Tuesday, 16 June 2009
| 11:19 am
| Industry
Commercial porn, true to its nature, has become a clusterfuck the last few days. People both inside and outside the industry are scrambling to make their opinions known a reported case of HIV in an adult performer. It seems very important to everyone in the room that they be heard on this issue now.
Meanwhile, there’s been a perfect storm of misinformation, misunderstanding, and defensiveness. Hubris, hysteria and bullshit: All three are certified virulent.
Articles like this one show curious figures at best; independent producer Tony Comstock lays viciously in to the sex-positive community on this issue; mainstream producer Ernest Greene accuses the press of fucking things up royally.
That information is being fucked up royally by someone is a fact which is almost inarguable.
Just today (Tuesday), the LA times has published the thoughts of Darrin James, who was the epicenter of the 2004 outbreak. The Times is also responsible for that often-cited article mentioned above, stating that there were 16 “unpublicized” cases of HIV in the porn industry since the last outbreak — a number they seem to have gotten from LA County officials using some really wonky data.
For those of you who don’t know, producers of commercial straight porn in the U.S. generally require a negative HIV test. Most performers get their tests through the Adult Industry Medical Foundation. The Foundation routinely tests all or most performers in straight, above-board, commercial porn movies. In the straight industry, condoms are rarely used — but we’ll get to that. In the gay industry, HIV tests are not standard, condoms are more common, and “bareback” porn remains a very strong niche.
AIM sees to the straight industry; it does not “authorize” performers to work, but reports the results of their HIV tests to the industry through a database that reputable producers access before hiring someone. The foundation is headed by Dr. Sharon Mitchell, who holds a PhD from The Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She is not a physician.
AIM presents itself as an independent medical foundation, but in fact is BFFs with the porn industry and exists almost solely at its suffrage. In industry terms AIM is about as far from independent as a foundation can be; it is an adult industry institution. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to put these things in context.
The performer who tested positive through AIM is not being named, because AIM doesn’t do that. On June 4, the patient was tested at an AIM clinic because her previous test was then 36 days old. Industry producers accept HIV tests that are 10 to 30 days old, but somebody fudged on that. The fact that one producer fudged the dates shouldn’t necessarily tar the whole industry. If we are talking about a system that failed because it is not effective, that’s one thing — but if talking about a system that “failed” because someone didn’t follow the rules, that’s another thing entirely. These are rules that performers trust producers to follow; they should be sacrosanct. But they are not rules that are ever, in any way, “enforced.”
After her June 4 test, this unnamed woman performed in a scene June 5 and found out her test came back positive on June 6.
Some sources, however, reported that AIM received the test results on the 4th, which is impossible, or that AIM “authorized” the performer to work. The general public (and therefore porn performers) frequently misunderstand and/or disregard medical protocols, and here someone appears to have played it fast-and-loose with those protocols. Dr. Sharon Mitchell of AIM said the following in a statement published in AVN:
Since AIM does not authorize performers to work, but merely reports their current status to the industry, there is no way that the actress in question could believe that anyone at AIM told her she was cleared to work unless a negative written report had been received and the industry so notified. No such written report had been received before June 6th.
That seems to indicate that the performer and producers didn’t care about waiting for current HIV results, and probably didn’t take the risk seriously.
Regardless, additional rumors circulated that AIM had failed to “publicize” previous cases of HIV infection in the industry, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what AIM does or should do. Though Mitchell isn’t helping that much with explanations I, for one, don’t find all that clear. I’m not sure, for instance, what Mitchell is claiming she did or didn’t do here:
As to reports of other HIV cases not being disclosed, it is clear that most occurred under prior law which only required that the incident be reported and the postal zone address and a partial social security number of the person testing positively be disclosed. As to their being “unpublicized,” the AIM database, which is used by all production companies, lists actors and their current testing results. When an individual desires to go into the industry, he or she must initially be tested by AIM to go into the database. If they test positively, they do not go into the database and cannot work in the industry.
Mitchell appears to be addressing an issue with their compliance with reporting requirements to the LA County Health Department. But such a statement is guaranteed to get necessarily misconstrued in the press and by the general public — porn fans and performers — who are, no doubt, confused.
The short version: AIM publishes performer HIV test results to a database, accessible by subscribers (porn producers). They notify the performers’ partners within the industry. They also notify the County Health Department. They do not release the performer’s name to the press. They do not “publicize” an outbreak.
However, also to be considered are the comments by Dr. Peter Kerndt, an MD/MPh with the LA County Public Health Department. New HIV infection, as Mitchell implies in the above statement, must be reported to the Public Health Department within 7 days. Kerndt claims AIM didn’t report the case promptly because on the Friday the 12th, six calendar days after the positive result, it still hadn’t been reported.. He was quoted in a Saturday XBiz Article as saying that AIM was using this 7-day requirement as a stalling tactic, presumably to protect the industry. Said Kerndt:
AIM is not providing us with information sufficient to confirm what they are reporting . . . we are extremely concerned with the information that is coming in, but we are not surprised, since this industry has been out of compliance with Cal/OSHA requirements for barrier protection . . . What’s disturbing about this is that they’re using the regulation to withhold the information and delay an investigation of a serious health matter . . . They’re saying that this is not a major event. I think if they were to ask the performer, it’s a devastating, major, life-altering event for that individual. It’s inexcusable that it would occur in the workplace.
There is no indication at press time that the performer was infected on a set. She may have been infected outside of the industry, though she certainly exposed someone on the 5th, which unquestionably makes it an industry matter, and one for Cal/OSHA. AVN doesn’t appear to have reported yet, now well past the 7 day mark, whether LA County received the disclosures he was expecting from AIM.
But then again, in the same article, Kerndt manages to refer to “rectal sex,” which makes him sound like he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. That’s late in the article, though, when Kerndt’s rabid recriminations have already set the tone for his comments.
If you’re expecting sex-positivity from the LA County Public Health Department, of course, you should look elsewhere, since it’s their job to manage contagion, not to pat your head and tell you it’s OK to do dirty things and sex is really all about love, intimacy, expression and sex-positive feminism. But is the LA County Public Health Department next going to tell me to avoid unprotected “rectal sex”? Are they going to continue to refer to the woman who tested HIV positive with the Orwellian and profoundly dehumanizing “Patient Zero?”
XBiz’s article from Friday says in the second paragraph that “Results of the June 4 test were received on June 6, but she performed in a scene on June 5, before the test results were back.” — but then in the second-to-last paragraph, “AIM said that people who tested positive through its facility never performed in the adult industry, which is why their positive tests were not publicized.”
Which is still more confusing. My query to Tod Hunter at XBiz clears this right up — AIM says on its website that people who do not receive a negative test do not work in the industry. But “Patient Zero” did. She broke the rules, and so did the producers — unless “Patient Zero” somehow forged her documents, which I find unlikely.
Again, if the system is broken because people don’t follow the rules, that’s different than the system being broken because its stated procedures are ineffective.
Maybe the system is broken. 100% safe sex 100% of the time was the public health message in the gay community in the early ’90s. 100% safe sex 100% of the time is just about guaranteed to protect you from HIV — but not everyone stuck to it. People slip. But producers who don’t wait for current AIM test results before letting talent work are not the same as guys who get turned on, have unsafe sex and think “Oh, shit.” Producers are professionals, or are supposed to be.
But then, AIM doesn’t make things any better by posting on their site:
There are no positive tests from exposures thus far, and AIM does not expect any.
I have a vague sense of what they mean, but I shouldn’t have to guess — and neither should anyone else. They mean there is a positive test from “exposures,” but no subsequent positive tests from exposures to “Patient Zero” on porn sets. But a statement that “there are no positive tests from exposures” requires an understanding of context that is explosively dangerous.
Similarly, AVN, surely without meaning to, is fueling the hysteria. It does so right alongside some relatively reasonable debunking, which has the self-stated goal of correcting misreported facts and rumors So why then title an article “AIDS Healthcare Foundation Wants Control Of Your Penis,” in a reactionary headline worthy of the “Libertarian” Fox News.
The article refers, of course, to the protest by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation outside Hustler Hollywood this past Monday night, in which the Foundation asked Larry Flynt, as an industry leader, to take a stand and make Hustler’s productions condom-only. In the original article, AVN claimed that the goal of this protest is not to get Hustler, or any other commercial producer, to go condom-only; it’s to get the California Legislature to require condoms in porn. But according to AVN’s article after-the-fact, And according to AVN, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation never showed up. AVN quoted Hustler’s Theresa Flynt as saying that the protesters were recruited by Lifestyles brand condoms, taking revenge on Hustler Hollywood for not stocking their brand.
I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea if she was kidding or not. It sounds like a joke, but then, a lot of things do lately.
Thomas Roche blogs at Thomasroche.com.
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Back in February, Amazon removed from its virtual shelves a Japanese video game called RapeLay. In RapeLay, according to an AVN story:
. . .the player stalks and rapes women. If one of the rape victims becomes pregnant, the player must force her to have a abortion. In one scenario, the player takes on the role of a criminal who rapes a mother and her two teenage daughters.
Yeah, I’m kinda shocked myself, and I’m not all that easy to shock, or at least it kind of seems like I shouldn’t be.
The Wikipedia page also mentions some other choice tidbits, like the fact that the point-of-view character summons a gust of wind to lift the female characters’ skirts on a subway platform — by saying a prayer. Oh, and the POV character for part of the game, Kimura, is a “chikan” — a subway groper, for which he is arrested at the beginning of the game, setting the stage for later revenge scenarios where he evens the score for his arrest with the family of his accusers. He can do this because Kimura’s father is an important and powerful politician. Yow!! God and the government’s on the rapist’s side!
The game is published by Yokohama-based company Illusion, which also publishes such games as Battle Raper, Artificial Girl, and Sexy Beach, according to the article in The Register. The company’s defense was that it had “done nothing wrong,” and that if Amazon didn’t like it then, well, tough. The game, said Illusion, was not intended for the US market and conformed to those Japanese standards.
It’s true that while Amazon banning the game is significant in the West, as far as Japanese games go, the game is within what has been done in Japanese games — but definitely the far edge of it. In short, there’s no law banning such games. RapeLay is far from the only example of a Japanese rape game, and every once in a while such games make their way to US news sources and create outrage.
This past week, AVN reported that RapeLay was “banned” in an emergency meeting by the Japanese Ethics Organization of Computer Software. Since games site Kotaku observed a few weeks ago that the Tokyo Broadcasting System had erroneously edited an interview to imply that the EOCS had already “banned” the game, WTF is going on? Are rape games banned in Japan or not? Nobody seems to know. AVN’s story claims the group said it would ban any material that “deviates extremely from social norms” and all “sexual torture software,” but also mentioned that they “will” draw up guidelines for video games that restrict sexual violence.
The truth is that the EOCS doesn’t have the power to “ban” anything. It is a non-governmental business organization. In fact, the relative ineffectuality of this organization is highlighted in the way it was formed. In 1991, a junior high school student in Japan stole a copy of Saori: The House of Beautiful Girls. This game shows a non-rape side of Japanese perversion, but still manages to be pretty extreme. With its themes of lesbian incest in a Shinto shrine, teacher-student sex in a classroom, and more (including a preponderance of incest scenarios), Saori outraged the populace and led to the formation of the EOCS.
Nowadays, the organization claims that 90 percent of the games in Japan carry its rating stickers. But even that claim appears to be largely unsupportable in Western sources. And even if it’s true, do you have any freakin’ idea how many video games are sold in Japan? That leaves a lot of games sold that haven’t been anointed by the EOCS.
This is, of course, an attempt for the industry in Japan to self-regulate, in response to the claims of the Japanese government that video games cause sex crimes.
Sound familiar? If you follow the video game industry you might remember the California legislation from 2005 penned by Democrat Leeland Yee and signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It sought to ban sales to minors of any video game deemed violent, with the rationale, according to the Register article, that:
Exposing minors to depictions of violence in video games, including sexual and heinous violence, makes those minors more likely to experience feelings of aggression, to experience a reduction of activity in the frontal lobes of the brain, and to exhibit violent antisocial or aggressive behavior.
The legislation also claims that kids who don’t become more inclined to commit violence as a result of video games still experience psychological harm. I think someone said the same thing about comic books once upon a time. Is it true? Fuck if I know. I will, however, testify to the psychological harm caused by video games. Anyone who’s ever spent eight hours playing Doom while consuming nothing but Jolt Cola and Ho-Ho’s will back me up on this one.
The California law never took effect because of a pending federal appeal, and was was just rejected by the 9th Court of Appeals as being unconstitutional.
In the U.S., rape games are quite simply not considered OK, so it’s not usually an issue, but remember the Hot Coffee Incident?
Rape games in the US exist primarily as an underground — built largely out of games imported from Japan. They also exist in their own way on Fetlife, arranged not by malleable teens but by 40 and 50somethings of the “Meet my wife at the truck stop on I-5, she’ll be the one wearing pigtails and a schoolgirl outfit” variety.
Any accusations North Americans make that Japanese people are “weird” always feel rather spurious and glib to me. I do, however, confess to being stunned at the content of RapeLay.
Ultimately, in Japan as in the US, nothing has changed and nothing is likely to change. But the weird postscript is that Kotaku’s article mentions that:
[Erotic] game maker Syrup Soft is delaying its upcoming game Gang raped by the entire village—girls covered in milky liquid~ to re-moniker it The trap set by the entire village ~bodies covered in milky liquid~.
Huh? What? Fuck if I know. Random tildes in a video game title? Must be a Japanese thing. I’ll never understand it.
Thomas Roche blogs about sex and science fiction at ThomasRoche.com.
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Tuesday, 2 June 2009
| 10:59 pm
| Industry
University of Iowa Journalism professor M. Gigi Durham’s new book The Lolita Effect addresses the ways in which sexually provocative media, toys, and clothing for kids and teens affect girls’ self esteem and sexual behavior. The eponymous effect is caused by a youth culture that sexualizes girls too young and in all the wrong ways, without appropriate sexual health information.
So where does porn come into all this?
Durham does not really address porn directly, but it comes up numerous times and is a frequent subtext. The culprit in her view is mainstream entertainment for kids and teens — the type that is not sexually explicit, but profoundly sexually provocative. In addressing the forces that build “The Lolita Effect,” Durham is basically talking about the increasingly sexual clothes, toys, and entertainments offered not just for teens but for children. Durham has worked with teen and pre-teen girls for some years; she has at her disposal numerous examples as to how rampant sexualization of teen and pre-teen girls can erode their self-esteem. But where Durham is different than many other commentators on this subject is that she believes just as profoundly that those cultural influences damage girls’ chance for a healthy sex life — “healthy” meaning “pleasurable.” She’s a self-proclaimed sex-positive feminist.
I can’t say Dr. Durham doesn’t struggle a bit against sounding sex-negative; she does, and at time she slips into what sounds like moral panic, occasionally while claiming she’s not advocating moral panic. But her heart is in the right place; she doesn’t demonize sex and she doesn’t demonize sluts. On the contrary: Dr. Durham believes that age-appropriate sexual information for girls will help them build egalitarian and pleasure-focused philosophies that embrace sexual diversity and informed sexual choices. That makes her very different from the family-first forces that want to see all adults desexualized “for the sake of the children.”
But I read the book with another agenda: In a world where Bratz dolls wear micro-minis and fishnets and companies try to market stripper poles to preteen girls (complete with fake money!), where does one fit in adult hootchie-positive behavior and its influence on global culture? Does the fact that teen singers dress like porn stars mean that porn is somehow the culprit?
Sure thing, exactly as much as Julia Roberts represents streetwalkers in Pretty Woman.
Durham also mentions “soft porn” briefly as an offender, and I think this illuminates an important point about The Lolita Effect, the book, and the Lolita Effect, the thing. By “soft porn,” Durham means the kind of non-hardcore entertainment that shows up on cable channels and direct-to-video offerings, where, in the absence of being able to depict anatomy, producers rely on weird stories right out of a B-movie that often, in my experience, have a strange anti-feminist subtext and are even more retrograde than hardcore porn when it comes to the depiction of both male and female beauty. The fact that soft porn is purveyed that way because it goes to the lowest-common-denominator speaks volumes; it happens to be that as long ago as the ’80s, I and my male friends formed most of our ideas about sex and women from “soft porn” — Playboy and cable-TV offerings. Bad porn is a hazard of the lowest common denominator — and I believe that the lowest common denominator has little to do with whether it’s softcore or hardcore.
In fact, decent porn is just another innocent victim of the same marketing machine that builds age-inappropriate influences into kids’ and teens’ entertainment. In the beauty, entertainment, clothing, toy and porn industries, the culprit is the same. cheesy, offensive kids’ entertainment is generated by the same sort of machine, relying on a sales-at-any-cost approach, that brings you crappy porn. “The fashionable jeans we buy may have been made by a preteen girl in a sweatshop,” she says, and while it’s a very different sweatshop, people creating kids’ entertainment are subject to the same capitalist forces that drive commerce-without-respect. It’s contempt for the consumer that leaves culture bankruput as surely as such contempt generates variable-rate mortgages and foreclosures.
As a marketing person I can tell you that this isn’t a Machiavellian patriarchal plot — or if it is, it’s not intentional. The people who put micro-minis on Bratz are not the same people who put phrases like “ball snot” or “baby chowder” on the cover of your porn DVD — these two industries are in no way directly related. But those people are performing the same task, and it’s a task that reduces the consumer to a resource to be exploited. I believe those marketing tasks are performed with desperation that increases the more money is involved. It’s profit-at-any cost that drives this machine.
I’ve heard many parents and Hollywood forces alike claim that they’re just giving kids what the kids demand. That is not unlike saying that kids eat refined sugar and no vegetables because kids want to eat refined sugar and no vegetables — while pumping high fructose corn syrup into your baby food and putting apple juice in a bottle. God forbid adults should decide what kids are allowed to do, right?
Or maybe adults should exercise responsibility over what ends up in the brains of children, rather than, say, advocating the legislation of so-called morality for adults as a way of protecting said children.
Meanwhile, in the hardcore arena, I’ve heard just as many porn marketers and producers claim that they’re just giving the public what it wants. That strikes me as almost exactly the same thing as giving your kid an IV of Welch’s grape juice and then claiming they never want to eat their vegetables. The same syndrome applies with writers of B-movie film scripts. “We do what sells,” I’ve been told countless times — but “what sells” is about what is created, and when businesspeople seek out the lowest possible denominator, they’re bitching out big-time. Bad porn sucks exactly as much as stupid crap that brainwashes teen girls into needing a Barbie body.
It’s a real danger that in seeking sex-positivity, we might become cheerleaders for all sex, even crappy sex. For what it’s worth, interested parents would do well to read The Lolita Effect with both an open mind and, if you’re like me, open contempt toward all industries. Business is bloody. If you want to save your soul, or your kid’s soul, you’ve got to get your hands dirty.
Thomas Roche blogs about lost cities, fairies, and Twittering in church at Thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 26 May 2009
| 12:00 am
| Industry
In a world where teenagers get busted for sexting and sex is, supposedly, everywhere on the web, why is abstinence-only-educatrix übermädchen Bristol Palin telling People Magazine:
“Girls need to imagine and picture their life with a screaming newborn baby and then think before they have sex. Think about the consequences . . . If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.”
As the owl is fond of saying in chat rooms, “ORLY?”
I trust a lot of people, Bristol: Dentists, airline pilots and the handlers of nuclear waste chief among them. Many of them I trust reluctantly. But I don’t generally trust girls whose education, apparently, didn’t tell them how babies are made. In fact, Bristol’s sex education seems to have left out a lot of things.
Or maybe it didn’t. What it seems to have included is something rarely part of a sex-positive age-appropriate education, but apparently big in Alaska. Her education taught Bristol Palin that being a knocked-up hottie can be a long-term career choice, once she put aside her opinion, stated earlier this year, that abstinence for teens is “not at all realistic.” Now that she’s an abstinence-only spokesperson with her “expenses covered,” she seems to have changed her mind.
Abstinence-only sex education also informed Bristol how to look fabulously sexy. Bonnie Fuller wrote last week in Huffington Post about the fascinating idea that, as Bristol tells People, this “harried” single mother barely has time to sleep but had plenty of time to tart herself up like a hot, sexy nun for the magazine’s photo shoot:
The . . .article, with dreamy full page photos, might as well be titled, “I’m 18, a mom and HOT . . .and you can be too!” There’s not one photo of an exhausted, haggard, harried, unkempt-looking Bristol, reeling under the enormous responsibilities of raising an infant, working part-time — which she is — and hoping to somehow continue her studies. Instead, Bristol appears tanned, rested and already fitting back into her skintight jeans.
And while we’re at it, is it just my imagination, or is Bristol wearing chickens in this photo? And this one? Is looking hot a requirement for an abstinence-only spokesperson — putting out the message that you can be as pure as the Virgin Mary and still look fabulously, devilishly sexy?
Since any ass-clown tall enough to reach the keyboard could reasonably Google “dirty diaper” and get a vivid representation of “the consequences of sex,” as Bristol so charmingly puts it, it’s clearly that Bristol was missing some piece of the puzzle. What condom was she handed that gave her and futurebabydaddy Levi Johnston “permission” to “go all the way” without it? What non-abstinence-only educational forces conspired — in that compelling way that we do, between planning Satanic orgies and having interracial threesomes while wearing cowboy hats and/or David Bowie’s hair — to convince Bristol that the potential “consequences” of sex were things other than physical pleasure, a good time, increased social status, a profound sense of closeness in your relationships, a greatly enhanced sense of self and/or a few orgasms, plus quite possibly an STD or two, HIV infection, or a baby, not to mention a lingering sense regret at how the fuck you hooked up with that loser?
Or that which of those consequences you get playing Teen Sex Roulette depends not just on whether one has sex, but on how one has sex, and with whom?
Who, I ask you, who lied to Bristol Palin about what happens when you fuck!?
If I sound like I’m making a joke of this, I am and I’m not. Bristol Palin is selling sex, and in doing so preaching that giving it away is wrong. The girls looking to Bristol Palin to help them decide whether or not to have sex are not her fellow 18-year-olds, but the 12, 13 and 14 year olds who are just now developing how they feel personally about that choice.
Or, more accurately, those choices, since the message Bristol gives — that having sex is a binary, an either-or — is total bullshit. In fact, Palin is proof positive that sexuality is a continuum or a series of them, because she is expressing her sexuality just by showing off in these pictures. This is a display of exhibitionism in its most damaging fashion. I cannot overstate the destruction that can be wrought by this kind of age-inappropriate influence, which too-young-to-drink Palin is wielding willy-nilly over younger girls just now figuring out where they stand on sex. Palin’s message, that you choose either YES or NO when you “have sex,” is exactly the kind of crap that leads girls to just close their eyes and let shit happen, when a sex-positive harm reduction model could not only teach them what “shit” is likely to get them into trouble, but to encourage them to make choices, to not “let” anything happen to them, but to make choices based on rational evaluation of potential consequences, both positive and negative.
These images of Bristol Palin are totems of sexuality. They are important guides to future behavior. Teen girls even now are looking at these pictures and thinking “Wow, she’s so cool!” The photos, and Palin’s whole media portrayal, embrace sexual desirability while rejecting sexual activity, not specific sexual activities, but all sexual activity. But only one sexual activity can result in what Palin calls the “consequences” of sex.
Bristol is now employed in looking hot while preaching that desirability must remain untouchable — or at least untouched. Meanwhile, while complaining about how hard it is to live as a single mother, she’s cashing a giant check from People — yes, they pay people for starring in their glam photo shoots. In fact, Bristol’s making more per hour, I’ll wager, than any other 18-year-old girl except possibly an actress, musician, model or — wait for it! — the very top tier of porn star.
How many 16-and-17-year-old girls will be “saved” by appealing photos of the glamorous Governette, having abandoned her pre-pregnancy dream of becoming a nurse, trading it in for being an international famous person with nothing to say but lots of room to say it in?
I can guarantee you one thing: Most of them won’t be next year’s abstinence-only spokespeople. They’ll be too “harried” to hang out with the cheerleader from “Heroes.” And they won’t cash any huge checks from People.
Thomas Roche blogs about fairies, zombies, and 18-year-old skanks at thomasroche.com.
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Wednesday, 20 May 2009
| 12:00 am
| Industry
For businesspeople in porn, search engines are critically important. Without access to a lot of the traditional marketing channels, like advertising, that non-erotic products have, adult companies must rely on customers finding their products by, well, searching for them.
Overall, this is not a bad thing. Search engines are more user-directed and friendly to sexual content than almost any advertising outlet. If someone searches for “facesitting” on Google, they’re going to get something related to the sexual fetish of facesitting — provided they remember to turn off Safe Search, or they’ll get a bunch of crap about circus performers doing headstands, which might be just as interesting but was not what the user was looking for.
For most of the adult industry’s lifetime, that interest in facesitting (or whatever) would have been served by much less efficient means — for instance, by the interested party going to the local porno shop and looking for mags about facesitting, or going to the front of the store and saying “Hey, weird biker dude at the counter smoking a cigar and reaching for his baseball bat because I’m talking to you, why doesn’t your store stock some facesitting magazines? That kind of thing really makes my dick hard.” Not a pleasant or efficient way to acquire your erotic entertainment, and far from easily accessible to all populations. Today’s version makes a hell of a lot more sense.
However, search engines are remarkably un-transparent. And king-of-the-heap Google is in many ways the least transparent of them all. According to a Texas lawsuit against Google by a company called Fire Pond, at least one of Google’s techniques violates federal trademark protections.
At issue is something called Google Adwords, or, in a broader sense, pay-per-click advertising. For many people who have worked in marketing for the adult industry on the web, search engine pay-per-click marketing is a fact of life. In the minds of many industry marketers, it’s a required adjunct to designing a good page that shows up well in search engines. Having a good page is all well and good, but it won’t necessarily guarantee you come up first in search results. What will? Paying money. In some cases, lots and lots of money.
In any “Pay Per Click” system, and specifically in Google Adwords, a company pays Google so that a search, for, say “Fire Pond,” a company that “offers the only true multi-tenant configure, price, quote solution featuring our robust product configurator [sic] software and unqiue [sic] proposal generation—” (huh!?!?!?) — will display to the consumer a “search engine result” that is not really a search engine result per se. It is in fact a paid ad, for either Fire Pond — if they’re willing to cough up the dough — or for one or more of Fire Pond’s competitors, if these competitors are willing to “bid” more money than Fire Pond is for each click delivered through this system.
The results look either almost the same or slightly different than unpaid results, which are called “natural” search results. The consumer probably has no idea whether he or she is seeing a natural or a pay-per-click result because, let’s face it, the consumer almost certainly doesn’t give a fuck.
The utility of buying competitor keywords is debatable. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Playboy.com, for instance, to purchase the keyword “Penthouse,” which will result in them seeing a spike in traffic from people looking for Penthouse Magazine and therefore being disappointed that there’s no pissing. One does not equal the other. However, companies certainly do this kind of marketing quite a lot, and Google makes a pretty penny on it.
The problem is, “Penthouse” is a trademark. The people who own the Penthouse trademark — or the Google trademark, or the Netflix trademark or whatever — have gone to a lot of trouble and expense to secure rights to that trademark, and to continue to protect them. In fact, trademark owners must protect their own trademarks, because if they don’t aggressively do so, their failure to protect their trademarks can be used later in a trademark infringement case under certain circumstances to argue that the trademark has entered into the public domain, which is essentially irreversible. Big companies take trademark protection seriously, because if you fuck it up, you can lose your intellectual property rights to your brand name.
Therefore, isn’t it a trademark violation for Google to allow, say, Macy’s to bid on paid search results on Gimbel’s trademark? Well, Fire Pond sure thinks so, which is why they filed suit. Whatever they sell (and after visiting their site, I’m still not sure what it is — software, I think?), their case could have a huge impact on web marketing in the adult industry. This could potentially end up as a class-action suit — traditionally the most difficult kind of suit to defend against, and a nightmare for most big businesses. Therefore, it could have far-reaching effects both for Google and for people who market porn on the web.
As to whether selling access to a consumer who searches for a competitor’s company is a trademark violation — nobody knows. But Google knows it’s on dangerous ground in doing so. With consummate weirdness, Google does not allow Penthouse to use the targeted term — let’s say, the trademarked term “Spooge Industries” — in the targeted ad itself paid for by competitor “Manseed Incorporated.” That’s true even though that ad is showing up only because the surfer searched for the term “Spooge Industries”. Weird, huh?
Therefore, the question becomes, “is it legal to sell the ability to responding to the customer’s use of a trademark if the trademark itself is not used in the response?” In other words, they’re playing a legal fandango, because in a way the only person using the trademark itself — in a consumer-facing way — is the consumer. The fact that Google just sold access to the consumer is another matter entirely.
Google’s view that it’s legal to sell companies pay-per-click ads for a competitor’s trademarks might be based on court decisions relating to spyware programs that take a search engine request for one company and use it to provide a popup ad for that company’s competitor. Apparently, that’s been deemed legally OK.
But the whole thing is made even weirder by the fact that in addition to search engine marketing, the vast majority of adult content sites (that is to say, porn sites) rely on “affiliates” for their traffic and sales. With many sites, this generates more than half their traffic and/or sales. These affiliates get a bounty on every buyer they send to a site. Those affiliates also buy pay-per-click results from Google — so in many cases an adult company is bidding for search engine results against its own affiliates.
Confused yet? You should be. This has far-ranging implications not just for porn but for how information gets to the consumer. Trademarks are just one kind of intellectual property that is subject to access and use by search engines with no monetary obligation to the owner of that intellectual property. This is a fairly profound shift in culture, as far as I’m concerned.
Take books, for example. Google has already established with their Google Books service that they intend to make the interior of every book published searchable on Google. I’ve already used this service to avoid trips to the library when I need to quote obscure texts on Alfred Jarry for nonfiction articles. Helpful, very helpful — and not at all what the book publishers had in mind when the published a given book.
So, overall, is it a good thing or a bad thing to be able to get to the interior of any book without either paying for it or leaving my chair and paying for it in the library? Is it a bad thing or a good thing to be able to buy my competitor’s trademark and poach customers who are looking for that competitor — if I’m willing to pay for acquiring those customers, and I have a good enough product to tempt them?
Fuck if I know. Google seems to think that making information available online for the price of the right search string supports their belief, derived from the early cyberpunks, that “Information wants to be free.”
But there’s free, and there’s free. And free enterprise might equal free expression — but as often as not, it doesn’t.
If anything gets legally decided in the Fire Pond case, it could affect the way trademarks are marketed in search engines. But for the consumer, it won’t ultimately make a difference — they’ll still get the information the powers-that-be want them to get, and how that information is doled out will be as much about dollars and cents as about the accuracy of the information.
Thomas Roche blogs about crime novels and robopr0n at Thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 12 May 2009
| 12:26 pm
| Industry
Happy National Masturbation Month! Now, before you wander off to celebrate with your favorite toy and a bottle of lube, I encourage you to watch some women wanking.
I can only really speak for myself, but watching erotica of gorgeous women jerking off has been not only a great source of pleasure for me, but a profound experience that’s just not provided by other porn. It’s one of my most sublime pleasures, and a necessary relief from the anal fucking, bondage and spanking I usually watch.
There’s something so profoundly hot about a simple scene of masturbation that whenever I return to this time-honored wank material, I feel a sudden wave of evangelism — in this case corresponding, thankfully, with the aforementioned holiday.
It’s a simple and obvious fact that most porn is sold, rented, loaned, and downloaded for the purpose of facilitating masturbation. It can serve other purposes — as inspiration and backdrop for partnered sex, as a sex education enterprise, etc, but mostly, porn’s sold to people who are going to jerk off to it.
Why, then, should porn mostly be about people fucking other people? Because that’s what porn consumers want to see while they masturbate? Bah! Porn consumers get at least partially acclimated to watching what is available, and were there more porn celebrating masturbation, people would feel a hell of a lot better about masturbating.
While I unquestionably love porn, and I believe it offers great benefit to society, there’s an underlying danger of watching too much porn: it seems like everyone is getting laid except you. On the other hand, masturbating while watching a scene of someone masturbating strengthens the idea that what you’re doing is normal. I believe it also provides the underlying suggestion that since other people are out there doing it, sharing self-love provides a kind of intimacy. It helps establish in one’s mind that experiencing pleasure alone is a good thing.
What’s more, assuming the wankers you’re watching are the same general type you’d like to fuck — as, presumably, they tend to be — real masturbation scenes can teach you plenty about how those people actually please themselves.
One of the most valuable pieces of sex ed I heard when I was still in high school was that watching partners masturbate teaches you how they like to please themselves. Perhaps more importantly, it was damn hot. Pretty soon, I learned that watching my girlfriend touch herself before things got going between us was enough to guarantee explosive sex. I don’t know if that’s where I developed my fixation on porn of women masturbating, but if so, I’ll have to remember to send that first girlfriend a thank-you card for Masturbation Month.
Unfortunately, there’s nearly enough hot porn of hot women jerking off. Two wonderful titles are Barcelona Sex Project and Intimate Moments: Getting Off. Intimate Moments: Shared features girls masturbating with minor “assists” but mostly getting themselves off. You’ll also see smokin’ hot masturbation scenes in Shine Louise Houston’s Superfreak and The Crash Pad — these scenes are worth putting on repeat.
Occasionally, mainstream porn movies have scenes of women masturbating, but they often dissolve into a fantasy scene that wouldn’t otherwise fit in to the “plot.” As if a hot girl masturbating isn’t hot enough in and of itself? Please.
Whether you’re going to take my advice and enjoy one of the above masturbation videos, be sure to celebrate National Masturbation Month in the usual way — with a wank, or hopefully many of them.
Thomas Roche is currently at work on a science fiction novel about a robot rebellion. You can follow his exploits at Thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 5 May 2009
| 12:00 am
| Industry
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on social-networking site Twitter, a tool that allows you to tell everyone you know about how you’re doing your laundry and/or having a gangbang, as long as you can do it in 140 characters or less.
In theory, Twitter is not unlike blogging or LiveJournaling, but using Twitter feels nothing like using a blog. Whether you’re reading or posting — and it’s impossible to effectively use Twitter if you’re not doing both — it feels, instead, exactly like a chat room.
But there’s something that makes Twitter totally and completely unlike a chat room. It consists, for the most part, of real people. To dedicated users of chat rooms in the early days, this is all wrong — all wrong. To devotees of “cyber,” short for “cybersex,” circa 1998, this means that Twitter is as unlike a chat room as it is unlike the Space Shuttle. It might feel like a chat room — but where are all the 18-year-old submissive girls wearing French maid’s outfits, and the built, cut, 6′4″ gentlemen with ten-inch dicks?
I was there in the early days of chat rooms, and I can tell you, that’s who was there with me.
I went to chat rooms looking for sex, which is what everyone seemed to be looking for. And the anonymous nature of chat rooms allowed people to completely blow off any pretense of reality. Why tell people you’re 40 when you can tell them you’re 38? Why tell them you’re 17 and get iggied (ignored) when you can tell them you’re 18 and get all the hot online stud sex your brain can handle? Why tell them you’re 5 inches long when you can tell them you’re 8 inches? Why disclose that you’re brunette when you can be a slutty blonde, or admit you’ve got any measurements other than 38DDD-24-34? Why tell them you’ve had profoundly conventional sex all your life when you can blather on about how you fucked your cousin, did your dig or smoked twenty-seven cocks at a church social and that’s how you learned you were deeply submissive, especially when the pastor spanked you?
That last observation actually grows from another fundamental fact of online sex — for some reason, when the invention of the chat room allowed people to make up any old bullshit about themselves, half of the men around decided to be women — particularly submissive women. Hence, any horny crossdresser savvy enough to locate a photo of a porn star suddenly became a blonde 18-year-old slut with a penchant for double penetration. “That’s really me!” you’d be told, if you were one of their chat partners, and this while you were staring at a picture of Debi Diamond. “And here’s my sister!” Teri Weigel, wearing bunny ears and holding a cream pie.
For the genetic males who were “pretending” to be themselves, or idealized versions of themselves, and were looking for sex with women, there were a couple of years there where, I could swear, we believed absolutely everything we were told. Webcams were not yet ubiquitous; digital cameras weren’t that common. The first demand of the online sex session wasn’t “Give me 30 photos of yourself and/or turn on your webcam.”
No, it was so easy back then! Got an old photo of your Mom in high school? What the hell, send it to the guy you’re having online sex with, and he’ll believe it’s you. Then send him a pic of Vanessa Del Rio with her legs spread, and — yeah, that’s me, too! I don’t know if straight men were actually less intelligent in 1998, or if we were so busy thinking with our dicks that there was no blood left for the more rational parts of our brains.
But it was a short window of opportunity. Eventually, males online who wanted to have sex with women began to get more savvy, i.e. paranoid, to the point where it was almost impossible to fuck with them any longer. Digital cameras became common; webcams got cheap and most laptops came with them.
And for the gay men, chat rooms seemed like paradise. The gay male credo that “on AOL, everyone’s eight inches,” comes from these heady days when you could log on to AOL or Yahoo chat room s and discover a list that ran on for what seemed like miles. There wasn’t just “M2M” or “M2MNorCal” or “M2MSanFran.” There was “M2M94102,” “M2M94110,” “M2M94117,” and when it came to “M2M94114″ — a single chat room didn’t cut it, so there were sometimes several. I have it on good authority that every guy was, as promised, eight inches — until you showed up at their house and they were four and a half, and that picture they showed you? Probably from Spring Break 1980. But hey, that just proves my point: why tell the truth when you can tell a lie? That’s the gift of chat room s: Freedom from the constraints of reality.
It wasn’t, er, quite as easy to have free, random, no-strings-attached real-time sex based on zip code for straight people, but it certainly happened, and straight guys in chat rooms seemed to spend almost all of their time looking for it. Five minutes of chatting, without fail, would yield the time-honored query “when are you flying out from California/ Washington/ Florida/ Alaska to be my gimpslave in Cleveland/ Atlanta/ Montana?” This almost never works, or, more accurately didn’t work back then. But having a full-time barely-legal blonde piss slave with a face like Liv Tyler and a body like Asia Carrera was, apparently, an important enough goal that guys would spend almost unlimited time looking for it, and become complete assholes when they realized that the girl they were chatting with wasn’t it.
As it dawned on the general population of straight males that chat rooms did not generally yield real-time sex, that five minutes contracted. Guys online reeked of terrifying desperation, and turned instantly into assholes at the slightest provocation. Meanwhile, chatbots took over the chat room s; visit a Yahoo chat now and all you’ll see are “bots” — automated programs that post entreaties to “come look at my pics!” at an offline porn or pay-to-chat site. It’s bullshit.
But it’s not the pleasant kind of bullshit; it’s commerce, not fantasy. That was the great thing about chat room s — it was all completely made up, sure, but it was all completely made up.
Twitter is similar to a chat room filled real people, or something that looks damn like. I’m telling you, it’s weird.
Thomas Roche blogs about twittering at Thomasroche.com.
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