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:
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.
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.
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.
