| Review of X-rated Swingers:
Introduction:
Oh, to be late-thirtiesh to 40-something and freed from the constraints of child rearing, freed from a grueling 9 to 5 job, free to swing. . . Okay, I'm not quite ready to convince my wife that running our own amateurs website is a great idea, but I do find the lifestyle presented by Aaron and Beth, your webmaster and mistress at xratedswingers.com, an appealing one. The question here is whether their pleasure in having open sex lives translates into good erotica/pornography. As fans of the amateur genre know, there's plenty of amateur content ruined by bad production values and less-than-talented performers. They sure make a lot of claims here, though. Hmm, "more amateur porn than any other place on the internet." That's an offer worth checking out.
Inside:
Okay, I've paid my way in (not really), and I'm free to run amok in this mammoth stash of amateur porn. Here's their promise: "tons of galleries, movie clips, a great collection of cam shows, live feeds, video feeds, e-zines, juicy stories, comedy, our party information, games and contests. What more do you want? Previews of other hot chicks? Ok.. . ."
Wow, even previews of other chicks. This one has got it all. I'm always skeptical about bonus materials, however, so I tend to jump right into the original content. Trying to count all the galleries in Beth and Aaron's photo section is a headbender, as they're not organized thematically, but I worked out after several long passes in scroll mode that there are around 250 with anywhere from just a handful of pics to more than fifty in each gallery. They claim you get more than 3000 pictures all together, and I'm happy to believe it. To their credit, your hosts and their friends tend to get around a fair bit and it shows in the raw number of partners they hire and/or seduce into hopping into their bed (and onto their website). The photos, on the whole, do tend to reveal the amateurism of the production team as much as the amateurism of the sexual performances featured. I don't mean that 600X480 as an average picture resolution is terrible or that I don't like Beth and Aaron's work. It's just that I tended to find the photography to lean toward snapshot-like documentation rather than well-conceived (or edited) erotica. Several of the galleries I visited included little more than a handful of shots of what looked like someone's birthday party, anniversary, or whathaveyou, where someone flashed their breasts. Then again, there's plenty of actual sex, and some of the galleries had in excess of 50 photos. Take your time, and you'll figure out where the action, the lighting, and the vibe came together. I, for one, found myself playing a came of hit or miss with more of the latter.
Okay, the videos. . . There are roughly 35 video clips available in xratedswingers' own video library, half of which is their own, original content. From the 50% or so of that content that I downloaded or streamed, it seemed that the files tend to max out at around 30 meg, or roughly 10 minutes in length. Some as short as 45 seconds, and overall not many are longer than 5 minutes. At 1.5 meg/minute of playback in real media or windows media format for high-rez, we're not talking state of the art. I've always wondered whether fans of amateur content are supposed to be either a.) residents of "backward" countries that cannot afford good IT infrastructure or b.) just a bit behind-the-times in updating their First World computers. I'm not trying to be insulting to either of those groups of users, I'm just having a hard time believing that there are too many out there who would pay $24.99/month for a membership and not have the money to get internet access supporting something better than even the hi-rez streams and downloads here. Sorry, I'm belaboring a simple point: this is an amateur content in its technical merit as well as its performance. More simply, the videos look blocky.
As I said, I usually steer clear of the bonus stuff, but I found that the webcamz clips featured were downloadable here, that some of the mini galleries in the "friends" section were slick and sexy, and that there really was a fair bit of exploring to be done. Granted, I hit a few unsolicited pop-ups, and came to the conclusion after a while that most of the links to outside content involved the free sample material offered at those sites anyway. In the end, I think there are some hours to be spent cruising through the bonus content, but that it's not exactly going to redefine your expectations of the "extras" promised by so many adult sites. I think it's safe to say that the nightly, amateur streaming webcamz™ shows will be the highlight for many.
The final word:
I always get a guilt complex in criticizing amateur sites. They always have the morally superior response that, "this is real amateur content and shouldn't be judged by mainstream porn industry standards." I'm the first to admit this. Personally, though, if I'm sacrificing quality in the technical specs—mainly, photo and video resolution—then I want the original content to be really hot. What I saw here was a health and largely attractive circle of middle aged swingers having pretty relaxed, mature, good times having sex and letting themselves be photographed. When this is wrapped up in a less than stunning package promising naively to be the biggest stash of amateur content on one site, my response is, "nah, maybe next time." For those that do struggle with finding good online amateur material suited to dialup connection speeds, however, I'd feel more confident in recommending this. Ditto for folks that are simply curious to see how other swingers have attempted to turn a buck in online porn while enjoying themselves on a regular basis.
2004-06-04
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