“Light spanking may be a cliche in adult movies, but when Alexei gave his wife, Yulia, a mid-coital swat on the rear at a woodsy campsite on a recent evening, he was just being helpful. The mosquitoes, after all, are brutal at the fenced-in cluster of cabins just off the highway to Ryazan, where the married couple was copulating on patchy terrain. The bloodsuckers were everywhere, buzzing around in a frantic search for human skin. In a pinch, they’ll bore through dress socks, though that tactic was largely superfluous on the outdoor set of porn producer Sergei Loginov’s latest film. There was plenty of exposed flesh to go around, including Yulia’s bare behind… Filming in the city would require a lot less bug repellent, of course. But Loginov knows the owner of the campsite and adjacent shashlyk stand, so accommodations were essentially free of charge. He is also fond of ad-hoc alfresco shoots, in which actors spend a few days barbecuing, drinking and having sex for the camera. But all of that is secondary for Loginov, who was once convicted on pornography charges. ‘First and foremost, the farther away from Moscow the better,’ Loginov said. ‘I’ve already had cops break down my door while I was filming in Moscow. I don’t need that.’ Loginov, 38, is one of a handful of adult film producers in Russia trying to run a legal business, although he says he has yet to turn a profit… Because of a vague pornography law that both moral crusaders and porn peddlers alike deride, hard-core film producers operate in a strange legal purgatory… The law also fails to define what constitutes pornography — the equivalent to criminalizing drugs but not specifying which drugs are illegal, Loginov said.” — Moscow Times (Russia)

The internet proliferated around the world just as the Cold War ended, and the two seemingly unrelated historical phenomena converged in net porn and cybersex. Twenty years ago, there were three sorts of porn: slick American productions, weird Dutch ones, and even weirder South American ones. But as détente met the internet, it gave rise to a new geography of porn — usually “Russian teens,” where Russian served to indicate a girl from any former Soviet bloc country and teen might mean anything from twelve to thirty. Guys who couldn’t locate Bulgaria or the Ukraine on a map now practice cyber-foreplay by googling for Ukrainian nymphets. And this online traffic is doubled by a very real traffic in human smuggling, East Europeans conscripted into brothels around the world.

Given the ex-Soviet penetration into the world’s sexual consciousness, it is curious to learn of the peculiar legal status of pornographic production in Russia itself. This article outlines a sort of Kafka-esque world of enigmatic laws and absurd loopholes. For example, the Criminal Code allows for a two-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of “illegal” production or distribution of pornography but fails to describe exactly what is illegal. What’s more, the fact that there are illegal forms of production has also been taken to imply that there are legal forms, and thus the ban becomes a blessing. Meanwhile there are known workarounds — like getting state approval of a softcore cut of a film, then releasing the hardcore version — and a guy known as the “Russian Larry Flynt” says that, in order to make porn in Russia, you only need to abide by one dictate: “Whatever is not forbidden is allowed.”

Let that tautology rattle around in your brain for a minute. What is not forbidden is not forbidden. Whatever is allowed is allowed. And meanwhile, whatever is forbidden is more or less allowed anyway. So, uh… Shit. Yeah. Whatever. What else can you say when Big Brother regulates porn with doublespeak? Just keep the good stuff comin’.

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