1. So, here's the story.
I originally posted this video on MedicineFilms because I wanted to reach a larger audience than I would if I uploaded it to one of my websites. At that time, MedicineFilms allowed users to label work "mature." It was one of the few video hosting sites that allowed mixed content. YouTube does not allow mature material. RedTube is for porn. I wanted this piece to be labeled "mature" because it contains graphic descriptions of bad sex. It is meant for adults. But I did not know about sites like RedTube and would not have wanted this particular piece on a porn site, if I had known. It is not porn.
I posted it. I sent the link around. People watched it. Many people, mainly women, said they too had been in similar though not exactly the same positions of wanting to say no and not being able to and being left wondering where they were responsible for staying trapped. Many people were grateful for my piece, despite its imperfections and despite the fact that it is a confessional, which the sophisticated claim to distain.
Months pass. It gets watched by over 1800 people on MedicineFilms.com. More time passes.
2. So far, so good.
I want to email the link to someone. When I click on the small screenshot that should take me to the video and thus to the link I want to harvest, I am taken away from MedicineFilms to sa.lacio.us: a website of social bookmarking for adults.
My video about bad sex now lives surrounded by bad porn on three sides.
Why it now lives here is a complicated legal story, which I will leave for those more well versed in such things to tell. The short of it is that MedicineFilms does not have the financial resources to fight a legal battle and does not want to become just another porn site
I wish someone had told me that all my "mature" work would be framed by
Another 260 people watch LearningToSayNo through the less than ideal portal of sa.lacio.us.
3. So I decide to make that whole experience into a brand new piece, to frame it as art instead of chance.
I show LearningToSayNo through the sa.lacio.us website as a new piece to the Digital Media Art Graduate Seminar. Like any critique, the comments range from insightful/useful to stupid/useless as tits on a boar hog. That is the nature of critique.
Perhaps I should call this scene Six Men and a Babe. I am the only woman in the room. Some of the comments are shaped by our gendered subject positions. A few of the comments are shaped by the legacies of sexism. What I find most interesting is that none of the men in the room can identify with the female narrator. They see her as an other to feel sorry for: they see her as an other that inspires guilt for their consumption of porn that surrounds her story that may or may not have contributed to her experience.
They do not see themselves in her. They do not think, "I could be her."
They do not think, "If I were her, what would porn mean to me?"
I am told that my message is too simple, too locked down. But my message is only simple, if you assume that I am saying that porn is all bad and if you are unable to indentify with the narrator's subject position.
In the video itself as well as its juxtapostion with the porn portal it seen through, I am trying to get at the ways in which sex, sexism and sexuality awkwardly dance together to create our experiences. Just like the man described in the story I narrate, porn is not all bad. It is not all his/its fault. But porn has an affect. We can never know precisely what that affect is, but we should look closely all the same.
Letting the comments from the class sit for a while I decide that perhaps the possible meanings of the piece are too locked down. Maybe I need to re-work it. I decide to revist the piece. But when I clink the link to see it, my video has been replaced by a grey box with black text that reads, "This video is no longer available."
4. So now what?
You can no longer see sa.lacio.usly LearningToSayNo on the sa.lacio.us website.
It may be because someone complained. It may be because the agreement between MedicineFilms and sa.lacio.us got screwed up. It may be because someone decided that a video about coercion and consent was likely to scare away advertisers. It may be because of sexism.
I don't know why it is gone. There are many possible reasons. When we look at why a work of art by a woman vanishes leaving only traces, it is important to remember that while many times outright sexism "dissappears" the work, often it is some other stupid something that may only have a hint of taste of the flavor of sexism that erases the work.