In the legendary 2001 lesbian hardcore film “Sugar High Glitter City,” there is a scene where a naked femme wriggles on a pool table while two butch women play with her body. Before long, she’s ... visibly ejaculating on the green felted fabric. A few seconds later, it happens again: A stream arcs forth in such an impressively forceful way it causes the woman penetrating her to break with her tough character and let out an innocent, awestruck laugh.
“In this particular scene, we were subverting and perverting the traditional pool table gang bang,” Shar Rednour, the film’s co-director, tells me. “In the traditional flicks, the woman gets penetrated then the men come visibly all over the place.” In their film, it was the woman who was visibly coming all over the place.
And t...
The movie was invited to play at LGBT film festivals around the world, which was groundbreaking for an explicit film of its sort. But then they got a phone call from organizers at an event in New Zealand: The female ejaculation scene had to be cut, thanks to a strict governmental oversight board. “I am not one to usually throw a diva fit about my artistic vision -- they could cut some other scene for time or what have you, but in no way could they cut that because it changes the entire pool table scene,” Rednour said.
Instead, they instructed the organizers to stop the film before that point, explain the controversy to the live audience “and tell them to stop censoring women’s bodies and to write to their government,” says Rednour.
Incredibly, more than a decade later, the controversy over female ejaculation persists. As has been widely reported in recent weeks, the U.K. has instituted broad restrictions against certain acts in online streaming pornography, including female ejaculation. “This isn’t actually all that new,” says Good Vibrations staff sexologist Carol Queen. “The UK and some other countries used to give lesbian movies with ejaculation an especially hard time at the import office.”
The U.S. isn't innocent in this, either. As Nan Kinney, publisher of the lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs and producer at porn company Fatale Media, said, “We faced censorship in the 1980s, primarily over images of fisting, but also female ejaculation because it was perceived as urination,” she said. “Back then, the law was implemented on a state by state basis. It was OK to ship this material to some states, but if you mailed to states where the law was strictly enforced, you could be prosecuted on obscenity charges.”
Sometimes they took desperate measures to avoid prosecution. “I can remember the staff at On Our Backs magazine tearing out pages of the magazine that showed fisting so that it could be sent to subscribers in the states that prohibited images of fisting,” she said. “Same with the videos showing female ejaculation; we would only ship those videos to states that weren’t enforcing the censorship laws.”
More recent obscenity trials against pornographers, including John “Buttman” Stagliano and Adam Glasser (aka Seymore Butts), have centered around films featuring female ejaculation. In 2001, lawyer-to-the-porn-stars Paul Cambria crafted a list of legally vulnerable acts, and female ejaculation was one of them. But, as is clear to anyone who has ever visited a porn site, those guidelines are routinely ignored. “Adult squirting scenes are not per se illegal under federal statutes,” says Carmen M. Cusack, author of the book “Pornography and the Criminal Justice System.” “Each jurisdiction may prosecute production, distribution, transmission or receiving obscenity using their own definitions of obscenity.”
So it should come as no real surprise that the U.K. is censoring squirting. This isn't the first time it's done this, either. In 2001, a porn film by the name of "Squirt Queens" was approved only after the name was changed to "British Cum Queens" and more than six minutes of female ejaculation was scrapped. The squirting was thought to look like urolagnia, the eroticism of urination, which is banned in the U.K. Never mind that the filmmakers said it was female ejaculate, not urination. All that mattered was that it looked kinda like pee to the censors -- and after consulting with experts, the British Board of Film Classification expressed skepticism that female ejaculation even existed at all.
Then, in 2009, filmmaker Anna Spans won a victory for squirting. She fought the board's attempt to censor her film "Women Love Porn," which featured female ejaculation. Spans went so far as to get samples tested of ejaculate from the fountainous performer in question to prove that it wasn't pee. The board ultimately approved the film, but not because it had come to terms with the existence of female ejaculation. As a spokesperson explained at the time, "In this particular work, there was so little focus on urolagnia that the BBFC took legal advice, and the advice was that, taking the work as a whole, there was no realistic prospect of a successful prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act and therefore the BBFC passed the work."
Nowadays, it seems the board at least concedes that female ejaculation might sometimes occur -- but it still won't allow anything that looks like pee. Vice called the BBFC or the “ejaculation police,” as they put it, and got this explanation: "[U]nless it's very clear that what is being shown is indeed 'female ejaculation', as opposed to urolagnia, the Board's position has to be that scenes of this nature featuring liquid that might be urine have to be cut."
There is another explanation -- one with more of a cultural angle -- for why female ejaculation so rankles censors. As Kristina Lloyd brilliantly wrote in response to Spans' case, "The BBFC's ban colludes with the cultural default of viewing female sexuality as intangible and precious, as if the 'enigma of woman' was something beyond the reach of science." The truth is, the science isn't unclear on the matter: In the 2013 paper "Obscene Squirting: If the Government Thinks it’s Urine, Then They’ve Got Another Thing Coming," Cusack noted that research has shown women can ejaculate even when their bladders are empty and that "the chemical composition of ejaculate differs from that of urine." It is not, I repeat, it is not urine.
Regardless of whether it's in the U.K. or stateside, attempts to censor depictions of female ejaculation aren't just assaults on freedom of expression -- they also have serious implications for the health of people’s sex lives. “Women who ejaculate are often made to feel ashamed of it, and because it’s so closely associated with orgasm in many women who are doing it, this can make some women actively repress orgasm,” argued Carol Queen. “A state ban on such images will only support that level of shame and lack of information. This whole ban is horrible ... but the ejaculation thing goes right to the heart of whether some women will come or not.”
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