$pread Blog

The Desiree Alliance Conference (held in Chicago this year, from July 16th-20th) will close their registration on the 10th, so if you haven't already registered, make sure to visit their site now! 

Do you ever get to a point of exhaustion with regard to an issue you care deeply about? A point at which you start to behave as though you don't care deeply about that issue, because you're so tired of articulating the same points over and over again only to have them ignored, or misrepresented? It's a wall I've hit many times before when it comes to reproductive rights and sexual freedoms. Here's a typical exchange when I'm flat against that wall:

Friend: So, we were debating abstinence-only education at work today, and—

Me: You were what? What's there to debate? You should fire all those people.

Not very pro-free-speech-ey of me, I know, and I'm nearing that point with obscenity. When the world around me is pissing me off, which happens a lot lately, I have to remind myself of a line I read years ago in Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography, paraphrased here: "The answer to speech you don't like is always more speech." 

Last week, fresh off my post praising the adult industry for supporting a man who disgusts them, I came across a drawn image of a naked girl pinned to a wall by knives, including one that was wedged between her legs. Lest you think this was one of those knife throwing gone awry jokes where the blades just miss the target's skin, there was blood at all the points of contact. I couldn't imagine what type of person would want to post this on their personal blog (which was where I encountered it) and so, like the true genius I am, I followed the link back to where they'd found it.

As Michael Bluth once said after looking inside a bag labeled DEAD DOVE: "Well, I don't know what I was expecting." Of course, the images I found on this other site were more graphic. They mainly involved extreme violence inflicted on naked girls. There was also a forum for discussion where members wrote about the types of violence that aroused them. (Not violence they enjoyed doing to others, but violence they thought about, and did not necessarily enjoy thinking about.) One particular post outlined a consensually violent scenario that the author and his girlfriend wanted to undertake. This was not a scenario that involved flogging or knife play, or breath play, or piercing. It was a scenario that involved amputation.

The people posting there seemed sincere and even vulnerable. They recommended that new visitors not look at the images. (Occasionally, they seemed to regret the fact that they themselves were drawn to do so.) They recalled being aroused by violence—just violence, not violence in a sexual context—as children. They weren't celebrating this condition; they were seeking advice and understanding in a community where they felt safe. 

I'm not a total neophyte when it comes to ero-guro; I've seen In the Realm of the Senses, which features actual people. And let me emphasize that all of what I saw was unmistakably drawn. It wasn't even CGI. It was cartoons, but they devastated me. To borrow a phrase of a friend, I felt like someone had shit in my brain. I was a zombie for hours afterwards. But when I finally started waking up from my shock-coma, I realized that even though the images and ideas there repulsed me, there were no grounds on which I could support them being illegal. In fact, aside from the obvious side effects of making me a total hypocrite and setting a precedent to threaten my own speech, eliminating that forum would be a profoundly unwise thing to do. Was the guy who wants his girlfriend to sever a part of his body going to be somehow healthier if he doesn't talk about that impulse? Ummm, sure. Just ignore the desire to hack off a limb. Never talk about it again, and I'm sure it will go away. Or maybe go see a therapist. You have the time and money to regularly see a therapist, don't you? Sure you do. Everyone with weird impulses does.

The answer to speech you don't like is more speech, not less. Speech you don't like is an opportunity to create speech that you do like, particularly speech that replaces confusion with clarity, or speech that replaces lies with truth.  

So this brings us to Barry McDonald, the law professor debating established Guy I Am Attracted To, John Stagliano, in the LA Times on the issue of obscenity. According to McDonald,  people are "harmed" by the existence of obscene materials even if people are not harmed in the creation of said materials. He goes on to helpfully clarify "I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, but it seems to me that viewing them to obtain sexual pleasure cannot be the healthiest way of experiencing sex." Perhaps it hasn't occurred to non-sex expert Dr. McDonald that some of us, dare I say most of us, might have the capacity to enjoy "obscene" things in the context of a healthy sex life. It clearly hasn't occurred to him that we don't all have cookie-cutter sexualities, and that some of us might be born with a mind that will never adhere to society's dictates of what is arousing and what is not. As John Stagliano responds, referring to his company's pornography, "[t]o me, the pleasure I get from viewing such material is simply a wonderful expression of my biological nature." If a child is watching zombie movies—government approved, standard horror movie fare—and feeling some kind of sexual charge, as was described on the guro board, that child may not be in for a life of what society deems "healthy" sexuality. If your biggest fantasy is that your lover bleed on your genitals, missionary sex for the rest of your adult life might not—pardon the pun—cut it. 

Let's also remember that what is defined as "healthy" sexuality in this country is schizophrenic at worst and narrowly defined at best. Not so long ago, the only healthy orgasm for women was understood to be obtained through vaginal intercourse without any clitoral stimulation. And not so long before that, the healthiest orgasm for women was understood to be no orgasm at all. Our society doesn't have the best track record when it comes to recognizing and encouraging the infinite ways sex is meaningful and satisfying. Maybe what's healthy for me is not what's not healthy for Mr. McDonald. Maybe what's healthy for me is being with a partner of the same sex, or not having a regular partner, or not having any partner at all, and maybe that doesn't hold true for others. This is a possibility I'm willing to consider, so I'm going to be good enough to not require that Mr. McDonald mimic my own sexual habits. Nor will I require that he spend the rest of his life pursing pleasure through my means exclusively, simply because I've told him that it's the healthy thing to do.    

McDonald goes on to explain that "[s]uch laws are also designed to protect minors and unwilling adult viewers from advertent or inadvertent exposure to obscene materials." "Advertent" exposure. So, these laws are designed to protect adults from seeing something they've sought out for viewing. I'm not an English expert—actually, I allegedly am—but if you stop an adult from watching a movie they want to see, what you're calling protection is, to them, actually just prevention. It's a culture cock block. And, as Marty Klein has already articulated, part of being an adult is that you don't expect the government to constantly protect you from your own emotions, particularly not when your emotions arise from something as trivial as the decision of what to watch for fifteen minutes when you're feeling horny, or what link you click on when you're being an idiot.

Of course, the media we consume is not actually trivial. It can have substantial impacts on our emotional and mental well-being, as people have proven with government sanctioned content. There's a certain type of media that makes me feel alternately incensed, hopeless, manipulated, and offended; it's known as the news. 

There was a post on the guro board asking if pedophilia is actually rape. His reasoning went like this: a rapist wants to harm someone, but a pedophile loves children, and so while he might want to be sexual with a child, he doesn't want to harm them. That question offends me, and the train of thought offends me, but censoring that author would be the wrong thing to do. It wouldn't answer his question and it wouldn't correct the flaws in his thoughts. It would leave him with his own confused (and dangerous) logic, in a void.

If something's forbidden, it takes on an air of power and often an air of truth as well. While we might agree that certain concepts are deeply offensive and wrong-headed, outlawing any mention of those concepts would only embolden those who believe in them. Suppression is a non-response. It's the reaction of those who don't have the evidence or the tools to address an argument they don't like, and so the only way they can cope with encountering that argument is to eliminate it. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, then, that our sexually repressed, sexually obsessed, sexually confused country's response to pornography is still a non-response. But the truth of this statement can't be ignored: The only adequate answer to any type of speech is more speech, not less. 

The Naughty American isn't quite a news site—it's more like a collection of human interest stories about porn performers. I visit for the headlines even more than the articles; they often rival those of The Onion: 

"Audrina Angel Can't Eat Herself Out - Yet"

"Porn Starlet Wants To Have Rough Sex, Teach Second Grade" 

"Porn Star's Beaver Kills Raccoon"  

It's no AVN.com, but I still love their spirit. You keep on keepin' on, Naughty American! 

Punishing Sex Workers Won't Curb HIV/AIDS. It's so easy to have a sarcastic response to that type of headline, but it's clearly not a concept that people understand. So thank goodness for the UN's Ban-Ki Moon, and Melissa Ditmore.  

Hookers Happy With Law Change. Charming headline. (It's another article about New Zealand.) 

Jamaican Official Recommends Decriminalizing Prostitution and shit hits the fan. First, the basics: Taxes are the justification for decriminalization, with the extra funds going primarily towards HIV/STI prevention and treatment programs. This column in response to the proposition cites Donna Hughes (oh joy) and a different official blasts the suggestion on the grounds that "we need more teachers, not prostitutes; more policemen and women, not more prostitutes." What needing more teachers has to do with keeping prostitution illegal is a little beyond the reach of my logic, but anyway…

On Thai Prostitution In Denmark 

England Distressed By Proliferation Of Strip Clubs. There's a second article about the issue here.

More Selective Taxation, this time out of California. I guess this is officially common enough to be called a trend? (For more proposed adult industry only taxes, see this post.)

On Porn & Music: "The only rule we have is that we have to be drunk to write or play our songs." (No wonder it sounds like their music sucks so much.) This article is weird. I don't know what else to say.

Well, no one saw this coming: More Cringe-Inducing Conflations of trafficking with voluntary travel for the purpose of prostitution. Should we make "spot the insidious conflation" a drinking game? Because I normally end up drinking heavily after reading these sorts of article anyway. (via NakedCity) 

Article out of D.C. about a case of Pimp Vs. Prostitute. This story is sad and confusing. Here's a sample: "She sees herself as both a victim and as a willing agent of her own self-interest. There was something exciting, she says, about getting paid for how she looked and what she could do with her body" 

Marty Klein's Brilliant Take on the judge who was taken off an obscenity trial because of his own porn collection.  

More On Ira Isaacs's Obscenity Trial: "A lot of this is about sending a message 'Don't make this stuff. Don't put it on the Internet. We don't want it here,'" Rosenbluth said. I am sick of these headcases who want to "send a message." You don't want it "here," "here" being the internet, a "place" that is compromised of more information than we can even conceive of, and which you have to voluntarily seek out in order to encounter? Here's a message I like to send: You are a small-minded, childish fool who is making life worse for everyone by assuming that we're all equally childish and mentally stunted. STOP DOING IT. 

A Write Up Of Penn & Teller's Bullshit Episode on the war on porn. Apparently, previous shows argued "against circumcision, for decriminalizing prostitution, and against abstinence-only sex education." OMG Penn & Teller, you guys are AWESOME. Has anyone seen this show?  

Heidi Fleiss Dishes About Her Past. The original article has a shitty headline (yeah yeah okay so mine was not so great either), but amazing content:  "The only thing slightly off-putting was he had this strange habit of munching on grapes the whole time we had sex. He kept them in a big bowl next to his bed."

$pread Magazine launched the $pread 2008 Voter Guide today as part of Grind The Vote 2008, a voter registration drive covered by Bound, Not Gagged here. The Voter Guide taps into the positions of the two major-party presidential candidates and their positions on health care, immigration, reproduction rights, LGBT rights, labor rights, drugs and harm reduction, and affordable housing. From the Voter Guide:

In an effort to connect the dots of party politics, $pread Magazine has compiled this voter guide setting forth the positions of the two major-party presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, on issues of particular importance to sex workers. Nothing in this guide should be understood to imply endorsement of or support for either candidate – its purpose is only to provide sex workers and their allies with information to help them decide on an individual basis which, if either, of these candidates to support.

To learn more about Grind The Vote or to download your own copy of the Spread 2008 Voter Guide, click here.

The Voter Guide is being released on conjunction with a series of Grind The Vote voter registration events. For more information on Grind The Vote events near you,  click here.

I saw this story when it first broke and, honestly, I ignored it. The unfortunate effect of keeping up with all things sex work is that I've developed a serious skepticism towards any and every news story, and, frankly, it makes reading the news an even more exhausting and unpleasant experience than it inherently is.  (Mainstream journalism in this country is abysmal, I think many will agree. But it's particularly incompetent and misleading when it comes to stories about sex workers.) 

Luckily, Claudine at RethinkResources has parsed the details and shed some light on the sensationalist reportage, which involves including adult women in the number of arrests, and on the most probable way these minors are being "helped" (hint: it's jail.)

The practice of massive arrests like this are to terrify and control people. I can assure you that both minors involved in the sex trade (including those being pimped out) and adults who are in the sex trade by their own decision or force will not feel reassured to trust law enforcement by these actions at all.

Exactly. Read her take on the matter here, and an earlier article on the matter here. Claudine even addresses the media fatigue that originally led me to postpone reading up on the issue:

I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with posting news items I find online about teens in the sex trade because they are so often like this article - covering up more than they reveal.

Edit: I'd like to add that the use of the word "rings" in conjunction with some type of sexual offense often makes me even more wary of the article in question. For me, the word is associated with the craze over child abuse "rings" in the 80s, where children were coaxed into false memories and false testimonies, to the point where "observers realized that society was entering a major state of panic." (Capturing the Friedmans is an excellent examination of this phenomenon.)

(Why is everything "of the week" with me? I don't know. I can't stop. I think it makes me feel powerful, like I'm handing out Grammys or something. Seriously, though, I just added that to be obnoxious. Did it work? …Yippee!)

Not to dredge up the Max Hardcore case again, but there are so many relevant issues surrounding the situation. And when Amber pointed to this post by Renegade Evolution, it reminded me of something else I wanted to mention about my time at the adult industry expo earlier this month. First, here's Ren: 

Now, is Max Hardcore my cup of tea? No. He is not. [….] Do I think he is an asshole who probably really does hate women? Yeah, I do. So I don't spend money on or watch his films. […] Do I like Hardcore's films? Fuck no. Yet I defend that he has the right to make them so long as all participants are consenting and of legal age.

I have yet to meet one person, adult industry member or not, who has a single good thing to say about Hardcore's films. (A comment in the original thread also surmised that he was an asshole.) Over and over again at the expo I heard people expressing disgust or irritation with his content. Yet every person was outraged by his conviction, and the combination of these two sentiments made me really, really happy.

First: the idea that people who make porn can be disgusted by porn is a fact lost on anti-porn activists, who believe that anyone making adult content would just as soon film a woman having sex as they would film her having her head dunked in a dirty toilet while she's got a baseball bat in her ass. There was a consensus among the expo-goers that was so strong it barely needed to be articulated: Hardcore's films are not sexy, not fun to watch, not anything they want to replicate in their own work. 

Second: it would have been really easy for all of these folks to separate themselves from Hardcore by claiming he's too extreme, he gives the whole industry a bad name, or that he makes content radically different from their own. (All of these points could be convincingly argued, particularly the latter, since it was true: some of the attendees made solo guy, femdom, or adult baby material - a far cry from Hardcore's films.) It would have been the easy thing to do — unwise, but easy, just as many gay rights activists find it easy to deny parade space to leather folks or drag queens in the name of whitewashing gay culture, and many sex workers feel comfortable trashing other sex workers.

The truth of the matter is that the adult industry is used to circling the wagons; I think it's a stronger instinct for them to support their colleagues than to denigrate, even when that colleague is making content they find disgusting. They are living the quote that so often arises in these matters: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Normally, nowadays, I hear people say "I disagree with" rather than "disapprove of.") And it takes a tremendous amount of maturity to really live consistently with this idea rather than just paying it lip service. As Marty "Breakfast" Klein says:

The adult fruits of democracy require that people be able to comfort themselves when their emotions want something their political system can't — and shouldn't — provide. 

People in the adult industry know better than to expect the goverment to address their discomfort with Hardcore's films. They're able to display more emotional and mental sophistication than Hardcore's prosecution, Mary Beth Buchanan, and all of the US citizens who are misguided enough to think that censorship serves the public. It's a community I feel really lucky and grateful to be a part of. So that's my thank you. Of the week. 

Former Stripper Ruth Fowler Opens Her Mouth - I'm baffled. Is this supposed to be sexy? Or was someone just told not to use "speaks" and this was the best synonym they could come up with? (Why would you tell someone not to use "speaks"? Who knows how things work at NYMag.) I'm allowed to write awkwardly, but people who get paid and have (one presumes) experienced editors need to do a little better.  

Anyway, Miss Mimi in NY is one funny, take-no-shit chick ("I certainly didn’t trip and just, oh, all my clothes fell off.") In addition to touching on the way sex workers try to distance themselves from prostitutes even as they take money for handjobs or blowjobs ("Because these girls build these quasi-relationships with guys who come in, you kind of convince yourself it's not really prostitution") she also dishes some dirt about certain NYC strip clubs that allow prostitution to go on in their Champagne Rooms. (Shocking!) Are we allowed to take guesses at which club she's talking about? Because if we are, I say Scores. If we aren't, I say [redacted]. 

Also, 

Spotted: beast of myth and legend, the male sex worker, on the website of Inside Higher Ed. (This has been a banner week for seemingly-tame websites embracing sex workers.) PhD holding former stripper Craig Seymour talks about his book, which our own Vixen will be reviewing for an upcoming issue of $pread.  

This fellow on the right is NOT Seymour, he's one of the many gentleman featured in an upcoming book on NYC's go-go boy scene. (So, wait, there are enough male sex workers to fill a whole book?!?!!) You can read an article with the man behind the book here. Here's an excerpt:

It has just as much to do with body politics as with the real economic situation at this time and place—where desire and despair, money and poverty, sex and frustration can be all jammed into a tiny bar. It is truly a fascinating, grotesque scene with lots of colorful and powerful characters! 

I am working on an article for the fall issue of Spread magazine, which will be a round up of reality and doc shows on cable that have or will feature prostitutes, strippers or porn stars. (Everything from WE’s “Secret Lives of Women” and “Family Business” and “Cathouse” on HBO to shows like “Real World,” “Bad Girls Club,” “Flavor of Love,” et al) I was hoping you could give me some comments about shows, the reality trends, and how these participants are being presented / portrayed in this context ….whether it represents progress or a step backwards or a mixed bag.

Thanks for your time,

Marcy Marzuki

marzuki [at] earthlink.net