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.