Language in Porn

Picture courtesy of Jules Jordans from Weapons of Ass Destruction #7

If you search the portmanteau ‘Girlvert’ online, the top hit is the Wikipedia page of Ashley Blue, who made a name for herself in the popular JM Productions series, Girlvert.

What the fuck is a ‘portmanteau,’ you ask’ A portmanteau is a word made of two other words that have been smushed together, such as ‘smog’ from ‘smoke’ and ‘fog.’

‘Girlvert’ of course is a combination of ‘girl’ and ‘pervert,’ but that doesn’t actually quite make sense, as the word ‘pervert’ does not actually imply any gender. A pervert can be a man or a woman, and the prefix ‘per’ does not ever mean ‘man’ or ‘male.’ Hence, combining ‘girl’ and ‘pervert’ does not make sense in any strict sense, the way saying ‘policewoman’ does make sense, being that the default is ‘policeman,’ making the default male.

What the portmanteau ‘girlvert’ implies is that ‘girl’ means ‘girl,’ ‘per’ means ‘man,’ and ‘vert’ means ‘pervert.’ So perhaps then a perverted farm animal would be a called a ‘zoovert,’ and a perverted human of no particular gender could be an ‘anthrovert.’ Excuse me, I meant to say, a verted animal is a zoovert and a verted genderless human is an anthrovert.

At least, that is what porn would have us believe. Porn twists and modifies our language in all sorts of ways, some of them just strange, like the above, and other times more delightful. One of my favorite cases is, unsurprisingly, in regards to ass-to-mouth. Ass-to-mouth is often abbreviated as ATM, which in the real world means ‘automated teller machine,’ better known as a ‘cash machine.’ However, both in porn and in real life exists the term ‘ATM machine”but here only porn is in the right, not reality.

In real life, ‘ATM machine’ is a silly redundancy as the ‘M’ in ‘ATM’ already means ‘machine.’ By saying ‘ATM machine’ you are implying that ‘ATM’ somehow stands for ‘cash”which is absurd. But in porn, adding ‘machine’ after ‘ATM’ is perfectly logical; an ATM machine is someone who goes ass to mouth automatically, unquestioningly, and efficiently’like a machine. Thus, by referencing ‘ATM machines,’ porn is taking a common lexicon mistake and rescuing it, transforming the error into a beautiful description, like a hippie using recycled tin cans to make gorgeous art.

The amusing puns and cultural references in porn titles are largely known, and too many to list in full, but the highlights are really superb: Weapons of Ass Destruction from Jules Jordans site, Too Big to Fail, and The Spit and the Speculum by Mike Adriano, are far and away my favorites, and I look forward to future amusing titles’you should as well.

The one gap in pornographic word play that irritates me is that nobody, to my knowledge, has taken advantage of the fact that the Spanish word for anus is ‘ano.’ This should be exploited mercilessly because the Spanish demonym for many Latin American countries’coincidently’ends in ‘ano.’ In Spanish, someone from Mexico is a mexicano. For Cuba it’s cubano, for Colombia it’s colombiano. As such, most anal Latino porn should have titles like Down MexicANO Way, All the Way Up that CubANO, Sweet Sweet ColombiANO. Unfortunately, there are a number of countries south of the border that don’t have naughty demonyms, most importantly Brazil, which is brasile’o, but even so, whenever possible, this pun should be shown to the world’much like nice anuses should be.

So, like with so many things pornographic, porn’s impact on language has thus far been interesting, even promising, but there is in-arguably a lot of room for growth.