On Friday night, I went to see the screening of Graphic Sexual Horror at Leather Archives. This is the second time I’ve seen this documentary, the first time being at Cinekink just shy of a year ago. Graphic Sexual Horror is a documentary about insex.com, possibly the most creative and notorious BDSM sites around, until it got shut down in 2005.

After the first screening, Calico wrote a fantastic post on the documentary from something of an insider perspective. She had done shoots with Pd, founder of insex, for some of his later projects. (By the way, if you don’t read her blog, you should. Her writing is fantastic /plug.)

I’d never seen any of the insex stuff myself until I’d seen the documentary. I was still just learning about this whole crazy scene the year the site was just down. I may have seen a trailer or two. But I had heard whispered legends of the site from various sources.

Insex… Now that was some truly depraved stuff. Creative, but my God, was that some sick shit. That was the sort of thing I’d hear from people when talking about the site.

So, when I heard about the documentary, my morbid curiosity got the better of me. I had to see what this site of legend was all about.
The film featured interviews with Pd, the Insex production team, Insex models, and Insex members, and interspersed them with clips from the site and live feeds as well as some behind the scenes footage.

Much credit to Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon, they put together one hell of a documentary.

The film was neither a glorification nor a condemnation of the site and its creator. It sets its sights, instead, on retelling the very human drama that took place both on and off camera, and did not shy away from the moral ambiguities that site came to represent.

I found the interviews with the models themselves to be fascinating; they shared the emotional highs and lows of an aria.

What struck me most about the documentary was the question it raises, and purposefully doesn’t answer about consent.

The documentary raised a lot of interesting questions about the nature of consent, the interplay of money, greed, and sex, and some of the darker and scarier corners of human fascination and desire. I liked how the film left these questions for the audience to decide.

Pd paid his models very good money, especially of those who agreed to play with him off camera. And he gave is models a safeword. However, if the models used said safeword, there was a strong likelihood not only that they wouldn’t make as much money during their shoot, but that they wouldn’t be called back for another shoot. When safewording puts that much money on the line, is that really consent? After two showings of the film, I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to that question.

There were also some wonderfully absurd parts of the film. For example, they showed footage of one of the models reading a book while Pd and the camera people fiddled for what seemed like forever with lighting and camera angles. It put a lot of what went on into an interesting perspective.

I brought along my vanilla/kink curious neighbor, and even he thought the film was one of the better documentaries he’d seen.

So yeah, if you get a chance, I’d highly recommend seeing this film if it plays anywhere near you or if you can get your hands on the DVD.