Scenes like this are now confined to porn, which is why porn is so wonderful.Image source: Kink.com video 105438, "Fresh Meat: Haley Spades" starring Haley Spades with a special appearance by The Pope's foot!
When I described
Amathea’s torture scene in my review of Barbarian Queen I said
that Queen Amathea subdued the torturer by grabbing his cock with her
fantastically well-developed pussy muscles which were probably the
result of a brutally intense kegel regimen, probably part of that
whole Amazon combat training thing. And I was wrong about that, but I
totally forgive myself.
Because I wasn’t
aware at the time that I had based my review on a censored version of Barbarian Queen. Turns out there were a bunch of scenes deleted from the
movie at the behest of various nation’s film boards. I wasn’t all
that motivated to pay any money to see the deleted scenes, but I was
able to find vidcaps of the deleted scenes by searching for them, and
I hit gold when I found the Movie Censorship site, which provides
info on images censored from movies. You
can see the deleted scenes right here on the Movie Censorship
site, if you are over 18. The site included vidcaps from the censored
scenes, like the ones below:
Vidcap of a deleted scene from "Barbarian Queen" that clearly shows her crushing the torturer/rapist between her powerful Amazonian thighs. No wonder it had to be deleted. Well not the whole scene, we still see him raping her from behind, though her legs are not wrapped around him in that shot. So it was probably the leg wrap thing. Weird. Image courtesy of Movie Censorship.com.
You can clearly see
what’s happening in these censored scenes via the vidcaps. Amathea
is clutching the torturer to her with her legs and squeezing the
breath out of him, which makes one hell of a lot more sense than the
whole Amazon pussy grab thing. (To be honest, I still like my pussy
grab theory, it’s completely in keeping with the over-the-top
nature of 80s sword and sorcery movies: “Barbarian Queen: Even her
vagina was a weapon!”)
But... why was
Barbarian Queen censored? The censored images are not much different
from the images that were actually used in the movie.
To answer that
question we have to get into what was going on in the early 80s,
asking the question, why did these movies happen? Why were
Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen so popular? Hell, why were the Gor
novels so popular? They had sales in the MILLIONS! Was there a big
BDSM breakout back then?
My theory is this:
feminism happened. It happened back in the 1970s. And there was a
reaction to feminism that manifested itself in the culture in the 80s
in the form of the Gor novels and sword and sorcery movies like
Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen and then Fifty Shades of Gray just
plain blew the lid off everything.
Now, I’m not
saying that anti-feminist ideologues in the early 80s ginned up
intellectual responses to feminist initiatives in the late 70s. It
may have happened, but it’s not what I’m talking about. I’m
talking about a natural psychological response called reaction
formation. Also known as the boomerang effect. It’s a known
psychological phenomenon. You didn’t have to be an ideologue to
experience it. You just had to know things were changing in ways you
don’t like and respond naturally to those things. You didn’t even
have to have a clear idea of what those changes were, or even that
what you were doing was a response to them. It’s very much a vibes
thing.
A visual representation of a forbidden vibe!
Image source: Kink.com porn video 24100 "The Model: Jessie Rogers Gets Taken By Her Biggest Fan!" starring Jessie Rogers's face and Mr. Pete's cock.
Even so the
feminist successes in the 70s were well known in the culture. Many of
their successes were generally wholesome and good for America. Title
IX was passed in 1972, prohibiting gender discrimination in
education. It was overall a very good and much needed piece of
legislation (though it probably contributed to reaction formation).
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, and gave women reproductive freedom
of choice, a very good thing. (Granted many social conservatives
didn’t feel that way. This wasn’t reaction formation, however, as
there was a long-standing religiously based opposition to it).
In 1974 there was
the equal credit opportunity act, giving women the right to obtain
credit on their own, a matter of simple justice, really. And there
was 1978’s Pregnancy Discrimination Act, banning workplace
discrimination against pregnant women, once again, a matter of simple
justice.
That’s why I’m
not against feminism generally. Feminists have done a lot of good
things, not just for women, but for society generally. But I
understand why some people feel diminished by feminist successes.
It’s a phenomenon called privilege loss, where loss of privilege
over others feels like a loss of personal autonomy and diminished
agency, even though what’s diminished is strictly their power over
others. They feel victimized, because they are no longer allowed to
victimize others.
It’s not a
privilege you are entitled to, it’s more the way managers felt when
Covid sent their employees home and they couldn’t strut around and
boss them personally any more.
So even legitimate
feminist successes in fighting sexism could be driving these feelings
of privilege loss. But of course, some feminists did not stop there.
Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin started working with
traditional prudish conservatives to censor porn, but they came late
to the game, and were never really successful in the US. But their
attempts to censor (basically, eliminate) porn probably triggered a
sense of privilege loss among many men, or at least, privilege
endangerment.
But back in 1975,
British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey really set things on fire
when she coined the phrase “The Male Gaze.” She didn’t come up
with this out of nowhere. She built on the work of earlier film
theorists who described the male gaze as presented in cinema as
something that transformed women into passive objects presented for
the male gaze, which possesses them somehow by looking at them. (I am
not making this up! Link.)
Mulvey’s coinage
of “the male gaze” had Rule of Cool riz going for it big time and
her essay really took off in feminist circles. It was absolutely
irresistible to feminists: a theory that let feminist blame men for
just looking at them! Whoa!
This is definitely
the sort of thing that would have the boomerang effect going big
time. When it started out it was mostly a film theorist thing and
didn’t create much stir outside feminist academic because who gives
a crap about academic film theorists? But Mulvey’s essay blew it up
and the theory leaked over into general feminism and of COURSE the
male gaze went from the camera and the big screen to real life. And
suddenly you were oppressing women just by looking at them with your
big, bad, sexist, patriarchal eyeballs.
Now this is the
sort of stuff that REALLY gets the boomerang effect going, because
men LOVE to look at women. We find them incredibly attractive,
sexually and aesthetically. The existence of the porn industry is a
testament to the deep enjoyment men get out of looking at women. And
unlike the feminists, I don’t think it’s a cultural thing. I
think enjoying the sight of women is baked right into men’s Y
chromosomes. From the Venus of Willendorf to Kim Kardashian on the
cover of Paper magazine, men have always looked at women and said,
“Whoa!” Granted, the nature of the sights that provoked the
“Whoas” over time have changed (check out Renoir’s extra-curvy
babes from the 1800s) but the phenomenon holds true no matter what
the beauty ideals are in any given culture or time. The sight of a
woman being beautiful, however that works, conscious or not, gives
man a solid hit of dopamine. And it feels so good.
“The Male Gaze”
changes the innocent pleasure of looking at a beautiful woman and
enjoying the living hell out of her beauty into a brutal act of
domination.
(I had no idea I
had dominated so many images on the Internet. I thought I was just
digging on hot women who had no idea I existed, as I was basically
looking at images on a screen. I guess I was just luring these images
of women into being the passive objects of my desire through my
masculine power. Call me a Master baiter!)
Of course you KNOW
the boomerang effect on something like this would be HUGE, but it
hasn’t been as huge as it would have if the mainstream media picked
up on the Male Gaze ideology. I looked for mainstream media
references to the male gaze, doing Google searches for magazine
articles, blog posts, Youtube videos and TV shows that dealt with it,
and it was almost all in academic, or quasi-academic media. Where it
was not noticed by most people. But it was noticed and used by enough
feminist bloggers and others (you don’t have to be feminist to
think a Rule of Cool term like “The Male Gaze” will bring
eyeballs to your blog/podcast/Youtube videos) to get those “loss of
male privilege” vibes going. And I believe that happened, in
conjunction with all the other feminist successes that also sparked
feelings of loss of personal choice and expression that were based on
male privilege.
So we have that
happening. Meanwhile, something completely different was happening
with the Gor novels. (I’m going to put this baldly, because I
explained the phenomenon at length right here.) Traditional
romance publisher were having booming sales but a lot of readers were
craving spicier stuff. So they set up some imprints (basically, books
published by the trad publisher but in a different subgenre from most
of the books) for spicier stories and they sold quite well.
But the traditional
publishers (mostly male, mostly patriarchal, mostly fat and stupid)
did not serve the desires of bodice-ripper fans well at all. Spicier
rape scenes just weren’t on their horizons.
Women SF fans knew
of the Gor novels, and a number of them were also bodice ripper fans.
And when they read the Gor novels they realized that the Gor novels
were MUCH spicier than any of the trad publishers’ stories. Word
got around. In the 70s this cranked Gor novel sales into the
millions. (Best reports online are six to twelve million dollars,
which is beyond gangbusters by SF publishing standards, or really, by
ANY publisher’s standards.)
But except for DAW,
most trad SF publishers hated sexy stories of any kind and most
especially maledom/femsub stories like the Gor novels. And so they
let DAW have the market, until the 2000s when feminists who were
influential in the publishing industry (and they very much were
influential) were able to pressure DAW into dropping Norman from
their author list. And they blackballed Norman among SF publishers
generally so he couldn’t get traditionally published in the US,
even though his books continued to sell very well in foreign
countries.
This was a
successful act of censorship and it worked because nobody gave a
flying fuck about the (mostly female, according to DAW) readers who
made the Gor novels successful.
No videos, movies, TV shows or books can be allowed to get people thinking about this sort of thing, say the prudo-feminists. So of course normal people, including many normal feminists, are FASCINATED.Image source: Kink.com porn video 44607 "Anal Alimony" starring Penny Pax (femsub) and Tommy Pistol (maledom).
Feminist Censorship Timeline
OK, now that we
have all the background put together, let’s just see if we can
describe what happened in a direct timeline:
1970s:
Feminism, which had been brewing since the 1960s achieved numerous
legislative victories in the 1970s, as well as getting some culture
wars going, most notably for our purposes, that whole male gaze
thing, but there were also all the assaults on male sexuality, always
framed as attacks on sexism. If you didn’t toe the line you got
called a sexist pig.
1980s: In
the meantime, the fat, stupid traditional romance publishers (almost
all were run by men) were losing readers because in the aftermath of
the sexual revolution they wanted “spicier” (i.e., more explicit)
romances. They were also publishing some of the precursors of bodice
rippers, but there was no established line of bodice rippers. It was
very much a catch-as catch-can business for bodice ripper fans. And
when the Gor novels came along with their stories of women captured
and chained and raped and forced to prance around naked and leashed,
bodice ripper fans made a student-body left and the Gor novels became
million-sellers.
Meanwhile Deathstalker was another huge
success for the sword and sorcery genre. It had a tiny Roger Corman
budget of less than half a million dollars, and made $12 million
worldwide at the box office. Considering that the movie got little or
no marketing from chintzy Corman, it was an even bigger success than
the original Conan, and like the Conan movie, it had a lot of success
in video sales and rentals and later, in DVD sales and rentals. And
it just happened to be arguably the most Gorean of all the 80 sword
and sandal movies.
1990s: The sword and sorcery
movie’s bloomed in the 80s and waned in the 90s, to be replaced by
an endless parade of kickass action girls/women, 120 pound women who
routinely beat up wave after wave of 200 pound male thugs. It seemed
as if the feminists had achieved their final, full victory over the
forces of maledom/femsub theme enjoyers (as almost nobody calls them)
in the movies and in book publishing. The Gor novels, banned. Bodice
rippers, sexually censored by romance publishers. Sword and sorcery
movies, rare. Kickass action girls taking over the leads in all the
movies and TV shows.
But of course the sexual feelings that
made bodice rippers and Gor novels and attractive to so many women,
and sexy, sexy sword and sorcery movies attractive to men, were still
there, just very underserved. So where were the maledom/femsub fans
going?
The answer became
clear in around 2009. It boomeranged. It boomeranged HARD. How hard?
Fifty Shades of Hard. More on that in another post.
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