The more info you're armed with, the better it is for everyone.
For several years, pornographers have been making movies that educate as well as titillate, offering hardcore sex education for XXX fans. There have been countless guides to giving better blowjobs and eating pussy like a pro, volumes devoted to anal safety and bondage for beginners. But until last week, there had never been a guide to fisting. So why does no one want the public to see this fisting tutorial?
For the unfamiliar, fisting refers to the sexual practice of putting one's entire hand, or fist, inside a partner's vagina or anus. Though frequently seen as the domain of lesbians and gay men, fisting is one of the most universally accessible sexual practices there is. So long as you've got a hand, a willing orifice, and a whole lot of lube and patience, you and your partner can happily fist the night away.
But even though anyone can fist, that doesn't mean it's the sort of activity you want to rush into without any preparation at all. "I had a friend in college get badly injured trying to force fisting to happen on her body, and a bit of information could have helped her out greatly," said Lauren Marie Fleming, also known as sex educator Queerie Bradshaw. Like other varsity level sex acts – anal sex, for instance – fisting takes a bit of practice, and a lot of patience, to master, and the more info you're armed with, the better it is for everyone.
So when Pink and White Productions – the team behind Crash Pad Series, Heavenly Spire, and Pink Label.tv – decided to dip their toes into the educational porn waters, fisting seemed like an obvious choice. Fisting's status as an advanced sex act combined with the absence of any other video fisting guides offered an attractive opportunity. And since fisting is frequently depicted in Crash Pad episodes ("I'd argue that fisting is more common on our site than cunnilingus is," said Jiz Lee, Pink and White's Online Marketing Director), the project was a natural fit.
There are many reasons to welcome a video-based guide to proper fisting. "While books are a great place to start for information, video is important to sex ed in that you can physically see the motions, get an idea of how much time, patience and attention fisting takes, and get a grasp on technique," says Fleming. As helpful as a guide like A Hand In the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting may be, all the reading in the world can't replicate the experience of actually seeing fisting firsthand.
But making and releasing a fisting how-to doesn't guarantee that it'll be seen by the broadest audience possible. Video On Demand sites like HotMovies.com, Clips 4 Sale, and Gamelink – which carry many of Pink and White's titles, and help to extend their reach – do not allow fisting content in their releases. Pink and White's safer fisting message may be online, but without access to broader distribution, its reach is severely limited.
For those who envision porn as a no-holds-barred free-for-all, this sort of censorship may seem counterintuitive – but it's actually an every day occurrence in the adult industry. For every extreme hardcore act that makes it to the screen, there's often another that's left on the cutting room floor, sometimes due to fear of obscenity charges, other times due to a form of backdoor censorship practiced by banks and billing agents (like credit card companies). In the case of fisting, it's a mixture of both.
Fisting's history as a target of obscenity laws goes back over a decade, to a case involving Adam Glasser (better known as Seymore Butts, the gonzo porn pioneer and star of Showtime's "Family Business"). In late 2001, the federal government singled out Glasser's "Tampa Tushy Fest" (a release that happened to involve fisting) for an obscenity charge. Technically, Glasser was never found guilty, but he wasn't exonerated, either: in early 2002, he agreed to a plea deal in order to avoid trial, leaving the state of fisting in the balance – and many pornographers unwilling to test their luck and risk going to court.
In the years since "Tampa Tushy Fest," obscenity trials have become exceedingly rare (unlike their predecessors, the Obama Administration considers pursuing pornographers to be a low priority). But many distributors still aren't willing or able to carry fisting related content. As Dee Viant, brand manager for FetishMovies.com, explained, "HotMovies.com, and its sister sites like HotMoviesforHer.com, GayHotMovies.com, and FetishMovies.com, does not allow fisting content because banks do not like it," adding that the practice is considered to be obscene "because it has the potential to do harm." For internet-based porn purveyors, what banks say goes. Without the banks' good graces, there's no way to process credit card payments, which means no way to sell your product and turn a profit.
Not all banks are anti-fisting (some billing agents are comfortable with the practice), but there's enough anti-fisting sentiment to create a chilling effect and virtually remove the act from most kinds of porn. And even billing agents that are comfortable with fisting often take issue with other acts: porn involving menstruation, fantasy rape, and extreme violence is often frowned upon by payment processors.
The forces of censorship may justify their actions by arguing that they're promoting safety, but the truth of the matter is that decreased access to information makes sex less safe, not more. According to Fleming, "We jump to ban the distribut[ion] of sexual acts that are more complicated or risqué, when in reality those are the exact things people need to learn more about so they don’t harm themselves."
And when certain sex acts are effectively banned from pornography, there's a dramatic effect on public perception of how sex works. The absence of menstruation from pornography reinforces the idea of period sex as gross or unnatural; the censorship of fisting creates an even thicker cloud of confusion and mystery around one more form of sexual pleasure. In the case of fisting, lack of information perpetuates the myth of fisting as a dangerous act that's only practiced by radical queers – when the truth is anything but. "If you look at fisting guides on line…a lot of them were straight," Jiz told me. "We can think of fisting as this subversive, maybe queer act, but it's actually universal. The way that it's controlled is painting a picture of who fists."
Which is, of course, all the more reason for Pink and White's guide to fisting. "We want to show that it's okay to show fisting," Jiz explained. Hopefully, projects like this one will help dispel all the rumors around fisting – and help banks and billing agents understand that, when it comes to fisting, the only thing to be afraid of is a lack of information.
Images via Crash Pad
