For boring people bored by straight sex.

Revolutionary as. The capitalist pornography barons must be quaking in their boots?

Porn=loveless sex

why does being bored of straight sex make me boring? why does sex have to be about love? if sex is mutual and everyone's enjoying it what's the problem?

and yes, i think the capitalist pornography barons are quaking in their boots. because the capitalist pornography barons make their money by reinforcing misogynist, heterosexist, cissexist, oppressive scripts about sexuality.

this is about people whose sexuality is marginilised and rendered invisible in our culture telling their own stories and constructing sexual scripts which are liberating, not oppressive.

Capitalist pornography barons will sell anything that will make them a buck. If videoing people whose sexuality is marginilised and rendered invisible could make them a buck, the DVD store shelves would be full of that particular product.

That's ambitious - Porn as a tool for Liberation.

Well good luck & don't get too uptight not to enjoy the movies.

hmmm, sex ...
hmmm, love, ....
hmmm ... meaning, love? meaning sex?
surely people are their own universes ...
so where do the universes of love collide ...
as for sex ...
one may as well talk about rainbows ...
woooo <g>

Steve L

Thanks for the post-modern/post-existential non-analysis Steve. No wonder Western 'civilisation' is falling apart.
Bazza

I fully support this effort, and look forward to free porn being distributed on the main street and outside schools. Smash patriarchy! Disrupt gender conformity!

What is "Cissexist"? Is it sex with Djibril Cisse?
Actually. Who cares.
The chickens are being debeaked!
Save the chicken!

what can be revolutionary about watching porn, an act which is by definition spectating?

i can see how it can be subversive but if you bandy about the term 'revolutionary' (as most people do...) then you could at least explain yourself...

if it is then let me know...

"Western 'civilisation' is falling apart."?
Great, but I wouldn't assume it was ever civilised, let alone coherent :-).
But ok, heres an analysis of gaps, in contrast to my earlier, minimalist, "non-analysis" of aesthetics.

The films are being offered as a tool for disrupting and subverting conformity, according to the notice. The intent seems to be to help Western 'civilisation' to split along lines of rupture, or otherwise fall apart. Fine by me.

However, the film as an event is not necessarily the same thing as sex activity. Certainly erotic experiences such as actively 'imagining into' porn can bridge between the event of collective representation and the direct embodied activity of sex. But why assume that such a representation in film is equivalent to the thing itself? No representation ever is. Theres always a political gap, and a political bridging of such gaps, to factor into any analysis.

The event of film seems clearly an act of sex-politics by gaining greater control of self-identity amid the cultural framing of the interplay between reproductive labour (often complacent) and erotic energies (often disruptively creative).

In Victorian times the 'lower classes' were described by the middle classes as ridden with sexual vice and licentiousness. These situations and ascriptions developed in the UK and were represented in English language, arriving in the colonies, in the colonial attitudes, in colonial legislation, and in a sexual underground.

Although such texts were then written, todays film texts seem to continue these themes of disruption and complacency. However, film and writing are no longer so controlled by an apparatus of approved public attitudes in published works. Theres now less censorship and more respect for different perspectives.

As a result I don't think such film events make much difference to the mainstream aspects of culture and social control, but do make a significant impact where particular peoples are marginalised. Theres always that question of how much difference can be accepted by a majority. Theres also a need to reflectively examine our self-censorous activities of thought and aesthetics, particularly in terms of addiction to stigma-purity and puritanism.

The Prostitution Reform Act decriminalised many aspects of sexwork. Nonetheless, this is a recent change to a rather long historical and cultural trajectory of illicit erotic imaginaries, representations in porn, and personal transactions in underground sex markets. In the early 1980s this underground situation was blown open by the advent of HIV/AIDS. The threats to the mainstream led to offers of empowerment to several marginalised illicit communities, particularly gay men, sexworkers, and injecting drug users. The combination of fear of HIV/AIDS and the public health empowerment helped in passing the Homosexual Reform legislation in 1985 and the PRA in 2003. But as public fears about AIDS decrease, due to greater control of infection vectors and more effective palliative treatments, there is less concern to empower the marginalised groups who participate in gender and erotic economies.

For instance, I do not think that the AIDS Foundation (NZAF) gives adequate resources and respect to trans and MSM sexworkers. I am disturbed by the NZAF's cultivation of Christian street outreach agencies in this country, since much of the historical bigotry and disempowerment of marginalised groups has had a Christian component. Furthermore the NZAF's extension overseas, in a US-led global climate of puyritanism, seems likely to weaken its foundational accountability to erotic practices and markets right here in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

So these are a few of the linkages and contexts that explain why I think porn is very important. Porn has empowering as well as disempowering aspects, and behaves as a circulatory medium that in part constructs and delimits certain marginalised peoples.

HIV/AIDS demonstrated, in a very direct manner, that such people are disempowered and driven undergound only at the risk to public health. Yet there is also an effervesence and an increased sense of identity in marginal worlds. Theres a gleeful insurrectionary energy in being revolting, in getting up the noses of the righteous ;-)

And so the empowerment of madness and badness is not necessarily desired, and can assimilate marginal identities into a slowly gurgling complacent mainstream. Better to enjoy porn than be approved!

cheers
Steve L

I agree with the above poster about porn watching being counter revolutionary due to its passive spectacular nature.

Therefore I suggest a no-holds barred fully oiled up orgiastic fuck frenzy instead.

Car keys in the peanut bowl please people.

I'd like to coin the term sexual obesity to describe what is yet another psychosocial illness. The last poster, if serious, is morbidly overweight.

------------------------------------------------
I agree with the above poster about porn watching being counter revolutionary due to its passive spectacular nature.

Therefore I suggest a no-holds barred fully oiled up orgiastic fuck frenzy instead.

Car keys in the peanut bowl please people.
-------------------------------------------------
I agree less Spectacle more action.add a DJ,VJ,food

or go dérive or something

The critique of the Spectacle is about representation replacing the thing itself, to the point where people no longer understand the difference between reality and representation. I suspect this porn is being presented to create a collective situation of aesthetic critique, rather than a substitute for actual sex (which presumably happens in private).

The idea that public sex is subversive is an interesting one. I suspect it comes from the idea that reversing privatizing - making the private public - is always good. In fact the existence of the private is not the problem, but the shifting of public goods into the commercial, which now presents itself as the private.

"The idea that public sex is subversive is an interesting one."

Yes, especially historically, for instance in the seemingly widespread practices of carnival (Refer the mountains of Bakhtin studies) being somewhat insurrectionary yet also supporting the order of things. Marx's attempt to conceptually distinguish the (pure?) working class from the (disordered) lower classes (lumpenproletariat) is also rather revealing when one looks closely at the historical interplay of misogyny, medical dominance, legislation, socialist reformism, and venereal disease during the 19th and 20th C.

I recommend studying 'Mapping Out the Veneral Wildness: Public Health and STD in New Zealand, 1920 - 1980' by Antje Kampf (2007), and 'The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, class and surveillance' by Lynette Finch (1993).

cheers
Steve L

Public sex? Hmmm. Too bad most people look bloody awful naked.
And regarding the historical class view, the worst offenders against taste and decency were the upper classes, who have never had any private morals, seeing these as something to be imposed on lesser humans. Some of the above comments read as if they originated from the amoral elite.

I'm an absolute vision of delight naked thankyou very much. Some have said I have the body of a greek god.

Goodness me! The world is going to hell in a handbasket, so the logical response is to crank some gay pornos with your "revolutionary" mates?

Picket lines too boring? Environment too far from the city to save? Feel a bit uncomfortable with brown people? Since when did anarchos become a counter-cultural clique instead of being revolutionaries?