Sock Puppeted By “Abby Winters”

It was big news back in 2009 when Australian porn “but don’t call it porn” producer Abbywinters.com got caught up in that special flavor of down-under anti-porn hysteria and ran into legal difficulties. The boss was arrested and multiply charged, but he subsequently beat most of the charges, although he did have to pay a fine in connection with a female ejaculation movie that the authorities thought featured urination, an illegal “fetish” in Australia. And then, quite famously, he upped and relocated his entire business to Amsterdam.

I was reminded about all of this when I stumbled upon a detailed story from late last year in an Australian newspaper. What particularly caught my eye was this detail about a controversy over whether there ever was an “Abby Winters” or whether “she” was a fiction propounded by the site’s current owner, one Garion Hall:

Hall claims that, in the late ’90s, he met a woman called Abby Winters at the Corner Hotel in Richmond who was interested in making a female-friendly porn site using non-professional models, and that he slowly became more and more involved in the venture as the site attracted customers. He maintains that Winters sold her share of the business to him in 2003, by which time it was run from a converted church in hipster Fitzroy, just off Brunswick Street.

…

And just who was this person whose name adorned the site? Where was she? Doubt began to circulate widely about the semi-mythical Abby Winters. Hall had always claimed she was the co-founder and the one who came up with the idea of depicting “wholesome” girls in the first place. But when the porn weblog Fleshbot.com ran a photograph of Hall at work with a name tag saying “Abby” and revealed that whoever wrote the site’s forum posts as “Abby” sometimes signed them off as “G”, it seemed the ruse was up. Critics say Hall concocted the name to make the site appear more female-friendly and “safe”.

“She’s the namesake,” Hall tells me, “and I’m the business guy. We met and had the idea in 1999. She’s a photographer who went to uni and did arts and wanted to make something different to mainstream porn. Then, around 2003, she didn’t want to be involved any more, so I basically bought her out. It suits me that people don’t think she’s real. It suits her, too. She’s not interested in speaking to journalists.”

So it appears that there are two possibilities here:

1) Abby Winters never existed, and was always a fictional character that Garion Hall operated as a sock puppet over the internet for purposes of better branding his female-friendly erotica;

2) Abby existed as Hall claims, but he operated her identity as a sock puppet for some years after buying her out in 2003.

Neither of these alternatives is particularly scandalous; in the colorful annals of porn marketing, a bit of marketing sock-puppetry barely trips the Deceit-O-Meter. But nobody likes to be misled by a sock puppet, and no publisher likes to be duped into unknowingly publishing sock puppetry. Thus it was mostly (but not entirely) with amusement that I realized ErosBlog had dealings with Hall’s “Abby Winters” sock puppet back in the early days.

When Abbywinters.com was, briefly, an advertiser at ErosBlog back in 2007, all of my dealings were with marketing professionals. But in 2004, I ran a photo that was (falsely, and the falsity was so obvious I called it out in the post title) being circulated as a “topless Chelsea Clinton” image: Fake Celebrity Nude Photos. In response to that I got an email from Jonno at Fleshbot, telling me “nope, it’s Abbey Winters”. Which (wrong) info I duly added to the post.

And that’s when the sock puppet appeared! Someone using the name Abby Winters posted (in 2004, after Hall says the real Abby Winters had been bought out) the following comment, with links not reproduced here:

Er, that ain’t Chelsea, and nor is it me! It’s Samantha, a model I photographed in late 200, in Sydney, Australia. As someone has seen fit to remove my copyright from the image, check the whole set of her. Her solo shoto is here, and her shoot which that image is from (wither her mate, Tully) is here.

By now the identity/deception meta is so deep you almost need a shovel. Somebody, perhaps Garion Hall, posts as Abby Winters, who may or may not have ever existed, to explain that a photo of somebody probably not actually named Samantha is certainly not a photograph of Chelsea Clinton, which nobody ever thought it was was in the first place. It’s a rum old internet we’ve got going on, yes indeed.

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Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture

The words I wrote six and a half years ago to celebrate the launch of Sex and Submission seem almost naive, now:

If you like your sex at all kinky, you’ll have noticed that genuinely kinky hard core porn is very hard to find. Bondage and spanking photos are a dime a dozen, but how often do you see a pretty woman in a leather collar with her wrists tied giving a big sloppy enthusiastic blowjob? Or bouncing happily up and down on some male porn star prong with her wrists clipped to the D-rings on her collar?

I’m not saying you can’t find it, but it’s not common and it’s rarely commercial.

Not only has the commercial production of explicitly-sexual BDSM porn exploded since I wrote that, but a great deal of stuff that already existed in obscure physical-format publications has found its way onto the web since then. And the web has continued to do its webby thing, constantly shuffling up and exposing to public view deep layers of our cultural history that were well-buried and almost completely invisible just a few years ago. So what once seemed radically uncommon now seems (in retrospect) to have been all over the place. Of course, it never actually was “all over the place”; it existed but it wasn’t available in any practical sense.

I was reminded of this by an old Europorn magazine cover I just encountered on Tumblr. The magazine is called Perverted Orgies #3 and the cover features a woman in bondage being screwed from behind while she sucks another man’s dick, while two more men fumble with details of her bondage. (You can see it here for however long the Tumblr link may last.)

I first saw that image before there was a World Wide Web. It was floating around on the Usenet image groups, in the form of a tiny little .gif about 250 pixels wide. It was a rectangle with an oval mask, so the actual image area was an oval about 200 pixels wide by maybe 110 pixels tall. But there was no way to tell that it was a magazine cover or what magazine cover it was — and even if you knew, the magazine it came from was doubtless long out of print, available only in the physical store of a dealer in old porn, if you could find one in your locale who had one of the sure-to-have-been-a-small-number that were ever printed.

The internet didn’t have a thing to do with the creation of this image. It’s older than the internet. But somebody with a primitive scanner liberated a low-resolution version of this “item of culture” from the bonds of paper, way back in the late 1980s, and put it on the internet. And then, with the marches of time and progress, somebody else with a better scanner did it again, in high resolution with better color fidelity, less cropping, and better preservation of the limited provenance info that is inherent to the magazine cover. And now the daily churn and ferment of the modern web brings it to the surface, from time to time and place to place, where it’s likely to be spotted, in time, by most everybody who is interested in seeing a thing like that. And I’ll wager (though I have not done the exercise) that a few minute’s effort spent typing that magazine information into torrent search engines would yield a more-or-less complete scan of the magazine.

For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape. But that’s a project that seems only to be accelerating. No day passes when I do not marvel at some internet find, some cultural treasure that “I can’t believe somebody put this on the internet!” But they do, and they (the whole world!) do more with every day that passes.

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Problems In Furry Land

This is from the not-very-secret pop-up easter egg tooltip text associated with a recent xkcd comic:

There’s Livejournal drama between those who want to wear human suits over fursuits and those who just take off the fursuits.

What’s notable about this asserted fact is that:

1) I believe it, absolutely, despite having made zero effort to Google it or confirm it in any other way;

2) The fact of my belief says something profound and interesting about the way we process information and establish our trust heuristics in the internet “information overload” era.

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