Results tagged “porn” from Uncivil Society
Any complete account of the evolution of communications media in the twentieth century must include the Tijuana Bible--small pornographic comics featuring bootleg versions of popular comic strips and celebrities. Tijuana Bibles are arguably the secret origin of the contemporary comic book. While newsstand publishers were reprinting newspaper strips, Tijuana Bibles offered new adventures of pop culture icons in a cheap and easily replicable form. We're seeing this same dynamic today, of course, as porn drives innovation on the web.
Although Tijuana Bibles eventually faded away with the arrival of cheaper photo reproduction tech, their legacy remains. And as commonly happens with archaic media, they have been revived and adapted by the avant garde.
In Denver this week, delegates to the Democratic National Convention will have the opportunity to get printed versions of this Bush-McCain Tijuana Bible, presented as a replica of a prophetic 1934 comic from Lieberman's Lil' Squeezer Books. Whatever one's moral stance regarding porn & politics, it's a rather clever piece of neo-retro performance art.
The FCC is considering a proposed new rule to require licensees of the 2155-2180 MHz band to dedicate a portion of its network capacity to making broadband Internet access available for free.
However, there's a catch: the licensee has to filter out "inappropriate content." And what is that, you ask? A few things to note from proposed Section 27.1193, Content Network Filtering Requirement:
(a) The rules requires blocking "images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography." Note the "and pornography," which seeks to expand the scope of the prohibition beyond what is obscene.
(b) The licensee must also block "any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents," i.e., "children five through 17 years of age." Yes, that's right--the FCC wants to make the five-year-old mind the regulatory standard for internet content, which I guess would make this the golden age for poop jokes.
(c) Per proposed section 27.1193(b), these rules also apply to material transmitted via peer-to-peer file sharing--and if the license finds it impractical to review every file shared, it has the right to "use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications." In other words, because people can use P2P and other modes of transmitting data to provide access to material not suitable for a five-year-old, an ISP has the right to shut 'em down.
Needless to say, these rules would affect far more than obscenity and kiddie porn. Web comics, Flickr, Youtube, Hulu--shoot, this effin' blog would pretty much be toast.
Opening to the public this week: the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas. Its mission:
The Museum seeks to bridge the gap between that which is commercial and often misidentified as pornographic, with that which is aesthetic, often identified as folk, pop, and fine art through a common visual language.
No doubt by now any number of comics aficionados have noted the John Hodgman comics-and-Kirby essay in the New York Times Book Review. It's a great read, particularly for the way it highlights how in Kirby's work, ideas and art explode from the page.
But this is not the only comics-related material in today's Times. In a tragic counterpoint to Hodgman's exploration of comics as transcendence, a story on early onset Alzheimer's disease in people with Down Syndrome uses a comic icon to highlight the limits of our all-too-mortal life:
His Superman T-shirt was bold and bright, but his face was creased with confusion. . . .
For an antidote to this sad tale, you might want to check out another book review that highlights evolving graphic illustration and technological change: Nicholson Baker's look at The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (also available here).
Note particularly how the cost of rag paper led publishers to conserve pages by shrinking type, thereby focusing even greater attention on the accompanying artwork. Another noteworthy feature: how pictures in junk media served to thwart the limits of convention. While law enforcement condemned the flash press as immoral, they missed its most powerful act of subversion: moving the culture away from typeset words to graphic media.
Via AVN:
X-Play and Hustler Video have joined Bill Margold's Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW) and performer Amber Lynn in a fundraising effort to help ailing adult director Henri Pachard, who is battling throat cancer.
X-Play will donate one dollar for each Not the Bradys XXX DVD sold through Hustler Video between now and June 20 to PAW's Henri Pachard Cancer Fund. Producer/director Jeff Mullen of X-Play encourages distributors, stores and customers to purchase copies of the movie to help Pachard and his family.
"Sometimes we forget that our troubles are minor compared to what others are going through," Mullen told AVN. "Henri Pachard has had kind words for me every time I have seen him and if we can help out a person who was one of the men that helped pave the way for our business, it is the least we can do. I encourage everybody to pick up a DVD copy of our Bradys XXX so that we can generate a nice donation for his cancer fund."
Folks in the virtue biz have long learned the value of children in making a moral appeal. But this protest of porn on Scribd--YouTube for documents--cites a paragon of purity I've never seen in this context before:
Are these traffic-increasing methods acceptable for a VC backed company to drive growth via porn?
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting censorship of sequential art. It recently won a major victory in Georgia, where a local prosecutor dropped charges against a retailer for giving a child a comic that the retailer didn't realize included a panel with Picasso naked. Among its current projects: working with other civil liberties organizations and booksellers to challenge new harmful-to-minors laws in Utah and Oregon.
I'll have more on all this later, but for now, a quick note about a trend that is going to make the CBLDF's work a lot more challenging in year to come: the emerging technology of child porn. Naked City highlights the work of journalist Debbie Nathan, who is researching the state of the art:
While it is illegal to make or look at pornography using real live underage people, it is not illegal to produce and own CGI pornography with figures that appear to be underaged. Five or ten years ago this wasn't a huge issue - it was easy to tell real photos and digital compositions apart. But that's no longer the case. And as Nathan writes, child pornographers are now beginning to make real pictures look digital so they can skate by under the radar.
It's a really creepy fusion of exploitative crime and new technologies, and chances are high that some really weird combination of technophobia, attempts to punish pedophiles, and desire to protect children will meld to forge a new law. Just what that will be remains to be seen.
NC's prediction of yet another new law is as close to a sure thing as you can get in policy analysis, and you can bet the next one will adapt to the objections raised by courts that struck down previous versions. When this happens, expect comics to be an even more tempting target. In contrast to the shady and often inaccessible world of child porn, comics are easily demonized--and indicted--as The Seducer Hidden in Plain Sight.
First they came for alt-comics, then they came for manga, and then . . .
When I was a tyke, I was fascinated with media theory, particularly the then-ubiquitous paperback ouvre of Marshall McLuhan. One of the things that leapt out from the work of McLuhan and his acolytes was that the photos of people in magazines depict real-world comics characters--the degree to which we manipulate images creates graphic abstractions that are closer, say, to Power Girl than people as they are in real life.
There are any number of ramifications of this that we'll be exploring here, particularly the way that attempts to use visual imagery to rise above nature can reverse into reductionism. For now, since I'm still swamped in end of the semester stuff, a picture and a quick note.
Below: an image ostensibly of Gwyneth Paltrow from a new Vogue Iron Man tie-in. I say ostensibly because if it weren't for the title of the article, I would not have recognized her. The shopped-in Iron Man tech is not the issue; the face has been abstracted to such a degree that it obliterates her distinguishing features. In fact, if you look at it for any length of time, you'll see that her face is essentially bifurcated into a Harvey Dent of idealized beauty--one wider, lighter, larger; the other, shaded, narrow, more compact. The head looks like its been pasted on, and her left arm (from the viewer's perspective, right) has fused into her body to form what looks to be wing-like webbing.
A series of Photoshop disasters? Perhaps, perhaps not. The whole effect is one of mechanized soullessness, which judging from Paltrow's hollow expression would seem to be the point.
This is one from a set of public service ads promoting the Child Protection Foundation of Thailand. The gimmick: branded images of boys having different kinds of sex with men. The slogan: "Remove is hard. Protect is easy."
Let's set aside my first reaction: that this was perhaps the most twisted condom ad in history. Then again, let's not. However unhappy folks may be with a little girl in a Mickey Mouse bra, my guess is that most commercial companies wouldn't feature a pre-pubescent boy being anally penetrated by a middle-aged guy.
Call it a hunch.
Yet this charity does, just as other charities have featured scantily dressed teen prostitutes or, to use the buzzword of the day, semi-nude drunks. It calls attention to a crucial yet generally ignored fact of charitable marketing: we tend to lack the morality checks of even the most aggressive commercial marketers. Our moral mission frees us to say and to do whatever we want in the name of our particular higher good, even if what we say or do is otherwise reprehensible.
As charities become more proficient in adopting business practices--cause marketing, effectiveness, efficiency, whatever--yeah, sure, it can help generate more social ROI, whatever the hell that is, but our innate moral nihilism can also increase the potential for these practices to have anti-social results.
Cynical? Not at all. It's just a fact, and the fact that the charitable community doesn't see this highlights just how much we do not know ourselves.
Jezebel raises an important issue pertaining to the Miley Cyrus controversy: conflicting sexual norms across the world. In the U.S., a sexualized image of a 15 or 17 year old can give rise to cries of child porn; in China, where the age of consent is 14, a Disney billboard with a sexed-up twelve year old passes without notice until seen by Western eyes.
The photo above illustrates how PR in another country can stand in striking contrast to PR at home. It's a European ad for HP Laserjets that incorporates the overt sexual objectification of young girls common in manga, particularly in the genre known as lolicon.
And here's another example from this series, which made the rounds in design blogs back when they hit Ads of the World.
In the U.S., corporate scandals have led HP to try to boost its tarnished corporate image by celebrating its commitment to civic virtue. The negative attention from an ad like this could be counterproductive, to say the least.
In Europe the reaction so far seems to be mixed, although one blog, Daily Yoghurt, has asked readers to post their own colorized versions.
The controversy resulting from the Disney billboard provides a warning as to the latent potential for negative PR resulting from ads that traditionally went unseen outside their offshore markets. After all, there's ratings and site visits in bringing hidden deviance to light. It's just one more reason why corporations are exerting more centralized control over local PR.
UPDATE: The Laserjet ads have now been removed from Ads of the World. A shame, really, because along with 'em went the info regarding the agency that designed them. According to this Google cache of a blog post mirroring the original AotW pages, here are the details regarding the apparent subcontractor whom, I suspect, HP won't be using any time soon:
Advertising Agency: Publicis, Bucharest, Romania
Creative Director: Razvan Capanescu
Art Director / Copywriter: Catalin Rulea
Published: April 2007
No Caption Needed points to the real story behind the Miley Cyrus controversy: the way we use the promotion of ethics to justify using imagery that is otherwise taboo:
We are never told the name of the model and there is no way to know her age. Nor does it matter. For whether she is fourteen or twenty-one, the point is that she is portrayed as a young Lolita, her supple body barely covered by a dress that seems to be in tatters. The expression on her face simultaneously performs a cultivated innocence and a primitive sexuality, the two reinforced by her bare feet and skinny, pale legs spread seductively around the back of a folding chair. Her long hair is both combed and yet unkempt, simultaneously complementing and accenting the tensions between nature and culture that pervade her pose and animate the adolescent sexual energy of the image.
This photograph is one of six images that appeared as part of a story titled “Green With Envy.†The story focuses on eco-conscious fashion being marketed to a “well-heeled audience†by Earth Pledge and Barneys New York. It thus operates within the soft porn aesthetic of high fashion photography. The woman above is wearing a Maison Martin Margiela dress made from “silk head scarves that were bleached, cut into strips and asymmetrically woven by hand.†The price is available on request, though the eco-conscious fashion wear on display in the other five images ranges in price from $910 for a smock dress made of “undyed cotton†to $10,000 for a ruffled dress made from “biopolymer—a corn-based alternative to polyester.†What we have, then, is the greenwashing of a soft porn aesthetic, where one progressive cause (save the environment) seems to trump another (protect our youth from sexual exploitation).
Apparently there is no end to what sex can sell, including a sustainable earth. Surely this is no way to save the planet.
Today in Malibu, via NSFW AVN:
Shane's World contract girl Casey Parker has banded together with Vivid Girl Sunny Leone, Brooke Haven and Veronica Rayne to raise money for abandoned babies [today] at a charity event to benefit Project Cuddle.
"It’s basically giving a chance for unwanted babies to get another home – our goal is to raise $5,000 but we want to go all the way and raise more," Parker told AVN. "We’re putting on the whole event – there will be live bands and an auction that I am going to host including a date with Brooke Haven and surfing lessons with me."
The fundraiser will take place from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. April 29 at 31800 Mulholland Highway, Mailbu, Calif. 90265.
"Anybody that makes any donation over $400, whether it's products for the auction or a check, one of us will personally go to the office and pick it up," said Casey. "You will get a porn star in your office!"
From the official description:
Usually seen riding their bicycles and preaching door to door, these steamy young men explode with sexuality on each calendar page.
Behind the eye-candy, this calendar has a deeper story -- one that can reshape perceptions, heighten awareness, and perhaps encourage and inspire a broadened acceptance of human and religious diversity.
For more on the controversy sparked by this supposedly "novel" calendar, check out the latest from AVN and read the comments thread. Buy the calendar at Mormons Exposed.
The image above is new promotional art for Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting women readership and participation in the comics industry. One of the refreshing things about FoL is that while other nonprofits are trying to amp up fundraising by pimping sexed-up images of women (a recurring subject of skewering on this site, you might have noticed), Friends of Lulu strives to provide an alternative to the hypersexual reductionism that is all too common in modern superhero comics. I enjoyed meeting their estimable prez Valerie D'Orazio at their New York Comic Con today, before my own panel on comics copyright.
For years horny teens knew they could rely on National Geographic to supply a parent-approved fix of topless women and mating animals.
AVN today reports the launch of a new site called National Pornographic whose initial offering, Cougars in Heat, would seem in its own way to continue the tradition.
The Tax Domme specializes in tax advice for the adult entertainment industry:
To be an adult entertainer in the United States of America more often than not means leading a double life. To the outside world, the entertainer is a student, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, best friend, coworker in a mainstream job and even fellow church congregant. When performing within their Adult profession they may be an exotic dancer, escort, phone sex operator, dominatrix, submissive, porn actress, smut writer or any combination of these. The reason for secrecy stems from the fact that there has been created a separate set of social rules for those that demand the product, sex, and those that supply it.
However, many consumers of sex, hold the entertainers to a separate set of social standards than themselves.
Her business seeks to help women rise above the economic difficulties of working in a taboo business. Besides running her tax "Dungeon," she also serves as a Financial Madam, managing investments. Arguably NSFW pics and tax advice here.
The federal government has filed a obscenity charges against a porn producer yesterday. My initial reaction: The feds still prosecute obscenity? Who knew?
Clearly other lawyers do, which is why they manage to build lucrative practices around such cases. I actually tell my nonprofit classes a goofy story about one such lawyer I've met--it involves a skin mag charity and a newlywed me--but First Amendment attorney Greg Piccionelli offers far more serious insight into what the latest indictment means for federal law.
In particular, he addresses the rather surprising decision to include child porn charges in what is clearly just an adult pornography case. The strategy that Piccionelli identifies is one that, were it to work, could have far-reaching implications for anyone who posts adult material on the web. If you want to get a sense of how the rule of law actually works in practice, check out his analysis.
Don't store your presentation on the same flash drive where you keep your porn. Especially if you're speaking to school kids.
BONUS LESSON:
And if you're a politician or a pastor, don't even bother giving this excuse:
"I have no idea where these came from," the Democrat said.
No one will believe you.
