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:

First I look for evidence that something’s wrong. Has there been a massive drop in traffic, in general, or from a particular source? If there has, that could mean our server’s down, or been hacked, or that Google’s lost control of the Googlebot again.

Next I look for evidence that something good has happened. Maybe there’s a big bump in search traffic from Russia, and that’s how I find out we got a nice mention in Pravda.

Last I look for things that don’t quite fit. An increase in visitors on uncommon search strings, or referrals from an unexpected page or site, or an increase in page views on some long dormant blog post. Some of our best marketing ideas have come from trolling through the depths of our keyword logs, or looking at a post that have gone 0 pages-views to 7 page-views overnight, and trying to figure out why. This morning brings two notable items.

The first is that Peggy’s blog post from yesterday, the one where she wrote having to explain E.D. to our daughter, seems to have provoked interest among parents. Deep in last night’s logs are a half-dozen visitors on the string [comstockfilms.com talking to my children about sex]

The other is this touching note we got from a customer:

After having bought both Ashley and Kisha and Matt & Khym I must write you this short message in praise of your work. Those films are further away from pornography than even the average PG 13 high-school comedy, not to mention adult pornography that I’ve either seen or heard of.

I have never, ever, seen physical love portrayed in such a loving way, regardless of genre, fictional or non-fictional.

When my young boys grow a little older and start getting bombarded with (and seeking out) the products of the porn industry, and if I find out about it, these films are what I will give them to watch: “This is what loving sex is about, this is what you can hope for in life. The rest has little to do with any of us.”

Again, thanks.

Google’s Banned Words and  Google No Fly-List really have me bent out of shape. I think the banned words and the No-Fly list together this quote from Matt Cutts Blog give a pretty good window into just what kind of site Google thinks ComstockFilms.com is, and what our place is in Google’s worldview:

“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.”

When I get asked what my films are about, my stock answer is that if I could put the answer to that into words, I wouldn’t have to be bothered with the time and expense of making films about sex and love, I could just write about them. But there are things about what it feels like to be in love and what it feels like to make love that I just can’t get at with words alone; at a certain point words fail and I have to take up the camera.

But I also have to write about these films. It’s a good way to work through (some) ideas without the expense of actually being in production, and it’s a necessary part of marketing and promoting the work. We need to make a living or we can’t make these films, so I have to write.

But in light of the discoveries of the last few days – what words Google keys off of, and the ways Google uses these words to filter their search result – it’s become increasingly clear that the way I write about these films is hurting us. That in using language that is as down-to-earth and real as the imagery is in our films, our home in the internet has ended up being categorized as one of the “hairy places on the internet” a “seedy back alley”, a “scuzzy” place that decent people will want to avoid.

I know in my heart that this in not true. I know in my heart that the father who sent us e-mail last night is right, and that the Googlebot is wrong. I know that Jenn P and Spaced Cowgirl are right, and the Googlebot is wrong.

The Googlebot is wrong because the Googlebot is a machine. A cunning machine no doubt, with its “advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories”, but a machine none the less. It’s crude approximation of context might be useful for parsing facts, but not for parsing feelings. The Googlebot can’t parse urgency, passion, desire, need. And it certainly can’t parse love.

No, the Googlebot can’t parse love, and what’s more, it doesn’t even try. It is calibrated to find hate and hurt and harm, and using its crude machine logic, its algorithm, it’s found me wanting. The Googlebot can’t see my films, so it’s looked at the language I use to talk about them, it’s found those words hateful, hurtful, harmful.

So I’m thinking about the words I use to talk about sex with my children vs the words I use to talk about sex with my beloved. And I’m thinking that maybe I’m going to have to start talking about my films as if I were talking to children instead of talking to grown-ups. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to start talking about these films as if I was talking to a doctor a medical problem instead of talking to a lover about desire.

That clinical, muted, euphemized view of sex seems at odds with the joyous carnality I try to convey in my films. It’s not how I talk about sex; not with my wife, not with my friends. To me, this dulled, detached language seems feels as hollow as pornography; each having little to do with my experience of love and sex. I chafe at the thought of self-censorship.

But making films is fraught with compromise. We bend so we do not break.