Have you every noticed that talking/debating about porn is (mostly) more engaging than actually watching it?

Anyway, Ms. Naughty, just back from bushwalking and wine-guzzling has added her two cents to the porn/blowjob/feminism debate in a post entitled Boring Blowjobs and Feminist Facials. This is the part that jumped out at me:

“Can a facial ever be “feminist”? My answer is yes. As always, context is everything.”

I agree. Context is everything. I’d even go as far as saying context is the only thing. Porn is often criticized for being fake and/or lacking context, but this is utterly untrue.

Porn is vividly real and hypercontextual. The very essence of photographic pornography is the depiction of actual sex, and it doesn’t get more “real” than two people actually fucking.

The problem is that (overwhelmingly) the reality depicted and the context in which it’s placed is utterly unappealing if not downright offensive. But when it comes to photographic images of sex, like the words “porn” and “feminism”, “reality” and “context” are at least as slippery.

Is “reality” the degree to which the viewer becomes engrossed in the narrative conceit of the film, or does “reality” extend to how well the narrative conceit jibes with the particulars of the production?

Similarly, is context limited to the moment when the house lights go down to the final fade to back? Or does it include the director’s Q&A after, or the Behind-The-Scene on the DVD? Or how about an e-mail exchange between the film’s director and a disappointed viewer? This is a post I made back in September of 2005 entitled Real Porn (No, Really):

Two days ago I received a note from a fellow who, although he liked many things about Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax, was rather disappointed that both love scenes ended with external ejaculation. Here’s a bit from his note (used by permission):

These videos have what I have been looking for that is missing from the usual “porn” videos with one exception. You claim that these represent real sex but in both cases the man pulled out prior to cuming and we were shown proof that he came… Maybe these couples actually have sex in this way but I doubt it. If they do I suggest using some couples who do not as well. This was a particular issue in the Xana & Dax video where he spent some time masturbating himself to climax. Why miss out on the wonderful sensations of being in your woman before cuming unless you are not able to do so for some reason. That, to a large extent, ruined the movie for me.

Also, my wife does not often watch explicit videos because she misses the loving relationship aspect of sex that makes it good for her. There is much in these movies that I suspect she would enjoy but I am sure she would be put off by this as well. She has made similar comments about other explicit videos.

He was also concerned that this might also be the case in Matt & Khym, which he had on pre-order. I wrote back:

Dear XXX,Thank you for your thoughtful e-mail. It very succinctly addresses some of the vagaries of shooting sex scenes of people having unscripted and and undirected sex. With your permission I’d very much like to use your letter in an upcoming blog post. FYI, Matt and Khym’s love scene ends with Matt ejaculating inside of Khym. No particular effort is made to “prove” that he ejaculated, but afterwards Khym does reach down to catch a little on her finger and taste it.

Yours,
Tony Comstock

This seemed to (mostly) satisfy his concerns:

From your response I take it that Xana & Dax and Marie & Jack choose to handle the men’s ejaculation without any direction or suggestions. If so I wonder if that is how they normally have sex or if they did it that way because they thought that it might be expected, maybe from watching “normal porn”. You might want to make it clearer to those you film that they don’t have to do things differently, especially that.I am not complaining if that is normal for them. It just seemed faked because of the way men’s ejaculation is handled in most porn.

The “might make it clearer” comment reminds me of the conversation I had with Desiree in the weeks prior to shooting her and her husband Ben.

“Oh, so you don’t want him to cum all over my face then?” she asked in response to my saying I just wanted them do have nice normal natural sex.

“Um well,” I stuttered, ” I don’t want you to do something you don’t enjoy when it’s just the two of you just because the camera is there, or because you think we want or need you to do something like that.”

“Oh no. I love having Ben blow on my face. I think it’s great, we do it all the time!”

“Well okay then. Please don’t let our being there inhibit you!” (It didn’t. Desiree had three orgasms that were very nearly disturbing in their intensity.)

Meanwhile, a tempest in a teapot seems to be swirling over similar question about what is and isn’t real over at SuicideGirls.com. Between kids, station wagon, suburban tract house, and a BMI of 26, I’m not really an alt kind of guy, (and even when I was young and broke and played my guitar too loud, I still wasn’t wasn’t an alt kind of guy) so I don’t really know that much about SuicideGirls, besides the fact that the chicks have downtown hairstyles, tats and piercing, and the photography style tends toward the deep focus/small focal plane style that I don’t really dig.

I do know what I thought I knew about SG, which was that I thought it was some hip, alternaporn site, run by technologically empowered female scenesters who were using the internet and cheap digital cameras to deconstruct the traditional pin-up. Okay, that’s cool in concept, even if I don’t really dig it as art, let alone as stroke material. Now it turns out that maybe SG is just some site run by some guy who’s making money off a lot of 18 year old girls’ yearnings to be a little less anonymous in the celebrity-obsessed world that we inhabit. Somehow that doesn’t seem quite so hip.

So what’s it all about, Alfie?

Back during that internet thing, people would sometimes say, “Content is king,” and the inflection they used seemed to indicate they thought they were offering a pearl of wisdom. Well here’s my pearl of wisdom, at least when it comes to making sex films: Context is king. Context is king, and when you use ‘reality’ as your conceit you walk a fine line. Most audiences are sophisticated enough to know that “the truth” is not the same thing as what you would have seen if you were on the set that day. But they’re also sensitive enough to know when the “reality” you try and present is too far way from what they would have felt if they had been on the set.

I don’t know what the “truth” is about SuicideGirls. The truth about Comstock Films is that all the way along there is a conspiracy between me and the couple I’m working with to present a very idealized portrait of their sexual relationship. It’s no more (or less) real than the nightly news or a novel.

Before their scene I asked Matt and Khym how they intended to enjoy Matt’s orgasm (experience has taught me not to assume that a “real couple” doesn’t enjoy the “so fake” external pop shot). When they told me that he was going to cum inside of her, I made a couple of suggestions for how we could visually signal the audience “yes, it really did happen.” The result can be seen in that lovely Comstock Films button that Mrs.C made for us.

Does that ruin it for you? I hope not.

As a director my ideal is that everything that an audience needs to know to enjoy one of my films should be presented within the confines of the film itself. If any information from “outside the frame” enhances the enjoyment the film, that’s fine, but the film itself should be the essential experience. If a viewer is on the fence until I’ve explained my intentions at the Q&A, or they seen everyone goofing off and having a good time in the BTS, or been given my assurances that it was “real” in a private e-mail exchange, then in my mind, the film has failed that viewer.

But film is first and foremost a commercial undertaking, so as a producer and marketeer, I recognize that creating and shaping an external context for our work is an essential part of the art and business of making films. “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex”; that’s the “frame” with in which we present our “erotic documentaries.” (Of course “erotic documentaries” is yet another frame.)

But for all the effort we put into framing our work, there’s a limit to how much control we have over the context in which our films are understood. By my reckoning, at the very most even a filmmaker like Steven Speilberg only has control over 49% of how any given viewer sees and understands one of his films.

I work on the assumption that I have even less control, so a lot of my effort goes into being mindful of vast space into which viewers will pour their own understanding and life experiences, and recognizing that each viewer is going to create their own context, based on their own understanding of sex, relationships, and pleasure.

Sometimes this works.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed something distressing in our daily site statistics; our google search referrals, which over time had risen to about 300-500 visitors/day on 100-150 search strings/day started to vascilate wildly. One day that would be typical, the next the would fall to 50-100 visitors on a few dozen search strings.

Then on Christmas Eve they crashed completely, a couple dozen visitors on a handful of search strings. A month ago we were getting 40-60 visitors/day on ‘couples sex film’ alone. Yesterday we got one. Other search terms relevent to our art and business have been similarly effected. In fact, since the Christmas Eve crash, we haven’t had the number of visitors on a single Google search string climb out of single digits on our daily search referrals.

But even more distressing than dropping off Google on the sorts of search terms that might lead the people who don’t know who we are (but do know that they want what we offer!) to our site, Google’s reshuffling has dropped our site on searches like ‘comstock films’, ‘www.comstockfilms.com’, and ‘tony comstock’.

That means the next time we get a mention in Esquire, The Metro, Penthouse, Jane, Women’s Health, and other magazines (after each of those mentions our Google referrals on the search ‘comstock films’ rose astronomically) people will have to click through several pages of returns before they actually find comstockfilms.com. The DIY trip, especially the DIY distribution trip, is built on the premise that If You Build It They Will Come. But that only works if people can find you, and it doesn’t help if the 800 pound gorilla search engine starts making it harder for the people who are actually looking for you to find you!

Now as it turns out, this is not a Google vendetta against Comstock Films. Google’s re-sorted the way they rank the entire sex/adult world, and everyone from pussy.com to Babeland.com has been effected. (For more read Google Delivers a Lump of Coal to Babeland.) It takes the sting out of it to know this isn’t something we did or didn’t do.

But it is going to hurt us. Our Google driven visitors are some of our best traffic. Both before and after Google’s re-ranking, people who come to the comstockfilms.com site via a Google search look at more pages and buy more DVDs than almost any other of our visitor sources. (In other words, people who find us through Google find what they were looking for.) If the current Google traffic pattern holds (and associated sales), the re-ranking will all but errase the financial gains we’ve made with the release of our new title, MATT AND KHYM.

Will this actually kill Comstock Films? No, I don’t think so. But it will make things harder, and it’s distressing and discouraging to watch something Peggy and I have worked hard to build go up in a puff of algorhythm alchemy smoke

ASHLEY AND KISHA is nearly finished, and we had sketched out a little marketing and promotion strategy for the next year (perhaps you’ve seen the beginings of it on some of the interweb’s finer blogs and websites) that was to have been fueled by additional revenue that our new titles and (until recently) ever growing web-sales was to have funded. We’ll just have to see what the medium term effect on sales is and see if the plan still makes sense.

It’s also a bit of a bummer to be looking at Christmas gifts and feeling like it might have been better to save the money for a rainy day. I didn’t need the Shuffle that Peggy got me (I’ve been borrowing hers to go running,) and that’s a month of advertising on a popular blog that sends us a steady stream of visitors, and each month a few of those turn into customers.

As I said, Comstock Films isn’t alone. If you google our friend Violet Blue, you’ll get a link to her podcast feed on the the first page, but tinynibbles.com is no where to be found. But what’s worse, you won’t see tinynibbles.com on the first page of a google search for for tinynibbles either! (This morning the first link to tinynibbles.com on the fifth page.) Chances are your favorite sexually related site is similarly effected.

What can we do? Well for starters, you can tell Google you’re not happy with the search results their providing. Google comstock films or tinynibbles or whatever your favorite might be, and if it’s not listed where you think it should be, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Dissatisfied? Help us impove link. Will that actually help? Who knows. It probably won’t hurt. (I happen to think that if someone googles comstock films, they should see comstock films on the first page, if not at the very top!)

And so it goes, the business of making art (and trying to make a living!) at the margin of culture. (Which seems like an odd place for films about real sex between real couples, but what do I know?)

A couple of weeks ago I posted a first draft of the cover for our upcoming release MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER. Here’s the final:

A few months ago Jamye Waxman asked if I could send over some screeners for an article she was working on for WOMAN’S HEALTH MAGAZINE, the premise being that a couple was going going to explore using erotic videos to give their sex life a boost and report back.

Stacy and Bryce, 32 and 34, of Brooklyn NY were assigned the “homework” of checking out a few titles and reported back in the December 2006 issue. On Saturday Jamye brought me a copy of the just off the presses issue at the CineKink filmmakers panel, and Peggy and I read it the next morning over a proper Hells Kitchen diner breakfast. I’m pleased to say the report is good. In fact, the report is very good!

Following the recommendations of a female friend who enjoys porn, Stacey brought home three movies. At 10 P.M. she popped [DVD #1] into the DVD player, and before long she and Bryce were both laughing and rolling their eyes. “We weren’t into the beefcake/Barbie-doll sex,” Bryce says. “It was weird to see so many fake boobs and unnatural bodies.” The next night, a second title, [DVD #2], got an equally bad review. “We fast-forwarded right through it,” Stacey admits. “The sexual acrobatics were awkward.” The third flick, Xana and Dax by Comstock Films ($25, Comstock Films), was different. “This was our favorite,” Bryce says. “There was no plot; it’s a real couple having sex. They looked like people we would know and be attracted to.” Stacey agrees. “I loved Xana and Dax because they’re a real couple, with genuine orgasms and a sincere admiration for each other,” she says. “We watched it straight through, and even though we were as tired as usual, we had sex right after.” And they changed their usual routine by trying a new position from the video. “Now we’re starting to incorporate more porn in our sex life,” Stacey says. “We even brought some on vacation right after doing this assignment.”

The rest of the article is online at the Women’s Health Magazine Website

Thank you Jamye, for inviting us to lend a disc to this important work (helping couples have more hot sex!) and thank you Stacy and Bryce ever so much for liking what we do! We’re working hard to make more films that I hope you’ll enjoy too!

Image from the upcoming ASHLEY & KISHA

I don’t know why it’s happened, but in the last week Comstock Films has risen to the second page of google for the search string “real sex”, and as a result “real sex” has been our number one search string for the last week. (That space is usually occupied by “Comstock Films”.)

I remember, I was in the shower when it came to me, fully formed:

Comstock Films: Real People, Real Life, Real Sex

Real people, meaning folks who seem whole and authentic; real life, meaning a point of view about sex that sees it as a part of the greater human experience, and one of its great joys; and real sex, meaning depicting sex in a way that is at least about the mutual pleasure of the subjects as it is about indulging the voyeuristic fancies of the audience (and the filmmaker!). It’s a tagline that would suppose to differenciate what we do from what is more commonly available to people who go looking for a film about sex with the very specific intent of watching it and getting turned on.

But lately I’ve been thinking the problem with porn isn’t that it’s not real enough, but that it’s too real. Too much of the time porn looks exactly like what it is (people having sex on camera for money), and not enough like what we wish it was (people having sex on camera because it makes them feel good). Instead of emotional, porn feels transactional; alien instead of fantastic.

That doesn’t mean we’ll be changing our tagline anytime soon. A lot of people who say they want something different say that what their looking for is something that feels “more real”, and a lot of those people find what they’re looking for in the films we make. But our tagline not withstanding, more and more I’m thinking the Comstock Films difference isn’t between “real sex” and “fake sex”, it’s between real intimacy and real alienation.

About two months ago, wrapping up a post entitled Am I Every Woman?I wrote:

“I’m not stupid. I know that when I say race or gender or sexual orientation aren’t always the most important thing, I’m saying it from the point of view of a person who’s never had his race, or his gender, or who or how I fuck held against me in any but the most trivial sort of way. And so I suppose it’s only natural that if I, as a middle-aged, white, straight man make a film about young, black, lesbian women, I’m going to have to prove that I can make the things they and I have in common count for more than our differences.That’s fine. It’s my privilege and honor to have the chance to try.”

Earlier today I found out that my film Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract received the award for the hottest straight sex scene at the first ever Feminist Porn Awards held last Thursday night in Toronto, Canada.

The Feminist Porn Awards (the Emmas) were part of Vixens+Visionaries: Female erotic directors revolutionizing porn, an evening that along with the awards, featured a round table with some of today’s leading voices in women-made porn, and I have to admit I was surprised to see Xana and Dax on a list alongside films from Candida Royalle, Tristan Taormino, Shine Louis Houston (Way to go, Shine!) and other directors who are not men.

But the criteria was “genuine female pleasure, women having a good time, films that were produced or directed by women, and adult movies that ‘expand the range of pleasure for women’, and by that criteria Xana and Dax is a worthy recipient. My films are very much about sexual pleasure, and I will gleefully admit to giving a little extra consideration to women’s sexual pleasure, both the women who appear in my films, and the women I imagine will be watching them, and I’m proud to have that recognized.

Anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog knows that I sometimes get my nose out of joint over the “by women for women” porn thing, but the fact remains, the notion of women viewing, let alone making sexually explicit imagery remains a radical and polarizing phenomenon. When I ask a women to spread her legs for my camera, I’m just “doing what men do”. For whatever risks (financial, social) I take to make my films, being a man making porn doesn’t make me a sex radical. There’s nothing revolutionary about a man wanting to take nudie pictures of women.

But twenty or so years ago, when Candida picked up the camera, she was making enemies of everyone — the old boys network that made porn, the “feminists” and fascists that opposed porn, and the academics with their studies proving that “women’s sexuality isn’t visual”. Twenty years later, the landscape is only slightly less hostile to the idea of women making or even enjoying sexually explicit imagery. And when a woman presents erotic work, it’s always evaluated in the context of her gender – what does it mean that a woman made it?

Doing this work is hard enough without feeling like the whole world is sitting in, whispering in your ear about what a “proper woman” or a “good feminist” would or wouldn’t do. So for whatever envy I feel at the way the press pricks up its ears when it hears “woman-made porn”, in the end I’m thankful I can do my work unburdened by other people’s expectations of how I should represent my gender, or how I should represent their politics.

And while I’ll probably still get my nose out joint when I hear that the problem with porn is that it’s made by men, I’m proud to be counted among a group of artists who are challenging poisonous, devisive assumptions about what it means to be a proper woman or a good feminist. Thank you to Good For Her for sponsoring the event, and congratulations to all the winners!

The 2006 Feminist Porn Award Winners

Hottest Anal Adventure
Winner: House of Ass | Tristan Taormino; Adam & Eve
Presented by Josey Vogels and Carrie Singh

Best Smutty Schoolteacher (Educational)
Winner: Orgasmic Women | Betty Dodson
Presented by Rebecca Rosenblatt (aka Dr. Date) & Valerie Scott (Sex Professionals of Canada)

Sexiest, Most Diverse Performers
Winner: Caribbean Heat | Manuela Sabrosa; Femme Productions
Presented by Manjeet and Michelle Chai

Hottest Straight Sex Scene
Winner: Xana And Dax: When Opposites Attract | Tony Comstock ; Comstock Films
Presented by Tara McKee

Hottest Dyke Sex scene
Winner: The Crash Pad | Shine Louise Houston ; Pink and White Productions
Presented by Chanelle Gallant and Deidre Walton

Hottest Fetish/Kink Scene
Winner: Tanya Hyde’s World Without Men | Tanya Hyde
Presented by Russell Smith & Carrie Gray

Hottest Trans Sex Scene
Sugar & Steele: All that’s Good For Her | Good For Her productions
Presented by Lorraine Hewitt and Flare

Fiercest Female Orgasm
Nina Hartley’s Guide to Double Penetration (Bonus scene) Aria | Adam And Eve
Presented by Renee Pilgrim

Indie Porn Pioneer
Dana Dane
Presented by Cheri Michael

Best New Canadian Pornographer (Vixen Next Door) Angela Phong
Presented by Niki Clover, star of ErocktaVision

Lifetime Achievement in Women’s Erotica
Candida Royalle
Presented by Carlyle Jansen

“Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard to go into print and say: ‘I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection.” — Kenneth Tynan

Yesterday’s post about DESTRICTED drew a post from Ms. Naughty which I’ve excerpted:

“I would say [DESTRICTED's] definition is fair enough…“If society was OK with porn’s place as a masturbatory tool, we wouldn’t have to talk about art being “disguised” as porn or vice versa.

Certainly attitudes toward sexuality and masturbation have their effect, but in the case of film it’s worth looking at this from a producer’s point of view.

When it comes to dollars and cents, the label “porn” is extremely marginalizing. Witness John Cameron Mitchell’s recent comments RE: SHORTBUS. “No one got a hard-on watching this film” says Mitchell. That’s a way of reinforcing the position that SHORTBUS isn’t porn. And with a budget of $2.5M — more than any porn film ever made — Mitchell and his backers can’t afford to have SHORTBUS shoved off into the porn ghetto, where returns are measured in thousands, not millions.

What I have noticed recently in reading reviews of films like THE DREAMERS, 9 SONGS, etc. is how venomously critics use the word “porn” - derision indeed. Whatever these movies’ failings, they look and feel nothing like any of the porn I’ve ever seen, and it makes me wonder just what sort of porn these critics have been watching that they feel a comparison is appropriate.

In fact it’s not, and in much the same way that “faggot” is used to dismiss a person’s sexuality as inappropriate and as the ultimate and overriding aspect of their humanity, these critics use the word “porn” to dismiss explicit sexuality as inappropriate subject matter and label the director’s interest in making such films questionable, and likely the product of a quirk or defect in the director’s psycho-sexuality.

In that respect, I would say that DESTRICTED’s and similar definitions of porn and erotica are anything but fair. At best it’s a useless construct that doesn’t really tell us anything about the work labeled “porn” or the work labeled “erotica”, save the economic ambitions of the person doing the labeling. (For some reason the phrase “straight looking/straight acting” pops to mind.)

More often such definitions are divisive, poisonous even; perpetuating a sort of Krafft-Ebing continuum for sexually explicit art, only instead of having poorly framed discussions about where the line between healthy and unhealthy sexuality lies, we have no less illuminating debates about where the line lies between porn and art. While this might lead to a lovely academic wank fest, it’s the wrong question, or at least a question I find utterly banal.

Let me lay my cards on the table about hanging the label “porn” on our work:

On one hand I have no qualms with being labeled “porn” because it lets people know in no uncertain terms that these films are absolutely frank in the way they depict sex and absolutely intended to arouse. If Mitchell proudly states that “all of the orgasms and all of the semen is real” but “no one got a hard-on watching SHORTBUS”, I am no less proud of the fact that my films also have real orgasms and real semen. Additionally, I am proud that my films have inspired countless happy erections, orgasms, and ejaculations. I’m please and happy that my films make people feel good about themselves and make them feel good about sex.

But along with the proclamation of sexual frankness, the word porn comes with a wagon-load of baggage and restrictions that I hope won’t be applied to my work. Like any artist, I want to have my work widely seen and widely respected. And like any business, we need to make money off the the work we do. The label porn is an obstacle to wider distribution of our films.

And just as I’m sure that directors who contributed to DESTRICTED don’t want to be lumped in with MEATHOLES, THROAT GAGGERS or CUM DUMPSTERS, I don’t want to be lumped in there, either. These are extreme examples, but by and large porn is cynical and poorly crafted; an insult to both sex and cinema. I am nothing if not sympathetic to filmmakers who do not want their work labeled as porn.

But what’s so very wrong about the the Porn vs. Art/Erotica vs. Porn question is that it supposes that whether or not SHORTBUS has crossed the line from art to porn (or whether our own DAMON AND HUNTER has crossed the line from porn to art.) is a relevant question.

It’s not; at least not if we’re evaluating the work without concern for its commercial potential.

Like Krafft-Ebing’s PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, this porn/art nonsense supposes a continuum where there is none. It separates sex from the rest of life, porn from art, and then tries to draw a line, or at least define a grey area. (Lest we go too far!)

This, of course, is sillly.

Sex is not apart from the rest of our lives, and in this context “porn” is merely an inflammatory, and largely meanless descriptor. (So is “erotica” for that matter.)

Either SHORTBUS is or is not a worthwhile viewing experience; either you are comfortable or take issue with the methods JCM used to achieve his vision. Either you enjoy watching DAMON AND HUNTER and are comfortable with the way it was produced or you’re not. Whether or not you got wet or hard only matters in as much as it helped or harmed your enjoyment of the film.

The rest is marketing spin or sophistry, or both.

Destricted

“The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The seven films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art: opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can disguised as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection os sexy, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange and sometime humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer to decide.”

Thanks for clearing that up. Can I have my hard-on now?

Sunday I had the privilage and the pleasure of chatting with Christophe and Diana for an upcoming episode of Blowfish Radio

One the long bus ride into the city to meet them I watch Cinema Paradiso. On the long bus ride back out I ordered I Am Curious, Yellow, I Am Curious, Blue, Nine Songs, The Dreamers, and Intimacy. I guess I should have got Last Tango in Paris while I was at it.