The Devils
I had fun seeing the Director’s Cut, restored, and remastered 1971 The Devils at the Vista Theater Hollywood.
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Filtering by Tag: CENSORSHIP
Etsy Banned Sex Toys, But It Can’t Ban Sex
This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2024.
Etsy, the e-commerce platform, prohibited the sale of sex toys as of July 29, 2024. In a June 27, 2024, public letter entitled “Strengthening Our Approach to Mature Content on Etsy,” Etsy Vice President of Trust and Safety Alice Wu announced the platform had updated its Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy. The updates included limiting the sale of adult toys sold on the site, prohibiting realistic depictions of nudity, and imposing stricter criteria for listings featuring mature content. According to Etsy’s updated policy on adult content, pornography (including Playboy magazine) is prohibited, human models cannot expose their private parts (which includes their “gluteal clefts”), and the sale of sexual services and custom “content that sexualizes a specific body part” (“‘e.g. foot pics’”) are not allowed. Perhaps most impactfully, Etsy prohibited the sale of adult toys except for “non-insertable and non-penetrable adult toys and sexual accessories.”
For sellers who specialized in selling sex toys, the potential consequences were catastrophic. On X (formerly Twitter), Simply Elegant Glass, which sells, among other products, glass adult toys, lamented the decision in an open letter to Etsy. “It's hard to run a business oriented around adult products,” the thread noted. The “blanket ban” was “the lazy solution.” Now, they added, “Everything we've built on your platform will be completely nullified in 30 short days.” Free Speech Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile, wondered: “Do adults get to exist on the web or nah?” In Wu’s public letter, she asserted: “Our policies are designed to protect our global community, and maintain our position as the destination for truly special, creative goods.” But for Etsy sellers of adult toys and mature product who had long seen Etsy as a sex positive marketplace, the revised rules felt like a personal betrayal.
So, what does the new supposedly de-eroticized Etsy product landscape look like? With some sellers pivoting in how their more mature wares are sold, the platform’s products aren’t exactly wholly G-rated. A search for “sex toys” produced a plethora of listings for miniature “dong” adult toys for use in dollhouses ($4), a 7-inch carved obsidian “penis model” ($64.08), a black silicone head hood with a silicone vagina where the mouth would be ($337.69), a rainbow-colored Nicolas Cage “penis figurine” ($8), and a “Ceramic Dildo Sensual Sculpture” ($91.73). While Etsy had expressly prohibited “Materials produced by pornographic publishers (e.g. Playboy, Brazzers),” including “vintage adult magazines and films,” there were numerous Playboy magazines for sale on the platform. As for a search for “porn,” that yielded no listings at all. “We couldn't find any results for porn,” the productless-product page read. “Try searching for something else instead?”, it suggested helpfully.
Ironically, as a New York Times article, “Etsy vs. Sex,” pointed out, celebrities are having better luck hawking their erotic wares to consumers. On Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop platform, one can buy a double-sided wand vibrator ($95), a “TEACH ME A LESSON” ruler ($20), and a bottle of something called a “sex serum” ($24). According to a July 31, 2024, Etsy Inc. investor relations report, the company’s second-quarter consolidated net income was $53 million, which was down $8.9 million from last year. So far, it remains to be seen how the removal of the platform’s once copious adult and mature product listings will effect the bottom line.
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Sex Sales
Today on Forbes.com, I wrote about Etsy banning adult toy sales, among a host of other new constraints imposed on people who hawk mature wares on the e-commerce platform. You can read it right here.
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It's Not Nudity, It's Art
I was a little surprised to see that this Saint Laurent video on YouTube entitled “Tan Lines” featured a topless model. Did that mean it was possible to post boobs on YouTube? To find out, I checked out the site’s Nudity & Sexual Content Policy. “The depiction of clothed or unclothed genitals, breasts, or buttocks that are meant for sexual gratification” was not allowed, it informed me. So, the Saint Laurent model’s breasts were allowed because they were being exposed for the purpose of fashion, not sexual gratification? This did not seem to allow for viewer interpretation. In any case, I felt heartened. Maybe the tech giants weren’t so anti-sex, after all. Then I tried to embed the video in this post and saw it was age-restricted. Anyway, it’s pretty sexy.
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What We See
“The images feature hardcore sex, fetishists, erect penises, the unhoused, the seemingly dead, freaks, the mentally ill, exhibitionists, masochists, sex workers, psychos, criminals, mobsters, a hooded figure removing a string of anal beads from his anus, and other types.” Read the rest of my latest Reverse Cowgirl newsletter HERE and then subscribe by hitting the button at the bottom of the newsletter.
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My, My Obscene Comic
In my latest newsletter, I reveal what happened when I set out to post an X-rated comic I created several years ago online: “My, My Obscene Comic.”
Well, maybe I’ll publish the comic in my newsletter, I thought. But then I started to wonder if doing so would get me banned from Substack. “We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack,” read their Content Guidlines, although “We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature.” So, I wasn’t sure.
Read the rest here and hit the button at the bottom to subscribe.
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Fuck in the New York Times
Recently, the New York Times published the word "fuck." Here, the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, explains why.
"Some readers have questioned the use of vulgarity in the series, including two instances of 'the f-word' in Thursday’s installment, the most notable of which is in a quotation from Dasani’s mother as she addresses her directly. It’s highly unusual for The Times.
The associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, explained:
'We had a very thorough discussion of the use of the vulgarities in that passage, which are certainly not the norm for us. The writer and editors avoided language like that in other places. But they made a strong argument that the full quotations were important in this very crucial scene. In the end, we decided that for readers, more would be lost than gained if we tried to write around those passages here. And we concluded that using that language in this one spot — but not repeatedly scattered throughout the articles — would not be likely to distract or offend many readers. Our basic guidelines about avoiding vulgarities and obscenities haven’t changed, but we all recognize that there are cases where an exception is justified.'"
The quotes in question:
- "'Shut the fuck up,' she says. 'You know, that’s one thing I don’t like about you — your negativity. You always talkin’ about the problem. You got a solution?'"
"She think she some-fucking-body."
[NYT / Related: "Satan Is Offended"]
The Price of Perversion
Photographer Clayton Cubitt explains why he's self-censoring:
"But honestly, there’s very little incentive for an artist to publish even modestly sexual visual work online. This is specially true when an artist also does work that requires patronage from often-skittish and culturally conservative corporations. Sexual images become extremely popular with rebloggers, and begin to crowd out more mainstream images, leading to an inaccurate survey of an artist’s oeuvre. While it might be superficially satisfying to have many thousand reblogs on a sexual/nude image, these many thousand reblogs are not worth even a single tiny poorly-paid ad campaign, which they might cost by scaring clients away when those clients do Google Image searches."
YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG: MOTHER JONES
The Accused: Asawin Suebsaeng for Mother Jones
The Problem: This well-respected publication and its DC reporter are going to have to do better if they want to improve their online sex game.
The Story: "The Evan Rachel Wood Oral Sex Scene the MPAA Doesn't Want You to See."
The Money Shot: A paragraph from the "Charlie Countryman" script describing a cunnilingus sex scene starring Evan Rachel Wood and Shia LaBeouf that was shot but cut from the final version so the movie would receive an R rating instead of NC-17 rating, an incident Wood bitched about on Twitter by claiming the MPAA had "censor[ed] a woman's sexuality once again."
The Fail: The title of the article promised sex, but clickers found no sex, just words, which are not sex.
The Grade: D-
The Takeaway: When it comes to digital content, don't promise to fuck and not put out.
TURNING JAPANESE
In Japan, hardcore is censored
Porn gossip and news blogger Mike South posted an interesting email from a reader about how the porn industry works in Japan. Apparently, when it comes to porn, the Japanese are doing it better than the American pornographers, who are floundering.
"You definitely hit the nail on the head in terms of the amount they release, it truly is staggering. When I did place an order with them and was given the spreadsheet to choose from it was unreal. They put out hundreds of titles a month, and I’m not talking about comps and recycled material, and the same girls all the time, it is all new content, new and different girls, and a wide variety of genres. More importantly, it is all quality because that is the model that Japanese corporations follow. If you need more of an example take a look at the auto industry. Toyota, Honda, and the other Japanese manufacturers dominate because of their quality, innovation, and new ideas. The American manufacturers simply can’t keep up and I think that template can be removed from the auto industry and placed over the adult industry resulting in a perfect fit. Lucky for the adult industry in America, they don’t currently have to compete with Japanese studios, otherwise I think it would be disastrous for the mainstay studios here. You are already seeing a little bit of this happening on the toy/novelty side with companies like Tenga."
There's also some interesting information on how Japanese porn stars are treated differently and the Yakuza's involvement in today's Japanese adult industry.