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The Sex Blog Of Record
Sunday, November 11th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
My commentary would be superfluous:
And yet lo I am a man, so here I am flapping my fingertips with the commentary anyway. In fact I have spent a lot of time and bashed up a lot of keyboards over the last sixteen years on this blog addressing particulars: posting a particular porn image, analyzing it as art, speculating about what it means. As a matter of editorial policy, ErosBlog (the blog is me!) is pro-porn and 100% coming from the notion that you can’t wedge a playing card between the baskets that “porn” and “art” live in.
Mostly I have only contempt for the conversations about porn that are seeking to disestablish porn from the realm of culture. In the early days of the blog, I would read them and sometimes post derisive responses to them. Nowadays I rarely even read them. I have pushed fifty. I don’t have time. The music analogy is a good one. You don’t like folk music? Don’t listen! But I am not going to engage with your 4,000-word thinkpiece on how folk music should be banned because of its pernicious effects on banjo players and folk festival attendees. Folk music is here to stay and I can only read so many more words before I die. Your attempt to destroy a cultural force that offends you will not be among them.
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Saturday, November 19th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
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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Thursday, February 5th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
The Ms. Magazine of my youth couldn’t mention pornography without excoriating it and stripping all agency from the women who appeared in it. For them to publish an interview with a scholar who could say a thing like this? It would have been inconceivable:
So when we talk about women in pornography today and reduce the conversation to trafficking, we miss how women are aware of the constraints and have made a choice to do this work because they’ve weighed it against other limited options and found it to be beneficial for them. Rather than judge them for being “wrong” in their choices, I wanted to see what they were doing and what they were trying to say. Some of the most important messages from the archives is that, even in the midst of the greatest oppression, we still want to love ourselves sexually and we want to be erotic beings, and we want to survive and thrive and be courageous and savvy, even if that means using the sex industry to carve out other choices and live better lives.
That’s from an interview with Mireille Miller-Young, author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography.
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Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
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.
One high-profile erotica author, Selena Kitt, writes: “The Pornocalypse has begun. Amazon continues filtering erotica out of their All Department Search in large numbers.”
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.
The pornocalypse comes for us all.
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Friday, January 25th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
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.
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Sunday, January 20th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
And here’s another one. This guy signed up as an extra for one of the massive indoor-gangbang sequences at Public Disgrace, and found it to be ethical porn-making in action. His report is called Liking Porn And Loving Women: My Day As An Ethical Porn Star; he’s got a lot to say, but this is from near the end:
Princess Donna ripped the clothing off the models and encouraged the audience to do all sorts of nasty things to them. Her commands carried over the crowd as she busted out all manner of kinky sex devices. Fairly close attention was paid to the models’ well-being, but the check-ins were so subtle that I doubt the audience even noticed. Whenever either woman approached her breaking point, Donna carved a path toward the exit and let them go on break.
…
I don’t have any regrets about participating in Public Disgrace. Because it showed me that ethical pornography is a real thing that can empower its participants. And because it let me see that porn stars are just, well, people – people who enjoy getting naked and having sex who just so happen to get paid for it.
Even with all my nervousness leading up to the shoot, Public Disgrace was still an unforgettable experience and I’d probably do it again.
There’s something deliciously seedy about his photo of the accoutrements marshalled for the Public Disgrace production. It reminds me of an atmospheric shot for a horror movie or for the interrogation scene in an old war movie, but here it’s just a “get the supplies laid out” bit of movie-making practicality:
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Sunday, June 5th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Mark Kleiman, one of our more distinguished academic analysts of crime has a short post on the incidence of forcible rape as reported in large-scale victimization surveys over the last generation. The news is good: rape is down in that period — way down. From 2.8 per 1000 population in 1979 to 0.5 in 2009. Kleiman comments that he doesn’t know what has caused this dramatic and welcome change, but then adds:
But the theory that pornography causes sex crime would seem to have a hard time surviving comparison with the data.
Well put, professor. Also, love your beard.
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Monday, October 11th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
I used to live in a tourist destination town, and it was not uncommon to encounter European backpacker types naked in the laundromat while they washed all their clothes. The impression we got from attitude and body language was that this was considered normal practice for travelers on a budget, and that considerations of more modest local custom were beneath contempt. So, basically: Suck it, you American prudes.
Thus it is with some irony that I have encountered this porn made by a U.S. porn company featuring a BDSM slavegirl being forced to launder her clothes in a public fountain in a European city (Berlin, I think):
Although the locals are probably rather less bothered by all this than they would be in the U.S., I’m sure there are some ancient moralists whose feelings were ruffled during the making of this pornography. And to them I say, in all good humor: Suck it, you European prudes.
Images credit: Public Disgrace.
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Monday, July 13th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
A learned friend sent me a link to a story in the New York Times about the decline (from a low prominence to an even lower one) of plot in pornography. Unfortunately, that was a few days ago, and the story is now unavailable unless you have a NYT login, so I’ll accomplish much the same thing for you by repurposing Violet Blue’s two-sentence summary:
They discuss the gradual demise of scripted porn movies and the increase of all-action porn. In the article they talk to Steven Hirsch at Vivid, who blames the short attention span of Internet porn consumers.
Now, if I were doing a dead media watch the way Bruce Sterling often does at Beyond The Beyond, I’d have trenchant observations for you about a dead-tree newspaper that can’t even manage to publish its material online at a persistent link that works for everyone, writing about the decline of plot in an industry that never particularly valued plot, while neglecting — in the last couple of years alone — probably several dozen more interesting news developments in that same industry. Is this news, or is it “old man shouts at cloud” stuff?
But instead of making this a dead media watch piece, I want to praise the dancing bear a little bit. Not only has the NYT deigned to notice the porn industry, but they wrote about it in a manner that doesn’t dispute the significant place pornography has in our cultural canon. For the major print media to write anything about porn that doesn’t include a big dose of anti-porn fear-mongering is unusual enough. For them to treat with it as a literary genre — which it surely is — and analyze its literary evolution and shortcomings? That’s downright revolutionary, and certainly to be commended.
That said, the instant I saw it I thought of Bruce Sterling again. About six weeks ago he published the very succinct Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature on his blog. If you are willing to read them with a bit of mental flexibility with regard to media (substituting, for example, “DVD” for “book”) they are germane to, and do a better job of explaining, the changes in porn production, distribution, and marketing that have driven the plot “decline” that the NYT was grappling with. I’d gesture specifically at items 2-4, 7, and 8-14. That’s what, 11 out of 18?
1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication – cellphones, social networks, streaming video – are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
3. Intellectual property systems failing.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.
13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.
15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.
18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.
Sunday, February 15th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
I mount the pulpit again for another Sunday sermon.
There is a common accusation cast against pornography, indeed against erotic arts of any kind, indeed against anything resembling a hedonistic theory of value, that it encourages people to be passive, to be mere consumers, couch potatoes even. I am in the pulpit this week to tell you that this is not true.
I’ll coin a term to cover the broad concept I need: neophorics, the bearing of the new — to represent together invention, creation, discovery, innovation — that lie at the heart of progress, whether in the sciences or the arts or in engineering. And I shall use an older word — hedonics — to represent the art of achieving enjoyment (and correspondingly avoiding suffering) in sentient experience. That the erotic arts and practices are a big part of hedonics I doubt many readers of ErosBlog will deny.
The key to understanding here is that hedonics and neophorics are intimately connected, as entwined with each other as the coupling snakes seen by Teiresias of old. Each needs and drives the other, and would wither without the other.
Hedonics needs neophorics. A simple thought experiment should make this clear. Take your favorite fantasy, the thing that makes you really hot, your best personal X in the language of earlier sermons. Eliezer Yudkowsky at one point offered “living in your volcano lair with a bevy of sexy (and presumably eager, skilled, and willing) catgirls” as an example of one that someone might have (it’s not my X and I don’t think it’s Eliezer’s X either, but it’s a good example). Now ask yourself: is that all you would want to do with the rest of your life? Or if the fond wishes of transhumanism are realized and you become effectively immortal, is that all you would want to do for the next thousand years? The next million? Wouldn’t there come a point at which you would get bored? Feel a lack of achievement? Wouldn’t your life be much better — even in purely hedonic terms — if you could be surprised by things at some point? Get outside your lair and meet something or someone that wasn’t a catgirl? There will always come a point for the sort of beings that we are at which something new will be needed in our lives. That’s one reason why I urge people who can to get busy in the arts and create new erotica.
But what’s more, hedonics drives neophorics. The quest for pleasure is a mighty force for innovation. I cannot think of any artistic medium aside from absolute music (and maybe not even that) that has not been pushed forward by the drive for erotic satisfaction. As soon as the Greeks figured out how to paint on vases they were painting amazing orgy scenes on them. As soon as the camera was invented someone took his clothes off in front of one. The Internet really is for porn, like the song says, and certainly wouldn’t have been built out as fast as it was had people not wanted to look at naughty pictures or share naughty stories.
And it’s not just erotic pleasures that drive achievement. Centuries ago there were great voyages of exploration motivated by…the search for fisheries? The quest for new fields in which to plant barley? No, by search for cheaper and better ways to get pleasure commodities, silk and spices. No one ever perished for want of the taste of cinnamon or the touch of silk, but many men nonetheless risked their lives to get these things. And out of these voyages grew mighty forms of commerce,not just in silk and spices, but in other tangible forms of enjoyment: coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, sugar, wine, spirits, and lets face it, opium and other drugs.
And the neophorics will go on and on, driven by hedonics. Right now we are just scratching the surface with new media like video games. Immersive virtual reality is probably yet to come. And who knows? Maybe someday some clever bioengineer will actually deliver up a catgirl.
The lesson to take away? There is nothing passive about porn. It is an engine of progress.
Friday, February 23rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Outside of the hentai realm you don’t see a lot of science fiction pornography, and what you do see is usually hilariously awful. I’m not sure exactly why that is, given all the fun you could have with big hard shiny implacable stainless steel sex robots and lustful tentacle-y aliens and autonomous anal probes and mind control rays and force whips and … oh, wait, am I talking out loud here?
Moving rapidly along.
Anyway, the folks at FuckingMachines.com may not be making science fiction, but they do understand the attraction of cruel implacable hard steel sex robot machinery and the considerable advantages of the indefatigable electric motor. Nor do they shrink from restraining mere human flesh when it might otherwise flinch away from and thus miss out on the intense mechanical pleasures of the machine age. In space, it is said, no one can hear you scream. But why go all the way to space when you can achieve the same effect with a high quality latex vacuum bondage bed?
Princess Leia in chains was cute. Han Solo in carbonite was novel. But this, I submit, would have been a better fate for either one of them, and would have immensely livened up the movie theater of my youth. Besides, wouldn’t old Jabba the Hut have enjoyed the heck out of a implacable robotic tongue-saw?
Science fiction this may not be, but it sure is entertaining!
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