November 20th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
The Sex Blog Of Record
November 19th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Goodbye To Kinky British Web Porn
Not that we don’t have our own problems looming here in the United States when it comes to worrying about official hostility to online pornography, but this blog post by Pandora Blake explains in the bleakest imaginable terms how all but the most uncontroversial and bland corporate porn is in the process of being legislated off the internet in the United Kingdom. Pandora recently fought a protracted and successful legal battle for the right to sell her progressive and ethical spanking porn online in the UK, but her site was offline during that battle and so her victory was necessarily something of a Pyrrhic one. And now her site is once again under threat (along with pretty much every other porn site in the UK from the sound of things) from a proposed new law that imposes economically-ridiculous age verification requirements on porn websites while simultaneously just flatly banning from the internet a great deal of kinkier porn:
The Digital Economy Bill is currently going through Parliament, and has just come to the end of its committee stage. The section of the Bill introducing compulsory age verification for all adult sites accessible from the UK will have a serious impact on Dreams of Spanking, and on many other adult websites.
Complying with this legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. First of all, I’ll have to overhaul the whole site structure of Dreams of Spanking. Any content that would be classified as “18” or higher will be illegal to publish publicly, on the open internet. So video, images and audio that contain any nudity, bums or spanking will need to go behind intrusive, privacy-violating age checks.
To prove you’re over 18, you’ll have to type in sensitive personal details such as your legal name, credit card details, date of birth, address or phone number. That data will be visible not to me, but to whatever age verification system I install – private companies that are free to operate unregulated, and without having to safeguard the security and privacy of your personal data.
Not only is this terrible for you, it’s terrible for me. Every age check will cost me money – estimates range from £0.05 to £1.50 per check. Dreams of Spanking currently receives over two thousand visitors a day (under half the traffic we had before ATVOD forced us offline), so the cost of checking the age of every site visitor would add up to significantly more than the site’s total revenue – and that’s before we take into account existing costs such as production, paying my team members, and bandwidth. In other words, complying with the age verification law will immediately put the site out of business.
Even if I can somehow persuade enough of those two thousand visitors to buy memberships that I can afford to verify all their ages, the site will never be the same. This law will mean no more public previews. No free trailers, no preview images, no free hosted galleries, no birthday spanking giveaways, no Creative Commons projects and no charity caning films. No more getting around CCBill’s content restrictions by giving material away.
No more transparency, and no more free porn.
As bad as that sounds, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part. The new UK law proposes to outright prohibit whole swathes of BDSM and fetish porn:
Even if I somehow manage to fully comply with the legislation: hide everything spanking-themed on the site behind age checks; find the money to check the ID of every non-paying visitor who wants to browse my free previews; survive the loss of traffic and Googleability – even if I can stomach the disappearing of this blog, the behind the scenes videos, the performer interviews, and the discourse about ethics and consent – the site still can’t survive, because every scene that was criminalised by the AVMS regulations will be recriminalised by the Digital Economy Bill.
ATVOD found us in breach because they ruled that some of our videos depict corporal punishment that leaves ‘lasting’ marks. We won our appeal on the basis that the principle purpose of the site is not commercial, and it is not in competition with mainstream broadcast media. That victory won us an exemption to the AVMS Regulations 2014. But the AVMS didn’t invent the rules around what content is banned; it drew them from existing classification guidelines used by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for films and TV.
The guidelines prohibit any depiction of pain play that leaves marks on the body beyond those deemed “transient and trifling” from classification even as R18, the highest classification category in the UK. Basically, under the current rules you can’t show any act which would constitute assault or actual bodily harm, or any act which would risk injury to the viewer if it were imitated. So no caning, no belting, no welts, no bruises – and that’s before we get into the bans on things like facesitting, breath play, fisting, squirting, watersports and “full” bondage, defined as the restraint of all four limbs plus a gag.
The AVMS regulations were the first instrument of UK law to apply those classification guidelines to material published on the internet. We’ve enjoyed a heady few months of official exemption from them: but now the Digital Economy Bill uses those same guidelines to control what can and can’t be published online. If the Bill is passed it will be illegal to publish any ‘prohibited content’ even behind age checks. Let that sink in: even age-verified, consenting adults who have handed over their real names and addresses to prove their age won’t be allowed to look at spanking videos that show marks.
Pandora is an award-winning community-supported activist as well as a pornographer, and she isn’t giving up. No law is a sure thing before it’s final; things might go differently and better in the UK than Pandora and her lawyers currently expect. We may certainly hope so, but my point, in any case, is a larger one: the relative freedom pornographers have enjoyed to publish internet porn in the 21st century is more fragile than you probably imagined. When British porn goes dark and Great Britain vanishes from the kinky internet, we in the rest of the world may barely notice; it’s not like we don’t have our own fetish porn resources. The lesson, though, is clear. Laws and policies change, not always for the better. If we value the work of independent pornographers here in the United States (as I, for one, do), we’ve got to have their backs.
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November 18th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Anal Alice In Buttsex Wonderland
It’s a wonderland all right, but not the one she was expecting. The sign said “suck me” but before she knew it…
Artist is Tram Pararam.
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November 17th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
A Thorough Butt-Washing
Gently but thoroughly, that butt is getting washed both inside and out:
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November 16th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
All The VR Porn
For several months now the noise around virtual-reality porn has been growing louder and louder in my inbox and on the porn-business social media feeds I see. Although market penetration on VR headsets is still short of what the porn companies selling these products would like it to be, headsets are on a lot of Christmas lists and everybody I’ve talked to thinks that if 2016 wasn’t quite the breakout year for VR as a ubiquitous consumer technology, 2017 almost certainly will be.
Meanwhile we are seeing development of robustly useful aggregation sites like the one at VR Porn, where they tell me their goal is to bring all the adult VR content from all the different VR porn studios together in one convenient place. They offer free short trailers and clips and the usual links for purchasing the full product. The trailers and sample stills are decently high-resolution and give you a good idea what you are getting, as in the case of this WankzVR video starring Marica Hase:
What really sets VRPorn.com apart is that they have also compiled an enormous catalog of free sex-themed VR downloads, including CGI animations, anime-type short movies, and free porn-game apps that run on the various VR platforms. It’s the first place I’ve seen that offers a well-curated and useful collection of adult VR free content to complement their paid VR porn offerings, and although the free stuff varies in quality as you would expect and is frequently short and/or fairly simple, some of it is visually very fine indeed, like this elf-girl riding the viewer cowgirl-style:
Remember up at the top of the post when I mentioned that VR headsets are on a lot of Christmas lists? I learned some more about that when I began to peruse the VRPorn.com blog, which focuses not just on the porn but includes updates about the burgeoning VR industry as a whole. According to the post Weekday VR Update: November 14, 2016, this is to be the first year when headsets will be discounted on Black Friday:
This is the first Black Friday where VR head mounted displays, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, will see some Black Friday love. The first of which is Best Buy, who plans to offer a $100 store credit when a consumer purchases an Oculus Rift head mounted display. Second, Microsoft will also be offering a $100 store gift card with the purchase of either an Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive through their Microsoft Store.
The blog at VRPorn.com may actually be one of the site’s more amazing assets. It’s not an afterthought or a parade of press releases; it’s a content-rich stream that includes things like this incredibly-detailed review of a third-party VR game being developed via Patreon that’s called VR Titties. The review is like 25 paragraphs long with dozens of screenshots, a level of detail that is perhaps necessary given the number of customization sliders in the game:
But my point here is that these guys are VR porn enthusiasts. Yes, they want to sell you some porn for your VR headset, but they are also obviously and genuinely interested in all the sexy things you can do with it. It’s the first site I’ve seen with such a useful mix of resources, and should be a regular stop for any VR afficionado who reads ErosBlog.
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November 15th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Cheerleaders For Cunt
This image is credited: Feminist Art Program, Fresno State University, CUNT Cheerleaders, 1970-1971.
I couldn’t turn up anything definitive about what in particular the FAP was trying to communicate with this image; the best information I found was this:
In 1970 Judy Chicago took a one-year teaching position at Fresno State University (now California State University-Fresno) and started the Feminist Art Program (FAP). Her and twenty-plus students — all women — held classes off campus (in former military barracks) and basically set up their own curriculum. Their focus was on developing a visual language to talk about their experiences as women and how gender had conditioned their lives.
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November 14th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
This Erotica Kills Fascists: Mädchen in Uniform
There’s a famous 1931 German film called Mädchen in Uniform about a repressive Prussian-style boarding school for young women. Let’s allow B. Ruby Rich writing in Jump Cut to help frame the movie’s context for us:
If we are to understand Maedchen In Uniform fully, it is important to keep in view the society within which it was made. It was the celebrated milieu of Berlin-avant-la-guerre, the Berlin with dozens of gay and lesbian bars and journals, the Berlin of a social tolerance so widespread that it nearly camouflaged the underlying legal restraints (which were to grow, rapidly, into massive repression).
Although Mädchen is primarily understood in our time as an early film about lesbianism, and is most notorious visually for a kissing scene between student and instructor (of which more later), the film is said to have been primarily appreciated by its contemporary German audience for its anti-authoritarian sentiments. From an IMDB review:
Though the film goes as far as it can in its theme of (awakening) lesbian feelings and sexual feelings of young girls in general, shifting emphasis automatically meant concentrating on the theme of the cold and inhumane authoritarian (Prussian) way of life and upbringing, a way of thinking still present in the Weimar republic and in 1931 already considered a danger to the young republic. Then audiences were more interested in this aspect than in the sexual one… A political stand this film certainly takes not, but, as the original title “Yesterday and Tomorrow” says, this film makes a plea for a more liberal and humane society. Of course the film was banned after the Nazi take-over (though for some obscure reason Goebbels liked the film “as film”).
Here’s Rich in Jump Cut again with more to say about that:
Most important to the film’s reputation through the years has been its significance as an antiauthoritarian and prophetically anti-fascist film. To be sure, the film has suitable credentials for such a claim. Any film so opposed to militarism, so anti-Prussian, so much in support of the emotional freedom of women, must be an anti-fascist film. Add to such factors the fact that the film was made on the very eve of Hitler’s rise to power, just prior to the annexation of the film industry to Goebbel’s cultural program, and the legend of Sagan’s proto-subversive movie is secure. In emphasizing the film’s progressive stance in relation to the Nazi assumption of power, however, film historians have tended to overlook, minimize, or trivialize the film’s central concern with love between women.
In my considered opinion, overlooking that must have taken considerable effort!
And what of the celebrated kissing scene in the dormitory?
Here’s the clip:
Rich in Jump Cut is much better than me at describing what we just saw there:
The scene is set in the dormitory on Manuela’s first night in the school. It is filmed with the soft focus and radiant light of a Romantic painting, say one by Friedrich. The lights are even dimmed, by Fraulein von Bernburg herself on-screen, to make the scene more seductive to the viewer. All the girls are poised on the edge of their beds, kneeling in identical white gowns, heads upraised to receive the communion of her lips touching their foreheads, which she holds firmly and ritually as she administers each kiss.
Rich again:
This extreme fetishizing of the kiss, by both the nature of the teacher’s gestures and director Sagan’s cinematographic style, is emblematic of the unspoken codes of repressive tolerance. The kiss is permitted, to each alike, but it is at once the given and the boundary. Nothing more may be allowed or even suggested, although the tension of that which is withheld suffuses the scene with its eroticism of shimmering light and grants the teacher her very power. The kiss is the minimum and the maximum, a state of grace and a state of stasis. The entire equilibrium is founded upon this extreme tension – which is snapped when Manuela, overwhelmed by the atmosphere and her feelings, breaks the rules. She throws her arms around Fraulein von Bernburg’s body in a tight embrace and receives, not a punishment, but a kiss. A kiss, not merely on the forehead, but full on the lips.
Without spoiling the subsequent plot of the movie for you, it ends surprisingly well, with no tragic suicides or dire fates. But Rich, writing in the 1980s about this 1930s film, makes an argument about the movie’s ending that’s still compelling today:
The bells and bugles that sound periodically throughout the film, casting a prophetic pall upon the love of Manuela and Fraulein von Bernburg, are waiting just outside the gates for us as well. The ending of the film can be interpreted as a warning to heed to forces mounting outside our narrow zones of victory and liberation. When, at the film’s end, the Principal appears to be defeated, she exits through a darkened hallway. But at the end of the hallway is the light of the outdoors, site of the buglers and the patriarchal forces mobilizing against any such victory.
The Nazis didn’t just ban this film, they tried to burn all the copies (source). Fortunately, they failed; some prints had already been dispersed outside Germany, and a very few of those survived the war.
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