The Debased Language of Porn

Photo by Flickr user notcub. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The other day in Tampa, Florida, Federal prosecutors got a huge obscenity conviction against Paul Little, a.k.a. "Max Hardcore," an industrial pornographer who lives in and, evidently, works only in California. The man in question may never have been to Tampa himself but prosecutors charged him there instead of California because, they say, his web hosting company had servers that physically resided in a Tampa-area data center. Oh, and also because "community standards" in Tampa are much, much more conducive to an obscenity conviction than anywhere they might have brought charges in California.

The specific convictions evidently weren't for *producing* videos containing representations of violent sexual assault that evidently included either him peeing on his fellow actors but jamming his fists into their mouths till they vomited. (Reverse Cowgirl has kept up with the story.) Instead the convictions were for "10 federal counts of distributing obscene materials over the Internet and through the mail." (Again, via ReverseCowgirl.)

Maybe I'm just feeling curmudgenly here but my contempt for that kind of scurrilous venue-picking by prosecutors is exceeded only by... Paul Little's conceit that his stupid little niche-market novelty acts could be considered "hard-core" pornography in any real sense. Beyond, perhaps, the "x-tremely" narrow sense of "still able to offend somebody's sensibilities somewhere even if they look at lot of porn." And the even narrower sense that, as one of his collaborators (in the constructive sense of the word), Ashley Blue of Emotional Audience, put it "some adults partake in consensual piss-guzzling, ass-fucking** and vomiting." Sure, and some adults partake in blowing up and sitting on balloons (mildly nsfw) but nobody calls *that* "extreme,* or "outrageous," or, especially "hard-core."

So... incredibly narrow niche fetish for violence and vomit? "Hard core!" Equally niche-market balloon porn or clown porn? Evidently *not* "hard core," but why not?

Gee, you'd think "hard core" had gone from being a euphemism for keeping the camera focused on the genitals during penetration or engulfment to a synonym for "transgressive violence." Against women, right? (Rhetorical question: what are the odds Paul Little gets consensually ass fucked, drinks anyone's pee or vomits while geting his mouth fisted in any of his movies?) And transgressive violence, when you think about it, is indistinguishable from the attitudes of the feebs, dweebs and morons who dreamed up and cheered on... the obscenity trial against "Max Hardcore."

Fine. Whatever. Seems like a stupid misappropriation of a great word though.

So. Just to be clear as a prudish libertine I think it's inexcusable for prosecutors to bring to trial, let alone a jury to convict, somebody for making what amounts to slightly more tasteless episodes of the original version of Fear Factor. I'm sorry it happened and I hope his convictions are either overturned or his sentences are reduced to time served. But as a libertine prude I think it's equally inexcusable to call what he was convicted for "porn," let alone "hard core" porn.

[** And by the way don't you have to be at least a little bit mainstream to lump anal sex together with urolagnia and vomerophilia? Even on a Tampa jury? Or was Ashley Blue misquoted?

And an update: Lynn Gazzis-Sax, who's post takes up the issue of "free speech" vs "workplace safety" makes a point that vomiting as opposed to anal sex differ in terms of worker-safety: "Terri Schiavo didn’t wind up in a coma by having butt sex; she wound up in a coma by having bulimia, and vomiting her electrolytes out of balance. Big difference between something that’s just a (rather large) minority sexual taste, and something that’s actually unsafe." Interesting. Again it's not knocking people with a vomiting fetish, and *definitely* not excusing anyone in Florida which isn't exactly workplace friendly anyway. It's just pointing the amusingly prim conflation of very different acts. --fl]