22 year old. College student. New Jerseyite. Significant other.
Adora is all these things.
She is also a nude model.
“I have been modeling since February 2009,” Adora- better known as Adora the Great to family, friends and fans- admits in an email interview.
Although the self-described burlesque pick up artist’s career has just started, the cherry-haired, leggy beauty has managed to create a reputation as one of the most-in demand pin-ups in internet porn, gracing some of the most popular sites on the Web to date. As a result, she has found herself in an unusual position as a celebrity of sorts in an odd subculture in porn- that of alt-porn, or hipster porn, as it is sometimes referred to.
Not a hipster herself- she laughs off the idea- Adora is not ashamed of her body, nor is she ashamed of the reputation she has made from flaunting it.
“I love my body,” she says. “Modeling is a lot of fun for me. I love to look at the end result [of my photo sets] and share them with others. That all makes me feel very good!”
Adora is one of hundreds of young women lucky enough to work in a niche carved out by a decade and a half of women toiling both in front of and behind the camera- a legacy of third wave feminism, with its emphasis on the empowerment of women’s bodies, from strippers to performance artists to run of the mill housewives living in conservative suburbs.
Megu is a typical example. The proprietor of alt porn website, inkygirls.com- she describes it as a “mom and pop shop, without the pop”- Megu has made her bones from photographing nude or semi-nude models, mostly women, blurring the conventional lines of taste that prevail in an industry known more for shots of blonde cheerleaders with hourglass curves than Rubenesque models with punk-rock hair.
“For me, alt porn has a different aesthetic, and by extension a different attitude and view of the world,” she says in an email interview. “It’s obviously edgier, more artistic, and a lot cooler. There are closer ties to music and art too.”
She is not exaggerating. Since its beginnings as a series of art house projects in the early 1990s, alternative porn has grown into something of a community inside a community within the hipster subculture. Blogs such as blueblood.com frequently feature interviews with unsigned and up and coming bands- not to mention up and coming porn stars. As a result, the world of alt porn and the larger hipster culture has become intertwined, and even though some in the mainstream of the subculture might not acknowledge it openly, porn plays an important role in their sexual development.
In a 2008 article for the Dutch magazine Kunstbeld, erotica author and professor of human sexuality Audacia Ray touched on the incestuous link between art and erotica in the alt-porn community.
“Although many of the websites that fall under the ever-growing genre of alt-porn feature women (and men) in various states of undress,” Ray writes. “Their relationship to porn is a complicated one, as many of the sites and their models identify primarily with artistic and musical subcultures that exist outside of, and sometimes in contrast to, the big business of the adult film industry.”
Not surprisingly, the internet plays a crucial role in this as well. From message boards to social networking, the alt porn community more or less has embraced the web 2.0 with abandon. On any given day, there are hundreds of active forums discussing everything from the latest Joanna Angel pic to indie music to the recession’s impact on the porn community at large. The result has been an economic and cultural boom for alt porn, with websites such as Suicide Girls and Supercult making a successful enterprise out of talking to and interacting with their fans, many of them young males and females, aged 18 to 30.
For a brief period of time, Inky Girls was part of this transformation in alt porn, with forums and blogs of its own. Not so much these days.
“Inky Girls doesn’t have a community anymore,” Megu says. “So I don’t communicate with members unless there’s some kind of random question or problem. Once in a while I’ll talk with members on Twitter or MySpace.”
Although Megu goes out of her way to stress that most of the interactions with her fans are positive, the majority of her time is spent with models, photographers, and anyone else she happens to interact with on a daily basis. Occasionally a professional photographer will step into the fray to help, but it’s a DIY affair most of the time.
“Inky Girls is not a company,” she says. “That should tell you how I feel about ownership and independence.”
She is not alone. According to Google, there are over 3 million sites categorized in one way or another as alt porn, and although artists and fans struggle to define it, the intersection of art and flesh remains a titillating subject for hipsters and non-hipsters alike.
“For me alt porn is something I can relate to more than traditional porn.” Megu says. “It’s way more attractive and interesting than vanilla porn.”
–John Winn