Porn is one of those things that many people think about, watch and wonder about. We fantasize about it, we wonder what it is like to create it and some of us even perform in it. So why has there been so little research into the nitty gritty of our sexy fun viewings? There are some aspects of porn that are considered, but what about the basics. The words we use for porn. What we search for. What we desire.
Enter the people of Proctor and Lever (don’t worry, they use lots of lube). They are seizing the opportunity to advance our knowledge of porn by utilizing the methods of Porn for Science in the hope of creating the Porn Genome Project. To learn more, I spoke with Proctor and Lever’s Director of Media Relations, Chet Chutney.
When did you know that Proctor and Lever was the leader in all things sexual (and countless other industries)?
Well, you’ll forgive me if I gush, but the story of Proctor and Lever is a story of unbridled success. The Cocke family founded P&L as an arsenic refinery in 1911, and ever since, it has been a near straight shot to the moon! It’s amazing what a diverse portfolio of brands P&L has managed to bring their unique, personal touch to, in a way that really makes people’s lives better. Obviously our “I Can’t Believe It’s Margarine” product is a heart healthy alternative to the artery clogging butters that the cutting edge scientists of the 60s and 70s knew was a serious threat to our health. And by by making sure our margarines contain absolutely no transgendered fats, you know that you will be saving money long-term on conversion therapy for your gender confused child. That sure makes it easy to “Spread a Little Cis-Shine”! Our Spartan UberThyn ThynSkyn condoms offer our customers a safe way to enjoy life, protecting very reliably against most known STIs and common methods of insemination, while offering almost no protection against pleasure. Spartan Condoms make it as safe as it can be to “Lead the Discharge”. But as I imagine most of your readers are aware, P&L really became the whetstone that hones the cutting edge of pornosexual science when we acquired Porn for Science Industries from the US government in 1989. As I’m sure the history buffs amongst your readery are aware, PFS Industries was originally founded at the behest of the House Un-American Activities Committee to serve as a bulwark against the rising tide of Homo-Communism in the 1950s. Now, we couldn’t be more proud of our work preventing and treating a whole host of porn-related diseases, including nostrilismus, rectal fracking, penile raisenetting, vaginal kelping, somNAMBLAism, and sex lupus.
If you weren’t a P&L champion, how would you spend your days?
Honestly, I can’t imagine my life without Proctor and Lever. Being part of a company that employs so many people, does so much work in the community, and offers such consistent and robust financial returns to its proud owners is what I’ve always wanted. I think that deep down, that’s what everybody wants. So I guess the answer to your question is, I’d do something else for Proctor and Lever! Maybe I’d work answering telephones in our world class customer service facility in Darra Adam Khel, in beautiful Pakistan. By moving our call centers there, we are helping to raise the standard of living and make life more safe for the residents of Darra Adam Khel by offering them a life outside the black market arms trade. Serendipitously, we chose a great time to partner with an economy which has been promised a particularly warm relationship with our esteemed President Elect Trump, who said that “[Pakistan] is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people…I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems.” Sounds like another smart move by P&L!
Please describe the current state of porn in a haiku.
Porn – A Haiku
Rarely want you want.
Where’s the proper data?
Numbers get us hard.
The Porn Genome Project offers an incredible opportunity to quantify an entire entertainment industry that has rarely been studied in detail. Do you expect any surprises as data is collected?
Well, to be honest Jon, that’s a difficult question. It’s always hard to know what we don’t know. For example, how would you answer if I asked you to name three animals you didn’t know existed? Tough, right? And unfortunately, this is the kind of question that our scientists, and all scientists, are faced with on a daily basis. AND scientific funding often hinges on scientists’ ability to answer this question compellingly for a non-scientific audience. What PFS hopes to do with the Porn Genome Project can’t be answered in a single sentence, because the Porn Genome Project isn’t an answer, it’s a tool to find answers with. This is basic research, meaning we are seeking knowledge about the nature of things without a specific goal. And in the same way that DARPA was just trying to figure out a way to move information from one computer to another when it laid the foundation for the internet several decades ago, we hope that our creation will provide us with a tool to answer countless questions over the coming years.
What do you think will be the top 3 noted porn categories and the bottom three categories?
Jon, categories are a problem. They create an illusion of choice. And by telling us what kind of things we might be interested in, porn companies today are forcing us to explore within the constraints of the vocabulary they provide. And simply put, this is no longer acceptable to the consumer of today. Would Spotify or Pandora be where they are today if they said, “Click here if you want to listen to rock, pop, or opera. Maybe your tastes are a little more sophisticated or specialized? We have bluegrass and death metal too! Or maybe you’re in to something particularly freaky and want to listen to a little Tibetan throat singing? Well, here’s every Tibetan throat singing song we’ve been able to compile, sorted by how recently we uploaded it!” No, of course not! I want to hear a song that’s an EDM influenced blend of Cyndi Lauper style 80s bubble gum pop and Ugandan hiphop beats, with a dubstep level drop in the middle, sung by a 19 year old Japanese girl raised in Britain who grew up listening exclusively to K-pop. Seriously, I would like that song.
But without dense math and reams of data in an expansive database, I’d be stuck listening to Youtube videos of Japanese men singing karaoke versions of “Hit Me Baby One More Time”. This is what the Porn Genome Project aims to do, at its most ambitious. We came to this world not to abolish categories, but to fulfill them. To achieve the promise that every website tacitly offers, exactly what you want to see.
Have you approached porn performers and producers to participate?
We have, but as with many visionary ideas before us, we have been met largely with a tepid response. We reached out to a number of connections in the porn industry, many of whom were known to our team through years of experience working in the pornosexual sciences, and the response was most commonly, unfortunately, radio silence. It seems that the road to a data-driven dirty deep dive runs not through the porn industry. Which is really a shame, given the history the porn industry has of influencing technological adoption, from tipping the scales in favour of VHS vs Beta in the early 80s, to leading efforts to develop more robust video streaming technology in the late 90s.
How can people help the Porn Genome Project?
Though nobody likes to beg for money, at this point, the answer is money. Time is running out for us to collect funds through our Indiegogo campaign. And though we usually rely on the superb investing instincts of our beloved captains of industry, the Cocke Brothers, to lead the distribution of funds within the corporation, our R&D budget for the year has been torpedoed by a number of on-going lawsuits against our Pumpers Diaper, Axehole Body Spray, Spartan Condoms, and Pop and Lock Home Protection products, and so we’ve had to avail ourselves of the global collective of perverts and pornography connoisseurs (a community which just so happens to dovetail with the target audience of this blog). With the amount of money we’ve raised so far, we will attempt to construct a functional prototype of the database we need in order to proceed, but the future of the project remains uncertain.
However, if the crowdfunding campaign doesn’t work out, we may be able to create new revenue streams by spinning off an adult diaper division from our Pumpers Diaper line. Our corporate spies in Russia have gathered preliminary evidence that the market for watersports in the United States might be about to get a boost from our dear leader and President Elect Trump.
