The flashmob with the hashtag #rospornobzor calls on people to narrate porn videos on camera as a response to the authorities’ decision to ban the largest porn websites in the country.
Last week, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked access to the world’s biggest porn sites – PornHub and YouPorn – on the demand of local prosecutors who wanted to ban porn on the internet. Roskomnadzor already blocked 11 similar websites a year ago.
Watching porn is not forbidden in Russia, but the law bans the illegal production, dissemination and advertisement of pornographic materials and objects. The flashmob launched by Esquire Russia’s digital director Daniel Trabun, his colleague at Afisha magazine Daniyard Shekebayev, journalist and human rights activist Mikhail Levin and journalist Tarlan Abdulayev came as a legal and creative response to the ban. Participants choose a movie, narrate it on camera and publish the video under the hashtag #rospornobzor. The authors use a witty wordplay – the hashtag title resembles the watchdog’s name, Roskomnadzor, and means literary “Russia’s porn review”. The initiative is aimed at breaking taboos over discussions of sex, improving your openness in discussions of sexuality and struggling against prudishness.
“The prudish sterile and conservative position is being imposed on us on the state level, and no one explains it. We don’t have any discussions. This unhealthy duality manifests in the lack of neutral vocabulary to talk about sex,” Daniel Trabun writes. “As you understand, you is the first one who must be unblocked.”
The flashmob attracted a lot of participants, among them famous people, journalists, activists and other people opposing the state’s excessive interference in all spheres of public life. The flashmob also attracted those who don’t care about pornography or even condemn it.
“While mainstream pornography is abusive as fuck, it’s not the matter right now, the matter is that censorship is even greater violence and the way to total prudishness, hypocrisy and isolation, where no honest conversations are possible at all, let alone about sex. What the fuck! It’s forbidden to forbid!” flashmob participant Natalia Istomina writes.
Discussing sex, let alone pornography, is a taboo in conservative societies for many generations. The flashmob takes the sex theme into public discourse through personalising porn watching and encouraging to lift the unofficial public ban that everyone violates and has no courage to admit it. Protesting against censorship is not the only message of the campaign. It also wants to form the culture of discussing sex and sex-related topics. Talking about such themes is not common in public and even in family or between sexual partners. All do it, but no one talks about it. Experts note that many sexual problems, including domestic violence, are caused by the lack of open conversations about intimate topics. The lack of verbal practice has led to the insufficient development of vocabulary as a tool of sexual communication. The public nature of the flashmob and verbal retelling sexually explicit visual content are an important steps towards overcoming these communication barriers.
Like other close societies, Soviet society showed how censorship and all kinds of bans stimulate the development of counterculture. Having failed to find expression in public discourse, banned topics find their place in art and also inspire new art forms. Censorship in today’s Russia resembles Soviet fighters against dissidents, and the cultural reaction looks much the same. The genre of narrating pornographic content through a viewer’s subjective perception is an absolutely new cultural phenomenon where a viewer becomes a producer of a new kind of a cultural product created due to and despite censorship.
Photo: www.yunjuu.com
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