Commitment post #3 (preliminary notes on Chinese prison fetish videos)

▣ What are these? My account will be very limited, if that is where I am starting from. I will disappoint readers by evading any firm conclusions. ▭ They begin and end in about the same way. A beautiful woman is arrested for a crime, confined in a prison, tried by a procurator, and then usually executed by a pistol round through the head. ▭ Despite being hosted on pornography streaming sites, the majority of the videos do not differ significantly from the sort of melodramatic soap operas or police procedurals broadcast on television. The filmmakers make room for a narrative. Interrogations are lengthy. There is generally no nudity. There is not even softcore romance. They all feature some form of bondage—shackles, handcuffs, ropes, zip ties, as well as confinement behind bars or doors—but it is not clearly eroticized. ▭ Each shot is too brief to fixate on anything. There is not often emotion. ▭ Some attention is paid to accuracy, but not enough to suggest anyone involved has experienced incarceration firsthand. Some videos appear to be shot in operating or decommissioned police facilities. ▭ I must be missing something. When I say that they make no sense to me, I am not merely being defensive. I find these productions fascinating but mostly because they seem to me not apparently intended to titillate the viewer. ▣  

▣ Many involve innocent victims of the legal system. Maybe this is part of the appeal. The actresses engaged for these productions have a lot to work with. They do their best. They beg for appeals. They protest that they have done nothing wrong. The executions are always bloodless, at least. ▣

▣ The minority of productions become something closer to the conventionally pornographic, but they still remain within the genre of bondage film. They incorporate foot tickling and Japanese rope bondage. The plot is usually still adhered to. The torture is not particularly erotic. I would need to watch more, but these productions are the least appealing to me. ▣

▣ It’s tempting to see in pornography essentially local preoccupations, and there’s some value in that kind of analysis, but it too often relies on stereotypes. So, is the Chinese prison video some form of fetishism of the power of the state itself? That element should not be discounted. But any theorizing should take into account the official images of female prisoners—not only the heroic victims of white terror in period dramas, but also the prostitutes made to kneel in short dresses for photographers of police raids, holding shackled hands up to cover their faces… ▣ 

▣ These are products being actively marketed, not private acts. I must remember that. They are being fed into circuits of desire and consumption. Please pay attention to the QQ addresses across their bottoms, and URLs scrolling across their tops. ▭ I wondered at first if they lacked any sexual heat because of tight regulations about pornography. That can’t be right. It’s not true that China produces no pornography. It produces as much as any other industrialized nation (and the fact that it is illegal means that all of it—softcore, hardcore, violent fetish videos, child abuse images—exists on the same outlaw platforms). And so, I must conclude that these videos are created for a consumer that I don’t understand. It seems too limiting to understand these productions as merely a niche genre of bondage video, but that might be all I’m capable of. ▭ I knew of the existence of these videos before today (a video of an execution from a fetish video was represented on social media as documentary footage), but thought of them today after stumbling across a Japanese-language website called Fictitious Prison. They seem to serve as a middle-man for Chinese producers. They promise that they can take orders for custom productions. Maybe these are fantasies too private for me to understand. Maybe their preference is for this sort of restrained production. ▣ 

▣ It is women that are under threat in these videos. Is there something to say about that? I might repeat those lines about the gender struggle leading to a widespread misogyny. But these are not clearly misogynistic. There is not enough sadism. There is not enough violence. There is no attempt to shame the subjects. Some clips even include behind-the-scenes shots of what happens after the executions, with the actresses being helped up, untied, laughing. ▣