Fists Are For Fucking, Not Fighting

October 21 is Fisting Day, a celebration of a still-taboo sex act involving the insertion of a hand into a vagina or anus. Created by Courtney Trouble and Jiz Lee, Fisting Day aims to raise awareness of queer sexualities and they way some sex acts are still marginalized and potentially criminalized. The mainstream porn industry won’t allow fisting to be shown in adult films due to unofficial “obscenity guidelines”. Filmmakers and distributors fear being charged with obscenity if they feature the act in their movies and most credit-card billing companies will refuse to process payments if a website features the act. This unofficial law effectively tells queer people and fisting fans that their sexuality is wrong.

In March I made an unusual short film with Zahra Stardust called An Open Letter To All My Lovers, Friends and Mentors. The film shows Zahra shrugging off her stripper garments and settling in for some self pleasure. Her voiceover discusses politics, sex work, past lovers and intense interpersonal relationships. It also touches on the subject of fisting a couple of times.

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This small, re-edited snippet features some of Zahra’s lines from the film about fisting. I thought I’d create this little movie for fisting day and submit this post as part of the festivities. I’d like to put it on Vimeo but I suspect they’d censor it, even if it is extremely tame. After my last bit of Vimeo censorship, I’m not keen to risk their ire again and possibly lose my account (see new edit, below).

So here it is. I hope you enjoy it. The whole film currently appears in the member’s area of Bright Desire. It will also feature at Zahra’s site when it goes live.

The film originally went under the title Fists Are For Fucking, Not Fighting. This is the title listed at the Berlin Porn Film Festival 2013, where it will screen next week.

 Edit 22nd Oct: Courtney Trouble asked me to upload the video directly to the Fisting Day Tumblr page. I couldn’t do that but did upload it to the Bright Desire Tumblr page so it could be easily reblogged. Within 15 minutes of it appearing on site I got an email to say it had been removed:

We have removed content from your blog because the content violated the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines that you accepted when you created your account. We do not allow users to upload sexual videos on Tumblr.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from their terms of service:

Uploading Sexually Explicit Video. You can embed anything as long as it follows the other guidelines on this page. But please don’t use Tumblr’s Upload Video feature to host any sexually explicit videos. We’re not in the business of profiting from adult-oriented videos and hosting this stuff is fucking expensive. You can use services like xHamster to host those instead.

The video is not explicit. It shows a boob and hints that Zahra is masturbating but you can’t actually see anything much. Her voiceover discusses fisting. This is apparently too sexual for Tumblr, which typically hosts gigabytes of extremely explicit pirated photos and gifs every day. They’re in the business of profiting from those, just not videos.

I might send them an email asking them to define “sexually explicit” and see what kind of prevarication they come up with. It will, of course, be a waste of my time.

This is why I originally just put the video on this blog page. As usual, if you use the commercial platforms you get more traffic… but that option is increasingly not available to erotic content. Never mind if it has a political message, if it’s trying to do something different or make a change in the world. Nope. Fuck off, you’re just porn.