Like Your Sex with a Little Ultraviolence? 0 Comments
If you haven’t caught the posts and discussions over at SugarBank on porn, obscenity, and the violence/sex split, get your smut-happy ass over there pronto.
If there’s reason to draw a line between violent movies and sex movies, should we be drawing it now? If not is there anything that we shouldn’t allow others to package as entertainment? When violence, fear, implied lack of consent and sex are rolled together how do we counter accusations of fetishizing rape? How comfortable are you with the crying edge of pornography? How comfortable do you think you’ll need to be?
“Could Donkey Punches KO Porn’s First Amendment Protection?,” SugarBank
That post brought up a great discussion about industry standards, sex, and violence in porn which led to this one:
For thirty years Miller has served the porn industry well, but thinking Miller will never succeed in proving any pornography obscene is wishful thinking. A 3 minute downloadable clip on a webpage is easy to ‘take as a whole’ and is increasingly likely to show an apparently distressed women being deliberately hurt by a sexually violent man. The government are confident the public won’t view downloadable clips the same way they did movies like Deep Throat in the seventies. They also know that if one judgment goes against porn it’ll put the industry in the same position as the once unassailable tobacco industry - paying fines and under constant, successful assault (the difference being that pornographers will do serious jailtime.)
“Should Pornographers Challenge the Miller Test?,” SugarBank
(Since this is my blog and not the Sam Sugar echo chamber, I have some more thoughts on that last sentence I’ll post later tonight. Yes! A real post! Feel free to orgasm in your pants. I did.)
What’s Sam’s answer to the Miller test? Canada’s Butler test. Which is a much better solution… unless you’re not straight, or unless you’re into the kinky stuff.
The line between sex and violence and consensual BDSM can be glaringly obvious or obviously blurry depending on where you’re standing. It’s one thing to think you obviously don’t mean BDSM when you say sex and violence, and another to not specifically exclude it and realize that a lot of people do see a person hitting another person with a cane, hearing that sharp swish, the resulting stripes as violence. After all, somebody’s hitting somebody with something and somebody else is getting hurt. They’re into it, yes, but as Sam brings up in comments, there’s also the issue of whether or not a person has a right to consent to getting beaten.
I like to play rough on both sides of the whip. I’m not going to try to argue that BDSM and violence are completely different. The intent is different. The emotions are different. But BDSM is as much about hurting someone until they can’t take anymore and then hearing them beg you for more as it is tying your lover up and torturing them using only your hands and tongue. Butler doesn’t clearly exclude BDSM porn - in fact, in implementation, it’s basically considered to speficically include it as being both violent and socially harmful/degrading to women (even femdom. Yep.).
You’ll have to pry my crop out of my cold, dead hands. If we’re going to draw a firm line between sex and violence we need to know what the hell counts as sex, what counts as violence, and why we’re drawing the line there. A lot of people instinctively squick at the combination, and a lot of people are instinctively turned on by it, so call it unnatural if you like but I live to bite and be bitten, to whip and be whipped. I want that natural sexual expression protected.
Go argue/agree with him in comments. It’s less satisfying than gangland jello-wrestling him but with any luck you won’t get arrested later, either…