LOS ANGELES — The decline of physical formats like DVDs and Blu-ray among mainstream entertainment consumers has paradoxically resulted in an unexpected feast of availability for cult, fringe and obscure movies, both via streaming and VOD services and specialty Blu-ray for collectors — a phenomenon that also includes the classics from the Golden Age of pornography (and erotica) in the 1970s and ’80s.

The trend resulted in odd finds like long-unavailable Walerian Borowczyk’s “Eurotica” classics being unexpectedly beamed into Apple TVs worldwide via Netflix, or a confusing collection of random Italian giallo or 1950s Japanese film noir being snuck into homes via Amazon Prime.

In the world of adult the digitally remastered resurrection of many titles that were only whispered about in the days of exclusively physical releases, resulted in mainstream VOD services like HotMovies striking deals with restoration houses and cult movies distributors, and indie powerhouses like Pink & White Productions’ streaming service PinkLabel.tv deputizing an experienced art house curator to buttress their LGBT erotic classics menu.

XBIZ spoke with HotMovies’ Mike Kennedy and PinkLabel.tv’s classics curator Jenni Olson about this trend, which is both important in historical/archival terms, and as a way to remonetize rights holders’ dormant IPs.

‘It’s Like History or a Time Machine’

HotMovies’ Mike Kennedy pointed out the pioneering work in getting these vintage titles out done by DistribPix, a film archive dedicated to independent restoration and distribution since the mid-1960s.

“We noticed DistribPix was probably the first company to start exploiting these vintage titles,” Kennedy explained. “They had some of the old classics, like Radley Metzger’s ’The Opening of Misty Beethoven’ (1976). They had it for broadcast, and then they did the whole Blu-ray thing.”

Back in the days when physical releases led distribution schedules, Kennedy noted, the VOD transfers started shaping up as an aftermarket. “What we’d do is we’d rip apart the entire DVD and release each little section of it — behind-the-scenes, the interviews — and then we would feature each as separate scenes,” Kennedy explains. “We got a really good response right away. These vintage titles weren’t your normal, run-of-the-mill ‘Big Boob Lesbian Stepsister 42,’ and I think people were really excited.”

Back in April, as XBIZ reported, HotMovies.com announced they were offering the exclusive VOD debut of remastered classic films from the “Golden Age of Porn.”

Kennedy admits he welcomed the remastered titles fondly into HotMovies for nostalgic reasons.

“Myself, I grew up watching the 1980s porn, and some of the 1970s,” he told XBIZ. “To see those classic movies so clear, that’s the thing,” he says about the crucially improved picture quality. “It’s like history, or a time machine. I love looking at the decor, and the furniture. It brings all that feeling, it really gives you an idea of what the reality was back then. You see the way it really was and not the way people portray now when they do a period piece.”

The new digital transfers’ image quality improvement, he said, is notable compared to not only the original VHS releases of some of these films, but also early-2000s DVD rips.

“We at HotMovies have been doing this for a long time,” Kennedy explained. “We started encoding a lot of stuff from VHS, even from Beta, and even from the DVD stuff, back in the day — and now you look at that stuff we put out on DVD 15 years ago and say, ‘That looks like crap.’”

“Compared with the way we are showing these porn classics on HotMovies right now,” he added, “what we got now it’s unbelievable.”

Saving Indie Queer Porn History

But image quality is not the only boon of the current vintage porn availability bonanza: for more independent or alternative titles, the sheer availability worldwide via the internet is enough reason to celebrate — and give thanks to the people making it available.

Filmmaker and film historian Jenni Olson was hired by Shine Louise Houston to run PinkLabelTV’s Classics Acquisitions division. “Jenni is single-handedly responsible for growing our collection of classic and vintage adult films,” said Pink & White’s Jiz Lee. “Many of these movies, particularly the LGBTQ titles, are rare and hard to find, so giving them a new online home to be enjoyed by contemporary porn audiences has been truly special.”

Olson is also responsible for The Bressan Project, which remastered and released films by the late filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr., including indie gay classics “Passing Strangers” (1974) and “Forbidden Letters” (1979).

“PinkLabel.tv enlisted me a couple of years ago to work on building out their ‘Classics’ library,” Olson told XBIZ. “I helped them secure from different rights holders a bunch of really standard classics in gay adult work like work by Wakefield Poole, Arthur Bressan, Jack Deveau, Tom DeSimone, Arch Brown and others.”

Bressan, Olson explained, “made films in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of gay adult stuff and then some straight adult, and then documentaries and independent features and he died of AIDS in 1987. We specifically launched ‘Passing Strangers’ and ‘Forbidden Letters’ on PinkLabel last summer and they both had been unavailable since they were released on Betamax, so that was pretty exciting. We did a really beautiful digital restoration and we’re gonna do a physical release, a Blu-ray release, this summer.”

Olson was also thrilled to share with the world a collection of lesbian-made lesbian porn from the 1980s from the the company that ran On Our Backs in the ’80s, a treasure trove known as the Fatale Media collection.

“Fatale had their 3/4 inch masters, and none of it had ever been digitized,” Olson said. “We worked with the UCLA Film and Television Archive to restore them. PinkLabel incurred the cost of all the digitalization, which was really great. PinkLabel is an amazing company — they saw it as an important thing to do and were confident that they were going to be able to recoup the cost of that.”

Olson explained that “a lot of times titles can’t even get into a digital format because they right holders cant afford to do the work [to get them up to standard] and nobody else is gonna gamble on it. PinkLabel did that and we had them professionally scanned.”

The Money Equation for Reissues

But even if we can all agree that archival work is historically important, especially for marginalized communities, with porn history there’s the further issue of stigma when acquiring grants or distributing the material and locating dwindling outlets that don’t discriminate against sexually explicit material. This fundamentally affects the economic equation.

“It’s a really difficult [equation] to make happen,” said Olson, who has encountered the same roadblocks with adult as well as mainstream film companies. “I think that the Fatale material literally would not have been possible without Shine making it happen. She cares about it — she’s running a business, which she cares about sustaining and generating revenue — but that’s not all she cares about. Whereas many other companies would look at those Fatale tapes and say, ‘Well — I could make way more money if I did something else,’ Shine said, ‘I don’t wanna do something else: I say this is this important, and we’ll make the money back eventually, and we’ll make some extra money, and it will be an important thing that we’re doing.’ It’s part of an ethos of doing business, where you care about the community and it’s the nature of the whole Pink & White website and everything that they’re doing: representing underrepresented communities — and they do make a business of it.”

Olson also mentioned the work of Joe Rubin from cult film preservation and releasing outfit Vinegar Syndrome, and Frank Jaffe at Altered Innocence, as more proof that people can run a business that caters to fans of gourmet erotica.

“I’m working with Arthur Bressan’s sister, who runs his estate, and none of his films were scanned,” Olson told XBIZ.  “So it was this dilemma: How can we get them into a digital format and then be able to exploit them? Vinegar Syndrome did all of the scans of ‘Passing Strangers’ and ‘Forbidden Letters’ for free as a favor to the community. It wouldn’t have happened without them, as the estate didn’t have $10,000 laying around.”

The digitization and remastering costs that would-be digital distributors would have to recoup can be anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000, depending on how much restoration work needs to be done in terms of color timing and sound.

An Ever-Changing Market

HotMovies’ Mike Kennedy agrees with Jenni Olson that the cost of restoration is going to determine whether reissues continue to be viable.

“It used to be they’d come out with DVDs, they would distribute those DVD as much as they could, they’ll be out there for six months, nine months, maybe a year, and then they’d release it on VOD,” Kennedy explained.

“So they always made their money back from their DVD reps and the VOD was always the aftermarket and it was extra money for them. But things have certainly changed. They’re not doing the DVD anymore — the sales aren’t there to warrant it, so they’re going direct to the VOD — which is nice but I don’t think the money is the same.”

Kennedy even recommends that would-be distributors put their material on as many platforms as possible, even on HotMovies’ main competitors, AEBN and AdultEmpire (which he describes as “the three that are left”).

“When we say we wanna do an exclusive with somebody, we are now talking about holding them only for a couple of weeks before any of our other competitors get it,” Kennedy explained. “Other than that, I strongly encourage my clients get the titles onto as many platforms as they can to recoup the cost of making it or recoding it.”

Kennedy also vouches for the pristine quality of the paid VOD versions of these vintage titles over the illegal tube site rips.

“We still worry about piracy,” he admitted. “I keep an eye out for anything new I put out to make sure it’s not on the tube sites. Most of the time it’s some schmuck who had the movie and decided to rip it and copy it and upload it there for whatever reason. Usually from the VHS copy. You don’t even know if it’s the whole movie.”

Story is King

As for the feedback he’s been getting about the vintage rereleases, Kennedy continues to be amazed that the Marilyn Chambers and Christy Canyon titles of decades past still bring in the paying fans.

“It’s also the plotlines,” he said. “It’s how much they really matter to everyone. All the [popular] performers are exactly who you’d expect them to be. And there’s the whole ‘family thing,’” by which he means the unstoppable popularity of the “family taboo” genre, as in the classic 1980 film “Taboo” and its slew of sequels.

“Anything that has a family theme, it always blows up,” Kennedy said. “I don’t get it, but it is what it is, and it has always been.”

And then there’s been the rise of the MILF. “In the early 2000s, you’d be rock solid if you did ‘Teen Cheerleader Babysitter’ or something like that,” Kennedy pointed out. “As time has gone on, it’s unbelievable — everyone wants MILFs”

HotMovies is making their restored titles available for streaming directly onto home screens through their Roku app and the company is currently developing a player that can facilitate streamcasts.

“We might charge a little higher rate for the vintage titles, because they’re in HD,” Kennedy offered. “It looks so much better than anything else and a lot of times makes a little bit more business for us. Our fans don’t care how old is; they care how good it looks. And from our standpoint: the story matters.”

Kennedy can prove this hypothesis with internal stats. “We have things that gives us an idea of what people are watching and I’m always amazed that the ‘heat map’ shows that people come back to the ‘set-up.’ The cumshot may always be the blockbuster part, but then it’s the set-up. They’re watching the plot part because that’s what giving them context and makes the scene hot.”

“For a lot of these classics, when we put them in this HD format, you have the great stories and people get naturally pulled into it. These are classics because of the quality of the movie itself. A lot of the stuff is timeless.”

Jun 22, 2021 3:46 PM PDT

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Content creator Sadie Holmes has announced her OnlyFans account is currently free to join.

“Her OnlyFans is packed with exclusive content and is the only place to see her new DDD boobs,” a rep enthused. “Sadie’s OnlyFans has a variety of content, and her newest updates include blowjob scenes, B/G, all-girl, taboo and more.”

“And fans can use it to order customs from Sadie,” added the rep.

Holmes noted that her supporters “deserve the best.”

“I love all the support that I constantly get from my fans, and this is just one thing I can do to show my appreciation,” she said.

Follow Sadie Holmes on OnlyFans and  Twitter.

LOS ANGELES — Alt Erotic has announced the return of brand ambassador Misha Montana with the Friday release of new scene “Stroking Away,” co-starring Tommy Pistol.

According to the studio, “Stroking Away” marks Montana’s “first onscreen performance since suffering a debilitating stroke in April — she even wears a heart monitor during the scene — and the Alt Erotic Chief Brand Officer explained that her highly-anticipated comeback was an emotional one.”

The B/G scene is part of Montana’s forthcoming release “InkedXXXploitation.”

“This is the most insane project of my career,” the performer said. “It’s a very vulnerable experience that I decided to share with the world in the hope that it humanizes performers in our industry, and the industry as a whole.”

“Not only will viewers get outrageous, hardcore, amazing sex scenes, but also a look into what it’s like to suffer a major life event and health scare,” she added. “There’s never been anything like this — one day I’m doing blow-bangs and getting extreme tattoos, then I have a stroke the next day and a few weeks later I’m back to doing high-energy scenes.”

“It’s a beautifully crafted project and it includes the best work I’ve ever done,” she added. “I wanted to inspire people to never give up on your dreams, and I know this will prove just how passionate I am about my career; regardless of a stroke, I’m still a badass performer that can’t be stopped.”

Alt Erotic CEO Ivan, who is also Montana’s fiancé, said he was “pretty amazed at what Misha puts on her shoulders; I have become the one yelling ‘slow down!’ but am so impressed with her drive as well as work ethic. While healing, she has helped the company in so many ways. I can only imagine, once these health crises are past her, what mountains this woman will climb.”

To watch the ‘Stroking Away’ trailer, visit Alt Erotic’s YouTube channel. For more information, visit AltErotic.com.

For more from Misha Montana and Alt Erotic, follow them on Twitter.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — AdultEmpireCash, the affiliate arm of Adult Empire, has announced their newest membership site partner, SpankMonster.com.

The site will be the new home to the entire Spank Monster library, including exclusive weekly updates shot in 4K Ultra HD.

“Director Donnie Cabo shows off his talent for creating immersive scenes ranging from family taboo POV scenes to no-nonsense reality-based gonzo scenes,” said a rep. “From MILFs to the newest babes in the business, this site has something for every fan of high-quality XXX action.”

“Strong technical credits and an energetic, lively pace are among Spank Monster’s trademarks,” the rep added.

The Director of Affiliates at AdultEmpireCash said: “We have known Donnie work for many years from his camera work with Jay’s POV, and have always been impressed by his passion and realistic works. We are hardly surprised to see his channels rise in popularity on the biggest tubes, and we are glad to welcome Spank Monster to our growing list of membership sites.”

Cabo said his past experiences filming for Adult Empire were “a pleasure.”

“It enabled me to see firsthand the care and attentiveness they apply to all their projects,” he added. “I would really like to commend AE for taking on the Spank Monster brand. I look forward to all the site will be able to do in terms of presenting high-quality productions from the POV, gonzo and reality genres.”

For more information, visit Spank Monster and AdultEmpireCash.

Jun 22, 2021 9:02 AM PDT

LOS ANGELES — Elegant Angel has announced the release of a new compilation titled “The Greatest Gang Bangs Ever 3.”

Available on June 29, the collection includes scenes with Keisha Grey, Candice Dare, Chastity Lynn, Holly Hendrix and Veronica Avluv.

“Our fans really love our compilation releases,” an Elegant Angel spokesperson said. “Our last compilation did so well, we didn’t want to make fans wait for the next. Fans will love the scenes we’ve curated for ‘The Greatest Gang Bangs Ever 3’ and it is a necessity for any collection.”

More about this collection can be found here.

Follow Elegant Angel on Twitter for updates.

PHOENIX — Online retailer It’s the Bomb has picked up distro rights in the United States for the “elegant, natural rose-shaped” Suckle Rose vibe.

The Suckle Rose includes “a discreet sucking feature in the rose bud and 10 different settings in the vibrating stem,” a rep explained. “This dual-purpose novelty product contains two quiet motors that can work separately or together to create multiple sucking and vibrating sensations for you — or for you and an accomplice.”

It’s the Bomb CEO Susan praised the multi-purpose toy.

“What’s great about the Suckle Rose that it’s a rose that never wilts or dies but just keeps on giving,” she said. “Plus, it’s two toys for the price of one.”

Click here for additional product details, and to place an order, or email itb@itsthebomb.com.

The company will also be taking orders at the Dallas Total Home & Gift Market today through Friday at booth No. 3214 “on the infamous 12th floor,” noted a rep. “Wholesalers will be able to buy a starting case of six Roses. The Roses also come in cases of 12, 24 and 48 count cases.” Click here for additional information.

LOS ANGELES — Magic Silk has expanded its top-selling collection Sexy Time with six “provocative” and “daringly erotic” new designs.

“These lingerie styles are made with rich, black, soft-to-the-touch fabrics that showcase the female form in stunning fashion. Fun and flirty, they offer a variety of captivating details including adjustable shoulder straps, hook and eye closures, metal garter clips and adjustable garter straps with metal hardware,” a rep explained.

The new designs include Criss Cross Bra & Crotchless Garter Panty; Halter Merry Widow Teddy with Split Crotch; Peek-a-Underboob Bra & Crotchless Panty; Merry Widow and G-Set; Bra and Boy Short; and Galloon Lace Bra & Strappy Panty.

All of designs available in sizes S/M, L/XL and Queen (1-3x). Delivery will begin July in the company’s new Exposed packaging design.

“Variety is the spice of intimate life, and this larger collection now offers something for everyone,” the rep added. “Daytime or nighttime, slip into Sexy Time and the time is right.”

Find Magic Silk on Twitter for the latest updates. Direct inquiries to Barbara Bauer at barbara@magicsilk.com or call (888) 889-8081.

In related news, the company recently debuted the “highly arousing” Wicked Ways collection and its “sexy and sophisticated” lingerie range Diamond Girl in four styles.

LOS ANGELES — #SexTalkTuesday has announced that Tracy Queen, described as “a fictional character who is an indie porn star and sex-positive, feminist icon” will serve as guest moderator for today’s edition of the Twitter-based chat show #SexTalkTuesday from 5-6 p.m. (PDT) to discuss “erotic art and audience response.”

“Tracy Queen is the subject and star of her own graphic novel. Written by Lynsey G and drawn by Jayel Draco, Tracy left a life of organized crime to become an independent adult performer — and discovered all the pleasure she’d been missing,” a rep explained. “But her criminal past and the powers of mainstream porn don’t want her to succeed, so Tracy must use her wits, and the engineering talents of her talking-raccoon best friend, to develop a race of cyborg-clones built to protect her. Along the way, she discovers her true self and what it really means to be human.”

Queen herself enthused about the opportunity to connect with readers and fans.

“I’ve been wanting to host #SexTalkTuesday for years, and I’m so excited that the day has finally come,” she said, via her representation. “I’m psyched to get the opportunity to talk to Twitter about erotic art in everything from animation to classic art to comics. This is going to be so much fun.”

Angie Rowntree, producer of #SexTalkTuesday and the founder of Sssh.com, welcomed the discussion.

“We are really looking forward to exploring the topic of erotic art — but especially through the lens of the subject itself. Tracy — and her creators — bring such a fun and innovative perspective to the graphic novel genre and it is duly inspiring to find artists who are so committed to spreading a message of sex-positivity and shared humanity.”

To take part in today’s chat, follow the #SexTalkTuesday hashtag. Visit the show online and on Twitter for the latest updates.

Follow Lynsey G, Jayel Draco and Tracy Queen on Twitter.

Find Sssh.com on Twitter and XBIZ.tv and direct inquiries to Rowntree at editor@sssh.com.

LOS ANGELES — BaeBay has announced the launch of brand token $SOPHIE in partnership with performer Sophie Dee, $SOPHIE.

“We’ve all heard of BitClout, the social media platform and cryptocurrency exchange where users can buy and sell tokens based on their reputation,” said a rep. “Now you have BaeBay, similar but with actual functionality. It’s not only about buying or selling tokens anymore but we take that concept way further — allowing the community to actually have engagement with the content creator and exclusive content through utility pegged NFTs which the community can buy, swap or sell.”

The rep explained that “a brand token is akin to a stock in an individual’s personal brand. As the personal brand expands, the brand token appreciates, and as a content creator engages with their audience, their brand becomes more valuable. We are capturing the value of the content creator behind and beyond just the content they create.”

As for the $SOPHIE token, the rep said that “fans will be able to invest in the brand Sophie has built and continues to build, and receive dividends from their support and fandom.”

There will be a fixed supply of $SOPHIE that will be “up for sale on a first-come, first-serve basis.” After the end of the public sale, the BaeBay said they “will be launching on a decentralized exchange called SushiSwap on the Polygon network, where $SOPHIE will be publicly traded.

For more information, click here.

NEW YORK — Almost three decades after Bill Clinton fired his Surgeon General for merely stating that masturbation “is a part of human sexuality, and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught,” the subject of sex ed finds itself once again embroiled in a culture war which, like that 1994 incident, is stoked by sensationalistic press reports.

And one of the targets this time around is Porn Education, particularly “porn literacy.”

Earlier this month, Dalton — a private school in Manhattan — dismissed their Director of Health & Wellness, Justine Ang Fonte, after a relentless campaign initiated by “concerned parents” and then broadcast internationally by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and other tabloids.

Fonte was first targeted by the tabloid on May 22 concerning a Zoom guest lecture she gave at another Manhattan private school, Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. Fonte’s lecture at Columbia Prep was titled “Pornography Literacy: An Intersectional Focus on Mainstream Porn.”

Although the headline and slant of the whole report by the New York Post’s Dana Kennedy are deeply judgmental and openly trying to get Fonte in trouble with her employers, their description of the workshop at Columbia Prep seems fairly straightforward:

“The often-explicit slide presentation and lecture by Fonte to the 120 boys and girls,” wrote Kennedy, “included lessons on how porn takes care of ‘three big male vulnerabilities;’ statistics on the ‘orgasm gap’ showing straight women have far fewer orgasms with their partners than gay men or women; and photos of partially-nude women, some in bondage, to analyze ‘what is porn and what is art’.”

The lecture was prepared by Fonte for high school juniors, typically 15-17 and one year away from graduating and attending college courses.

Kennedy also salaciously stresses that she’s seen “some of the presentation” and that includes “a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including ‘creampie,’ ‘anal,’ ‘gangbang,’ ‘stepmom’ and more.”

She also added that “one slide cited various porn genres such as ‘incest-themed,’ consensual or ‘vanilla,’ ‘barely legal,’ and ‘kink and BDSM’ (which included ‘waterboard electro’ torture porn as an example).”

Kennedy damning tone also permeated Fonte’s discussion of OnlyFans, particularly a slide where a performer clarified, “I identify as non-binary, but because that hasn’t hit the general consciousness of the adult industry, I say ‘girl,’ because that’s what people who want to buy my content will be looking for.”

A Highly Qualified Sex Educator

Fonte has plentiful credentials to teach such a workshop. The 35-year-old has a B.A. in Psychology from UC San Diego, a Master’s in Education in Teaching from the University of Hawai`i at Manoa and a Master’s in Public Health in Sexuality from Columbia University.

Fonte is also very open about her theoretical framework and personal background, with a website that mentions her life experience as a BIPOC woman from an immigrant family, wishing to “disrupt health education for 10 years” by framing her “pedagogy through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s teachings on intersectionality.”

“I interrogate how our multifaceted identities shape how we experience health,” Fonte writes on her website, which was available to the authorities of Dalton and Columbia Prep when they hired her. “I believe it is the responsibility of comprehensive health education to be about social justice because health is a human right. Through my teaching, I promote agency, activate empathy, fight for equity, embrace one’s authentic self, and navigate care.”

As sex experts go, Fonte’s style of presentation, demeanor, topics, approach and content are far from controversial, as can easily be seen in this YouTube video discussing “destigmatizing conversations about pleasure.”

She has also been open about her approach for years before the New York Post amplified the voices of a few angry parents. In a 2014 interview, Fonte proudly described herself as “the Dalton School’s Health Coordinator for grades 4-12 teaching health classes covering it all from puberty to pornography while organizing sex-positive programs for the school community.”

“I am currently devising a parent workshop series for the Parent Association at my school for grades 4-12,” she enthusiastically told the Center for Sex Education blog. “After conducting two well-attended parent events on “How to answer questions about sexuality” I’ve convinced the administration and the community that this work is relevant!

But The New York Post’s Dana Kennedy used anonymous complaints, supposedly by a student and several “concerned parents” in her May 22 article to attempt to pillory Fonte and ultimately get her fired. She succeeded.

The ‘Critical Race Theory’ Boogeyman

It would be naive not to see Dana Kennedy and the New York Post’s shaming of a BIPOC intellectual who presented a non-shame-based view of porn in 2021 without mentioning as relevant both the current War on Porn and also the current right-wing-media fueled panic over the supposed ideological boogeyman of “Critical Race Theory.”

Kennedy even went out of her way to point out to the New York Post readers that Fonte’s role model Kimberlé Crenshaw “is a law professor at Columbia University and the UCLA School of Law and an early proponent of critical race theory who coined the word ‘intersectionality’ more than 30 years ago.”

Here’s Kennedy quoting her anonymous sources on Fonte’s workshop, which from the slides appears to be a fairly standard, non-shame-based, non-stigmatizing sex education presentation:

“We were all so shocked and mortified” said one anonymous student apparently speaking for “all” and given her impression of a class by a qualified instructor that she did not care for. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK? We were supposed to answer questions about the porn stuff in the Zoom chat but we were all side-chatting in group chats and tons of kids thought it was so dumb that they sent the link to their friends all over the city and they were all logging on with the password.”

The the also anonymous mother brought up an even bigger right-wing boogeyman: “cancel culture.”

“No one wants to be cancelled or lose their livelihood and that can be done in an instant,” said this anonymous mother who nevertheless got her notions platformed internationally by a powerful newspaper and claiming to speak for a multitude. “Most parents feel the same way I do about not going public but at the same time we’re incredibly frustrated by what’s going on. None of the parents knew this was planned. We were completely left in the dark. It makes us wonder what else the school is up to.”

This disclaimer is both cruel to Fonte and laughable. Anyone even remotely familiar with the dynamics of private education knows that fee-paying parents hold all the power and that the “customer is right” ethos is rampant.

And so, neither that “mother,” nor any of the extremely affluent parents who send their kids to Manhattan private schools “was cancelled” or “lost their livelihood” over the New York Post campaign.

The one person who lost her livelihood? The educated, competent BIPOC woman the “concerned mother” targeted for censure.

Here’s another quote that Dana Kennedy dug up, from another anonymous parent who had nothing to do with the presentation because their kid is a middle-schooler at the pre-K-12th-grade school said: “It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families.”

Warriors Against a Vast Cultural Conspiracy

After making her ideological allegiance clear through her selective quotes (not a single student or parent is quoted who may have approved of Fonte’s seminar), Kennedy spreads her condemnation to “a ‘pornography literacy’ program for adolescents developed in 2016 in Boston through a partnership with the city Health Commission and a Boston University professor.”

Still in full condemnation mode, Kennedy reveals as if it was a huge scandal that “among other things, the early program was designed to teach students that ‘pornography is created for entertainment and generally not for instructional purposes’ and about the danger, say, of texting each other nude photos.”

Finally, Kennedy concludes with a quote from an (again, anonymous) spokesperson for an organization named Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), who told her that Fonte’s workshop was “part of an orthodoxy that has taken over schools across the country.”

“Millions of kids are being experimented on with a new curriculum that racializes and sexualizes young children, labels them by traits like skin color, gender or sexual orientation and tells them the paths of their lives are determined by those traits,” declared the anonymous FAIR source.

Kennedy did not point out that FAIR is an anti-affirmative-action group that believes in a massive cultural conspiracy to promote “diversity” which must be fought within all American institutions.

In their words: “Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to identify ourselves and each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.”

Their board of advisors includes noted critics of what they call “woke culture” like Megyn Kelly, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan.

Columbia Prep Surrenders and Issues Mea Culpa

After May 22, Dana Kennedy and The New York Post continued their campaign to get Fonte fired.

The story was amended with a followup after publication pointing out that the Columbia Prep head of school, Dr. William M. Donohue, had bowed to the tabloid and the parents’ pressure and emailed the parent-customers distancing the school from Fonte’s presentation.

“The content and tone of the presentation did not represent our philosophy,” Donohue mea-culpaed, “which is to educate our students in ways that promote their personal development and overall health, as well as to express respect for them as individuals.”

“It was unfortunate that we did not better inform ourselves of the speaker’s specific content in advance,” Donohue’s apology continued. “In this case, the speaker did not align with our unique CGPS mission and for this, I apologize […] Going forward we will certainly learn from this experience.”

Kennedy then quoted “one of the mothers organizing the parents’ new social media campaign” who spelled out the real stakes of the incident: “It’s not about this one class. It’s about the whole radical direction the school is going into.”

A Salad of Various ‘Woke’ Panics

Then, a week later, Dana Kennedy published a second attack on Justine Ang Fonte’s pedagogy, taking aim to a class at Dalton where she had apparently discussed masturbation with younger students.

“Dalton Parents Enraged Over ‘Masturbation’ Videos for First-Graders,” the New York Post now headlined. Kennedy was now rehashing a months-old story when some parents had complained about Fonte’s methods.

Kennedy quoted angry parents who had taken objection with Fonte’s way of teaching kids about consensual touch, in a profanity-laden tirade about how much they paid for the school.

Kennedy wrote that “while one mother conceded that teaching the concept of consent can be valuable in protecting children from abuse, another said telling kids that that their own parents or grandparents should not touch them without first asking for permission is extreme.”

“Literally parents are supposed to say to their kids, May I hug you?” a supposed anecdote that Kennedy followed with “one mother said another parent told her, ‘I’m paying $50,000 to these a–holes to tell my kid not to let her grandfather hug her when he sees her?’”

‘We Are Furious’

Now fully conflating a whole salad of current media-fueled right-wing obsessions — “sex education,” “wokeness,” “critical race theory,” “cancel culture” — Kennedy quoted Dalton “concerned parents” ranting full-on about modernity, embodied in the figure of the at-that-point-still-employed Justine Ang Fonte:

“Kids have no less than five classes on gender identity — this is pure indoctrination. This person should absolutely not be teaching children. Ironically, she teaches kids about ‘consent’ yet she has never gotten consent from parents about the sexually explicit, and age-inappropriate material about transgender to first-graders,” said an anonymous parent

“We are furious,” someone else piped in “We were horrified to learn this was shown to our first-grade 6- and 7-year-old kids without our knowledge or consent. But it’s so hard to fight back because you’ll get canceled and your child will suffer.”

Again, the only person who suffered a cancellation of her livelihood at the end of this whole charade: Justine Ang Fonte, the BIPOC woman with the actual qualifications to teach non-shame-based sex education.

Kennedy’s article then got picked up by the right-wing echo chamber. Suzanna Bowling, a Manhattan blogger with no visible qualifications on public health or sex education, took Dana Kennedy’s reports and amplified them saying the quiet part out loud: “Who Is Justine Ang Fonte and Why Are We Letting Her Near Children?” she headlined, lambasting the sex educator for supposedly “grooming our kids to be dysfunctional [regarding Fonte’s presentation about LGBTQ+ youth], to allow [sic] pedophilia and teach it is ok if you consent as an underage child? We need to wake up and see what is being taught to our kids before it is too late!”

On June 12, the New York Post and Dana Kennedy declared victory: “A teacher who taught controversial sex-education classes that included cartoon videos on masturbation for first graders at the posh Dalton School has resigned, The Post has learned.”

The school tried to whitewash the removal of Fonte as “a resignation” claiming that she was leaving having “helped to develop an exemplary K-12 Health and Wellness program. Dalton — our faculty, staff, administration, and trustees — continue to stand firmly behind this program and those who teach it.”

The New York Post then dogwhistled the victorious, notably uncancelled and unharmed, “concerned parents” by boasting that “Fonte is the third high-profile Dalton staffer to leave the school this year as the school struggles with a simmering conflict between the faculty and parents over its progressive agenda.  Domonic Rollins, the school’s director of DEI, (“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”) left in February to “pursue other opportunities,” the school said at the time. [Jim] Best, Dalton’s headmaster for the past 3 years who has been with the school a total of 16 years, announced in April he was resigning.”

Another Qualified BIPOC Woman Hounded by Right Wing Voices

The sight of a qualified BIPOC woman being hounded out of a public health job by paranoid right-wing culture warriors should immediately bring to mind that shameful incident in 1994 when Bill Clinton removed the country’s first Black Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for daring to point out that masturbation existed and maybe should be part of sex ed curricula.

The non-stop criticism of Elders by Rush Limbaugh and his army of “dittoheads” was also fundamental in eroding her position, which made her at the time a pioneer in having a more frank conversation about formerly taboo topics like marijuana use and sex. Many of the attacks against Elder also featured dogwhistles about her condition as a BIPOC woman.

This is how Newsweek described the Elders firing 22 years later:

“At a 1994 United Nations conference on AIDS, Elders was asked if she thought teaching children about masturbation might reduce unsafe sex. Yes, she replied, “I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality, and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics.” The conservative outrage circuit erupted, and Clinton promptly asked her to resign.

In ‘Sticky: A (Self) Love Story,’ a new documentary that takes the revolutionary stance that touching yourself is not a cause for moral repulsion, Elders defends her position. “I felt it would reduce unintended pregnancy and reduce disease,” she says. (She was saying that schoolchildren should learn that masturbation is natural and common—not that they should be taught how to do it, she later clarified.)”

“The tragic firing of Dr. Joycelyn Elders helped inspire the making of this movie,” Nicholas Tana told Newsweek in the last months of the Obama presidency. “As a modern nation, we still suffer from more teenage pregnancies and STDs than most any other modern nation in the world.”

And Elders, Tana continued, “was fired by the same president who felt it appropriate to insert a cigar into his intern Monica Lewinsky’s vagina! I would be willing to bet proper sex education would have more appropriately prepared Bill Clinton for his position of power. Now Bill Clinton is campaigning next to Hillary and I’m appalled.”

The 2016 Newsweek writer was being cheeky that it’s a “revolutionary stance” to see masturbation as not shameful. But one Trump administration and several years of evangelical/conservative triumphs at the state level and in the Senate later, the expression seems much less jokey.

Turns out it is still very much a revolutionary stance to attempt to teach porn literacy or masturbation, or the destigmatization of sex and sex work, at the time when the War on Porn — fueled by right-wing outlets like the New York Post but also by supposedly liberal or progressive sources like the New York Times or The Guardian — dovetails into the War on Porn Education.

Meanwhile, at the New York Times

Over this past weekend, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Peggy Orenstein headlined “If You Ignore Porn, You Aren’t Teaching Sex Ed.”

“Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room,” Orenstein editorial begins. “But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media — The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story — accusing the school of indoctrinating children.”

But instead of denouncing the campaign against Fonte or addressing the actual shaming campaign that got her removed, Orenstein made a mild general suggestion that “refusing to discuss sexually explicit media, which is more accessible to minors than at any other time in history, won’t make it go away.”

“Curiosity about sex and masturbation is natural: good for girls, boys and everyone beyond those designations,” Orenstein continues, again without addressing the War on Porn Education or the mainstreaming of the notions of religiously inspired groups like Exodus Cry, via their ally Nicholas Kristof, by the very New York Times that publishes her.

“Adult porn use is a different conversation,” Orenstein protests. “One could also debate the potential for sexual liberation of ethically produced porn, queer porn or feminist porn, but those sites are typically behind a pay wall, and most teenagers don’t have their own credit cards.”

And then, of course, she gets to familiar anti-porn talking points (of the supposedly “feminist” variety), which invisibilize all of queer sexual expression, or the fundamental role of it in LGBTQ+ coming out processes. “The free content most readily available to minors tends to show sex as something men do to rather than with women,” Orenstein proclaims, channeling verbatim virulent anti-porn crusaders like Gail Dines or Laila Mickelwait. “It often portrays female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction, shows wildly unrealistic bodies, is indifferent to consent (sometimes in its actual production) and flirts with incest.”

Orenstein even quotes that methodologically meaningless “2020 analysis of more than 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos, 45 percent and 35 percent, respectively, contained aggression, almost exclusively directed at women.”

Dreaming of a Liberal, ‘Ethical Porn’ Utopia

After continuing along these lines for several paragraphs, Orenstein concedes — as Kristof did also in passing — that “to be fair, though, mainstream media use is associated with many of the same beliefs and behaviors, so even if you could block all the triple-X sites on the internet (and good luck with that), it wouldn’t be enough.”

But then, like Kristof, she brings it all back to the porn, because why address complicated internet-wide moderation issues when you can bring up again and again “what the dirty, dirty pictures are doing to our poor cis boys and girls”?

After a series of essentially “I just want to make sure you know that I also consider porn extremely objectionable, even though I evidence zero knowledge of the adult content being produced in 2021” statements, Orenstein finally arrives to her defense of “porn literacy.”

“Porn literacy,” she writes, “may sound salacious, and it certainly makes for sensationalist headlines. But like other media literacy courses (including those aimed at reducing teen use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol or offsetting damaging messages about body image), when they’re done right, the aim is to reduce risk, help identify and question the incessant messages that bombard teens, encourage them to hone their values and give them more agency over their experience.”

“Honestly? I’d rather we didn’t have to talk to kids about explicit media, and I wish pornography weren’t, for so many, their first encounter with human sexuality, that it didn’t arrive so early to hijack their imaginations with its proscribed fantasies,” is her conclusion.

And while Peggy Orenstein wishes for a liberal, more chaste, NPR-ready utopia that will never come, in actual reality the War on Porn continues raging on — and another well-meaning, highly qualified BIPOC woman lost her job, thrown under the bus by supposed “progressives” under right-wing pressure.