Hello, World! ……….. It’s ME!

Boys showing off their junk!

We live in the Age of Porncreep, where everyone aspires to be a porn model — from the boy next door to the store-bought boy on DVD. The Under-Thirties just can’t take off their clothes for the camera fast enough.

And yet…What could be more wholesome and natural, to quote Tallulah Bankhead, who when Chico Marx tried to get a rise out of the lanky glamorgirl with a crude “I intend to fuck you, Miss Bankhead,” replied, “And so you shall, you dear old-fashion boy!”

Old-fashion boys have always been proud of their displays — the peacock (not peahen) flares open his tail to reveal a starry twilight sky out of the Arabian Nights, and this magnificence finds its boydom equivalent in the raging two-handfuls of hard-on.

Indeed, what could be more wholesome and natural …. with one slight but very modern twist.

Here we invoke the shade of the now forgotten Jeff Gannon:

In the wake of the gay-escort scandal that would reveal Jeff Gannon to be not only a Republican mouthpiece planted at White House press briefings to ask friendly, Bush-idolatrous questions but that he himself — a studly Lex Luthor lookalike with bald, cue-ball head — was a gay hustler with a website that sold dates, underwear, and his own bodily secretions … in the wake of this the most delicious “Family Values” scandal of 2005, ol’ Jeffrey faced the hostile questioners with a bland Lex Luthor smile and the sort of uncanny clairvoyance usually left to Allison DuBois.

“In the future,” he said, without a trace of shame, “everyone will have a picture on the Internet that they’re embarrassed by.”

Ah yes, the Internet! The Sign that is the Times. The spark of Promethean fire that has brought light to the dark places. In its digital glow, the whole world has shown itself to be one big, happy fuck orgy.

And as far as embarrassment goes. We see no evidence of it … well, not just yet in these young and reckless lads, most of them in their late teens or early 20′s.

The snapshots are themselves worthy of study. With a shock, we find they are familiar to us from studio “catalog shots” where the tradition is to turn menacing street trade into safe, passive objects for our … afternoon prayers.

We doubt, though, that this current crop of shutterbugs is showing off their engorged cocks to titillate masturbatory reveries in male viewers, or even female ones.

The motive seems more likely to be a form of boasting, an update on guys of a more genteel America who would strike a cocky stance in their skin-tight muscle shirts as they stood beside souped-up Chevys. These were always submerged sexual advertisements: the shiny red convertible as vagina substitute into which the hard-bodied boy slips himself, describing “her” ride as “sweet,” priding himself on how nosily he can peel out of a tight space and race his beauty against the wind.

But that was a discreet, euphemistic time. In the Age of Porncreep, the metaphor has been trampled under by the literal, the poetic by the prosaic. Not that we’re complaining.

We scholars of porn can not help but be struck by the formality of so many of these everyman snapshots. How they follow, without variation or mistake, a tradition in which the cock is made to seem to tower over the body by placing the camera flush to the ball sack. In a miracle of exaggerated foreshortening, The Penis that Devoured Cleveland stalks over a lean, rapidly receding body to meet its only nemesis, the giant rising head of the cute suburban boy.

Without prior instruction or — we assume — exposure to the source materials mouldering away in the cob-webby files of the Athletic Model Guild, these Boys Next Door lack only the street-hardened faces of their gay-for-pay ancestors.

Gone is the pissed-off discomfort of rough trade making itself an object for ogling. These young shutterbugs merely register high seriousness — so taken are they with the vascular surge roaring through them — or outright joy as their proud erections soar skyward.

The Hunk of Funk, at right, for instance, has certainly gotten into the spirit of the thing. Not only the thing, but of the Age itself.

Greece had its philosophers, the Renaissance its painters, the Constitutional Convention its Enlightenment intellectuals, and Porncreep has its humperoonies on the hoof, happy to see ya, happy to see everybody! To see and, more importantly, be seen … in total. Look World. This is ME. Your new American Idol.

With Jenna Jameson’s hilarious, no-punches-pulled How To Make Love like a Porn Star on the bestseller list (“After three hours of sweaty, psychotic sex, she handed me a huge black strap-on”), and the once optional webcam now standard on brand new laptops, porn has become middle-class enough for both college Bros and blue-collar grease monkeys to roll their own.

Most au courant of all — a modern classic of sorts — is the nude shot in the mirror with digital camera in hand. This is a whole new genre of photo, and one that the spaceship people will frown over when they pick through the rubble of our ancient civilization, learning much of our customs and ways, particularly how the baseball cap is to be worn.

As we noted earlier, being a porn model has only recently shed its low-class, survival-sex connotations. Not by accident, the Age of Porncreep coincides with the age of the Internet.

It is an age in which hard copies are becoming obsolete. Horned-up digital photos need no awkward trips to a third party to develop the film. The image exists only as machine code, as an antiseptic list of 0′s and 1′s that switch electronic circuits on and off, rapidly uploaded and downloaded to the Internet, circling the globe in a blink, ending up in all sorts of unintended places — like porn sites that specialize in straight amateurs, however unwary.

The posting of the porn self-portrait is akin to an impulse purchase. Just as quickly as it appears, a new one downloads and replaces it.

To the modern Under-Thirty mind, we suspect, it is merely a matter of when, not if, the picture will be sent up into the ether. After all, who has time to be embarrassed when everything is moving at the speed of fiber-optic light?

And so we celebrate the Now. We celebrate an instant people in an instant time. Hail the Age of Porncreep, when idle hands and devils’ workshops are everywhere on spectacular, well-endowed display.

hat tip to Backroom