Blue Blood hottie Serena Toxicat recently mentioned that she would be showing thirty of her art pieces at the Blow Gallery in Berkely, California. If you are in that neck of the woods, you can stop by 2112 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 for an evening of hotties like Serena Toxicat, art, and possibly some free booze. Most gallery shows have free booze. I try not to examine why too closely. Here you can examine the conversation Serena Toxicat and I just had about art.

Amelia G: What first got you into creating? Were you always creative?

Serena Toxicat: Apparently as a 5 year-old my painting looked like pointillism. My 1st grade art teacher raved about the stuff. After my dad saw how much I liked to color and paint, his best friend bought me a set of acrylics and I never looked back, except to kick my own ass to make more. I do so many things in the world of art and performance that my productivity in any one area tends to ebb and flow.

Amelia G: What are your favorite media to create in and how to you feel writing vs. visual arts compare for expressing yourself?

Serena Toxicat: I love acrylic and just developed a system whereby I draw in marker over an acrylic base. I also like making sculpture with found objects and occasionally indulge in photography. I made some mixed media pieces, with b&w images of my pointy little Isis as the central focus. Most intriguing might be my channeled oracular pieces. I close my eyes and let the spirits paint with my hands. You should feel the energy coming out of those things!

Creating is creating, and if I’m happy with a piece of art I feel the same sense of completeness I do with my writing. Usually the visual stuff goes faster. Well, compared to a book it does!

Amelia G: Who is curating the Blow show and how did you get involved? Does it have any particular theme?

Serena Toxicat: Amy O’Rourke, one of the stylists, curated the last two shows. It is very eclectic – everything from artistic nudes to hanging paper sculpture – and she is quite happy about that!

Amelia G: Is it true that the Blow gallery is actually a hair salon? If so, how does that work? Do they get the sort of clientele where the art and hairstyle work have good synergy and complement one another?

Serena Toxicat: Yes! And they do great hair. It seems to work well for them, this meeting of the aesthetic worlds. The clients appreciate it and many come to the shows and buy or just enjoy. Blow has a new opening every 10 weeks with fantastic catering. They have been combining hair and showing art for as long as I can remember. I discovered them while searching for a colorist. When I found David, who has since moved, we developed a relationship based on bright horizontal stripes (in my hair) and mullets (as material for many a delirious joke).

Amelia G: When to when can people see the show? Anything in particular, specific art piece of yours, event feature, other artists showing with you, whatever, which you think people will extra enjoy?

Serena Toxicat: It starts Sat. 4-4 and closes June 7. I’m really excited about my bright green and orange pieces. They address important issues, like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc., and feature multicultural female (so far) subjects dressed in gothy striped frocks.

I also hope people get off on my socially conscious and poetic propagand[iv]a video. I play a newscaster and talk about everything from Bush and Obama to animal activism and being nice to hookers. Jim Stipovich has been showing his nudes since the 70’s. I’m sure he’ll bring out his following out of the proverbial woodwork and make many new fans! I also love Shaista and Kelly’s stuff. Fun!

When the feminist publications like Feministe and the rock publications like AntiQuiet, and the news overlords like MSNBC all agree on something, it is safe to assume the topic is something as definite as the sky is generally blue. In this instance, pretty much everyone agrees that famous homophobe Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” video is a lot like a tremendously sucky version of a Girls Gone Wild set up.

More than a decade ago, Jill Sobule sang a bouncy tune, of the same name, about a woman who is titillated and unsure and excited about the new experience of having kissed another woman. Neither video shows a lot of lip-locking because both were intended for MTV airplay and, as a society, we tend to still view same sex kisses as potentially unsuitable material for kids. I think there will come a time when the idea of two women kissing being scandalous is as quaint as the idea of two people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds kissing is now. Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal, recently had to work on their legislation because they had some old laws on the books to prevent black/white couples from other states from using Massachusetts to legitimize their otherwise illegal unions.

Because progress really can and does happen on so many fronts, the lameness of third wave feminism never ceases to disappoint me. If Katy Perry thinks it will turn guys on to tell them that she had a dream about kissing a girl, but, like, ew, not that she’d ever really do that . . . well, it probably will turn guys on.

Most guys I know, who would freak if their girl made out with another guy, think they will be just fine with it if she makes out with another girl. In real life, guys often beg to see this and then get really upset when the opportunity actually arises. Like it never crossed their minds that the chicks might actually be into each other, so then they get belatedly jealous. Personally, I think the swinger relationship model is at least internally consistent, but it is just silly to have the notion that it is totally cool for your girlfriend to kiss other girls, so long as she doesn’t like it. The idea of chicks kissing chicks because they really want to kiss a guy and need to get his attention . . . well, I guess I just think it is better to be more goal-directed towards what you really want.

Gentlemen, before your girlfriend starts kissing girls, decide whether or not you are cool with swinging. In most cases, the other party having a vagina doesn’t really mean it does not count, unless you are making your darling do something she hates. Of course, there is also the possibility that your girl is indifferent one way or the other to whomever she fools around with. To her, getting down with anyone may not be worthy of a musical anthem because it is a matter of some indifference and just really no big deal. This may include doing it with you.

Ladies, do not ever plant your beautiful sexy lips on anyone who would sing a song which manages to be sexist, male-bashing, and homophobic like “Ur So Gay”. Katy Perry does not deserve your kisses.

Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.

I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.

Here is where we come to problem number two. I dislike it when companies use a fake female spokesperson and have her pretend to run the company or some such, just so they can get some feminist points or chick support. I dislike it the same way I do when large corporations will back some supposedly indie project and send out phony press releases about what a bootstrap operation said project is. Basically, I think that a certain strata of American culture has figured out how to co-opt their own opposition. So Juno looks like a hip little film, with a spunky portrayal of how intelligent teenage girls approach the world. As played by Ellen Page, even in the trailers, the title character Juno looks like the sort of girl any teenage girl would want to be. Only the storyline of Juno has a teenage girl getting pregnant, deciding not to get an abortion, and giving her baby up for closed adoption to a woman in the middle of a divorce. This is pro-life without even the benefit of family values. Are the baby boomers really that scared that social security is going to go bust if younger generations don’t start breeding immediately?

I’m pro-choice, but I’ve never had an abortion. I realize that there is some powerful biology there and you don’t necessarily 100% know what you would do, until you are dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. So I’m not saying it is wrong for a teenage girl to bring her baby to term and then give it up via the out-dated closed adoption method where she can never meet her offspring, even if the child wants to meet her. I do, however, know that every single woman I know, who has had an abortion and saw Juno, came out of the movie feeling terrible about having had an abortion. So, if the film was not intended as pro-life propaganda being disseminated from within the castle walls of hipsterdom, then it was a poorly done movie, because that was surely the impact it had on its audience. If it was intended to cause more unplanned pregnancies to be brought to term, then good job, guys.

Witness the recent much-publicized pregnancy pact in Massachusetts. Whether or not the fourfold increase in pregnancies at Gloucester High was the result of something which could be described with so sinister a term as “pact”, the fact remains that teen pregnancy appears to be on the rise in some surprising places. My mother mentioned this teen pregnancy story to me when it first broke and my first thought was that this was another example of co-option of cool to promote a counterintuitive agenda. Sometimes certain cultural patterns look obvious to me, but I’m not sure if others will share my view. Well, turns out high schools are now referring to this as “The Juno Effect” and this apparently annoys actor Jason Bateman, who played the prospective adoptive father.

You can be damn sure that, if kids were stealing cars after playing Grand Theft Auto, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started killing themselves after listening to Ozzy Osbourne, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started swearing after listening to Eminem, connections would be drawn. So, now that the shoe is on the other ideological foot, connections can damn well be drawn here too. Juno causes teen pregnancy. The film only cost $6.5 million to make and has grossed over $100 million, so maybe they can use some of those profits to help out all the unwed mothers they have inspired.

If I were a nearly immortal, highly intelligent, time-traveling, space-faring, womanizer of an alien with a lot of heart(s) to give, I would definitely totally want to get me a long string of very high end companions. If I were an alien from Los Angeles, I might prefer that they be adoring, young, and paid for. This apparently is the case for those who hail from Gallifrey or London as well. The Doctor aka Doctor Who found the perfect companion in Rose Tyler played by Billie Piper. The Doctor picked Rose up when she was a cute blonde working retail, told her of a more thrilling life, and whisked her off in his chick magnet car Tardis right in front of her boyfriend. Talk about dark triad!

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the important point that Showtime debuted their airing of Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Which also stars actress Billie Piper. Playing, ya know, a prostitute. Secret Diary of a Call Girl originally aired on Britain’s ITV. After a bidding war between HBO and Showtime, Sho secured the rights. There was some conjecture that Showtime would censor the show for non-European sensibilities. They have apparently kept it delightfully intact and there is some full frontal male nudity in at least the first episode, albeit in a context more humorous than turgidly hot. The dialog is witty, the acting engaging, and the cinematography showcases Billie Piper’s Belle character with a lover’s eye. The original airing on ITV even won a UK Adult Film Award for best softcore. I don’t know what a UK Adult Film Award is, but it certainly sounds like some sort of porn seal of approval for excellence in hotness.

To give you a bit of history, the whole thing started out with a journal on Blogspot called Belle de Jour after the 1967 movie where the glorious Catherine Deneuve plays, ya know, a prostitute. Albeit one who only does it as a hobby because her housewife existence is so tedious. The blogger Belle (not to be confused with any classic movies directed by Luis Buñuel) was purportedly a high end call girl in London who blogged about her life but whose identity was never discovered. This blog lead to multiple books deals and the Showtime airing of Secret Diary of a Call Girl and ITV is reportedly shooting a second season of the Billie Piper vehicle this coming fall. So somebody found out who Belle really was sufficiently to cut her some checks for her writing and ideas anyway. Secret Diary of a Call Girl is inspired by the blog and books, but it is fictionalized for our viewing pleasure.

I have no idea whether this is going to turn out to be one of those situations where J.T. Leroy turns out to be a woman or an alleged businesswoman turns out to be the PR mouthpiece for an actual businessman. Certainly some people assert that this is the case. From a sex worker politics and feminism perspective, this is an issue, but, from an entertainment perspective, it is less of one. I like that so far the series depicts a woman who says she likes sex and likes money and admits that she is “fundamentally lazy” and that these are the ingredients for a perfect whore. There is none of that sexist victim nonsense where cinema loves to pretend that women only do anything with their own bodies because some man makes them. Yet Secret Diary of a Call Girl is exploring what happens when one commodifies something as delicate and potentially complicated as human sexuality.

I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with these themes and all the fabulous funny lines in the show. You can check out the first two episodes for free at this VIP Secret Diary secret link on the Sho site. Enjoy.

My mother’s generation had a saying about how you could go anywhere so long as you had a little black dress. I’ve been working on putting this to the test this September. Every year, I tend to feel kinda gothic during the summer and I perk up as soon as it is Fall. I don’t know if this is some sort of Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (Disorder is such a judgmental word.) or if I just really like school to be in session, whether or not I am attending it. My birthday is also in August and I tend to use my birthday and New Year’s as times to make adjustments designed to perfect my existence. This Fall, I’ve made a commitment to get out and enjoy what Los Angeles has to offer. So I bought a lot of little black dresses and have been trying new things and enjoying it a lot as it happens. The only weird thing about doing so much which is brand new is that it creates a bit of social anxiety.

The feminist blog/site Say Object referred to me saying,

“One of our favorite feminist thinkers, Amelia G of BlueBlood.net, recently weighed in on the “Captivity” billboard controversy, and some of what she says suprised us (plus, Girl clearly did her research).”

Writer/editor/cupcake fetishist Rachel Kramer Bussel and I were chatting about the Say Object mention and she told me they were having a party.

So Tuesday night, although I knew I was eventually headed to the West Side to help Blue Blood hottie Superna celebrate her birthday, I started all the way on the East Side at The Echoplex in Echo Park. The first event on deck was the The Conversation which was the opening act for Yo Majesty at Lady Party 911. Apparently comedians Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin do a weekly show called (I think) The Pages where they intellectualize tabloid fodder in a humorous fashion. The duo moderated The Conversation for this event where the topic was Punishing the Princesses. Basically the idea was to do a feminist deconstruction of why, as a society, we put people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan on a pedestal and then knock them off it. The panelists were Tracy McMillan who I kind of think maybe writes for television, but I’m not sure. Then there was Jen Sincero who was apparently booked because she wrote The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, although Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer is the books of hers I’m familiar with. It would be most accurate I guess to say I’m partly familiar with it, as I was enjoying reading it but was in the middle of it when Blue Blood exhibited at Erotica LA and a couple of members of Jen Sincero’s entourage stopped by my booth and acted so weird that I never got back to reading it. Rounding out the panel was Nina Hartley who, at least for me, I thought needed no introduction. For the event she was billed as Porn Queen Nina Hartley.

Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin were good moderators and kept The Conversation flowing. They have a sort of intelligent sex-obsessed vibe that strikes me as sort of Sex and the City, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to seeing that show is watching a spoof of it on Saturday Night Live. Tracy McMillan says that she thinks masculine energy is all about going out into the world in a hunting sort of way and that feminine energy is about being receptive and gathering things in a powerful way. She says that she thinks Madonna has evolved from seeking masculine power and energy to seeking the feminine side. I think that I am secretly a man. Jen Sincero explained that she wrote her The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks because she found herself thirty-five-years-old and in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She said that she interviewed a lot of people for the book and that the people her own age she interviewed were very caught up with issues of sexual identity, but the younger people had more of the attitude of why wouldn’t you just sleep with whoever you feel like. Nina Hartley surprised me by being really awfully cool. I sort of thought I knew who she was in a general way, but she had really interesting insights. She is definitely not just another pornstar with an unconventional relationship and a publicist who claims she is smart. She is very well-spoken and was able to make interesting counterpoints all evening to an audience which was not necessarily porn-familiar or even porn-friendly. At one point, the panelists were talking about some reality show chick who had nude photos of herself posted to the internet and, while deconstructing whether the photos were more simply nude than prurient, someone mentioned that the girl was seventeen. Nina Hartley expressed horror and the other people on stage were like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what’s the difference? From a professional performer’s perspective the issue has to do with what is legal and I thought she handled that and other issues really well. The most interesting point she made was when they got to the topic of blowjobs. Apparently, some teen perv researchers recently did some sort of study (yeah, sure, a “study”) of how girls as young as twelve are just handing out the blowjobs these days and boys are not reciprocating. Nina Hartley said that, when she was fifteen, the notion of boys not reciprocating would have been totally uncool, but that she was interested in penises and would have been interested in giving blowjobs. However, she did not know that she could be alone with a boy and have limits on what she would do and she did not feel ready for intercourse.

Now you would think that, having had the site responsible for the event call me a favorite feminist thinker, I would not be experiencing any social anxiety, but that would be inaccurate. I figured I would be just kinda incognito and get to see other people talk. Only my good friend Lange kept hitting me on my cell during the talk because he had gotten to the club for the Superna birthday party an hour early. My cell phone is set so it is really loud when being turned off. It sings an entire song before powering down. I generally only think of how annoying this is at times when it would be even more annoying to play with the cell phone settings. So I just kept hitting mute and texted him where I was. I think the ringing makes the people sitting near me glance over at me and it turns out that one of them is Julia Rubiner with a super different haircut from the last time I saw her at a party at her house. Julia was kind enough to help write some Blue Blood About Us stuff when I was totally hyperventilating and blocked on writing it. I actually would have worked with her a bunch more, only all of her publicist pals were apparently part of the same pact to put a media blackout on Blue Blood projects. Whatever. It was nice to run into her.

Once The Conversation was complete, I got back in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, just long enough to get kind of turned around and lost in Echo Park. Fortunately, my cell phone features the primitive form of GPS where you call your friends and make them MapQuest where the fuck you are. I have nice friends.

I make it over to The Viper Room and meet up with the rest of the Blue Blood posse. The entire downstairs lounge is set for a Superna takeover and she is getting ready to play an all acoustic set with a new drummer. Uber-scenester Casper, of Coyote Shivers band fame, makes me and Forrest Black feel very welcome and we appreciate it. Last time I bought Superna shots, she vomited blood, so I don’t get her any birthday shots, but everyone else does. After her performance, she and Scar spend most of the rest of the night making out.

We hear that Fred Durst is filming a reality show in the upstairs of the club shortly. That seems like the perfect surreal end to the evening, so we all trundle upstairs. Fred Durst is gracious and nice, although I get the sense that, like me, part of him is really into being where he is and part of him is just crawling out of his skin with so many people around, looking and maybe judging. The band on stage for the reality show has a kind of an 80’s hard rock Pat Benetar sort of thing going and I like them, although security requests that I not shoot while they are on stage and I comply because I am considerate like that. When folks are nice to me anyway.

The thing people who are not extremely shy sometimes don’t get about me is that, it is already kind of painful to leave my house. Once I’ve exited the building, it is no more uncomfortable for me to talk to a rockstar than it is to chat with someone I vaguely know. It is all over the agony threshhold in a way and it is all interesting and stimulating in a way, so it is sort of all the same to me. I’m actually most comfortable with total strangers and with people I know very well. People I sort of know make me the most uneasy.

In closing her set, Superna mentions from the stage that people who want to see her naked ass (which must be everyone!) should go to BlueBlood.com. When I go into the bathroom, someone has put a Blue Blood sticker up in one of the stalls. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain my anxiety level, if the universe is going to be so sweet to me. I hope my art doesn’t suffer.

It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.

I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?

Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.

It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to more vanilla smutsters, Los Angeles has seen tattooed hotties doing BDSM once or twice before. In point of fact, the club is essentially a tent erected by where the Coconut Teazer nightclub used to stand. So that very location has probably been host to more than its share of tattooed hotties with fetish gear over the years. The most ground-breaking aspect was probably that it is unusual for a movie to not screen at its own premiere.

Anyway, both the MPAA, which rates movies, and a variety of watchdog groups have objected to Captivity’s presentation well before they started planning a premiere. After Dark Films pulled thirty of their billboards from Los Angeles and more than fourteen hundred taxi cab adverts, the creative for which featured the slogan “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.” over very beautiful stylized photos of a very small portion of a scene involving a woman. I can’t emphasize enough how great the color scheme of those advertisements was. Meanwhile, the MPAA jerked the movie company around on when the film was even going to be rated. After Dark Films co-founder Courtney Solomon claims the MPAA rigmarole with Captivity is just about the MPAA maintaining their position of power. “They needed a whipping boy. They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.” The upshot of this was that a schedule May 18 release date became a July 13 release date. While releasing a horror flick on Friday the 13th is always nifty, any organization which can keep audiences away from a product is scary. And not scary in an entertaining way, scary in a bad way.

A quick history lesson: The Motion Picture Association of America was founded in 1922 as a trade association. Although the initial industry concerns it dealt with had more to do with copyright and contract standardization, over the years, it has become almost synonymous with the ratings system it devised. Many industries choose to police themselves, partly out of decency, and partly out of a desire to take care of it internally before outsiders do it for them. So the MPAA ratings board determines whether a movie will receive wide release as a PG flick or the financial death knell of an NC-17. Representatives of the six major studios sit on the board. These studios includes Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers.

Now, the opening weekend gross for Captivity was only a bit over a million bucks, which is pretty terrible for a major studio release and brought the movie in at a ranking of #12 for domestic releases that weekend. In all fairness, the flicks Captivity was beaten out by were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Ratatouille, Live Free or Die Hard, License to Wed, 1408, Evan Almighty, Knocked Up, Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Had the movie been able to open as planned, if the MPAA had not hung them up, then it might have been able to do better against the movies opening that weekend. Although a $1.4 mill opening is lackluster for any theatrical release, especially a heavily advertised one, had Captivity opened May 18 with the same total, it would have ranked #8. Then again, maybe it would have gotten its ass kicked by Shrek and Spider-Man, just like everybody else.

Part of the difficulty I have parsing out my feelings on the brouhaha is that it is difficult to figure out whether an After Dark Films release counts as a major motion picture or a plucky little guy trying to make it. Captivity is “co-released” by Lionsgate, but Lionsgate leaves all the responsibility for potentially problematic promo on After Dark’s doorstep. I’m not sure what “co-releasing” means exactly, but Lionsgate has a market capitalization of one point three five billion dollars and an estimated four hundred full time employees. Which I would not categorize as small or independent. I think it is important to note that the distro on a partner-produced movie like Captivity is a microscopic portion of the business of a behemoth like Lionsgate, which is responsible for very enjoyable and successful projects such as the Academy-award-nominated The Cooler and innovative DVD packaging and distribution for projects ranging from cutting edge fare like Weeds to cult classics like King of New York. Then again, if you inflicted the Care Bears movie on your kids, that is partly Lionsgate’s responsibility too.

According to the New York Times, Courtney Solomon, who put himself on the map by optioning Dungeons & Dragons and parlaying that into a much-lambasted directorial turn, “persuaded the director of Captivity, Roland Joffé, the much-honored filmmaker behind The Mission and The Killing Fields, to undertake reshoots. These added explicit torture, including a so-called “milkshake” scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it.” Both to the New York Times and in other media outlet, Solomon chortles about what a freakshow his premiere is going to be and how upset he hopes women’s groups get about his movie. The National Organization for Women said, on the record, that they were not going to protest to give him press.

So, having delved into the issues involved, here is my summary take on it. First, if After Dark Films is looking for a modern audience for their movies, it is a bit antiquated to act like BDSM and tattoos are outrageous fringe culture. I’m sick of this sort of marginalizing nonsense from people who would like to make a dollar off of my scene. Secondly, because of the major studio makeup of the MPAA, I feel it can’t really be objective. I like having ratings on things as a viewing guide, but I dislike the way the ratings system leads to unwarranted limitations on distribution and I particularly dislike the way the current rating system encourages violence against women in place of human sexuality. It will be a chilly day in Hellywood before I deliberately view torture porn like Captivity, but I don’t think a project like that should have its success determined by whether or not its producers can convince a half dozen really biased businesspeople that violence against women is appropriate viewing for teens. Thirdly, although I kind of liked the Captivity billboards, I was personally revolted by the Saw signage at the San Diego Comic Con and I think movie producers, and everyone really, should pay attention to what they put in an advertisement people will not be able to avoid. I do not want strangers telling me what I can see in my media. I deeply believe that that becomes a slippery slope to total destruction of the free speech rights granted to all Americans by the First Amendment, but I also do not want strangers forcing me, or forcing children, to see things they do not wish to see or should not see. This means that adverts, in public places, for potentially upsetting products, should be honest about what the products are, without ramming the product down the throats of the unwilling.

I admit that, although I loved Elisha Cuthbert’s performance and character in the surprisingly awesome The Girl Next Door, I loathed her Kim Bauer character she played on 24. I thought about kicking off this article with a joke about how I thought Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer should have just let her be kept captive and tortured. Heck, that was probably the inspiration for Captivity. For me to want to watch that, however, it would really have to be one of the dungeons on Fucking Machines, where the action is consensual and female pleasure might actually be involved too.

So, as many of you gentle readers probably know, in addition to running general entertainment sites and multigirl membership sites such as BlueBlood.com, I also run a number of membership sites for individual superstar Blue Blood hotties. At the moment, we are just about to launch a new one. The design has been pretty good to go for some time. Forrest Black did an absolutely killer job on it and the hottie who the site is for is awesome sexy fun and I’m dying to unveil the site. But we are having some trouble with the banking people, although I am a professional so I’m going to do what is needed to make the site go live, I am having some feminist issues with it.

Essentially, in order to be able to accept credit card or check or phone payments online, a financial institution of some sort needs to facilitate the charges going through correctly for the correct product. There are a lot of different methodologies for this and different companies have wildly different policies, but the salient point for what I want to talk about is that the banking people can ask a site to make changes before the site will be able to accept credit cards and such. I have no problem with this in general. Obviously, it is good if there are people paying attention to make sure that it is difficult for criminals to make money from doing terrible things to women, children, animals, even men. But the banking people refuse to process credit cards etc. for a lot of perfectly legal and perfectly ethical and decent content as well, including even some things which could run on prime time network television without outcry. The rules are sort of specialized and idiosyncratic.

I do kind of have a problem with the cultural bias some of the banking people seem to apply. It may not be their fault, in that Visa or MasterCard or whoever really might have a problem with some of the types of content the banking folks fret about. The billers are supposed to essentially function as a liaison between a company like Blue Blood and a company like Visa. Visa, for example, does not deal directly with the people who accept their cards. So it is the billers’ job to fret about what will freak out the credit card and check and phone people and I do kinda pay them to do so. Nonetheless, it sometimes bothers me which things do and do not get approved.

In the case of Blue Blood sites, the main things the billing people have asked us to censor over the years are the actual real fantasies of women we shoot. Second place is actual real stories women we have shot have shared about their personal sexual adventures. Part of the problem getting billing approval for our newest solo girl site is that, to me, one of the really exciting things about this particular woman is that she is all about exploring her sexuality and pushing both her own boundaries and other people’s boundaries. It is kind of difficult to communicate this exhuberance in a censored interview. I am also just really troubled by trimming down a person’s answer to questions about what turns them on or what they’ve actually personally done. Most recently, the billers held up the approval process on this newest solo girl site for the third time because they ran across the expression “lite choking” in the text of the interview I did with the subject of the site.

Apparently, they felt it was too “extreme” to have a woman talking about being turned on by being choked just a little bit. Now, they process for all sorts of gag porn sites where women perform fellatio which is done so hard and rough that the women weep and choke until they literally vomit. And it is all captured in colorful video and pictures. So how is a text representation of choking fantasy different in a more problematic way from a video or photographic representation of choking fantasy where a performer really is being choked? It comes down to what is directed at the male consumer. Hands around the throat for a little bit of breath control or mild strangling is primarily about female pleasure and female orgasm. Brutal fellatio is about male pleasure and male orgasm. Hence, “lite choking” is “extreme violence” but puking on penis is acceptable.

I was super psyched to see notable writer Gram Ponante join the Blue Blood forums this week. His writing cracks me up. I was also super psyched by his recent press mention of Blue Blood where, among other things, he said:

“Part of the 1300th photoset hosted on pioneering punk erotica site Blue Blood.com, the photos of Sara X remind me that I really need to watch my diet.“

Gram made the interesting point that he feels labels have to constantly be defined and re-defined because of the human “tendency to aggressively misunderstand.” This was primarily apropos of whether or not I could talk about feminist issues which matter to me and not have my existence become unmitigated hell.

But Gram has, for quite some time now, been promoting the notion that the annoying altporn terminology should be changed to steveporn because steveporn is a term which comes without the baggage. Now, it is my impression that some of the support for the steveporn terminology comes from the same divisive, art-destroying, and scene-damaging camp which coined the altporn terminology in the first place, and that the main point of using the term steveporn is in the hopes of mollifying famous director and writer David Aaron Clark. DAC’s objection to altporn is complex. I should probably have him explain it here some time, but perhaps his view can be summed up as generally feeling that, as an adult video genre, it is neither an alternative to anything, nor particularly quality pornography, nor generally being produced by the best that industry has to offer.

I’ve known David Aaron Clark for many years and I adore him and I respect his opinions. I agree with him on many things and enjoy debating the topics on which we do not agree. And I feel qualified to say that dressing up the same problem with a new name is not going to fool DAC.

Nonetheless, I am entertained by Gram’s blog and his suggestion that perhaps altaltporn could be termed steveporn. Sadly, a rose by any other name and all that.

In recent years, I realize I have shied away from talking about certain topics such as feminism or sexuality or even actual products. This is kind of odd as these were certainly pretty cornerstone issues which were, not only covered in Blue Blood in the past, but were instrumental in why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I feel like feminism on the net, particularly when associated with the site genre dubiously dubbed altporn, is pretty much a mockery. The language has been so co-opted by people who don’t mean it, or even understand it, that the whole thing pretty much makes me sick. It definitely makes me want to disassociate myself from the whole thing, but do I really want to change my life and who I am because someone fake pretended to be like me? Probably not such a good idea.

One of the difficulties involved with feminist politics in 2007 is that it seems to be in vogue to attack people on a personal level, rather than to debate the issues. I see that most people deal with personal attacks by either defending their personal lives or correcting misimpressions about their personal lives. I think that people should pay attention to and debate the actual point and not deconstruct details which are merely specific to the person bringing a broader feminist or other issue up.

I think any artist has to give of themselves, to a certain extent, in order to create. But the global communication networks we live with today make it so difficult to maintain the slightest shred of privacy. Reality show programming and tabloid journalism put into the zeitgeist the notion that the world is entitled to know really personal things about anyone remotely famous. This makes me want to, not only avoid being famous, but move to a farm in Montana. The main thing which prevents me from doing this is the knowledge that it is terribly cliche for a Los Angeles person to buy a spread to get away from it all. That and the simple fact that pretty much no place today is really remote enough to truly get away from it all.

But it is difficult to talk about sex in this type of media climate while maintaining one’s personal privacy and avoiding becoming a public figure. But sharing any private moments in this world is like entering into a BDSM relationship with a room full of strangers who don’t believe in safewords. Sometimes, I believe a person should be entitled to say, hey, this is just for me and not the public. I believe in a fundamental right to privacy.

Lastly, various marketers have disseminated the notion that, if anyone you’ve heard of either endorses or slags a product, then they must be corrupt and inaccurate. These are marketers who of course utilize something called WOM or word of mouth marketing. Just one example of what this often boils down to is a solitary lonely dude posting two hundred reviews on Amazon, with sixty different usernames, of a dozen books, not one of which he read. But, if someone with an actual journalistic pedigree gives an opinion, it is often dismissed as envy because they also wrote a book or some such nonsense. Note to the world: known journalists really do tend to have more valuable opinions than anonymous posters. For real.

I could probably have written three long treatises in place of this article. My primary point here is that feminism, sexuality, and pop culture products news and reviews used to be the main things I wrote about. The current media environment is one where the producers have become cynical and manipulative and the audience has become jaded and betrayed. It is difficult to express true and heartfelt opinions, knowing that marketers may be rushing to either pirate or discredit what is said and readers may be looking for spin in all the wrong places.

So, if I sounded like a feminist, would you hold it against me? If I talked about sex and sexuality, would you feel compelled to pry beyond my comfort zone? If I reviewed products I like, would you assume it was just for the advertising dollars? If I reviewed products I don’t like, would you believe that I was just envious?

I used to be above it. Now I’m down in it. But I don’t really want to lose my voice.