—Bruce Willis, Die Hard  (edited for broadcast television)

t’s a hoary cliche in American cultural criticism that if you kiss a breast in a story or film, you’ll get in a lot more trouble than if you stab one. Of course, despite the censors’ best efforts to preserve our childlike innocence, anyone who can work a computer can instantly see almost literally anything, but how has our continued hypocrisy towards sex and violence deformed artistic depictions of both? 

While we can finally have everything we ever thought we wanted, everything has become porn—an empty, self-justifying indulgence sanitized of truth or consequences until it has as much in common with real human interaction as kabuki. Even in the edgiest content on offer, sex still causes problems that only violence can solve.

While many of us who grew up under the iron fists of broadcast standards & practices, the Million Moms and the MPAA revel in this new era of sleazy glasnost, what is and isn’t acceptable in mainstream culture has become a political football in the culture wars. Outrage for its own sake has too much tactical value to be weakened by precedent or objective standards of morality or taste. Witness the chronic moral crises of video-game violence as a red herring lobbed into every mass shooting tragedy, or the Super Bowl Halftime Show being perennially rebuked by scandalized folks who have no problem with a self-professed sexual predator in the White House. The Purge franchise and The Hunt reaped cheap outrage not for their overkill, but for who gets killed, as cultural conservatives get ever more triggered by depictions of the civil war they’ve been loudly spoiling for.

They can’t stop us from bingeing all we want and in this quarantine, it’s pretty much our only job—so we have only the market and ourselves to blame for all the nostalgic gore and action porn we’re getting. 

In an age of cheap and easy digital bloodspray, the lost art of practical fx persists as a retro synthcore trip to Reaganaut days when heads popped like champagne corks off boneless bodies filled with homogenous corn syrup goo. But in slavishly paying homage to the golden age of gore, what’s left out is any of the thematic marrow that made those original films memorable. Icons like Carpenter and Cronenberg built on their influences and understood that shocking visuals needed equally shocking ideas. Any genre becomes a museum piece when it settles into being a genre of things—of familiar premises, themes and aesthetics. Even the most confrontational art becomes comfort food when we know what to expect. (By this metric, three of the best horror movies in recent years are from outside the genre—Funny Games, Green Room and Let The Corpses Tan beautifully tear down the most rancid cliches about just how much abuse the human mind and body can withstand, and are damn good horror, to boot.)

The current state of the action genre seems like weird mission creep from the jingoistic propaganda we grew up on in the 80’s. Now that military recruitment leans so heavily on economic hardship and immigrant aspirations, with the bulk of the public completely insulated from the hardships of service, it’s decoupled from patriotic themes to drift into full-on revenge and grievance fantasies, telling dangerously stupid lies about the nature of violence itself. 

Stallone’s immortal roid-rage golem Rambo shambles on to unwittingly point out every outdated delusion we still entertain about the nature of American power, but it’s a straight docudrama next to his Expendables trilogy, which turns war into an apolitical, PTSD-free fantasy stunt-show… seriously, if they’re expendable, why are there MORE of them laughing even harder at the end of every installment, and none of them ever gets killed? 

You can convince every sheep in the fold that they’re secretly a wolf with hyper-stylized red-placebo ultraviolence like the John Wick franchise, whose choreographed gun-fu extravaganzas turn death into a dance competition. And in the name of demographic outreach, there’s the whole sub-genre of La Femme Nikita knockoffs, with eerily beautiful nymphets turning on the patriarchy that made them into grrl-powered killing machines. It’s like they asked the Mountain Dew-chugging AI that generates summer blockbuster pitches how to bring equality to the industry, and it belched, “Hot chix jumping sideways with two guns. PS–Please kill me.”

It’s mindless murder-porn, or, as my excellent friend John Skipp astutely coined it, stupography: media consciously devised to leave you outraged, excited, empowered, and dumber than you were before you watched it. And thank gods for that, because if Hollywood thinks a callow Silly Putty swipe at peak-Scorsese gravitas like Joker is a deep think-piece on violence in society, then stick to murder-porn, please. As a winking indictment of white incel rage, Joker almost satisfies; but if you saw yourself in this ham-fisted apotheosis of blighted entitlement fantasies, then brother, I’m sincerely worried about you, and I sure hope you get laid soon.

And speaking of sex...

Goddamnit, we need more serious erotic cinema that frankly explores sexuality itself. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover. Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. Shit, even The Secretary or Showgirls. One reason sex continues to be more problematic than violence is the dicey nature of faking it. While few actors have come forward to speak of being traumatized by feigning violent death (injury or death does occur with appalling frequency to stuntpeople, who seldom rate more than a brief entertainment news item and never derail production) the experience of participating in a sex scene in front of a full crew and a tyrannical director can be almost as traumatic as off-screen sexual assault. 

Game Of Thrones broke a dam in frankly depicting sex in an adult fantasy program, but seemed to have chronic problems with letting female characters enjoy it. Only recently have new policies, such as the welcome addition of intimacy coordinators––think stunt coordinator, only horizontal––begun to insure that actors can be comfortable with nudity and simulated sex on-camera. But even so, sex in film and TV these days must be dark and meaningful, which means prostitutes, strippers, adultery and rape… and violence. 

It’s getting so you almost want to turn off the TV and read a book. But wait...

Violence and sex on the printed page is only less stigmatized than other media because of the nigh-impenetrable firewall of you-have-to-read-it, but reading prose makes it a far more intimate and affecting forum for exploring unfulfilled desires, as well as a place to unpack our unaddressed fascination for these extremes of sensation. 

Science fiction and fantasy have frequently led the way, but for every pioneer who brought mature insight to gender and sexual issues (see Theodore Sturgeon’s Godbody, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness or Harlan Ellison’s Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled), you had creeps like Heinlein, John Norman or Piers Anthony, preaching liberation of women as more accessible objects. If there was progress, it all too often was in the wrong ways, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley proving you don’t have to have a dick to be a predator. 

And what about violence? Military sf and sword and sorcery are still churning out the raypunk action porn; even the most cerebral hard sf still has to have an intergalactic war to prove its weighty bona fides, every fantasy series a modicum of swashbuckling and massive battle scenes. In horror, the quiet vs. extreme feud prevails over a bifurcated genre that seldom looks beyond its own appetite for more or fewer squishy adjectives to interrogate the troubling obligatory nature of rapine and pillage itself. Seldom outside of bizarro or the gentrified suburbs of the New Weird is the reader’s need for vicarious carnage turned around for serious examination, but I fervently commend Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream as a splendid satire of golden age pulp that skewers the toxic catharsis of fantasy violence as a scratch for genocidal itches.

We believe that sex is a wholesome, vital ingredient in life and art, and should bear far less burden in justifying itself than its strange bedfellow, violence. Longtime readers of Forbidden Futures already know all too well how shy we’re not with sex and violence, but for this special issue, we gave our esteemed contributors free rein to explore the issue with no holds barred, but with an eye towards greater agency, wider representation and more conscious pornography. The result may not be to everyone’s tastes, but we reserve the right to offend, and as always, we welcome your outrage.

And as with every story in every issue, we had to ask ourselves, “How far is too far?” With no standard to abide by beyond our own easily excitable appetites, we relied upon the wisdom of former Attorney General and noted pornography connoisseur Ed Meese, who famously said, “I know it when I see it.” And as FF contributor and legendary literary vulgarian Ed Lee puts it:

 “Mankind evolved to rule the earth because he is very violent and very sexual.  These are ancient components of human dynamics, and those components linger ever as we have developed into sophisticated, civilized beings.” * — (interview with 52 Weeks OfHorror)

A-fucking-men.