Strub, Whitney. 2011. Perversion for Profit : The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Amazon
I’ve been reading Whitney Strub’s book, and despite its age, it is still very relevant in explaining the culture war over pornography in American politics. One of the things he details is though American history is littered with censorious firebrands like Anthony Comstock, those moral crusaders frequently stumbled over the problem that the majority of Americans don’t care very much about pornography as an issue. Men like Comstock and Charles Keating of Citizens for Decent Literature could mobilize a small, but vocal minority.
As Strub tells it, when the neoconservatives and the New Right rose to cultural power in the 1970s, they had to reconcile their belief in small government, free markets, and libertarianism with more culturally conservative allies, particularly evangelical Christians.
Thought it sought a socially conservative, generally religious voting base, the New Right was heavily corporate-sponsored, and such groups as the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress recognized the value of neocon thought in legitimizing their project of deregulating American markets even as they reregulated American morality.[Pg.190]
We’ve seen this strange-bedfellows alliance ever since, creating people who believe the Invisible Hand should rule everywhere except areas like pornography, abortion, and queer issues.
In 1979 the New Right organizer Paul Weyrich had come dangerously close to admitting the movement’s emphasis on social issues was a shallow commitment designed to garner evangelical votes while obscuring the substantive procorporate agenda of New Right politicians: “Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation,” he said. Certainly the corporate benefactors of the New Right’s organizational superstructure valued profits over ideology; Coors, for instance, was headed by a reactionary zealot whose donations largely funded the important Heritage Foundation. But when the company recognized the consumer power of the gay market in 1979, it unhesitatingly ran ads in the gay paper the Advocate. [Pg.191-192]
More than 40 years later, we still see the same dynamic, even if the names have changed: trans people instead of gay people, puberty blockers instead of abortion, “cultural Marxism” instead of “the permissive society”. The 2023 brouhaha over trans streamer Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light suggests that the free-marketers sometimes back down when challenged by the cultural conservatives. Donald Trump himself embodies this contradictory political alliance: a man with multiple wives and a history of sexual indiscretions, who has been on the cover of Playboy magazine, can somehow be favored by the Christian right and even more reactionary forces. Grifters and quacks like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson constantly stoke culture wars over issues of sexuality and gender, anything to drown out considerations of economic policy from the discourse.
I’ve said it before, and I hope I’m wrong, but I still think it’s only a matter of time before BDSM takes the place of trans in this particular social-political complex.
I’m old enough to remember how different and exciting the Internet was in the 1990s. So does Violet Blue, who lays out just much has changed for the worse since then, especially with the censoring of Tumblr last year. “I can tell you for a fact that Tumblr helped a generation of frightened, isolated kids trying to figure out their sexual identity.” Her essay on Engadget.
David Wraith has an overview of how terrible the SESTA/FOSTA laws are, stifling freedom of expression on sexual matters while subjecting sex workers to greater danger.
On the brighter side, England has reviewed its obscenity laws and a number of kinks, including spanking, BDSM, and female ejaculation, are now okay in porn, as long as they are shown as consensual.
Kink Guidelines is a project “to explore what constitutes clinical best practices in working with those who are interested and/or involved in kink, BDSM, and/or fetish eroticism.
The city leaders of San Francisco have approved the construction of Eagle Plaza, a small park commemorating the Eagle bar’s contribution to the LGBTQ and leather/kink cultures.
Lupercalia, the ancient Roman festival that loosely corresponds to Valentine’s Day, was known for men playfully whipping women “believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy”, according to Plutarch. Today, whipping rituals are a part of fertility festivals in parts of Europe, Mexico and Asia. From Vice.
Even though Walmart, regular drugstores and other mainstream retailers now stock vibrators and other sex toys, sex products are still caught up in controversy. Producers risk rejection from retailers, payment processors, crowdsourcing platforms, and advertising venues. Sex toys have to toe the line of being for “health and wellness”, not for pleasure, which would be prurient. The Verge has more.
I got started on the Internet in the early 1990s, when every session was preceded by the squeal of an acoustic modem over a phone line, and USENET was the cutting edge of interaction. I loved it. USENET was a decentralized, public system that didn’t really have an owner or a central control. The USENET group alt.sex.bondage was a major influence on my budding interest in BDSM. The Internet seemed like a wide-open utopia/frontier of freedom and choice, where I could find like-minded people.
I knew that there were racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-Semites, etc out there, spewing out their hatred, but also assumed these were sad little men in small dark rooms who didn’t pose a serious threat to anybody. (Being a white, cis, hetero male was definitely part of this assumption.) Child pornography was, I read, a bogeyman for people who wanted to censor for the sake of censoring. Free speech was an almost unequivocal good.
Fast forward more than twenty years, past high-speed internet, Youtube, Facebook, Google, Gamergate, Sad/Rabid Puppies, 4chan, ironic racism, pick up artists, MGTOWs, incels, revenge porn, etc. Those sad little men networked and became a force that has dragged North American society hard to the right. This also coincided with a terrifying rise in right wing demonstrations and violence.
As of the end of 2018, there has been at least some pushback against the alt-right. People who have committed hate crimes have been prosecuted under the law. Media figures like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopolis and Gavin McInnes have been kicked off major platforms like Youtube and Twitter and barred from venues, a tactic known as “de-platforming”.
I was never 100% comfortable with the concept of de-platforming, which to me had an unpleasantly Newspeak overtone. “It’s not censorship, it’s de-platforming.” But I’ll be honest and say that, despite my commitment to free speech, I wasn’t going to go to the barricades for the likes of McInnes, Jones and Yiannopolis.
One of the big takeaways from Slavoj Zizek’s two films explaining his theory of ideology (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology) is that ideologies don’t require all of their followers to have sincere belief. A successful ideology can accommodate people who know how to toe the party line, say the phrases, wear the uniform, and smugly congratulate themselves on being ahead of the game, all the while contributing to the machine. Whether they were true believers or hucksters/trolls, the end result was the same: an endless flood of hatred, paranoia and self-righteousness, into the eyes and ears of people who had a limitless appetite for it. Likewise, it doesn’t matter if the recipients are hardcore white supremacists or misogynists or anti-Semites, or they just get off on the transgression, they’re still propagating it. The best way to curtail such people is to attack them where it hurts: their bottom lines.
That’s why I didn’t object to the de-platforming very much: because North America and Europe are seething with racial, gendered and religious violence, and I didn’t know what else to do about it. Something had to be done to reign it in. Even if you don’t believe in the “monkey-see-monkey-do” model of the media’s influence on the individual’s actions, such tactics at least sent a message regarding what was acceptable discourse. If that had even a slight chance of preventing another Pulse nightclub shooting or Toronto van attack, go for it.
The idea that media creates and propagates a culture, and certain percentage of recipients of that media will do physical violence, is straight out of the second-wave radical feminist arguments against pornography and sadomasochism. Which puts me in a bit of a bind.
The changes in content rules on Tumblr (coming into effect December 17, 2018) and Facebook (soon) are driven by the “anti-trafficking” ideology that gave use SESTA/FOSTA. Going into the history and flaws of that legislation would require an in-depth article itself, but they’ve already caused problems for sex workers, and people who discuss sexual issues.
Personally, these changes will cause problems for me. As of December 15th, 2018, I have 2,790 followers on Tumblr, 223 followers on the Facebook group and 233 followers on Pinterest, and no way to transfer them to other platforms. They are major assets for promoting A Lover’s Pinch and other future projects. I especially liked how I could set up automatic daily updates on Tumblr and then have them repeated on Twitter via IFTT. While I was never a huge user of Tumblr, especially not for personal material, I liked scrolling through feeds and reading the freewheeling, queer and quirky stuff. I know it had its own problems with hateful content. I read the “raceplay” tag a few times and, as I read, I kept thinking, “You’re just kidding, right? This is all just rhetorical?”
It’s not a good look to shrug when other people are de-platformed with “Well, they had it coming,” and then cry when it happens to me.
The philosopher Karl Popper wrote about the “paradox of tolerance” in 1945, right after seeing the global violence of fascism.
In other words, we have to draw the line somewhere. But where? I know where I would draw it, but that’s a solution only for me.
I could pile up the word count hashing out this debate, but the real problem is that this is an issue outside of politics. Tumblr, Facebook, etc, are private corporations. They exist to benefit their shareholders, and any other benefits are only incidental. Thus, they can impose whatever content regulations they like. Whatever communities users may have built on those platforms, they never belonged to their users. The real problem is the influence of capital on our discourse, at multiple levels.
One of the things that suck about getting older is that you have to see the revolution you believed in falter and be assimilated or even corrupted. The online communities of hatred (of women, non-whites, queer people, trans people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and so on) (and their parasitic profiteers) festering on the Internet in 2018 are a twisted, degraded reflection of the communities of acceptance and diversity that flourished on the Internet of 1998. (Please make allowances for rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia.) The Internet was supposed to be a path to utopia.
I don’t know what will happen to my blog on Tumblr Monday, or what will happen on other platforms in the years to come. Will there be some kind of cultural conservative backlash, a return to the middle after the excesses of the extremes? That bodes ill, not just for online communites, but for society in general.
As I’ve dug deeper into the silent film era in search of the proto-dominatrix and the roots of fetish fashion, I found that a certain image I and many other people thought was of Musidora in her famous Irma Vep black catsuit was actually someone else entirely, from a Musidora-inspired photo shoot. The perils of uncredited images.
The following is a copy of an email I sent to Pinterest after they removed one of the images (replicated above) from my BDSM History board.
To whom it may concern:
On April 25, 2013, I received an email informing me that one of the images in my Pinterest account had been removed. The explanation was, “The reason is, it looks like the pin may have had nudity on it.”
The image in question was created and distributed by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and features actor Jensen Ackles nude and kneeling in such a way that his arms and hands obscure his genitals, wearing chains and with a whip on the floor. The copy reads, “Whips and chains belong in the bedroom, not in the circus.”
PETA has a long history of using sexually suggestive or explicit imagery in ads and publicity stunts to advance its animal rights cause, though many have questioned the efficacy of this tactic. I chose this image to illustrate PETA’s use of sadomasochistic imagery, part of a recurring trend of sadomasochistic imagery being used in persuasive media such as advertising and propaganda. This is part of my historical research.
A cursory search of “peta” on Pinterest will display numerous other examples of PETA’s advertising, featuring nude or nearly nude men and women (mostly the latter) in sexually suggestive images. This is in addition to countless other pins featuring nude or nearly nude adults in sexually suggestive or explicit settings.
I am at a loss as to why this particular image in question was removed. The only way it differs in degree or kind from many other images on Pinterest is that it features a nude male in a vulnerable position. Am I to understand that an unclothed man is somehow more nude, or the wrong kind of nude, compared to an unclothed woman? Even if the people are posed in such a way that their genitals are not visible?
I understand the necessity of enforcing rules regarding sexually explicit imagery on a service such as Pinterest. However, I do not understand the logic of this particular instance of enforcement, and I do not consider this removal to be just or fair or consistent with the content of Pinterest.
Please explain to me why this particular image is not permitted. I have attached a copy.
I found another page on the Stalag novels, a sub-genre of porn/pulp novels published in Israel in the 1960s, and featuring sex-and-violence adventure tales set in concentration camps.
UncategorizedComments Off on Don’t confuse your Sams or your Gargoyles
Mar022012
Vintage Sleaze has a fun tidbit of kink history. Sam Menning, an actor who also worked as a photographer, took fetish pics, including the great Betty Page.
Menning eventually became the “house” photographer of sorts for Gargoyle, a distributor of 4 x 5 nude photos with a fetish bent. Mind you, they were 1950’s photos of a fetish bent…which meant play-acting with rather dim and confused models being asked to look tough…dramatic to this day, but little more than lingerie ads with the models in black. Not MY cup of tea, but someone’s.
Meanwhile, Senator Estes Kefauver was gunning for porn publisher Samuel Roth, particularly for the fetish/kink pictures Kefauver thought were published by Roth.
It turns out that Kefauver and his puritan goons had confused Sam Menning, photographer for Gargoyle Sales Corp, with Samuel Roth, publisher of Gargoyle Books. This mistake wasn’t revealed until Kefauver had Roth on the stand testifying.
The history of obscenity and censorship is the history of drawing and redrawing very fine lines in the ever-shifting sand, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors.
Consider the recent case of Michael Peacock in the UK, charged under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 for distributing allegedly obscene DVDs. (Peacock sold DVDS via Craig’s List and his own website and magazine ads, which seems like an oddly old-school way to do a porn business these days.) The Crown Prosecutor presented two lists, one of things that would probably be prosecuted (“sadomasochistic material which goes beyond trifling and transient infliction of injury”, “fisting”, “torture with instruments”) and those that usually would not (“mild bondage”, “fetishes which do not encourage physical abuse”)
Samuel Pepys, who was always pretty frank about his moral lapses and erotic urges, recounts buying the French classic “whore dialogue” L’Ecole des Filles, reading it and burning it. You can detect a binge-purge cycle at work.
