During the unfortunate Donald Trump presidency, the issue of “censorship” gained salience, especially in regards to social media. When people wanted to push inane, unscientific vaccine conspiracies on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter during a deadly global pandemic, those platforms slapped them down in the interest of public health. In response, many of those people cried foul. Insert bird screeches here. Haha, get it, foul-fowl? I’m hilarious. Libertarian Ron Paul ran into roadblocks on Facebook. Alleged comedian Jimmy Dore gets accused of misinformation on YouTube all the time. When Donald Trump was lying on Twitter about the results of the 2020 election, claiming despite a lack of evidence that it was rigged and stolen, Twitter gave it a misinformation label. Certain conservatives freaked the freak out but not in a fun way. When noted bigot Steven Crowder would go viral, everyone would point out that he was selling merch that said “God Hates Fags” - the slogan of hate-group the Westboro Baptist Church. His fanboys would point and laugh when this happened and go “clearly he’s saying god hates figs. You can’t take a joke? If you think it says fags, you’re the homophobe.” So what is the joke? The joke comes from people getting offended by something that is clearly intended for bigotry and then pretending to be removed by a layer of irony as if that absolves them. Crowder ended up changing his header image on social media after one firestorm about this clear bigoted merchandise. That header had been showcasing that “joke.” I was one of the people who reported it for hate speech, by the way.
So obviously, online conservatives are warriors out there to defend free speech, right? They want to make sure it’s never infringed on the internet, right?
I mean, think about it. They lobbied Elon Musk to reverse the bans on several popular Twitter accounts after he got ownership of the platform and they celebrated when he did so. Surely they didn’t then go on to celebrate when that same sort of banning happened to figures they disliked. Obviously no one online is a hypocrite and obviously everyone online cares about whether or not they’re a hypocrite. Who can stand a contradiction? Well, it turns out, everyone, as long as it’s an internal contradiction they’re okay with or don’t have to think about all that often.
Now you know the joke. “Why can’t I say the n-word?” or some other slur. “Why do you want to say it?” And then the stuttering starts because dirtbags of all persuasions are actually babies when subjected to the gentlest questioning of their goals and motives.
I did a very deep dive into Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill, a disgustingly homophobic and transphobic law pushed by extremist Ron DeSantis and others in Florida whose true goal was to keep children in closet and broadly paint all queer people as “groomers.” In that same video, I go over the nonsense of Trump appointed judges who ruled a Florida city’s conversion therapy ban unconstitutional. They claimed it violated the first amendment and that the government couldn’t compel talk therapy because it’s speech and not medicine which is insanely nonsensisical but, for all the left leaning people wanting to inflict the Republicans as punishment for Biden, that is explicitly the method the GOP aims to use to keep torturing gay children across the country. Trans affriming efforts like using preferred pronouns and names can be banned and parents not allowed to consent to affirming talk therapy, but parents should be allowed to do conversion torture on their gay kids. Now you may say, wow, that sounds like they don’t care about speech and it’s just a tool to push their a restrictive, authoritarian governance to promote their wants and punish their opponents. Correct, welcome to the Republican Party.
It’s been a bit since I’ve focused on conservatives. In my past couple of videos I’ve talked about trends on the left that I find idiotic or harmful, so here’s a little reminder that I’m a social democrat who thinks conservatives are far more dangerous than the handful of fringe leftists who fantasize about a violent revolution that’s not coming. Neither should have power, but one does. One can win elections. And that group is quickly trying to ruin the internet and art as a whole.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: looking at the state of contemporary movies, TV, music, games, and literature, there is an overabundance of sex. All these sex scenes are unnecessary. They’re exploitative by nature. They’re voyeristic. They’re amoral. They don’t advance the plot. They don’t advance the characters enough to justify not cutting to black. Sex scenes are a result of writers and directors being too self-indulgent and self-obsessed. Proper restraint would have prevented their work from getting so infected…
We most commonly associate that with what’s derisively called “puriteens.” You might have heard the uncomfortable feeling term “woke-scold” used to describe the demographic. SJW kids who have gone so far into their ideologies that they’ve turned around and accidentally become puritan evangelicals, often without the religious angle so there’s not even the “But it’s for God” game that Evangelicals pretend to care about.
Today, we’re going to get a bit spicy for YouTube, and talk about the censorship of spicy content. What ways does it manifest, what excuses does it use, what do they get wrong about NSFW content, and who else might be behind the screed.
One - Salacious Censorious Scissors
In that insanely long video I did on the GOP and Don’t Say Gay–side note, it’s kind of crazy to have done that long a thing as one of my first essays on here–in that video, I talked about so-called “reinegrative therapy.” That’s a rebrand for conversion therapy nonsense, and it’s endorsed by the Texas GOP by name in their state platform. It’s headed up by a homophobe named Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr.. Baby boy is carrying his father’s torch. Joseph Nicolosi Sr. is the man behind reparative therapy which, yes, was the previous rebrand attempt for torturing the gays. Baby loves his daddy, and we know this because he’s super concerned with preserving and protecting his legacy. So much so that he threw a little baby fit when retail juggernaut Amazon removed some of his daddy’s abusive, homophobic books from their website. He claims science supports him and daddy. It doesn’t.
One of the things little baby boy complains about in his Daily Whine, I mean Daily Wire article, is that Amazon still carried Mein Kampf on it’s website. What possible morals could be guiding one to ban one book and not the other?
Well, obviously he doesn’t actually care because a man who’s pushing ex-gay psuedoscience doesn’t have an understanding of facts or morals. But let’s actually think about it. On one hand, you have the manifesto of a genocidal dictator of great interest to historians and a first-hand source into his thoughts and propaganda techniques that can be studied and critiqued by students of history, politics, communication, English, and philosophy. It’s widely understood to be a horrible book written by a horrible man who did horrible things. On the other hand, you have unscientific books by a relatively unknown psychologist who should have lost his license pretending to be non-fiction, scientific guides on how to make sure your kids are straight. Does the second option have the same level of scholarly significance and cultural connotation that makes its dangers and fictions clear?
So here’s a question: Should restrictions be more strict on fiction or nonfiction? If something purports to be factual and advocates for harm, is that worse than something that is fiction that includes harmful or potentially harmful material?
A lot of times in debate over fiction, you see people get caught up in a debate of whether or not fiction effects reality. In a video responding to Sargon of Akkad, YouTuber Big Joel presents a hypothetical Nazi film named Lubenshuben that celebrates those sorts of people. In his hypothetical, no one is influenced by the film because society is already anti-Nazi and engages with it critically or they’re maximally Nazi. So it has no ability to affect real life. But, he says, it’s still an immoral work because it agrees with evil actions. In a pinned comment beneath the video, he argues further that it isn’t merely an object inscribed with a bad message. Art is an action. It is what it advocates for. He also makes a point that art obviously effects reality in some way or another. It invokes emotional and intellectual responses. Ads are art and they obviously influence whether or not someone buys something.
So then, can art be morally wrong? Yes. Can it influence people do bad things? Probably also yes, to a degree, likely in someone who already has certain proclivities.
But… I also think that’s too simple a way of thinking about all art. Not Joel’s hypothetical, but the idea I built up by mentioning it. We’ll go into fantasy and depiction in a later section, including a conversation of ContraPoints’s Twilight video. But I needed to bring the idea of it up here so as to build a slight base for us to understand at least the surface reason for why one might censor fiction. When Florida banned queer characters from their school libraries, the idea was of social contagion. The books would make the kids gay. That’s not how that works, and they don’t really believe it either. But. It’s an easier argument to make. People are quick to grasp their pearls when you pretend what you care about is the safety of children.
Once you’ve built that shaky platform, you can start throwing things off the plank with a smile. What shaky boats are restricting the world of art?
Amazon
Kindle Direct Publishing is one of the most popular arenas for self-publishing currently in the market. It helps that they’re an online distributor with a massive market and a wildly popular ebook reader. As the majority of reading now is done through e-book, it makes sense that they’ve become a juggernaut in the industry. Self-publishing is fantastic. It does remove some of the gatekeepers from getting the work of we writers out there while allowing us to get paid for it. The traditional publishing route is also great. There are dozens of pros and cons for both sides there. Plenty of authors do both. Plenty swear by one or the other. But either way, there’s no debating the popularity of Amazon and KDP.
As an article on Publishers Weekly says, “Any story about trends in erotica or erotic romance must reckon with Amazon’s impact on the genres. The company’s dominance as an e-book distribution platform–and its squemishness toward sexual content–gives it tremendour influence in determining what’s popular…”
And, of course, Amazon is going to have guidelines on what you can and cannot publish through them. Their content guidelines read, “We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.”
On hearing that your first thought may be “…That’s a little vague there at the end.” And you would be right. It’s purposefully vague.
And apparently, when they flag you for violation, they aren’t going to be of any help. Nikki Sloane tried to sell Sordid on Amazon. When it was removed, she asked why, and they continuously pointed her to the vague guidelines and refused to clarify. Eventually, she got, “If there are scenes in the book that ‘society would object to’ that I should remove them.’” You may be thinking, Wow. Society objects to a lot of things at various points in time. How entirely unhelpful. Of course, Sordid is on Amazon. That’s because Sloane found a publisher for it. Now in her interview with HuffPo, she makes clear she was not going to bend the knee to Amazon, so the content did not change. Amazon’s policies change depending on who’s selling. That double standard led Noah Berlatsky at Salon to say, “Its decisions, in short, seem to be based neither on principle, nor on a desire to protect its consumers, but simply on panic, ignorance and the knee-jerk impulses of the bully who kicks the smallest kid and scurries away from anyone larger.”
Given all of that, if you’re looking to publish something that may be risque, you’d do great to end up on some reddit forums for writers such as r/EroticaWriters. Through research of what’s been previously banned and gotten authors in trouble, they’ve compiled a useful, non-exhaustive list of what gets you thrown in the Amazon dungeon or your account nuked. Now for the sake of not getting nuked by the YouTube gods, I might not be extremely explicit here, but through some clever coded language, let’s go over what’s banned. On Amazon, you can’t have family, pets, magic creatures, dubcon, no thank yous, “We agreed beforehand that I’m saying no thank you, but actually yes please,” synchronized yellow swimming, chocolate, gore, nom-noms, unaliving, Eureka O’Hara on Bossy Rossy.
Did you roll your eyes at how I worded some of that? Did you catch the TikTok-standard English of “unaliving,” the dumbest thing to happen to the internet lexicon?
So… For NSFW content, what does that mean? Well, it means a lot of OmegaVerse is off limits, for instance. Heat cycles enter into dubcon, as does the use of drugs and alcohol. Werewolves have to be fully human when being intimate. Stories of sexual exploration that include initial trauma as the starting point or as a moment of conflict are a no go. You can’t have bladders and you can’t make jokes about gay accidents. No rip-offs of Cell from Dragon Ball Z snacking on androids. Erotic thrillers and erotic horrors… Well, you better not lean too hard into the horror, or else you’re gone.
Quick. Before we go on, I have a question. What is genre? Is it real? Obviously it’s a social construct more than most social constructs are social constructs. But still. What is genre? What is erotica? What’s the difference between it and romance? Between it and any piece of writing that includes spicy scenes?
Author Chloe Alice Balkin says, on her Wordpress, that “(f)or a story to be erotica, the primary plot must be one of sexual discovery… Our identities change, our comforts change, our interests change, our bodies change. This is the central theme of erotica.” She goes onto argue that erotic romance is not erotica but a subgenre of romance. So what is romance? Well, it’s not just a love story. Any author online or publishing professional like Gina Davis is going to tell you it’s a love story that has a happily ever after or a happily for now. If it doesn’t end with that, it might be romantic but it isn’t romance. Balkan then talks about how the two genres are often a bit muddy. You can typically tell which is which, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t heavily similar. And, of course, afterwards she goes on to complain about Amazon which, by the by, doesn’t let you advertise erotica.
Let’s go back a half-measure. There’s a difference between romantic stories and romance. So then, is there a difference between erotic stories and erotica? Well, yes. For something to be erotic just means it titilates. Lots of people find different erotic. Some tremble at horror movies. Some get bothered over long buildups with brushed hands and furious blushes. Some find nothing better than the idea of washing their partner in the bath. So that’s when we ask, “Is it’s purpose to excite?” A lot of people insist that’s what makes it erotica. But I don’t think so. I think that makes it purposefully erotic. No uh involved. Well, maybe for the characters. But, for instance, you can probably think of a handful of non-horror with scary scenes whose purpose is to frighten you. Do those scenes make said film a horror film? Probably not. You have to look at the broader context. Erotica then is not simply a story with spice aimed to give you heat. I agree with Balkin: the spice has to be the core of the narrative. It drives the character development.
But. When you’re comparing it to spicy romance, where is the line? ContraPoints makes a joke about it in her film on Twilight, saying she emailed a bunch of literary departments who determined “Romance is for good girls and erotica is for sluts.” The joke is referencing the frought distinction. If romance and erotica are different genres, when you get close to the line separating them, who can truly say what is on either side of it?
That brings me back to Amazon. Genre is a tricky thing. You end up having to trust the categorization of authors or readers. They say you shouldn’t purposefully label things as romance that are erotica, but the sincere question is: What if you disagree on what that means? So when Amazon is stricter with what it publishers in the erotica genre, when it doesn’t allow advertisement for it, how does that play into censorship of other genre work? They don’t like noncon. I have a question about horror novels. Say someone writes an assault scene, detailed enough to bring about terror. That detail can also be taken as titilation regardless of intent. Now, which is it? Is it suddenly bannable erotica or is it allowable, terrifying horror?
A horror writer posted about a situation similar to this on the KDP forum boards confused and scared as to why his books were getting flagged and miscategoried as erotica by the site. Eventually, he managed to work it out through email when they read his work and realized that he was writing horror.
A romance author made a note of a similar thing happening to her over on the r/selfpublish subreddit, where Amazon decided to recategorize her novel as erotica because it had explicit scenes… when that’s not what defines the difference between the two genres, and her work was very much not an erotica. Likewise, through emailing, someone eventually read her book and determined that she was right. The mistake was corrected. It took multiple emails. She fought them on the definition of erotica.
Taken all together, it seems as if there’s an automated level of content moderation that may take into account reader complaints. That then leads to changes and removals. Sometimes, talking to Amazon can rectify the issue. Sometimes it does not. If certain material is acceptable in other genres because it does not aim to excite, then here’s a question: what if banned content occurs in an erotica piece that doesn’t happen for the purpose of excitement. Take an erotic horror novel. If there is a death in that piece, but the death is not erotic in nature, does that qualify as snuff and become grounds for termination? Doesn’t that sound pretty fucking stupid?
It is.
And because the bounds of what is and isn’t erotica are actually blurry, you do find self-censorship going on in the self-publishing world in order to access Amazon’s market. Now all the more power to the business minded creatives who take that and run with it, but why should that be the standard?
Here’s another question. Why is some of that banned? For written works. There’s no legal trouble for a story between an omega cat boy magician and his jock werewolf alpha going at it after the spring formal at some generically named university. We’ll get to it. And yes, it’s about as dumb as you could imagine.
Surely, if Amazon causes such frustrations and has those limits, obviously there has to be a competitor in the self-publishing arena that allows for more content, right?
Smashwords
When you’re thinking of self-publishing written work for profit, after people talk your ear off about Amazon and KDP, they’ll inevitably bring up one little, massive competitor: Smashwords. Effectively, the self-publishing market, e-book wise at least, is cornered by Smashwords and Amazon. Or, rather, it was. And a few years before that, there was a third contender, Draft2Digital. For several reasons I’m sure, Draft2Digital and Smashwords decided to join forces. D2D’s aquisition of Smashwords was announced on the 8th of February 2022. In the FAQ section on a Smashwords post about the merger, they announced the policies for erotica will follow Smashwords’ existing guidelines rather than forcing Smashwords authors to go by the previous, more restrictive standards of Draft2Digital.
So, what are the Smashwords guidelines? Well, theoretically, almost anything goes. Except you can’t have chocolate, corpse-maxing, or Anabelle Lee-ing. Yes, Edgar Allen Poe would be quite disappointed if he were a modern day spicy writer.
Let me spin a scenario for you. I was reading a manga called MADK by Ryo Suzuri. It is pretty hardcore. The main character summons a demon so he can… feast on him like a zombie. He sells his soul. Becomes that demons underling in hell. There’s a lot of “death.” Scare quotes there are because most of these characters are immortal in a sense. If you stab someone who cannot die from a stab wound, are you intending to kill them? What if your story is specifically about depravity, its causes, how you devolve through it, and how it intersects with power? Yes, it is available on Amazon because there are vast differences in how self-publishing is handled in regards to allowable content versus traditionally published art. But back to the manga itself. Is that what is called “snuff?”
Mega question for you, just like when we asked about the difference between the erotic, erotica, and romance: What is snuff? We’ll get to the metaphors of it later, but what qualifies something as the corpsemaxxing oh no we need to ban this genre? It is a slang word for murder. You snuff out someone’s life like you do a candle. But obviously that’s not what’s being banned because you can have murder in the vast majority of books, films, and tv shows. So let’s approach it as a “genre.”
I think the first instinct is to turn where the term began as a type of art: film. No thinking hard about it, what would you call a snuff film? That’s the question Sebastian Stoddard asks in this article for Collider. In it, he says that some people claim snuff films have to be pornographic in nature while noting that the majority of people think it basically has nothing to do with sex. It’s a film that depicts real murder.
In her excellent concept album, Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain tells the story of a woman who is caught up in the machinations of a cult in her attempt to find love, eventually being murdered and canibalized by a man. The song in which the character Ethel dies in the album is titled August Underground. It shares that title with a series of films by director Fred Vogel. I wasn’t going around googling the song title until I watched the HTHaze reaction to the album and he was told it was a snuff film. Is it?
Well, no. It’s a fictional horror movie. As Stoddard notes, part of the problem is people turn off their critical thinking skills when they watch things shot found footage style. Primed with the belief that snuff films already exist, if a found footage horror film gets that label, it sort of sticks.
In fact, it turns out the famous films that caused all the moral panic about the genre… are all fiction. Not even Cannibal Holocaust depicts actual murder despite what people may think.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen the label put on any video that depicts actual death. When Aaron Buschnell committed suicide, the video going around on Twitter was described by those who didn’t want to be forced to watch someone’s horrific death as a “snuff film.” Is it, though? Stoddard argues that none of these things are snuff films because, as widely thought about, snuff films don’t exist. They aren’t merely videos depicting death. There’s a difference between a video and a film, after all, and those videos tend to be for proagandic or historic record keeping purposes. These sorts of films have to showcase actual death as the point for profit. That’s his definition, and I think it’s the most correct. It may or may not have a sexual component. He also notes that older definitions don’t require “reality” to it, but the popular meaning of the word, which is, by the way, what words mean, how they are “known,” requires that reality.
So. A book. Can a book be a “snuff book”? Well, theoretically. There can be journals documenting the real details of the murders committed by the person writing them, and if that person is a specific kind of sexual sadist, sure. But. The publishing of that - Would that ever exist outside proagandic or record-keeping purposes? I don’t think so. But, regardless, we’re talking about fiction here. Can a fictional piece ever be true snuff? No. That removes a core part of the contemporary definition.
But okay, when we’re talking about censorship and guidelines with self-publishing, we’re typically talking about erotica. So then the definition is massaged around. They don’t actual snuff because there is no real anything in a fictional book. You would assume then that they mean death or the threat of death in an erotic context. And. You would be wrong.
On the Erotica Authors subreddit, one user detailed her experience with a book being banned for supposed snuff and what she learned through emailing with support. She bolded two important lines. These were her takeaways on Smashwords guidelines: “If any isolated scene in an erotica story makes it look like someone is killed or should have been killed by an intentional violent act, it’s snuff. Regardless of any other context.” And, “You just can’t depict extreme violence of any sort in an erotica piece in any context.” You may think those are saying the same thing, but there is an important difference. The second statement takes away the “intentional” aspect of it. It also takes away the “death” aspect.
Where then lies erotic horror? What happens when the definition of erotica is disagreed upon? If someone believes erotica is any writing with adult scenes aimed at titilation, though intention is hard to assign, then is a thriller novel about a serial killer wherein the lead detective happens to have a steamy scene, does that become a novel with bannable snuff?
Alternatively, this opens up an entirely different realm of the subgenre. If someone dies peacefully of natural causes, and that death excites the main characters, that doesn’t seem to qualify under the communication she had with Smashwords. But, isn’t that more clearly the fetish they don’t want than an erotic piece that has an unconnected scene of violence? If Smashwords were to classify that as snuff, are they likely to distinguish between that and say, a scene at a funeral or after where, in part to process their emotions, the main characters sleeps with their partner?
In their guidelines, a handful of the things that Amazon bans, Smashwords says they discourage and might ban your account for if you put too much of it out there.
Patreon
When you’re looking around the internet these days on ways to make money off of the things you create, one of the first things people will suggest is drafting up a Patreon. Speaking of! Like, comment, subscribe! Lol. So… when it comes to Patreon and NSFW, it’s… interesting. Dubcon and noncon are disallowed in any media which means you’re not allowed a sip of alcohol, hypnosis, Omegaverse heats. Consensual noncon is a no go. Actual pets be a no go but magical creatures? Sure. No family unless you’re doing a Game of Thrones. No actual pornography unless you’re drawing it. So congrats to all the furries out there. It says you can do writing and audio too. No age play.
OnlyFans
The biggest Patreon-esque site for adult content creators is OnlyFans. If you’ve been around on gay twitter, you’ve no doubt seen hundreds upon hundreds of links directing you to go view their content over there. And you’ve probably also seen complaints about censorship over the years.
The site came under heavy fire all the way back in 2021 when ti announced plans to ban adult content that October. It was going to turn its back on the users that constituted its backbone. Following massive outcry, they reversed course. Does that mean they’re completely pro-adult content? No, not remotely. Perhaps because of its “amateur” vibes, wanting to connect performers and creators to their users, they’ve stripped away the fictionality of porn. NSFW doesn’t become film, erotica, art. It becomes only NSFW. Documentary. Because of that, things that would be frowned upon in real life must not be allowed.
Before we go on, I want posit something really quick that seems to evade a lot of people. What is filmed intercourse? What is erotica? It’s art. It’s expression. NSFW involves characters and a plot with a beginning, middle, and end. It always, by its nature, says something about the nature of beauty and the state of being human. You see people making fun of old porno acting a lot. There’s that excellent Emma Stone sketch on SNL where she plays an extra on a gay set. It is funny. But. The performers are acting. It’s the same concept as when someone is performing an autobiographical solo show at a theatre. They aren’t merely being themselves. They’re performing the character of themselves. And that’s assuming that’s who the character in the film is. That’s not true a lot of the time. Actors in these sorts of films are generally improvisers working around predetermined scenarios or working off of an exacting script, at all times working under restrictions and permissions. Erotica is also one of the oldest artforms. Grecian urns are covered in sex scenes. This fact seems to get lost a lot in the conversation over NSFW. People assume it’s merely real life. That assumption ends up playing up a lot of these bans on content. For instance, a lot of the following restrictions on OnlyFans don’t make any sense if you think of the content posted as film and fiction.
You can’t show or refer to any sort of weaponry. So put your robbery and serial killer role play. No drugs, so you can’t have a drink or a cigarette together. And no drug paraphernalia so if you forgot to put away your poppers or bong and they’re deep in the background, oopsies, that’s a content violation even if it doesn’t play into the content at all. No family time. No pets. No violence, noncon, dubcon, heavy BDSM, filmed piercing. No hypno or pretending to be in the OmegaVerse. No corpsemaxxing or Annabell Lees. No playing about in pools or chocolate, which means any accidents have to be edited out. No being out in public. No playing at being a lady of the night or owned by anyone. No slurs of any sort. So, if you like being called the f-word in bed, not on here. That’s hate speech.
I’ve seen people complain about content getting taken down for fake blood, too heavy a, uh, carrot gobble. It’s good for your eyesight.
In the OnlyFans Advice subreddit, there are lists of words that are supposedly of restricted use for the site. Some of them are sensible. Some of them… Well let’s take the word “jail” for instance. Assumedly the reasoning behind the restriction is because it can have an association with dubcon and noncon. However, it’s also part of the gay lexicon. Have you ever watched a Mike’s Mic video where he yells “Jail!” at something wild going on in whatever show he’s talking about? Another is “young.” So of course that’s due to not wanting…. But also. Say you run a couple’s page. Does that mean you can’t answer a question about who is younger and who is older? Here’s the big kicker: “consent.” Let’s imagine you want to make a video that is focused on how consent is both important and attractive.
The first guy I was ever in a long term relationship would always make sure to check in with me. He’d ask before we did anything new, and when it was no longer new, most of the time he still asked. He wanted to make sure I was safe and happy and enjoying my time with him. Before we met, my previous encounters were of a, let’s say, difficult nature. His natural sweetness and desire to check in with me was attractive. It was, on a level, romantic. AND it was healing.
I don’t like the idea that you can’t discuss that on site.
JustForFans
When creators get burnt by OnlyFans, one of the most popular places for them to land is the similarly named Just for Fans. I appreciate their website not because I use it but it does have a clearly stated list of prohibited content AND prohibited words.
They say no pets but they make clear they mean like actual animals. Go be the trans cat girl and the whimpering pup boy you were always meant to be. No asthma. Don’t be bleeding, unless it’s your time of the month, but you’re still not allowed to start crying tears of blood from hitting the amaterasu. Don’t set yourself on fire. No cannibalism. Now this one is funny to me because like obviously it’s banned because that’s illegal, but I think they mean you can’t roleplay it and you can’t roleplay vore stuff but I’m not entirely sure. No drinking or drugs, but you can be a Hollywood character from pre-2000s and chainsmoke til the end of time. No corpsemaxxing and no scary. No family. Though they clarify you can pretend to be family. So… that’s kind of funny. It’s a reasonable entry on that topic compared to most, but I’m enjoying their “hey don’t do actual illegal stuff.” No noncon or dubcon play. So probably no omega verse. No stapling yourself. No water polo with others and no drinking the pool, but you can play water polo by yourself it looks like. But no brownies and no naps! No weapons so a lot of parody porn of the past is out which is… annoying.
For their banned words, they ban all variations of those words too. Meet is on there so you can’t post a collab and be like ‘OMG we finally met!” Teen, for good reasons but the variations bit probably means adults of 18 and 19 aren’t allowed to mention their age.
Compared to other sites, I really like the transparency here and the relative laxness with their restrictions compared to other places.
After Gumroad kicked out NSFW artists, JFF went all “Hiiii friends come use us. We’re willing to create new features as you need them. We just made a way of hosting and selling art on the site. Pleeease?” And honestly, good for them.
According to a reddit thread in Erotica Authors, they’re trying to figure out if their payment processor is going to make them restrict the same things they have to restrict for actual people doing things to each other.
Tumblr
We all remember when Tumblr turned around and banned NSFW content. Plenty of people fled the site. You had a bunch of people try to make replacement sites. There was tumbex and newtumbl and BDSMlr which I think is the only successful version to come out of it.
Is NSFW off tumblr? No, not at all. Does it regularly get taken down with people making new profiles and posting it all over again? Yes, very much so. Is it filled with erotica on gifs and pics that don’t technically break the ban? Obviously.
You may recall one of the bits that annoyed most people was the restriction specifically on female-presenting nipples. They were banned whilst male-presenting nipples were not. Which goes to show that this sort of censorship is also determined by cultural biases. There’s a sexist double standard at play.
Here’s a question for you: Why does tumblr not crack down as hard on erotica as it does on visual posts? I think part of it is the difference in liability. Posts with bare bodies have a higher chance of copyright infringement, revenge posting, or being illegal posting. Erotica has a drastically smaller chance of being any of those things.
So why are there restrictions on erotica on publishing sites that are stricter? We’ll get there.
Florida
It’s one thing to talk about social media, video hosting sites, and publishers, but the current urge for censorship obviously doesn’t end there. You might cast your mind through recent news stories and think, wait, wasn’t there a recent win on that front? There was a lawsuit and a settlement and everyone involved seemed happy at the result…
You’d be forgiven for thinking that. According to this transcript of NPR’s Morning Edition, the lawsuit clarified that disgustingly vague language of the law that was written specifically to have this deniable plausibility while inflicting maximum pain before a ruling such as this. More importantly, it still bans instruction on LGBT people. So the gay civil rights movement can’t be discussed in history classes. Neither can the AIDS epidemic, not in any meaningful way. Characters can be gay in books, but any books taught with gay characters can’t have that as a central theme to them or the book. Assumedly, the teacher also can’t discuss that aspect of the characters. It also means discussion of queer health in sex ed remains unavailable. In fact, in this Metro Weekly article, it claims that when teachers are allowed to discuss queer people through non-instructional moments, they have to be neutral. At the same time, it doesn’t prohibit intervention against anti-queer bullying. Here’s a question: how do you intervene there without making any statements of moral or ethical judgement? “It’s wrong to bully your classmate for being gay.” Well if you have to be neutral, you can say, “It’s wrong to bully your classmate.” If they reply, “We’re not bullying; we’re warning them about how wrong it is to be gay.” What’s the response? If you correctly that bullying, aren’t you making a non-neutral statement? Now you might say I’m not being particularly kind in my interpretation of this settlement or how it will be implemented. Unfortunately, Florida is the one who passed that shit law. They deserve it.
So books are allowed in the library but you’re not allowed to teach them. That sounds like censorship. Now why am I talking about that in a video on NSFW censorship? Those are obviously separate issues. Except, you can only view them as separate if you’re not a homophobic, transphobic bigot operating out of bad faith. When people decry the “social contagion” of mentioning queerness around children, the assumption is that all queerness is inherently sexual. It’s inherently not safe for work. So I want to ask you: when these people are busy talking about restricting NSFW on the internet, in libraries, in media, do they mean what they say? Do they mean what you think of when think NSFW? Do they actually care about supporting what they claim?
No. They don’t.
Two - Concerned Condemnation
What are some of the supposed reasons people want to ban and censor things in creative fields, especially when it comes to NSFW content? You’ll get Evangelical types talking about sin and ascetics, sure, but they’ll also feign medical concern for “porn addiction.” You’ll have SWERFs talking about exploitation. People will bring up sexism and the impacts of fiction. And, of course, the go to: “but what about the children.”
And I want to take their concerns seriously because I think most of them are mostly stupid, but I want to lay out how.
Addiction
In my video over gay readings of the video game Genshin Impact, we asked if so-called “behvarioral addictions” are real or not. What are behavioral addictions? Well, in regards to that video, gaming. Then most everyone can rattle off porn, sex, and gambling. Go watch that section of the video… We’ll wait. For those who didn’t go do that, are those addictions real?
No. Okay, to be more nuanced, it’s hotly debated. Is gaming addiction a real disorder? Maybe. Is it caused by games? Almost definitely not. So-called “gaming addiction” is likely an expression of an actual condition like a struggle with impulse control or depression. As I mentioned in the Genshin video, when a Chinese state newspaper did its whole “gaming is opium” lie, they cited a child who specifically said he enjoyed gaming because it gave him a sense of fulfillment. The obvious conclusion is not that gaming is bad but that he is experiencing some form of depression that prevented him from feeling successful, content, or happy. And based on the response of his father, my guess is that part of that is from a lightly abusive environment.
So in my opinion, gaming addiction is largely bullshit. Besides the evidence not necessarily being there, as with China, a suggestion that it might exist easily leads to exaggeration, legislation, and heavy restriction. If you call gaming an opioid for the soul, why then you can crack down on the industry however you like. Wow I’m being so subtle in suggesting what people who pretend erotic addictions are real might actually be after.
A Time article quotes sex therapist Dough Braun-Harvey oas saying, “People can have sexual behaviors that feel very much uncontrollable, and those feelings should be taken seriously by health professionals… But it’s way too premature to call that an addiction or a psychiatric disorder.” That same article says, “several studies have found that people who are what clinicians call ‘hypersexual’ do not display the symptoms of addiction.”
The UK’s NHS has a page answering someone’s question of “Can you become addicted to sex?” with “Eh, who knows.” Which is great, thanks guys. Very helpful. But I bring that up because it’s another case of a health organization taking something people insist is real and pointing out that, well, the evidence isn’t there.
But surely, surely, porn addiction is real. Right? I mean, you see comments about it all the time. When someone makes a joke on Twitter about something non-sexual being sexual, people roll their eyes and call them porn-brained. The common response to gay twitter accounts wading into politics on their alts is someone calling them an addict. The charge gets lobbied at OnlyFans creators all the time. Now obviously none of that is a real concern over a potential addiction to anything. The urge is to call someone over-sexed so everyone else can feign disgust and shun them. It’s an attempt to stamp a scarlet letter. But because the charge gets thrown out all the time, surely it is a thing that exists. Right?
Wrong! Business Insider paraphrases Dr. Nicole Prause as saying, “People who struggle with their pornography viewing almost always have an underlying disorder – most commonly depression – that requires treatment.” Pushing this false idea of addiciton, she claims, is delaying actual research and actual treatments. It’s theatre. As the article says, “People’s cultural, moral, or religious beliefs may lead them to believe they are addicted to pornography, even if they don’t actually watch a lot of porn.”
Noted Shakesperian Weird Sisters, Girl Defined, talks about so-called porn addiction on their website. They spin a made-up story about a woman who loves chocolate bars eating accidentally eating mud in a way that confuses addiction with delusion and psychosis. Bethany Beal says, “In the end, you find yourself feeling disgusted by what you did and, at the very same time, strangely craving for more.” Post-nut clarity, Bethany. Sometimes that causes shame often because offffffff purity culture. “According to recent research, it’s estimated that 9.4 million women access adult pornographic websites every single month. … Girls of all ages are finding themselves enslaved to pornography with no power to escape.” What research is that, you might ask? Who knows, they don’t cite anything. It’s easy to wonder then: does their data point about 9.4 million women every month mean it’s each woman accessing every single month or the amount of women total in a month? Does it account for people who access those sites multiple times? Does it count clicking through to find a video as one visit or each page as a different visit? No one knows because they don’t cite anything, but my guess is that they’re conflating any consumption with full-on addiction. Also, monthly does not an addiction make. Their solution? Their version of Christianity of course. Is the concern actually supposed addiction that doesn’t actually exist or is it a way to push their religious beliefs?
In a “yelling into a microphone video” where the two sisters call purity culture bad before going on about how purity culture is fine and reading romance novels is bad for you, they do actually have a couple of decent points. The two sisters mention how part of the issue with sexual struggles is the silence fueled by shame. Talking about your struggles is always an important step in dealing with them no matter they’re about. They also point out that marriage is not going to suddenly curtail all your desires. Now they mean that in a “having desires is because of sin” evangelical nonsense, but there is a point there. Having a partner does not suddenly make you entirely partner-sexual. Just like marriage will not cure depression. Kristen partially blames porn for the horrible, uncommon, shocking moment of… fantasizing while being intimate with her husband.
In that, they advertise a free pdf that you have to give them your email to view so of course I made up a mail.com account and read through it. In a section called “Consequences of Watching Pornography,” they say, “On a neurological level, porn is short circuiting your brain and emotions. … Therefore, the normal everyday pleasures and connections you have start to become less and less satisfying.” That’s of course comparing porn to substance addictions. Is the evidence there to support any of what they just said? No, of course not. They don’t go as far as suggesting legal, political remedies for this, but equating the erotic to substance abuse draws a clear implicit conclusion. Like hard drugs…
According to WSBT in Michigan, Brandywine School Board aimed to tackle the totally real phenomenon of “porn addiction” at a meeting discussing banning books from school libraries. WVPE says of that same school board that the video they played in that meeting “insinuat(ed) that the school library contains pornography.” In that same article, Debbie Mikula of the Michigan Library Association points out that “most of the books being challenged are books that deal with racism or have LGBTQ characters.” In otherwords, the scary spectre of addiction is being used as an excuse to attempt to pull a Don’t Say Gay-ing on public education.
So of course I watched the video they played at that meeting. Guess what it did. That’s right, it lied and claimed that pornography functions as an addictive substance that can cause you to get high. Does it? No. One interviewee claims, “It is as destructive, if not more so, than other even hard drugs.” Is that true? No, it’s entirely untethered to reality. What else does the video do? It implies that porn creates child sex offenders and zoophiles in and of itself. One woman blames it for the abuse she faces. They blame sexual violence on erotic content. The argument is that viewing NSFW content is a “gateway drug” to illegal activity. Is that true? No. The last statement is that adult erotic content should be banned. So it’s a series of lies meant to push for censorship. Given how the schoolboard attempted to use this video to push for a ban on books containing LGBT characters, how drag is considered NSFW, how gay people are called groomers for just existing, it becomes clear. The addiction framework paints an easy route to enforcing the closet on queer people.
Exploitation
In her film Pornland, anti-porn feminist Gail Dines apparently says, “There has always been pornography, but there has not always been a porn industry.” At least, that’s how Julie Bindel quotes her and the film in an opinion piece for The Guardian. Bindel is maybe most famous for being a TERF which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist which is a fancy way of saying transphobe. As made clear in this article, Bindel is also what’s known as a SWERF, a sex-worker exclusionary feminist.
In an article for the Journal of Feminist Scholarship, SWERF Necropolitics, Aaron Hammes claims SWERFS believe “(t)he transactional nature of sex work renders consent impossible, or instantly revokable and unnecessary for the labor.” The capitalist labor reality of the work part decides that “buyers of sex have agency and … sellers are reduced to non-agental bodies.” He later says, “Beyond evacuating bodily autonomy, SWERFism mistranslates sex for compensation as inherently outside definitions of valid labor.” While sex work is generally thought of as prostitution, it does include all forms such as porn actors. So if the view is that any form of sex work is exploitative in a capitalist sense, does the same hold true for erotica? Well, SWERFs do tend to be against erotica from my understanding, but it doesn’t have the capitalist argument. So put a pin in that.
Okay, why would NSFW with real people be bad under capitalism according to SWERFs? Let’s ignore anti-sex feminists. They’re not much relevant to the conversation or life in general and there’s no need to examine their “abolishing sex” goal because it’s insane and impossible. That lack of consent Hammes talks about means the presence of capital means any sex work is noncon. The presence of money, apparently, makes it automatically coercive. After all, money is needed to survive. If it weren’t for the money, perhaps there would be no intercourse partaken. There are people who turn to such work as a last resort and don’t enjoy it. There are also plenty who willingly do it as labor because it is work and either they’re good at it and don’t mind or they enjoy it. But their opinions don’t matter to SWERFs, definitionally. You might heard so-called puriteens talk about how sex scenes in film and TV are also inherently exploitative. They remove the agency of actors completely. Yes, of course there issues in media. Yes, the entertainment and porn industries deserve critique and examination. I’m not arguing elsewise.
Now, if anti-capitalism is the driving force of SWERFism supposedly, what be of China? China is communist, right? The same labor capital exploitations don’t exist there so surely sex work and pornography must be fine, right? Well. Prostitution is still illegal in China. So is porn, both the creation and consumption. So is capitalism not the source of the supposed evils of NSFW creation? I mean, China isn’t actually a communist or even leftist country. It’s a homophobic and sexist entity with authoritarian tendencies. The Human Rights campaign links to an article by Graeme Reid in The Hill which talks about how China uses its supposed concern for the health of its young citizens to bad “harmful and vulgar content.” In practice, that’s an excuse to crack down on gay media. But back to capital. Women on livestreaming sights figured out they made more money by using their sex appeal. Shocking. According to this Vox article, China went after a bunch of livestreaming sites supposedly because of that phenomenon, but it argues that really, it’s a move to consolidate capital under companies the government has a history of cooperation with. Sounds like state capitalism to me.
Is porn legal in Cuba? Well, you’re not allowed to make or distribute erotic material in Cuba. If it’s so wrong because of capital, then surely it would be legal and fine to make in Cuba.
When you ask these people if there will be porn in the post-revolution state, you probably won’t be surprised that they say there won’t be. It sounds then like “labor exploitation” isn’t the real issue. They want a blanket ban and censorship. Often times it’s to push a puritanical worldview and increased restrictions on citizens.
Sexism
Another concern of SWERFs, of course, is sexism. A lot of porn is violent. A lot of language around NSFW includes violent words. Slam. Force. Gag. Impale.
Think of the reactions to Fifty Shades of Gray and Twilight. A lot of romance and erotica plays into damsel in distress storylines. There are brooding alpha males who are often emotionally abusive and domineering in some way. They’re dangerous, and it seems like the female main characters are into this. “It’s teaching our daughters to accept bad behavior,” is a criticism some parents had of Twilight.
In her article for The Guardian, Julie Bindel says of her concerns, “(T)here are real women in pornography and, whether the violence is acted out or real, the messge is that brutality equals sexual pleasure. … Rather than look for a direct causal link between viewing porn and sexual violence, we should be looking at the culture of misogyny that porn arises from and contributes to.” I think that’s a pretty interesting statement. There is, for sure, a certain misogynistic violence to contemporary erotic material. But Bindel’s suggestion of shrugging of investigations into links between viewing NSFW and increased violence seems out of place to me. While I understand the argument she’s making, that it’s wrong independent of its outcomes because of the systems it exists in and perpetuates, wouldn’t it be better for the argument to investigate and establish such a connection if it exists? I almost wonder if she’s afraid that link doesn’t exist, or if it does, the effect is minute enough to not matter. She thinks the world would be better off without, specifically, real-life heterosexual porn, but based on her “acted out or real” bit, I don’t think it’s a risky bet to say she’s likely also against erotica. A lot of sexuality itself is violent. If that’s inherently bad, then its perpetuation in any NSFW context is also bad.
In an article for Unherd, Bindel goes after lesbians who practice BDSM. She says, “Buying in to the misogynistic myths that women love to be hurt and humiliated during sex – that pain is erotic; that pleasure can be derived from the steel-capped boot on the neck – is nothing short of capitulating to patriarchy.” Oh, fun fact, in the same article she does some casual reactionary queerphobia with the “alphabet soup” joke for the LGBTQIA acronym. So yes, Bindel is a bigot. Her feminism is anti-trans, anti-sex, and seemingly anti-queer. She’s a conservative reactionary. But it does lead me to wonder: how would she write about the topic in terms of female doms? How about gay male partnerships with BDSM elements? If a twink likes putting a leash on a cub, are they doing misogyny in her mind? Logically, no. If sexuality is misogynstic violence, then in gay male couples, sexuality can rarely ever include that layer. Unless you think one of the men “is the woman” in which case, you’re just a homophobe. But if it’s not, then such kinks are only bad when women engage in them, which seems like a denial of agency for women at which point you’re doing misogyny yourself. I know I’m building a bit of a strawman here, but I am curious.
There’s this quote from the video “Envy” by ContraPoints that has stuck with me ever since I first watched it. She says, “When you make loving your body into a moral imperative, not only are you still going to hate your body, but not you’re also going to feel guilty about hating your body because it makes you a bad feminist.” I want to take that quote and think about it in terms of desire and Bindel’s assertion that desire for masochistic experience is immoral. If you make changing your desires into a moral imperative, not only are you going to have those same desires, but you’re also going to feel shame about desire because it makes you a bad feminist. You cannot shame spiral your way out of.. Well, almost anything. Shame is the mindkiller. So shamelessly put your hand in the box.
Part of the video played at the Brandywine School Board meeting paints their anti-porn crusade as partially fueled by concern for women. A section title for the video says, “Pornography demeans women.” That video was published by Family Watch International. Of course I went digging to look for their feminist credentials. The hate organizations website is, predicatbly, anti-queer. It’s against gay marriage and transitioning as well as supporting conversion therapy. Queer issues are feminist issues, so there’s one strike. They’re against abortion, so there’s the second. They’re also opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment. Isn’t it so fun that a group advocating conversion torture had a propaganda film played by a government entity in order to encourage censorship of books with queer themes? Hm, I wonder what the goals of this supposedly feminist group are. They sure don’t taste like feminism. They say on their policy page, “Research also shows that mothers and fathers, by nature of their genders, make unique contributions…” as part of their argument against gay marriage and adoption. And yes of course it’s also implicitly a screed against single parents which includes single mothers. And yes, it is biological essentialism. So… sexism.
Of erotica, noted hate group that is disturbingly influential in US politics, Focus on the Family says, “(S)upporting the genre supports the objectification of women and sex.” They know why women like erotica though: it’s because they long to submit to a strong man! That’s what women were made for afterall. Did I mention they’re a hate group? Because they are.
But okay. Let’s actually consider the point. A lot of erotic art is centered around images of submission and domination. Homoeroticism is often defined around sport and violence. As Dan McClellan talks about in his examinations of the clobber passages and current use of them for anti-queer bigotry, the assumptions of the ancient world was that sex itself is about power. Think of it as a food chain. The penetrating person is at the top of the food chain. They are the human. The penetrated partner is the beast, capable of being hunted, owned, and tamed. For the beast to climb the foodchain is death for humanity. For a man to lie with another man is to make him non-human. Yes the entire concept is incredibly stupid and sexist and the concepts of thousands of years ago often don’t translate well into today so maybe chill out.
But if we take that conceptualization of sex as the expression of power and ownership, then all heterosexual NSFW material becomes another grain of sand on the scale of male domination over women. The erotic is by its nature death. For a man to take a woman for the viewing pleasure of another is to kill her. It is to make a snuff film. Yes, that is incredibly sexist.
But in a sexist culture where women often aren’t treated as fully human by their male counterparts, there is some there there. Women are often treated as the object, as the tamable beast. While putting it in such terms is upsetting to hear, the vague idea of Biblical sexual dynamics does continue. Sex as a showcase of power fuels a lot of violence. So if we think media has any effect on those watching it, we have to consider the idea that NSFW work that portrays power differentials of any sort plays into that culture of violence. And there is no interesting video of any sort without changing dynamics. Even in the equality of yin and yang, our brain places one on top of the other.
Here’s an odd quote from New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldburg, “(T)here have been growing signs of young women rebelling against a culture that prizes erotic license over empathy and responsibility.” She then goes on to misrepresent demisexuality as an aversion to casual sex when that’s not what that term means. Anywho. Her article discusses this idea that some young people have felt pressured to be into certain activities because they see it in erotic material. There are men supposedly getting away with cruelty in the name of sexual liberation. And, well, yeah. As a person attracted to men, they suck. My automatic response to the article is that, uh, yeah, they’re young people. You’re going to feel pressured by every aspect of everything because that’s what it is to be young and figuring out who you are when you, say the line with me, live in a society.
Goldberg’s article explains that to some people, the embrace os sex is patriarchal male gazing. The male gaze is often critiqued in visual media nowadays. If you’re my age, you’ll remember all the criticisms towards armor designs in games and movies that didn’t seem at all practical but instead designed to be “sexy.” Nowadays you’ll find the inverse of that conversation with a lot of incels complaining about female characters not being their type and therefore manish because the worst thing to an incel is for a woman to not be a pet. It’s still a hotly contested issue in manga and anime, too. Fan service often goes over the top. I’m sure there are plenty of women out there who have been pushed away from the mediums because of the intense sexualization.
But is all of it feminism, or is it prudish conservatism trying to do entryism on an intimate subject that makes people uncomfortable? I think almost everything is open to critique and examination, but as an artist who loves art, I’m vastly more critical of any instinct to censor art.
In their reviews of the 50 Shades trilogy, both Jenny Nicholson and Dan Olson of Folding Ideas point out how Christian becomes unsexed as the movies go on. The first film had a female writer and director. The next two were done by men. Transitioning from the female gaze to the male gaze lost a lot of the eroticism. He became what straight men think women find sexy. In desexing him, some of the equality is lost. I know that might seem odd to say about a BDSM series, but think about it. My understanding, based on the reviews I’ve seen, is that 50 Shades follows a slow trajectory of Ana gaining power over Christian. The dynamic shifts. But that only works if both of them are eroticised. To steal the sexual gaze on him is to rob him of his vulnerability. He stops becoming a participant and becomes a creaturing inflicting eroticism on his female counterpart. No longer can the dynamic change, because he isn’t truly part of it. It’s only Ana and what is done to her. I would guess that makes for a vastly more uncomfortable viewing experience. If the sequels were women-led, would it feel even a bit less sexist to people? I’d wager yes.
I’m not going to entertain anti-sex ideologies because they’re idiotic and unrealistic. Sex can be very important to some people and it can be a nonfactor for others. Neither one has any moral positioning relative to the other.
But in their concern for the ways women continue to be harmed, why is the push to desex art? To ban pornography? If the conflict is feeling pressure from these media to do things you might not want, isn’t the obvious solution to… simply speak up and not do them? You have to be your own advocate. If you can’t handle that, how does that become the fault of the existence of art?
Speaking of.
Ascetics
I saw recently a joking tweet comparing Catholicism to Protestantism. It went something along the lines of, “Protestants think pleasure is bad. Catholics think suffering is good.” A piece of lore about me I bring up every now and then is my experience with Catholics while I was in college. One of the friends I made my freshman year eventually became an anti-gay Catholic. She dropped out to go be a nun. Before she left, we had a long conversation in my car that caused both of us to cry a lot and absolutely ended our friendship. In it, we talked about how joyful she often is and how I loved that for her, how I was a bit jealous of it. My mental health issues were well known to everyone in my life. She told me I could be happy, too, if only I was Catholic. That was my problem. Of course, the conversation started because I confronted her about some gay friends I had who she was conseling to be celibate. To make a long rant short: Catholics think being gay is being broken to a degree but it’s fine as long as you’re celibate. No love for you. It’s homophobia. Given that context, what she was saying had an additional layer: Part of your unhappiness comes from being a gay man. If you repressed your desires for love and intimacy, you might be happy. Self-denial is holy.
During that same conversation, we were talking about suffering. I believe I brought it up as part of the obvious explanation of the bad fruit of non-affirming theology. It causes immense suffering, and suffering is not holy. She disagreed. To her, perhaps because of the Passion of the Christ, a terrible movie, suffering was holy. Part of the moment that caused the struggle with my gay friends was a masculinity program that ran at the local catholic ministry. This is anecdotal as there’s not much that my googling managed and I wasn’t about to pay a bunch of money for some Catholics to tell me to take cold showers. Exodus 90 is a masculinity program that aims to encourage asceticism. One of my friends after starting the program broke up with his boyfriend and decided to be become chaste. Is that connected? One article on their website reads, “We encourage chaste and proper marital relations between a monogamous, married, man and woman.” Catholics being anti-gay isn’t a suprise given their homophobic catechism, but that statement combined with the negative effects I observed it having on my friends… Well.
Eventually I found this companion document called “The Exodus Bride” by a group called Endow meant for the wives of men partaking in Exodus 90. On page 4, it reads, “IN engaging in Exodus 90, your husband is attempting to restore this unity. Through prayer, the foundation of his exercises, he will ask God for the grace to heal his own disordered desires. Through the ascetical practices, he has a concrete plan for establishing discipline in his life.”
As the Catholic Catechism reads, “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial.” It calls a condition, and then says, “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disintered friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”
Notice the use of disordered in both the Endow pamphlet and the catechism. In an interview with Spoken Bride, Exodus 90 founder James Baxter says, “I know that freedom is a cultural buzzword, and thrown around to justify everything from sexual exploits to abortion.” I’m guessing he means queerness by sexual exploits. That is uncharitable, but I’m not keen to give charity to programs that have hurt people I have loved. More importantly, he says, “Here are my recommendations regarding chastity: First, start today. All virtues are dispositions, or habits, toward the good. … Identify your triggers, take control of your glances, use your screens only for work or school. This will make the chastity of your future, married selves much easier.”
I can’t help but consider this all together and wonder if the program, when at my college, specifically targeted young queer men in order to show them how much better their lives would be if they gave into homophobic interpretations of the bible. That’s why my one friend broke up with his boyfriend. I had another who was heavily struggling with his sexuality. He loved the idea of this program. We talked about it briefly. It made me deeply uncomfortable.
And, you guessed it, he claims the program helps with porn addiction, a thing that does not exist. Exodus 90 is based around the concept of asceticism. As they say on their website where they supposedly lay out how it works, “Asceticism means acts of self-denial.”
Baxter says, “For asceticism, a big part of what makes Exodus 90 so hard is the constant self-denial. And we ask that men don’t modify the regimen to them but ben themselves to it.”
Practically what this means is cutting out most of the world. You’re not allowed to partake in art. You should stay off your phone. Texting has to be “essential” so if you have friends you mostly communicate with via text, they’re cut off for 90 days. No sweets, so if someone gives you a gift, you have to be anti-social and tell them on. A lot of it actually hinges on being anti-social outside of the others partaking. Oh, fasting and cold showers. Why cold? If it’s about denial, wouldn’t the idea only be that you can’t have a hot shower? That doesn’t have to mean a cold shower. As one of my friends who partook said, the cold is the point because it sucks. Cold showers can be painful. They’re not fun. They’re a small form of suffering. And suffering is supposedly good.
Back to that comparison between Catholics and Protestants. “Protestants think joy is bad. Catholics think suffering is good.” Either road, where do you wind up? Ascetics. Have you heard the stereotype that Christians think being of the world is bad? That often includes much of culture. You have to deny it. To indulge is a sin.
I’ve found that this thought process is not remotely restrained to religious thought. Let’s go back for a brief moment to the so-called puriteen phenomenon, something Michelle Goldburg was touching on in her article one section ago. In an article for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson writes about sex scenes in movies. He spends a while going over the issues with exploitation and the thankful rise of intimacy coordinators in the field–they’re growing in theatre too, which is good. He says, “There is a popular idea–popular on corners of the internet, anyway–that sex scenes are unnecessary relics from a horny, pre-internet-porn age. That they are distractions and cheats and sweaty indulgences that really have outlived their usefulness in the art of filmmaking.” The article was prompted of his viewing of the film Passages and his reaction to watching a long sex scene in a room filled with old straight white dudes. He goes on to say, “The scene probably didn’t *need* to be so long and graphic, though what does “need” even mean when we’re talking about film, or any other subjective expression? … (B)y some metric, the scene is unnecessary. But by so many more–chiefly that it’s what the filmmaker wanted to do–Passages wouldn’t be passages without it.”
The lines of thought about what’s “necessary” and what’s “indulgent” are reminiscent of the thoughts behind Exodus 90. Indulgence is next to sin. Self-denial, apparently, is how you make supposedly “good” art, a thing that’s totally real. Isn’t indulgence all of art?
“One could argue that Tarantino’s famous foot shots are not ‘essential to the story’ of his films, but clearly the director is imbuing his work with his own interests, fixations, and eccentricities as any good artists should,” says Dani Di Placido in Forbes. When I watched the excellent weird sex film Infinity Pool by Brandon Cronenberg, I thought several of the nature shots towards the start of the film were unnecessary. I’m not personally a fan of these sorts of establishing or transitional shots in most films. But. They’re part of the story the filmmakers wanted to tell. And *that* is what I care about.
“This is self-indulgent” is one of the single most useless criticisms I think anyone can have for a piece of art. Well, no, I think it’s next to useless in a worse category: destructive.
I read an article on Flavor Wire about the very concept of “self-indulgent” art by Judy Berman that eviscerates some of the most insanely annoying, stupid advice you ever hear about artists and arts careers. She says, “Don’t write unless you can’t do anything else, writers often say, by which they mean to convey that their work is such a punishing struggle that were they not conscripted by the gods, they would’ve bailed. … (T)his statement is a cover, meant to absolve writers of the responsibility for their choice of profession, their deep *desire* to write. … But there is no need for such a cover. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an artists because the work is meaningful and pleasurable.” And she’s right. You see that same sort of “don’t do it if you can or want to do anything else” about pretty much every artform. Actors say it, composers say it, painters, filmmakers, dancers. And it’s a bullshit line each and every time. Don’t do it because you have to. Do it because you want to.
But that last line of hers points clearly to why people employ advice like that. “The work is meaningful and pleasurable.” If you’re an ascetist, the pleasure aspect is problematic. Pleasure is not holy. Its denial is. Suffering is. The artist must be starving because that’s the only way for them to be pure. They must be consumed with need and not want because otherwise they are not pure. They must cut out anything not deemed necessary because elsewise they are a sinner.
As Berman says at the end of her article, “But there is an element of indulgence … in even the art that *isn’t* called indulgent, if it’s any good. Because in art, this is the only work really worth doing.”
How often have you heard the but true joking observation that a moment in a film or a tv show is the writer’s barely disguised fetish? It’s fun to point out and observe, and important for criticism in certain areas and productions. But most of the time, it’s just that, an observation. Think of one of the most popular franchises of all time: Dragon Ball by the late Akira Toriyama. From the beginning, there is an obsession with consumption and food. In the sequel series, Dragon Ball Z, several of the villains literally eat their opponents and the good guys. The good guys merge together. That’s all am evolution of the eating obsession. It’s self-indulgence, and it’s compelling work. Obviously, given how insanely popular Dragon Ball has been for a long time. Toriyama was indulgent in making it.
I see advice against indulgence in a lot of writing spaces I’m in, too. Have you heard of the insistence that writers slave over every single word? That’s not true. But why do we insist on it? I think it goes back to what Barnes said. It turns creation into struggle. Struggle is holy. Struggle removes the pleasure and selfishness of creating because we’ve determined that all selfishness is inherently evil. And it’s a stupid game we’re playing. Do you have to weigh every word? No. In playwriting circles, I’ve seen people continuously argue over what lines have to do. They have to move plot or character. Some say they can push theme or worldbuilding. But otherwise they shouldn’t be there. Everything should push a reason for its existence. I categorically reject that. “Kill your darlings” but only if you want to. Yes, edit and revise and sharpen and make the best work you can. But no one can tell you what that is. Only you can. I want to see the colors of your soul. What you should cut is all the stuff you’re putting in there for other people.
So when people are concerned about indulgence with the use of sex and other less than worksafe material, what are they actually concerned with? The quality of art? Obviously not, especially since there is no such thing as objective good or bad when it comes to art. It’s pleasure. They think it’s wrong. And, unfortunately, I don’t think that viewpoint deserves any respect, and it certainly isn’t a reason to start censoring art.
Protection
The main concern that a lot of people pretend to have when they look to rid the world of NSFW content is the protection of children. The video put out by hate group Family Watch International is framed around the idea of protecting kids. The school board that played the propaganda was using it to defend censoring books with LGBT characters out of a pretend defense of children. When Anita Bryant was on her “Oh my god you guys making it illegal to discriminate against the gays is going to hurt my children” speech, she liked to pretend her operation was in their defense. As she’s well known for says, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.” Social contagion. That’s the idea that fueled Britain’s failed and disastrous Section 28 that, as Abigail Stone of PhilosophyTube said, negatively affected her because she didn’t know being herself was an option for the longest time.
As I pointed out in my video over Don’t Say Gay and the vast homophobia of the Republican Party, that’s the actual point for one of the crafters of that bill. He wanted kids forced back into the closet. The drag ban bills pretend to be protecting children from inappropriateness, but that’s not accurate to drag as an artform. It, too, is just a smokescreen to get rid of queer people.
That’s important to keep in mind when talking about attempts to censor art and NSFW content in general. Republicans often use it as a smokescreen in order to go after anyone who doesn’t fall in line with their sexist version of Christianity. Think of uniform policies in schools that prevent students from having dyed hair or piecings while pretending it’s about preserving the standard of education and professionalism when in reality it’s about control and making sure no one deviates too far from the norm. It isn’t about protection.
Pornhub recently disabled its usage in several states across the country due to age verification laws that have been passed requiring users to prove they’re above the age of 18 to access the sites. No, that doesn’t mean clicking the “yes I promise I’m old enough owo” button, but providing government IDs.
Here’s a question for you. Given that they’re required at threat of lawsuits and fines, if adult websites were to abide by the law, logically, wouldn’t they have to keep records of compliance? If they were to keep records of compliance, would that require them to log every instance of someone using their site? Would you have to provide it when creating an account or if you have an account, would you have to provide your ID every time you visit the site? If it’s to create a login, doesn’t that theoretically mean all a kid needs to do is copy down the info on their parents’ license a total or one single time? So then logically, shouldn’t you be forced to provide ID each time of access? That seems like an undue burden to me. But let’s say you do. And let’s say these same lawmakers are the sort who pretend porn addiction is real. Suddenly you have a database you can access to attach legal names to a supposed addiction. And, quite likely, a way to monitor individual interest in specific content. Someone likes step stuff, and suddenly they’re a brand of ladders in the news.
When those porn sites are inevitably hacked, those IDs are prime for blackmail. Let’s say someone’s identity gets stolen. Your license might be used to access the most depraved things they could legally find online and attach your documents to them. Other methods are facial scans which uh sounds dumb as some people look quite young and some quite old for their age. Or banking info. But if you have to share your banking info, often times a credit card, what happens when the credit card companies despise NSFW content? For instance, PayPal doesn’t let you use it to buy NSFW online or to get paid for it. We’ll get into it over credit companies later, but what if your bank or the credit company frowns on certain usage. What if they decide to monitor what content you watch and then use that to terminate or restrict your account? Sometimes when Paypal shuts down an account, they don’t let you withdraw you money.
Of these verification measures, an article in the Scientific American says, “This poses obvious opportunities for hacking, theft and extortion.” They interview Professor Olivier Blazy who says, “The worst example would be if you directly collected people’s name and the type of website they’re trying to access. Then someone could establish a list of who follows certain content–which could be used to target groups such as LGBTQ+ people. That would be terrible. … We know that establishing lists is a very bad idea.” When he talks about the dangers of the various methods of verification, he talks about how facial recognition would require storing biometric data. This is my own wondering, but with the proliferation of AI and the use of AI by some abusive people to nonconsensually make intimate content of people, what happens if that data is hacked? Beyond privacy, safety, and identity theft concerns, now there’s a concern over the further creation of AI porn stealing people’s faces.
That article links to a different one by the Electronic Frontier Foundation which warns, “If a website misuses or mishandles the data, the visitor might never find out. And if they do, they might lack an adequate enforcement mechanism. For example, one recent age verification law requires a user to prove ‘damages resulting from’ the unlawful retention of data, in order to hold the website accountable in court–a difficult bar to reach.”
Okay, so this recent span of laws restricting access are likely to result in a massive breech in user privacy so either that’s going to result in such a thing or in a mass exodus from accessing NSFW in this country. If your goal isn’t to protect children but rather to ban the erotic from existing and enforce your prudish religious control over the populace, this is a good way to do it without running into the pesky issue of outright banning porn and running facefirst into the First Amendment. In the first case, you’re probably a hyper capitalist hoping for porn sites to go the way of Facebook and other social media where real money is made through selling consumer data.
However, it’s not the only example of a law put out that’s supposedly meant to protect the vulnerable actually turning out to mostly work as a censorship law banning certain forms of art and expression. FOSTA is a 2018 law that “aims to fight sex trafficking by reducing legal protections for online platforms. The conflation of consensual sex work with sex trafficking, as well as the threat of litigation for websties, has already led to a crackdown,” says Megan Farokhmanesh for The Verge.
We have our next attempt at protection. This time we’re supposedly protecting the victims of sex trafficking, a legitimate issue that plagues the countries aflat the world. The first obvious question, as it’s been a few years since FOSTA-SESTA passed, is: Did it work? As an article from The Nation says, “(F)ive years later, reports from legal scholars, researchers, and the Government Accountability Office conclude that the law has been counterproductive at best and deadly at worst… (B)y most accounts, online sex trafficking remains rampant. … To date (October 2023), there has been just one criminal conviction under the law.” So. It doesn’t work. Oops. But what has it done? As that same article says, “To avoid serious criminal and civil liabilities, many websties and apps now overregulae all erotic content–much of which is unrelated to sex work.”
Sarah Rahman argues in Book Riot that self-published erotica has faced increased censorship because of FOSTA. Despite erotica having quite literally nothing to do with trafficking, if you’re given an excuse, why not take it? Or, if you’re afraid, go ahead and do stupid things just in case.
While talking about Tumblr’s ban on content, Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole writes about FOSTA’s effects, “(S)ites have cracked down on NSFW communities or shut down altogether for fear of repercussions of hosting adult content.” When platforms attempt to restrict content out of this kind of fear, especially when they have a large userbase, they don’t have many options. Human moderation would require a large increase in hiring. Famously, Tumblr is broke. Supposedly they lose $30 million a year. What you’re going to do then is attempt to use filters and auto-mods. The Electronic Fronteer Foundation points out the filtering system ended up accidentally targeting the posts of a blogger who posted patent designs. They say, “Tumblr employs an automated system incapable of being nuanced, resulting in absurd results.” Insert HBomb’s resulting in destructive results joke here. “Tumblr says it has to use these tools because it’s the only thing that can work on a large-scale, but that, again, misses the point that Tumblr didn’t need this policy in the first place. It already had rules against illegal content, deciding to accede to Purritanical notions of what is acceptable was not necessary.”
Mid-2023, FOSTA was clarified and restricted by the DC Circuit Court. David Greene opines that it’s unfortunate the law wasn’t overthrown in its entirety, but the court gave some extreme clarifications. He writes, “(W)e appreciate that the court significantly limited its previously broad reach.” He lays out a series of cases that make it seem like platforms, such as social media, “do not aid and abet when they are generally aware of an overall unlawful enterprise the intermediary must instead knowindly assist a ‘specific, wrongful act.’ And they have to take some affirmative action with inent of facilitating the commission of a specific offense…”
Okay. FOSTA doesn’t work. The suggested verification systems pushed by certain states are ripe for mass abuse and are also easy to skirt around with a VPN so theoretically… don’t work. But both have been effective at censoring the internet. Even with the DC court case, FOSTA’s effects can still be felt. There’s that Stafford Beer idea, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” That means its purpose can’t be what it fails to do. FOSTA fails to prevent sex trafficking. It succeeds in causing censorship. In that case, its purpose is the censorship.
With that in mind, where lies the proposed Kids Online Safety Act championed by politicians on both sides of the aisle? In a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee in July 2023, Tech Freedom argues, “The impact of KOSA remains unchanged from its original language: adults’ First Amendment right to access content and speak anonymously will be undermined by a de facto age-verification requirement.” The company also argues that the “duty of care” the law would require has already, in previous cases, been ruled unconstitutional for violating the First Amendment. Since that letter, the proponents of the bill have changed its language. Presumably, this time, they actually want to protect kids. They want that to be what the system does instead of merely what it purports to do.
Except, as the ACLU notes, it continues to push for age-verification which we’ve already been over. They say that “(U)ltimately the revised version of KOSA still poses threats to our First Amendment rights.” EFF says of the updated bill, “This language still means increased liability merely for hosting and distributing otherwise legal content that the government–in this case the FTC–claims is harmful.” While the updates claim to have restricted the ability of state Attorneys General to go after speech they simply don’t like, the EFF says, “The state attorney general could simply claim that they are not targeting the LGBTQ content, but rather the fact that the content was made available to minors via notifications, recommendations, or other features of a service.” Which makes it seem like the purpose is still in censorship. But that’s unconstitutional, so they’ve put window dressing on it. It seems to me like they’re attempting the abortion clinic restriction strategy here. “Your halls are one inch too narrow according to this new regulation we passed so now you either need to completely renovate or shut down.” The purpose of something is what it does. KOSA promises, once again, to censor the internet and likely not protect children. So then that censorship is its purpose, just like the other attempts mentioned in this section that claim to be protecting people but whose most meaningful contribution is an increase in censorship.
The shields these people claim to throw in front of everyone are simply made of smoke.
Three - Fatal Fantasy
In part 2, I started off by listing various concerns people have with NSFW content before I went into each of them one by one. You, being very clever and sticking it out through this whole thing, might have caught on that there’s one thing I left out: the effects of fiction. We’ve lived through years of people wondering about the effects of violent video games and violent movies. When I was growing up, there was a push to get smoking out of movies under the idea that having people smoke on screen would cause kids to get a nicotine addiction in an attempt to look cool. “Thank You for Smoking” is a decently funny film that includes a tobacco lobbyist pushing to get films to return to making smoking sexy. Everyone and their mother will tell you about the effects of propaganda because we’ve learned about that in school. Pretty much everyone has had a piece of art effect them in some way emotionally. I’m sure most of us have also been presented with a fact in a piece of media and simply trusted it to be presenting us with the truth. When I was in college, sometimes I would see things. I’d be walking to the parking garage and with every step I could see my ribcage exploding outwards like a cosmic blood eagle. I could live with the violent images, but I was terrified for what it might mean because of the various ways crime shows have painted mental illnesses. So I’m not going to contest the idea that art CAN effect real life. I’m a strong believer in the power of representation for instance. Hamilton and Head Over Heels have done wonders for some people.
Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson in Psychology Today says claims of violent video games being connected to increases in violent behaviors aren’t based in evidence, going so far as to claim typically the opposite is true. It seems there is something to the idea of catharsis. Perhaps such video games and movies act as a cut, bloodletting out aggressive instincts before they can reach the point of actual aggression.
Professor Alan McKee of the Univesity of Sydney says, “We know that people who are more sexually adventurous are also more likely to consume pornography. That doesn’t mean that consuming pornography makes you more sexually adventurous - but a lot of the research claims that it does.”
As someone who critiques media, I’m not saying suggesting we shouldn’t critique it or its effects. Anita Sarkeesian examining sexism in games is a good thing and a valid topic. Likewise, looking into the sexism in a lot of NSFW work is valid and worthwhile. “What do people desire? Why? Is it bad? How do those desires interact with negative things in our cultures and systems?” All of those are valid questions and none of them can be satisfcactorally answered with, “We need to get rid of NSFW.”
Speaking of the why. Is it as straightforward as people want to think?
ContraPoints
I was introduced to ContraPoints in late 2020 or early 2021. I was on a date with a nice hairy artist man and we were back at his place watching videos. That’s my love language. He asked about video essayists. At that point in time, the only one I watched was Jenny Nicholson. There Make Be Snakes. He told me I needed to watch the videos of someone called ContraPoints. When I saw the screengrabs and titles, I was a bit apprehensive in that I thought this was going to be a Tumblr-esque moralizing rant. I was very pleasantly surprised instead by pleasant philosophy, politics I mostly agreed with, great production design, and funny jokes. I’ve been watching her videos ever since. That led me to Lindsay Ellis, Dan Olson, HBomb, PhilosophyTube, Alizee Eezy, Rachel Oates, Fundy Fridays. The channel is the brain child of professional catgirl impersonator Natalie Wynn. I’ve really enjoyed her past few videos a lot. The opening bit of The Hunger really made me feel seen with the whole “Catholics telling me my depression would go away if I was Catholic and Side B or pretending to be straight or whatever” thing. At time of writing, her latest video is an insanely long video about Twilight. Go watch it. I know, this is a long video and I’m suggesting you go watch an even longer video. I’m evil. You don’t have to watch it, but I think it’s an excellent deep dive that looks further into certain related topics that I’m not going to get too far into here. She also gives genuine consideration and credence to anti-erotic arguments.
While I already had this video as a topic to eventually get around to writing, the Contra video made me want to get to it sooner and go a bit more in depth than I normally go. I whole heartedly recommend it, and I am going to be discussing some key points Natalie brings up. She uses the idea of the Twilight series by Stephanie Myer and the cultural reaction to that series as a jumping off point to talk about fiction and desire itself. Of the critiques against Tiwlight for its danger it supposedly poses, she says, “The main line of argument against Twilight is that this type of story ‘normalizes’ and ‘romanticizes’ abusive relationship dynamics. It’s a monkey-see-monkey-do theory of media analysis, this moralistic CinemaSins things that everyone is doing now. … I see the obsessive moral policing of the romance genre as a continuation of literally centuries of concern that women are reading the wrong kinds of books.”
But, as she reveals the more she goes into her consideration of desire itself, this isn’t even necessarily just about women’s erotica. There’s a lack of consideration for what fantasy is, how it does and doesn’t intersect with actual want, and how we as a species seem conflicted over sexuality, uncomfortable.
According to Freud, or my understanding of this Psychology Today article, that discomfort, sometimes urged by acknowledged asocial tendencies or harms acting on desires might cause, we often transform that desire into something else. We sublimate it. The article gives an example of a man who covets his neighbor’s wife and instead of acting on that, he uses that as fuel for exercise, housework, creativity. If we think that productivity is often caused by the sublimation of our desires, if society on some level runs on that sublimation, then it makes sense to push back against expressions of those sexual thoughts. You look at dubcon and get grossed out. Jenny Nicholson reviewed the book “Troll” and theorized that maybe if it was popular enough, it could kill the dubious consent romance novel because it’s gross.
The Dubious Yes
Do you know what the Omega Verse is? Omegaverse is, as Lindsay Ellis puts it, a subgenre of romance. Of course that means it’s also a subgenre of erotica, and a lot of the tropes can appear across literature. If you don’t know, in it people are classified as normally three “secondary sexes.” You can be an alpha, a beta, or an omega. Sometimes that means a dom, a normie, or a submissive. Sometimes that means “one who impregnates, normie, one who is impregnated.” No, I don’t know how straight versions of it go down when there’s an omega male. Recommend some down below! I’m kidding.
An extremely common trope in the omegaverse is the presence of pheromones that almost exist as magic. I’ve read manga where alphas almost battle by releasing their pheromones and trying to overpower each other. It’s a delightfully silly genre as a concept. Alpha pheromones are often dominating. They’re like the soul pressures in Bleach. Christian Grey is Byakuya. Don’t sign his contract, Hitsugaya! Omegas often give off sweet pheromones that can be hard to control and can send in alphas and betas to take them.
In a lot of omegaverse stories, “heats” are important plot devices. Someone enters a period of time where they can’t control their pheromones and often need to spend some time taking care of themselves or being taken care of someone else. Yet, it is very much focused on getting pregnant. The presence of pheromones and heat cycles make omegaverse as a genre largely, at best, dubious consent. Therefore, the genre is banned on Amazon as erotica and its banned in most places as a genre for film and art.
When someone fantasizes about omegaverse, are they saying they believe in or want to live in a world where the facts of biology make assault a necessity? As someone who enjoys plenty of omegaverse BL manga, no. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve been on the receiving end of that sort of violence and it messes with me when I least expect it even now. I don’t want to experience that again. I don’t want anyone to experience that. But I still enjoy BL. So what’s the fantasy there?
In her Twilight video, ContraPoints talks about noncon and dubcon fantasies. After discussing the popularity throughout history of ravishment fantasies, she says, “The non-consent fantasy is a device that absolves the woman from blame. If she’s being forced, then it’s not her fault.” It allows us to distance ourselves from our sexuality. Alternatively, in the case of omega verse, it allows us to imagining purely surrendering to them. What would it be like for the world to be built around giving into sexual desire? What if we were animalistic in some way?
Alternatively, fantasies such as this let us engage in narcissistic desire without having to confront that. We want to be loved. We want others to love, and we want them to love us. We want to be desirable. In omegaverse and other dubcon and noncon fantasies, we become so desirable that even the handsome man who has it all has to have us or else his life is incomplete. We can recognize that as abuse in the real world while separating out the fantasy of it.
A lot of people find assault scenes in media hard to handle. There’s plenty of critique for the Game of Thrones show for using assault as such a constant plot and character device to the point where plenty of people thought it was fueled primarily by sexism. Yes anding that possibility, I also want to talk about the healing ability of that kind of fantasy. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on the channel before, but the first film I saw with an assault scene after my own unfortunate history was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the movie with the best opening credits sequence ever made. It was a terribly hard watch when THAT scene came on. I was death gripping the hand of my then-boyfriend. He warned me before the scene. He told me we could skip it. He was very sweet. I watched it. Though it was a hard watch, it helped.
Sometimes the fantasy of questionable consent is the fantasy of surviving it, of being able to disengage whenever you feel like it, to be able to put it away.
But you don’t have to take my word for it.
When these sorts of moments happen in romance, they tend to get classified as “dark romance.” In exploring that subgenre for Paste Magazine, Kayleigh Donaldson says, “These stories talk of love not only as the most important thing in the world but as something worth destroying the planet for. … Life doesn’t always have a happy ending, so finding passion in the hopeless is an enthralling alternative. After reading a dark romance, you get to turn on the light.” There is control in reading disturbing things. Horror movies function much the same way. You get to explore your fears without any of the mortal peril. Horror works because you can walk away from it. Consent fantasies are the same.
Kate Lister says “The first thing that needs to be established is these are not fantasies about rape, they are about submission and domination.” She cuts straight through the theatre and outward expression of the desire and goes to the core of it. Often times it’s about playing with submission or, on the other end, domination. Of being able to give and take what you want. One person she interviews says, “I think it’s more about being desirable. I know that sounds daft, but in my fantasy the man is so overcome with lust for me that he just has to have me.”
Based on the ads I’ve seen on certain sites for studio films, this sort of fantasy continues to move credit or I guess Bitcoin or whatever Doge Coin scam people are using to cash their spank bank cheques. The Lonely Island song is a popular category of adult video. Domination videos, invaders, “do me a favor,” “you have to pay rent,” “this pizza ain’t free.” And it’s been there from the start. Greek myh is filled with noncon. Zeus does all sorts of depraved things. And these scenes get splattered on urns, and the Athenians would grab their olives and gather round the urns.
But despite the popularity, most people don’t walk around looking to assault people. It’s almost as if fantasy is separate from intention and asocial tendencies.
Tentacles
Is there any more asocial tendency than being the devastating and unknowable fear that is Cthulu, overlord of the seas, final evolution of Squidward? If there is, it’s probably liking anime. As an anime enjoyer, I’ve seen some of the worst art ever created and yes, I’ve loved every second of it. At the mall near the town I grew up in, there was an FYE store that had an entire aisle of anime DVDs. I would look through it every time I went there, not that I would buy anything because I am and always have been very reluctant to spend money on myself. If you’ve not been to a video store with anime, then imagine two thirds of the shelves with Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, Fairy Tale, Death Note, all the covers of the anime everyone watches. Then there’s the end of the aisle where all the covers are hidden by decency panels. Behind them is, you guessed it, Pokemon. No, it’s hentai. And of course, when you think anime weirdos and NSFW, you have to think of tentacles.
Cady Drell over at Glamour points out in a funny article that the idea predates anime by centuries. But its popularity today isn’t merely a continuation. It’s innovation. “According to Toshio Maesa … the appendages were used as a way to flout Japan’s stringent obscenity laws.” Japan doesn’t like anatomy. They love lightsabers. What’s the medium ground between human anatomy and lightsaber? Tentacles. The article goes on to claim it’s basically a version of bondage fantasy, a submission fantasy, often a noncon fantasy.
But what if it’s also something entirely different?
I watched a film on Hulu called Tentacles because it promised to be a weird psychosexual horror film and I loved the idea. It’s a part of a series called Into the Dark? I haven’t seen any of the rest. Here’s the logline over on IMDb: “A couple falls head-over-heels into a new romance and entwine their lives–until their intimacy transforms into something terrifying.” Doesn’t that sound thrilling?
It wasn’t. I don’t believe in “good” or “bad” art, but for me this was a case of a film being too restrained and afraid of its premise. There are tentacle creatures that seduce humans and slowly morph into them, eventually killing them. What happens when someone unkowingly falls in love with one of those creatures? That sounds so amazing. I ended up disappointing myself by expecting a different film. Brian Tallerico really gets to what I was thinking in his review of the film for Roger Ebert.
“‘I wish there was some way to show you other than sex or talking–some way to touch brains.’ In most episodes of ‘Into the Dark,’ there’s a turning point, a moment in the film when it could really take off and become its best self. Here … ‘Tentacles’ threatens to become true Cronenberg-esque psychosexual body horror, to truly get into how passion can physically change us. … (A) journey of two people who become so obsessed with one another they ignore warning signs and spiral into a Lovecraftian nightmare? Sign me up.”
To put it another way, what if Junji Ito’s Uzumaki was an erotic horror? What if the balls of spiraling flesh were the results of love, creatures of true ascendance and connection?
Did I do it? Did I trick you into thinking this was going to be about anime? No. We’re talking body horror and monsters.
Why do we eroticize the horrifying? I’m not asking about fear sublimation. Sublimation is the next section. But for now, I’m not as curious as to why we tackle fear with desire, but why we desire things that are inhuman. Take tentacles and slime. Generally these are magical creatures, some horrors either monstrous or alien in some way.
Sometimes, the erotic is how we explore religion. This isn’t merely submission to another human. It’s to something above humanity. A creature at whose mercy all of us are. And instead of destroying you, it makes love to you. Angels are a really popular creature in romance books especially for urban fantasy romances. Alpha males with wings. With magic. Sure flying is cool and everyone loves Angel from the X-men and got emotional at that scene in Last Stand, but the popularity isn’t just because flying is cool, is it? The word angel is specifically used. What is the fantasy of being taken by an angel?
Well, it could be a want to cross the taboo. The fleshes that shouldn’t mix in the Bible are Angelic and human after all. But I think it also stems from a desire for love. In this case, divine love. To be the mate of an angel is to be a chosen one. It’s to be told that the tribulation may be harsh, but the promised Eden has a space for you. And it will be pleasurable. People who fantasize about getting abducted about aliens are fantasizing about being desirable and being chosen by a higher plane of being. They’re not literally wanting to be kidnapped and treated like a zoo animal. Vampires work under a similar fantasy half the time. You don’t want to die. You want to be chosen.
Back to tentacles. What if you don’t fantasize about getting caught but doing the netting? What if you want to be the slime creature taking human form? There’s still a fantasy of domination there, sure. There’s a fantasy of magic which is a power fantasy, a control fantasy, a desire to be special. What does being the tentacle get you though? It gets you the ability to hold onto your loved ones forever. You get to transcend the bounds of what it means to be human. And if you transcend those bounds, maybe you don’t have to die. And if you don’t have to die, and you’re a tentacle creature who can hold onto your loved ones as long as you want, maybe they don’t have to die either. It can easily become a fantasy of heaven taken to the erotic. Think of zombies. There’s that movie based on a book Warm Bodies. On one hand it’s a metaphor for being deserving of love no matter what your circumstances, but what does it mean to imagine yourself as the zombie? Are you wanting to partake in rampant consumption? Consumerism without guilt? Are you a vore person? Or is it a fantasy about transcending death and being able to choose who you take with you?
Monsters often have a way of revealing what we want in utopia. The undead are often an expression of the desire to cheat death, the desire for heaven on earth. The alien are an expression of a desire for desirability, to be chosen by the highest powers that might ever be.
Erotic horror is often an enemy of self-publishing platforms. They despise the stuff. They don’t want violence caught up in their desire. But isn’t desire often violence? Not in asocial way, but it’s a wound on the ego. The ego bruises even when the flesh does not. The physical acts mimic violent ones. OnlyFans and JustForFans want nothing to do with horror. Smashwords and Amazon think erotica cannot have action or fear. In doing so, they misunderstand erotic horror, and they also misunderstand the nature of the erotic.
Alternatively, they do understand. They just don’t care. They ignore the realities of fantasy to embrace conservative, willful ignorance. I know which one I think is worse.
Family
Speaking of worse. I’d say if you asked someone the absolute worst fantasies someone could have, they would tell you: noncon, which we’ve already talked about; kids, which we are not going to talk about as that is rightfully censored in my opinion; death, which we’ll get to later; and family which is now. Horror stories about family relations are well laid throughout human history. Carveouts for abortion are often laid out as exemptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. For that second one, it almost seems a little redundant. Most acts of that kind are of the noncon variety. There is an inherent power imbalance to most family relations that remove an aspect of consent, especially when they cross age boundaries. Now sometimes this exemption is for the health of the child. Genes crossing like that can lead to birth defects that make life inviable except for a few torturous hours. Obviously that’s not always the case.
But at this point in time, we recognize it as a taboo that should not be crossed. At the same time, we seem to have a cultural fascination with it. Maybe that’s not a contradiction. The placement of “taboo” goes a long way to explaining a lot of fantasies on its own. To cross the bounds of human society, to be free in a way no one is allowed to, to destroy society, et cetera, et cetera.
As I mentioned in part one, this type of erotica is banned on Amazon, Patreon, and OnlyFans. It’s frowned on at Smashwords, and who knows what’s going on with JustForFans. Now of course, with erotica, it’s confusing as it involces no actual people in any actual form at actual point no matter the subject matter. Is there a legal reason to ban it? No. Is it because of credit card companies and people being insane? Well. We’ll get there. How about on film sites with actual people? Well they require consent documents from the performers. On OnlyFans for instance, they either have to have an account or you have to have written consent and ID ready to send their way. So besides actual family being illegal, they could theoretically do a background check or a few googles and see if you’re related. So they know the videos are just… pretend. Because erotic film is just film. Actors playing characters. So… why is it banned?
Cassandra Claire’s Mortal Instruments series is often derided by moralizing types who think it’s a sin on Claire part to have included a plotline that teased a family relationship between siblings. The main pair. It explores what it’s like to have forbidden desires and the conflict that causes you. It’s almost like the people playing Moral CinemaSins let their gut reactions remove their ability to actually engage with media. The mortal instruments is all about the forbidden, the profane, the sacred and its defilement. As ContraPoints might say, the romantic plotline of the Mortal Instruments turns out to be a disavowal. “The bad boy is bad so that the good girl gets to stay good. We can call this disavowal, the process of constructing fantasy situations where your desires are gratifies without having to assert or even having to acknowledge the desire.” Clary, the lead, I know such a subtle name choice, is in love with someone revealed to be her brother. Then, it turns out, he isn’t her brother. In that book, City of Glass, she gets a new love interest who kisses her whose kiss she doesn’t like. It turns out that Jace is not her brother but weird kissy evil assassin boy is. That’s the final form of the disavowel. “See, when it’s her actual family, her soul knows to be grossed out cuz it’s icky. Haha that wasn’t an integral part of the fantasy…”
Just as with noncon, there’s one series that comes to mind for a lot of people when they think of family in NSFW contexts. That’s Game of Thrones. It’s an aspect of the series that fascinates people. That trend continues with the other series set in the same world, House of the Dragon. Julia Naftulin went digging into why that is in an article for Business Insider. She comes to the conclusion that it’s because of the taboo nature. Taboo makes us curious. We peek through our fingers as someone crosses the boundaries. We want to see the wages of sin.
She links to a Mel Magazine article that says family is everywhere. As one actor puts it, “Everything you see now is ‘Mom’s got this, mom’s got that,’ aye, aye, aye, mom, mom, mom.” Milf has been popular as a general term the entire time I’ve been an adult. Think about gay slang, too. People are always “mothering.” Someone will turn up in a sickening sexy outfit and someone will go “She’s so mother for that.” Part of the explanation for that might be the numbers of people who actually enjoy family fantasy. The Mel Magazine article asserts that it’s about one fifth of the population. And it’s been a fascination for a long time, they point out, including the obvious: Oedipus.
ContraPoints posits that the Oedipus Complex isn’t necessarily real in a literal context but in a metaphorical context. In her video Envy, she says, “It’s not that you literally desire your mother right. That would be weird. It’s more that you desire an archetype, Mother.”
What is the “mother” archetype? In Twilight, Natalie says, “Why is the ocean inherently erotic/ Well, because of the rhythmic expansion-contraction cycles of her wave motion, yes of course. But also because she’s mother, because she’s life, she’s birth, she’s death. She’s the primal horror of horrors and the sweet womb of mother night.”
Family fantasy then can sometimes be said to be a desire for peace. A connection to creation. The Gods make more gods at the family reunion on Mount Olympus. The womb is birth. Aimed at mother, it’s going for the peace, returning to a state of protection. Aimed at offspring, it can be an embrace of creation. To be a god.
It can partially be fueled by nostalgia. If you view your days living with your family as “the good ol days,” something you can never get back but will always miss, this sort of fantasy can simply be indulging in nostalgia in a way even if you’d be grossed out thinking about your actual family. Most people interested in it don’t want anything to do with anyone related to them. But it symbolizes a time when life was less stressful. Less burdensome. More connected. More loved. Even if that isn’t the actual case, even if you’re romanticising the memory, that aspect is there for some people.
Think about shipping too. In the Supernatural fandom, there were really two popular ships. Destiel–Dean and Cas that ended with gay superhell–and Wincest, a relationship between Sam and Dean, the two brothers. Why was that so popular? Well, the two have chemistry together. They fight to the death for each other. They fight each other but it’s their familiar love that drives the show forward. They know deep facts about the other. They’re always there despite the bickering. And most characters on the show weren’t around often. People long for romance. They took a deep bond that was available. It provided comfort for the characters in their mind. At least, that’s my assumption.
This Refinery29 article suggests that the popularity in visual mediums might be because of the implied narrative. Especially as NSFW is increasingly found on places like OnlyFans where the action, I assume, rarely has the context of the story, perhaps because of the assumption that it’s documentary rather than narrative, perhaps the implied story of having pre-existing relationships provides more meaning and depth. You can imagine these people know and love each other. They’ve had conflict and binding moments that have led them to this moment of passion. That story fills a space many find lacking in the content they absorb.
Contrary to claims of taboo and depravity, the Refinery29 article even suggest for some people it provides a sense of safety in a world of NSFW art that’s filled with violence. As one person they quote says, “Family always feels safe.” And safety can be really important in erotic fantasy for some people.
But I think the ultimate reason for the fantasy in art is seen in Cassandra Claire’s novels. It represents a taboo, and that taboo lets you explore what it means to love. What it means to be denied. What is desire, when is it good, when is it not? How do we handle being given everything we’ve ever wanted, having it yanked away, and then dangled in our face? I think that’s a really interesting set of concepts to explore. Blanket banning the topic, as many self-publishing spaces do, seems like a shame.
Saltburn
So it seems like a lot of these things people are concerned about, the suggestion we’re being corrupted by their existence in media, that they might lead to dangerous actions in the real world… are removed from what desire actually is in the vast majority of cases. So the intent to censor has to either be based in that misunderstanding or in spite of understanding fantasy, in which case, it’s a lie meant to restrict the expression of others for less pure reasons. For reasons of crafting a restrictive, puritanical, conservative world view where repression and asecticism are prime.
Let’s relatively quickly go through some other fantasies and what their desires might actually be.
Bathroom stuff - There’s degradation and the taboo, sure, but it’s also an ultimate act of submission and dominance. It takes supreme trust. It can be an eroticization of recycling and rebirth, a form of nursing.
Blood - Remember that scene in Saltburn? She tries to warn him off almost like she thinks she’s unclean. Much like with the one before, that makes it an acceptance of someone in their filth. A statement that you are so desirable, that nothing can turn someone away. In the film, the character has incredibly low self-esteem. Barry’s character does this because he knows it plays into her ultimate desire: to be shown she is worthy of love even if she’s the horrid creature she views herself as. The vampire will still take her blood. Blood also represents life itself. Birth. Continuation. Its place in fantasy can be an embrace of life. A viewing of intimacy as the place where safety and love is found at the end of danger. A symbol of safety. Fantasizing that there can still come pleasure and joy when hurt.
Aquaria and Eureka - Drag queens dressed up as beefing babies on a fake talk show. The most RuPaul thing to ever exist. So the fantasy connected to that. What’s that about? Caretaking. That’s what it is. It isn’t, like people will claim, a desire for the young. It can be a desire for innocence and its corruption, sure. People love that. But really, isn’t it a want to take care of someone and a want to be taken care of? It’s dom-sub but with what’s stereotypically aftercare being almost the whole of the event. It’s a desire to be needed and a desire to be loved at your weakest. I suppose, though, it could be a way for an inclined individual to slightly sublimate their desire into a non-dangerous form.
Oh hey, there’s that word “sublimate” again.
Four - Sub-Sub-Sublimation
After all of that, I do have a question for you. Are fantasies of NSFW always even about… the fantasy? And I don’t mean that on “what if noncon fantasies are about the concept of safely exploring consent or allowing yourself to have desire.” I mean “What if fantasies are sometimes about tangential subject matter that may seem wholly unrelated?”
When I was writing my poetry collection butterfly snuff–out now on Amazon–I wrote a lot about my relationship with intercourse as a concept. One poem in the collection is called “snuff sublimate.” In it, I talk about mental health and how that interacts with erotica. Specifically
Vore.
Vorephilia is a fetish similar to cannibalism. In an NSFW context, it’s the sexualization of consumption. But it doesn’t have to be NSFW much like a lot of subject matter we consider “erotic.” For instance, my introduction to the media was through the anime Dragon Ball Z. One of the big bads is this bug lookin dude called Cell. Cell has a stinger-like tail that stabs people and sucks the nutrients out. Think of it similarly to the energy draining in the new manga Ankoko Delta but where the drained vanish. For particularly powerful beings, he doesn’t drain them. Instead, his tail opens up and swallows them whole like a python. Dragon Ball Z has a particular fascination with vore. The next major enemy is Buu, the bubblegum beast, and his main thing, too, is eating people, though he likes to turn them into cookies first.
The majority of vore content is not really related to the pop culture ideas of cannibalism. Cooking, chopping, gore, that’s it’s own thing, called hard vore, and the majority of people in those communities aren’t necessarily into that aspect, and they certainly aren’t into the actual idea of such violence and desecration.
Now we can go over this like we did other fantasies. There’s metaphorical connection to returning to the womb. You see a lot of fetal positions in film and art to signify a desire for safety or a signal of innocence. So it can be seen as a desire for surrender, for trust, for safety. A want to consume someone else can be a desire to be loved deeply, to possess someone in the safety that they will never leave you. On the other hand, it can be a way to process the idea that love and relationships will end. Consumption makes leaving into a metaphor for growth. Those you come across will make your life better even if they go away. You gain something. The opposite goes for those who fantasize about being the food - that your presence in someone’s life is nourishing. It can be a desire to give care.
Often it’s an expression of dom-sub relationships. A longing for power and control, and for submission and surrender. There’s a deep intimacy to the act. A person on the prey end of things might view predation as someone needing them so wholeheartedly, they have no option except consumption. A pred might view it as being able to give into their desires, to carry life in their stomach and have choice over whether to birth it or regain it.
You can even go deeper into the metaphor of it. I mentioned the Biblical idea of sexuality being expressions of power and place in the food chain, designating human and non-human through various acts. Vore is a literalization of that idea in some cases. But that’s not where it ends. If you’re subjected to your place on the food chain, does willingly placing yourself in a lower tier equate to complete surrender or is it elevation to the divine? Cannibalism is, of course, frowned upon in the Bible if for no other reason than the whole thou shall not kill thing. To consume another person is to turn them into the animal, similar to the powers of sexual dynamics. Only one person is allowed to lower themselves on the food chain. Who is that? Jesus Christ. Transubstantiaion equaling cannibalism is a stupid gotcha people attempt to pull on people who partake in the Eucharist that I don’t care to pretend is real. But. Let this be his flesh and this be his blood. To consume it provides holiness. To offer it is to be the ultimate in the divine. To lower oneself on the food chain is a privilege only God is allowed to possess. In that way, vore can be a chasing of the divine. It can be the existential search for meaning.
Did you roll your eyes? You probably should have. It’s an easy fetish to be grossed out by, to judge, to be cruel to the people who fantasize about it. But then again, people do that with every kink. The gut instinct, pun intended, is denigrate any sexual drive that we don’t share. Is that juvenile? For the most part.
But I want to use this as a jumping off point to ask if sometimes desire is not the sublimation of other emotions. In a Vice article by Richard Greenhill, one interviewed vorephile talks about how Little Red Riding Hood was the first time they were introduced to the broad concept of vore, and it terrified them. Consumption is a chief focal point of horror. You have Jaws, Teeth, zombie films, vampire media. We fear the ocean partially because we fear the giants of the water who might pop out and devour us. Black holes carry fascination because of they hunger and cannot be resisted nor sated.
For this person, that existential fear eventually crossed over into desire. But did it? What if fear was sublimated into desire?
That goes directly against the Fruedian concept of sublimation, that it’s the transformation of sexuality into acceptable actions or desires. But it’s not an exact opposite. Fear is not coded as acceptable. In our society, we make fun of people for being scared. We have our stiff upper lips. We call each other sissies and pussies for not be being brave enough. Scaredy cat is one of the first insults you learn as a child. To be scared is supposedly a bad thing. So in the case of this respondent, he took a socially unacceptable emotion and turned it into sexual expression. Later on in the article he talks about how he likes to imagine himself as prey but in interactions, he’s more comfortable presenting as the predator. If this is a fear sublimation, that makes sense, doesn’t it? The fear of the Big Bad Wolf is not being the wolf. It’s being Little Red. So on his own, he can safely fantasize about being in that position. But in interacting with someone else, he connects deeper with the predator. He says those characters are always more fleshed out. Theoretically, if to be on the prey side while playing with someone else puts him a lot closer to the fear position everything started with.
And that would be where the secondary sublimation, the Fruedian one, takes place. These people aren’t going out eating each other. They’re making art and erotica and they’re doing role-playing on Discord or something. That’s taking a sexual drive and sublimating it into art, in a way.
But fear isn’t the only thing that can be turned into desire. The title of my poetry collection, “butterfly snuff,” comes from the titles of two poems: The Midnight Butterfly and Snuff Sublimate. I’m not going to read out the whole thing here, but the premise is getting eaten by a giant. The line that makes this tangent matter is, “I have Kafka’d suicide into snuff sublimate.” I posit a theory about my personal relationship to poor mental health, suggesting that I have taken certain impulses and transformed them to the realm of fantasy desire. By doing that, there’s an outlet to express and explore those feelings while firmly shutting them out of reality. There probably isn’t going to be a handsome giant from Attack on Titan to toss me whole into their stomach. It’s a defense against acting on the worst impulses of my brain.
Combined together with the interview where fear morphs into desire, I wonder if Frued’s concept of sublimation is merely the second half of a process. What if there are a lot of feelings and desires that are unacceptable in one way of another that get transformed into desire which is easier to repress and deal with, and then that repressed desire, by its nature and our compulsion towards social compassion, sublimates into art and productivity, like Frued thinks.
If that idea does hold any weight, then what happens when we remove art? Can we add a third layer of sublimation or does it then start to loop back? Does desire become compulsion? Or does it continue to go backwards? If you sublimate fear into desire into art, if art no longer becomes an option, do you start to desire fear and danger? Or do you crash into overwhelming anxiety and paranoia?
Admittedly, this is an odd one to think about, so let’s explore… some other unsavory subjects.
Human Pets
Woof.
I’ve had that thing for over a year, never really used it, and oh my god, no matter what I’ve done to it, it smells like chemicals. Zero out of ten, do not recommend.
If you’re attuned to gay spaces, you may have noticed in recent years the proliferation of pup boys. It’s a subculture of BDSM. In a way, you could think of it as an equivalent to catgirls, though catboys are also a thing, and I love them. I talked about the phenomenon of nekomimi when I explored how the popular roleplaying adventure game Genshin Impact handles gender and sexuality. In it, I suggest that animalfication can serve as an exploration of gender and a signifier of queerness. Catboys in anime find their origin in BL, supposedly. The catboy manga is, of course, Loveless by Yun Koga. I haven’t read it since I was a child and I don’t remember much of it to be honest. As far as I know, it isn’t finished yet. But for the Genshin video, I read a paper by T.A. Noonan that does a deepdive onto how the nekomimi of it all is comparable to the Western concept of the playboy bunny. You take a symbol of innocence and you corrupt it. That plays into the desire for the taboo. Plenty of people are attracted to the idea of defilement, perhaps as a subconscious rebellion against religion or society. I have a somewhat young look to me for my age, so I’ve been subject to some incredibly creepy messages on Grindr. The amount of people who have accused me of being a child and still wanted to meet up is upsetting to think about. But. It can often be similar to the caretaking desire we discussed with the regression roleplay in the fantasy section. Perhaps it’s a nostalgia for innocence, an attempt to reclaim it.
But that’s not necessarily the sort of sublimation we’re talking about in this section.
Another BookTube creator I occasionally watch is Crow Caller, aka the author A.M. Blaushild. One of the first videos of Crow’s I saw is “That One YA Dystopia About Human Pets.” It’s a review of the YA series Perfected by Kate Jarvik Birch. And yes, it is about human pets. There’s not Maximum Ride gene splicing with animals thing going on either. These pets are pure human. I haven’t read the books so I’m not going to make any commentary on them, but based on Crow’s video and the Goodreads review, that premise seems to really get to people. There’s a lot of talk about how it isn’t realistic, about how there should be animalfication, but… That would ruin the fantasy injected into it, wouldn’t it? This is a pet play book. And pet play can often be an offshoot, albeit less instinctively horrifying, of erotic slavery.
That’s a somewhat popular fantasy out there. If you go searching for free NSFW games to play, there are lots of options with this as a central plot point or fact of worldbuilding. No, I’m not going to name them because most of the names would get you smacked by the YouTube gods.
On the most basic level, it’s a nonconsent fantasy taken to the extreme. Hypnosis, substance use, violence, bondage, posession, mind control. To some degree, those fantasies all revolve around disavowel. It’s a way of engaging in desire without any of the blame and shame that often unfortunately comes with desire. But that’s also too simple. We can’t throw that blanket on everyone who has those fantasies. Some people are curious about what it would be like to be a sex worker, and this fantasy allows them to explore that desire without, again, shame. You know, much with noncon fantasies sometimes being a way to safely explore past trauma, I do guarantee that there are a handful of people out there who engage in this fantasy, consciously or not, as a way to explore ancestral trauma. That’s a very sensitive subject to explore and not one for me to touch, really.
But what if it also exists as sublimation?
I want to suggest that human pets and similar phenomenon can be born from anxiety. Now if you’re familiar with pup play, that’s not going to come as a surprise to you. If you’re not familiar, this might help. Matt Baume writes in The Stranger, “If you’re having trouble understanding the appeal of puppy play, just imagine how amazing it would be if there were a form of group relaxation where you could empty your mind of all your cares, forget all of your responsibilities, lower all of your defenses, and bypass small talk forever. Now imagine that vigorous cuddling and praise are key components of this relaxation technique. And did I mention snacks? You get snacks. Awesome. Why aren’t we pupping right now?”
The article tells the story of a trans man who was wracked by anxiety but would go on to be a confident performer that could play with femininity and still be embraced and celebrated as a man in queer spaces. “Tugger discovered that his unease melted away when he was a poodle.”
Think about the stereotype of a golden retriever boyfriend. Sweet, loving himbos who might be a bit unaware of their size. They love freely and openly. They have a lot of affection. They feel safe. It doesn’t always seem like they have a lot going on. Importantly, they don’t seem consumed by the demons in their mind.
That’s the appeal of submission for a lot of submissives. You can order a million of me at Subway in that I’m an Italian herbs and cheese sub. I was talking about this with a fellow Italian sandwich who relayed a similar idea. Anxiety and stress push him nad his ambition in his day to day life. When in the hands of a dominant man, he doesn’t have to think about any of that. You don’t have to make choices. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to think. Just listen to my voice and do as I say. Good boy.
Is that necessarily sublimation? In a way. At its core, what is anxiety? Fear. Fear of what? Pain? Loss? If you zoom out far enough, doesn’t every fear come down to death? No, not even death. To the hole deep inside of you. Primordial Chaos. From nothing we were to nothing we shall become. The Big Crunch. Bounce. Bounce. Ball! Woof. If we fear the nothingness, what happens when we eroticize its embrace? To not have to think or make decisions is to be dead in a way, but while still living. Rather than dealing with anxiety, pup play is a form of rejection. Rejecting it can sometimes lead to healing. But it isn’t necessarily in and of itself. “I need a break. I need to stop. I need to cease. Can I please slip into a coma?” As someone who dealt with mental illness for many years, I still have shame when those thoughts and drives come to me. Submission is a way of avoiding the shame by instead turning those thoughts into a more acceptable form: submission. Even if, yes, a lot of people find it weird. Weird is different from shameful. And when you’re losing a battle to your own brain, that difference can be very important. Not to be dramatic, but it can be life and death.
MPreg
Okay, maybe that was to be dramatic in a way to set up this next section because I thought it was a somewhat funny segue.
Alex Garland’s Civil War is all over Twitter recently. People have been making fun of the map in it since the first teasers. There have been posters that are apparently AI. There are anti-voting leftists who tried dunking on Garland for making a film about civil war and then talking about the importance of voting because in their mind the revolution is coming and it will be a good thing when it is not coming and would not be a good thing. Before Civil War, though, there was Men. Doesn’t that sound like the plot of an accidentally problematic feminist book? “Before the civil war, there men. Now, there are only women.” Honestly? Intriguing enough premise.
I watched Men with a lot of high expectations because I adore Annihilation and I really enjoyed Ex Machina. The latter fits so well within my favorite type of horror movie and Annihilation is just… Oh, the visuals. The bear. The absurdist horror. I really like that film. I also really like Jessie Buckly as an actress. I’m thinking of ending things is my favorite film of all time, and she turns out a stunning performance in it. So, did I like Men? I mean, I love men, but the movie. The movie was… alright. But you can trust Garland to always serve you at least something great. And unhinged. Spoiler alert, but towards the end of the movie, the antagonist starts a series of MPreg birth scenes. The actor just keeps giving birth to himself in all of these grotesque and absolutely wonderful ways and it’s the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in a movie and oh my god I loved it, please inject that shit straight into my veins.
MPreg stands for male pregnancy. Is m-preg real? For some trans guys, yeah. Power to them and also I’m so sorry for the people who fetisihize you because of that. Most often you see it in texts between cis guys. Castiel mpreg. SasuNaru. Aether and his harem. It’s also a staple of M-M omegaverse works. Omega males can get pregnant. Sometimes that’s only by alphas and sometimes that’s by any guy who can do the depositing.
To answer why people are into MPreg, don’t we have to ask why people fantasize about pregnancy in the first place? There are a lot of people into the risk of pregnancy. Gay TikTok is filled with the joke of “We keep trying to have a baby.” A guy saying, “I’m going to get you pregnant,” can be… quite nice. Business Insider says that sort of desire is likely rooted in general transformations of fear and danger into the erotic. The risk of pregnancy, even if it isn’t possible, carries a sort of danger, a risk of a sort of death. That can be thrilling in a sort fear sublimation way. “I don’t want children, I don’t to be a parent, getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant would ruin my life.” People don’t like it when you talk like that. Transforming that into a kink let’s you explore that space in a safe-ish sort of way.
But what about pregnancy itself? Carrie Weisman explores why some men like pregnant women in that way in an article for Fatherly. It seems like some of it is sexism. A sort of “she’s doing what women are made for and she’s fertile” thing. There’s a physical aspect for how pregnancy can affect someone’s appearance in positive ways. There can also be a sort of anti-impregnation thing. There’s no risk there. She’s already carrying. The risk is gone. It could be about creation itself. This is an act of the divine. If it’s your child, there can be an ego ownership thing, pride. Continuation of your line and in a way a metaphorical extension into immortality. Defying death. Back to divinity. If it’s not your kid, it could be a dominance thing, cuckoldry and all of that.
So MPreg of course has all of that. There’s the extra layer of defying nature, or miracle working, of the divine in a new form. But how does mpreg work as sublimation? Well. Internalized homophobia. There’s conversations surrounding parents who have a moment of struggle when their child comes out as LGBT. They have to take a moment to accept the death of the life they imagine for their child to make room for the true and therefore better life they are going to have. Well, when you’re gay, you might also have to have that period of mourning, especially if it’s not a realization you have immediately. You could build up this idea in your mind of a heteronormative life. When you find out that’s not in the cards, what happens? What do you do with expectations that, perhaps, you as a gay man are meant to have a wife and child? MPreg lets you live in the fantasy where you can have everything. Your husband can be your wife. He or you can get pregnant with your child. Rather than give voice to and struggle through that barrier to your happiness, you can sublimate it into desire and thereby make it more acceptable.
Internalized bigotries can often show up in the erotic, as can the wounds of other people’s external bigotries. You sublimate your pains into desire because pleasure is better. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Yes, you probably do have to actually work through these things. Pushing them aside through sublimation won’t necessarily heal you. But it is better than letting it consume you.
And that’s part of why it’s absurd for certain NSFW platforms to bad the use of certain language. Take the f-slur. It is, in a way, reclaimed. There are people who use it amongst their friends and whatnot. There are assholes who pretend it’s fully reclaimed so they can call people they dislike the slur and use it as a slur. But then there are also the ones who eroticize it. It can be part of a desire for degradation which, yes, *can* be the flipside of an issue with self-esteem or a history of victimization. A gay person can eroticize homophobia in a way to reclaim and own their traumas. That is not a weaponization of or endorsement of bigotry. While that’s the only one I can speak on personally, I’m sure that’s true across the spectrum for any potential moment. Now you can be a gay guy who is uncomfortable with that. I’m personally uncomfortable with the f-slur existing outside of the bedroom. That’s the only place I personally find it acceptable. Many people don’t agree with me. But a blanket claim that it’s this horrid thing that needs censorship is incurious and, honestly, inconsiderate. The push for censorship will not save us. Art must be allowed. A misunderstanding of desire and fearmongering about its effects is not a valid reason for censorship.
Five - Come On, Credit Companies
A lot of the censorship is driven by credit card companies, not allowing payments using them for certain adult media. Suggest lobbying against this
So why do internet publishers have such censorship terms? Do they not understand what fiction is? Well in terms of filmed erotica, potentially. It does seem a lot of people have a problem understanding the fictionality and performance or adult film. Guys, it’s not real. They are doing the acts, but they are characters performing. They’re concerned with lighting and angles and visuals. Sounds and stories. There is a literal plot. It’s fiction. People who don’t understand that, well. I don’t want to be rude and say they’re dumb. But I do think there’s a lack of critical thinking there and that is not the responsibility of the artists. Ethical consensual creation is what counts on the end of creators. Audiences not engaging with the meta is a problem with the audience and sex education. It is not a valid reason for censorship. So what’s next?
What about brand association? I don’t buy that for OnlyFans and the like. But surely that’s a valid argument for Amazon, right? As a company, they do a lot. If there’s one thing the internet has made clear, it’s that people will harass and harass over the slightest slight. Heck, they’ll harass over a fever dream unrelated to reality. Though. Amazon has the Prime original edgy comic book tv show The Boys which features a shrinking dude who goes inside his boyfriend’s genitalia during a sex scene, you enter it with him, and then he accidentally returns to full size causing a very gory death. I quite like the boys. That scene was cool partially because of how unhinged it is. But. That would not be allowed in a self-published book on Amazon. If they care so much about association and complaints, The Boys wouldn’t be allowed to get away with what it does. And that would be a shame. I’ve seen independent films on Prime that turn out to be based around transphobic premises, and those stay up. And. I think they should stay up. The “men in a dress are scary” genre of horror is harmful. I don’t think anyone should make it. But I also, personally, don’t see an acceptable argument to ban those types of movies. So I don’t buy this argument for Amazon any more than I do for OnlyFans. It’s an excuse without any weight to it. Could it be that Amazon is anti-art and doesn’t understand erotica and doesn’t understand fiction and is anti-sex in general? It could be.
We’ve already established that a lot of censored desires people moralize against don’t much have anything to do with the frantic, misplaced concerns. We’ve talked about how Smashwords standards ban entire genres. Amazon and Smashwords genre classifications lead constantly to the miscategorization of books because they don’t understand genres. Erotica is not allowed to have extreme violence even if the violence is not erotic in any way. That is a nonsensical policy. There is no defense of it. It is lazy. It is pointless. It is a complete disregard for their duty to art and to their artists. It protects no one. It has no purpose.
So why does it exist?
Credit card companies.
There was a period of time when the content you’re allowed to publish on Smashwords that you can’t on Amazon was also banned on Smash. Why? Well, quite openly, because Paypal threatened them and other publishers. They told them to get rid of that content. Eventually, Paypal relented and Smashwords once more allowed that content. According to Rueters, Paypal didn’t make this decision on their own. Even their choice to make the original threats was cause by companies. According to Reuters, “PayPal told e-book distributors earlier this year that the original policy was in place partly because the banks and credit card companies it works with restrict such content.” In that article, around that time, Visa and Mastercard both clarified that they weren’t looking to take action against erotica. So explicitly about the written form. But the PayPal fiasco made clear: they might change their minds. Be careful.
But. PayPal is far from innocent in this ascetic nonsense. They backed down from erotica for the most part, but they still have puritanical attitudes towards art. When Gumroad decided to smash its creators with the ban hammer, who did TechCrunch point the finger at? PayPal and Stripe explicitly. Two payment processors.
PayPal’s policies don’t let you “sexually oriented digital goods or content delivered through a digital medium.” Now you might think that would logically include e-books. It doesn’t, because they hit a sleeping with that and rightfully recieved a mass of criticism that smacked them back into this century. PayPal might shrug and point to FOSTA as a reason, but that doesn’t work here. Why are you not allowed to buy an erotic comic, PayPal? Give me the legal reason. It’s not because of FOSTA because that’s not how that law works. There isn’t one. What is the moral reason? Is it a complete misunderstanding of art? Well they already through this with the Smashwords scandal. They’ve had it beaten into their heads. They know there is not a moral argument here either. So what is it? It’s a political one. It’s a pro-censorship, anti-sex, pro-asectic, anti-expression statement. I know, I am being quite pressed about this, but I don’t care. These companies have no business exerting the amount of control over the internet and art that they do.
Do you remember that brief period of time when OnlyFans was planning on getting rid of adult videos on its platform? Guess why they did that. “To comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers.” A TechCrunch article reporting on the proposed ban said, “At the organizational level, however, the companies may find it difficult to scale due to the trepidation of investors and banks, both of which tend to avoid the industry in general as a ‘vice,’ much the way cannibis and sex toy startups have faced challenges. Pushback from financial backers and payment processors can effectively sink an entire business model.”
Gumroad’s situation was blamed on PayPal and Stripe in that article. So let’s go after Stripe for a bit. Are they any different? Well, you can’t use Stripe for NSFW. Their FAQ reads, “For now, due to various reasons including requirements that apply to Stripe as a payment processor, requirements from our financial partners, and the potential risk exposure to Stripe, we can’t currently work with businesses that sell or offer adult content or services.” You may be thinking “Wow, the phrase ‘various reasons including’ sure is vague and is probably hiding some internal decisions based on bullshit.” And I’d bet good money on that, money Stripe wouldn’t let me use. Notice all also how they buck off the blame for their decision.
Wise is another payment type thing. You can get a debit card through it. Transfer money. International transfers. What do they say? Well, they don’t let you use them adult content that’s “visual” in nature, so I guess erotica is safe? I wouldn’t risk it though.
Cashapp doesn’t let you use it for NSFW of any sort. Venmo is owned by PayPal so guess what they do and don’t allow. Businesses aren’t allowed to use Apple Pay if they sell “pornography,” though what they mean by that isn’t specified so you can assume that’s any and all NSFW content.
MasterCard doesn’t let you use it for “depictions of non-consensual activity.” That’s going to include all non-con and dub-con fantasies. Do they understand adult content as art and that depiction is not endorsement and that fantasies are often about other things and that actors in adult content are acting? It doesn’t matter.
Cherie DeVille points out that Visa and MasterCard almost operate as a duopoly. Sure, Chase, AmericanExpress, and others exist. But Visa and MasterCard have the majority of the market. That means when they collectively say jump, you better jump if you want your money. They’re the ones you can blames for the ban on fake blood. Why? Are they afraid it’s real? Are they incapable of understanding that NSFW is not real? In that article, DeVille talks about how credit card companies and banks and payment processors don’t want you to full puppet someone. You can’t be a furry. They’ve historically been harsh on any form of bondage. They don’t like choking.
Wow, that sounds like all of the content that’s restricted. It sounds like a handful of businesses have decided they get to determine the limits of art and speech, which, in this case, are fictional and do not encourage harm. Depiction is not endorsement. They know this. Of course they know this. These companies aren’t run by people with an inability to think. They’re run by companies with agendas. So let’s talk about speech.
Six - Desire
Everyone gets annoyed when they get censored. They start crying about definitions and technicalities when other people get censored. Is there a difference between presenting harmful misinformation as fact versus fiction? Obviously yes. Pretending otherwise is operating under extreme bad faith and dishonesty.
Concerns over NSFW content are often used as a jumping off point to go after other people. You claim a social contagion, you claim non-sexual acts are erotic, and you claim the erotic is evil. You say gay people existing in art is the same thing as grooming children. You ban drag. You creep ever so slightly forward to gutting the internet, emptying the libraries, and throwing queer people in the closet.
I am a vociferous defender of art. I am against asceticism in all of its forms. Joy is more holy than self-denial.
If you consider yourself a proponent of free speech, a defender of art, a defender of queer people, someone who yearns for an open and free internet, someone who doesn’t want your life controlled by a handful of financial companies that pretend to know what is best for you while not caring one little bit about the actuality of their decisions, then it’s beyond time that we fix this problem. Write to Amazon. Write to Visa and MasterCard. Call up your representatives and senators. Ask why these companies are allowed such control over the lives of the American people.
There is a lot of content that I personally find repulsive. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to read it. I don’t want to think about it. The vast, vast majority of that revolting content is defensible free speech and expression. It is art. It is desire. It is the core of the human expression. It is exploration and identity. It is love and hate. It is life and death. It is religion. It is blasphemy. It is every philosophical question known to man.
These companies are doing all of us a disservice. My desire is that they stop. I hope you share that desire, and I hope it doesn’t stay a fatal fantasy.
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