From: "Keri" <coull1-AT-btinternet.com>
Subject: For Erik: Review of the furniture porn site
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 09:14:10 -0000


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.




> Hot seats
> Want to get off watching fornicating office chairs or "hot gay teen lawn
> chair sluts"? Check out Furniture Porn!
> By King Kaufman
> March 06, 2002 08:16:00 PM
>
> Is it hot in here? Or is it just ...
> My chair, baby!
>
> I think it's me, because I've been spending a little too much time at
> Furniture Porn, which is not the Ikea home page -- though that's pretty
hot,
> too, in a cool, Scandinavian kind of way if you know what I mean and I
think
> you do -- but is in fact a porn site, sort of, where you can watch pieces
of
> furniture, usually chairs, having sex with each other.
>
> Yes, I am feeling OK, thank you. Why do you ask?
>
> Furniture porn has a little something for everyone, as long as we define
> everyone as those people who like to look at pictures of chairs posed in
> such a way that it looks like they're doing the seat-cushion mambo.
>
> There's Lance, a "virile overstuffed armchair," in the full upright and
> locked position with Debbi, "a pink baroque beauty." "When the owner's
away,
> wow, do they play!!!" There's the bondage chair, a simple black model
bound
> with rope because, apparently, "Baby did a bad, bad thing." There's
> something for those with a taste for the wild side -- "hot gay teen lawn
> chair sluts!" There's even a furniture porn movie and a treat for those
with
> an eye for celebrity sex: In a Furniture Porn exclusive, "Chairlie's
> Angels" -- director's chairs with the names "Barrymore," "Diaz" and "Liu"
> stenciled on their backrests -- sizzle salaciously by the seashore.
>
> And there are links to unrelated sites with similar sensibilities, such as
> Prawnography and Playcow, which features Playcows of the Month Jenny
> McCowthy and Pamoola Anderson.
>
> Furniture Porn is the brainchild of T. Mike Childs, a member of the Los
> Angeles sketch comedy group the Van Gogh-Goghs and also the father of the
> Rocklopedia Fakebandica, which contains "all the fictional bands and
singers
> from TV and movies listed in one convenient, scarily obsessive place."
>
> Hoping he won't say anything I don't want to picture as I drift off at
> night, my naked buttocks dangerously close to a mattress and box spring
that
> for all I know is wanted on a morals charge relating to an incident with
an
> end table in Tennessee, I ask Childs how he came up with the idea for
> Furniture Porn. "Well, I received a gift of two chairs, the Lance and
Debbi
> chairs in the pictorial, the really fancy, overstuffed ones," he says. "I
> was just really struck by how masculine one chair was and how feminine the
> other chair was. You don't really see that in modern chairs; these were
> older. So for some reason I just found that really compelling, and I had a
> weekend where all my apartment mates were out of town and I was really
> bored, and I had a full roll of film in my camera. So I just started
> screwing around, and then after I had the film developed I was so
> embarrassed I kind of just tucked the pictures in a drawer for a year."
>
> He eventually came across the photos again, and this time he showed them
to
> somebody. "And they were like, 'Hey, that's hilarious, put 'em on the Web
> site.'" So he did. This was around 1996, Childs says, meaning that
Furniture
> Porn is one of the older sites out there, a relic of the wild,
freewheeling,
> sex-without-an-antimacassar days of the early World Wide Web. Furniture
Porn
> started, as part of the VGG site, with the pictorial of Lance and Debbi,
and
> slowly expanded, mostly with pictorials by Childs, though the gay lawn
chair
> sequence was added by Van Gogh-Gogh Galen Black.
>
> "We did have the problem at the very beginning when it was just one page;
> people just stole the whole page and put it on their site, and we had to
> write some nasty letters to people and their ISPs," Childs says. "But we
> haven't really had any problems since we moved it to furnitureporn.com and
> made it so big that it's a little unwieldy for people to steal."
>
> The site has waves of popularity, mostly fueled by word-of-mouth. "People
> think it's hilarious and they tell all their friends, and the e-mails
start
> flying around," Childs says. "It's kind of funny because several of us
have
> received links to it saying, 'You've gotta check out this site.' I think
> that's a sign of success."
>
> Yes, and so is the way my chair is caressing me. Or am I imagining that?
The
> power of suggestion is strong at Furniture Porn because the site seems to
> have been created by someone who knows his way around a real Triple-X
barely
> legal awesome action you won't believe it you'll never go anywhere else
join
> now only $3.95 a month site.
>
> "Yeah," Childs laughs. "I had to do a little research. It wasn't
> particularly arduous."
>
> The little porn-site satires in the captions, the warning page and even
the
> alt tags are funny, but what makes the site work is that the chairs really
> do look like they're gettin' it on.
>
> "I know. It's amazing," Childs says. "It is also interesting how you can
> capture that sort of porn milieu without being dirty at all. There's
certain
> tropes and conventions of the genre that you can just exploit and make fun
> of."
>
> Childs says he's never heard from any real pornographers who might have
tips
> or criticism for him, though he is occasionally approached by porn sites
> that want to trade banners. He ignores those, he says, because he doesn't
> want any "real" porn on the site. "I guess I want to keep it family
> friendly. Does that make any sense?"
>
> Of course not. The sofa in my office tells me to ask Childs how he feels
> about the real must-be-18-to-enter thing.
>
> "Surfing the Internet," he says, "I'm amazed by the depth and ...
broadness
> of what's out there. Just every kind of porn imaginable is on the
Internet.
> So I guess our site is a reaction to that as well. The Internet allowed
all
> these weirdos to crawl out from every rock and go, 'Hey, we're not
weirdos.
> We're a subculture.'"
>
> Well, I'm not a weirdo. I just can't seem to get comfortable as I type
this.
> Whew! Funny feelings. I'm wondering, as I click through a pictorial
> featuring "Mr. Brown" and "Ms. White," a pair of amorous office chairs: Is
> this porn?
>
> "It's chairs!" Childs says. "They're just chairs! You can't touch me. You
> can't possibly indict me under any obscenity law in this country, can you?
I
> hope to God not."
>
> Speaking of getting arrested, I ask if the Van Gogh-Goghs make their
living
> with comedy. "Hell no. Dear God no," Childs says. The six men, who are all
> in their 30s, met in their mutual home state of North Carolina while half
of
> them were attending UNC-Chapel Hill. They moved to Los Angeles en masse to
> "make it," which they haven't. At the moment, Childs says, they're on a
> hiatus from performing while they work on some short films they hope to
> enter in festivals. In the meantime, Childs makes his living as a software
> tester, and all of the Van Gogh-Goghs work jobs that Childs calls "vaguely
> high-tech." The presence in the group of a programmer, a graphic designer
> and a copy editor helps make vgg.com and its offshoots a first-rate source
> of Web humor -- or, as Childs notes, "at least spelled correctly."
>
> He says next up for Furniture Porn might be an amateur section, in which
> people can submit photos of their own randy furniture. But believe it or
> not, in this seemingly amoral universe, there is a line that Childs and
> company will not cross.
>
> "We did have a serious discussion in the group, actually -- a semi-serious
> discussion," he says. "You know you can get those little kiddie, plastic,
> child-sized chairs? There was some brief discussion about whether we
should
> do a photo session with those, maybe adult-sized furniture and child
> furniture, and that's where we drew the line. Although it's still up for
> debate. That would be pushing the envelope even more, as it were."
>
> Hmmm. Envelopes. What's that rustling noise in the drawer?
>
> Oh my God! Envelope porn!






First they came for the Communists and I didn't speak
up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they
came for me, but by that time, no one was left to speak up. -- Pastor
Martin Niemoeller, Nazi Germany



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