The fantasy of seeing what’s going on inside characters during sex has been around in porn for a long time. There’s even a category devoted to it: X-ray porn. It mostly takes the form of hentai, but not exclusively.
In hentai, making X-ray porn is a piece of cake: it’s a drawing. For more realistic films, you need to do some retouching… Or use scientific methods that can sometimes seem rather risky.
Some erotic toys also let you enjoy porn from the inside. I’ve already told you about the Do-it-yourself-macro-porn, a sex toy of the future that lets you see what’s happening inside the person being penetrated. This one eventually turned out to be real, in the form of an endoscopic camera vibrator.
(Source of the illustration above: lumby’s post on hentai-foundry, cropped)
The hentai version of X-ray porn
Well, I won’t dwell too long on hentai, where X-ray porn is almost a classic.
With comics, anything is possible. What’s happening inside the body is shown either through transparency or in a separate panel.
But in Japanese works, since Japanese law censors genitals in porn, genitals end up hidden behind pixels or blurring. In short, you can’t make much sense of the characters’ anatomy any more.
A few galleries: here and here, and also over here.
X-ray porn: the retouched version
The idea is simple: an image of the entire penis or sex toy is added, often with a transparent effect, over the woman’s (or man’s) body, while in reality it’s inside them.
And the result can be quite impressive when you realise how deep the thing goes.
You’ll also notice that there often seems to be some cheating over the supposed size of the original dick. Tucked away nice and warm, it gets to let all sorts of wild rumours about its dimensions run rampant.
Sadly, there aren’t many images on this subject, but if you look hard enough, you can still find a few dedicated galleries.
X-ray porn: the medical version
In photos
In 2001, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye created a series of photographs showing people having sex, taken using medical X-ray machines.
To do this, Delvoye turned a radiology clinic in the Belgian city of Ghent into a photo studio. He also recruited a team of doctors, radiologists and technicians to supervise his work.
The people being photographed had first covered their bodies in Nivea cream in which a little powdered barium had been dissolved, to improve the quality of the image captured.
Letting his models get it on in front of the machine, Delvoye watched the action on a screen in another room, triggering the X-ray shots.
The atmosphere doesn’t seem to have got the participants very excited. Some of the male models even asked to take Viagra to get in the mood.
Wim Delvoye is also the creator of Cloaca, a “poo machine” that replicates the digestive process by turning food into faeces.
(Photo source: Wim Delvoye’s official website)
In video
Tucker Max, a highly controversial American author, has posted a sex tape on his website, made using a medical X-ray machine.
According to his account, it was the woman in the video, a radiology technician, who came up with this rather wacky idea. Finding that penetration didn’t produce anything very watchable to their taste (too many bones…), our two experimental pornographers opted for a blowjob.
Needless to say, exposing yourself to X-rays “for fun” without medical supervision is extremely dangerous (how dangerous depends on how modern the machine is and how long you’re exposed, but anyway, it’s carcinogenic, it can make you temporarily infertile, etc.) and strictly forbidden.
But it seems that, in the heat of the moment, Tucker Max and his friend didn’t really think about the risks.
By magnetic resonance
In 1999, four researchers, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, Ida Sabelis, and Eduard Mooyaart, carried out a study in which they took, using an MRI, images of the sex organs of a man and a woman during penetration, and of a woman during a solo orgasm.
They set out to better understand what actually happens anatomically during sex, and to highlight the mechanisms of female pleasure.
To do this, they observed eight couples in the missionary position, and three women on their own. Summed up in an animated gif, it looks like this:
To briefly recap (though if you’re interested in the subject, it’s best to read the study’s report):
- Before orgasm, whether or not penetration takes place, the anterior vaginal wall lengthens.
- During penetration, the uterus moves upwards into the pelvic cavity. But it doesn’t budge during sexual stimulation without penetration.
- The penis, for its part, takes on a shape during penetration that the researchers describe as a “boomerang”.
You can also find a video about this study on YouTube.
