From the non-paywalled part of a paywalled article on a publishing news website, we learn that Barnes & Noble is making most small/indy publishers (but perhaps not the majors) remove dirty books from its catalog:
B&N to Limit Erotica And Summary Titles On Their Site
Barnes & Noble is eliminating certain books from their online catalog. Some digital book distributors have been tasked with removing all of their erotica ISBNs from feeding onto the site, as well as public domain works and “summary” titles that bill themselves as guides to other popular books. Additionally, B&N is updating the search function on their site so that customers “can decide to see clearly explicit content or not.” Senior director of book strategy & customer experience Shannon DeVito told PL that this is a quality-control move that will not affect major publishers.
If anybody who is cleverer than me with paywall-defeating tools (but I’m pretty clever, and I failed) can provide a working link to the full article, that would be sweet.
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.
A couple of years ago, I discovered that the number of books I was selling suddenly fell off a cliff. I did some research and found that the same thing was happening to a lot of erotica writers, especially self-published writers. Amazon’s Search function on their Web site was filtering out a lot of erotica, particularly erotica with themes of non-traditional relationships like BDSM.
However, I discovered something interesting a few months back: The Amazon search API, a set of programmer’s tools that allows Web programmers to search Amazon’s book titles, doesn’t filter search results. You can log on to Amazon and do a search for a particular book and see no results, but if you write a Web site that uses Amazon’s API and do a search, ta-da, there it is!
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
On and off for the past few months, I have been working on building a new Web site, called Red Lit Search. This site has a database of erotic books in Amazon’s catalog–so far only about eighteen hundred or so, but the list is growing — and also allows you to do uncensored searches of Amazon.
Erotica author Selena Kitt is the one who first brought the term #Pornocalypse to my attention, back in 2013. Then and now, her beat is Amazon’s bizarre blunderings in the realm of trying to pretend for investors and the public that they don’t have books about sex, even while books about sex remain a huge seller for them. Selena’s latest:
It’s a far too complicated and inside-baseball story for me to summarize well, but the gist is that Amazon has started dumping entire publisher catalogs into the “erotica” category (which gets no search visibility on the site and is thus the kiss of death) if the publisher in question publishes any erotica. Cookbooks, horror, sci-fi, doesn’t matter. This should give you the flavor of the piece:
In my conversation with the Amazon customer service representative about this situation, I was told, “We are improving our ability to identify erotic content, so you’ll see more books put into erotica going forward.”
Me: Just going forward?
CS: No, we’ll also be identifying other content and moving it into the erotica categories.
How long do you think she spent in that artful pose, just waiting for you to enter the room?
Picture is from a Vintage Cuties gallery. But am I to be forgiven for thinking the model looks a bit like Michelle Dockery, the actress who plays Lady Mary Crawley in the Downton Abbey TV show?
It’s been a long time since I saw a spam email subject line that struck me as clever, erotic, or interesting. But one from my inbox this morning, considered strictly for its erotic literary merit and without respect for its obvious bullshit nature, seems to qualify. It said:
Subj: Good girl looking to explore being bad. Can U meet up?
Of course the link goes to the front page of one of the ubiquitous “dating” sites.
From Humans of New York, with the caption “Moment of appreciation for the girl who didn’t give a shit about being photographed in the Erotica section.” Indeed:
Ask not for whom the pornocalypse tolls. It tolls for thee.
Recently I’ve been seeing lots of tweets and headlines suggesting that Amazon is going through another round of cracking down on porn ebooks, generally burying them deeper and making them harder to find (or, as their people would no doubt put it, making it harder for porn to pop up accidentally in general searches.) I haven’t paid a lot of attention, because I’m old and I’m weary and I’ve seen this pattern repeated over and over again throughout the internet age. Somebody builds a platform or service or community or whatever, it is even better with porn, lots of people use it for porn, it grows awesomely, eventually the suits get uncomfortable with all the porn that is at the foundation of their business, and so they try to marginalize it or (usually later in the process) drive it out entirely (though this often fails).
Smart people know that the internet (hell, any new technology disruptive enough to be interesting) is for porn. Remember why home VCRs exploded in popularity? How many of you Usenet veterans were motivated to get a Usenet feed (or a better feed than the on you started with) because of the porn groups? Smarter observers than me have noticed that the appearance of porn on your new platform is proof, of a weak sort, that your platform is important enough to matter:
I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media — it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test — if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
There’s one sentence there that’s very important: “If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work.” The suits always miss an important corollary: “If you’re trying to root out the porn in your system, you’re trying to break your own system.”
But, strive to break it they do. It’s a seemingly-inevitable phase in the growth cycle of any commercial “read/write technology”. (Although, these days, I’ve noticed that a lot of new platforms are attempting to bake “broken for grownups” into their products from the beginning. Pinterest and your “no nudity” TOS, I’m thinking of you! Google+ and your war on nyms, you also.)
The first one of these cycles I lived through was eBay in the early days. If you remember that far back (we’re talking mid 1990s) eBay was especially vital and amazing right after it got a critical mass of users, but before the whole world had figured out that old stuff was suddenly much more valuable now that there was an efficient mechanism for matching it to willing buyers. Basically there was a supply glut on nifty old stuff right at first, the accumulated collectibles of history all hitting the market at once. And this was as true for vintage porn (magazines and books and videotapes) as it was for any other genre of collectibles.
And it was AWESOME. I still have (in very deep storage) apple boxes full of vintage porn magazines I bought for less money than it cost to have them shipped to me via USPS media mail. Someday I’d love to get a high speed scanner and put them all up on the web Internet Archive style, but it would be a labor of years and I’d need a very wealthy and eccentric patron. Meanwhile, I preserve them as best I can.
But then Meg Whitman happened. It’s too many years ago now for me to recall how many successive waves of anti-porn activism swept the eBay auction platform, but it was many.
The adult items got their own section, it got put behind an age self-verification button, the adult items vanished from the general search, the adult section itself got removed from the category listing making it very hard to find, and then there was wave after wave of auction removals based on listing policies that were vague and erratically enforced. There were rules about how much nudity could show on magazine covers, there were wide-ranging keyword bans that meant you could not list (or show an uncensored photo of) the true titles of many porn items, there was a ton of selective enforcement, and there was an enormous chilling effect because seller accounts were often banned or limited based on first-offense violations of these deeply-murky rules.
It eventually became clear to everyone that Ebay under Meg Whitman (the former Disney exec) was now officially hostile to porn, where once it had been the leading sales platform for vintage porn especially. The market dried up, market offerings became bland and boring, and everybody who was on eBay for that reason had left. The suits, having stricken off the member that so offended them, declared victory and moved on. They broke it, but they like broken better. Broken is what they wanted, broken is what they got.
So now: is Amazon doing the same with erotic ebooks? To me it looks like early days, but yeah, I see the handwriting on the wall.
That’s true as far as it goes. My nascent Bacchus Media porn ebook project has one erotica title (a Victorian erotica classic that I repackaged for the Kindle back in 2009) for sale on Amazon, and sure enough, it’s flagged “Adult” and does not appear in an “All Departments” search. But it does appear in “Kindle Store” and “Books” searches, which strikes me as proper behavior. This is not (yet) a hidden and unsearchable category ghetto.
Not yet. But erotic authors are starting to feel the noose. Here’s Selena Kitt in another post:
Hey, does anyone remember when Amazon started banning erotic fiction?
Or when Apple removed “certain” titles from their bestseller lists?
Or when Paypal stopped paying for “certain types” of erotica?
When Amazon began excluding books from its “all department” search?
When Smashwords started cracking down on “nipples and floppy bits and dangly parts?”
Or when Apple began rejecting outright those books which contained “certain content” they didn’t agree with?
Or when Barnes and Noble stripped bestselling erotica books (in the top 100) of their ranks by 1,000 points?
And the new anti-porn pornocalypse rules get bizarre very quickly. Why would the largest bookseller in the world deny the existence of the Erotic Romance category? Back to the first Selena Kitt post I linked to:
Back when I hit the top 100 on Amazon, the competition wasn’t anywhere near as fierce as it is today. They didn’t know quite what to do with a naked woman’s bottom on their bestseller list.
That’s when they began the system that we are seeing them implementing now — what we in erotica circles call the “ADULT filter.” Back then, you were only filtered (which means that you were excluded from the all-department search, and your book didn’t appear in the also-boughts of any books that were not filtered, which was very limiting at the time!) if your book contained nudity on the cover.
So I slapped a thong on the woman on my Babysitting the Baumgartners cover and Amazon “unfiltered” my book. Sales resumed at their usual pace and life went on. But I had to figure out myself what the problem was, the reason the filter had been applied in the first place. There was no transparency on Amazon’s part. None. Nada. I even talked on the phone to an “Amazon executive customer service representative” who would only “confirm or deny” my suspicions.
I felt like Woodward and Bernstein talking to Deep Throat in a parking garage somewhere. That’s how bizarre and surreal the conversation was.
The media has recently picked up on Amazon’s latest attack on “porn,” but the Pornocalypse looks as if it’s just begun.
The filtering tool that Amazon previously only used to exclude nudity on covers is now being applied to books arbitrarily, but in very, very large numbers. We haven’t seen a purge this big on Amazon since they banned incest and bestiality in erotic work.
First of all, Amazon has now separated Erotica and Romance. I don’t know if erotic romance writers know this or have realized it yet, but Amazon has recently changed their policy (not that they’ve told anyone about it or anything!) and you can no longer put your book in BOTH Erotica and Romance categories. You have to choose one or the other. “Erotic Romance” as a category will now classify your book as “erotica.”
And be careful, because once you have labeled your book as “erotic,” they will not allow you to reclassify it as NOT erotic. The only exception to this rule I have seen so far is for traditionally published books (ala Fifty Shades). Self-published books don’t get this treatment.
Meg Whitman rides again, and this time her name is Jeff Bezos. My prediction is, the pornocalypse rules will get more restrictive and more opaque and more arbitrary. Erotica will never vanish from Amazon’s platform — just like it never vanished completely from Ebay — but its prominence in the success of the Kindle platform will be swept under the rug of history.
And make no mistake: erotica mattered to the success of the Kindle and to that of ebook readers in general. Here’s my own take on that from a few months ago, from a post I called Discreet Porn For Women:
It’s no secret that the rise of the portable e-book reader (whatever brand you favor) has triggered a quiet boom in the prose-porn-for-women industry. But if you’re a man and you’re like me, you may have been fooled by the unassuming “Erotic Romance” styling of the genre.
…
When a book was a physical artifact only, you had three choices. First, you could limit your reading to book-objects that wouldn’t get you more grief than you could handle, when you were observed with them by your friends and family. Second, you could limit your reading to times and places so private that your book-objects were physically secure from observation. Or, third, you could fudge, by reading book-objects that looked more innocuous than they were, placing them in the first category by courtesy.
Now the electronic reader gives you a fourth choice: read whatever the hell you want, where-ever the hell you want, and just flip closed your completely opaque personalized bejazzled leatherette Hello Kitty e-reader cover whenever anybody else gets too close to your screen. Throw in the Internet so you can buy whatever the hell you want without any witnesses, and the circle is complete. Your credit card statement says “Amazon” and your browser history says (at worst) “erotic romance” and it’s all so very safe from inspection, criticism, or judgment.
Here’s a confirming related visual found at Bondage Blog, talking about why an iPad is an awesome thing to have for looking at porn in public:
Selena Kitt puts the “porn built the Kindle” case even more strongly, from her erotica author’s perspective:
Jeff Bezos may have put out the product, but I made the Kindle into what it is today. Me, and legions of other erotica writers who were already writing it, and those who came later, who saw how much readers were clamoring for it. Readers could suddenly read erotica without anyone seeing the cover. The Kindle device made that possible, Amazon made the Kindle available… but I provided the content readers were surreptitiously reading under their desks at work and on the subway home.
…
THAT is what sold Kindles. Porn. Face it, Jeff Bezos. You owe the success of Kindle to me, and to every erotica writer out there making a living writing “porn.”
It’s true. And Jeff Bezos knows it. But Amazon is moving on nonetheless. The Pornocalypse comes for us all.
Who is next? My guess would be Tumblr. [2018 update: Did I call this or what?] Tumblr is, of all the big platforms, perhaps the most porn friendly; there’s lots of porn on there and the Terms of Service do not prohibit it. But if you surf Tumblr porn blogs for very long, you’ll notice that they get deactivated a lot. There are some kind of rules (not published anywhere) and if you break them (or, maybe, if somebody complains) you get nuked.
What is forbidden? Tumblr does not say. Maybe it’s age-play images that causes trouble (it can be hard to distinguish that stuff from illegal/pedo shit after all), maybe it’s rough sex photos that aren’t obviously consensual/commercial porn, maybe it’s scat or bestiality. It’s hard to say when all you’ve got to go by is the occasional non-working link with [deactivated] in it.
But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up” (for the VCs, for the advertisers, for the potential buyers, for somebody). A lot more porn tumblrs will go away when that happens.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
Is there any defense against the pornocalypse? Not really. To be sure, if you follow Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet you can at least protect yourself from losing your data and intellectual property when the anti-porn suits decide to “clean up” whatever social publishing platform you might otherwise have been using. You remember my First Rule: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.”
Unfortunately I wrote that before the true social power of platforms became fully apparent to me. You can protect your physical stuff from loss if you keep it buried in a cave, too, but what good is it if people can’t see it and play with it?
Social media platforms, publishing platforms, auction platforms, online stores, all of these benefit from the network effects of their many connected users, and increasingly they are turning into self-contained silos that aren’t sufficiently connected to the open internet. Following the First Rule protects you from loss, but it doesn’t expose you to gain as well as I thought it did, back in 2004 when I first wrote it down. Back then I believed in the power of the open web and in the impartiality of Google. You make a cool porn thing, you put it on the web, people will find it, joy and orgasms and profit for everybody.
But here in 2013 things look very different. What’s more useless than an iPhone app that isn’t allowed into the Apple store? If you publish that bad boy on your own domain, Google won’t surface it well for searchers and Apple won’t let them install it if they did find it. Nope, the First Rule is not enough.
If you want to play, you have to play where the people are. If you do anything with erotica and porn, that means shunning the platforms where you’re wholly unwelcome, pushing yourself as far as possible onto the platforms where you’re somewhat tolerated, and enthusiastically exploiting the platforms where you’re truly welcome.
But even when you do all this, it’s important to understand that companies and platforms have life cycles, and there seems inevitably to come a time in all of them where porn that was formerly welcome (often, porn that played a fundamental role in building the popularity of the platform) will get kicked to the curb or shoved behind a sleazy curtain at the back of the store. Although I believe in making this process as embarrassing and painful as possible for the companies that do it, I don’t really believe it can be prevented, or even mitigated much. All you can do is expect it, prepare for it, diversify as much as possible onto as many platforms as possible, and stay agile.
From Models And Prejudice, by fetish photographer and pornographer Hywel Phillips:
A vast number of people consume erotica and porn.
It is only OK to do so if you treat the people who make it and appear it with respect and let them feel good about the work they’ve done for you to enjoy.
I once had a powerful but foolish (and not reciprocated) crush on a good friend. I managed (I think) to contain the obligatory making-an-utter-ass-of-myself spasm to a brief episode that was not utterly destructive of our friendship; at least, I still got an invite to her wedding, where I drank in a (I hope) not-too-sombre fashion with her (actual) former boyfriends. We stayed in desultory email communication for awhile after that, but it’s been ten years now at least since I last heard from her. She’s in my mind this morning because she would have really enjoyed these links, I think, to a 1933 album of erotic illustrations of the Russian alphabet, as painted by Soviet sculptor Sergei Dmitrievich Merkurov:
You know the legends of the vast and secret porn vault maintained beneath the impacted bowels of the Vatican? Well, for us North Americans, it turns out we’ve got a better-documented version of our own. But in ours, the porn is etched on whale ivory.
This is no shit. This is real. The Vancouver Maritime Museum triggered a local controversy (in the form of one nutcase offended local mother) when it included some pieces of scrimshaw featuring nudity and mild erotic themes in a recent exhibition:
For me the interesting part is the basement collection of hardcore scrimshaw porn they won’t show to the public:
Lust was a common theme in 19th-century scrimshaw, which is what this obscure art form – etchings on hard surfaces culled from sea creatures – is called. Scrimshaw was typically made by lonely whalers, trapped for months aboard ships that scoured the South Pacific for their prey, usually sperm whales, magnificent, 50-foot long creatures prized for their oil.
The whalers had idle hands and feverish minds. Scrimshawing was their means of expression, their release valve. Using ship-made hand tools and tobacco juice for ink, they set upon whale leftovers. Some of their work is finely detailed. Some is undeniably erotic.
…
The museum has “more graphic” examples of scrimshaw, [Museum curator Patricia Owen] says, but these remain hidden downstairs in the museum’s basement. They include depictions of creative candlestick use and what Ms. Owen cautiously describes as “the act.” They will likely never see the light of day.
I do not write smut. Instead, I write about smut — a subtle but very real distinction. Still, like everybody who does not write a particular thing but who sees a lot of it and fancies themselves an educated consumer of it, I flatter myself that I could write that stuff, and maybe I even might do it one day soon, who knows? (Breath: never hold it in this situation, you will turn blue. Pro tip.)
Still, I thought Steve Almond’s Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto sounded relevant to my interests. And sure enough, it’s a fast and worthy read. My personal favorite of his fifteen reasons is #7:
Because President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did have sexual relations, and while I could care less about the big phony scandal that story became, I am interested in the sweet and deranged version of love that passed between them. Aren’t you?
On the other hand, I wish I could change Steve Almond’s mind about #13 by challenging all his wrong-headed assumptions about pornography that are buried in this densely misguided paragraph:
Because, though I watch pornography, and am terrifically involved with it for about two and a half minutes, I am most often made sad by pornography. Not simply because it involves the self-exploitation of people who probably have suffered a good deal of misfortune, and not simply because porn stars can perform in manners that often seem like physiological, geometrical, and even gravitational impossibilities (and thus make me feel like the abject sexual nebbish I surely am) but because porn stars are actors being paid, most often, to simulate pleasure. They drain sex of its single most intimate aspect: the vulnerabilities that bring us to the act in the first place, the drama of our imperfect bodies as we seek to make a communion of our desires.
But I can’t change his mind — and it would take a whole long ranty blog post just to try — so I’ll content myself with observing that accusing porn stars of “self-exploitation” is condescending and dismissive of their agency, which is not something that nice people do, even in the privacy of their own heads and sure as hell not out loud as part of an otherwise-intriguing literary manifesto.
Slate has an entertaining article (but no photos) by the man who wheedled access from the Vatican to see the 1516 bathroom decorated by Rapheal in the pagan Roman erotic style:
In 1516, the Renaissance master Raphael decorated a bathroom within the Papal Apartments with erotic frescos. Today, the wicked gallery is called the Stufetta della Bibbiena, the “small heated room of Cardinal Bibbiena,” after the worldly official who commissioned the work.
…
We passed through Bibbiena’s original bedroom, now a sanitized meeting room, and stopped in front of a small wooden door. Poised with the key, the monsignor was momentarily perplexed. “We open up the Stufetta very rarely. Almost never.”
But then we were inside. That tight, vaulted room–twice as high as its 8-foot width–was covered with cavorting naked deities. Raphael had designed his frescoed panels like a graphic novel, recounting the adventures of Venus, the goddess of love, and Cupid, the god of erotic desire, for Cardinal Bibbiena to admire as he lounged in his hot tub. At knee level, the original silver faucet was crafted into the face of a leering satyr. One panel showed the naked goddess stepping daintily stepped into her foam-fringed shell. In others, she admires herself in a mirror, lounges between Adonis’ legs and swims in sensual abandon. A couple of the frames, even more risqué, have been destroyed. One, recorded by an early visitor, showed Vulcan attempting to rape Minerva.
Embarrassingly, I had to ask the monsignor to stand aside, so I could get a proper view of the most notorious image, of the randy goat-god Pan leaping from the bushes with a monstrous erection. I was shocked to see that the image had been vandalized. Someone had etched out Pan’s manhood and filled in the gap with white paint. This, of course, made the object even larger and more noticeable–another parable about the futility of censorship.
It doesn’t matter how strange you are. The human race is very large, and there are people out there who are like you and who will like you.
The real question is not whether they are out there, but how to find them. I’ve long asserted that publication of erotica is not just about expression, but association, a means of forming part of civil society and overcoming personal loneliness. I have yet to tire of enlarging on this point.
Publishing erotic art of whatever kind is actually a pretty good way to find them, especially if you’re weird. It’s unfortunate, but for the most part we live in a society not terribly friendly to kink, and so frank expressions of unusual turn-ons are likely to get you into trouble. But if you can put yourself on the line and manage to get the fantasies out of your head, you are doing two things simultaneously. You are making a friendly gesture and providing a bit of happiness to people who are like you, and you are also identifying yourself as someone they would like to talk to. You are reaching out to people and showing them that they are not alone, and that you are committed to a common interest by having put in time, effort, and resources, to something that will make them happy. Many great friendships have started over less.
(It is also possible that if you identify yourself as interested in something that you’ll find people who want to play with you. In candor I cannot speak to this possibility all that directly myself if only because the thing I’m into can’t — or shouldn’t — be realized in real life. Your situation might be different, because there is a galaxy of things that you can be into — and it can be anything from an interest in exotic edible oils to speaking Russian in bed to re-enacting scenes from Stephen Douglas’s Slaveworld stories — that you can realize with the right partners. And if that’s the case, awesome! I hope you get together with like-minded people and have a blast. Although if you do want to go the Slaveworld route, please make sure to keep it safe, sane, and consensual.)
Also worth nothing is that there are lots of people out there who not only have common interests with you, but who will be interested in being creative partners, and that too is a rewarding form of friendship. If you’re a writer you will want to find artists and vice versa, and working together with the right sort of people you can experience a form of mutual enrichment.
When you publish, you show the world your individuality. Not the phony simulacrum of “individuality” you get through social networking sites, where you check the boxes as to what cheesy pop-cultural phenomena you “like.” You are rather putting something unique into the world, something that’s not just a formula for the convenience of corporate marketers. Remember that your friends aren’t internet persons who “friend” you. They’re people who really care about who you are.
An instant more, and his tongue had left her fainting mouth and was twisting like a soft, pink snake about each breast in turn, passing from one to the other till his lips closed hard on the nipples, sucking them with a tender gluttony.
Then suddenly he drew back her wrapper entirely, whispered, “I want you all, so that my eyes can see all that my lips can’t cover,” and in a moment she was free, lying before him in her fresh young nakedness, and feeling that indeed his eyes were covering it with fiery kisses. But Mr. Palmato was never idle, and while this sensation flashed through her, one of his arms had slipped under her back and wound itself around her so that his hand again enclosed her left breast. At the same moment the other hand softly separated her legs and began to slip up the old path it had so often traveled in darkness. But now it was light, she was uncovered; and looking downward beyond his dark, silver-sprinkled head, she could see her own parted knees and outstretched ankles and feet. Suddenly she remembered Austin’s rough advances and shuddered.
The mounting hand paused, the dark head was instantly raised. “What is it, my own?”
“I was–remembering–last week–” she faltered, below her breath.
“Yes, darling. That experience was a cruel one–but it has to come once in all women’s lives. Now we shall reap its fruit.”
A little while back in a post on media technology I mused a bit about audio erotica. Well, this past Friday I managed to get a bit more concrete experience with the format.
Picture this, if you will. In the cold, pre-dawn darkness a battered, schmutzy commuter train grinds its way across one of North America’s grittier industrial landscapes. The train is full of morose-looking men and women on their way to a day’s toil in Metropolis. Some doze fitfully, some clutch styrofoam cups of coffee, some scowl at that morning’s Wall Street Journal. You can tell just by looking at them that every last one of them would really rather be somewhere else.
Except for one man, who blogs in his spare time under the name of Faustus. Faustus is grinning from ear to ear. Why? Because on Faustus’s hip there rests a media-playing BlackBerry, wired to Faustus by a small set of headphones. And if you could hear inside the buds resting snugly in Faustus’s ears, you could hear something like this:
I activated the Amatory Capacitors, and a crackling noise filled the air. It joined in pleasing counterpoint to the Vibratorium’s hum and Mrs. Hargreaves’ groans and gasps as my Ontological Engine woke to life, powered by the trickle of Vital Energies she was emitting.
Yes, indeed. Circlet Press, since 1992 the world’s leading (arguably, world’s only) exclusive purveyor of science fiction and fantasy erotica, has entered the podcast era by putting out a four-part MP3 version of Vinnie Tesla’s story “The Ontological Engine, or, The Modern Leda.” (You can have a lot of fun just mining that title for sly references. The story appeared earlier in the Circlet anthology Up for Grabs: Exploring the Worlds of Gender, edited by Lauren P. Burka.) Mad science, flagellation, Victorians Gone Wild, sex machines, erotically-inquisitive monsters, and the power of female orgasm harnessed to questionable purposes. Seriously, what’s not to love here?
To be sure, it does do a lot with the whole Mad Science thing, which discerning ErosBlog readers have perhaps noticed is somewhatupmyalley.
And perhaps most attractive of all, the first part of four is available for free (mp3 download here with the remaining four parts available for a very modest outlay. If audio erotica or steampunk erotica or Mad Scientists are your thing (or if you just hate your commute and need to liven it up a bit, maybe?), you owe it to yourself to have a look.
When I visited Moscow in the late-Soviet era, enterprising young men would come up to me muttering “lacquer box? lacquer box?” under their breath. They wanted American dollars, and a lot of them, for what could charitably described as cheap touristy knockoffs of folk-art painted boxes.
If the boxes had been painted like this (popup warning), I might have been more enthused:
I realize that on any number of occasions Bacchus has expressed skepticism about the validity of the distinction between “porn” and “art”. Perhaps such skepticism is well founded. But in the spirit of friendly controversy, I shall offer an explanation of the distinction.
Bertrand Russell once introduced the concept of “emotive conjugations,” meaning that the words we use are determined by the person of the speaker. His example was as follows:
I am firm.
You are stubborn.
He is pig-headed.
The concept transfer nicely into the porn-versus-art debate, to wit:
I enjoy the erotic arts.
You get off on porn.
He is addicted to horrible smut.
Though perhaps the distinction doesn’t apply to absolutely everyone. Cue the classic Tom Lehrer song!
I am not making this up. Mexican Playboy did a photo shoot of Maria Florencia Onori as the Virgin Mary, and the result was a bunch of pissed-off Mexican Catholics.
I myself think Maria is beautiful, and don’t have a lot of time for Christians who despise female beauty to the point where they freak out when it’s associated, however indirectly, with their holy figures:
Folk erotic art from the battlefield is hardly unheard of — remember nose art on bombers? Here’s a sample from an even more unlikely place to find beauty, namely, the latrines at Ali Al Salem Air Base, near Kuwait City:
In the best tradition of comic folk erotica, our latrine siren is ready and willing; the speech bubble appears to say “any hole”.
It’s hard to say for sure what the headband and the wires and the radio controller handset are for in this Bill Ward cartoon, but my money’s on some sort of super mad-scientist mind control unit — being used for nefarious erotic purposes, of course:
It’s been awhile since I’ve put up a good bit of cartoonish sex art. This 1970s-looking illustration has a rough sex “she’s in deeper than she expected, but still game” feel to it, reinforced by the construction-worker cad who can’t be bothered to remove his hard-hat:
I once visited Russia during the late Soviet period, at a time when cheesy propaganda posters were still the second-most prevalent form of public art (after statues of Lenin, of course.) At that time, the Five Year Plan was still an official priority, which means that posters saying “You Need To Fulfill The Plan” could be seen on every wall.
The Communists may be gone, but the bureaucratic Russian soul endures. Evidence? How about this story (sent in by a friend) from the Moscow Times, regarding the publication of the Russian edition of Playgirl? The article devotes most of its ink to a concern about whether Russian women will approve of circumcised American penises. Anyway, down near the end, we get this gem:
Chermenskaya and the publication’s founders, whom she refused to identify, studied Russia’s confusing pornography laws before registering Playgirl as an erotic entertainment magazine. As erotica, Playgirl cannot publish photographs depicting sexual intercourse and has a quota for the number of large pictures of penises in each issue: six, Chermenskaya said.
Don’t worry, ladies, National Penis Month continues. Although I don’t see how any of my male readers could possibly object to this one, all things considered:
I have another shot from this photo series which I may post another day….
