Sex : features

Fun blonde brings home bi-guy: welcome to the Xciting world of XTube

Jeannie Greeley — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:12:00 GMT

I first heard about XTube — YouTube’s naked, well-hung, slutty stepbrother, with even less talent and more ego — weeks ago from a friend, who gasped at my unfamiliarity with the sex site. I promptly went to my computer to begin my one-handed research. By then, XTube already had an entry in the Urban Dictionary (“A Web site like YouTube, but for porn. I saw your mom get fucked by your dad on XTube”), along with more than three million users. Its Canadian creators are rumored to have already purchased a $25 million island. (Canadian dollars, but still.)

Expecting some hack, amateur site, I was floored to discover a seemingly endless supply of every kind of porn imaginable. You could make raisins of your fingers getting off to this stuff. Videos are divided into straight and gay, then subcategorized into everything from “Swingers,” “Hairy,” and “Shemale” to “Daddies,” “Fisting,” and “Muscle Worship.” There’s even an anime section which, frighteningly, has more videos than the “Bisexual” and “Swingers” sections combined.

One minute you can be enjoying “Blonde amateur footjob babe,” and the next be glued to “Screaming housewife gets rammed by her first black cock.” The options are endless. And the best part about XTube is that it’s free.

But as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for. Though littered with links to DVDs and paid porn sites, the site that dubs itself “The Greatest Thing Since the Orgasm!” is essentially user-run. XTube video quality ranges from high-end, professional-looking scenes to shaky bathroom jerk-offs. (It’s also proof that many men will do anything to flaunt their meat.)

Though many users have complained about the site crashing or providing sluggish videos, my complaint is of another order. What the hell is a girl to do with 19 seconds of porn? Come on, people. If you’re going to make a frothing whore of yourself for millions of viewers, at least make a video that’s long enough to be worth it. Though the rare XTube video streams for longer than five minutes, the average one is somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes, which can make for a frustrating, albeit prolonged, experience.

Of course, if the user-contributed videos aren’t enough for you, XTube also has thousands of photos for viewing and purchase, plus chat rooms, community groups like the “Nasty Byches” and the “Strap-on Lovers,” and a store selling everything from anal lube to XTube ballpoint pens and boxer-briefs. For addicts of another kind, XTube has even partnered with Grand Nevada to present live nude gambling, with a dealer working in real time. And XTube offers its amateur contributors the opportunity to make money from their photos and videos through a revenue-sharing equation based on a contributor’s number of page views.

So what does this mean for the future of porn?

Reactions seem mixed. Some people with whom I’ve broached the subject have seemed disgusted, others intrigued, and still others as dumbfounded as I was when I first learned of the site. One guy was ecstatic at my newfound familiarity with XTube. “You know XTube?” he screamed, before whipping out his iBook, logging into his XTube account, and showing me a video of him screwing his boyfriend through a split in the seat of the guy’s pants.

As much as my mother is dying as she reads this, I like the idea of XTube. Something about professional porn makes me cringe a little bit. There’s always that glimpse of desperation or pain I see in a woman’s face; I lose my buzz thinking of the abusive dad and trailer-park past that led her down this road. At least with XTube it seems the participants are happier to be involved. And they’re certainly not making millions from their 20-cents-a-minute rates. It’s nice to see real women, sans implants and two-inch talons, actually looking like they’re enjoying sex with their boyfriends, girlfriends, or husbands. Last week I watched a black chick completely destroy her boyfriend. And though her moves made me feel like less of a sexual being, I enjoyed the refreshing role-reversal.

Like journalists fretting over the proliferation of blogs, I’m sure some porn stars are shaking in their silicon about this organic, amateur competitor. No doubt some of the folks involved with XTube will achieve cult status. Some of its more popular stars have already been featured in men’s magazines, and at press time, Canada’s Fab magazine was trolling the site for gay men interested in being interviewed about their XTube popularity. The porn industry will likely follow suit, swooping in and snagging the site’s most popular players to cast them in feature-length films.

But there’s another byproduct of XTube that seems less explored: it offers a window into someone’s sexual soul. YouTube and MySpace have essentially allowed us to discover everything about a person before we meet them. We know their likes and dislikes, talents, hobbies, quirks, even all the famous bands with which they’re tight. Now, with XTube, we can check out the goods, watch them in action, see if we think we’d be compatible in the sack. We can hear the noises they make, learn about their stamina. We can check to see if they dub themselves “kinky man” and snap clothespins on their penises, or go by the screen name “slutwife” and have regular gang-bangs with their friends.

Welcome to a world where nothing is private. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go change my pants. @

Jeannie Greeley is a freelance writer who likes to “Log On. Get Off” at www.xtube.com. She can be reached at jeannieg@comcast.net.

Grin and bear it: a wildlife adventure

Jeannie Greeley — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 18:48:00 GMT

THIS 6’ 9”, 400-pound man starts lifting his massive, furry body out of the oceanside pool. The heather-gray briefs he’s using as a makeshift bikini suction to his comparatively tiny ass.

“No laughing!” he shouts to me and my two skinny pals, watching the scene unfold like a competitive sport. “No laughing!”

Laughter isn’t a reaction we could even conjure. It’s more disbelief. We are three lesbians in a sea of bears. Yes, bears. We have unknowingly arrived in Provincetown for the kickoff of its annual Bear Week celebration, which draws thousands of pot-bellied, pelted, bearded gay men from around the globe to come and hunt one another. We are like visitors at a zoo, studying the various members of the species, trying to interpret their behavior.

“They are fat,” my friend says dryly, “but it looks like they work out. There’s muscle underneath.”

Most seem shorter than your average man, or perhaps their bellies are creating a disproportionately stout look. Many are older; others have enough ink on them to write a novella. If they were dressed in jeans and work boots, they could be your electrician, plumber, uncle, mechanic. They are dudes to the extreme. And they just want to *** the snot out of each other, which probably scares the crap out of your average straight man.

“That guy can get his dick sucked tonight,” I whisper to my friend as the man completes his exit from the pool.

“It’s not fair!” she protests, plagued by a prolonged bout of *** celibacy. “It’s like the world has been turned upside-down.”

For those of you reading this article who still think I’m referring to large, carnivorous mammals, you’re close. The bears I’m talking about are actually a subculture of the gay community that originated sometime in the 1980s in San Francisco. They began as sort of an offshoot of the biker and leather communities, and are known for shunning stereotypical effeminate gay behavior with their displays of über-masculinity, ranging from excessive facial and body hair to extreme muscle and girth. When not dressed in Speedos and rubbing lotion on one another’s matted backs, they can likely blend easily into a straight world.

You can read all you want about so-called “subcultures,” but until you witness them in their natural habitat, you’ve got no clue. And despite the fact that I’m a member of the “gay community,” there are a million little facets and subcategories around which I still need to wrap my brain.

Fortunately, we had two gazelle-like gay basketball players to give us some insight.

“If I woke up next to that man,” one said, “I would set us both on fire.”

Surveying the scene, he pointed out husky former collegiate cheerleaders, an Asian bear who was too “queeny” for his liking, retired linebackers, and muscle men.

My friend piped in. “Where are the black bears?”

Turns out the bear community has been criticized for being racially limited, but in my observation, a) there aren’t a ton of openly gay black men to begin with; b) fat, gay black men probably don’t want to have sex with other fat, gay black men; and c) Barry White is dead.

As the afternoon progressed, our curiosity remained piqued. “What if you want to be a bear but you’re naturally thin?” my friend wondered. Is this simply a clique for gay men once they become old and heavy? How does one determine a “top” in a physical match-up of this caliber?

After their pool time, large men once clad in bathing suits appeared wearing T-shirts with slogans like “Hairy 69” and “Bear411.” Some sported a military aesthetic, with combat boots and fatigues. Many wore Tommy Bahama shirts, cargo shorts, and Teva sandals. If you lopped off their heads, they could have been bull dykes.

I asked one bear from Montreal about a rumor I’d heard that his city’s pride parade had been canceled.

“Good,” he said. “I think the parade just perpetuates negative stereotypes of gay people.”

I laughed, assuming he was being sarcastic. “Look at you in your fatigues and combat boots, with your shirt that says, ‘You Were Hotter on Bear411,’ ” I said, “complaining about stereotypes!” He wasn’t kidding. I love how some gay people go to such extremes to fit a certain stereotype and then balk at being stereotyped. You are a big, fat, hairy gay man who likes having his boots licked. Own it.

Perhaps my impressions of the bear community seem ignorant or naive. I don’t really care. While the larger world might view the gay community as one big, frolicking love fest, it’s really not. Some of the fags hate the dykes. Some of the dykes hate the fags. Some of the bears hate the twinks, and vice-versa. Our worlds are segregated. There’s a Bear Week, a Women’s Week, a Circuit Week, a Women of Color Week, a Leather Week, and so on. We know a lot less about one another than people might imagine.

Maybe if we blended together more often, we could learn a little bit about each other. And then the dykes wouldn’t all go running for the hills when the frenzied circuit boys come to town. And the men wouldn’t bolt the doors to their guest houses when the lesbians arrive.

Or maybe this is exactly how people like it. Maybe we should just stay out of each other’s hair. @

Jeannie Greeley is a clean-shaven freelance writer. She can be reached at jeannieg@comcast.net.