I saw that documentary on Channel 4 in the UK on first broadcast: it was extremely uncomfortable viewing. Also unusual in that the documentary maker was so upset and affected by what he was recording that his voice could be heard in the background of the segment with “Max Hardcore” persuading Felicity, the new porn actress & subject of the film, that she didn’t have to continue and could walk away. Little came across as an evil, bullying, misogynistic psychopath & that film footage should have been enough to see him charged long ago. Absolutely no sympathy for him, his first amendment rights be damned & hope he rots.

Please ban all anal sex.

absolutely, but let it be for a crime.

I have written and had published a number of erotic novels under the name ‘Kendal Grahame’. All were published legally and sold well in the UK and abroad. This was despite the fact that they were hidden on ‘top shelves’ in bookstores whilst books depicting war, violence, horror etc were cearly available to all ages on much lower shelves.

Enough of this hypocracy please!

Huh? Pack animals have Alpha males. That’s WAY before culture.

What does this mean for us? I think it means that we have a duty to ourselves and to society, which is just the Self writ large, to set limits on behavior. Just as we have a choice of who we wish to be, we as a society also have a choice of how we wish to be.

To which I would quote from Trainspotting:

There was no such thing as society and even if there was, I most certainly had nothing to do with it.

I’m not interested in your society. Leave me the hell alone. I choose with whom I interact with on a person-by-person basis. I’m not interested in joining your “group“. Thank you.

…fucking meddlers. As exhausting as Jehovah’s Witnesses you are.

(You know, one of the major objectives of human action on the Internet was so that people could form self-selecting communities instead of being lumped together by proximity or authority.)

anyone else see the irony in the “dirty jobs” promo at the top of the page?

LOL, sometimes there’s a downside to using AdBlock. Great observation though.

When I beat them and sell the films, first amendment voluptuaries will come rushing to my defense!

This argument works on me insofar as why prostitution is still criminalized. To quote George Carlin, “selling is legal, fucking is legal, so why is selling fucking illegal?” Having sex for money on film is legal, but sex for money sans camera still isn’t. Why? If you can rent your body for other forms of manual labor, I see no justifiable reason to exclude sex. (And I doubt that few if any of us reading BoingBoing are so puritanical that they can honestly say they’ve never had sex with someone in exchange for some form of compensation.)

Now, as far as beating your farmhands… if they consensually agree, then sure. That’s their choice. The flip-side of that is, that they have the right to quit at any time regardless of contract (thus precluding indentured servitude as a euphemism for slavery). And the flip-side of that is that you have the right to fire them at any time.

What is obscene to one is fine to another, it is a subjective analysis of the material.

Bullshit. This typically libertarian critique is based on an ignorant understanding of human sexuality. Just as we have seen the abject failure of libertarian “free market” economics, we can also see the failure of libertarian ideas in the general culture.

1) So you’re saying that what’s offensive to one person is offensive to everyone? And that if it’s not offensive to me, there’s something wrong with me? Because last I checked, there are many people in the world who consider oral sex offensive. Or kissing in public. Or sex where you can actually see your partner. Or sex for anything but conception of a child. Is there something wrong with me then that I don’t find anything offensive about any of those? How about when a man spanks his wife and they both enjoy it? Should they both go to jail?

2) Not to get off subject, but where have libertarian “free market” economics failed? If you put 27 regulations on a market and then take 2 or 3 away, that’s hardly a free market. When deregulation fails it is usually because the deregulation is arbitrary and half-assed. Not because it has created a free market and that market collapses. If you want to start comparing political ideals, let’s see how well censorship works in China.

Not because I don’t like it, because it is harmful. I’m also in favor of limiting TV violence for the same reasons, it causes real harm.

Source? Some correlating evidence? Maybe people didn’t hurt each other before TV? Do you only watch good wholesome family TV and movies? No violence? No sex? No alcohol? No swearing? Or, like the rest of us, do you choose which of those you think are suitable for you to watch, and which you would rather not? If the latter, you are self-censoring. You are behaving like a rational adult. Like most of us. It’s when you start trying to define what everyone should be able to do that we have a problem. If you don’t like Terminator, does that mean I can’t get my Summer Glau fix every week? Who decides? On what basis? YOU decide. On the basis of what YOU want to watch. Every time you choose to watch something or not. As do the people who watch Max Hardcore. If someone has chosen to watch a woman being degraded, and they get off on that, then maybe there is something wrong with them. But I guarantee you that it wasn’t Max Hardcore who made them that way. While we’re making sourceless claims, I can claim that every time someone watches Max Harcore pee on a woman, it keeps that person from going out and peeing on someone themselves. Max Hardcore is a hero! (note: That’s sarcasm. I don’t like the stuff either. So I CHOOSE not to watch it.)

I advocate balance in all things. This porn, this man, is out of balance. I reject it.

That’s the most intelligent thing you’ve said. YOU reject it. Good for you. And if everyone thought like you, there’d be no market for his movies and he would dry up and go away. Unfortunately, some people do like them. And they give him money, so that he can keep making them. And women keep signing up to be in them. But in each case, they’re consenting adults who have made the rational decision that “I value money more than my dignity” or whatever rationalization they make for themselves. Maybe they even enjoy it. Maybe they’re broken. I don’t know. What I do know, though, it that so long as all of the people involved are consenting, it’s none of my business. As soon as he tries to forcibly show that stuff to kids (or even unwitting adults), or recruit people who are unable to legally consent, I say nail his ass. Until then, I still live in America and I’ll defend his freedom to have consensual sex in whatever manner he chooses.

If I remember correctly, “Max Hardcore” was one of a couple actor/producers who Melissa-Ashley (aka Anne Howe) complained in interviews of not recognizing the “safe word” during a shoot. If true (as my memory might well be wrong), he deserves whatever punishment he gets, if not for the reason he’s receiving it. Unfortunately, it’s easier to get an obscenity conviction from a jury than to for assault or rape of a porn actress during production.

Is BoingBoing a place where limits are placed upon others’ freedom for the sake of comfort and convenience, where personal squabbles are buried and rewritten, and above all, all sorts of censorship are rationalized and subversively promoted?

Absolutely no sympathy for him, his first amendment rights be damned

…yes, that’s how it starts.

You know, there are some words I’ve known since I was a schoolboy: “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on we’re all damaged.

– The Drumhead

if I sign a waiver saying that I agree to have sex, and then, later, in the middle of it, as it starts to get violent, I say “No”, Is it rape?

Or does a waiver take away all rights?

is it probable that of all the persons used in these films, at least one was taken advantage of in the worst way? One? Is it possible?

perfect solution fallacy

Where’s the uproar over people who were “tricked” into accepting the job of executioner in states that have the death penalty?

If the basis for legality is whether or not the viewer thinks the actions are factual rather than fictional, you’ve left solid ground behind you. Readings are profoundly idiosyncratic, and cannot be constrained by art or intent.

Noen:

Films do not give us what we desire, they teach us how to desire.

If that were true, no one would ever be a kinky deviate, because the vast majority of the desire we see in films is a stylized version of mainstream straight.

Few watchers notice the feet and shoes in films. A small percentage of watchers experience feet and shoes in them as luminous, numinous, erogenous, and intensely fascinating. Millions of kids watch Sleeping Beauty. Only a few of them get to the bit where the witch-queen Maleficent goes all Dark Phoenix on the Prince, and swoonily vow that they want to be exactly like her when they grow up. Homosexuals and lesbians experience the same constant flood of heterosexual plots and images that straights do. We all grow up watching the same anthropomorphic animal cartoons that furries do.

That’s some strange kind of teaching going on there.

I’ll grant that some things are learned. Corsets, bustiers, garters, stockings, and high heels all date back back to the same period as the first mass-produced cheap color photographic repro, which enshrined them as the standard signifiers they’ve been ever since. (Oddly, the titillating signifiers for “little girl” — short trapezoidal ruffled dresses, hatless curls and pigtails, white or pastel stockings, black patent-leather Mary Jane flats — date from the 1930s.)

Another argument for learned behavior is the existence of kinks for recent inventions. Where were the rubber and latex enthusiasts before those material existed? Where were the furries before the invention of plush toys? Where did the bound foot fetish go when feet ceased to be bound?

Still, a person doesn’t remember “learning” a sexual response. At most, they remember moments at which they recognized in themself a response to something they hadn’t previously realized was sexual.

MDH:

Prohibition teaches us how to desire.

I’ll grant that “hot” and “transgressive” have a significant amount of overlap. Elizabethans had a thing for bared arms, and Victorians had one for ankles. I think it’s a limited effect, though. If prohibition was primarily what taught us how to desire, kink would be a lot weirder than it is, and no one would be straight.

Me, I figure that what movies do for sex is suggest possibilities that may not have occurred to us, tell us what’s okay and what isn’t, and give us a storehouse of images to draw on.

Max Hardcore’s movies aren’t socially objectionable because they appeal to prurient interests, as PDuggie has suggested. First, all functional pornography appeals to prurient interests. That’s its defining characteristic. Second, Max Hardcore’s movies aren’t appealing to that many viewers, even ones who’d happily watch dominance/submission storylines that were presented in a less crude and nasty fashion.

What I dislike most about them is their message about what’s allowable. Max Hardcore creates the impression of non-consensuality. That’s a known kink, and he’s playing to it more realistically than most porn of that kind. That’s disturbing. I dislike it a great deal. Furthermore, if it’s anything other than an illusion, it’s illegal. I’ll nevertheless defend his right to create that illusion, if that’s what it is.

Basically, I agree with Cpt. Tim, Wareagle, and Ignatz: if anything should have gotten a criminal investigation, it was what went on during filming, not what got shown on the screen.

Brandon Abell @34: No, there isn’t a magic switch that gets flipped when you turn 18; but since we don’t have a reliable, objective device for measuring a youngster’s maturity, social awareness, and empowerment, we have to draw the line at an age. Eighteen is where we’ve decided to draw it. Arguments could be made for drawing it earlier, but that’s a question of engineering and implementation.

PDuggie @47, what the bleep is a “first amendment voluptuary”? Can you please describe what you mean there? Because the concept strikes me as thoroughly bizarre.

Ill Lich @59:

I don’t want to ban anything, but I sure wish this kind of thing didn’t exist.

Amen and amen. It’s repulsive, and it teaches the wrong lessons to some very wrong people.

I really don’t give a damn about Max Hardcore’s travails. I do care about it as a potential precedent.

Winner of thread. A well-spoken response with attention to detail, and articulating a case of the real issues, rather than knee-jerk ‘I don’t like this guy!’ emotional ranting. Including the (correct) view that while Paul Little is a smarmy little piece of shit in a cowboy hat, the case he was convicted under has a wide-reaching scope that affects us all.

I just hope that those upholding his conviction on this board never get their own 1st Amendment rights shut down because the government decided to slip’n'slide on this slope, with the ignorantly happy consent of those to be punished in the future.

“Not infrequently” means? Well, it makes no difference anyway. Anyone who has the slightest interest in underage girls wouldn’t be interested in Max. They’re too busy watching videos of Maria Isabel, which are far more erotic than anything in Hardcore’s films. You people who trade in kiddieporn paranoia should really get over it. You will NEVER be able to censor enough material to stop people from fantasizing. (That goes for images of girls over AND under 18.)

Defending the 1st amendment sometimes means defending a creep, and Max Hardcore is undeniably a creep, and yet I can’t bring myself to defend him.

Max Hardcore reminds me of Deniro’s “Max Cady” from the remake of “Cape Fear”– maybe he hasn’t broken any laws, but everything he did is still wrong, there’s an underlying sinister-ness about it all; he hasn’t committed pedophila or rape, but that is pretty much his intent. I hate to infer intent, but in this case it’s pretty obvious. But then there are plenty of films that portray murder. . . and I have no problem defending them.

Which brings me to what a friend said about “The Blair Witch Project”– it didn’t scare him because he knew it wasn’t real, despite their attempts to make it seem real. There’s something “too real” about Max Hardcore movies, I mean, they are obviously real, and not just the vomit or sex, but the degradation too. Like others here I can’t believe the actresses were 100% consenting– they are portraying being abused too well, if it was an act then they should be doing serious drama with that talent. Maybe Mr. Little will claim it’s a form of “method acting”, but I’m not buying it.

Is this verdict part of the slippery slope or not? Time will tell. Maybe it won’t hurt the rest of the porn industry– what Max Hardcore does is not the same as what Vivid (et al) do; he has more in common with “snuff” films than erotica.