Merry XXX-mas: A brief history of Yuletide smut
Could anything better invoke the festive holiday sprit of Christmas than pornography? After all, before the laughably nonexistent contemporary War on Christmas, in which a friendly face says “happy holidays” and ever-fragile Western culture thereby crumbles, the actual historical war on Christmas came from Puritans even more joyless than Sean Hannity himself. And as Stephen Nissenbaum makes clear in his delightful “The Battle for Christmas,” most of that resistance came from the holiday’s occasioning of “a kind of behavior that would be shocking today,” much of it openly sexual. Christmas began in debauchery, and, through holiday-themed smut, extends that impulse through the present day.
As an invented tradition, Christmas grew out of drunken, interclass carnivalesque behaviors such as mumming and wassailing more than any theological imperatives. These activities always intersected with freewheeling sexual activity. In 1712, the somewhat uptight Cotton Mather’s complaints about the holiday included “lewd Gaming,” while a decade later an Anglican minister in New England bemoaned finding himself “in the midst of Rioting and Chambering, and Wantonness.” Less polite lips might call chambering fucking. Almanacs of the era frequently alluded to holiday sex (Nissenbaum notes that birth patterns for colonial New England show that “sexual activity peaked during the Christmas season”), and when the Puritans took charge in the mid-17th century, Christmas celebrations were made illegal.
As always, however, capitalism proved a more effective disciplinary mechanism than law, and in the 19th century U.S. the holiday was co-opted by the consumer revolution. Santa Claus was rendered banal and bourgeois, detached from his rowdy plebian traditions; the tree and its gifts went to use stabilizing children, privatizing the family, and expanding consumer markets; and holiday activity moved indoors to the church pew. Christmas even became a tool against pornography, when good Christian men in both London and New York established a “sham indecent street trade” in the 1840s, selling purported “shameless publications” in sealed packages that, when unwrapped, contained Christmas carols and sermons (as Donna Dennis notes in a deliciously juicy footnote in her book “Licentious Gotham“). Yet the suppressed erotics of the holiday’s folk traditions resurfaced constantly, as when the charitable work of Charles Loring Brace, Louisa May Alcott, and other midcentury philanthropists so nakedly sought excessive displays of gratitude from their “charity objects” that they nearly served as an “economic equivalent to the sexual representation of women in pornography,” as Nissenbaum notes.
Thus it’s no surprise that Christmas smut is, and historically has been, everywhere. A stealth trade in holiday erotica surely dates back to the very invention of Christmas, but becomes more visible by the 20th century. By 1939, John S. Sumner, successor to infamous smut-buster Anthony Comstock at the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, claimed that while “it may seem unthinkable that for commercial gain anybody would make and sell vulgar and licentious cards making a travesty of Christmas and the Christmas spirit, this practice has been prevalent in recent years.” While Sumner’s plea for stricter laws went unheeded, and his vice society soon sputtered into protracted death throes, spicy Christmas cheer persisted. In one perfectly calibrated historical incident, the Jolly Rogers Club in Maryland hosted a Christmas fundraiser with a striptease in 1952 that was busted by police sergeant Leo Kinsey, of whom the Baltimore Sun added, “(no relation),” lest the public think that Alfred’s stricter brother was out putting the kibosh on those sexual behaviors of which the famed researcher had written. Siding with Sgt. Kinsey over Dr. Kinsey, an unimpressed judge issued fines all around.
In addition to being a season of ribaldry, Christmas has also provided an erotic iconography for everyone from Hugh Hefner to Kenneth Anger. A half-century of smiling Playmates offered safely sanitized Christmas leers, and in a nominal gesture at equality, Playgirl put Burt Reynolds on the cover in a Santa hat for its 1974 Christmas issue. But those in the margins founds holiday pleasures, too. “Christmas isn’t for queers,” Lauren Gutterman recently noted, but perhaps that also gave it a deliciously illicit frisson. A Christmas tree candle enters into Anger’s set of barely-sublimated invocations of male orgasm in his queer experimental masterpiece “Fireworks” (1947). A few decades later, gay liberation allowed for less coy Christmas pleasures, as seen in Robert Opel’s elusive 1978 short “Fuck You, Santa Claus,” described by the UCLA Film & Television Archive as a “satirical look at the commercialism that surrounds the Christmas holiday that culminates with a young man enticing a department store Santa in an explicit sexual act.”
Still, throughout all of this history, the holiday season remained marked by rampant gluttony and consumerism, remaining a capitalist’s dream, and many of us partake in it whether we approve or not. Perhaps this is why Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is such a persistent favorite. In spite of its seeming anti-capitalist message, the story generally promotes consumption (just share the consumables!), while Dickens and the Victorian era are the origin of our modern understanding of Christmas.
This all has a lot in common with the history of hetero hardcore cinema, itself an adaptable capitalist enterprise that frequently plays, in complicated and contradictory ways, with the Victorian past (as Laura has shown in her scholarly work). Sometimes, the link is as facile as cheap—if endlessly amusing, for the easily amused—wordplay: “O Cum All Ye Faithful” is apparently too irresistible to avoid, popping up as a title for an early-1970s short, a 21st century Christmas dinner orgy and even a recent ebook featuring—and we quote—“a gangbang of biblical proportions.”
Yet within this yuletide frenzy, there’s a distinct subset of cynical, dark, and strange XXX Christmas flicks that tap more deeply into this vexed tradition, such as David Stanley’s delightfully downbeat “Eve’s Gift” (2001). The greatest of these films, though, is Shaun Costello’s 1976 “The Passions of Carol,” faithfully adapted from Dickens’ perennial classic, perverting many of the Dickensian values we still cherish. Filmed and set in 1970s New York City, the epicenter of the golden age of porn, here Ebenezer Scrooge is Carol Scrooge (Mary Stuart), editor of Biva Magazine (a takeoff on Viva magazine, Bob Guccione’s attempt at a Penthouse for women). Carol is selfish and exploitative, using other peoples’ sexuality for capitalist profit. It is Christmas Eve, and she won’t let Bob Hatchet (a deceptively sweet Jamie Gillis) go home until he has fixed the soft dicks in the latest pictorial (we still have no idea how he is meant to achieve this). Carol has lived a lifetime of selfish antics and greed, and it’s about time she learned her lesson. Thus, she is visited by three spirits, each of whom shows her scenes of a sexual nature from which she is meant to understand the toxicity of sexual commodity culture. Spoiler: She changes her ways and declares, like Ebenezer, that she will “never be mean again.”
What is captivating about “Passions” is that while Costello manages to retain the lessons we are meant to take away from the Dickens tale—don’t be mean, don’t be selfish, give to the needy, don’t exploit your female sexuality for capitalist gain (ok, the last one is Costello’s)—he also manages to thoroughly unsettle other, arguable more cherished, sentiments. Watching this cheerful, sparkly Christmas yarn from the director of the notoriously rough and violent “Forced Entry” and “Water Power,” we have always imagined Costello chuckling from behind the camera as he artfully inverts the sanctity of childhood, cherished notions of femininity, and ultimately traditional notions of gender and sexuality. Easily the most impressive scene in this regard is that of Christmas Past. How to foster a hardcore sex scene set in the past, when the protagonist is a child? The answer may surprise or even horrify you. Costello chose to create an oversize playroom so the adult actors look like children, while the scene itself takes on a feeling of the fantastical. Furthermore, in this scene Carol is essentially molesting her two childhood friends, Billy and Barbie, and the exploitative nature of the proceedings is figured in the body of a doll. Let us explain. This doll, unsettlingly large in itself, serves as a symbol of childhood and commerce throughout this number, showing up in the creepiest of places, such as above Carol’s head while she gives head. Later, as if to depict the raping of childhood, the doll appears disheveled and missing an arm. This initiates a bizarre sexual number. Carol fucks Barbie with the doll’s arm, eventually inserting it all the way to the wrist, resulting in the disturbing image of a hand emerging from a woman—fucking and its sometime-result are merged. Did we mention Costello also punctuates the scene with hardcore shots of Raggedy Ann and Andy? Well, he does. This is as carnivalesque as early Christmas revelry, a cinematic wassail for the Gerald Ford era.
This is just one memorable scene in a film that offers up a bounty of grotesqueries at the same time as it produces romance, humor and a genuinely festive atmosphere. Somehow Costello manages to create a Christmassy film worthy of cuddling up in front of with a partner, but which may elicit more than a few “what the fucks.” Personally, that’s our kind of Christmas yarn. The leering old pre-makeover Saint Nick would surely approve. The film shimmers and sparkles, the music (ranging from “Tubular Bells” to “Carol of the Bells”) is festive, and Costello has made a genuinely cinematic recreation of Dickens’ story on an incredibly meager budget. Whip up the eggnog, grab that special someone (the one you thought of while reading this), and watch the beautifully restored release of this classic courtesy of Distribpix and now streaming on exploitation.tv.
WHITNEY STRUB AND LAURA HELEN MARKS
Published on salon.com
