Sin título

[fanduber]

[fanduber]

[animentality]

[unspeakablearchives]

i'm not a gay man, but i think the weird influx of gay trucker erotica may have stemmed from the gay BDSM artist known as tom of finland? who may be of interest to you since he dealt with similar battles fighting censorship before his death. he very clearly had a type of man and often drew military or working class gay porn.

Oh. My god. I LOVE Tom of Finland! 😍 🇫🇮

That is the exact type of art that I love. Not the content, mind you (personally don't think men should be allowed to be masculine - being masculine is a woman's job 😏)

No, I'm talking about the motivation behind it. I LOVE when someone makes art about (or writes about) some weirdly specific topic just because they think it is the hottest thing imaginable. He qualifies:

I like that he knew exactly what he was into, and wasn't afraid to show it. I like the fact that he quit his successful job at an international advertising firm in order to draw gay porn. I like the fact that he made a bunch of problematic drawings of gay Nazis because, and I quote, "they had the sexiest uniforms!"

And I also like the fact that the government of Finland officially released the gayest stamp of all time in his honor:

And at this point, you may be thinking, "surely she's not going keep talking about vintage gay beefcake hardcore pornographic graphite drawings for much longer, right?"

Well, there is a bit more, actually.

Because I have found some relevant info regarding the sorts of books in the original post: underground taboo erotic pulp novels of the 70s.

The books with illustrations that most resemble the style of Tom of Finland were published by Surrey House / Surree Limited from roughly 1972 to 1978, with illustrations attributed only to "Adam":

And I have identified this elusive artist as being... Giacomo “Jack” Bozzi!

Although I don't have direct confirmation from the artist, many second-hand accounts do say he was strongly influenced by Tom of Finland!

...what's wrong with me? I hate how easily I get distracted & write these unnecessary long-winded posts. Just hope someone likes this 😭 🏳️‍🌈

[unspeakablearchives]

[unspeakablearchives]

Hi, please do talk about Addio Zio Tom (if you want to, and have time ofc). After some light wikipedia reading I’m intrigued!

Let's take a break from our regularly scheduled discussions of fucked up books, and instead talk about a fucked up movie!

Here's the (kind of) short version:

"Addio Zio Tom" aka "Goodbye, Uncle Tom" is a bizarre 1971 docudrama, which one person online summarized thusly:

Goodbye Uncle Tom boldly asks the question “What if a European film crew went back in time and shot a documentary about the history of slavery, slapped an atypical Italian soundtrack on top of it, and saw it marketed as a piece of exploitation?”

Yeah I know. There's a lot to unpack there. But let's just focus on what made it actively unethical / harmful: The film was made with the enthusiastic participation of the brutal Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier. He provided the filmmakers with hundreds of "extras" that they could use for anything, with no oversight. In reality, these appear to have just been normal Haitians who were forced to participate in the film without any knowledge of what they would be required to do.

The film's goal of depicting the brutality and cruelty of slavery meant that these people were subjected to abuse and humiliation on a scale that is almost unimaginable.

The most harrowing parts of the film are in the slave ships and the receiving station where recently arrived slaves are "prepared" for sale. Roaches and rats are shown crawling all over naked people, packed next to one another in a ship's hold. Vast crowds are stripped naked, buckets of cold water are flung on them, others are thrown into pools, have delicing powder thrown in their faces. Some are locked in chains, cages, stockades, some are hung upside down by their feet. They're made to kneel down and scoop out gruel from a trough with their hands and shovel it into their mouths like animals. This is a mix of naked men, women, and children of all ages, mind you.

The sexual elements are particularly offensive. Pregnant women are paraded around naked during scenes set in a "breeding ranch" for slaves. A happy little white girl is filmed running through a meadow pulling a naked little black boy along behind her by a leash around his neck.

Hey, were you upset over the idea of adolescent girls twerking in Cuties? Do you think you would you perhaps be more upset if those girls were forced to be in the film, were depicted as being in a slave brothel, and were entirely naked when they were twerking? If so, perhaps you should avoid watching "Addio Zio Tom." Yes, seriously. That 100% happens in this movie. Yes, it's legal, but like, ethically? Wow is it fucked up.

Sufficed to say that it's a rough film.

Once again, I want to point to The List I recently posted of reasons that even repulsive content such as this should be preserved. But there's an extra reason this particular film should be preserved, in my opinion. Despite the horrible background to the film, and despite some really tone-deaf elements where the movie tries to be goofy, funny, or erotic while dealing with some stuff that should be treated with much more respect - despite all that, the truth is that this movie really does have many moments that are probably closer to an accurate depiction of American slavery than anything that has ever been made.

Hope that helps clear things up.

[paraphiliaresearcharchive]

The Paraphilia Research Archive

A public digital library preserving books, papers, and research on paraphilia, fetish, atypical sexuality, and related topics.

This archive exists to keep knowledge accessible at a time when research on stigmatized and taboo topics related to sexuality is increasingly difficult to find, removed, or buried. It collects academic texts, historical material, and other resources so researchers, paraphiles, fetishists, survivors, and curious readers alike can explore the subject with nuance rather than panic.

The goal is simple: preserve information, encourage informed discussion, and support approaches to sexuality that prioritize harm prevention, accountability, and understanding over ignorance and stigma.

Knowledge should not disappear just because it makes people uncomfortable.

[unspeakablearchives]

[quasi-normalcy]

It's incredible how all of the censorship on the modern internet doesn't actually seem to be making society kinder or more wholesome hmm maybe there's a lesson in this

[unspeakablearchives]

In my humble opinion, Censorship is not only vile, But also useless. It's useless when you can guess EXACTLY what it's trying to hide.

YES. Okay so this reminded me. Hmm... hey, can I go ahead and deeply upset everyone here?

Great, thanks 😅

So I really don't like the common internet usage of things like censoring the word "nigger" as something like "N------" regardless of context.

And yes, I understand that you can get in trouble on many some social media sites, regardless of the context in which it. Yes, I understand that it can be shocking and upsetting for many people to see that word written out, regardless of context. No, I don't think people should be using it all willy-nilly without any restraint.

But I recently saw people using that sort of self-censorship to refer to famous quotes (ie. "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger"), and the titles of some very well-established literary works. For instance:

(Edit: I don't know why this post refuses to use smaller thumbnails... 😓)

And that didn't quite sit well with me. Like, these are very good authors, it's not like they were oblivious to the connotations and impact of that word. It was a very deliberate choice on their part to specifically use the word "nigger." If they wanted to call it "The N Word" or "N-----" then they would have done that.

So to me, self-censoring yourself when you talk about those books or quotes has a bit of a twinge of disrespect about it somehow. I guess it feels like you're prioritizing your own comfort over the surrounding context and the author's intentions on this very important subject.

Just my personal thoughts. What do you think?

Note: Those books I mentioned earlier are most relevant titles, in my opinion, because they were written by some very important, influential black authors. But there are several other significant books that used the word in the title too.

[unspeakablearchives]

What would you say is the weirdest book that you've seen in your research? Not the most disturbing or freaky or whatever, but the type that makes you go "...what?"

Huh. Good question... 🤔

As a matter of fact, I've found a lot of very weird books just incidentally as part of my research. I might have to actually break this up into a whole series of posts...

Here, let's start with one very specific category:

𓊈 Weird French Books 🇫🇷 𓊉

The French have a particularly long and illustrious history of very weird books, including the weird literary movements of Lettrism and Oulipo. So what the hell, lets start with some Weird French Books:

Livre de Prières (1886) aka "Book of Prayers" by J. Hervier, J. A. Henry, and A. Roux

Huh, this just looks like a normal prayer book... What's so special about it? Heh, well buckle up. Strap in. Shit's about to get crazy.

Because this book is not printed, and it's not handwritten either. The pages of this book are made of woven silk. The creators used a precursor to modern computers, the extremely complex, Victorian Era programmable Jacquard loom, in order to literally weave the threads into the intricate pattern of text and illustrations. This was unimaginably difficult, and required many thousands of punchcards to be meticulously punched by hand. It is a literally insane the amount of effort for what I believe amounted to only... something like 50 copies of the book.

You can examine the whole thing HERE

Le Livre (1984) aka "The Book" by Pierre Guyotat

Guyotat is revered by academics in France, and his writing style was always extremely unique and bizarre. For instance, his book Éden, Éden, Éden (1970) is a litany of obscenities, written as a single, long, frantic, delirious run-on sentence. And let me be clear, THAT book seems absolutely mainstream and boring compared to Le Livre.

Le Livre isn't quite written in a separate invented language, it's more as if it was written in a rhythmic, polyphonic French that's been mutated and mutilated so drastically in morphology, syntax, sound, and typography that it becomes something alien. The style is aggressively broken up, sometimes described as being "riddled with apostrophes, as if they were sprayed from a machine gun." It's composed of chopped-up words, intentional misspellings, certain sounds missing or added, and contractions that can make it look almost unreadable, etc.

It's never been translated because that would be literally impossible. And I've never read it because I can't even read normal French, let alone whatever the fuck this is written in. Also it's strangely hard to find a copy of the book.

Composition n° 1 (1962) by Marc Saporta

Okay, the descriptions are getting too long. I'll try to keep them more compact from here on out:

This "book" is one hundred and fifty loose pages, which the reader is instructed to shuffle and then read in whatever order they land in.

Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) aka "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Raymond Queneau

A "book" designed as a sort of... poem-generating machine?

It is only ten pages long, consisting of ten different sonnets, using the same rhyme scheme. Kind of. But each line of the poem is cut into a thin strip. This allows you to mix and match the different lines in order to make 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) different sonnets.

La Disparition and Les Revenentes (1969) aka "A Void" and "The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex" by Georges Perec

The first book is written to not use the letter "e" at any point. And the second book is written using "e" as the ONLY vowel. I cannot stress how difficult and frustrating these would have been to write.

Even more baffling was that both books were somehow translated into English so that the translations ALSO avoid the letter "e", and exclusively use the letter "e" for vowels, respectively.

I know that the first book also also has a rather clever premise where the sudden disappearance of the letter "e" from the world becomes a central mystery in the book.

Les Journaux des dieux (1950) aka "The Journals of the Gods" by Isidore Isou

Bro, I don't even know wtf this shit is.

The book mixes words, letters, drawings, diagrams, musical notation, mathematical signs, and blocks of color layered on top of one another, in an attempt to unite many different systems of communication inside one book.

...it might not work, but hey, he gets points for trying.

[unspeakablearchives]

I saw your post that had the advanced anarchist arsonal. Do you have any other anarchist books that have been heavily censored?

Mmm.... not really, no 😅

HOWEVER It turns out that Internet Archive has quite a few. Here are a few collections that seem like a good place to start:

182 books published by AK Press - These seem like more polished, mainstream, intellectual - BORING. Comrade, do I look like I want professional graphic design and glossy, properly-bound books? Who wants anarchist lit with an official ISBN number from THE MAN?

300+ books by Sprout Distro - Okay, now that's more like it. Their shitty black-and-white zines about showing up to protests to cause a ruckus are clearly designed to be printed at home and distributed by hand - way more authentically anarchist imho

4000+ books in the Sparrow's Nest Library and Archive - Aw fuck yeah. That's the kind of look I like in my underground literature. An interesting collection of historic self-published anarchist materials - largely from the UK.

[unspeakablearchives]

Do you know about books made by "Kowloon Kurosawa"? He is the creator of hong kong 97 and he has a lot of sort of journalistic books about his travels to poor regions of mostly southeast asia afaik. In one of them he investigates child sex trafficking and follows a buyer and watches the entire buying process up until the sex. I would love a comprehensive archive of his books because they seem really interesting, and afaik theyre all on amazon.

Oooh, no I haven't heard of him, he sounds right up my alley!

If you know the name of that one particular work you described, let me know. I'm extremely interested in child sexual exploitation - and yes, as I typed out that sentence, I did notice how suspicious that sounds 💀

So maybe I should explain... Is everyone cool with me doing this by blathering on and on about some long stupid story? Great:

It was 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night, over 20 years ago, on January 23, 2004, & Dateline NBC was airing a special entitled "Children for Sale."

The program was an undercover investigation into child prostitution¹ in Cambodia. It was astronomically fucked up on a level I couldn't have imagined. I was just a wee youngster myself, but I was just mature enough to fully grasp what was happening, and it really affected me.

Although I didn't realize at the time, I can now see that this was a huge turning point for me in regards to disturbing media. Because I wasn't just upset at the abusers, pimps, and corrupt officials: I was furious at NBC for filming and airing this special in the first place.

You need to understand that this program really felt like a How-To guide for child abusers². The show highlighted just how easy it was to fly into Phnom Penh, find a driver, say you were looking for the youngest girls, and get taken to the village of Svay Pak, which specialized in this. At the time, it seemed so goddamn irresponsible to put this info out there.

So this news story stuck with me, and for years I would periodically research random stuff about Cambodia: it's history, news, and the current state of this child sex trafficking. And, as time passed, I began to realize something important:

I was wrong.

I was wrong because this mass-exposure by Dateline WORKED. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s the child sex trafficking in Svay Pak was omnipresent and completely out in the open. But all the ensuing news coverage focused the world's attention. It put pressure directly on the Cambodian government, it forced other nations to place their own pressure on Cambodia, it actively caused the mobilization of non-profit organizations and the formation of new ones.

Yes, the Dateline special probably did attract the attention of potential child sex tourists. But for every one of them, the news special mobilized tens of thousands of good people who would fight back against the abusers - people who had no way to know this exploitation was even happening until they saw Dateline.

And this is precisely what I mean when I talk about this being a turning point for me. Over time, this helped me form my viewpoint which is so central to this blog: that it is GOOD to make horrible things public.

The actual bad people out there? They do NOT want fucked up stuff to be made public. They want to keep it secret, hidden away. I want it out in the open, because THAT IS THE ONLY WAY IT GETS ADDRESSED.

Now that I've written such a long, impassioned explanation, I think there's finally enough context to release something very controversial but very important from the Archives™️:

"Cambodian Sex Trip Diary" by Hyacinthus

I believe this to be the only known surviving firsthand account of a child sex tourist visiting Cambodia in the early 2000s. I feel like it gives immense insight into what happened back then, and also into the mind of abusers. One day I'd like to write a proper analysis or even an annotated version detailing all the internal details that I think provide evidence of it's authenticity, proving it is not wholly fiction, but was written by someone who really engaged in child sex tourism.

Footnotes:

¹ Official sources are increasingly starting to shift from using the term "child prostitution" to "CSEC," or "commercial sexual exploitation of children." The idea is that the term "prostitution" can potentially imply consent, agency, or even criminality on the child’s part, and so should be avoided. However, few people are familiar with the new terminology so I used the older one. Sorry if that's inappropriate.

² This originally read: "this program really felt like a How-To guide for pedophiles". I have since been reminded that the term "pedophile" only refers to people with the attraction itself, many of whom control themselves and do not in fact end up abusing children. Well, you know, it's a learning process, I'm gonna make some slip-ups.

[unspeakablearchives]

i'm sure you know well but a common thread amongst people looking to censor works for any reason is that they romanticize, normalize, etc problematic themes. And now i'm curious what examples exist of this actually happening, particularly with themes of incest, rape, or pedophilia. I'm sure this is gonna be something that's heavily opinion based but given your experience I figure you'd likely know some actual credible examples to compare against (VS the lay-person listing [artist name who draws porn of underage anime characters])

It's funny because I kind of disagree with everyone on this.

I mean, I hate to always play into the stereotype of being some centrist "um akshually, both sides wrong" idiot but hey, if the shoe fits lol.

Yes, it is absolutely possible for media to "romanticize" or "normalize" themes that are "problematic" (even if those terms are kind of stupid).

Of course media can affect people. It can shape public taste, flatten moral seriousness, make certain things feel glamorous, dull, funny, sexy, normal, tragic, whatever. Media is meant to affect the audience.

But just because a work romanticizes something ugly does NOT mean it should be censored.

There are SO MANY reasons for this:

The minute you start banning fiction for possibly having a vague, indefinable negative influence on people, the standard becomes hopelessly vague and infinitely expandable. What counts as "romanticizing?" How much impact is too much? On whom? According to whose moral framework? Does the author's intention matter?

Once you hand that power over, it will not stop at the most extreme examples.

And even under "ideal circumstances," I strongly believe that even the most extreme examples should NOT be banned. I enumerate more specific reasons for why this is in this post.

...but I hate avoiding direct questions, so in the sake of thoroughness, let's also answer your original question really specifically:

i'm curious what examples exist of this (romanticizing, normalizing, etc problematic themes) actually happening, particularly with themes of incest, rape, or pedophilia.

In 1972 a random historical romance book geared towards female readers came out called The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. I know, you've probably never heard of it - almost no one nowadays has. But at the time, it was radically different, with the male lead being a gruff and lusty sea captain who repeatedly rapes the protagonist, starting within the first 30 pages. The protagonist eventually softens towards him and they fall in love. This book started the subgenre we now call the "Bodice-Ripper" which followed a similar very rapey structure, and quickly became extremely popular.

It's tough to say how much this new genre (and the tropes it established, which became embedded in our popular culture) ended up influencing society's views. But more than a few people have observed that there seemed to have been a shift in attitude amongst women starting around that time, where more women seemed to enjoy or at least excuse the concept, in real life, of a partner who just "just couldn't control himself" and "took charge," essentially forcing himself on her.

I have no idea how widespread this sort of attitude change was, or how causal the relationship here was - in fact it seems impossible to ever know for sure. But the point is that it seems plausible, or even likely, that media can, in fact, have the effect of making certain unethical sexual things seem more "normal" or even potentially viewed positively.

Again, this in no way means that any of these should be banned.

[spookyboywhump]

I do really love it when women write graphic and fucked up things. I feel like so often people react to fucked up fiction with “of course a disgusting man would write this 🙄” and it often carries an unspoken (honestly sometimes spoken) message of “a woman’s PURE and DELICATE and FEMININE mind could NEVER think of something this VILE”. Thank you women in fucked up fiction 🫡

[unspeakablearchives]

[endlesss-rain]

[unspeakablearchives]

[unspeakablearchives]

What was virgin bride dot net?

Well. You might, very reasonably, assume that VirginBride.Net was the name a website (which I suppose it also was). But it was mainly the title of a real, physically-published book written by an eccentric scumbag predator named George Hoey Morris also known as... ugh, this is such a stupid alias... "Johnny Ray Fortune" 🤦

From what I can find, this book appears to have been first written around 2002 or 2003. It's presented as a practical guide for how to locate, marry, and bring back to the US "virgin brides," which is the author's euphemism for foreign girls under the age of 18. The book explains in detail how to exploit various loopholes that existed in the law at the time, which allowed for foreign marriages to young girls to be legally recognized in the US.

Spoiler Alert: It turns out that these activities WERE, in fact, illegal. Morris was ultimately sentenced to 85 years in prison, where he died in 2021.

Now, I can hear you asking why- WHY would anyone want something like this horrible book to be available and preserved in ANY capacity?

Well actually, this is one of the most important examples I give when I talk about why we shouldn't censor incredibly offensive and "dangerous" books.

Why? Because in this case, Freedom of Speech did two things:

In very direct, practical terms, freedom of speech is what allowed this absolute dipshit to openly document and publish what amounted to very detailed confessions of his own illegal activities. And that really was the only reason that he ended up getting caught.

Despite the gross intentions behind the book, the fact is that it thoroughly documented these loopholes in the laws, and the fact that people WERE exploiting them, making it clear what the problem was and how to fix it.

Law enforcement and government officials in both the US and Vietnam failed these girls at every conceivable level. No one appears to have found it suspicious that this old, single man traveled to foreign countries over 20 times and repeatedly returned married to 15-year olds. No fucking wonder he thought he could publish a book like this and no one would care- he had already gotten away with it for so long.

This book (along with a variety of other incidents, to be fair) ironically served as a loud wake-up call, and probably the only one that officials would have listened to, considering how incompetent everyone was.

Within just a few years, these loopholes had been largely closed. Vietnam raised the marriageable age, as did a great many US states...

Although not as much as you might hope:

Meanwhile, federal law made it explicitly illegal for the first time for US citizens to travel abroad for the purposes of sex with anyone under 18 - regardless of what the laws of the host country are. Note that Morris was only convicted of transporting minors across international lines for sexual purposes, and NOT for the abuse that happened outside the US.

The point is that I am so thankful that the US had freedom of speech even for the most repulsive of content like this. By doing so, it allowed a very bad and very stupid man to expose his crimes, and it allowed us to see how we could collectively help prevent such abuses in the future.

Today, the guide is thankfully of virtually no use to predators. But, in my mind, it serves as a crucially important historical, legal, and probably psychological lesson as well, giving insight into the minds of abusers.