Do all media people have ‘porn names’?


I was surprised to see this clip from The Colbert Report in which media personalities casually spoke about their ‘porn names’ as if it was the most commonplace thing in the world to have one.

Is this some kind of hip trend that I had not heard of before? What’s the point?

As far as I could tell from the clip, a common mechanism for creating one is to combine your pet’s name with the name of the street on which you live. If that is the case, then my porn name would be ‘Baxter Townley’ which actually sounds pretty good, don’t you think?

(This clip was aired on January 17, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

Comments

  1. glodson says

    Sometimes it is called the “stripper name.” And it is the first pet you had, and the street you grew up on. As far as I know, no one really uses this to generate a porn pseudonym. But people have been doing it around here since I was a kid in the late 80’s.

    Mine would have been Peanut Pinnacle. But if we allowed for current street and pet names, it would be Mason Coney Island.

  2. Rodney Nelson says

    combine your pet’s name with the name of the street on which you live

    Rover Ninth just doesn’t sound like a proper porn name.

  3. Enkidum says

    I used to hear middle name and the street you grew up on. Robert Rockhurst for me, which isn’t too bad.

  4. Jared A says

    Yes, I agree that this is a pretty well-known game, but maybe it was invented a generation later than Mano’s. “Baxter Townley” is an exceptionally good male stripper name.

  5. machintelligence says

    Gee, I rather like Simon Lawler. This could be fun.

    Off topic, but could you put a log in button down here at the bottom of the comment thread?
    The one at pharyngula could be used as a model.

  6. julian says

    Name of first pet and street you grew up on?

    ….um…

    Trouser Troutman

    >_>

    Yeah, I’ll stick with julian.

  7. Mano Singham says

    I checked at Pharyngula and it looks the same here as there, to me at least.

    Could you be more specific about the difference (with screen caps if possible)? Also, what benefit does it offer?

  8. Donnie says

    Yes, this game has been around for decades: Tiger Ogemaw. Not bad if I was native American :/

  9. says

    I have always wondered if this was some weird sort of phishing thing as so many sites ask what is your first pets name as a secret question. It’s probably pretty silly of me to think that.

    Mine would be Henri Pleasant, kind of odd as I’m not a guy.

    Of course I rarely use my pets name for a secret question or if it is the only choice, that I have any chance of remembering, I choose the name of my first pet that I got on my own.

  10. Yellow Thursday says

    Gandalf Eleventh. Nope, doesn’t sound good.

    If I use my first pet and the street I grew up on, though: Sugar Park. Yeah, that sounds like a porn name. lol

  11. F [nucular nyandrothol] says

    Yeah, this thing has been around for quite a while, but I don’t know what is up with the media heads in this regard. I’ve also run into different formulae for deriving the “porn name”, and other things you do with names to discover some other thing in a more-or-less superstitious manner (even if just for entertainment) .

    Best wishes,
    Pepper 224

  12. sosw says

    Of course I rarely use my pets name for a secret question or if it is the only choice, that I have any chance of remembering, I choose the name of my first pet that I got on my own.

    OT but if you’re registering somewhere where you’re genuinely concerned about security, you should never, ever answer the secret question as asked, and instead use it as an opportunity to have a secondary passphrase.

    Even if you forget it it’s better than having something easily susceptible to a trivial dictionary attack. Most services offer better methods for re-authenticating (challenge-response over a secondary, more trusted channel, such as e-mail or mobile phone).

  13. JohnnyAl says

    My street name has 2 words in it, so I guess I could just use one of them. Not sure about Jake Sycamore, but Jake Ridge isn’t too bad.

  14. machintelligence says

    It may just be that WordPress doesn’t like me. If I have not logged in it recognizes my blogonym and e-mail address, but when I try to post a comment I get a “possible imposter” warning page. The WordPress button at the top will get me logged in but the text I had typed earlier is lost. I have figured a work around by opening a new tab and going to pharyngula to log in and then returning to this page, but it is inconvenient. Sadly I don’ t know how to do screen caps.

  15. estraven says

    Hmmm. Billy Romeo Plank. Or, middle name version, Dee Romeo Plank. Either way, not effective …

  16. Ewgenij Belzmann says

    Hm, Cleopatry Zhukovsky wouldn’t be half bad, if I wasn’t a guy. Is there some provision in this game for mismatching gender-specific pet names?

    P.S.: And no, don’t have a middle name. What’s up with people having several names anyways? Always found kinda weird. One is quite enough for me, thank you very much.

  17. Mano Singham says

    I agree that middle names seem unnecessary. My parents gave middle names to the children to commemorate family members whom they respected or who had died.

  18. Ewgenij Belzmann says

    I guess it is a question of tradition then. Here in Germany, where I live, most middle names come from godparents, which is apparently a thing most people here take fairly seriously despite an overall secularity in most everyday issues. But where I come from (former Soviet Union) there has been no such tradition, at least in several generations back. And in the traditions of my culture (Russian-Jewish) it apparently was common to name children with the name of grandparents (or even further back) or at least match the initials, which was the case for me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *