If you’re a reader of this blog, then you should also be a reader of Ell’s Wilfuldamage Blog.

Ell is the brassiest broad I know. She loves men, she love sex, she loves cocks and cunts and cum; loves all of it enough to be a little wounded by the shabbiness that depictions of sex are afforded.

Like me, she takes it personally, and why shouldn’t we?

If there are no good movies about how good and wholesome sex is, there’s an implication that caring too much about sex is silly, that thinking too much about sex is silly, and that wanting to make or to see films of good sex is silly too.

But hearing Ell’s very nice voice read these very nice words makes me feel a little less silly.

Ell’s review of Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story

Yesterday I was a panelist at Q-Me Con 2006 sitting along side New York gay porn impresario Michael Lucus. The panel was ably moderated by Lisa Vandever, Co-Founder & Director of the CineKink Film Festival. Among the topics that came up was the nebulous cloud of obscenity that hangs over anyone that makes and distributes sexually explicit films.

My response to that, both at the conference, and as a matter of how we conduct our business is that I make films that I believe in, both as an expression of the freedoms guaranteed me as a citizen of the republic, and as an artist; and that we will make them, sell them, and defend our right to do so; whether it’s in San Francisco, New York, or Nashville.

Michael’s response startled me. Said Michael:

“Well I’m not going to ship to Tennessee or Alabama if those people won’t even stand up for their rights.”

I have no problem with Michael or anyone else deciding that it’s not worth the risk to do business in places like Alabama or Tennessee, Western Pennsylvania, or any of the other places in this country where you can go to jail for embarrassing the angels. My favorite sex retailers have banned zipcodes built into their shipping software. It’s the wise and prudent thing for a business to do.

But please don’t turn around and tell us that you won’t ship to dicey zipcodes because the session drummer in Nashville won’t stand up for his rights, or the health clinic physician in Alabama won’t stand up for his rights, or the teacher in Western PA won’t stand up for his rights.

No one, and certainly not me, is accusing Michael of being a coward or a traitor for making the decision not to invite unwanted attention to his company. Let’s not accuse the gay men who live in Tennessee or Alabama or whereever else it’s not as easy to be a gay man as it is in New York City – and make whatever compromises they need to – of being cowards either.

I console myself with music. Notable in the last few days:

THAT AIN’T NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY
Helen Reddy

READY FOR LOVE
Bad Company

ANYTHING GOES
Cole Porter

THE LADY IS A TRAMP
Rogers and Hart

RUSSIAN SAILORS DANCE (from The Red Poppy)
Reinhold Gliere

What’s on your play list these days.

I’m not sure if I should thank my friend Ell (of Wilful Damage fame) for pointing me to this inane essay from Peggy Noonan, but she did it, and the damage (wilful or otherwise) is done.

Noonan’s upset because she got felt up going through airport security. Not by a man, but by a woman; a woman doing the thankless job of trying to make a sure an radical chechen woman doesn’t sneak a bomb onto a plane in her bra while impatient bos/wash corridor movers and shakers jet from New York to DC to Boston and back again. (In fact, she hysterically compares the experience to second degree rape, an insult to the woman doing the thankless task of insuring her safety, and rape victims everywhere.)

Noonan thinks this brusk treatment is a symptom of an increasingly indecorous society, one that features prime time ads for viagra and yeast treatments, and one that offends her delicate, lady-like sensibilitites. But worse than offending Noonan, she’s also concludes it “embarrasses the angels”. Writes Noonan:

“You are embarrassing the angels.” This is what I intend to say for the next 40 days whenever I see someone who is hurting the culture, hurting human dignity, denying the stature of a human being. I mean to say it with belief, with an eye to instruction, but also pointedly, uncompromisingly. As a lady would. All invited to join in.

I’d like to invite Noonan to shut her self-righteous, sanctimonious piehole.

Since when does being a political writer and commentator make anyone an expert on what does or does not embarrass the angels?

I had always presumed that when I get my wings I would flit about, unconcerned with mundane terrestrial matters – like whether or not the transcontinental flight I’ll be taking next week (with my angelic little daughters) will be blown out of the sky, or turned into a guided missle. To never again be worried or embarrassed or otherwise concerened about such things, that’s my idea of heaven. If you know better, Ms. Noonan, I’ll thank you to keep it to yourself.

(The brassiest broad I know tells me it’s the ladylike thing to do.)

I was immediately attracted to the name “Real Adult Sex”; after all, that’s what we’re trying to do here at Comstock Films, depict adult enjoying sex the way it happens in our real adult world, rather than the bizarre adolescent fantasies of aspiration and acquisition that are the stock and trade of pornography.

Having long labored in pursuit of this vision of a new way that sex and the moving image might merge, the sex-blog culture is very encouraging. More and more everyday people have the opportunity, through sex blogs, to see and share sex as they experience it in their own lives, to see and share how sex really is, and to learn that pornography’s rather juvenile concept of sexuality (that they already know doesn’t represent their own sex lives) doesn’t represent the sex lives of the rest of the world either.

Ten years ago this level of honest exchange was risky at best; unless you live in San Francisco talking about how much you like eating out your husband’s asshole is generally not cocktail party conversation. Swingers and other “alternative” types might have chance to find out what “regular” folks were up to, but your average suburban soccermom or lawn-mowing, Weber Kettle BBQ’ing dad had to make do with what they read in Redbook or Esquire - a rather homogenized and sanitized version of what’s going on in America’s bedrooms to say the least!

Not surprisingly it was “alternative folks” who first seized upon the power of the internet to communicate with each other. Some of you might even remember places like Lifestyle.com or the EnglishPlace.com BBS. Okay fine, sex freaks and afficianados chatting up and hooking up. Then there was the sudden rise (and almost instant commercialization) of the real amateur exhibitionist Web site (from which comes 53% of the inspiration for Comstock Films). But it is the sex blog that finally brings sex back where and how most of us experience it: in private, with the same person we slept with last night, with the same person we expect (hope?) to sleep with for the rest of our lives.

Bloggers like El or HousewyfeWithBenefits aren’t writing about the kind of sex they wish they could have – they’re writing about the sex they do have, they’re writing about sex the way it happens in real life between real people. They’re not looking to promote themselves or their work (like yours truly), they’re not looking to justify or explain their unusual sex practices, they write simply to celebrate that they like to fuck, that they are adults lustily enjoying one of the great pleasures of being an adult.

When you think about it, these women’s blogs are remarkably subversive, destablizing even. We have a sense of how to respond to a sex-radical’s blog, “Yes, you’re a sex-radical. And even if I don’t quite get it, I acknowledge that you have a right to be yourself and to enjoy whatever sort of consentual relations you want, with as many other adults as you want. It’s (for the time being) a free country.”

Fine. Good. Our openminded and affirming world stays intact. But what do you say when a woman simply tells you ” No, I’m not a porn star or a sexworker; I’m not a radical or an activist. But I do have secret that I want to share with you, and that secret is I can’t get enough of my husband’s cock, I can’t get enough of him fucking me. And I want you to know this about me.” That sort of fucks up the world, doesn’t it? That’s not porn spinning half-baked fantasies about silicone-enhanced blondes and red sports cars, and it’s not Cosmo giving you “5 Killer Moves You Can Try Tonight!”. It’s just real people, real life, and really good sex. And I don’t think it gets any hotter (or more wholesome) that that!

-T.C.