On the subject of censorship in art. A personal reflection.
The other day Patreon flagged Devlin's nose hair moustache. Attached was a familiar message: too sexually gratifying.
Now it's probably not the nose hair moustache that got censored but instead the nip slip she has in that piece. A feature, mind you, that I cheekily draw in defiance of the persistent censorship of certain nipples over others.
I've had to paywall most of my work on Patreon at this point because over the past three months I got hit with ten flagged art posts that were deemed too sexually gratifying. Many of my comics and illustrations have been flagged and my hand forced to remove them. Even when I censor. I got shadowbanned for a time on here for a censored comic. Which in one way I take as a compliment! But this last year has been especially rough when it comes to censorship in the art world at large.
I've seen a crack down on my fellow artist friends and a gutting of their financial avenues to support their works. Many game devs and comic artists are caught in the crosshairs of the recent Steam/Itchio NSFW purge. Horror artists are being hit hard. Hell, I know several Youtubers who have faced demonetization on their videos for as little as swearing.
There's increasing moral panic on all fronts.
Mature creatives are just especially feeling the vice grip of being forced into narrower and narrower corners of the internet. NSFW creators are some of the first to be hit in moral panics but they'll come for it all.
The message is clear: you are too obscene to be seen.
And even with places like Bluesky, that allow NSFW (*for now, the Oct 15 TOS update might change that), how long before those platforms face similar bans? How many times are we expected to start over because puritans can't handle seeing a nipple? (Or nose hair moustache)
I've had many influences when it comes to erotic art but I want to take a second to talk about the comic Saga (by Brian K Vaughn and Fiona Staples). I bring up Saga specifically because it's both a very successful comic AND an incredibly mature one!
For example, it features:
a dragon sucking its own dick,
a robot man's cock on full display as he masturbates,
a giant named Fard with a big soggy nutsack,
a bald buff guy fucking a spider lady in web,
that same bald guy exploding a traffickers head with his bare hands.....
and just so, so many sex scenes!
The list truly goes on. And I love it! Saga deeply influenced my trajectory as a comic artist. I read that series and saw a future of storytelling that I needed to be a part of.
In Saga, there's a cyclops guy named D. Oswald Heist who is a writer. He pens a trashy romance novel called A Night Time Smoke. In universe it's seen as low-brow drivel but the protagonists, a young couple who were once enemies from opposite sides of a war, start a book club reading it. In it they discover a radical narrative of resistance and love.
The book inspires them to rebel against the hegemonic military states of their respective governments. They pursue their love for each other in stark defiance. All because they read some silly novel that sparked a romance between them.
I think that metaphor is so apt right now because it's a similar experience I've had with erotic art. I can point to several artworks and pieces of media that are core to who I am.
Art and pleasure are some of the most important forms of human knowledge. There's a reason those in power seek to censor it.
