This morning brings a nice column from Seth Finkelstein in The Guardian about sex, search, and “content filtering.” What I appreciate about Seth’s point of view is that he’s got deep expertise in the nuts and bolts of how these things work, he’s not given to conspiracy theories, but doesn’t give an inch to the powers that be.  He’s also a lucid and entertaining writer, with a sense of humor as dry as a leaf in Winter:

Real sex is difficult for the Googlebot. If humans argue so much about distinguishing between erotica and pornography, imagine the difficulty search algorithms have with the topic. Two years ago, an admitted bug in a change to Google’s ranking algorithm caused many respected and popular sexuality-related sites to suddenly lose their rank in search results. The bug was soon fixed, but not before it had made Google’s treatment of sexual material into a prominent issue.

Although such events often spawn theories about political motivations, the explanation is almost always along the lines of a problem with Google’s spam-filtering; instances of governmental censorship of search engines in western countries are very rare. As porn is one of the most popular subjects for spam, legitimate writers concerned with sexual topics can find themselves filtered out as collateral damage.

I don’t expect Google’s much-celebrated algorithm would have any better luck with the Erotic vs Porngraphy question then we mere humans, but one would hope it would at least be able to distiguish between the internet’s honest participants and bad actors. Sadly, a Google-search like ["bill and desiree"] doesn’t give me much hope; Google ranks stolen torrents of our just released Bill and Desiree: Love is Timeless pages ahead of our own efforts to promote and sell the film on the web.

Of course I would suppose there are those who would argue that whether Google’s efforts represent a war on spam, a war on pornography, or a war on sex, it’s a war worth winning, and the harm to Comstock Films, if not intended, still falls in the realm of “acceptable losses”; that the suppression of Comstock Films that’s taken place over the last two years in Google’s search returns is an unintended, but inevitable side effect of Google’s larger efforts “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As Seth puts it – collateral damage.

We’ve made every effort we can to make Google (and the rest of the world) aware of the effect of the New Searchable Era ™ and the Complaint Driven Internet ™ on our ablity to continue to make the films we make, but for us, things are getting worse, not better.  I sometimes imagine (sardonically) a Google senior engineer watching our site sink in their rankings, shaking his head and muttering “poor bastards”; like we were a company sent on a suicide mission for the greater good of the battle. (No one’s ever accused me of not having an over-inflated sense of self-importance.)

Of course what you think is important is a product of your values and your point of view. More than once I’ve been accused of merely arguing for my own self-interest. As a Madisonian, that accusation has always left me puzzled. Who’s interest am I supposed to be arguing? And never minding that, doesn’t the minority point of view have a vital role to play in a pluralistic democracy? But perhaps I flatter myself too much. Returning to Seth, who’s more temperate:

It’s become almost a cliche to point out that algorithmic choices made by search engines represent social values. But different factions care about different values, as demonstrated in the case of complex topics such as sex. As more groups begin to see how Google’s determinations affect their own interests, we’ll likely see repeated outrage from people newly arrived to these debates.

Here in the US these “filtering” debates seem confined to sex, and for the most part people can go about their daily lives untroubled, unaware even, of what they do or do not see. No one’s life depends on whether they find their way to ComstockFilms.com and and are exposed to our point of view on the collision of sex and the moving image, so for now I suppose to most people the debate seems frivilous, and perhaps, given the focus on sex, a little unseemly. I don’t expect to see the level of energy and outrage these same questions have provoked in the UK, or Australia, or China unless or until everyday people feel like they’re losing something important to them.

–

I sent a note to Seth, thanking him for the article and for mentioning us:

Just read the guardian column. Of course I appreciate the coverage, but the perspective you bring is just as valuable. Today’s Peggy’s birthday and we’ve spent several hours talking about what’s next. More than likely the next project won’t involve sex. I guess we’ve arrived at the same conclusion as Google: it’s just too much trouble. 

Seth’s reply, droll and understated as usual:

The Google God wields great power over commerce.

And of course commerce wields great power over culture. For every Don Quixote, eager to tilt at windmills, there are thousands of everyday people who just want to peacefully go about their business.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just because Bill and Desiree are old

(I know I know. Don’t try and lawyer your way around it. Don’t even try to wrap your fucking head around it!)

So yesterday YouTube decided that our trailer for “Bill and Desiree: Love is Timeless” was not appropriate content, and removed the clip. Against what YouTube does consider “appropriate”, it’s a hard decision to understand, except against the broader understanding that sexual pleasure, even in the most pro-social context is still the ultimate taboo for a filmmaker.

Writers and painter have long had a wide latitude in exploring desire, in whatever context and using whatever language they like. But photographers and filmmaker are still required to limit the scope of their inquiry, lest they be subject to economic marginalization and even arrest.

The intellectual foundation for Comstock Films was laid more than 15 years, in large measure to answer my question, “Why am I, as a photographer, prohibited from trading in subject matter open to other artists?” Along the way a few things happened that changed the context and seemingly the question.

I moved from making my living as a still photographer to making my living as a filmmaker, and discovered that whatever the economic and legal limitations put on the collision between sex and the photographic image, the collision between sex and the moving image was all the more constrained.

As a filmmaker I began doing work that (sometimes) traded in quite horrific imagery. While I have been spared the trauma having a person killed in front of me while I held a camera to my face, I have documented more death and dying than was probably good for me. If it goes too far to say that I am still wounded by making these films, I am most certainly scarred.

By this time Peggy and I had begun the studies that became Comstock Films. Against the films I made about suffering and misery my question changed, “How can it be that these films filled with misery and horror have a place in polite society, but films filled with love and pleasure do not?” I hoped that these studies that Peggy and I worked on in secret would flower into an answer to that question.

But by a few years later, with the rise of the internet the question seemed irrelevant. If the films were provocative on the question of our values and norms with respect sex and the moving image, they seemed so only in the abstract. With the surfeit  of explicit and often repulsive sexual imagery widely available, if anything our films of couples in love making love seemed oddly quaint, and strangely normative.

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We have, in our norms concerning what is appropriate to show, and appropriate to see, in concerning what sort of imagery has a place in polite society, the idea that sometimes we might cast our eyes upon things that are difficult, or even upsetting; because we gain something, both in the seeing, and in the freedom to see. That whatever harm might be done by certain imagery, whatever horror might be felt, it is balanced by what might be learned, or understood.

But something has gone wrong. Somewhere along the line something has gone terribly wrong.

In yesterday’s post, along with our own trailer I posted other YouTube clips that featured sexual content so that readers might make their own judgement about whether or not the trailer for “Bill and Desiree” was in keeping with YouTube’s terms of service. But one might answer none of these clips belong on YouTube.

But in the comments I posted links to two more YouTube clips. These clips were not about love, or even about sex. They were about hate, and violence and death. 

The first an execution of three people by hanging:

The second shows the murder of a teenaged girl by a mob:

How did we get here? How did we arrive at this place where we accept that even in its horror,  a video of a girl being murdered by a mob of angry men has a place in polite discourse, but a nine second glimpse of a couple making love, shot from the side and showing no more detail than what one might see on any beach, does not. How did we get here?

How did we get to this place where we are so concerned with the possibility of accident exposure to sexuality that we are willing to excise “clitoris” from all “SafeSearch” returns? How did we get here?

How did we get here? And how do we get out? How do we get to somewhere with some semblance of sanity? Those are the questions I’m asking today. And I hope in some small way my films are part of the answer:

Yesterday we put up a trailer for Bill and Desiree on our YouTube account. Today YouTube deleted the video for a TOS violation. Here’s the trailer, off our own server:

Here’s a College Humor clip from YouTube.com that’s received over 4,000,000 views:

This is what YouTube has to say about sexuality and nudity:

YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it’s a video of yourself, don’t post it on YouTube.

Most nudity is not allowed, particularly if it is in a sexual context. Generally if a video is intended to be sexually provocative, it is less likely to be acceptable for YouTube. There are exceptions for some educational, documentary and scientific content, but only if that is the sole purpose of the video and it is not gratuitously graphic. For example, a documentary on breast cancer would be appropriate, but posting clips out of context from the documentary might not be.

Of course anyone who’s clicked around YouTube knows there are all sorts of “sexy” video clips on YouTube, so before we put up the trailer we clicked around a little to get an idea of where YouTube draws the line. Here’s a little of what we found.

A bit from a Lindsey Lohan movie:

At the end of the Lohan clip, YouTube suggest we might be interested in this Japanese schoolgirl fetishist clip:

At the end of the quasi-pedophiliac video, YouTube thought we might be interested in a little sex ed:

Then YouTube thought a testicular exam was in order:

And then finally this clip, mislabeled “Britney Sex Tape”:

After watching the above clips, you might feeling a little confused about what is and is not acceptable on YouTube. The trailer for “Bill and Desire” does not show full nudity. There are no female nipples shown, and the swell of Desiree’s breast is barely discernible between her and Bill’s bodies. There is no pubic hair and no genitals. There are no buttocks or ass-cracks. In short, there is no objective difference in the degree of nudity shown in the trailer for “Bill and Desiree” and these other clips that YouTube is hosting. But YouTube has an answer:

Please take these rules seriously and take them to heart. Don’t try to look for loopholes or try to lawyer your way around the guidelines—just understand them and try to respect the spirit in which they were created.

That clears it right up, doesn’t it. Like YouTube’s parent company Google, YouTube favors pranksterism over candor. The College Humor clip shows just as much skin as our trailer, but it’s meant as a joke, so that a-okay. Lindsey Lohan’s orgasmic moaning and groaning is okay because we know she’s faking it. The pedophiliac fetish schoolgirl clip – even the part with “POV” intercourse between the videographer and the model – is okay because she’s wearing white cotton panties and covering her breasts with her hands. The penile exam clip is just fine because it’s medical.

Oh, speaking of medical, next month “Bill and Desiree” will be playing for faculty and clinicians at the Martha Stewart Center for Center for Living at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center.

“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.

“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])

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:

(more…)

Okay, so now you’ve read about it here, at Being Amber Rhea, and at Bacchus’s Eros Blog. Google Suggest will autofill somethings, like [stormfront] or [comstock films podcast]; but not other things, like [being amber rhea] or [violet blue]. Let’s call it the Google Suggest No Fly List.

This is a fact. A lot of what people say about Google is rumor-mongering and tinfoil-hate conspiracy paranoia. But the quirks in Google Suggest’s autofill, that [peggy comstock] will autofill at the ‘m’, but [tony comstock] will not – that’s not something somebody said might be so on some underground blackhat SEO bulletin board. It is a fact. You can call up Google.com right now and try it for yourself.

How and why Google does this gets more into Renolds Wrap territory, and unless Google decides to tell us how and why they constrain the Google Suggest autofill all we can do is speculate. But since speculating about Google is even more popular than downloading dirty pictures, here’s a little of mine.

(more…)

“Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.” – Paul Valéry

“Impotent rage.”

That would more or less sum up my mood this morning. We can talk all we want about “independent production” and “new digital distribution models”, the simple fact remains: when you move a physical product through a physical distribution pipeline it’s a lot harder for the powers that be to fuck with you than when all they have to do is screen your work against a list of banned keywords and off-limit domain names.

Erotic writers are still be able to get there stories onto the mainstream bookstore shelves under the rubric of “erotica”, but what do you think is going to happen when the text is digital – and searchable. What do you think is going happen when Paypal starts backtracking search results the way Google is doing right now? And how about when image recognition software comes of age? Flick of a digital switch, and *poof*, we will disappear.

For years we have battled to make a place for our work at the “grown-up table”, but today I despair. Today, despite all our successes, our victories seem small and fragile. Today I question the wisdom of pouring still more time, money and hope into such a lopsided battle.

But it’s not all bad news. This morning (via Google alerts, of course) there are some people saying some very nice things about our films. I’m especially tickled to see Hot Movies for Her making Em & Lo aware of our work. I’ve been trying to get there attention for years without any success, but the Porn Librarian came through!

From the Porn Librarian on Em & Lo’s Daily Bedpost:

Em & Lo: What would you recommend for women, gay or straight, who just don’t like porn (the lighting, gynecological detail, fake boobs, bad acting), but wish they did, or wish they could get into it with their partners, or wish they could accentuate their fantasy lives with it, with something?

Porn Librarian: I would start by looking at something from Comstock Films. Tony Comstock creates these really interesting sex documentaries that star real life couples. There are lengthy interviews, so you really get to know about them before getting to the dirty part.

And a new friend, Dr. Strokes at the Swarthmore Daily Gazette:

Comstock Films are so perfect for couples even Oprah recommended them and so hot that they’re, well, molten. These are documentary-style films of real couples who tell you how they fell in love and then invite you to look in on their bedroom. Right now they have a gay feature, a lesbian feature, and two straight films (one featuring an awesome interracial couple), but once you’ve watched those and realized you can’t get enough, don’t despair! They’re coming out with more soon, including an older straight couple, which rocks. I can’t recommend this company enough.

As for the future, well I’m not quite ready to quit yet. But I do feel increasingly pinched between two possibilities:

1) Reconsidering the offers we’ve received from the biggies of the “adult entertainment” world, which would embed our films in a more established and less vulnerable distribution chain. Of course that would mean higher production quantity, which in turn would mean lower production values and diminished emotional and physical safety for the people I film. Not an especially attractive option.

2) Backing away from my commitment to explore sexuality as frankly and honestly and cinematically as I can. There are good films, and a good living to be made without showing cunts and cocks and jizz. Google rankings/listing for my non-erotic documentaries are stable, and none of those films have ever been banned.

Not even the one with the man getting his head cut off with a machete.