Sanitizing the Seventies

Abstract

During the 1980s US feminist sex wars, pornography edited its own history, leaving a distorted record both less problematic and less queer than scholars have yet recognized. Academic inquiry into pornography coincided with home-video boom years, and research often took place in adult backrooms, necessarily because pornography was so poorly archived. Yet even as access has shifted from VHS to digital, the field has yet to reckon with how its interpretive frameworks were shaped by a material history in which the films that scholars watched were often altered from the versions patrons had seen in theaters. Gone from both straight and gay films were many transgressive sex acts that had frequently been staples of the genre, affecting the perceived oeuvre of nearly every hardcore filmmaker of the era. This article recovers the lost history of sexual media editing, arguing for a more carefully historicized interrogation of the commercial sources of our porn archives.

The pre-digital in the digital: Private’s online back catalogue

“…Accordingly, this article aligns itself with historiographic observations made by, among others, David Church (2016) in Disposable Passions, Whitney Strub (2019) in 'Sanitizing the Seventies', and Linda Williams (2005) in '"White Slavery" Versus the Ethnography of "Sex Workers"': that in the contemporary handling of vintage pornographic material, transgressive, misogynist, or illegal elements may very well be eliminated through self-censorship or simple curating.…”

Fisting intimacy: The sexual scripting of intimacy in gay men’s anal fisting

“…In public discourse, fisting has received sustained attention from both cultural conservatives as well as queer writers and scholars. While the former has focussed on the representation of fisting in pornography and, at times, succeeded in banning and regulating fisting (in) pornography 4 (Antoniou & Akrivos, 2017;Green, 2012;Stardust, 2014;Strub, 2019); the latter have lauded fisting for the way it unmoors erotic pleasure and intimacy from the conventional logics of heteronormative and phallocentric vanilla sex (Califia, 1998). Fisting has however also come to feature in more mainstream sexual health discourse 5 through the contribution of sex positive writers, podcasters, pornographers, porn stars, and fisting aficionados (Abysse, n.d;Bigbuttgeek & Jazzmatazz, 2020-present;Brough, 2005;Cheves, 2018;Herrman, 1991;Niederwieser, 2013;Shockey, 2009).…”