Sex sells anything and everything (from holidays to household appliances) so when we hear that for once sexy images will be on display just so they can sell sex (I mean porn) we rushed towards the Eros 2006 erotic fair. We grabbed our most needed assets, the camera and some voice recording device and just like a reporter commando unit we headed towards the location of the erotic event.
As one can certainly imagine we were rather curious and all the three of us, Ana, Tudor and me were very pleased to enter the area restricted to those under 18 years of age and discover the most recent porn devices, trends, movies, magazines and some other not quite porn yet still very erotic objects.
What follows is how things look as seen by our team: three musketeers, three opinions... about the porn-star diva (now retired and writing her own biography), about who was there and about the items that we saw on display (the purpose of some still remains mysterious).
The very fist things that came to my mind as entering the fair was that it was so similar to any other fair, convention or exhibition. Not the people involved, but the way things are organized, with great attention to what and where is displayed and with small stands all alike. There are many people moving around the stands and from the loudspeakers an annoying voice tortures your years. In one bigger stand, Cicciolina, the porn diva who later became member of Italy's Parliament signs autographs and talks to the press. There are women dressed in leather, women dressed in ordinary jeans and a labeled t-shirt that give you past issues of some porn magazine for free; there are the dressed in a powerful shade of green boys and girls from the stand of a sexshop. There is music in the air (as one could have already imagined mostly hip-hop and sexy house). And, of course there are special prices for most items; there are huge sales for huge dildos and sale baskets with items from the past "collections". I couldn't explain what the hell was a perfume stand (not even sold in sexually shaped bottles!!!) doing in the middle of the show.
Another interesting aspect is the unexpectedly large number of ladies attending the fair. Not the hard body teenage dream dreamy porn industry girls, but the common not at all pornstar alike female visitors. Teamed up in small groups and pairs (and no, they were not "teamed up" like that!), the female visitors seemed not at all inhibited by the things on display and the things going on around them. They were quite amused by the whole event.
As much as I was pleasantly surprised by the large number of ladies and very pleasantly moved by their lack of pornophobia I myself had one moment of realizing why some people are so anti-porn because they say it de-humanizes the woman and is an abusive industry.
But, as that quickly slipped away from my mind, I realized that what is most impressive about a porn convention is the variety of things that are to be shown, advertised, sold. It takes some time to get used to huge amounts of products and gadgets all around you. And fact is there are so many things in those stands that any one could find one things to like or wonder about. Because it's curiosity that drives you through the stands. As your eyes face any kind of color shape, texture or size dildos, as you are fact to face to DVDs such as Rio Anal Carnivale #6 or "Wet&Young #4, The Hole vol7, Black Maids 11, BIG Naturals #19, and so on. Ever noticed how most of the porn movie productions are numbered? And people complain about the non-porn movie industry sequels...
Another interesting thing to see is the S&M stand. There are lots of whips and masks (from smaller one, Zorro-like to masks that cover one's entire head, some even have feathers attached!!!) there are black leather like dildos, interesting yet bizarre and hard to figure out latex clothes and one blond Bavarian dominatrix totally bored by what is going on around her.
But not everything is just adult hardcore. There are also lots of funny gadgets, an enormous range of condoms and lubricants, some deco stuff that is sometimes funny sometimes utterly idiotic (a chess set with phallic resemblances) red velvet beds and pillows, oils for massage.
Cristi MarculescuAn Alien at Eros ShowI was punished by my planet because I fell asleep during a documentary about the customs of the other planets and sent on Earth to observe live the customs of the species living here, men. I stayed for a whole week, I didn't have much information to start with, I had to discover on my own. And I discovered a few things; I even started talking like them, as you will see.
For covering the part about reproducing-sex, as they call it here, I decided to go to a "festival" that would encompass various sexual practices from Earth, and I somehow ended up in Bucharest, Romania, at Eros Show. Eros used to be considered by men the God of Love, a long time ago, when they still believed in gods, since then their beliefs kept changing, according to circumstances, now the monotheist religions are fashionable, and there's a popular guy, called simply God that everybody believes in. That's why the name of the show surprised me, since nobody believes in Eros anymore, what was the point?
People pretend that when they have sex it's not something exclusively physical, like it happens with the animals that populate their planet; that the reason for having sex is many times love, a feeling symbolized by Eros, and sex is just a physical expression of love. Of course people don't believe in gods, in Eros anymore, and love…I didn't really understand what it is, but it seemed that sex in itself had become so boring, that people were trying to spice it up in any possible way, and they discovered this sells, and really well, people pay for example to see others f*** (the oldest word used to describe this activity, which is now considered vulgar compared to the more popular "to have sex").
The male reproductive organ is still considered by people a force, at "Eros" you were surrounded by reproductions from all materials, of all shapes and sizes. It's probably a symbol of power, and all people want to have at least one in their homes. At Eros one could also find handcuffs, masks, chains and other such strange objects which made me think that people are either very bored, or they have a very complicated mating ritual.
I could also see "live shows", what they here call "porno". There were only women, it appears the sex act begins with a dance, some people with bored looks hang around at a table somewhere behind and smoke, they are the employers, or the "pimps" as they call them on the street. The girls start undressing, they seem equally bored. It's the "Budoar" Magazine's cabin. The public keeps growing, at least 30 or 40 men with cameras form a crowd of fixed looks. The girls get undressed and start: the public appears to be excited, hot, the pimps smile, and the girls move "professionally" says somebody, but I think they don't really feel anything, one of them, bored, leaves and another one takes her palce, with a black mask and a whip; the public is almost screaming…
They announce other similar shows…I try to find out how come only women are naked in this show, surrounded by many phallic symbols, like torches (this last analogy was written by a friend from Earth that writes scripts for porno movies). It seems there is an organization here, "Accept", that fights for the rights of gay…men. Yeah, gay women, too, gays in general, but women are free anyway, for example they can do in public whatever they please, of course nobody takes them seriously, like that time, in World War II only gay men were persecuted by Nazis, for example, as women don't go to war. They are not really persecuted, regardless of their sexual orientation, as long as they look good and move well. What are Accept doing at Eros Show? They fight Aids; if heterosexuals fight, they should fight as well, right? I mean they are a sexual minority, they should be represented, otherwise it'd be like missing from a funeral, the dead doesn't matter, he/she couldn't tell anyway, but the others see and judge. "Accept" shouts as loud as possible that it represents a very decent sexual minority, while it crowds to get an autograph from an old porn star, chuckling and sighing. A pity that this sexual minority has such shameful representatives in the sexual Parliament formed there.
But the real Parliament has its own porn stars. The old porn star we were talking about is Cicciolina, who was in the Italian Parliament for a while. Now she's sitting, wearing glittering make up, on a chair at Eros show, smiling and signing pictures of herself that people carry home sacredly as if they were icons( this comparison belongs to the same dirty friend). She looks like an alien in a 60's movie with all that make-up and seems rather sad, it's probably hard to change your profession so late. She answers all my questions with: why not? Why did you decide to enter politics? Why not? Can pornography be art? Why not? And so on…
It's getting late and I decide to leave…still not understanding much about the difference between people and other species of animals that populate their planet. They'll surely ask me about this back home and I won't know what to reply. Somebody called me a musketeer, a modern one, of course, member of a commando troupe. I don't see any resemblance between me and a musketeer, though, musketeers are just in stories, on this planet, or maybe they existed a long time ago, like Eros, but we are only left with their empty names (like this writer Umberto Eco was saying in a book). And their names enter different stories, stories that sell like the products of the Kama Sutra brand (massage oils, bath gels, all at huge prices, only at Eros Show).
Ana Constantinescu"Lick that …!"The patriotic call didn't belong to me, but to the big stage announcer, about whom I was told it was Mircea Zara, a Romanian MTV VJ, who was encouraging some guy on stage to join two young ladies into rubbing bodies against each other.
I hope you weren't offended by that, after all, this was Eros Show 2006, the festival of love…ahhh, not exactly, more likely the festival of promoting vibrators, pornographic magazines and so on.
I got to Sala Palatului (a Romanian building where certain events are held), armed with my camera and ready to capture unique moments, which I couldn't obtain anywhere else. Speaking about images, I can honestly say that I was not disappointed, numerous opportunities having existed.
Because we chose to go to Eros on Thursday, the day the Steaua-Rapid football game took place, we were pleasantly surprised not to bump into too many people. Personally, I even thought that given the large number of men on the stadium or in front of the TV set, most of the population present at the festival should have been composed of females.
Obviously, I was wrong. There were some ladies, but they were few in number. Upon making this evaluation, I came to a paradoxical conclusion. Aside from pornographic magazines with CDs or DVDs, which are mainly aimed at men, most of the devices were vibrators, of different shapes and colors, with one or two heads, sexy lingerie and glass, rubber, small, big, dildos, which are only aimed at women (except for men who have a different orientation than the heterosexual one). So, how come such an event which has more to do with women is populated mostly by men?
Another conclusion I reached while chasing photos was that digital photography has become extremely popular in Romania. It was unbelievable. Everybody has a digital camera or a camera phone, even those whom I've imagined standing in line at some special discount shop, so they could save some money. There were even some who had both: a phone and a digital camera. These were the 'pros'.
Before I end my part of the article, I'd like to make an important announcement. Following some careful observations, I have discovered the secret sign used by strippers and porn actresses, by which you can recognize them on the street. I am talking of the tribal tattoo placed above the buttocks. Over three quarters of the blood pressure-raising personnel had this on their bodies. My opinion is that the others were either amateurs, or they hadn't yet been accepted in the guild.
Tudor RaiciuPhoto: Tudor Raiciu
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