What price virginity in 2011?

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Jan 112011
 

From Xbiz, via Warren Ellis’ Twitter feed:

Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.

The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.

“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”

Whats surprises me about this is just how retrograde this seems. Virginity in 2011 just isn’t what it used to be. After the invention of condoms and antibiotics, it isn’t a magic talisman against sexually transmitted diseases. Virginity doesn’t have the social weight it used to either. Few people in North America expect a woman to be “virgo intacta” at the altar anymore, or to display a blood-stained bedsheet the morning after her wedding night. 18th century libertines fetishized virginity because its removal in a socially unapproved manner (e.g. rape or “seduction”) had such huge social ramifications for the woman. Apart from the direct violation of a person’s integrity, it would also result in social ostracism. (Assuming she wasn’t of low social standing, in which case society didn’t give a crap.)

In Clarissa, Lovelace spends most of the book trying by seduction and deception to get Clarissa to give up her virginity willingly, suggesting that he still puts a social value on it, despite his libertine views. Eventually, he just gives up, drugs her unconscious and rapes her, marking him as both a failed seducer and a coward. When she comes to, finally disillusioned about him, he offers to marry her to wipe away his crime and save her from social death, but she refuses.

Fast forward about 250 years, and watch the “Like a Virgin” number on the TV show Glee, in which three different people are moving towards their first full-on sexual encounter. They are not motivated by internal lust or passion for another so much as a desire to change their social status by removing the status of virgin, which they view as a stigma. In this case, they want and need others in their community to know that they have completed sex and are no longer virgins, completing their initiations into normative adulthood. Again, the social implications of virginity and non-virginity outweigh the physiological implications.

The existence of Girls Gone Wild and Barely Legal-type porn suggests there is still a fetishization of virginity, but I think this is more of a fascination with youth and freshness. It isn’t fascinated with the almost-magical instant of transition between two binary states, virgin and non-virgin, which seems to be driving this particular scenario.

The second thing that seems just odd is the definition of virginity implied in the press release. Kink.com seems to assume that virginity is not a social or psychological phenomenon, but an empirically verifiable physiological state. In other words, what they are really showing is the presence and then absence of a small scrap of human flesh, via heterosexual coitus. Big whoop. By that definition, a lesbian woman who has never had heterosexual intercourse would be a virgin her entire life, even if her first girlfriend got rid of that pesky hymen ages ago. In fact, a woman can have a non-intact hymen for any number of reasons, sexual or not. If we sign up for the pay per view, do we get a notarized affidavit of virginity after confirmation by the “trained expert”? (And who is this expert anyway? A gynecologist? Annie Sprinkle?)

I have no idea what Miss Blue’s sexual history is. It quite likely that she is hardly sexually inexperienced, and thus is a “technical virgin” only. This particular scenario may earn her a sentence or two in the history of porn, but it won’t significantly change her social status. The sign (the intact hymen) is de-coupled than the signifier (the woman’s sexual status). When the press release uses language like “sacrificing Nikki’s innocence”, it’s speaking in an obsolete language. We don’t believe in it anymore, in the same way we’re not impressed by a white woman with an Afro representing a lost tribe of beauties.

If I’m coming across as callous to Miss Blue, it isn’t intentional. I’m much less concerned about the state of her hymen, and whether it is breached in the right or wrong way, than whether it will be good for a rookie adult film performer to be dropped into the deep end. That this will be a live show, where they are discouraged from stopping and renegotiating if something goes wrong, is even more of a concern. As we saw in that excruciating scene in Graphic Sexual Horror, live shoots can create a situation in which everybody, including the models, wants to press on instead of stopping and making sure everybody’s okay with what’s happening. Nikki Blue’s first time (however you define that) doesn’t have to be hearts and flowers and soft music, but I would rather it didn’t go haywire for her.

That said, I don’t know how this can be anything beyond an ordinary video shoot. Linda Williams in her book Hard Core says that pornography evolved a complex visual language to represent what could not be represented: women’s subjective experience of sexual arousal and orgasm. What Kink.com is doing is attempting to visually represent what exists only as physiology, and has nothing to do with the social status or subjective experience of anyone involved. There’s nothing to see.

Addendum: Clarisse Thorn has a couple of good posts (1,2) on this.

Miss Maggie Mayhem has a good discussion of what “virginity” actually means.

Also, there are rumours going around that Nikki Blue is not actually a virgin. The deception!

Pornosec and the Ministry of Love

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Nov 192010
 

Julia… worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department [of the Ministry of Truth]. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading’, she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

[…]

She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

‘What are these books like?’ said Winston curiously.

‘Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes [that composed the text]. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I’m not literary, dear — not even enough for that.’

He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the head of the department, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

‘They don’t even like having married women there,’ she added. ‘Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here’s one who isn’t, anyway.’

[George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Everyman’s Library edition, Page 136-137]

In Orwell’s dystopia, sex is strongly regulated.

For the Proles, the working class, sex seems to be completely uninhibited, or at least it is from Winston’s perspective. Likewise, Proles are given free reign to indulge in liquor and gambling, and pornography.

For the Outer Party, roughly the middle class, sex is extremely regulated and disregarded. The Party attempts to channel the libido into endless activity, hard work followed by play that is as organized, compulsory and endless as work. No individual attachments or contemplation. Sex itself is reduced to something akin to an unpleasant medical procedure, a “duty to the party,” as Winston’s sexually dysfunctional wife called it.

Whereas Julia is an apolitical hedonist, Winston rhapsodizes about the liberatory potential of his affair with her, describing the way she takes off her dress as “a single, splendid movement” that could bring down the corrupt society.

I saw a book on sexual history in Germany that showed an interesting poster from the early Nazi regime. One half of the poster showed a number of fair-haired nudes in natural settings (walking in meadows or wading in streams), while the other showed dark-haired (Jewish?) women, dressed like showgirls, in indoor, urban settings. The captions read something like, “Bad beauty vs. good beauty.” The problem wasn’t with porn, just right and wrong kinds of porn.

It seems axiomatic that repressive politics leads to repressive sexuality. After all, the Nazis burned the Magnus Hirschfeld archives and gassed homosexuals alongside Jews. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Orwell’s Oceania is not universally sexually repressive, but it appears that sexuality of the Outer Party (i.e. the middle class) is tightly repressed, so as not to interfere with work or encourage dissent, but encouraged the opposite way for the largely expendable Proles, as an opiate of the mostly non-productive masses.

The other side of this issue is violence in Oceania. There a lot of public violence, both the mass execution of internal and external enemies, and the display of propaganda films with graphic violence. There’s also a lot of “private violence,” in the Ministry of Love, with torture and executions. Note that there is a significant disconnect between the two realms of violence, that the public executions are purely for show while the real work of suppressing resistance is done in secret, its victims completely disappeared.

Foucault talked about how, over the past few centuries in the West, the process of correcting social deviance has been hidden away from public view in institutions like prisons, hospitals, asylums, etc. In Orwell’s book, the state’s real work of violence is done in private, while the public work of executions, confessions and so on are just for show. Yet, Winston seems to have an instinctive knowledge of the “technology” of the Thought Police and the Ministry of Love, their instruments and techniques. Presumably there are rumors floating around. The separation can’t be perfect.

So, is Julia busy turning out porn that draws on the imagery of eroticized power from their own society?

“Graphic Sexual Horror”: The challenge and the money

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Sep 222010
 

Graphic Sexual Horror (2009), dir. Barbara Bell, Anna Lorentzon IMDB

“I’m looking for something that’ll… break through, you know?” Videodrome, 1982, dir. David Cronenberg

In the mid-90s, bondage photography was still stuck in the glamor-based, damsel-in-distress style mode that Harmony Concepts had been putting out since the 1970s.

Then came the notorious website Insex.com, hardcore bondage shoots that owed more to crime scene photos than Helmut Newton. Insex was also new in that it was designed for the web: downloadable clips instead of mail-order DVDs, and live chats. It was created, almost on a whim, by PD, also known as Brent, who cited his experiences during a tour in Vietnam, when he saw a bondage show in a Japanese nightclub. He also cited his bondage-influenced performance pieces.

Continue reading »

My posts on the Circlet Press author chat

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Sep 162010
 

Here are the post I’ve made on the Circlet Press Livejournal group to promote Innocent’s Progress.

“The Innocent’s Progress and other stories” now live

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Sep 142010
 

innocents-progress-cover-RE

The Innocent’s Progress and other stories is now available for download at the Circlet press site.

From the publisher:

In a steampunk society where sex is ritualized and marriage is sacred, the slightest misstep can bring your world tumbling down. In this collection, Peter Tupper explores the many facets of a time that never was, and a society that is all too familiar. Rich in eroticism, and immersive in its detail, The Innocent’s Progress and Other Stories is a sterling example of what steampunk can be.

In an unnamed place, in a time that never was, sex is elevated as high as ritual, and can be had for the price of a theater ticket. In The Innocent’s Progress and Other Stories, Peter Tupper explores the many facets of a complicated, sensual, and, in many ways, rigidly conservative society. Here, we are given passes to a theater of fantasies; we are allowed into the labyrinthine world of steam-powered workhouses; and we are given glimpses into the minds and mettle of the kind of people who survive in such a world.

I’m also hosting an author chat on the Circlet Press Livejournal group for the next few days.

Alan Moore’s 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom

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Jul 092010
 

Alan Moore’s 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom is a long essay that lays out Moore’s theory that pornography should be integrated into society. It’s only relatively recently that any shame attached to erotic depiction. Before then, there was a beautiful tradition of erotic high art, which Moore says goes back to the Venus of Willendorf.

The problem started with Christianity, or rather the ascetic Christianity of the late Roman empire. It wasn’t decadence that did in the Romans, but becoming a Christian, and therefore an-erotic and xenophobic, society. There were brief flowerings in the Rennaissance and the Englightenment, but thing really went wrong with the Victorians. (This is a pre-Foucault view of the repressive hypothesis.)

Implicitly, it was acceptable to enjoy sexual imagery as long as you accepted also that such acts were sinful and felt suitably ashamed and guilty if you were in any way aroused by their depiction. This established the immediate link between the perusal of pornography and intense self-loathing or embarrassment, which still exists today throughout most of the Western world.

Pg 16

For the purposes of this discussion, there’s the problem of where does BDSM porn, and BDSM in general, fall into Moore’s schema? Is it an expression of the humanizing erotic impulse, or of the corrupting influence of violence and shame?

Even in the golden age of written and graphic pornography, with works like Fanny Hill or Gerda Wegener’s illustrations or Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings or the like, BDSM acts are frequently in there somewhere, especially flagellation, but also a well-turned high-heeled boot or shoe or the like.

In those [Victorian] times, long before the advent of the adult video outlet, city businessmen returning homeward for a wekened with their spouse or partner would call in at some backstreet establishment and pick up a gaslight equivalent: just as theater predates cinema, so too did fully scored dramatic home pornography precede the skin-flick. Pornographic playlets could be purchased, ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble pieces if the neighbors were agreeable. These publications came with sheet music, so that if one of the participants were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity was taking place upon the hearth rug or the horsehair sofa. (Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but was told that by Malcolm McLaren, and if you can’t rust Malcolm McLaren then whom can you trust?)

Pg. 18

This isn’t really a historical book or even an essay. It’s more like have a pub conversation with Moore where he’s spinning out some off-the-cuff theories. You don’t bring a bibliography to a pub conversation.

Just to recap, then: Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization, and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.

Pg. 39

As a general rule, I think this holds up: the better the status of women in a society, the less restriction there is on sexual expression. But I wouldn’t stake my reputation on that. I’d like to see some kind of study comparing the two factors: an index of pay equity, reproductive rights, etc, versus restrictions on depictions of sexuality, sex work laws, etc. But it would involve so many subjective issues that I don’t think it would be a solid piece of research.

So, what is the relationship between a society’s sexual expressiveness and its progressiveness on a social scale?

I think that this is a much thornier and complex issue than some people would like to make it. Anti-porn feminism wanted to create the equation of “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” Sex-positive types say there’s no connection at all, that pornography actually functions as a release valve for desires that would otherwise fester into violence.

It’s said that liberal democracies are good for market economies, but market economies aren’t necessarily good for liberal democracies. I see this as analogy to the relationship between sexual expression and progressiveness.

I tend to agree with Moore’s hypothesis, and there’s a bit of a manifesto that I can get behind: that there should be ambition on the part of porn’s creators, and porn should not be consumed in shameful secrecy. These are the ideas that informed Moore’s Lost Girls trilogy, which aimed to be part of an art-porn historical tradition, to be a coffee-table-book display artifact, to invest literary and artistic skill into porn and stimulate discussion.

Still, as I historian I want a more rigorous study of the history of porn, and one that’s more nuanced too.

Reading by Jacqueline Carey, author of Kushiel series

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Jun 162010
 

Jacqueline Carey, author of the Kushiel and Naamah series of erotica/historical fantasy novels, did a reading at the local library Monday night. Though I’m not that familiar with Carey’s works, I decided to attend.

The audience was mostly young women. I have a strong impression that the up-and-coming generation of kinky women will have their “aha!” moments from reading Carey’s books. (Certainly better than from reading Gor.)

Carey did a good reading, featuring a scene of a forthcoming novel in which an alternate Renaissance-era courtesan meets with the emperor of an Aztec empire-analog. She talked a lot about her love of historical research.

Curiously, she said she didn’t consider herself an erotica writer. Her main consideration was how much of the total length of the work was given over to sex, which is a fair criteria. She also said she got in on the ground floor of the historical/fantasy erotica boom (which includes its conjoined twin genre, the paranormal romance/urban fantasy). I had hoped for more discussion on the history of erotica and where Carey’s work fits into that, but she said she didn’t know about that topic.

The deeper meaning of nunsploitation

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Jun 132010
 

Inspired by Lady Gaga’s video for “Alejandro” (more on that later), Slate provides a run-down of nunsploitation books and films.

It includes a link to a Hermenaut article, “Convent Erotica“, that goes deeper into the nunsploitation genre, including its similarities to the “women in prison” genre.

The nun movie is the mirror of another disreputable genre, the women-in-prison movie. Both deal with women’s bodies in confined spaces, with innocence abused, with microsocieties, with the forms and channels of power. The women’s prison and the convent are sexual laboratories, the prisoners/nuns experimental subjects. Thus the emphasis on surveillance. If two people are having sex in one of these movies, chances are a third character is there to watch. Concealment and revelation, crucial issues in all pornography, take on special importance in nun movies because the convent, or more precisely the cloister, is designated as a space of invisibility. But it’s really the other way around: It’s this designation that makes the cloister so apt a set for eroticism. Just as it’s because the nun is supposed to deny her body and become invisible that she compels attention on the screen.

I wonder if nuns have fallen out of favor as fetish objects in the past few decades, as society becomes increasingly secular, and few women choose to renounce the world or are forced into convents.

I think the “torture porn” genre has stepped in to fill the gap of nunsploitation and women-in-prison films. This genre has a similarly ambivalent attitude towards women, unsteadily moving back and forth between victim, heroine and villain. There are similar elements of confinement, voyeurism, exploitation and the sense that this nastiness is happening in a hidden part of our own society.

From an interview with Thomas Fahy, editor of the essay collection The Philosophy of Horror:

I think we’ve been talking about torture in this culture a great deal recently and these films raise a very clear question: Is it ever permissible to torture someone? It’s a hell of a lot different thinking about that when you’re watching somebody torture somebody, in all of its ugliness, on-screen than when you’re watching the nightly news.

What I find interesting about them is that they’re not films about mutilating and torturing women — in the “Last House on the Left” remake, one of the torturers actually is a woman. And “Hostel” was raising a lot of really provocative questions. The protagonist who is able to escape the torture facility — in which rich people pay to torture European backpackers — had a different price charged for people from different countries and the most expensive people to torture are Americans. That speaks to anxieties that we have as a country.

However, with only a slight “shift in optic”, these stories are the basis for BDSM fantasies.

No yaoi porn on your iPad, says Apple

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May 282010
 

Prism Comics, about LBGT issues in comics, has a great post on the impact of Apple’s content policies on comics in general and specifically LBGT themed comics. Even fairly mild stuff

“My problem with Apple banning [Jesus Hates Zombies] is simply this,” says Lindsay. “They allow the Marvel book Kick-Ass. How in God’s name is my book worse than Kick-Ass when it comes to content? The simple answer, it’s not. But because Kick-Ass is a Marvel book, it gets a pass.”

The experience of smaller publishers producing books with LGBT characters and situations also seems hard to reconcile with Murphey’s assessment of Apple’s guidelines.

Tom Bouden’s adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest was rejected as an iPad app for the App Store, again due to “materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.” A handful of sexually suggestive images depicting men, some extremely mild, were specifically flagged as problematic in the 80-page graphic novel.

A few lessons from this situation:

1. Media and standards and platform, and especially who controls them, matter to content. Censorship (public- or private-sector) is often not so much about controlling content but about controlling the medium itself. When new forms of media appear, which put words and images in new places, censorship kicks into high gear. Walled-garden content systems like the iPhone/iPod/iPad or the Amazon Kindle are a reaction to the wide-open Internet, reassuring big media companies that they will retain control.

2. If you’re a big, established company, like Playboy or Sports Illustrated or Mavel comics, the standards for judging your content is different if you’re somebody publishing an indie comic off your laptop. Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition will net more revenue to Apple than some little swimsuit company’s illustrated catalog app. Money talks, “community standards” walks.

3. People will find a way. Even if your LBGT indie comic doesn’t get into the iVerse, it can still get into the iPhone via the Amazon Kindle app. The question, however, is how level will the playing field be. Amazon takes a 70% cut, while Apple takes a comparatively mild 30%.

4. It’s still censorship when non-government parties do it, and even worse in a way because there is no system of appeal or open standards. Apple and Amazon, being corporate entities, can do it purely by fiat.

5. That the violence of eroticized-yet-plausibly-deniable violence of Kick-Ass gets a pass and two men making out doesn’t speaks volumes about our culture’s twisted view of sex and violence.

6. Watch out for chilling effects and pre-emptive self-censorship.

I’ve often imagined an alternate history of American comics in which the Comics Code Authority of 1954 never happened, and the medium matured, gaining respect and credibility until it equaled film or television. It surely isn’t coincidence that the most heavily censored medium is also the one that struggled longest for critical respect.

Kenneth Anger’s unmade “The Story of O”

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May 272010
 

Commenter Citizen Kinkster tipped me off about avant garde film director Kenneth Anger and his abortive attempt at making a film of The Story of O. From an interview in the Quietus:

I got permission from the publisher of an erotic book called Histoire d’O [The Story of O], which was later made into a rotten commercial film, which I never saw because it would spoil my vision. But even with the help of some literary people I couldn’t find the money to do it so I just move on and make another short film if the longer ones don’t work out.

Of the many longer projects you have conceived of that haven’t been realised, which of them do you most regret not happening?

Well, The Story of O, would have been beautiful because I was doing it in the style of Robert Bresson, like Les dames du Bois de Boulogne which is very understated. The subject is kinky eroticism but in my concept, I never showed anything. There are things implied but it’s a bit of a tease.

Which you have said is more powerful.

Yes, suggestion. Which is why I’m quite opposed to . . . I’m not advocating censorship, but to me, porno is a very problematic area because they defeat what they’re doing by having too much and too long and you get very bored with it, it’s like watching a sewing machine or something.

From what I’ve found so far, it’s unclear how much, if any, of this film was actually shot, or whether it was one of those things that never got out of development hell.

Another article on Anger says footage was shot, and then the story got even weirder:

He recounted his failed attempt to direct a feature-length film version of Pauline Reage’s mythic S&M novel The Story of O in Paris (“Don’t try it at home”). Describing the story as “a wanking fantasy, if you know what that means” he claimed that the production was bankrolled by money acquired by the young star’s boyfriend–ransom money from the kidnapping of the nephew of the Citroen car company’s owner. That this starlet was the daughter of the French minister of finance–and required to wear a chain attached “inside her little down there” for the shoot–ignited such a scandal that “M. Ange” was threatened with expulsion by some “magnificently cool guys” from the French government. Apparently the twenty minutes of footage that was successfully shot is lying somewhere in the archives of the Cinematheque Francaise…

Yet another interview:

When I was living in France,my publisher was Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
He brought out the original edition of Hollywood Babylon, which I
wrote in French, before it came out in English. At that time Jean-Jacques
was the publisher of a rather notorious novel, Histoire d’O, by Pauline Reage.
It was an erotic novel; I guess you could call it a sadomasochistic fairytale
because it’s absolutely a fantasy, nothing that could actually happen in real
life. I met the author, whose real name is Dominique Aury, and she gave me
permission to film the book, and I began work on a black-and-white, silent
film. My model for the project was Bresson. I shot about twenty minutes,
and then the production came to a halt: it turned out that the father of the
young lady who was playing the lead was the French minister of finance.
The girl was in her late teens, old enough to make up her own mind about what she wanted to do, but at any rate, the filming had to stop when it became
known that she was playing a part in an erotic film. It wasn’t pornographic,
but did involve some nudity and some simulated S&M; most everything
takes place of camera. The film was basically an exercise in style. I
had a work print of what I had shot, which I left at the Cinémathèque
Française. Another unfinished project.

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne is a 1945 film by Robert Bresson that was itself an adaptation of an anecdote in our old friend Diderot’s novel Jacques the Fataliste.

The story concerns a woman, Helene, who is spurned by her lover Jean. To get revenge, Helene hires a dancer and prostitute, Agnes, and passes her off as a bourgeois woman to trick Jean into marrying her.

The lesbian subtext of this scene could give a hint of what Anger’s low-key version of The Story of O would have been like.

Anger’s Scorpio Rising was definitely a contributor to the leatherman style, as you can see below:

Ah, what could have been. I suspect that coyness is not something that would have worked with the source material. What’s distinctive about The Story of O is its lack of gentility or discretion, its directness and bluntness. I think, if it had been completed, most would have criticize it as a poor adaptation, perhaps even more so than the Just Jaeckin version.

PS: Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon alleges that Rudolph Valentino liked to get beaten by dominant women.

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