Let me forewarn you to give you enough time to prepare. Next Monday, October 21st, it’s International Fisting Day – the third such celebration, in fact. Before you get your latex gloves and favourite lube out, however, take a minute to learn about the event, as the story behind it is much more interesting than you imagine.
It all started in 2011, when “feminist porn” director Courtney Trouble shot a film as a fundraiser for the Center for sex & culture, an institution founded by sexologists Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence to collect, study and make publicly available sex-positive information. The movie included a scene between porn star legend Nina Hartley and the genderqueer performer Jiz Lee: they got so enthusiastic that they spontaneously got into fisting, which Lee unequivocably enjoyed. Everybody was happy, until disaster struck.
Because of that handballing scene, no American distributor picked up the film. Just a few months earlier two of the biggest porn producers ever had extremely serious legal troubles for showing «obscene» contents in their works, and fisting was listed among the controversial subjects that could land anyone involved in jail. You see, during the Bush Junior presidency pornography in the United States has been subjected to two set of restricting rules known as the Miller test and the Cambria list – and both indicated manual penetration as a no-no.
Beside harming the fundraising project, this development raised a big ethical question. The Miller test basically censors anything “not mainstream” by popular consensus, but nothing can become accepted if it is consistently censored. According to this, how can a pornographer depict “unusual” (including threesomes, interracial sex and other perfectly harmless acts) practices? What about freedom of expression? The practical answer is, of course, «shoot your videos abroad and sell them online from foreign webservers» – which is exactly what everybody does, but that is beside the philosophical point.
Tu cut to the chase, Trouble and Lee launched the annual International Fisting Day to raise awareness about the right to express one’s sexuality more freely – and to have fun while raising a giant middle finger before the authorities, no doubts about it.
In example, on the 21st they will stream live fisting performances on the official event website; they are educating about this surprisingly spiritual practice from its pages and their blogs; they are having fascinating guests… and anyone can… er… give a hand toward the cause. I wonder what the celebration will be like at the Fistine Chapel.
