It may not be there anymore when you look. Then again, maybe it will. After all, the article has… staying power.
As of July 30, 16:34 Japan Time, the Elder Porn story about a 74-year-old porn actor in Japan placed 8th among the articles most frequently read by TIME.com readers. What’s remarkable about this feat is that the article, posted on June 17, is more than a month old. By contrast, the next oldest article in the TIME Top 10 was posted on July 24, less than a week ago.
ADD July 31: I changed the first link to the article itself. It is down to number 10 as of 12:22PM.
3 comments:
Forgive me if you've posted about this earlier, but what do you think is the credibility behind that "Elder Pornstar" story? It almost seems like something that that Waiwai column would cover.
I dunno, Benjamin. I'm not that old. Besides, I only posted this because I was amazed a the story's longevity. The mainstream media is on a steady online drift towards sensationalism, and this example tells you why.
Seriously, it depends on what you mean by “credible”. Do I believe that the video featuring 74-year-old Shigeo Tokuda going down on 71-year-old Fujiko Ito (I read it off the image, if I may set the record straight) really exist? Yes. Do I believe Mr. Tokuda when he claims that he “prefers not to disclose his real name because, he insists, his wife and daughter have no idea that he has appeared in about 350 films over the past 14 years”, yet allows his porn video appearance, face and all, to be displayed prominently in a magazine that is well-known even in Japan? No. And why should Mr. “Tokuda arguably embod[y] the contemporary state of Japan's sexuality”? The correspondent segues into data showing the lack of sex in married couples in Japan, and I do remember reading about such studies. But is she implying that porn serves as a substitute for the real thing among married couples? She doesn’t really make the connection, though, and drifts back to her original subject, elder porn.
Here, the correspondent also abandons for the most part the old-on-old porn angle he used to open the story. All the titles other than the one video that the correspondent plays up feature old guys on younger women; so is most of the state-of-the-industry talk. Unless you believe that this material caters to female fantasies about older men (and here I remind you—not “you”, Benjamin—that my email address is conveniently located on the sidebar, if you catch my drift), it’s likely that they are being watched by lonely old guys, a growing market in an aging society. Now, some of those guys will be aged husbands watching on the sly while the—literally and colloquially—old lady is out, but that has little to do with the lack of sex in Japanese marriages.
So the correspondent catches eyeballs with a highly rare production of old-on-old porn, complete with the box cover to prove it, drifts into the reported lack of sex in Japanese marriages, then gives an overview of an industry exploiting the growing, super-mature market. In other words, begin with the most sensational stuff you can find, follow that with some information from respectable sources, then move on to the main point; and never mind the interconnections, or the lack thereof.
Sensational and sloppily constructed, it would be great fodder for a Japanese version of WaiWai, from the pages of English-language “vernacular tabloids”, as Japan Times calls the likes of the Yomiuri Weekly.
Not sure this is a straight answer to your question, but there you are.
Incidentally, I’m convinced that the Japanese adult video market is much larger than $1 billion (rental fees, straight sales, both?). My guess is that much of the revenue goes unreported, and that’s before the illegal, hardcore stuff s accounted for.
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