all the variations, treating human bodies as interchangeable parts in machines."
    It's a no-brainer, then, that a truly pomosexual porn, combining Crouching Tiger wirework, prosthetic effects, Japanimation, and bleeding-edge computer-graphics with the post-literate visual narratives of a Cindy Sherman or a Joel-Peter Witkin, is long overdue. Imagine semen spiraling through the air in Matrix-style "bullet time"; clusterfucks inspired by The Matrix Reloaded's "Burly Brawl." Why not a live-action version of a manga bondage nightmare? How about an Imax version of George Bataille's The Story of the Eye? A CGI version of Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden? A triple-X remake of Busby Berkeley by Matthew Barney? Speaking of whom, bring on the giants! The satyrs! The tapioca and the petroleum jelly! Lame though they may seem, PrivateGold's F/X facials are a vision of things to come.  n°