“Sergei didn’t know HTML, and he really wasn’t all that interested in learning. What he was really passionate about doing was building a search engine, was building a product that worked. And so he put together the homepage as a way to get the service up and running as quickly as possible. In many ways the Google homepage that you see today – in some respects you could claim that it was almost a happy byproduct of laziness on his part.” – Jen Fitzpatrick, Engineering Director, from her presentation, “The Science and Art of the User Experience at Google.”

The title of this blog is “The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films”. The reason I chose this title is because after 20 years of being a commercial artist, I’ve come to believe you can’t understand why someone makes the art the make without understanding the environment in which they do their art-making.

The writing on this blog has tried explain the commercial, legal and social environment within which erotic films are made as a way of trying to explain why most films dealing with explicit erotic subject matter have such easily identified characteristics, both technically and in their thematic approach to the material.

I’ve written about the tools that are used.  I’ve written about the underlying economics. I’ve written about the legal and quasi-legal limitations on distribution. I’ve written about the misinformation that is endlessly promulgated when mainstream media outlets try to sex-up their pages with porn stories.

When I uncovered the shocking disparity between how Google’s [SafeSearch] filter treat [penis] vs how it treats [clitoris] and words that it finds problematic has made me curious about environment under which the SafeSearch filter was create. How was it that Google so cavalierly discard [clitoris]? How is it that this has gone addressed? How do the attitudes about sexuality that can be inferred though such an omission effect other aspects of Google business operation?

Viewed through that lens, this presentation from Jen Fitzpatrick, an Engineering Director at Google. is instructive.

The Science and Art of User Experience at Google

I think it’s also useful to reread this passage from Matt Cutts blog. Matt Cutts is the Google engineer who wrote SafeSearch, and now heads Google webspam team:

“As the head of Google’s webspam team, I prowl around some pretty hairy places on the internet. Almost every day I encounter hacked pages, malware, porn, and generally scuzzy pages. The security model in Google Chrome is much stronger than most other browsers I’ve used. I’ve surfed through hundreds of seedy back alleys of the Internet over the last several months, and Google Chrome has safely kept me from being infected or affected by the junky web pages I encounter.” (emphasis mine)

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Google is some sort of amazingly sophisticated company, filled with the most amazing people that ever worked in information technology. Maybe that’s true. I’ve met a few Googlers, and they’ve generally struck me as above average in intellect and sophistication.

But that doesn’t change the fact that is that Google is a company filled with people. Google’s search algorithms are written by people. “SearchSearch” was written by people. Google’s webspam identification and suppression tactics are written by people. People with their own quirks, blind spots, and judgements about what’s important and what’s a distraction.

It’s also important to remember that quirky, idiosyncratic decisions can have long lasting effects. In his efforts to find a reason not to ban James Joyce Ulysses, Justice Woolsey used the phrase “intent to arouse.” 80 years later, this “intent to arouse” is still market as the dividing ling between “legitimate artistic inquiry” and pandering; between expression that must be protected and work that must be suppressed.

This is not a theoretical concern. We’ve had our DVDs seized by customs officials in Germany. We’ve had our DVDs removed from store shelves in Australia. Here in the US we’ve had retailers decide they can’t carry our work for fear of prosecution. Film festivals that have tried to screen our films have been threatened with fines and their programers threatened with jail time. In one instance police actually raided a film festival where “Ashley and Kisha” was schedule to play to prevent the film from being screened.

These are the realities of the world in which we make our films; and when Google excises [clitoris] from their SafeSearch returns – whether out of prudery, expediency, ignorance or laziness – they reenforce these realities. When Google classes explicit sexuality as just another variety of internet malware, they reenforce these realities.

Google is a private company with no obligation free speech, and no obligation to strive for “fairness” or “equality” in their search returns; and they are certainly under no obligation to advocate for my vision of sexual equality and liberty.

But whether they like it or not, Google has become a powerful force for how our culture takes shape in this new searchable age. Where will Google’s influence be most keenly felt? Along the margins; at the edge of new ideas and minority opinions, arenas that require nuanced judgements, and a gentle hand.

So far, where sex is concerned, Google has failed. To date, Google’s approach to [clitoris] and other erotic words, and erotic website, has been, at best, thoughtless and clumsy.

Because of the shame and secrecy that surrounding sexuality, it’s an area of expression that attracts more than it’s share of asocial and antisocial entities. The task that Google faces separating bad actors from honest participants in the marketplace of ideas in undoubtably challenging.

But Googles current approach favors coded language and pranksterism over candor. It grants undue deference to already established voices, while disproportionately penalizing those who are already marginalized.

In Google quest to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” Google treats sexual information and expression as acceptable losses in it’s mission to achieve it’s goal. The zero “safe” returns result for [clitoris], [nude], [erotic], etc. is accepted as collateral damage in Google’s ongoing war on spam, and that war on spam has (inadvertently, I hope) become a war on sex.

Can Google do better? Maybe. Will they try? I hope so.

Jezebel picked the Google [penis] v [clitoris] story this morning, and maybe, must maybe it’s going back to Google. Says commenter YankeePioneer:

“It’s about mannerisms and keywords that people say, that kind of imply that they’re interested, but they don’t want everyone to know. That’s a lot of what I was getting on campus. But I didn’t want that. I wanted somebody that was going to be just as out there as me.” – Ashley, from “Ashley and Kisha: Finding the Right Fit.

“It can be hard not to feel ashamed when nearly everywhere you turn, if you want to reap the benefits of particpating in the larger culture, you’re told you have to act like you are ashamed; substituting coded language and knowing looks for real ideas and authentic emotions.” – Tony Comstock, from “Google Fails When Language Fails, Part 4“

A couple years ago we entered into a non-exclusive distribution arrangement with a fairly well-know company that specializes in placing sexually explicit films in mainstream markets. This is the blurb they wrote for Matt and Khym: Better than Ever:

“This adult instructional guide helps married couples rejuvenate their sex lives through the erotic experiences of real-life couple Matt and Khym, who explain and then demonstrate explicit techniques for becoming better lovers.”

I was horrified.

If watching “Matt and Khym” helps rejuvenate a couple’s sex life, I think that’s great. But the above description runs against everything these movies stand for; the dissembling “educational” language; the promises that somehow the secrets to a better sex life (and a better marriage) have been magically encoded in the DVD; the idea that medicalized, educational sexuality is okay, but sexuality for the sake of its own beauty is not.

We severed our ties with the distributor and set about the months long work of tracking down and eliminating this description where ever we could find it.

But if you know where to look you can still find it. Not anywhere people actually shop for our films, but it’s still out there.

And it still bothers me.

Having heard what makes their relationship special in episodes 1 and 2, in episode 3 we get a peek at what makes Marie and Jack’s lovemaking special. The focus of this segment is cunnilingus; from both Jack and Marie’s point of view! Subscribe to the Comstock Films Video Podcast here:

http://feeds.comstockfilms.com/ComstockFilmsVideoPodcast

“As soon as you deal with [sex] explicitly, you have to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class” – C.S. Lewis

“You don’t know shit from good chocolate, babies.” – Joe Dick

As mentioned previously, I had been working on a post tentatively entitled “Does the Googlebot have Asperger’s Syndrome?” but I realize now that the analogy is too generous. People with Asperger’s see and understand the world differently from “normal” people, but I’ve never read anything about Asperger’s that suggests that Aspies are especially lazy or malfeasant.

The way that Google’s SafeSearch filter handles returns for [penis] vs. the way it handles them for [clitoris] isn’t a product of seeing things differently. It’s just plain lazy. Somewhere inside of Google, an engineer was tasked with filtering “adult” sites from returning under “strict filtering” searches. Somehow he (I’m going to have to assume this engineer is a man,) when confronted with the vagaries English language, was able to write an algorithm that allowed 30 million “safe” returns for [penis]. But when faced with the same problem for [clitoris] he found it easier to simply put clitoris on a list of banned words.

That’s not Aspie-ish, that’s just lazy and sexiest.

[Erotic] was too much trouble for him, so it got banned too. [Nude] and [naked] were too much trouble, so they were out. His algorithm couldn’t tell the difference between a nursery rhyme rooster and a raging hard-on, so [cock] got banned. Is this webpage talking about kitty-cats or cunts? His algorithm couldn’t tell, so [pussy] went on to the list, along with [bastard] and [anus]. For some reason his algorithm could find 4.7 million “safe” returns for [glans] and 2.5 million “safe” returns for [testicle], but not a single “safe” return for [fellatio] or [cunnilingus], so they went on the list as well.

That’s not the product of a odd blind spot to social interaction, that’s just lazy and ass-covering; not to mention laughable coming from a company that touts its “advance proprietary technology.”  (I’ll leave it to someone else to decide whether or not it’s [evil].)

A couple of days ago Seth Finklestein wrote a post linking to my “Taking the Real Sex out of [Real Sex] Searches” post. This morning Seth’s post is page two on the “do not filter my results’ search for [real sex], while my original post is somewhere around page 50. If I write about sex, the algorithm says it’s irrelevant, but if Seth writes about me writing about sex, it’s relevant. The algorithm isn’t just “advanced proprietary technology”, it’s post-modern too!

People ask, “Why are films that have explicit sex so badly made? Why is the lighting bad? Why are stories inane? Why the focus on misogynistic circus-sex, rendered in the most ham-fisted way? Why aren’t there films that treat audiences better? Why aren’t there films that treat sex better? Why does everything have to be so crude, tasteless, and poorly made?”

The answer is that these films are made in a ghetto, a ghetto walled in by the legal, business, and social constraints that are put on films, and on the people who make them. Anyone who makes films or video that deal with sexuality in an explicit way must do so mindful of with these constraints. Our own films are no different.

Our efforts have been finely calibrated against these constraints, and I’d like to think that we’ve had some success. Our films have played in venues not generally receptive to films that celebrate erotic pleasure. But more importantly, these films have touched people’s hearts, opened people’s eyes, and even changed people’s minds about what is possible in the collision of sex and the moving image.

But even as our films have received recognition from an ever more diverse range of sources – film festivals, universities, newspapers and magazines – revenues from our website have steadily fallen. What once was the mainstay of our operation is now a secondary revenue stream. Our diminished visibility on Google across a wide range of search strings has cut our traffic substantially, with a corresponding decrease in sales on our website.

Before this week I had seen this as a quirk, a fluke in Google’s algorithm, and as something that there might be some hope of addressing. I took Google at its word, that honesty would, in the end, win out. I saw it as a temporary set back, and thought that if I kept making my films as best I could, and writing about them honestly, that they would we would find our rightful place in the Googleverse. That maybe getting ranked at page 50 — back behind the spammers, and the archane agency documents, and the pedophilic trolling, back behind the posts linking to our posts — that maybe that was all just an accident.

The discoveries of the last week — the banned words like [clitoris] and [nude], the autofill for [stormfront] but not for [comstock films], [real sex] returns scrubbed clean of virtually all results with actual real sex — have forced me and Peggy to re-evaluate.

If this is the new reality, with a filtered “Googlenet” in place of the internet that incubated and made it possible for us to do what we do, then there’s little hope of re-capturing our lost website revenues, and that raises questions about what’s next.  Google’s actively suppression of sexual content changes the calculus. It devalues honesty and frankness in favor of coded language and pranksterism, and in so doing, it makes it hard for us to make a living making the films we make.

So we’re looking to re-cast ComstockFilms.com to make it “safe”. To that end we’re looking at Christianist anti-sex sites and “women’s” sites that use terms like “vajayjay“.

But in all candor, I find the prospect of this incredibly depressing.

15 years ago I found Blowfish.com and thought: Ah ha, this is it! This is what I’ve been looking for. A place where sex isn’t stupid, or cutesy, or hopelessly wrapped up in phony medical jargon or academic pretense. A place where it didn’t matter if you were a man or a women, gay or straight. Blowfish was a place that was talking about sex they way I was thinking about it.

15 years later I’m remembering what it was like to work outside of the sex ghetto. I’m remembering that when I made films about death and disaster, when I made my living off of other people’s dying, no one ever tried to silence me. No one ever said you can’t show that starving child, or that dying man, or that pile of corpses. I’m remembering that no one was ever made to feel ashamed for watching or enjoying my films.

No, they told me my films were honest; and that my honesty is what let me find the beauty and dignity in the midst of squalor and misery. They told me I was courageous to take so much sorrow into my heart and and give back love.

I’ve tried to bring that to the films I make about love and sex. But it doesn’t look like there’s any place for my sort honesty in the Googleverse – not even with all of their advanced proprietary technology. Like  [nude], or [clitoris], it’s just too hard. Easier just to sweep us off into a little corner of the Googleverse, a corner labeled “unsafe”.

Unsafe.

Hello and welcome Susie Bright visitors. The post she meant to link to is here: Dragged Google’s Sex Ghetto

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Another entry for the Google’s Banned Words list: Clitoris.

That’s right. Put your Google SafeSearch filter on “strict filtering” and search [clitoris]. Zero returns.

Now try a Google SafeSearch “strict filtering” search for [penis]. 33,000,000 returns.

Googles says it’s SafeSearch filtering system uses an “advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories.” This wonderous technology, this algorithm is able to find 33 million “safe” returns for [penis], but not a single “safe” return for [clitoris].

Not a single return.

(Google’s “strict filtering” offers over 74,000 SafeSearch results for [vajayjay])

No knock on Oprah intended. I’m just thinking about what it’s going to be like writing about my films using “vajayjay” and “hoohoo” instead of “cunt” and “pussy”.

“As soon as you deal with [sex] explicitly, you have to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.” – C.S Lewis

Just a quick post to made a note of a few things.

Since last Friday, I have not heard from Matt Cutts or anyone else at Google about the quirks that I and others have noticed in how the Google Suggest search box autofill behaves. But in his note he did say he would pass the info along to the Google Suggest team, so hopefully he or someone else at Google will let us know what’s going on.

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On most days my morning routine goes something like this: The alarm goes off about 6:30. I wonder down the hall toward the kitchen. Along the way I knock on Older Daughter’s door and call, “It’s time to wake up.” Once in the kitchen I put water on to boil and wake up my laptop. The next hour is spent multitasking between making coffee for me and Peggy, making breakfast for our girls, making lunch for Older Daughter, and checking overnight e-mail and the previous day’s stats for our website.

The triage for checking stats goes something like this:

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