How Feminist Censorship Success Created Its Own Failure

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.

Why Mainstream Media Never Gets Sex Scenes Right

Closeup from Madison's ride that hopefully won't get Google cranked up, unlike the gif just below that this image is from.

This is porn. You'll be tested on this later! This is bondage porn, not vanilla porn, which is also covered in this post. You can if you like imagine that Madison Scott's wrists are not tied to her ankles and she isn't ballgagged. If that's what works for you.

Source: Kink.com video 9799, "Taboo Teaching" featuring Madison Scott and Mark Davis.

If you watch mainstream media that deals with sex, porn and the sex industry you will soon conclude that sex is a Very Bad Thing that is Definitely NO Fun that no sane person would participate in. 

Now if you are a healthy, sane, normal adult human being who has actually had sex, your experience of sex was probably that it felt WONDERFUL, maybe the best feeling EVER. Pure pleasure, the very apotheosis if you will, of pleasure. So why does mainstream media always portray it as a bad experience? There are several reasons.

This is Holly Hunter tied to a bed in an upper spreadeagle, stark naked from the TNT television series "Saving Grace." It's one of the, if not the, raunchiest bondage images I've ever seen on broadcast cable TV. Hunter is seen like this for ten or fifteen minutes of the show. (Which is also very rare, most of the time when mainstream media shows partial nudity, it's only for a brief second or two.) It's the old "got tied up for consensual sex and then the partner leaves them tied up" scenario. Natually she's tied face down. This is BY FAR one of the raunchest mainstream media sexual images. Most are far tamer and far shorter. 

1) Mainstream media is CENSORED and CANNOT portray sex accurately. They cannot show naked human beings having sex with their genitals. While there are all sorts of reasons for censoring explicit sexual imagery, some more valid than others, the undeniable fact is that censorship prevents viewers from seeing how sex is done, preventing viewers from assessing it. 

It's actually a moot point: everyone who can have an orgasm knows what orgasms feel like, and everyone who has had sex with someone else knows what sexual intercourse feels like. Pictures of people having sex won't change their opinions either way. But if you cut out the explicit parts, you don't really show why people enjoy sex so much. The effect is that happy sexual relationships are portrayed most often without sexual imagery. It's just the nature of the beast.

A scene from "Spartacus: Gods of the Arena" shows a slavegirl being raped by Baritatus, in a television series that aired on the Starz premium channel. She's naked and collared. One of the advantages of slave girls in sex scenes is that the drama is already present: she is a slave, she has no choice about the sex, it's rape by nature. So any sex scene involving a slave is dramatic by nature, even if all that happens is apparently consensual sex.

2) Most movies (and TV shows) generally involve some conflict or other. The dramatic elements often show up in the sex scenes and generally makes them unhappy in one way or another. It's not a matter of intentionally trying to make sex look worse than it is, but overall, it has that effect. This tends to be more the case with movies and TV shows where sex is central to the plot. A movie or show about people who have a wonderful relationship with lots of happy and fulfilling sex and that's about it would be derided as porn. (It's the same reason science fiction movies and TV shows tend to be about dystopias instead of utopias. Utopias where everyone is happy and living their best lives don't tend to produce drama.) Hence, sexual relastionships that make people unhappy tend to be far more common in mainstream media than they are in real life. Once again, it's the nature of the beast, not the result of intentional censorship.

Many speculate that "Game of Thrones" would be classified as porn under Mike Lee's proposed censorship bill. Here's Emilia Clarke and Jason Momoa porning things up. Of course, most of the scenes in Game of Thrones do not involve sex and/or nudity, but censors are a VERY inclusive bunch when it comes to defining porn. 

3) Culture War Issues. Sex in media is not the cental issue of the culture wars, but it is an issue. And for the people who want to censor, it is a central issue, an issue for which they have great passion. I would not be surprised to learn that some portion, maybe a very large portion, of the people who are the most strident about censorship, like that stupid little weasel Mike Lee (Senator from Utah, Crazy) have a fetish for preventing other people from having orgasms on their own terms. He has recently proposed legislation to censor all porn, basically, all images of naked men and women, having sex of otherwise. He does this kind of shit regularly, one might also say, compulsively, without success. But the bill he's put forth is straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, so things might go differently this time. I hope not. 

My point is that if you haven't heard much about this it's not surprising. The general public isn't at all interested in censoring sexy stuff right now, they're a LOT more concerned with not being rendered homeless or unemployed by the economic antics of the current dementia-addled semi-octogenerian in chief. As they should be. But these censorship crazies never stop, because they're compelled to attempt censorship for their own freaky reasons.

Religion rears its ugly head, along with sex. NOW we're getting kinky! Image source: kink.com video 22717, "The Sins of Sister Summers" starring Angell Summers.

3) The Religion Grift. But there's more to it than weird sexual obsession with other people's orgasms. There are also cultural forces at work for censorship in America, primarily religious in nature. Catholics in league with Protestant evangelicals were responsible for the Hayes censorship era that hamstrung movies and TV shows for decades, and they still form the bulk of the cultural pressure for censorship, now with extra added Mormons as well. (Mike Lee is a Mormon, and they are censorious bunch.)

Mormons are also avid consumers of porn, like many evangelicals and Catholics. Three different religions, but they have censoriousness in common. And they all claim that they're doing it for good of others, most especially for (let's say it all together now!) "the chilllldreeeen."

This is, of course, bullshit. Not because many religious types aren't actually concerned with preventing children from being exposed to explicit sexual images, I'm sure many are, especially among the base. It's bullshit because the censorship never stops with the children, most especially if it's unopposed. Protecting the children is a wedge issue. If censorship succeeds "for the children" the goalposts are immediately moved to protecting the adults.

Religions want to censor sexual materials because most of them, at one time or another, were in a position to control the sexuality of their followers. In the case of Catholics and Protestants, you had to go through the church to get married, and that gave the church a powerful gripping hand on the libidos of young men. Especially since the church and the families REALLY pushed chastity on girls and women.

Now there were good practical reasons for this. From the Bronze Age to medieval times, a woman who had a child without having a mate was in for a hard time, in most societies.  And safe, effective birth control did not exist. So chastity was important for young women, because men wanted to be sure that the children they were providing for were in fact their own children. At the same time, a man who could impregnate a woman without having to help care for her and her children is a reproductive winner. More offspring, no costs. Which is why the general culture tends to make chastity much less important for men.

Nuns have always been a bit problematical in the Catholic faith: shouldn't they be out there having babies to further God's glory?

Image source: "Filth and Sin" kink.com video 34016 featuring Ana Foxxx and Chanel Preston.

A religion that pushes chastity on young women is therefore a good thing from the viewpoint of the parents who want their daughtrs to succeed in Bronze Age and medieval societies. It's also a good thing for the state. The state's rulerse generally wants their population to increase so they'll have more agricultural workers and soldiers to make them more wealthy and powerful. They also want their population healthy, because you get more work ($$) out of healthy subjects. They also want their population to be kinda dumb and very prone to be submissive to authority. All things the Catholics, Protestant evangelicals and the Mormons are big on. (Mormons are a bit late to the party compared to the other two religions, but they do share those traits.)

All of the religions cited are against porn, but their opposition to porn is just an effect of their desire to control the sexuality of the men and women in their charge. They want to prevent young people from getting sexually aroused and doing sexual things that the church authorities can't control. Curtailing access to porn is just a means to that end. It made sense in a time with no safe, effective birth control and harsh Bronze Age morals about women who had sex outside of marriage (thanks in large part to the church).

 The state finds the religious focus on celibacy outside marriage very useful, since it keeps the population growing and ensures that the men who become soldiers will be healthy, ignorant and conditioned to responding unthinkingly to authority. These are grifts that have been around for so long that they are not recognized as grifts. Now THAT'S a successful grift!

 With the advent of safe, reliable birth control, however, the problem of out of wedlock childbirths is greatly reduced. Not entirely eliminated, of course, because not all young women or men have sense enough to use contraception. Plus, these religions are fighting with all their might against contraception and abortion, creating all sorts of horrifying medical stories about women who need abortion for medical reasons and can't get them in red states. The religions claim that their reason is that all life is sacred to them, even as yet unborn life.

But their real reason for fighting abortion are revealed by the fact that these religions are fighting against women's access to contraception, all forms of contraception. No pill, no IUD, no condoms, no nothing. The religious justification of this is that whether or not a woman gets pregnant as a result of having sex is, and should be, a function of God's will. But the real reason is that the religious leaders want to be the ones whose will is enforced, and their will is always that the women in their charge should be pregnant at every opportunity, which creates more followers. That's all there is to it. Every religion wants more followers because that means more money and power for the leaders. All their religious claims are simple grift. (They're against porn for the same reason: men who are masturbating to porn are not impregnating women. It is possible to do both, as I personally can attest, but that's not a major consideration for religious censors.) 

When the state gets involved, autonomy about sexual choices vanishes.

Image source: Kristy Lynn and James Deen in kink.com shoot 21250, "Bribing an Officer."

4) The State Grift -- The state generally has the same goals as the religions with regard to their population: they want more citizens for more money and more power. They also want their citizens conditioned to obey authority unthinkingly and conditioned to create lots of new citizens. Catholics, Protestant evangelicals and Mormons all deliver on these demands, so the state and religions generally are tight with one another on sexual issues.

If you don't believe that the state and the major religions are in line on sexual issues, just look at the current makeup of the Supreme Court: six out of the nine current Supreme Court justices are conservative Catholics in a nation with a population that is only 20 percent Catholic. The justices were hand-picked by conservative legislators to take down Roe v. Wade, and they did it.

I should add that conservative politicians are the ones who work most substantially for religions. The left has been much less cooperative, as many Americans are either not religious at all, or are not deeply religious. They tend to vote more liberal, though they can be censorious over some issues, rarely sexual issues however. I might add that there are many Catholics who are not deeply religious often cross Catholic teachings on sexual issues, particularly contraception.

Fortunately there are forces opposing these forces. Big, powerful forces, too. 

"Look, I'm worried about keeping my family housed and fed. I could give a rat's ass about someone watching this, OK?"

From kink.com video 36433, "Fear Play: Cherie DeVille's Roleplay Fantasy" featuring Cherie Deville and Tommy Pistol.

1) Bigger Issues To Deal With -- As mentioned before people have much bigger problems on their plates than porn. The issues that need to be dealt with are life-endangering in some cases, and life-ruining in others. It's going to be very hard to convince people who are worried about high-priced groceries and rent and mortgages to get all worked up about preventing other people from seeing images of people having sex. It's not exactly central to most people's lives right now.

 There's been no groundswell over Lee's call for censorship. It has only gotten responses from some leaders among the Usual Suspect religions and conservative pols mentioned above. The people have other fish to fry. 

2) Been There, Seen That -- Most of what I've talked about is familiar to most people who've followed these arguments. But here's something new: people are not prone to get roused over the dangers of porn any more because they KNOW porn. Practically all the adults in the US have had the opportunity to watch hardcore porn of whatever they like, for decades. It isn't the dark, hidden, secret sexy thing it once was, and it hasn't been since the 1970s when home video players made it possible to watch porn in complete privacy, huzzah! It's been normalized, as some like to say.

Well the political conservatives and the censorious religions have not been going huzzah! But there was nothing they could do, it was the 70s and only their core groups were interested in censoring adult videos. There were attempts at censorship but they got nowhere. And now that most Americans have had four decades to experience porn, most of them have come to the reasonable conclusion that it's just not a big deal. It's good for keeping the old libido at manageable levels when there's no prospect of managing it with a partner and that's about it. Some people have claimed to be addicted to porn, but it's hard to know to what extent it's a real problem because of course the censorious types are all over that shit. But overall, it seems to be a manageable problem.

My suspicion is that the public's familiarity with porn videos have removed the bogeyman factor from porn. Back before the 70s porn was this big dark hidden thing that could be everything the censorious types said it was. Now the censorious types are decrying the dangers of porn to people who are outside their core who know the "dangers" of porn for the bullshit that it is.

It makes for a very difficult time for censors, which is why I don't think there will be any popular groundswell for censoring porn. But that doesn't mean porn censorship won't happen. The political conservatives and the religious types don't understand that the sexuality control game is over as far as the majority of Americans are concerned. They've still got their core constituencies buffaloed, and they hope to get the rest of us under control, by re-instituting censorship of all pornography, making it dark and mysterious once again, and most of all getting a gripping hand on everyone's libido again.

This will not exactly be a great campaign issue for anyone except a few politicians in deeply conservative areas. That may not matter, because Trump, the Heritage Foundation and others are working very hard to end democracy in the US. If they succeed, voters won't matter. If the President can deport people, even citizens and legal residents, with an executive order, and so far he can, he can probably jail pornographers and and even porn viewers with an executive order.

The courts may have opinions on such orders, but the Trump administration has already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the decisions of the Supreme Court and all the other courts, and if they continue to get away with that courts will no longer have any power at all. If things get worse (and they're certainly headed in the general direction of Worse) there will probably be other Executive Orders that will put Executive Orders about porn in perspective.

I don't think porn is politically exciting enough to get banned for its own sake. I think the most likely avenue for a porn ban would be if the conservatives who run our government want to use it for a distraction to keep people's attention diverted while they do much more dangerous stuff, like end habeus corpus or declare martial law or end elections, much more important goals for them.

Although I don't think  most people would support an executive order banning porn, I do think about 27 percent of the electorate will, if Trump issues one and especially if he starts using his bully pulpit to encourage his people to support banning porn. The Trumpers will support anything Trump says, no matter how ridiculous or even how harmful to them personally it might be. They've proven it time and again. And you can be sure that if the Trumpers get wound up about banning all porn, they will jump on the bandwagon with everything they've got, though that's not nearly as much as it once was.

A porn ban might succeed if used as cover for more dastardly deeds, sliding through as more energy is spent battling more pressing issues. This is very much in keeping with Project 2025 strategy. It's still a very chancy thing, but it could happen.

Now as far as the porn ban and mainstream media getting porn right, obviously if a ban succeeds, that won't happen. Not even porn will get porn right if it's banned! If porn isn't banned, the Usual Suspects will work hard to "other" porn and make it socially unacceptable. This is highly unlikely to work, because the continued availability of porn and its natural attractiveness to people will continue to normalize it, making it even less likely to get banned.

I think the real problem with mainstream media getting sex scenes right will continue to be the first two reasons I listed: the censorship of mainstream media, because explicit images of naked people having sex are unlikely to be shown in media open to people of all ages. It's not a problem, just the nature of the media. And mainstream media will likely tend to continue to interject drama into sex scenes because peaceful, happy sexual relationships aren't all that dramatic.

That's a blowjob, alrighty. Chloe Sevigny in "The Brown Bunny."

Where I see long-term effects will be in movies. As porn normalizes sex scenes, movies will probably allow more and more explicit scenes. It's already happened to a certain extent: Chloe Sevigny gave an explicit blowjob with a cock seen entering her mouth in "The Brown Bunny" and Sharon Stone famously flashed her pussy in "Basic Instinct" and they both continue to get roles in movies, so not much in the way of blowback for them.

Elizabeth Berkley drop-kicks a rapist in Showgirls, with exposed pussy. Now THAT'S a drop-kick!

However, there is one obvious counterexample, and that's Elizabeth Berkley's appearance in "Showgirls." For the story of a Las Vegas nude dancer/stripper/entertainer Elizabeth went fully naked in several scenes, and the film bombed hard. Elizabeth Berkley got a share of the blame, but the director got most of the blame. (Interestingly, "Showgirls" has since developed a cult following. I've watched Showgirls, and it didn't seem teriffically awful to me. My suspicion is that Showgirls pushed the nudity and the sexuality harder than the mainstream critics were ready for, hence the strange vigor of the bad reviews.) Fortunately Berkley's career has gotten back on track since, though not as readily as Sevigny and Stone did.

Sevigny, Stone and Berkley would probably all have been blackballed in Hollywood if their scenes had occurred 40 or 50 years ago. But since the 70s, things have been different. And unless porn gets banned, things will continue to get different. The old Bronze Age grifts of religion and the state have been destroyed by modern contraception and video technology, and the sociopaths who like controlling others will have to use other grifts or lose power. In a few decades maybe we'll develop dramatic conventions that make explicit sex scenes perfectly acceptable in some movies and TV shows. We shall see.

Perhaps one day mainstream reviewers will be able to look at an image like this and see that, in addition to being kinky and sexy, it is beautiful. Look at the way Penny Pax's toes are curling. Look at Carissa Montgomery dommeing it up! The light, the color, the composition of the shot. Beauitiful!

Penny Pax (bottom) and Carissa Montgomery (top) in Kink.com shoot 42344.

The Accidental Beauty of Porn

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

PMC Glasses Have Clouded Netflix’s Vision

A "shocking" steamy sexual bondage scene from the Netflix favorite, "365 Days."

This is about as wild as it gets on Netflix.

 In which I become the 4,263,769th writer to weigh in on "What's Wrong With Netflix"

There has been a lot of theorizing about what might have gone wrong with Netflix that has caused them to have the Earth-shattering minimal dip in subscriptions that they recently reported, causing them to have a 35 percent drop in market capitalization because investors are flighty idiots. (Not that I blame them, I’d be nervous too if I had two nickels to rub together in this ghoulish Late Stage Capitalism nightmare economy.)

Anyway, I want to get in on this whole theorizing thing myself, because I think I have a theory that is more all-encompassing than most other theories, which tend to run along the lines of “Netflix is failing because it isn’t making the kind of movies/shows I like any more.” My theory is more theoretical, more all-encompassing, explaining why Netflix fails to make or buy engaging content for its subscribers most of the time.

My theory is that the Netflix execs, the producers, the showrunners, the directors, set designers and decorators, costume designers and the writers are all members of the Professional Managerial Class (or PMC) or are at least PMC wannabes.

First of all, what do I mean by PMC glasses? I mean the people who make Netflix productions see the world from the viewpoint of one of the top 10 percent of American society, or world society. They are the affluent, the comfortable, the successful. They aren’t angry about anything. They aren’t upset about anything. They may have their causes and their viewpoints, but they’re comfortable causes and comfortable viewpoints.

And I’m not claiming that all these people being members of the PMC class or PMC wannabes is the result of any conspiracy. No one deliberately gave all those jobs to people just because they were PMC class members. Instead they gave people who are successful in film and television money, plenty of it, enough to propel them into the PMC class. By the time they got to the point where they were cutting deals with Netflix, they had been successful for a while. Members in good standing of the PMC class.

That’s why Netflix comedies aren’t funny. To be really funny, humor needs an edge provided by anger, by outsider outrage, which is generally in short supply among the very comfortable PMC class.

For example, one of the most successful, if not the most successful offerings on Netflix recently was “Don’t Look Up!” in which a planet-killer asteroid approaching Earth is an obvious stand-in for the climate crisis. It is edgy it is angry it is full of the sort of stuff that PMC types might find disturbing, looking at politics, politicians, the military and the media with a very hard, cynical eye. It has a downbeat ending and it portrays the mighty on Earth as a bunch of self-obsessed, greedy idiots who are too busy money grubbing and power grabbing to save themselves.

“Don’t Look Up!” would seem prove me wrong, except it had some outsider outrage going from David Sirota who co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay. Sirota was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential campaign, and prior to “Don’t Look Up” was primarily known as a leftie commentator. He wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, but he could fairly be described as a Social Democrat like Bernie Sanders.

It was Sirota’s leftist outrage over climate change and his in-depth knowledge of the duplicity of the media and politics that made the barbs sharp and nasty. The instincts of most PMC types would be to moderate the anger and the rage, replacing it with merely clever wordplay and very broad satire, leaving “Don’t Look Up!” in the vicinity of funny. Sirota’s knowledge and anger kept it right on target.

This rarely happens on Netflix, and I think that’s what makes the service dull. Once Netflix started getting up to 100 million subscribers, its major preoccupation became finding entertainment that wouldn’t offend its enormous base, rather than entertainment that would make them glad they were subscribers.

This impulse, combined with the PMC goggles that want to make everything look comfortable and safe makes everything dull and uninteresting. The comedies aren’t funny (lookin’ at you, “Yes Day” “Bad Trip” and “Starsky and Hutch”) the romances aren’t all that romantic and definitely not sexy (lookin’ at you, all of Netflix’s recent romcoms) and the action/adventure stuff is vigorous and active but not at all compelling (lookin’ at you “Red Notice,” and “Eagle Eye”) and sometimes they’re just godawful (lookin’ at you “Spenser Confidential”).

The sexuality stuff is also indicative. They can’t even match softcore porn in their sex scenes. It’s all ladylike porn, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about movies and shows that have porny scenes and content, and I’ve watched some of them, and they’re a bunch of nothingburgers compared to actual porn. They’re not porny, they’re kinda sorta in a way pornish, at best.

Do an image search of such notably “porny” movies and shows as “365 Days,” “Bridgerton,” and “Sex Education” if you like, you’ll see what I mean if you’re familiar with actual porn. There’s not much of it, it’s underlit, and most of the good parts get blacked out. It’s PMC porn, in short, nothing to offend someone too much and yet give them the impression that they saw something sexy.

The problem is, the PMC vision doesn’t “see” the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, who are definitely not part of the PMC class. They don’t connect with their subscribers psychologically, intellectually or emotionally. Netflix’s PMC types may have some demographic data, but they have no idea who their subscribers are are or how they live, other than “not as well as me.”

So the PMC types turn out generic stuff that doesn’t really interest their subscribers. The bland, comfortable stuff that suits the PMC vision doesn’t work for the angry, increasingly impoverished bulk of Americans locked in alienating, dead-end jobs that bore them and which they hate, while also taking great pleasure in gaming and social media of various sorts that the PMC types typically do not understand well.

If Netflix and its content providers wanted to appeal to their actual audience, if they could actually SEE them, they’d have more characters who were out-of-touch seniors doing and saying stupid things. They’d have more characters who were horrible corporate bosses making their employees’ lives miserable. They’d have more characters who were lovable slackers outwitting their horrible bosses and having sex with all the pretty girls and making the lives of those around them more rewarding, though generally not in monetary ways.

Climate change would be a huge theme in a lot of stories. Housing would be a theme, mostly not being able to get it. The way the PMC and the oligarchs rip off middle class and poor people would be a steady background theme to the stories, and often the main theme.

Homeless people would be portrayed as people, not drugged-out zombies. And most people would be living in cramped apartments, often with roommates to make paying the rent possible. And the struggle to keep the rent paid would be a much bigger thing.

PMC types would say such stories are boring and distressing, not the sort of thing people want to watch to be entertained. But the real truth is that the “people” they’re describing are the PMC class, because they can’t see the rest of us, and don’t want to.

And they would really HATE stories about how they economically oppress everyone else except their oligarch masters, and which detail how horribly managers treat employees as a group, because they instinctively dislike any story that reveals just how much better off their lives are than those of the middle class and poor people they systematically oppress.

So Netflix, its management and content creators consisting only of PMC types, don’t show these things or anything like them. They have shows about wealthy people, often members of the PMC class and oligarchs who lead “interesting” lives. Even when they portray members of the poor and middle class they do so through PMC lenses. The middle class and poor people on Netflix live in housing that is much nicer than real middle class and poor people could ever afford. They generally wear clothing and have possessions that are nicer than most middle class and poor people can afford. In fact, they tend to live like upper middle class and lower upper class people do – PMC types pretending to be poor and middle class, in short.

When Netflix does attempt a realistic or gritty depiction of poor or middle class people, they tend to go way too dark. For example “Hillbilly Elegy”is a gritty depiction of how tough people in Appalachian mountain country have it. It was presented in the PMC-controlled mainstream media as a sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian mountain people. But very quickly reviews came out saying that the movie was actually poverty porn, focusing only on the miseries of the Appalachian poor, creating a misleading view of who they were as people. Even when the PMC types are looking hard at the middle class and the poor, they cannot see them as they are.

Wouldn’t pay them to, you know.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the PMC are conspiring to exclude and misrepresent the poor and the middle class. It’s just a case of shared interests leading to a shared vision, one of those unwritten cultural things that’s invisible and would be denied by most members of the PMC.

But there are some members of the PMC who do intentionally lie and mislead about the economic oppression of the poor and middle class. Academics and media people often know enough to know that the wealth of the oligarchs comes from the economic oppression of the poor and middle class, but you’ll never hear it from their commentating and the media enterprises they work for.

And if PMC commentators do somehow attempt to tell a progressive message, especially on political or economic topics, they are very rapidly fired. For example, when MSNBC hired Dylan Rattigan, Krystal Ball, Ed Schultz and Cenk Uygar to give a progressive “edge” to their coverage, then fired them all when it turned out they had spines.

How does this all relate to Netflix’s woes? Netflix, with its hundreds of millions of subscribers and its PMC staff and oligarch management can’t see its subscribers, and by “see” I mean understand. What’s more, they don’t WANT to see their subscribers. What they really want to do is feed the subscribers bland, feel-good escapism and works that support the status quo, even when they claim to be edgy, challenging work.

(That’s why Netflix, and ALL the streaming media are so ecstatically happy with comic book movies. Movies about spandex-clad idiot good guys flying around and foiling the plans of spandex-clad idiot bad guys are just the pablum they want to serve to subscribers to keep them docile and unaware.)

This is why virtually all the entertianment options on Netflix rouse only half-hearted interest among subscribers, if they rouse any interest at all. Netflix and every streaming service and cable provider would LOVE to provide entertainment that will have audiences absolutely rapt over what they’re watching and eager for more. Many may actually believe they are doing just that. Some people do love a lot of Netflix productions. And some of them are good. (“Don’t Look Up!” “The Witcher” “Stranger Things” “Travelers” and some others.) But generally they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the huge swirling mass of mediocrity that is most of Netflix’s (and most other streaming services’) productions.

There’s a reason for that. Netflix’s content isn’t made for us. It’s made by PMC people, for PMC people, though many of them think they are making shows for us. They aren’t. That’s why they aren’t any good. They’re not supposed to be good. They’re supposed to be tranquilizers. Soma. And they are. Netflix’s collection of merely tolerable films isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

See you at work tomorrow, bright and early!

Just for the record, this is actual steamy bondage sex.

Image source: Carissa Montgomery in Kink Shoot 35037, "Big Tit Milf in Extreme Bondage."

"Sex Station Slut" is hardcore sexual bondage rape socialist propaganda science fiction porn!

 

Get it here at Smashwords! (Kindle format available)

Here’s a little scene from a great sports movie, “Bull Durham,” that describes my creative process. I don’t know where the story is gonna go!

Take “Sex Station Slut” for example. Like some of my stories (OK, a lot of them) it had its beginning in a pornographic image. This image here, a hentai. It’s not the best hentai in terms of graphic quality. Particularly bad is the left leg, where the artist CLEARLY had some issues with handling foreshortening properly, so that the left leg appears to be about half the size of the right leg. 

But that’s not important. What really matters is that the image is insanely hot. The figure of the bound, naked woman is ripe and round and her breasts are large. She’s posed in what appears to be mid-writhe. Why is she writhing? Some of it might be the giant buttplug in her ass. (The butplug in her ass doesn’t bear looking at closely, or thinking about at all. It just serves to make her look sexually impaled.)

But the real clue is her pussy, which is reddened and damp. It looks like someone has been fucking it senseless, or at the very least vibrating it with a wand or finger banging it. Whatever, her pussy is the very picture of female sexual arousal.

Combined with her dynamic pose straining against the ropes that hold her, and the big gag that covers her mouth, and her wide open eyes, she’s just a vision of helpless female sexual arousal. You just want to jump on that pussy and fuck it senseless and make her scream with pleasure into her gag as she writhes helplessly beneath you while you fuck her brains out.

And that’s the feeling I wanted to capture in my story, that jump-on-it raw lust fuck it now feeling.

So I started out writing a story about a horny young dude with money in his pocket wanting to get it on on a Friday night, and wound up writing hardcore socialist bondage rape porn about the way capitalism alienates people from one another, and from their own feelings.

Really. That’s what happened. I had thought about capitalism and alienation before, but never from the perspective of bondage porn. It was always political in nature when I thought about it.

But my main character said early on “That’s capitalism for ya.” It was a throwaway comment, comparing capitalism to the weather, something huge you can’t do much about, just shrug and go on.  And the crux of the story is what sort of relationship might arise from all the intense bondage sex they have. But the male character kept having issues because of the female character’s job.

And that’s when I figured out what was going on, and I went with it, and that’s how I wound up writing socialist propaganda hardcore bondage rape porn.

Now, I tried to go easy on the socialism, and I think I did a pretty good job It was easy in a sense, because it was a relationship story and it was porn, so I kept things focused on their sexual action and their personal relationship, and tried to keep it to the natural thoughts the protagonist would have … no sudden outbursts of speculation on the nature of capitalism and its debilitating effects on human relationships. I just showed the relationship being degraded by the inbuilt assumptions of the protagonist.

I strongly suspect that no one would recognize it as socialist propaganda if I didn’t point it out as such.

The female protagonist is not the POV character, and she spends a lot of time gagged, but when she does talk she is not very forthcoming. She has the kind of clear perspective that people sometimes get when they are on the very bottom of the social totem pole. But she also knows that, being on the bottom of the social totem pole, nobody cares about her opinions. (Something being bound and gagged a lot while strangers rape her has taught her.)

I also found it easy to keep my socialist propaganda in the background because I set my story in my Basic universe, where most people are the survivors of a genocidal war between regular folks and oligarchs that damn near wiped out both sides, with the regular folks survivors, still numbering in the hundreds of millions (but no longer in billions) guaranteed a Basic Income since almost all jobs are automated and the oligarchs own all the machines.

The resulting society is kind of utopia, and kind of a dystopia, depending on your point of view and your experiences. For the oligarchs, it’s a utopia, they have wealth beyond measure and can do whatever they like, constrained only by the knowledge that there are only a few hundred of them and if they make things too tough for the regular folks they might just get wiped out if there’s another war. As they learned in the previous war, they might have all the weapons and all the tech and be able to kill regular folks en masse, but when millions of people are willing to risk death to kill you, you die, even if the chances of your dying are a million to one.

Still, if you can just resist the impulse toward genocide, life is pretty sweet for oligarchs.

Life is also very sweet for Premies, or Premium citizens, those few people whom the oligarchs need to perform important tasks for them. They live like rock stars, with beach mansions and very comfortable lifestyles in general, including the ability to obtain Basics who have misbehaved as sex slaves through the Pet Girl program (I’ve got a freebie book about a Pet Girl called Pet Shop Slave Girls #1 Katie -- feel free to check it out, better yet check out the novel I wrote about a Pet Shop slavegirl, Nataly: Virgin Auction. 

Premies live like medieval lords when they aren’t working for the oligarchs, and there is a lot of media interest in their goings and doings and parties – they are celebrities, in essence.

Life is also pretty damned good for Basics if they can stay out of trouble, which mostly consists of not committing acts of violence or stealing. They get all their Basic needs (housing, food, clothing, medical care) taken care of for free, and a lot more than that, actually. Here’s a bit from the promo for “Nataly: Virgin Auction” that shows how good Basics have it:

>Everything went to hell for Nataly when her dad lost his job as a programmer and he and the family went broke and had to fall back on Basic Income to survive. Nataly, her father and mother found themselves trapped in a nightmarish reality in which they had to eat PRINTED steak and lobster instead of the real thing, when they couldn't charter a private jet for a family vacation, but had to SHARE a jet with other Basics on vacation, and in which they couldn't buy first-run designer fashions straight from the runways of Paris, Rome and New York, but had to wait a MONTH to buy incredibly cheap knock-offs (once again, PRINTED instead of handmade), and endure other such indignities too numerous to mention. 

As you can see, Basics have it pretty good. Vacations, designer clothes, lobster and steak for dinner every day if they like. Cheap 3D printer tech has made material want a thing of the past.

And if you’re a Basic with any intellectual interests, the ollies will not only allow you to pursue them, but will actively HELP you pursue them. And if you want to be a rocknroll star and spend all your time playing music, you can do that, you can do pretty much whatever you want except hurt other people. The Ollies don’t care, and they make no pretense of having religious or moral concerns about the Basics, they just want to them to not be violent. (Though various forms of recreational violence, such as boxing, MMA fighting and football are allowed – useful for giving release to the violent impulses of hormonally swamped younger males and sometimes females.)

And even though jobs are rare, gigs are not rare, many Basics have gigs, like our protagonist, work that can disappear overnight, often very short term work, just things that need to be done and can be done by your average Jamie. And if you have a gig you may not be a rockstar, but you can easily afford to buy the use of a woman like Vanessa for an hour or two – any kind of use you like.

The only people who have it rough are the Basics who can’t live by the rules, for whatever reason. People like the Pet Shop girls Katie and Nataly, and Vanessa.

The Basic universe is hence a cross between Super Ultra Late Stage Capitalism and Super Gay Luxury Space Communism. The oligarchs own it all, but what does “ownership” mean in this case? Not a hell of a lot, to the Basics.

The point of all this is that I could embed my socialist viewpoint in simple descriptions of Basic society – it’s already there for me to use, I don’t have to do tons of exposition.

Well, now you know. Buy the story, get turned on and propagandized! You have nothing to lose but your capitalist propagandizement!

TedX Hates Porn

So, TedX hates porn. It has to be said. Do a Google search on TedX and porn and you will be inundated with videos about porn and how horrible it is, most of them with a little disclaimer that say "This video contains assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies."

That means the video is bullshit, basically. I've watched several of them, they are almost invariably bullshit. They generally use porn to excite the audience, but by coupling it with a "safe" message that porn is bad, very bad, very very bad and boy isn't there a lot of it?

There are a couple of TedX videos about porn that aren't out and out attacks on porn, but they tend to be corrective in nature, things like "It's time for porn to change."

What this tells me is that there's money in attacking porn. I'm not surprised.  Our culture is really, profoundly weird about sex. It creates porn, and antiporn, and everything in between, as well as bizarre phenomena like the Epstein case, with multi-millionaires and powerful politicos sharing out harems of underaged women like sex toys.

But really, people are paying lots of money to watch these stupid videos. As our president would say, "Sad."

Eat your fucking heart out, TedX

Image source: Kink.com shoot 22824, "Operation Americana" starring Christina Carter and Riley Rey. Riley Rey is seen here giving blowjob.

Getting Inspired, The Fun Way

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Office Slave: In the Future, Work Will Be Kinky, Sexy and Fun! Now on Amazon

Click here to get this book on Amazon via my Inernational Bookstore site.

Da Blurb!

It's the future. Robots have taken all the jobs. Everyone still alive after the civil wars that happened as a result of that lives on Basic Income. They do not work, and their lives are an endless party, or an endless pursuit of their dreams, hobbies and ambitions. Nobody has to do anything just to survive.

Still, some corporations do need human beings to work for them, if only to provide human input on their products and services. Thunder Muffin Corporation is one such corporation. So how does a corporation attract human beings away from their endless parties and make them care about the WEINUS? Or the VEINUS? Or the heinous ANNUS?

By making work MORE FUN than FUN, that's how. And that's why Jenny became a corporate slave girl for Thunder Muffin Corporation, the lowest, humblest job the corporation had to offer, even lower than being an intern, and just as unpaid!

But if you think being a corporate slave girl is endless drudgery, that's where you're wrong. Drudgery is for robots! Slave girls are for sexy, kinky sex games, an important part of keeping any corporation humming along smoothly. There will be much fun had in break rooms, in hallways, in deserted meeting rooms, and in crowded workrooms, including but not limited to the slave girl bouncy ball bondage race! Plus a mysterious message, corporate insider info and skullduggery, and a heaping helping of BDSM whatnot!

If you're up for some upbeat, kinky fun, set your brain on robot cruise control and enjoy this ride.

This story is just over 15,500 words long and is part of the Basic Income universe.

The Art of Porn: Getting the Big Picture

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.