Synapse Films unleashes the Slamdance Film Festival knockout Graphic Sexual Horror, a documentary on one of the most depraved and revolutionary websites in history, www.INSEX.com

FILM-
Insex.com, one of the first BDSM sites on the web. Founded in 1997 by
Brent Scott (known as PD on the site), it revolutionized "violent porn"
as we know it. Disturbing, graphic, and groundbreaking, INSEX managed
to accumulate over 35,000 members, all paying $60 a month to enjoy it's
sadistic content. After severe bullying by the Federal Government,
INSEX was forced to shut down in 2005.

"Warning!
Graphic Sexual Horror"- before entering INSEX, you had to pass this
warning screen. Inside, PD had created a a beautiful horror show. Women
with needles stabbed through their nipples, held underwater in dunk
tanks, rigged to orgasm machines, crying, bleeding, and loving it. It
all began when Brent PD Scott (who describes his early experiences with
bondage in the film) created his own Sado-Masochistic website, hoping
to bring the subject into American culture. A former teacher at
Carnegie Mellon, Scott left with this message- "if you won't allow me
to teach your children, I will corrupt them".

You
see, documentaries are always a tricky thing to review, and Graphic
Sexual Horror is no exception. In a nutshell, it's a reminiscent on
INSEX before it was hijacked by "Big Brother". Interviews include PD,
other site workers (many of whom have started their own sites like
Hogtied.com and Kink.com), the builder who made Scott's visions
reality, and the models. Tons of site footage (much of it never before
seen) is shown, and the interviewees talk about the decline of INSEX,
and how their experiences there affected them. As far as "plot" goes,
that's essentially this movie, but it's much deeper than that.

Like
I said, documentaries are tricky, because nothing is face value. I
can't describe how profound this movie is. From the naked body, bruised
and crunched into a rusty cage, to the reason why she is there. It's
not just an interview, it's an eye opening moment. The top reasons for
being an INSEX model were sexual fulfillment, genuine sexual pleasure,
or money, a gluttonous greed. It's amazing to see one women remember
the orgasms she received through the abuse, and another remember that
she went on a shopping spree after her shoot.

Graphic
Sexual Horror is not a movie about bondage, but a document on INSEX.
It's nothing like an exploitation film, so don't go into this expecting
a Jess Franco flick. It's mature, respectful, and open minded. Aside
from showing how INSEX revolutionized the internet porn business, it
also shows that humans are going to do what they want, for the reasons
they want, and no force on earth can stop them (aside from their own
laziness).

Documentaries
are designed to be eye opening, and when the credits roll, you should
have taken something with you. Graphic Sexual Horror is one hell of a
successful film. It's enlightening, beautiful (one scene involving
snow, and another involving singing were almost uplifting to me),
shocking, and eye opening. This film really shows human nature, and how
pleasure is not the same to everyone. It's sad, to see the old set,
it's cages covered in cobwebs, and the shackles strewn across the
floor. The death of INSEX was not the end of bondage or violent porn,
just the end of a man's vision and hard work. That's more disturbing
than anything consenting people do for enjoyment. 10/10.

PICTURE/ AUDIO-
The reason INSEX was so popular was the raw, rough look of their videos
and live feeds. All the archived footage is presented un-altered, and
the interviews are shot on a high quality camera. In short, every frame
of this movie is fitting to it's mood. 9/10.

Audio
is just like the picture. On the interviews, everything is clear and
polished, but the website footage is rough and raw sounding. Screaming,
crying, moaning, it's all there- and it's all super loud. Volume is not
an issue here, and everything fits it's on screen counterpart. 9/10.

EXTRAS- Synapse
has included multiple deleted scenes including an alternate ending and
alternate montage that are as chilling as they are amazing, additional
interview scenes with the models, a featurette with co director Barbara
Bell, and the trailer. The movie it's self is a must own, and with
these extras you'll have no problem adding Graphic Sexual Horror to
your collection. 8/10.

This film will be released August 10th from Synapse Films!

http://www.sinsofcinema.com/2010/07/graphic-sexual-horror.html

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Graphic Sexual Horror is a documentary film about the late, hardcore BDSM pornsite, insex.com. To me, this film can be succinctly described as a brain virus. Since the seven days that I have seen it, I've not quite been able to shake it from my head. The images of women chained, cropped and tortured for viewing pleasure continue to project themselves into the dark of my eyelids, and my brain is still working overtime to try to make sense of it all.

Part of the reason why this film is such a mind-fuck is because of the utter lack of positioning on the part of the documentary makers. The film took a stand back position, gracefully allowing the porn and this company to be shown for what it was, without any sway on what we as viewers were to think of it. The film was neither a monologue at or a dialogue with the viewer on the subject. Rather, it felt  like some omniscient third party, passing along information and images to be burned into our retinas.

Here is what you need to know in order to understand the film: Insex was a brainchild of BDSM enthusiast and artist, PD. The site employed models, many of whom that weren't into BDSM, to engage in hardcore BDSM play on camera for a generous amount of money. There was always a safeword any model could use to end the session, but the women were also rewarded with more cash, the longer they went and the more they endured. This site was eventually shut down by the State.

As Arvan points out in his review of the film, taking a feminist argument with porn that centers on showing beautiful women suffering as men torture them just feels a little too easy, a little generic. Kind of like those feminist blogs that repeatedly become shocked and abhorred by Dov Charney of American Apparel; the joke kinda ends up on them.

Yet my inner feminist, as laid back as she might be, did inevitably stir. One of the ex-models described her first set and explained that before coming into film, they are asked what they are willing to do or not do, and what they might be apprehensive about. This model had never had anal sex, and was clearly apprehensive about doing so. On her first shoot, PD broke that boundary. As she laid tied up, ass up on the floor, he penetrated her anally with a nearly baseball-bat sized instrument. She went onto say that although she hadn't used her safeword, she felt like she had been raped.

When this was brought up during the discussion after the film, a woman who had been invited on stage because she had once done a session herself with PD said, "she said she felt like she was raped, it's not the same thing as being raped." I agree it is not the same thing, but I don't think it is the opposite of rape either. I don't think consent is a yes-no/black-white issue. What it seemed the model was explaining is a tight-rope walk of that delicate, fuzzy line of consent.

Another aspect of consent that the film captured is the act of putting your own comfort aside in order to prove sexual prowess. The women in the film often talked about the sexual acts as a test of strength and endurance, a way to overcome their own limits in terms of fear and pain threshold. This is an aspect of sex that I haven't seen discussed very openly. In my own sex life I know that I have done this very thing, not to these extremes and not in BDSM, but in putting my partners needs first. I've been penetrated in ways that I didn't enjoy, or barred pain that wasn't turning me on at the expense of the sex, to accommodate my partner, and I have sometimes enjoyed doing that. 

That inner feminist of mine could argue that is a product of the patriarchy, how women are raised to accommodate the needs of everyone around them first. However, I also have a sneaking suspicion that men have done this too. This grinning and bearing for a partner also brings up the personal issue of consent and how we sometimes do things we don't want to, for our partners. That is okay, yet could easily spin into gray areas and cross certain lines and it is ultimately up to the person in the sexual act to decide what they feel okay with. The problem is that in most vanilla relationships there isn't a safeword. And further, many of us are so out of touch with our emotions or how to express them that traveling into gray areas feels out of our control.

One of the lines from the film that keeps running through my own mind is, "I thought I was this feminist, who was in control and knew what she wanted. I guess not." This was spoken from the aforementioned model who addressed the rape issue. It has been said time and time again that what we want in bed, is not necessarily what we want socially or politically. It is still a dark thing to address.

As this film hasn't left my mind, what it has made me see is that I found the porn, not always a turn-on but very alluring. I also walked away feeling like I "got" BDSM in a new way, where my light experimentation with ropes or spanking without bruises only hinted at it. It is more than the image of a woman suffering. It playing with something raw and often historical-- fears that run deep as blood. Even though we know the porn is safe, there is some element of playing with the line of life and death. And I find that a turn-on. I think that sexual fantasy is a playground for the unconscious to get a work-out and the art of insex lived on this plane. While the company or even the porn itself might not have been politically correct, we are left with stunning, in depth porn that can be used a guide to our own unconscious, to help us dig to the very core of our being and question what we find in those dark passages along the way.

Rabbit White
http://rabbitwrite.com

Last Friday I too had the chance to see the documentary Graphic Sexual Horror at the Leather Archives and Museum.  The film explores the story behind the now-defunct hardcore BDSM pornography website InSex.com, with an impressive lack (or mix) of glorification or condemnation.  I'd like to thank Arvan for the detailed review he's already posted - as well as of course Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon for making the film, and Clarisse Thorn and the Leather Archives' Jennifer Tyburczy for hosting.

While Arvan's post touches on many fascinating aspects of InSex and of Graphic Sexual Horror, the one that I left the museum discussing was the ambiguity of consent.  InSex's trademark was hyper-realistically torturing women to the very edge of their limits.  The documentary asked whether these women had given fully-informed, empowered consent, and left the audience with the answer, "Some of them, some of the time."  Which is almost more unsettling than "No," because it calls into question our sacred differentiations between sadomasochism and exploitation.  But then, any strong differentiation has to withstand occasional questioning.

And when I make these ethical judgments, it's important for me to be aware how automatically and irrationally I judge pornography as "hot" vs. "squicking" by my own kinks.  The clips of a women being dunked in water and gasping for breath make me want to masturbate, because personally I love playing with breath in my bath-tub.  But the clips of women with eggplant-colored breasts from long-term tight bondage, while less dangerous, do not look fun by my own admittedly quirky standards.

That being said, Bell and Lorentzon captured moments and gathered interviews with both models who enjoyed performing for InSex and with models who believe that they were exploited.

I connected happily to what one voice-over called "the money shot": the masochist after she's been released from a spectacular scene, high on endorphins, giggling, enraptured by her own tenacity.  It's a happy state I like to call subspace or "fuzzy."  Regardless of whether their specific kinks are my specific kinks, and regardless of the appearance to the casual observer, some of us really are wired to find some kinds of physical pain euphoric.

But then came the story of model S4, who, like many of InSex's performers, came to the site not because she was a masochist but because she wanted the generous paycheck.  S4 had told the site's owner, PD, that one of her hard limits was face-slapping.  During a live feed to the internet, PD forgot and slapped S4's face while she was tied to a chair.  Graphic Sexual Horror shows that moment and the minutes following, when S4 reacts first in shock: "You weren't supposed to do that."  PD maintains his dominant persona and mocks her.  He does ask if she wants to use her safe-word, but clearly implies that saying yes will make her a weakling.  S4 does not use the safe-word, but emotionally collapses.

I understand that S4 and PD both felt the extra pressures of PD paying S4 large amounts of money and of thousands of viewers watching live on the internet.  But I feel awfully strongly that S4 needed to be untied and sent home with someone she trusted.  The line between adrenaline-happy pretending not to consent and actually not consenting had been crossed.

And I can even forgive honestly forgetting a limit.  We play with dangerous things, and sometimes accidents happen.  But then how we handle accidents counts for a lot.  I too, actually, once slapped the face of a play partner for whom I hadn't realized face-slapping was a hard limit.  We were grappling, and he's significantly larger than I am, so our negotiation had been more about my limits than his.  His response in the moment was to say, "That was a hard limit," and acknowledge a lack of prior communication.  I apologized, and then he took the next hour away from me, and then eventually we moved on.  The accident didn't end our friendship or mutual respect, but it did end the scene.  What feels traumatizing in InSex's slapping debacle is how long it continues past the point of shattered trust.

So, while some of the InSex shoots are undeniably hot to me, I think I'll be sticking to their lighter (and still extant) rival Kink.com as my primary source of kinky porn.  Throughout the Leather Archives talk-back, Barbara Bell and the audience discussed Kink as less extreme and more theatrical than InSex - but I love that.  Kink shares InSex's reoccurring theme of non-consent, but it has more winks to the audience that everyone's just pretending.  There are the occasional archetypal costumes and "stories," and camera cuts from women struggling to the same women in highly intricate shibari ties.  I don't condemn InSex, but I still prefer kinky porn that less often breaks the stage-combat rule against making me stop and worry if the actors are okay.

(Posted at Annabelle River)

Last night, I attended a screening of "Graphic Sexual Horror", directed by Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon.  The venue was the Leather Museum & Archives (LAM), who also sponsored the event along with The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum as part of the Sex+++ Documentary Film Series.  The event was presented by Dr. Jennifer Tyburczy, Ph.D. Director of Programming for the LAM and Clarisse Thorn.  Present for the showing and taking questions afterward, was Barbara Bell herself.  I was joined in the audience by blogger Rabbit White and her husband Ned.

So, the warning and disclaimer: This could easily trigger you.  I'm not even kidding.

This is a documentary about the creation of a website that produced media of women being tortured for people to watch as they masturbate.  BDSM porn...torture porn...whatever you may call it.

This is striking stuff and I found it difficult to separate my thoughts about the porn from my thoughts about what I thought of the film.  Which, I suppose is a nod toward the directors for presenting the subject without overtly interjecting themselves into the process.

The film is about 120min long and covers the story of how this website insex.com was conceived, launched, operated and finally shut down.  It starts right out off with a grainy film titled "worm" being shown.  The narrator, "pd" - is describing that this is his wife at the time, wrapped in vinyl, bound and laying on the floor.  The film then continues on through a series of interviews done recently, with staff members of insex.com relating their experiences on the site. 

Worm, Super 8, 1980. Art film by Brent Scott (AKA PD) that prompted an FBI investigation.

The film includes interviews with many of the models used in the website content, the metalsmith, "KGB", "pd" and many other staff members or others that had been in some way involved in the site. 

Judging the film as a documentary, I must say that the directors didn't proselytize in either direction: for or against.  They presented the words, thoughts and experiences of the people at insex.com in their own words and deeds, leaving it up to the audience to choose our own opinions.  With this subject's potential for volatile response and objection, there could easily be a temptation for a filmaker to guide the audience along to some conclusion.  This film does not provide the any such easy conclusions or safety nets.  We are left to choose for ourselves, just what we think of all of this.  As testament to this, I really had no thoughts about the film.  I was completely absorbed by my thoughts about the website, its creator, the models and the rest of the staff.

I had several trains of thought throughout the film.  Going into the film I didn't have any preconceived notions about the film itself.  I deliberately avoided learning anything about the film or its subject matter in advance.  Knowing that the subject matter was going to be extreme, I chose to see it with little foreknowledge.  I wanted to avoid forming my conclusions ahead of time. 

I did have one fear: namely that in the Q & A afterward, I'd be subjected to a bunch of pontificating, suck-ups trying to sound intelligent and flattering in the nervous energy that follows such an extreme spectacle of emotion and intimacy.  I've probably been to one too many sci-fi conventions.

So, anyway.  I was watching these scenes of torture, interviews and erotica intersplliced, overlayed and discussed.  I had an assortment of thoughts that went through my head.  I'll list them here, in no particular order.

Brent Scott,(AKA PD) and 912 discussing videography during a shoot with Star (model) in the barn at the farm.

Consent: the models came to the job because of money and not for any love of BDSM.  The film covers the viewpoints of the models and the site's filmakers and it opened up several questions about where consent is given.  The film creates or rather, illuminates the subtlety around consent; the dynamic tension that comes with the insertion of money into the equation.

One of the models actually approached pd for a session, believing initially that she would be paying him for the torture session.  She not only stayed on as a paid model, but moved behind the camera and into a relationship with pd.  So, this is not a black & white topic by any means.

Hydrophobia, Live feed, 2005.  Caged 922 about to be submerged in The Tank.

Money: the film's trailer has a line about greed, but in considering consent I kept asking myself about whether there was still consent if the girls felt "need" instead of "greed".  In other words, if they were being tortured and didn't need the money or could get the same money elsewhere - then it is pretty much a freely given consent.  If the girls did not feel that they could get that money in any other way, then I question whether the consent is in some way coerced.  I can't tell of course because I'm second-guessing these women and doing so in the face of their own admission that they were fully aware of their own choices. 

So, it's important to remember here that my projections onto whether or not they have any agency in their own lives is a negation of their own assertions.  I think that this issue is ignored a lot in discussions of consent surrounding sex work in specific, but echoed in feminism, gender identity conversations, disability conversations and personal identity as a topic.  One aspect of respecting personal space and identity is to accept that one we must all be free to choose things that others would not choose or agree with.  One model mentioned the process she went through as her path of learning and mistakes. 

120 (model) on Rack, 2004. Insex Live Feed with Brent Scott (AKA PD) and crew.

Power/Control: The girls all had a "safe word" which they could use at any time.  pd had the money and that was control.  What is the power relationship between men who have money and women who do not?

Several women were encouraged or invited to "play" with pd off-camera.  Sometimes that meant sex, sometimes kink.  This is where the human element of the director played into the picture.  The girls that played with him got paid more and the implication was that play meant pay and no play meant no pay.  That is sexual harassment.  Now, if sexual harassment happens between the shift manager at a convenience store and one of the clerks, it's just sexual harassment and it means nothing about the convenience store business.  I happen to think the same reasoning applies here.  It might be a temptation to just lay into the whole torture porn or porn business because of sexual harassment, but that is a mistake in my view.  It allows the sexual harasser to shift the conversation away from the harassment.  Harassment is harassment and the industry is unimportant. 

Dairy, Insex, 2003. Stone wall with women in metal cages at the farm.

Sexism:  I am watching this film and it's men torturing pretty women.  I'm thinking: "how fucking typical is this crap?"  Then I realized that this is only one site.  There are sites that show men being tortured...by other men & by women.  

This site takes the inequality of our sexist societies and exacerbates them for the people that can orgasm by reveling in the inequality of sexism.  By playing out a gross characterization of male objectification and cruelty, this site is only one aspect of such fantasies.  The sites that have men brutalized are built to please the fantasies of those who want to see the opposite portrayed to extremes.

It's easy to lash out at this site and say that it's vile, foul, sexist, misogynistic, etc.  One could easily jump all over pd and the rest of the site staff.  It's real tempting to start imagining what these women were thinking, what their choices were, how they felt or feel and to judge what they should do or want or feel.  Doing so, is a huge negation of their right to make their own choices and a negation of their own stated experiences and views of their lives.

The fact is that I am no more qualified or entitled to judge or valuate these women for being paid to be tortured than I am to decide the worth or quality of my neighbor.  In fact, the real sexism is in declaring that I know what's best for these women and obliterating their story of their own lives with my assessment.

Stimulation: Brain chemistry is everything and how we trigger our bodies to get the orgasm chemicals to the brain - is different for everyone.  For some, it's 'vanilla' hetero-cis sex, for others it's ingested in the form of food or drugs and for others still, it's a complex mix of physical triggers.  Some of us like to feel pain, some of us like to look at pain.  Hell, some of us just like rubber balloons.  It's all chemicals and the film points out that everyone here was consenting. 

Hydrophobia, Live Feed, 2005. Caged 922 being repeatedly dunked in The Tank during a Live Feed.

Ritual: More than one woman discussed the experiences in terms of facing challenges and overcoming their limits of fear and endurance in terms very much like men talk about toughing out grueling sports or the military.  They seemed to find that it was a rite of passage to mark their transition into a greater maturity or strength.  I didn't expect that.

Art: pd really had an amazing knack for setting up amazing, striking images.  Every scene was compelling in terms of color, focus and composition.  He really has a knack for setting a stage.

Morality: I won't even get into what I think morality is because I think we're each entitled to our own definitions and as long as we orgasm with consenting adults or alone, then it's no one else's concern.  The website was shut down by the department of homeland security using the Patriot Act.  This brings up a very dangerous question of morality, namely:

If the morality police are lying in order to alter our behavior, then is the whole point negated?

"KGB", the website's metalsmith said something about their being attacked by the US Gov't for morality:

"The US Government has secret jails where they torture people that don't want to be tortured, but make it illegal for us to torture people who want to be tortured."

Incidentally, that guy - KGB was fucking hilarious.  I could watch two hours of him talking and that would be totally worth my time.

So, in conclusion I will say this.  This film's subject is not an easy thing to watch.  The film itself is well done.  It gave a clear view of the website content, its creator, the models and the site crew.  I can tell you that I won't be watching the film archives of insex.com but I did come to some understanding of what I have in common with those who do.  I think that's all I really could hope for with exposure to anyone's point of view that differs from my own.

-arvan

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