Deli Spoon, my home away from home in Marigot, SXM

My family has flown back home, which leaves me free to hang out at the cafe, nursing a drink for hours french-style and checking out what’s new on the internet.

And what do I get for my trouble? Yesterday I saw that someone is marketing vulva dye, which promises to “restore women’s sexual confidence” by pinking up their pussies. Naturally this dye is available in a variety of colors with names reminiscent of famous porn stars.

I can’t quite figure out why this bothers me so much. After all, I rather like lipstick and other affectations and artifices of femininity, so why should pussy make-up get my panties in a bunch?

But as I look to my draft of unfinished essays, I see there’s a rather long one about Betty Dodson, her online “this is what vulvas actually look like project” and the effect of 2257 on people’s ability to express themselves anonymously.

The right and ability to dissent anonymously is fundamental. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was published anonymously. The Federalist Papers were publish anonymously.

But if Betty can’t put up annonymously offered (but clearly “of age”) pictures of women’s vulvas without running afoul of the law, that means that the images that most people see most of the time are going to be commercially produced images; which for a variety of reasons are going to fall into a very narrow range. So while everyone knows perfectly well what the lips on a woman’s face look like sans cosmetics or cosmetic surgery, our vision of what the lips between a woman’s legs should and do look like is informed by images that are fantastically constrained by the laws and economics that dictate what can and cannot have free, unfettered access to the market.

I’ve explored some of these issues over at TheIntentToArouse.com, but they might best be summed up by the OFLC’s dictum that if a photograph of a woman shows “excessive genital detail” then a magazine with such photos must be wrapped in plastic and kept behind the counter.

Of course this isn’t good for sales, so people who want to make money in Australia selling magazines with pictures of sexy ladies photoshop “excessive genital detail” out of their magazines; and leave trading on “excessive genital detail” to those who are satisfied with the more meager returns of being relegated to the ‘porn ghetto’.

And then the whole thing feeds on itself. Making beautiful images of vulvas is like making beautiful images of food; whether it’s a big bowl of steamed fruti di mar, or a vulva, wet and plump and in full bloom, rendering a photograph that does justice to the subject is hard work; and if you don’t pull it off, the photo stands a good chance of actually look revolting.

But while there’s good money to be made in food photography (I used to do a little, and 20 years ago I assisted one of the best food photographers in New York) the returns on specializing in “excessive genital detail” are meager.

Which turns the whole thing further back on itself. What does a beautiful sexy pussy look like? Trim and pink. The OFLC says so. The DA in Utah says so. And so does any company with a “no pornography” clause in their TOS. And no matter what Alison Croggon thinks, or what Violet Blue thinks, is where the rubber hits the road on the Art vs. Porn or Erotic vs. Porn question. Period. Paragraph. Page.

—

Meanwhile, one of the reasons I decided to make this trip was to try and figure out what’s next for me. My “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex” films are produced with keen awareness of what the limits of the market are, which has meant either transcending the limits in cunning ways (shooting film for example) or accepting those limits in cunning ways (for example, developing a format that works without music.)

But in a very similar way to how shooting on consumer photo/video gear has a profound impact on the sort of images you can make, or like making the desciiion whether or not to show “excessive genital detail” has a profound impact on where and how you can market your films (thereby limiting the the sorts of films you can make) the decsssion to “go naked” (sans music) influences creative decssions in a fundemental way.

—

Let’s loop it out a little more.

One of the reasons I moved from making films like A Generation of Hope or Fair Winds/Uncertain Future or Sudden Shock to making a full-time commitment to my erotic work was because taking on and trading other people’s pain was simply taking too big a toll on my mental health and even my physical health. Back in 2003,  when I got back from Kenya I had terrible stomach problems, and figured it was a bug I picked up in the bush.

Nope.

Turns out it was just stress. The stress of wallowing in other people’s misery and trying to make good films and a good living out of it. Ironically, I realized this because shortly after I got back we went on a family vacation to the Canadian Maritimes and ended up in Peggy’s Cove on the 5th anniversary of the Swiss Air Crash, and CBC Radio had a radio-doc on the lasting effects of the crash on the community, including (wait for it) a big up tick in “unexplained” stomach problems. (It all came clear as our overloaded Volvo wagon hit yet another chuckhole in Nova Scotia’s not so well maintained roads, pressing the lap-belt against my stress-cramped guts.)

And the feeling I get when I read about labiaplasty and vulva dye is about the same. My stomach tightens. I lose my appetite and I want to make somebody pay.

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This is no way to live a life. Nor is missing fine surf or a day of good clamming (fruti de mar indeed!) because Google has over-tweeked their anti-spam algorythms and dissapeared your company.

Neither is making films without music anyway to make films. Before “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex” my productions were known (in my little NGO world) for using music well.

I could do this because when you have $25K, $50K, $150K to make a film that might only be 5 or 10 minutes long, you have the money to pay real composers and real musicians to make real music. I could do this because when you make films about people showing that even under the most terrible conditions, our better nature will out, you can negotiate good rates to use well-known musics

So where as I once got rights for 8 different Ennio Morricone tracks from The Mission for only $4,000; pennies on the dollar for the “going rate,” I had zero success trying to get rights to use even small portions of any of the artists that Damon and Hunter referenced in telling the story of how they fell in love. (I thought it might be nice over the closing credits.)

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So anyway, I promised tools, right?

Previously on this blog I’ve gone on (at some considerable length) that the tools used to make sexual images have a huge effect on what we think sex looks like. I see this as hand in glove with the way “excessive genital detail” and “no pornography” TOS, and obscenity laws effect what we see. (In fact, the second, yet to be written half of TheIntentToArouse.com is concerned with film theory and filmcraft, and how differently most of the explicit erotic images we see are made and in turn how they effect us differently.)

One of the  things I promised myself I would do with my free time down South was dig into digital music making tools. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth, I was a promising music theory  and composition student. But I didn’t (and still don’t) have keyboard skills, an that was a huge handicap in studying traditional four-part harmony based composition and arranging.

But right about the time I was deciding that photography was a better path for me, the very first of the Macintosh/MIDI based music composition, arrangement and transcription tools were coming online. I’ve always wondered how things might have been different if those tools had been available to me just a little sooner.

Which is all a long winded way of saying I’ve been fooling around with GarageBand, and in sort of the same way that a Canon Elf will make all your erotic photographs look more or less like IShotMyself.com, GarageBand is making everything I try to do come out more or less like Trent Reznor:

NtheSludgeWithU.m4a

Anyway, tools, sounds, images and dissent. A friend who masters records for artist like Carlos Santa and Aretha Franklin says these days people prefer the sound of compressed audio; that since the advent of the iPod, people think that’s the way music is supposed to sound and they don’t like it as much when they hear uncompressed versions of the same song.

I guess whether that’s more or less panty-twisting than designer-vagina labiaplasty and cunt-blush depends on what you care about; and I guess it’s just my bad luck that I care about both…

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.