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.

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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.

Long time readers know that we’ve had more than our fair share of mishaps with Google. In fairness to Google, the commercialization of sexuality attracts malefactors all out of proportion to the effort it takes separate the wheat from the chaff. But knowing that is cold comfort when your livelihood is on the line.

More over, this New Searchable Era ™ combined with the rise of the Complaint Driven Internet ™ have tipped the balance away from new voices, and  back towards those who seem to take delight in taking offense. I don’t expect we’ll see College Humor videos pulled off YouTube, or James Joyce re-edited for the iPhone App Store, but it’s clear that lessor known writers and filmmakers aren’t given the benefit of the doubt.

When Peggy and I started this Comstock Films thing, the internet was a leg up, a place a the little guy could mount an insurgent campaign against the status quo; a place where a good idea could go around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media and straight to the people who might appreciate it. But increasing the internet is the mainstream media,  with it’s own (mostly automated and mindless) gatekeepers and time again we are finding ourselves shut out. It’s frustrating, and even a little scary.

But because at a certain point making the films we wanted to make required that we go “all in”, we have no real choice but to soldier on. There’s simply too much invested in blood, sweat, and tears to do anything but keep fighting.

I have been wondering for some while why pages that link to my posts, or even pages that steal my post wholesale rank in Google’s search returns, while my original posts are (often) nowhere to be found. Today a clue. 

Since our return, between cleaning the house and returning correspondences that went unanswered while we were away, I’ve been Google-stalking myself. I find that seeing when, why and how people are writing about what we do is a good way to come up with PR ideas. For a reason I’ve already forgotten, I ended up running this search on Google:

blogurl:http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/tony

Apparently the last post in Google’s index of my blog is my post from Dec. 27, 2006 “Will Google Kill Comstock Films?” That’s two years of blogging and something like 300 posts missing from Google’s index. That’s countless hours devoted to creating unique content (i.e. search-bait) that’s not helping our business.

I don’t know what the reasons for this might be. Maybe it’s another Googlebot bug. Maybe we’ve got our Wordpress Update Services misconfigured. (I’ve checked and will ask Peggy to double check when she gets back from the vet.) Maybe it’s sun spots. Maybe it’s because after we broke the Googlebot bug story,  The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films became The Most Dangerous Blog on the Internet ™ . I don’t know. I do know is the timeline is uncanny, so I’ve asked my daughter to get out the Reynolds Wrap and fold us a couple of tinfoil hats.

I also don’t know what the answer is to the question “Will Google Kill Comstock Films?” But on days like today, it sure feels like they’re trying!

“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:

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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.

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“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.

Some readers may have noticed that in 2008 I have not been as prolific with my blogging as in past years. While some of this has to do with things like the boat trip we made last Winter, it is also because I am starting to feel like I’m covering the same ground, but not adding much to the conversation.

The simple truth is I am worn down: worn down by our misadventures with Google and PBS and Boing and IMDB and the OFLC; worn down by John Cameron Mitchell and Alison Crogon and Max Hardcore; worn down by very attitudes that make it so important to me to make my films. 

Peggy Comstock, my wife and partner, is going to take over the lion’s share of the blogging here at Comstock Films, and with your help, her blogging will be a much a part of how people find out about what we do as mine has been. As she says in her “re-introduction” post:

Comstock Films is genuinely a ‘mom and pop’ operation, which is one of the reasons Tony and I decided that it was important for me to step in and continue blogging while he pours his mental resources into finishing our next films. We rely so much on word of mouth and “guerilla marketing” to keep awareness of our little shop going, and blogging allows us not only to periodically shout, ‘Hey world, we’re here making these quietly revolutionary films about sex and relationships!’ — but also to engage in a direct dialogue with our viewers, friends, and fellow travelers in a way that means a lot more to us than it possibly can for a larger, more diffuse company.

Somewhere between this new responsitibly and everything else she does around here I expect that Peggy will roll out some design tweaks that will make it a little easier to find her blog on our site. In the meantime there’s a link in my side bar “Peggy’s Blog”. If you have a blog of your own and would like to make mention her new role here, or add her link to your blogroll, of course we are very appreciative.

But mostly, just read what she has to say. Of the two of us, Peggy is the one who is an actual *published* writer; and ultimately her “quiet girl thinking”  take on things is far more subversive than my boorish sturm and drang. So book mark, or ad to your Google reader or do whatever it is that you do. Your not going to want to miss what she has to say!

So what I was talking about when I said I saw some trends I didn’t understand is that about two years ago we started getting Google visitors on the search [real sex] and that was very good for our business. Visitors arriving on the search [real sex] were just as likely to return and ultimately just as likely to buy one of our DVDs as visitors arriving on the searches [comstock films] or [tony comstock].

What that means is we were catching and keeping customers who didn’t already know our name or our films. They were wandering the internet, looking for “real sex”, and when they wandered into our little corner they found something that was real enough to spend $28 on a DVD.

Then last December, it all went to shit. We and many other sexually oriented sites got caught in the gears Google’s ongoing fight against spam. Not only did we lose returns on [real sex], we lost returns on [comstock films] and nearly everything else. 

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