Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
Whenever a new celebrity ‘sex tape’ makes its way into the public sphere, we’re all treated with the same old song and dance.
It’s a bit of contrived choreography I became familiar with back when rumors of the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tape first surfaced. While it varies from case to case, the basic contours of the charade are similar in each situation.
First, the celebrity (or celebrities) at issue makes a big show of how he/she objects to the idea of the footage being sold. In some cases, they might even file a lawsuit ostensibly aimed at preventing the release of the footage.
Somehow, though, after all the weeping and gnashing of teeth has subsided, what emerges is a sex tape featuring the very same person who claimed for months to be completely dead-set against the release of the footage. In some cases, the person who had been insisting he/she was against the release of the tape is eventually revealed as an utterly pathetic phony, usually long after the public has figured this fact out on their own.
This Just In: Most Producers And Distributors Don’t Like Being In Prison
Oddly, a lot of people seem to swallow whole the idea Kim Kardashian wound up in a commercially-distributed sex tape against her will, despite the fact it would be damn hard, if not entirely impossible, to do so without the approval of the purportedly aghast celeb.
Here’s the thing; even without having any “insider” information, anybody who cares enough to research this question at all should be able to determine how unlikely it is for the commercial release of a celebrity’s privately-recorded sex tape to take place without the consent of the celebrity at issue.
Why?
Well, for starters, most companies which distribute movies try avoid blatantly violating federal law in the process, which a company certainly would do if they tried to distribute a sexually-explicit video without the permission of those depicted in it, and without having documentation of the fact those people are adults.
Pro Tip: If You ‘Don’t Want Something To Happen,’ Don’t Sign The Contract
Couched in the same HuffPo piece which quotes none other than Vivid Entertainment’s Steve Hirsch saying Kim Kardashian “did not want” her sex tape to be released, there’s a nugget of undeniable information which makes this claim more than a little questionable.
“In order for Vivid to legally release the tape, both Kardashian and Ray J had to sign their rights away to the company,” the article correctly states. “There is no disputing that.”
Well, if there’s “no disputing” both parties depicted in the tape had to sign away the rights to Vivid for the commercial release to happen legally, and the commercial release of the tape did happen legally, how am I supposed to take seriously the notion it was released despite Kim’s staunch objection?
This is not to say she was happy about signing away the rights, but the stubborn fact remains quite simple: If she really didn’t want the tape to be released commercially, all she had to do was not sign the release.
Perhaps ironically, the Pam and Tommy tape referenced above actually DID start out as stolen property. Like all other celeb sex tapes which get commercially distributed, though, you can bet several contracts were signed along the way, rendering its distribution legal from that point forward.
But This Was Different, Because The Internet
Yes, no question, the internet being the internet, the Kardasian/Ray J sex footage was likely to make it into the public domain, regardless of such distribution being illegal. As such, I don’t blame anybody in Kardashian’s position for thinking Well, if it’s going to out there anyway, I might as well get something out of it.
If anything, far from being objectionable, this line of reasoning makes perfect sense to me – but for fuck’s sake, if that’s how and why you made your choice, do the rest of us the simple courtesy of owning up to it.
If you go the other route, signing the release privately while publicly pretending the whole thing was happening over your surgically-enhanced dead body, you come off less like someone victimized by a shady ex-lover and more like an opportunist trying to play to my emotions using a handful of self-serving bullshit.
Real, Non-Famous People Deal (Better) With This Sort Of Thing All The Time
Some years back, I found myself on the wrong end of a bit of office politics which ultimately resulted in me losing a job, in large part because I don’t take well to attempts to intimidate and cajole me. On the same day I was told to pack up my personal belongings and GTFO, I was hailed into the office of a senior executive at the company, who I was told had a proposition for me to consider.
I was informed I would be receiving a severance package which included the equivalent of five week’s salary – but, if I wanted to double the severance amount, all I had to do was sign a contract under which I agreed not to say anything negative about the company, or about my departure from it.
What the agreement didn’t do was bind the company to any confidentiality or discretion along the same lines. In other words, they could still talk all the shit about me they wanted, while I’d be legally required to keep my trap shut in exchange for about twenty thousand bucks.
After the executive handling my “exit interview” made it clear he wouldn’t add a provision like the one I wanted, which would have the effect of muzzling the company and me, I told the him exactly where he could stick the proposed agreement, and precisely how to make it fit in such a tight hole, considering his head was clearly already deeply inserted therein.
Predictably, after I refused to sign their hush-money agreement, the company went on to say some nasty and untrue things about me to other prospective employers and clients, but here’s the rub: That company is dead, gone, tits-up, a rose entirely out of business by any other name…. And I’m still here, happily being my mouthy self, doing just fine, thank you very much.
So, if the choice you face is cave (for money) or stick to your guns, and you choose to cave?
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Well, don’t come crying to me – or far worse, come lying to me about how you’ve been done so wrong by the same people who just cut you a seven-figure check to get your permission to do you wrong.
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
