The Art of Carver

It’s impossible to know, objectively, who the hottest woman ever might be. Whenever anyone pitches their pick, it’s usually understood that the decision was based on averages rather than any comprehensive data or expertise. This isn't an art or even science; it's bullshit. Conversation meant to wile away the hours between work and death.

After all, this isn't baseball; we don't have stacks of analytical data telling us why we think Sydney Sweeney is one of the greatest first basemen ever to play the game. In other words, it’s a gut feeling that has the ring of truth more than the actual weight of it. Plus, it's just fun.

All that being said, if we are talking about all-time hotties, then one of the first names out of my mouth would be Jordan Carver. No contest. Carver exists in a rarified company with Denise Milani, Tiffany Towers, Lucy Pinder, vaunted first baseman Sydney Sweeney, and others. If not in the top three, she is easily in the top five. Among Carver’s many attributes, the one that cinched the deal the most was her massive set of personalities. 

The early aughts saw a resurgence of glamour modeling and cheesecake pin-up photography, which, while erotic, were never outright pornographic. Like Bunny Yeager or Bettie Page before them, these models were more concerned with teasing, the act of titillation, rather than nudity. For the full monty, as it were, there was Playboy, Penthouse, Juggs, Score, and what-have-you.  

The irony, of course, being that the titanic titted legends of this era, Denise Milani and Jordan Carver, would likely, literally, break the internet if they did full nudity in their prime. Heck, if they did it now, they would still likely crash whole swaths of the internet. 

In the pantheon of legendary knockered models, Carver surely reigns supreme. While easily the B-side to Denise Milani, Carver was a thornier, hornier, and less subtle practitioner of the pin-up. At times, she bordered on being transgressive. But what she lacked in polish, she more than made up for in salacious moxie.

Carver had a way of presenting her gravity-defying gazongas within the frame that made them feel as if they would bounce free of the screen. Yes, they were massive, but they felt larger than life, because Carver was larger than life.

Her photography was first-rate. Easily on par with the other juggernauts of the era. (Emphasis on the juggs.) One photoshoot consisted of Carver in a two-piece bikini being splashed with milk. The milk erupted from off-camera and splashed on her face. The streams of white fluid trickled down into her impressive, cavernous cleavage.

For Carver, the line of modesty wasn’t a boundary so much as a thing to be poked and prodded with mischievous curiosity. The shoot was a blatant callback to the infamous “Got Milk” campaign with a sultry twist. But Carver, ever the provocateur, behaved as if the milk was anything but.

Any other model would have merely been splashed with milk, but Carver made sure you saw the ecstasy on her face as she roleplayed what everyone was thinking. She even went so far as to mime her O-face, completing the sexual farce. She wanted there to be no mistake; that wasn't milk being splashed onto her.

However, where Carver stumbled was in her videos. Unlike Milani, she could never quite get a handle on blending style and form in video. Something that Milani excelled at. Her early video work is top-notch, but eventually they began to devolve. Carver’s videos were edited in the vein of a Russ Meyer film, only without clear intent or any understanding of montage theory. Meyer was a lover of healthy bosomed women, who also hated to see them blink, a trait that some have cited as the source of his rapid-editing style. But with so many of Carver’s videos, the editing doesn’t help build tension as much as it builds frustration.

The rapid cutting in many of Carver’s videos borders on seizure-inducing. There’s a thin line between art and porn: art is about the buildup, the denial of release, anticipation without satisfaction.  Porn, on the other hand, is all about satisfaction. Release is the whole damn point.  

In other words, art is about teasing, and porn is about pleasuring. Pin-up models traffic in the former. For the whole point of pin-up, aside from teasing, is allowing your eye to take in the feast of visual pleasures the pin-up is offering.

A feast, that when it comes to Jordan Carver, is an all-you-can-eat buffet. You'll find yourself going back to Carver, time and time again.

Carver was hungry in a way that Milani never was. (Which is saying something as Denise Milani is easily one of the thirstiest models ever to step in front of a camera.) Carver looks at the camera not as a portal to the audience but as the eye of a lover.  

Unlike the Czech-born model with the infamous jaw-dropping measurements, the Germanic Carver’s claim to fame, besides her surgically enhanced bust, was the almost feral sexiness that exuded from every frame. In many regards, Carver was akin to Pamela Anderson in terms of the brash and open embrace of her body and sexual agency. 

Carver’s performative femininity was carnal, edgy, and more suggestive than most other pin-ups of the time. What she lacked in her videos, she more than made up for in her photos. For there can be no denying Carver’s photoshoots are first rate. Caver would teasingly toe the line between tasteful and vulgar.

She's a feminine fantasy personified. Jordan Carver doesn't really exist. It's a stage name, one that she has changed multiple times since. Indeed, her very physique is the result of a strict fitness regime and the brilliant work of surgeons. She’s a persona, like Elvira. Despite Carver being a persona, she nevertheless feels real. 

Bimbos like Carver show how gender is performative. Nothing about Carver is natural. This level of femininity is an expression, an aesthetic. The glamour pin-ups of the early aughts were expressing femininity through Fauvism. Women transformed into wild sexual beasts, bold strokes of colors, and attitudes with their surgically enhanced physiques. They weren't girls next door; they were works of art, painstakingly created beauty that required a white-hot sense of self. Models like Carver border on the transgressive, presenting an arch version of the feminine while exploring the pleasures and desires of the gender. 

The character of Carver is neither realistic nor representative of being a woman. Carver was a bimbo, an arch parody of the expectations of womanhood. But what makes Carver so compelling is how she presents womanhood as both arch and strangely aspirational. She both comments on the absurdities of expectations while playing into heightened fantasies and wish fulfillment.  

What separates Carver from so many models of her time, and models of today, besides her gobsmacking cup size, is how she understands the fundamental difference between merely trying to “look” sexy compared to "embodying" sex. So many influencers and models misunderstand the act of “looking” for the act of “appearing”. 

 For Carver, the act of looking, or rather being looked at, was the impetus. The spark that lit the fuse of the sexual. The central problem with so many of Carver's videos was that they failed to understand how best to blend Carver’s physique with an aesthetic. Her best videos were essentially glorified photoshoots. But when she was able to achieve a perfect synthesis of her body with an aesthetic, oh baby, it was sex personified. 

Nowhere is this better proven than in her infamous gym video. Like Milani, Carver has several videos of herself at the gym. All of them with Carver in a sports bra so strained you’re left trying to mentally will the poor overworked garment to give up and release the hounds. But one of these videos stands above them all. 

Carver wears a simple blue sports bra (with a lacy bra underneath), a white baseball cap, and her dyed blonde hair flowing down over her shoulders, giving us a clear view of her yawning chasm of breast flesh. The video shows her on a treadmill. The internet is full of videos of racked babes on treadmills making recoil cinema, but Carver’s remains a work of art.  

The beauty is in the simplicity. The camera, poised directly in front of her, films her straight on, with Carver’s ripe basketball-sized melons so big they almost don’t fit in the frame. Her cleavage glistens with sweat, giving those overflowing milkers a sheen for the light to bounce off, making it impossible for us to look away from the sheer artistry of the moment. The camera seemingly merely observes, as Carver and her Gigantors fight the most mouth-watering battle with gravity ever captured on camera.   

All of that alone is enough to leave even the most ardent monk with dry mouth. But Carver shows her understanding of what makes the art of looking so electric. It’s the taboo, the voyeurism of it all, as if we’re not supposed to see this.  

Carver achieves this by never acknowledging the camera. The camera is looking directly at her, but she is not looking directly at the camera. Her eyes are focused on the horizon, and we feel as if we are standing in front of her in the gym, unnoticed, spying, being given a show, unaware of our presence. The moment hits because it is the rare instance where she achieves cinema, the act of voyeurism. (It’s also the purest visual definition of why we call them knockers.) 

Cinema is the art of movement, which is why recoil cinema hits so hard. It’s the distillation of the artform. In that moment, Carver understood pin-up modeling, human nature, and the art of looking, all at once. A primal scream of erotically charged mania, the recoil on each bounce borders on the pornographic, but it isn’t; it merely brushes up against the notion, teasing without the release. 

The moment exists like a lightning bolt to our desires. Little wonder that the moment lives on as a legendary GIF. I use it as the avatar for Recoil Cinema page for that very reason. At her best, Carver excelled at the art of the tease, and this instance is a prime example of her mastery.

Milani walked the tightrope of both being incredibly open and approachable while maintaining an intense and jealously guarded private life. In stark contrast, Carver seemed like an open book. Especially when she would explore or hint at her own fetishes within her work. 

At the very least, she was more open about her more prurient kinks. Never was this more so than in the now difficult-to-find video, titled “Dog Walk”. The video is unlike anything Carver ever did before or since. Hell, it’s unlike anything any of the pin-up models of the aughts ever did. “Dog Walk” feels almost confessional in its content. For one thing, the video is a seven-minute short film. Like most of her videos of the time, it suffers from ill-timed editing. But unlike those videos, "Dog Walk" feels like an attempt at a whole new version of Jordan Carver.

The simple story sees Carver kidnapped while walking her dog alone in the woods. She is held captive by a mysterious man in his shed. Like Carver’s other works, "Dog Walk" is never outright pornographic. But more than her other videos, it feels more charged, more psychological, and more taboo than if it were outright porn. 

“Dog Walk” feels like a fantasy of Carver's, as opposed to presenting a fantasy. Carver's anxiety about her predicament clashes with the camera's leering eye. More than anything Carver has done, the camera leers at her in a way that feels almost predatory. "Dog Walk" embodies the classic Hollywood log line, "This video wasn't released; it escaped!"

Gone is the typical ebullient Carver. In her stead, we see a mewling damsel in distress who may or may not be enjoying her distress. By far, the darkest of anything she ever did, it is implied that her dog is murdered by her soon-to-be abductor. It is also the most cohesive narrative project she has ever produced. Themes of abuse, humiliation, and bondage are explored outright. Implied is the possibility of sexual assault, an implication that awakens Jordan in the end. A reveal that it was all a dream.

However, the reprieve is short-lived. The next scene shows us Carver in the same woods with her dog. The implication being her nightmare will shortly become a reality. The ouroboros structure is why "Dog Walk" sticks in the craw. The video feels like something carved from Carver’s Id. A mixture of fantasies, anxieties, and pressures that nevertheless could serve as a proof-of-concept for a disturbing yet steamy exploitation film.

"Dog Walk" feels dangerous, primal even, as it crackles with a sweaty and psychological eroticism. It's important to understand that most digital videos of this time operated on a theme and told a story, but in the way photos tell a story. The stories were more impressionistic. The videos were usually filmed photoshoots or vignettes designed for cheesecake antics. Cheap excuses to see Jordan wash a car covered in soap suds, doing jumping jacks, or whatever excuse they could think of to have Jordan wobble her hooters at the camera.

But “Dog Walk” feels like an erotic short film by way of Sam Peckinpah in how much of the titillation is almost psychological. Her sweaty flesh smeared in dirt and grime, clad in lingerie, as she hangs from the ceiling. More than anything Carver ever did, "Dog Walk" is the most conventionalist, showing the breakdown between Carver the fantasy and Carver the reality.

The boldness of her sexual allure overcomes everything, infusing every scene with stark, potent imagery. For Carver, her body is a canvas on which she paints an array of fantasies. But in "Dog Walk," the camera treats her more like an object than in any other work. There is a helplessness and a danger to “Dog Walk” that feels like Carver exploring her own psychological paradoxes. The joy of being a sexual tease, of self-objectifying, of being made into a sexual object for one man's amusement.

Interestingly, Dog Walk divides its point of view between Carver’s and the audience's, but never the captor's. Part of what makes “Dog Walk” feel so taboo is that it feels like it’s about to cross a very real boundary, but never does. Once more, we see Carver flirt with the border of pornography in a way that almost feels transgressive. 

For all the shots of Carver’s heaving, bouncing, jiggling chest, there’s an attempt at getting at some very real dark themes about helplessness and forced objectification. Carver's silent disownment of "Dog Walk" speaks volumes and only adds to the taboo nature. She has never talked about the video, and for a time, "Dog Walk" was impossible to find. Perhaps, she was not comfortable with being so open about desires she could not put words to or making them so public.

One could view it as a transgressive comment on how Carver the woman felt about Carver the persona. She was never merely satisfied with being only a model. She tried to get into movies. However, bad luck plagued these attempts. Aside from one movie, Who Killed Johnny, Carver’s film career never took off. She was slated to be the star in a low-budget horror film that, from all accounts, would have put "Dog Walk" to shame, but it never got out of the pre-production phase.

A pity, as I think Carver could have had an interesting second life as an actress. Granted, Carver is no Brie Larson, but in a more adventurous and imaginative Hollywood, perhaps a director would craft roles suited for someone as fearless as Carver. She has fearlessness, and the camera can't get enough of her. To say nothing of how those massive cans are a special effect all their own. Keep your AI and your pre-vis, I'll take Jordan Carver bouncing across the screen any day of the week.

Most models are photographed through the photographer's lenses. Carver, however, uses the prism of gender and sexuality and reflects something more complex but with a distillation of self, regardless of the implants, teased hair, and makeup, at the heart. She is taking the trappings of societal norms and fashioning an image of womanhood that fits her wants and needs, regardless of what society wants. For her, it’s the Carver gaze that matters, and everything else is forfeit. 

Images courtesy of Jordan Carver