How To Run A Smear Campaign, The Sequel: Have Cal-OSHA Employees Been Trolling Porn Sites Propagandizing For Condom Mandate?? Is Water Wet??

Not that this will be a big blockbusting surprise to you all, but it does stir the pot a bit.

Over at The Real Pornwikileaks, Sean Tompkins has just dropped an article there, citing "a well placed source" which charges that employees of Cal-OSHA, the state agency responsible for maintaining health and safety standards, were not quite as non-partisan as they are sworn to be regarding proposed regulations concerning "barrier protection" within porn shoots.

Actually, it's more like Cal-OSHA officials actively colluding with advocates for mandatory condoms such as Michael Weinstein's AIDS Healthcare Foundation, even going as far as anonymously and pseudomonsly posting pro-condom mandate propaganda on various porn websites and message boards.

Keep in mind that Cal-OSHA is currently in the process of drawing up new regulations involving the transmission of "infectious materials" in the production of adult films, of which part of the new proposed standards would include mandatory condoms for most if not all penetrative sex acts, dental dams for oral sex acts amongst female performers, and other forms of "protection" such as goggles, gloves, and other forms of protection for "bloodborne pathogens". (An addendum to those regulations would exempt oral sex from the mandate, but only under the conditions of rigorous testing and vaccination, with expensive follow up by a verified physcian.) This is totally independent of the successful campaign by AHF to induce the LA city council to pass into law their "condom mandate" bill which would require all porn shoots getting FilmLA permits to go condom only.

Now, some of you would have guessed that Cal-OSHA was in on the fix all along, considering the paternalistic attitude that folk like safety officer Deborah Gold showed at that classic June 7th hearing of theirs, when plenty of performers showed up to defend their right to their own choice of protection and to question why this was needed in the first place.

But, if that still wasn't enough to convince you of the gross collusion between Cal-OSHA and the AHF, perhaps this will seal your concerns:

FSC has been endeavoring to work with the Standards Board to develop new, industry-appropriate regulations to replace those haphazardly applied to the adult industry years ago absent any consultation with industry leaders. But many observers within the adult community have long believed that the fix is in.

This view was bolstered by the recent leak of a cache of AHF emails that seem to indicate a cozy relationship between AHF and Cal/OSHA officials.

The emails include references to Cal/OSHA records being sent to AHF, as well as apparent assurances by OSHA leaders that the process was tilted in favor of AHF’s agenda.

A May 24, 2011 email, from AHF attorney Brian Chase to Weinstein, indicates that, while Senior Safety Engineer Deborah Gold and attorney Amy Martin, confided they were “not at all happy about” a motion made by L.A. councilman Richard Alarcon that sought to create a mechanism of local enforcement for workplace standards for porn, the two Cal/OSHA leaders nonetheless “confirmed that the new Chief [Ellen Widess] is onboard with adding a specific [Cal/OSHA] regulation requiring condoms in the production of adult films.”

Weinstein then asked, “Will Jim Clark be the attorney for Cal/OSHA? If so we may have to educate him on the employer/employee relationship between performers and producers.”

If the latest reports are true, elements within Cal/OSHA have already made up their mind about what’s best for the porn industry, and have taken to porn news and gossip sites to spread pro-AHF rhetoric.

That would be these emails, folks.

The TRPWL article goes on to list the names of Cal-OSHA officials who might be trolling for propaganda; I'll simply refer you to their article for finding out if you've been buttonholed or shook down. I just wonder how much money Weinstein's giving them under the table...if you catch me drift.

The Latest from the "Liberal" Media

The latest round of porn-bashing from the ostensibly liberal media comes in the form of a Washington Post editorial by Pornified author Pamela Paul. Apparently triggered by the news University of Montreal study that turned up no link between porn consumption and pathological behavior, Paul comes back to the porn wars after several year ready for a fight.

Paul wants us to know that porn is dangerous addictive stuff that is damaging society. Her evidence – the anecdotal reports of the self-described porn addicts she interviewed for Pornified (selection bias, anyone?) and, that favorite cudgel of the anti-porn movement, the studies of Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant. She then drops one of her favorite shocking assertions: when Zillmann and Bryant took their findings to an ethics committee, it was found that they had clearly demonstrated that exposure to porn was so harmful, that all further direct laboratory studies using exposure to porn were forbidden from that point forward.

This latter point is taken up as the basis for a column by the rather clueless Tracy Clark-Flory, a writer for Salon's feminist column Broadsheet. Clark-Flory admits that Paul "seem(s) to have an agenda of (her) own" and talks about her "ambiguity" about porn, but nonetheless, seems to be perfectly fine with passing along the claims by Paul, and Zillmann and Bryant without comment.

Now where to begin with all this? First, a quick note on the University of Montreal study that triggered the article. I've been aware of this study for several months, and yes, I agree with the criticisms of it – only 20 subjects, same age group from one college campus, no control group; that's not a good study, which is why I don't quote it. (I do want to note, however, that blogs like Jezebel that made much to-do about the flaws of that study were very quick to laud Melissa Farley's latest study on the evils that johns do, with seemingly no concern about its methodology or research ethics – funny thing that.) The most I can say about it is that it squares with the established body of research that has so far failed to find any overarching negative effect of porn exposure on psychologically normal men.

Now, as for Pamela Paul, she makes a big to-do about her interviews with self-described porn addicts, but a purely anecdotal study of a group that is selected for having a problematic relationship with porn doesn't tell you anything about the role of porn in the lives of all men, or even most men. But if we're going to bring out anecdotal books, why not give equal weight to David Loftus' Watching Sex? Which found men reporting that porn plays a much less problematic (and sometimes even positive) role in their lives, in stark contrast to the claims made by anti-porn activists (who often don't even talk to, much less study, male porn consumers). (Audio of interview with Loftus here.) However, until the claims made in both Pornified and Watching Sex are the subject of a controlled, methodological study, any such claims must be only seen as provisional.

The meat of this critique, and something I've been meaning to write about for some time, concerns the pornography research of Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, who's studies on the behavioral effects of pornography are a mainstay of anti-porn literature. What seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, however, is that Zillmann and Bryant were deeply biased toward what can only be described as a deeply conservative view of gender relationships (the "virtue" of women, etc) and engineered this bias into the questionnaire they used to evaluate the "sexual callousness" their subjects supposedly picked up from exposure to pornography. Their assumptions about what constitutes “sexual callousness” include: the belief that having multiple partners is more natural than life-long monogamy, placing a low value on the institution of marriage, seeing nothing wrong with non-marital sexuality, belief that repressing sexual desire is unhealthy, and having less desire to have children. In other words, being sex-positive makes you “sexually callous”!

Zillmann and Bryant had been called out by a number of writers during the 1980s and early 1990s for the political biases and its negative influence on their research. Notably, see the debate between Ferrel Christensen and Jennings & Bryant in the pages of Journal of Communication (link and link). The responses by Zillmann and Bryant really give their game away as to where they are coming from in terms of sexual politics, and their contempt for Christensen's sex-positivity is palpable. Note also the response by Daniel Linz and Edward Donnerstein (link), who do not seem to have a dog in the porn wars of the time, but nonetheless clearly point out Zillmann & Bryant's political engagement with the anti-pornography side and, most damningly, the fact that they simply ignore research that contradicted their own when discussing their findings. Additionally, Alison King's 1993 essay "Mystery and Imagination: the Case of Pornography Effects Studies" (partial link here), is an excellent critique of 1980s porn effects research, with a particular focus on the work of Zillmann and Bryant.

Getting back to Pamela Paul, its not surprising that she's such a partisan for Zillmann and Bryant, considering she seems to be working from a similar set of sexual politics. While I don’t know her exact political leanings, based on what I’ve read of “Pornified” and interviews I’ve listened to, she seems to show a strong neo-conservative streak, an impression that's only strengthened by the fact that the overwhelming concern of her writing centers on the strength of marriage and family, and potential threats to that institution. Though she’s not overtly part of the religious right or making religious arguments (albeit, she does have good things to say about religious right anti-porn activism), she does work from a host of traditionalist assumptions about men and women. That women ultimately want to be in a faithful, emotionally supportive, monogamous relationship with a man, and that men basically need to be hammered into the role of faithful partner, something undermined by porn. Call it "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" feminism, if you will.

This brings me to one Pamela Paul's tallest assertions, apparently based on an interview with Jennings Bryant, in which he claims that the results of his study showed such clear and overwhelmingly negative effects that they were blocked by an ethics board from conducing further research where subjects were directly exposed to pornography. Paul implies that this has been the case ever since Zillmann & Bryant's original study. A simple search of the academic literature would dismiss this whopper of a claim (one I've seen a number of antis repeat over the last several years, BTW), and one really has to wonder about Paul's qualifications as a journalist for not even checking this story.

In fact, quite a bit of porn research was done throughout the 1980s, notably by the Linz and Donnerstein, the above-mentioned colleagues of Zillmann and Bryant, as well as Neil Malamuth. The results of all of this research was highly equivocal; Neil Malamuth (a wildly misunderstood researcher who is a strong believer in the idea that pornography has *some* behavioral effect) has conducted several meta-analyses of this research, and has led him to note negative behavioral effects only in the most violent subset of men and mainly from violent pornography (link), and this in combination with a certain set of pre-disposing psychological cofactors (what he terms "moderators") that he is currently engaged in studying. Most notably, Malamuth was not able to find any evidence that pornography promoted sexually aggressive behavior in psychologically normal men, something anti-porn crusaders like Robert Jensen and Gail Dines have been forced to admit time and again.

And this is not to mention the fact that pornography is routinely used in other areas of psychological research, notably studies of sexual attraction; for example, the controversial research on gender and sexual attraction by Meredith Chivers and Michael Bailey (link).

The story by Bryant, repeated by Pamela Paul, that research using pornography ceased following Zillmann & Bryant's early study is spun out of whole cloth, and is simply a dodgy cover for the fact that their alarming results were not, in fact, generally replicated. That a crusader like Jennings Bryant or Pamela Paul would float such a tale is par for the course. However, that somebody like a Salon columnist – Salon presumably being a journalistic source – would pass something like this along without some remedial fact-checking is truly shameful.

Perspectives on Porn: or, why it helps to know what the hell you're talking about

This week, Huffington Post featured an interview with Nona Willis-Aronowitz on her recent book Girldrive. For those not familiar with her, she is none other than the scion of the Aronowitz and Willis who's now making a splash in her own right as a writer and journalist. She has also apparently written a senior thesis on the social history of 70's porn, something I hope she sees fit to publish someday. Her book Girldrive includes a short interview with Rebecca Rosenfelt, proprietor of the one of my favorite blogs, Porn Perspectives.

Unfortunately, the interviewer, Chauncey Zalkin, basically takes this background as a starting point for an anti-porn diatribe and condescending dismissal of sex-positive feminism. She singles out as "ludicrous" Rosenfelt's statements comparing Jenna Jameson's position in the porn industry to Oprah Winfrey's in television. Aronowitz manages gets a few good points in, but its quite clear Zalkin is pretty much dominating the discussion, never a good thing if you're supposedly carrying out an interview. Its also pretty clear that when somebody writes stuff like "Porn is a mammoth industry and most of it is comprised of drug addicted young women without much if any support system," they're not exactly writing about the subject from the most informed point of view.

Not to be outdone, Rebecca has put together a response over on Porn Perspectives:

I really don't mean to pick on Chauncey. She doesn't position herself as an expert on porn, so I don't want to overanalyze her every word. She has not thoroughly researched porn or the porn industry, and is basing her ideas on second-hand information and stereotypes. That is totally normal. In fact, I'll make the rest of this post about "Porn Skeptic", which is a stand-in for people like Chauncey who mean well, but don't have the full facts about today's porn industry. I've heard her arguments a million times, and I'd really like to do what I can to take the stale half-truths out of circulation.

[more]

Rebecca's response is a nice takedown of some of the more common anti-porn arguments one sees trotted out these days.

As an aside, I was kind of wondering just who the heck Chauncey Zalkin is and where she was coming from with her charge that porn is this monster industry who's media product was messing up women's body image and everybody's sexuality. A quick look at her prospectus reveals her to be a highly successful member of the advertising industry. Its only the first week of February, and I think I may already have a winner for my 2010 "Pot Calling the Kettle Black" Award.

ALERT: CNBC Documentary "Porn: Business of Pleasure" Airs Tonight

It's usually news when the mainstream media decides to take on porn; most often, it's not so good.

Starting tonight, though, CNBC, the cable business network, is offering up a documentary program that actually might be promising, even quite progressive.

Titled Porn: Business of Pleasure, the special is designed to take what they call "an inside look" at how the industry is surviving (or not surviving) the economic pitfalls of late, and it interviews both performers (such as Jesse Jane), producers, and executives alike.

The website promoting the special includes a slideshow featuring highlights of the program, which will begin airing on CNBC starting at 9 PM EDT, with repeat broadcasts at 10 PM and 1 AM EDT.

They also promise frequent rebroadcasts in the future, so check your local listings, as the saying goes.


Update (7/19/09): Well...the good folks at Hulu have done us a great favor and posted a clip of the documentary in its entirity and generally commercial free...and they have also freely allowed folk to embed it to their sites/blogs. So, for those not having cable or not able to catch the doc, here it is for you.



Porn: Business of Pleasure (CNBC, via Hulu.com)

Win and fail

Some briefs from around the Internets. In the "win" category, comes this post from FurryGirl on sexual objectification. Now this is a subject that's been the topic of not only some very extended writing/argument around the feminist blogosphere, but is the subject of entire books and journal articles. Nevertheless, FurryGirl in a brief post manages and effective smackdown of the "it objectifies women" as a be-all end-all of charges against porn:

Ah, “objectification”, one of those buzzwords - like “empowerment” - that I’ve heard so many times, it just sounds like gibberish. And really, I’m not sure if I ever knew what it was supposed to mean in the first place.

This topic is one of my major headdesk issues with anti-porn crusaders. They say, “porn objectifies women!” as though that’s some kind of end-all analysis. I address this topic from two directions.

Firstly, as a porn model and cam girl, it’s my job description to “be a sex object”, (as the anti-sexers would define it), and it’s a job with which I’m very happy. My friendlier customers treat me like a multi-dimensional person, too- but it’s not required of them, and I don’t resent the ones who don’t try and get to know me. (Hell, I know it annoys me when I, as a customer, get an overly chatty waiter or cab driver who tries to impose socializing on me when I’m not feeling up to it.) On cam, my customers pay $3 a minute for the expressed purpose of not having to wine and dine me and pretend to care what I’m saying in order to get me to take off my clothes. It’s so much more honest than dating.

[...]

Secondly, everyone at their job is “objectified” in their roles. I don’t profoundly care for the cashier at the grocery store, but no one’s ranting online about how he’s being oppressed and “objectified” because, at work, most people see him as “a cashier”. I don’t care to delve into the inner intellectual passions of the woman who made me tea at a cafe, but I’m not aware of any college courses being taught on the “objectification” of baristas. I have never fallen into deep romantic love with a nurse who’s weighed me and taken my blood pressure at the doctor’s office, but if there are protesters outside the clinic that day, their signs don’t read, “Stop the exploitation of women! Planned Parenthood objectifies nurses as mere one-dimensional healthcare workers!”

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In the "fail" category is yet another anti-porn documentary Overexposed. It was made a few years ago, but has gotten some recent buzz over the Film Talk blog, which is unfortunately lapping it up. Trailer and website for the film here. It appears to be a kind of right-of-center version of The Price of Pleasure (featuring Drew Pinsky, Pamela Paul, and evangelical Steven Arturburn) that was produced at USC of all places, and focusing on the claimed addictive and degenerative effects that porn has on men. The centerpiece is Drew Pinsky spouting off some piece of junk science on the evil that porn does to men's brains. (Aparently, such images stimulate pleasure centers in the brains of men – uh oh, can't have that!) Pinsky is up there with Dr. Phil as being among my least favorite sex-negative pop psychologists. The negative messages coming from these guys don't get enough attention and response from "sex positive" community, even though each probably ultimately have more direct influence on public attitudes toward sexuality, sex workers, and sexual minorities than Robert Jensen, Gail Dines, and Melissa Farley put together.

Greta Christina Reviews "The Girlfriend Experience"

Greta Christina has an insightful review of Sasha Grey's new "crossover" movie, "The Girlfriend Experience". (Warning: contains some spoilers.)

I'll admit I was skeptical. Even biased. When I heard about "The Girlfriend Experience," a movie about a high-end prostitute who provides companionship as well as sex -- and what happens when she gets emotionally entangled with a client -- I expected one of two things.

I expected a) a morality play about the consequences of turning love and sex into a commodity, with either a sadder- but- wiser ending in which the guy just can't live with his girlfriend being a prostitute, or -- more likely -- a happy ending in which the prostitute leaves the business to be with the guy...

or else b) a wacky romantic comedy, the kind that might star Ashton Kutcher and Sarah Jessica Parker, full of amusing secrets and misunderstandings and cross-purposes that all come to a head at the end of the second act and all get resolved in the third. With, of course, a happy ending, in which the prostitute leaves the business to be with the guy.

I was wrong. It's neither. Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" is thoughtful, complex, emotionally nuanced, and thoroughly grown-up. It's definitely a flawed movie (I'll get to that in a moment), but it's an interesting movie and is very much worth seeing. And, although the prostitute is the central character, in an odd way the movie isn't really about prostitution. Instead, the movie uses prostitution as a way of commenting on the economies of human connection, underscoring the link between money and emotion in a variety of non-prostitution relationships... both professional and personal.

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The Kink.com Wars, Round II

This just in from my home city – the California Employment Training Panel nixes Kink.com technical staff's right to participate in free Bay Area Video Coalition technical training, something available to multimedia employees working for a wide range of for-profit and non-profit employers. The stimulus for this was a request for information by SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith, the process of which tipped off the state that Cybernet was a porn company, and apparently Cal ETP has rules against funding adult-sector employees.

However the real scandal came when Smith, far from contrite about having just deprived a number of multimedia workers of further job training, wrote a rather nasty hit piece in his SF Weekly column. Using none other than Melissa Farley as his only source for the article, he is quite pleased to have stopped "torture porn" company Kink.com from receiving supposed taxpayer funding. He then goes on to revive Melissa Farley's rather sickening comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib and the accusation that they pay poor desperate models to be abused. Topped off by the usual platitude found in so much anti-porn writing these days that Kink.com "passes itself off as hip".

Violet Blue has the full story here:

On Wednesday, SF Weekly's Matt Smith took his torture porn fantasies beyond the realm of safe, sane and consensual to gloat over how his actions caused Kink.com to get screwed out of legitimately earmarked BAVC job training funds, threatening a community training program that Smith, himself, has benefited from to the tune of 184 hours.

Here's the situation: Smith recently submitted an inquiry about Kink.com to the California Entertainment Training Program (ETP). He received a response from the ETP's general counsel, which said, in part:

"Since learning about Kink.com through your Public Records Act request, ETP has informed BAVC that it will no longer reimburse the cost of training the employees of Cybernet."

and then removed Kink from the list of subsidized applicants, kicking Kink out of the nonprofit Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

As tempting as it is to immediately scapegoat Smith for this, you can't -- after all, all he did is submit a public records request. It's not as though he attempted to incite a harmful scandal simply for the purpose of writing about it.

It's Smith's actions following his request that are deserving of scrutiny. The resulting article, "Whipped and Gagged," is infused with (unrepentant) and sensational anti-porn bias, with accusations that Kink is soaking up taxpayer dollars to create "torture based pornography" and "depicting sexualized torture". Despite the one-sided commentary and airtime Smith devoted to local anti-porn feminist Melissa Farley's two-year-old comments repulsively comparing Kink's product to Abu Ghraib, he certainly knew his way around Kink's websites and content enough to frill up the Fox News-style hit piece.

According to BAVC's Director of Training and resources, Mindy Aronoff, Smith more than nonconsensually screwed the pooch with his biased reporting. Aronoff stated, "Mr. Smith's lazy attempt to jump on the "bad government spending" bandwagon is dangerous in its disregard for this bigger picture and the economic realities of our state. His questions of government spending and censorship are an unfortunate case of reactionary sensationalism that could threaten the ETP program at BAVC."

[Read more]

Another rather yellow aspect to Smith's journalism is the issue of "taxpayer funding". His spin is that taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the production of porn. First, the taxpayer dollars he mentions are a specific payroll tax that all employers in the State of California pay into, Kink.com included. This payroll tax goes to specifically fund employee training programs through various local projects, among them the Bay Area Video Coalition, who in turn provide training for employees to upgrade their skills. Until recently, multimedia employees of Cybernet (the umbrella company behind Kink, that also includes some non-porn production work) received this subsidized training the same as any other SF multimedia worker.

Some Background

For many years, San Francisco (by which I mean the city proper and not the whole Bay Area) has been a town with only one major daily newspaper (the San Francisco Chronicle), but with two competing "alt weeklies", The Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. Bay Guardian is a local independent paper, has its roots in the 1960s, and is definitely leftist in its editorial leanings. Its articles are often politically slanted, but also, they wear their politics on their sleeve and you at least know where they're coming from. SF Weekly is part of the Village Voice/New Times Media chain, has a more liberal-to-centrist slant, at least superficially has less "spin" in its articles, but like many centrist news sources, often has real problems with hidden bias. Matt Smith has been the paper's main columnist on local politics and he quite openly has an axe to grind against the progressive faction in SF politics. The two papers have been at war with each other for over ten years, with the Guardian having recently successfully won a lawsuit against SF Weekly over undercutting practices used in getting advertisers.

As far as sexual politics go, over the last few years, the Guardian has leaned sex-poz (like the majority of the SF progressive community) and even sponsors the Sex SF blog. SF Weekly originally was also characterized by the relaxed attitude toward sexual politics characteristic of this area, but several years ago, took a decidedly different slant. In 2006 it ran an article bashing Cake parties (and borrowing heavily on Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs), followed soon after by another article by the same author bashing Maxine Doogan's fight against the SF "john's school" program. In 2008, the paper was a major source of opposition to to prostitution decriminalization initiative Proposition K. The have been quite outspoken through all of this in their opposition to sex worker rights activism, and frequently quote Melissa Farley as their go-to source for the bottom line about the sex industry. Smith's latest column simply continues in this unfortunate tradition.

For all its sex industry- and sex-poz-bashing, it is notable that SF Weekly, like Bay Guardian, runs back page ads for strip clubs and massage parlors, as well as escort classifieds.

A Heartening Response

The silver lining to this situation is that the response to the article over the last few days has been overwhelming negative, with more than a few people taking specific aim at the use of Melissa Farley as the article's source. The comments thread for article is up to over 60 comments, almost entirely anti-Smith. A number of (mostly) local bloggers have also weighed in taking Smith to task. In addition to Violet Blue's takedown of the article in SF Appeal, SFist, Sex SF, The Sword, Carnal Nation, and even the Reason magazine blog have since taken a smack at this piece. (Addendum: whippedandgagged.blogspot.com just launched to track other articles and posts responding to the article and controversy.)

My (main) response from the comments thread:

Unfortunately, it seems that Matt Smith and SF Weekly has allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for the cranky and crank-ish neoconservative feminism of Melissa Farley. First with its jingoistic anti-Prop K stance last year and now with the rhetoric displayed in the article.

To my mind, the relevant question about CETP is whether its being used as a form of corporate welfare or whether its truly a jobs-creation program. If its the former, then I don't think either Kink.com or, say, KRON should be getting that subsidy.

However, if it is genuinely a job-training program in multimedia, then it should make no difference whether the employee is going off to a well-paying job for a design firm or a porn company. (And lets get away from the red herring that this has anything to do with forcing the poor into porn modeling – we are talking about production-end jobs here.) You have moral problems with pornography? Well, too bad, a lot of people have moral problems with advertising (pick up a copy of Adbusters sometime) and I don't see a call for ending government funding for training to enter that industry. And your "first amendment expert" aside (who was using what was already a bad piece of legislation – the NEA attack on Karen Finley – as a defense of this), I really don't think its the government's business to channel trainees into one form of media over another, especially in a way that constitutes blatant viewpoint discrimination.

The absolute low point of this article is the inflammatory language calling Kink.com "torture porn" and repeating Melissa Farley's disgusting comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib (rhetoric that really dishonors the victims of Abu Ghraib). Farley-esque rhetoric about "giving people money if they'll agree to being on camera while being stripped, bound, impaled, beaten, and shocked" is pure nonsense. Kink.com films people practicing BDSM and many of the models for that company are local "players" from that same scene. Last I checked, BDSM was already something some people consensually seek out, in fact, its not unknown for someone to pay some of the advertisers in the back pages your newspaper to do *to them* some of the very things that are depicted on Kink.com. Ironic, that.

An unfortunate response was made by one particular article commentator (who also seems to be connected with an anonymous flyer circulated around the Castro) demanding the article be dropped and Smith be pressured to retract the article. This call, of course, is hugely self-contradictory from a free speech standpoint and seems to have no support beyond the original commentator who circulated it. (And fact a few people on this side of the fence, myself among them, specifically have denounced it.) Nonetheless, Matt Smith has latched onto this comment and spun it into a "pornographers are trying to censor me" post on his blog. This, apparently is his only response to the whole controversy.

4/25: This just in – Mz Berlin, an SF fetish model who has done a lot of work for Kink.com has challenged Matt Smith to an open dialogue/debate and he apparently has accepted. What form this will take – blog, print media, or live public debate is still not clear.

A Hearty Endorsement of "Carnal Nation"

It's always good to have more allies in the Sex Wars, and today, I've discovered a new journal dedicated to promoting the pro-sex/sex-positive viewpoint.

Actually, the blog Carnal Nation has been at it for more than a month now, but it is already doing significant work in its stated mission to improve the quality of debate about human sexuality. Quoting their mission statement.

CARNALNATION provides comprehensive coverage of entertainment for grown-ups. We at CARNALNATION embrace and honor human sexuality, and we promise to be current, consistent, and uncensored. We compile event listings; we publish original and incisive content; and we provide insightful commentary on a range of related topics from health to fashion to the latest toys. We know you take your fun as seriously as we do, so we invite you, our readers, to use CARNALNATION to realize and explore your interests, desires, and curiosities.

CARNALNATION was developed out of a compelling need to counteract those oppressive forces, whether internal or external, that stifle sexual growth, awareness, and fulfillment. We believe that sex is a vital human need and that sexuality is an important component of who we are as individuals, how we relate to each other, and who we want to become. In our view, fear and disdain of all things sexual have led to a society that too often vacillates between impulsive titillation and compulsive repression. Such extremes can only have a negative impact on our physical, psychological, and social well being. Therefore, we strive to inform and entertain without being pornographic or offensive. We make this commitment at all levels of sexuality: the personal, the political, and the perverted.

If the featured columnists and articles are of any indication, then they certainly have succeeded in fulfilling that commitment.

Editor Chris Hall (also co-founder, along with the equally wonderful Elizabeth Wood, of the related pro-sex site Sex in the Public Square) has arrayed an all-star cast of liberationist columnists....and the depth and breadth of quality of commentary is fascinating to say the least. A sampling based on issues recently debated here in this journal:

1) Chris Hall's follow up on The Price of Pleasure and its issues with "fair use" doctrine, in synch with comments here by both Ernest and Trinity:

The record-keeping requirements have been around for a while, but standards of enforcement have become even more arcane and inflexible in the last few years. Especially troublesome has been the law's requirement that records of the performers' ages be kept not only by the original producer, but by anyone redistributing the images. In October, Ernest Greene wrote an extensive four-part deconstruction of the film's content and Sun's ethical and legal obligations regarding the performers and 2257 records (Part 1, 2, 3, 4). Sun and her supporters claim that the film is protected by "fair use." Even the sex-positive bloggers haven't been united on whether Sun's film is fair use or not, which make the most recent entry in the debate even more interesting. Harper Jean Tobin at Polymorphous Perversity has a very precise and thoughtful legal analysis of the issues involved. Her conclusion? The Price of Pleasure can't claim "fair use" protections because fair use and 2257 apply to two entirely different sections of law. The former has to do with protecting the intellectual property rights of the original work's creator; the latter are federal regulations to prevent criminal exploitation of minors. Whether Sun (or anyone else) should be able to use those images is an entirely different matter that speaks to the nature of the impact that 2257 has on free speech.

2) Dr. Carol Queen (through her Live Nude Woman column) discusses the etiology of the philosophy of "sex-positivity", and defends the use of the term as it relates to defining her base sexual liberationist philosophy (in lieu of criticism from others):

So let me tell you what I think sex-positivity is now, lest I’ve given you the impression you have to start turning tricks to do it right. You don’t have to be bisexual (or trisexual), kinky, non-monogamous, or even sexually active. In fact, some of the most interesting discussions about sex-positivity I’ve had this year have been with a guy who’s busy organizing asexuals into a community of support and affiliation. Yep, you can even be sex-positive if you don’t ever want to have sex, just as you can be very sex-negative indeed and still have plenty of hot sex that you enjoy to the fullest.

Here’s the deal: Sex positivity means you acknowledge that sex is, or could be under the right circumstances, a positive, healthy force in anyone’s life… even if it isn’t right now. Those circumstances may not be the same for everyone (though some may be universal, like consent), but they include things like access to information, support, condoms (if relevant), a loving (or at least friendly) partner, healing from past negative sexual experiences like rape or abuse, privacy, enhanced self-esteem, etc. This list could be very long and, again, it won’t contain the same exact elements for everyone. This leads to the rest of what sex-positivity is, namely, the acknowledgement that not everyone’s sexuality, including sexual needs and desires, is the same, such that one person’s optimum, positive sexuality may not look anything like another person’s. That is, sex-positivity includes the acceptance of sexual diversity, and acknowledges that optimum sexual wellbeing for you might look different than it does for me.

3) Dr. Betty Dodson and Carlin Ross team up for a discussion on the uses and abuses of porn, via a videocast recorded through their site through YouTube. (original video here)

Other interesting articles include Chris' discovery of a proposed Chinese program for seeking out and screening adult material; Kingfish's article on the recent revival of burlesque; and a joint response to an inquiry about talking personally about kinky sex.

All in all, Carnal Nation is a welcome addition to the "sex positive" discussion, which I wholeheartedly recommend to all sexual freedom fighters.

Zack and Miri Get Banned in Philly

It seems that shooting porn has been a popular comedy theme over the last few years – The Amateurs, Slippery Slope, and I Want Candy all come to mind. Kevin Smith adds his contribution with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, coming out at the end of the month.

And it also seems that some of the advertising for Zack and Miri is now the latest battle in the new porn wars. Apparently, billboards for it have been banned in several places and a number of newspapers are refusing to carry the ads. So is the ad really raunchy or something? No, actually the ad only contains stick figures, with no added naughty bits or suggestive positions. It seems the big problem is the title of the movie itself, which contains the word --gasp-- Porno.

According to "child development expert" Diane Levin, the simplicity of the ad is part of the problem, since the fact that the ad contains stick figures means that its being marketed to children and is trying to sell them on the idea that "porn is an acceptable occupation". In case anybody is wondering who this person is, she's none other a Wheelock College professor (yes, that Wheelock College, which must have its own Department of Anti-Porn studies), and fellow footsoldier of Gail Dines and Jeane Kilbourne in the "progressive" battle against smut. Levine is co-author of "So Sexy So Soon", the latest in the century-old tradition of "lock up your daughters" lit, and in general is somebody who is milking the scare over "the sexualization of girls" as a stick to attack adult media. She's particularly off base with this one, as whatever you want to say about the inappropriateness of Bratz dolls and the like for young girls, Zack and Miri is clearly not being marketed to children, nor is mere exposure to the word "porno" going to damage them.

Now I will note that I actually have some sympathy for the idea there's some things you just shouldn't put on billboards displayed to the public, who are in most cases, not a voluntary audience. Time and place restrictions are acceptable under a general climate of free expression, and, in the case of private companies, they can refuse to carry whatever they want. (I'll leave the more radical question of who owns public space out of this for the time being.) A few years ago, the "torture porn" movie Captivity crossed what I think is a definite line when they put out some extremely disturbing ads on public billboards, and a lot of people have big problems with American Apparel billboards for analogous reasons. However, I am also against the total bowdlerization of public space – one cannot possibly remove from public display all things that are going to possibly be offensive to somebody, and in fact, that kind of bowdlerized public space would in turn be equally offensive to many others (like myself, for instance).

Its especially problematic in the case of newspapers that won't carry this ad, because they almost certainly will carry news stories, often very salacious ones, about porn. In these cases, its really amounts to point-of-view discrimination – Zack and Miri present making porn as lighthearted, comical, and, in some ways, normal. That's a view that clearly clashes with a moralistic view that porn is a road to ruin or "unacceptable". Of course, people have every right to that view and they have every right to push it (and, boy, do they), but trying to suppress the opposite point of view from the marketplace of ideas is wrong and unworthy of a news organization.

Ultimately, however, I'm not too worried about how Kevin Smith and his film will do. Smith is no stranger to controversy – some feminist and lesbian activists got their knickers in a twist over Chasing Amy, and the Catholic League went after Dogma, and both movies actually benefited from the controversy. Kevin Smith actually scored a minor propaganda coup when he showed up at a Catholic League protest against Dogma and helped them picket his own movie, apparently without being recognized. If Zack and Miri is the new front in the porn wars, I say, bring it on – lets expose the antis for the pinched humorless scolds that they so often are.

(H/T to The Legal Satyricon.)

New Antiporn Documentary: The Price of Pleasure

Well, the documentary we've been hearing about from the APRF crowd for the last – what, 4 years, at least – has finally been finished. This was the one that was being put together by Chyng Sun a few years back, and more recently by Robert Jensen and Miguel Picker. Website here:

http://www.thepriceofpleasure.com/

Trailer here.

The press kit promises, "Honest and nonjudgmental, the film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations." But one look at the who the writers are (Chyng Sun and Robert Wosnitzer), not to mention the obvious slant even in the trailer, belies the idea that there's anything "honest and nonjudgmental" going on here.

Witnesses for the prosecution are, not unexpectedly, Robert Jensen and Gail Dines, but Pamela Paul, Ariel Levy, and Sarah Katherine Lewis are also brought in to further the case against porn and the sex industry. (And apparently the much-circulated video of the anti-porn statement by Chomsky is from this film also.) Interestingly, the documentary also feature some pro-porn folks, most notably, our own Ernest Greene, who, based on the trailer at least, seems to get some good points in, though I have no idea what his original interview versus what made it into the film is like. Joanna Angel seems to be treated to more of a hatchet job, where they select some "worst of" moments from her videos and use them to undermine her statements. Similarly, statements from fans are selected to come across as very self-incriminating.

If anybody's anxious to have a look at it, its scheduled to play in Austin, Montreal, and New York over the next several weeks, and it may play elsewhere after that. I have my doubts it will have anything like a major release (1-hour documentaries usually don't), but, is scheduled for video release next month from the Media Education Foundation, but like other MEF releases, are only available to educational institutions at $150-250 per copy. Like the Killing us Softly and Dreamworlds series (also from MEF), its likely this video end up having a long life life in women's studies and "media education" classrooms, fueling misguided outrage for years to come.