Maria Beatty’s films The Black Glove and The Elegant Spanking are quintessential fine-art fetish erotica titles; they’re richly textured expressionist-noir masterpieces in which kink and esthetics tangle like snakes fucking.
In the more than ten years since those two classics, the Venezuela-born, New York-raised, currently Paris-dwelling filmmaker has continued to make audacious erotic films packed with sumptuously sensual visuals and scorching hot sex; I’ve already written quite rapturously about her superhot recent flicks Skateboard Kink Freak and Sex Mannequin, two of the best films of 2007. Skateboard Kink Freak and Sex Mannequin are brilliantly naturalistic art films with some of the most intense, explicit lesbian sex committed to film.
The Beatty film before that duo, Silken Sleeves, is an entirely different kind of sex-art film. It’s an extended scene between educator/Shibari expert/performer/globetrotting perv Midori and gorgeous bottom Mayan. A sexual-aesthetic art piece about the seasons passing, it’s both high-concept and immediately accessible to anyone who appreciates the aesthetics of fetish in erotica. Silken Sleeves features complex suspension bondage, the sensations of seasons passing and smokin’ hot SM all rendered with textures that evoke Beatty’s expressionist influences. If you’ve never seen one of Midori’s brilliant live performances, this is as close as it’s possible to get — it captures everything except the scent of the candles
I got a chance to ask Beatty a few questions about Silken Sleeves recently.
TR: How did you meet up with Midori and decide to make Silken Sleeves? Did the idea originate with Midori, with you, or in collaboration?
Maria Beatty: I met and did a photo shoot with Midori back in 1997. At the time we loosely talked about the possibility of collaborating on a fetish/SM film together, but for some reason or other it just didn’t materialize until 8 years later. I finally decided to dedicate a medium-length film to the art of bondage and approached Midori to star in it with Mayan as the submissive. I’m often inspired by nature and thought it was time for me to blend the two — nature and the art of bondage and an homage to the Four Seasons. From this point Midori and I further developed what kind of bondage and actions would take place within each Season.
TR: Where was Silken Sleeves shot?
MB: Silken Sleeves was shot in an artist’s studio in upstate New York. Initially we wanted to shoot outside in nature but due to scheduling problems we were locked into shooting in November when it was just too cold and damn to shoot these scenes outside. So, we created a very minimal set inspired by Kabuki theater.
TR: Silken Sleeves feels very much like it’s a single chain of events, happening all in a flow, rather than a more traditional film that’s cut together. Was it shot that way or is that an illusion of the editing process?
MB: Yes there is an even flow due to the seamless interaction and chemistry between Midori and Mayan. As soon as the action began, it just organically unraveled into a sensual play and delight and ended when Midori and Mayan decided to do so. It’s the first time I just let the action go for a long stretch of time. The editing had very little to do with the flow. It was definitely more about the flow of energy between Midori and Mayan that created this feel. There were brief pauses in between each of the four seasons, but each season flowed as one piece without interruption.
TR: In watching Silken Sleeves, I find that it feels to me like a departure for you, but I can’t really tell you why. Does it feel like a departure for you as well, or is it of a piece with all your earlier work?
MB: I’m curious what kind of departure and where to?
TR: It’s so different than Skateboard Kink Freak and Sex Mannequin, both of which are so fleshy and wet and spontaneous. All three films are unified by their intense use of light and texture, but Silken Sleeves is much more formalized.
MB: I prefer to experiment with various genres, moods and travel to all sorts of time periods so my work never gets stuck or stays in one look or style. I’m an aesthete which consistently shows in my works but with variations on a theme.
TR: Silken Sleeves features intricate suspension bondage and SM. It also has a very clear visual attention paid to textures, colors, artistic details. Was it challenging to balance these two demands when shooting?
MB: Not at all, but rather all of these elements worked together to create a complete style, mood and piece. Midori’s choice of kimonos, costume styling and bondage enhanced and further inspired the gels for lighting, additional props and post-production choices for color correction, additional texture and tones.
TR: Was it hard to get good shots when such intricate SM was being done?
MB: There was no cutting during the shooting process of each sequence, and the cameras remained as far away from the action as possible to give Midori and Mayan more intimacy. The cameras were as precise as possible without a second of footage to waste.
There were times when I would have loved a tighter shot or a pan or less movement, but I had to let go of this thought and to not compromise the intensity of the moment. The flow and buildup was more important than the shots for this piece.
TR: As I was saying about Silken Sleeves being a departure, it feels in many ways to me like it has a cold, stylized brand of eroticism compared to the very wet, hot, organic, spontaneous feeling of Skateboard Kink Freak and Sex Mannequin. Would you agree, or does it feel differently to you?
MB: Silken Sleeves has a more sophisticated cold, stylized look to it because of the attention given to the kimonos, costumes, props, color coordination, textures, hair and makeup, and accessories to complete the Japanese look to the film. It’s treated in a more precious way and as a theater piece/experience rather than the more spontaneous, grab what you can, au naturel look of Skateboard Kink Freak and Sex Mannequin.
A lot more time and preparation and attention to details was invested in Silken Sleeves, and the stylized look can come off to some as artificial and cold rather than primitive, impulsive, wild hot energy circulating in KF and SM. I believe I’m moving further away from the more over-stylized pieces in my SM/porn films. I’m working more with available existing elements and focusing more on the dynamic, the chemistry and the interaction between the women rather than obsessing on the aesthetic details surrounding them. To me, this is what I find most exciting and groundbreaking. Finding variations on a theme and twisting it even further.
Watch for Part 2 of this interview in an upcoming update, and check out Maria Beatty’s films in Blowfish’s SM section.
Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, has written or edited ten books and blogs about cryptozoology, politics, sex and the Mafia at thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 6 May 2008
| 12:00 am
| Industry
Prostitution scandals have been in the news a lot lately. This past week the scandalscape took an even more tragic turn than usual with the apparent suicide of Deborah Jeanne Palfrey, the alleged D.C. Madam, who published her client list in 20 compressed files of phone records on deborahjeanpalfrey.com, which now returns a 404 error, as if in an unintentionally eerie comment.
Sex worker advocacy group Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK) drew a broader societal message from Ms. Palfrey’s death, publishing a press statement that said “We—prostitutes, strippers, pro-dommes, porn stars, sex experts, and allies—extend our sympathies to all of those hurt by this most recent chapter of the ‘Pink Scare,’ in which oppressive legislation and social stigma partner to generate hysteria around what, for us, can prove to be simply a decent way to make a living.”
But the “Pink Scare” that SWANK refers to is part of a larger paranoia about sex, especially the commerce in sex, that is nothing new. To hear SWANK tell it, “From New York to California, daily reports of Pink Scare-fueled police busts, e-stings and raids, even at legal venues like strip clubs and dungeons, have reached a fever pitch.” Whether or not that’s true, the comments are a look into the kind of legal and social paranoia that sex workers have to operate under every day. With the exception of porn actors—who just about never get busted, though they have other troubles—all sex workers have to worry about the law on some level. Strippers can and do get busted for doing a little too much during a private dance; professional dominants sometimes get arrested for running a house of ill repute even if they don’t provide, or might not provide, “sex” by most peoples’ definition. What’s more, video and novelty stores in many jurisdictions could get cited for zoning violations, obscenity and more. Then there are the street prostitutes, who account for the vast majority of sex work busts—they’re pretty nervous about the cops, I understand.
The number of busts is relatively small compared to the number of transactions. However many sex workers get busted, thousands more feel that nervous anxiety that goes with doing something legal and popular—or not so legal, or maybe borderline illegal, or definitely illegal—and potentially prosecutable and definitely embarrassing. And I would submit that almost none of them feels the anxiety as acutely as the callgirl, because the callgirl by her very nature must walk in the middle and upper classes. She’s the sex worker who engages in the most clearly illegal activity, but must appear not to be doing so, or she loses her ability to work. She’s usually not full-time; she has another job, making it even more important that she maintains her middle-class status—to lose it by getting busted means a fine and jail time, but it also means exposure in an even more destructive way. Rebecca Dickinson, one of Palfrey’s employees who testified against her, is a perfect example—a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy, she faces administrative punishment up to and including dishonorable discharge because of her work for Palfrey. Many thousands of other callgirls face similar repercussions of varying extremity if they’re busted—or even if they’re not busted. Blogger and sex worker Debauchette, interviewed about the Eliot Spitzer scandal in silhouette on TV, was recognized by her Mom—bad news. It’s a rare sex worker who wants to have that conversation with her or his mother.
In short, it’s no wonder sex workers tend to worry about their social and physical well-being. That might be why, as observed by Patrick J. Lyons blogging at The Lede in The New York Times:
All over the Internet, from reader comments on The Lede to the far misty corners of conspiracy-theory land, hardly anyone seems inclined to accept the initial police judgment that Ms. Palfrey simply committed suicide. A quick search turns up scores of variations on the same theme: She knew too much about too many powerful men, so it must have been murder.
According to infowars.com, as far back as 1991 Palfrey was sure her suicide would be faked:
“If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized,” she wrote in August 1991 following an attempt to bring her to trial, “Rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me,” said Palfrey in a handwritten letter to the judge accusing the San Diego police vice squad of having a vendetta against her.
Does that mean Palfrey didn’t kill herself? I have no idea, but the prospect of prison doesn’t sit well with anyone. The callgirl keeps the secrets of the rich and middle-class, and scandal of varying proportions awaits every callgirl who is busted and almost every callgirl who is outed. If Palfrey was murdered because she “knew too much,” it’s a shocking crime. But if she killed herself, it’s still a crime—albeit a crime of a system that outlaws, persecutes and prosecutes sex workers while the same men that make those laws patronize them. It speaks to a wider culture in which sex is so shameful that it must be outlawed—and wanting sex is so shameful that it must be sequestered, so it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, because otherwise law-abiding citizens will break that law.
The whole thing shows not only contempt for sex and therefore a contempt for sex workers, but also tragic disrespect for human nature and for the function of law.
It builds a society that’s crazymaking—but I guess that’s not news to anyone.
Thomas Roche is the PR Manager at Kink.com, an educator at San Francisco Sex Information and has written or edited ten books under his own name plus a bunch more under pseudonym. He can be found at thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 29 April 2008
| 12:00 am
| Industry
One of the first interviews I ever did, back in the mid 1980s, was with poet, memoirist and singer Jim Carroll, author of the quintessential streetwise NYC memoir The Basketball Diaries. In addition to being a beautiful, insightful and deeply poignant book, Diaries is bad-fuckin’-ass. With its explicit details about drugs and sex, it was was one of my early experiences of living on the edge, an entrée into a world that I found infinitely more exciting and adventure-filled than the boring suburban nightmare I’d just spent seventeen years wanting to get the fuck out of. As the author of this classic street story and lots of poetry and NYC-school punk songs about cool shit like heroin and prostitution, Jim Carroll had become my hero, and I hung on his every word. One seemingly minor thing he said has stuck with me for 20+ years because it seemed so banal and yet was incredibly illuminating to me — and it came at the end of an era.
I’ll paraphrase it here, because the quote was cut by an economy-minded college newspaper editor, and my cassette tapes have long since demagnetized. Carroll said something like this: “When I’m writing poetry, everything about my physical surroundings becomes part of the experience. For instance, I find that if the typewriter ribbon is running down, it profoundly affects the way I’m writing.”
I remember my ears going pop-pop when he said that, the way they do in moments of sudden and agonizing clarity. I’d spent a year or so in college-level creative writing classes at that point, but had never heard one of my fellow writers describing this concrete experience, which I’d had since my early writing days — not with typewriters, but with fountain pens.
When, at 12, I sat down to write my fantasy epic, I’d spent my ill-gotten lawnmowing gain on cheap fountain pens and a half-dozen colors of ink. I could only write fantasy in fountain pen; for whatever reason, I had to go through that archaic ritual of loading, blotting, scribbling and smearing in order to get any creative juice flowing. What’s more, I had to have a variety of ink colors, or the sensual details of the writing just never showed up. When my epic hero was in his pseudo-medieval metropolis, dark blue ink would do, but if he was on a pirate ship sailing legendary seas the ink needed to be the peacock-blue of a Caribbean ocean. When he slogged through the depths of a magic forest, the pages had to be rendered in green ink or the chapter never got going. When he delved sword in hand into the dark, dusty realms of an underground cave system, the ink had to be brown. Once he’d gone deeper, far enough into the ground to reach the outer reaches of the domain of Evil, it was black ink all the way. After that, the poor sonofabitch found himself punching through the darkest subterranean depths into a fantastic hell — and there in the savage realm of smoke-belching damnations, the ink was always red.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but I wasn’t drawing comic books or rendering any sort of narrative pictures — this was just text, pure and simple, but the sensual details of the page were critical. It wasn’t just ink color. I had a desk packed with different types of paper I traded off with. Eight-inch-by-ten-inch paper conjured a different feel of story than eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. College rule inspired differently than wide rule. I even once used unlined paper because the hero had traveled to the land of the magical air beings, above the clouds, where everything was all white and open and there were, if you’ll forgive me, no rules.
What does any of this have to do with sex? Well, when it comes to Jim Carroll, the author who created such loving sensual depictions of the streets of New York and the scents and sensations and textures and tablature of drug use, that particular author could reasonably be placed in the tradition of sensualists — small “s” — that includes such writers as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Poe, Octave Mirbeau, and, yes, the Marquis DeSade. Carroll himself is anything but a porn writer, though he often deals frankly with sex. But once you start talking sensuality and writing, pretty soon you have to end up considering sensual masterpieces like Venus in Furs, The Pearl, and The Story of O. One of the themes running through those works is the empire of the senses, the idea that physical experience is as real as mental, and that the former can be captured in and communicated by the latter — by writing.
I have no idea if Pauline Reage wrote The Story of O on a typewriter or by fountain pen, or if she switched her ink color from peach to ruby-red as her heroine’s cheeks went rosy with punishment. But I know what happened to my epic fantasy stories when I hit puberty.
I’d been reading increasing volumes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan books, and the many comics based on them. I was well aware that certain fantasy worlds had people who really didn’t wear a whole lot of clothes, and my fantasy universe relocated itself from the pseudo-Medieval-Europe of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis to the exotic reimagined occult antiquity of Howard and Michael Moorcock — which would surely trouble Moorcock greatly, as he’s long been an antiporn crusader. There, people wore loincloths and thigh-high boots, with tight leather halters for the women; straps went across their chests to hold their weapons and occult tattoos etched across their half-nude bodies indicated the complex demands of their warrior castes. Years later I would attend Folsom Street with a weird sense of déja vu.
Sensual details became even more important as I switched from G to XXX fantasies; in the new fantasy world, incense burned in demonic temples; the scents of magical drugs came wafting from pavilions in my pseudo-Orientalist opium dream.
Meanwhile, my heroine turned female, and in each new environment came a crew of fantasy extras ready to pleasure, punish or gangbang her. She was every bit as fierce a warrior as the male avatar who kicked ass in my pre-pubescent fantasy stories; she just sometimes happened to lose. When she did, the story got at least as interesting as it did when she won. Stripped naked and felt up by the mud people? Brown ink, of course. Seized by dryads and subjected to a little forced forest girl-girl? Green ink, naturally. The blues got a little complicated — when the dryads handed her off to the naiads, her riverbound ravishment was related in deep-river indigo, but her later debauchment on a pirate ship was rendered in Caribbean blue. In these early erotic stories, written by a virgin, the groundwork was laid not just for all the porn I would write afterwards, but, frankly, for all the sexual and sensual experiences I would ever have.
I’ve now written a whole lot of porn novels (something more than 30 and probably fewer than 40 — sheepishly I must admit that I lost count some time in the early naughties) and not one of them has been scrawled in fountain pen. But whether it’s the black-to-gray progression of a typewriter ribbon, the color of the ink in my pen, the feel of QWERTY under my fingers, there’s a direct connection between the sensual experience of putting down words, and the sensual details that fill the writing.
Thomas Roche is the PR Manager at Kink.com, an educator at San Francisco Sex Information and has written or edited ten books under his own name plus a bunch more under pseudonym. He can be found at thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 22 April 2008
| 12:00 am
| Industry
It’s fairly hard to miss this story if you read the adult entertainment news sources, but it’s still amazing to me how many sex-positive, porn-positive people in my social circle have no idea it’s happening — and how many more than that just don’t seem to care. On April 9, adult industry website XBiz reported that John Stagliano and his company Evil Angel had been charged by a federal grand jury in Washington, DC with a host of offenses, to wit:
Seven counts of “operating an obscenity distribution business and related offenses” not to mention “three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to sell and distribute DVDs containing obscene films together with a movie trailer in violation; two counts of using a common carrier for the conveyance or delivery of DVDs containing obscene films in interstate commerce; one count of engaging in the business of selling or transferring an obscene film and a movie trailer; one count of using an interactive computer service to display an obscene movie trailer in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age; and one count seeking forfeiture of certain assets of the defendants.”
Damn, that’s a lot of obscenity. Stagliano, in case you don’t know him, is the eponymous “Buttman” of the influential Buttman series of porn movies. His Evil Angel video is known for pushing the envelope and releasing movies with decidedly taboo themes. In the case of this indictment, there are two movies named: “Milk Nymphos,” which appears to feature milk enemas, and “Storm Squirters 2,” which features female ejaculation. Also named is a trailer for Belladonna’s “Fetish Fanatic 5.”
Stagliano’s attorney Al Gelbard addressed some of the constitutional issues surrounding this case, and XBiz reported that Stagliano would hold a press conference following his April 21 arraignment. Evil Angel responded by launching DefendOurPorn.org, a clearinghouse for information about the case and a place for fans and free-speech advocates to donate to Stagliano’s defense fund. They also said that DefendOurPorn will remain live after the charges are (inevitably) beaten, and left over funds will be donated to other free speech causes.
Though the paragraph’s worth of charges quoted in the XBiz article is enough to make one’s eyes cross, the case hinges on the idea that the material in “Milk Nymphos,” “Storm Squirters 2,” and the “Fetish Fanatic 5″ trailer is obscene.
Calling it that relies on the Miller test, the US Supreme Court’s standard, and therefore the US legal standard, for obscenity. In determining whether a work is obscene, the Miller test asks:
- Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
- Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
- Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The government thinks that a work depicting female ejaculation is without literary, artistic, political or scientific value. In an industry of money shots, this is one of two titles selected for prosecution?
But ultimately, why should you care? Certainly a lot of people, even porn people, don’t seem to, except as it relates directly to them. They see Evil Angel as one of the “big dogs” who “asked for it” by being too big, being too successful, being too extreme. I’ve heard it in recent days from the lips of otherwise right-thinking supposed sex-positives.
On the other hand, antiporn groups are bloody pissed off that Stagliano has been indicted. Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, said that the government does nothing to stop the mainstreaming of porn by prosecuting Evil Angel. He also asserted that Americans do not like pornography, despite its rampant popularity: “Just because there’s a lot of pornography around doesn’t mean the American people accept it,” Peters has been quoted as saying.
Morality in Media is one of those antiporn groups that opposes pornography and other forms of “obscenity” in the media. Their founder, the late Fr. Morton Hill, sat on Lyndon B. Johnson’s Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. In 2006 and 2006, Morality in Media received Department of Justice grants in the amount of $150,000 to fund ObscenityCrimes.org, a website that solicits citizen obscenity complaints. As of August, 2007, it had resulted in a whopping zero obscenity prosecutions. High five, Fr. Hill. Morality in Media also led a campaign to get Cosmopolitan banned from supermarket checkout lines, and their response to the white ribbon campaign against violence against women was to lead a sort of counter-white ribbon campaign against pornography.
But I digress — Morality in Media is hardly the problem, since they could give a rat’s ass about “Milk Nymphos” specifically; they oppose the fact of porn, not its execution. The government has the burden of proving that individual works are obscene, and that’s going to be tough, even with something called “Milk Nymphos.”
The reason you should care is not — or at least isn’t just — because the government’s going to be coming for your porn; maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
But one thing’s guaranteed: the dollars spent on having federal agents watch zillions of hours of porn, pick two titles to prosecute, and build a case they’re almost certainly going to lose — those are real dollars; if you pay US taxes, they’re your dollars, and they’re going down the drain even as we speak.
Thomas Roche is the PR Manager at Kink.com, an educator at San Francisco Sex Information and has written or edited ten books. He can be found at thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 15 April 2008
| 12:00 pm
| Industry
An officer at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, recently admitted to working as an escort. She faces administrative discharge for conduct unbecoming an officer, despite the fact that she’s protected from non-administrative punishment — in other words, a court martial — because she confessed, by testifying against her former Madam.
Lt. Commander Rebecca C. Dickinson was the manager of food services for the Naval Academy from September 2004 and May 2007. During part of that time, she was also serving, apparently somewhat unhappily, as an escort run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey — the “D.C. Madam.” Palfrey’s clients included the military strategist who invented “shock and awe,” as well as a Deputy Secretary of State, a Senator, and more.
As reported in the Baltimore Sun, found via sex work blog Bound, Not Gagged, the 38-year-old Dickinson testified against Palfrey under a grant of immunity, which means that she can’t be court martialed or prosecuted under federal law. But, at 19 years into her Naval service, Lt. Cmdr. Dickinson faces administrative discharge — which means the loss of her pension.
The reason? While Dickson testified that she did not always have sex with her clients, and when they did, “it was mutual,” the Navy, along with most of the world, regards being an escort as prostitution. The idea goes like this: Pay a woman for her time, and of course you must be paying her for sex. It also goes like this: A woman would not voluntarily have sex with a guy she doesn’t know. Prostitution is forbidden under the Uniform Code of Miliary Justice (UCMJ), as is “sexual misconduct” in many other avatars. If Dickinson she hadn’t gotten immunity, she’d face court martial; with immunity, she’s likely to lose her pension and benefits.
You might ask what working a second job, even as an escort, has to do with being an officer in the navy. Or you might just cut to the chase and ask why officers are forbidden sexual misconduct or prostutitution, which would be a reasonable question. Would you also be surprised to know that US military officers can be court martialed for all sorts of sexual misconduct?
In fact, the military’s attitude toward sexual misconduct and its related behaviors is nothing short of fascinating. Start digging and you see all sorts of weird prohibitions. For instance, the following language occurred in Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) until October 1, 2007:
Any person subject to this chapter who commits an act of sexual intercourse with a female not his wife, by force and without consent, is guilty of rape and shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.
Yes, yes, that is two-thousand-freakin-SEVEN, not 1907: rape your wife, apparently, and it’s not problem, Cap’n — but I digress.
On October 1, 2007, Congress came up with a revised Article 120 that is like 10 times as long as the old Article 120. covered sexual misconduct in agonizing detail, with a medieval Demonologist’s fascination. The new 120 specifically details its applicability to such nasties as date rape, roofie rape, child molestation. It also contains some really bizarre language; “wrongful sexual conduct,” for instance, requires in cases of sexual contact without another person’s consent, “That the accused had no legal justification or lawful authorization for that sexual contact,” which makes it sound like you can get a court order to commit rape, but I’m sure that’s not what they had in mind.
Dickinson probably didn’t run afoul, or didn’t just run afoul, of Article 120, but also of Article 134, which covers prostitution. You can also be court martialed for committing a felony, even if you admit to it, which probably covers Dickinson. But the prohibitions go on — Article 134 also covers adultery; that’s right, you can be court martialed for committing adultery. From watching JAG, I had always thought that prohibition was about fucking another officer’s spouse, but apparently adultery proper is included, provided “the conduct of the accused was to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces or was of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.”
Article 134 also covers indecent assault, but only if “the acts were done with the intent to gratify the lust or sexual desires of the accused,” which is kind of a weird requirement for prosecuting indecent assault. Apparently, if you hump your buddy’s leg as part of a hazing ceremony, no problem, but if you enjoy it, it’s the brig for you, sailor.
The new Article 120 also specifically amended a particular offense from Article 134 — this one boggles the mind. Here our Congressional friends are discussing “indecent language communicated to another,” meaning that someone faces court martial under Article 120 if the following can be established:
- That the accused orally or in writing communicated to another person certain language;
- That such language was indecent; and
- That, under the circumstances, the conduct of the accused was to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces or was of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.
Those of you who have sleazed around on Yahoo chat may know already that such messenger services are one of the few types of sexual interaction that deployed servicemembers have access to, and one that they utilize with gusto. Congress does not want.
But I want to get back to Lt. Cmdr. Dickinson, because she’s the one who’s really getting screwed here. Know how much she made per encounter? Well, of the $275 fee for her services, $145 went to the agency, and she kept $130. She says she did it because she needed the money, which could seem like an apologist’s argument except that Dickinson stopped shortly before she declared bankruptcy.
As a patriot and a civil libertarian, I have no problem with the idea that military personnel might turn tricks because they want the money, but I find it pretty royally fucked up that a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy would be turning tricks because she needed the money. I don’t mean that the government should pay our officers more; I think the situation Dickinson found herself in probably speaks to the broader structure of capitalism and the fact that even a pretty well-paid working person can find her or himself in some pretty dicey financial straits. But shouldn’t a USN officer have had access to financial information, counseling and assistance to keep her head above water? Apparently not. Non sibi sed patriae indeed.
Like many women who do sex work, Dickinson was doing it out of necessity, hoping no one would find out; now in order to secure immunity she’s a witness at somebody else’s trial and a news item in somebody else’s blog. And she might find herself at 38 without a pension after 19 years of service because the Navy thinks getting paid to have sex with someone is conduct unbecoming. Smells like bilge water to me, sailor.
Thomas S. Roche is the Public Relations Manager at , the author, editor or coeditor of 10 books plus a bunch under pseudonyms, and a member of the training staff at San Francisco Sex Information. He blogs about funky shit at www.thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 8 April 2008
| 12:00 pm
| Industry
As I wrote last week in these hallowed (virtual) pages, when I started to review porn for a living I began accumulating huge amounts of the stuff. To say the least, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, for largely administrative reasons and the practical immutability of the time-space continuum.
After several years of virtually unlimited access to video porn, I found that my reaction to it has changed, and not for the better. I used to love porn — just going I was going to watch it later would lend my entire day an aroma of mystic sleaze. I obsessed over the concepts and theories of it, loved the very fact of the existence of the porn industry as a counterbalance to oppressive and suffocating cultural structures. But mostly, I just dug it, the positions, the bodies, the taboos, the goofy role playing, the bad acting, all of it. Most importantly, porn turned me on.
When I was reviewing porn aggressively, I brought to the task both my long history of teaching sex-positive fundamentals and my shameless and somewhat creepy love of unredeemed sleaze. This, as anyone who knows me well will understand, contributed to my immense feeling of superiority; in porn, non-performing, non-directing professionals — writers, reviewers, publicists, photographers that sort of thing — tend to fall into two categories: the overworked and harried pros who privately say (apologetically) that they never have time to watch porn any more, and the creepy dudes who watch it all the time. There are more of the latter than of the former, which is why it pleased me so to be making the effort to be current in the genre. Incidentally, I don’t say the guys who watch shitloads of porn are “creepy” because they watch porn, but because they’re creepy — one does not equal the other, they just happen to coexist with truly disturbing frequency.
When I was reviewing porn in earnest, every two weeks I’d glance at 100 DVD boxes, watch 30 DVDs, review ten or possibly twenty. I’d skip around and fast forward and roll my eyes a lot. The clichés of pornography became so common and predictable that they didn’t bug me any more; they became a soothing security blanket that wrapped my days in predictability, like reruns of “Matlock” or “Law and Order.” I wouldn’t really get turned on watching these DVDs — but the good moments definitely had an effect on me, and they’d stick with me, and turn me on at the most inopportune moments. I felt justified in writing about porn because I actually jacked off to it, and the idea that many other people in the field didn’t (any more) made me feel kinda like my shit didn’t stink. How are people supposed to create and evaluate and market quality product if they have no idea what kind of reaction it produces?
But as I watched more and more porn, I got more businesslike in my behavior, staring down the magical power of pornography like a sheriff at high noon. I couldn’t afford to get turned on by porn. The clichés actually made discs easier to write about. And the clichés exist for a reason — because they tend to turn people (usually men) on. The clichés were as arousing to me as the quality aspects, and infinitely more arousing than the “teaching moments,” which got me excited for a whole different reason. Something kind of good happened in there — it stopped being about watching porn because I wanted to produce reviews, and started being about a wider sense of industry trends, for which I developed an immense hunger.
Watching hundreds of porn discs, I never noticed a difference in my sexual response cycle; I was like a frog being boiled in milk. The stuff that hit my buttons still hit my buttons, but I didn’t really notice for a while that there was less and less of it. Seems like a pretty obvious equation — I was being desensitized, getting used to the stuff. It no longer produced an automatic response. The porn that punched my ticket showed up less and less often; hot scenes were few and far between. I started looking at porn with a weary sense of inevitability, rather than a feeling of mysticism.
That’s kind of a high price to pay — I used to really enjoy porn, and now most of the time I could care less.
I could say the loss of my sexual interest in porn is because now I think of it in industry terms, I evaluate it professionally; I could even say that I’m now beyond getting excited by porn because I’ve reached some new peace with explicit sexuality. All that would be total bullshit. For me, it’s a simple equation, and so obvious a caution that it almost seems silly to voice it, especially since will apply to very few people. (I mean, we are not talking a porn movie a week here . . . we are talking four and five and six hundred movies a year, you dig?)
So here it is: Watching way, way, way too much porn can be bad for your ability to watch way, way, way too much porn.
Oh, and your thumb — I think I’ve got RSI from hitting the fast-forward button.
Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and resides online at www.thomasroche.com.
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Tuesday, 1 April 2008
| 12:00 pm
| Industry
In 2005, I started a new job where I wrote about porn. With a voracious appetite to learn about the field and, of course, be rapaciously titillated in the process, I sent out literally dozens of letters to porn studios, outlining my credentials and asking for review copies of DVDs. I’d already spent some years as a commentator and occasional pundit, drawling with great authority to mainstream journalists that “adult entertainment is a growing business,” and that “there sure is a lot of this stuff,” as if that was some kind of brilliant observation. Frequently questioned about the scope of the adult entertainment business, I’d tell writers something like “More than 12,000 adult DVDs were published last year,” secretly thinking to myself “And some day I’ll become a porn reviewer, and I’ll have it ALL!”
Now was the time. This was my moment. 12,000? Hell, send me every last porno disk, motherfuckers, and I’d finally have a stew going. Some guys dream of being porn stars; I wanted more than anything in the world to be the Lester Bangs of the pop shot.
Pretty soon, packages started arriving: boxes crammed with lurid DVD boxes promising “Horny sluts glazed with steaming BALL SNOT!” and “The HOTTEST face-fucking ACTION!” Sure, it wasn’t good porn, most of it, but it was porn, and it was free — it was free porn Oh, I was in friggin’ heaven. “Free porn,” I would murmur over and over again. “Free fuckin’ porn.” Within a few weeks I would sit in my office surrounded by great mountains of DVDs, weeping with joy. I sorted it by category: feature, gonzo, anal, audition, MILF, girl-girl, squirting, cumshots, gay, blondes, brunettes, redheads, big boobs, small boobs, medium-sized boobs, barely legal, double penetration. I took more pleasure in arranging piles of DVDs than I’d ever taking (or ever would take) in jacking off to them. Reviewing them was fun, too, but it was far less important than acquiring them. They were free.
The packages kept coming. Day after day after day after day, I slashed open boxes and stacked DVDs with shuddering pleasure. I guzzled French roast watched porn on fast-forward, cackling maniacally and typing as fast as I could, churning out reviews and pushing myself to consume more, more, more porn!! — after all, it was free. And damn, this was an easy job! All I had to do was watch this porn and say it sucked, it ruled, it was kinda OK, there wasn’t enough cunnilingus, there was too much deep-throating, gangbangs were freaky, pop shots were odd, I hated fake tits, I loved redheads . . . whatever bullshit struck my fancy. And in return for my efforts, I collected a paycheck — kinda cool. But more importantly, I was sent MORE FREE PORN.
It’s probably a testament to my Bangsian gusto that it took some months of frenetic viewing for the porno rose to lose its blush. I think it happened right about the time I discovered that my office was so packed with the stuff that I needed to actually sit on boxes of free porn in order to review my free porn. My office chair, you see, had become a place to store free porn. To say the least, there was a lot of it.
“Holy shit,” I’d say as more and more packages arrived at my office and I searched desperately for a place to stash them. “There sure is a lot of this stuff.”
And there was. In fact, “A lot” barely even begins to describe it. Twelve thousand DVDs is an easy number to chortle at gleefully (and it may or may not be accurate). But panic soon set in. According to my own oft-quoted statistic, there were like another 11,400 DVDs on their way, which kinda scared me — I mean, the fast-forward button only goes so fast, right?
I was still in denial about the steadily growing disaster that was my office. The nightmare shifted into overdrive when a ceiling-high stack of creampie titles crashed down around me and I pulled a pratfall into the six-deep gangbangs stacks. I desperately tried to claw my way free from the great cascading cave-in, and got crushed under an even larger assortment of felching discs, which I had separated out from the anal creampie category when I began to view it as an industry trend. Cursing, I scrambled for the door and got buried under an Everest of pseudo-lesbo smut; then the cumswappers started raining down about me.
“Damn,” I said. “There sure is a lot of this stuff.”
Finally, I came to my senses. I cleaned my office and gave away a bunch of review copies to my coworkers, none of whom had anything to do with the porn-reviewing side of the business. They were stoked. “Holy shit!” they said. “Free porn! You sure you don’t want it?”
I responded with a shudder and a twitch, and scampered back to my office to hide from the UPS dude.
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