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!

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.