Originally posted yesterday at 3 p.m.

First things first: the deadline for submitting a film for HUMP! 2013 is getting closer! Details on entering HUMP! are here. Second things second...

From: XXXXX.XXXXX@yahoo.com
Date: June 1, 2013 1:18:25 AM PDT
To: "hump@thestranger.com"
Subject: hump spoilers

Hi. Just so you know. Christians are showing up to spoil the event. So, we'll start off with a big "Fuck you." I think Paul said that shit somewhere in the New Testament. Anyway, what you guys are doing promotes slavery, prostitution, child molestation, rape, incest, bestiality, and pretty much every gross and detestable thing that "men" can come up with. We can pretty much lump you guys in with Hitler.

We are planning a peaceful counter movement. So, I guess I should start by apologizing for telling you and your staff to "fuck off." My bad. I need Jesus and so do you. There it is bitches. See you in four months.

Jesus Is King

JIK's email popped into my inbox a couple of months ago.

We've had picketers at past HUMP!s—okay, we had one picketer at a HUMP! screening in Portland once—and it wasn't a problem. People have a First Amendment right to picket whatever they care to picket. And if JIK and his friends wanna protest at HUMP!, well, that's their right. They don't have a right to "spoil" HUMP! for the rest of us, however, and the beefy security guards we employ at HUMP! are there to make sure no one spoils HUMP! But I wish JIK had the courage to attend a screening of HUMP! before deciding that we're as bad as Hitler and that Paul sent us a "fuck you" in the New Testament. (I said there was bullshit in the Bible and religious conservatives were on Fox News crapping their pants for three straight nights. JIK's guy's a "Christian" and he says there are "fuck yous" and "shits" right there in the NT? My, my, my.)

There is a lot of terrible, misogynist, dehumanizing porn out there. One of the questions I'm constantly tackling on the "Savage Lovecast" is how to find non-terrible, non-misogynist, non-dehumanizing porn. (Pay attention to sex-positive, porn-positive feminist writers, bloggers, thinkers and filmmakers like Violet Blue and Tristan Taormino, and the whole gang at Our Porn, Ourselves. They know where the good, hot, and ethical stuff is.) But HUMP! is anything but dehumanizing. The short films we screen at HUMP! are very deeply human. Even the hardcore stuff—even the BDSM stuff we screen at HUMP!—was obviously made by small groups of friends and lovers who are having a blast making a little porn together. There are no slaves up on screen at HUMP! (except the pretend kind), no one is raped at HUMP!, no children are molested, no animals are harmed. (The first rule of HUMP!: "No poop, no animals, no minors.")

JIK is one of those people who thinks porn does terrible things to women, to children, to animals, to society. But the evidence is in and increasingly clear that anyone who wants to bring down rates of sexual violence—anyone who wants to protect women and children and animals—should be pro-porn:

Liberal access to porn is good for society in general but particularly so for women. There are many studies about this but I am just going to mention one because it gives us the closest we get in social science to a controlled experiment. In the Czech Republic, after the fall of communism, the iron grip of authority was relaxed. This also meant more liberal access to porn as well as laxer crime suppression generally. Crime rates in every single area except sex crime—all types of them—increased. (Diamond, M., Jozifkova, E., & Weiss, P. (2011). Pornography and sex crimes in the Czech Republic. Archives of sexual behavior, 40(5), 1037-1043.) It is highly plausible that fantasy can function as an outlet for desire. Steve Pinker has recently documented how violence—including sexual violence—has been decreasing across the board. Has consumption of violent fantasy decreased? Quite the reverse.

I wanna break in here and say that while, yes, some of the porn we screen at HUMP! is quote/unquote "violent"—a.k.a. safe, sane, and consensual BDSM porn—videos featuring "power exchange" scenes are a small percentage of the total. The offerings at HUMP! run the gamut from animation to humor shorts to charming home sex tapes to funny dance videos to hot group sex to BDSM to centaurs. Gross and detestable? Hardly. The films we show at HUMP! are sweet and delightful.

Equally delightful? The audiences at HUMP!

HUMP! audiences are straight, gay, bi, lesbian, trans, cis, vanilla, kinky, able-bodied, disabled, and all over the BMI. And the films screened feature straight sex, gay sex, bi sex, kinky sex, sexually empowering images of trans people, disabled people, big people, and small people. What I love most about HUMP! is not so much what happens on the screen—although I love that too—but what happens in the theater during the screenings. At the end of each two-to-five minute film... the audience roars, claps and cheers for whatever they've just seen. It's a theater full of straight people cheering for gay porn, gay people cheering for straight porn, vanilla people cheer for kinky porn, kinky people cheer for vanilla porn, cis people cheering for trans porn. HUMP! is as much a raucous celebration of sexual diversity as it is a pervy porn festival. HUMP! is affirming in a the best possible way: affirmation isn't the festival's mission. It just seems to happen naturally.

And maybe that's JIK's real problem with HUMP! It's not that women and children and schnauzers are being abused at HUMP!—they're not—and it's not that HUMP! is a Hitlerian evil that must be confronted before people who don't like porn are herded into camps and forced to watch awful, terrible, dehumanizing short films like this HUMP! Award winning short...

No, it's not what's up on the screen that threatens "Christians" like JIK and his pals. They're threatened by what's happening in the audience. All the palpable love flowing back and forth between gay and straight people, vanilla and kinky people, cis and trans people during screenings is proof that "Christians" like JIK are losing the debate about human sexuality. They've already lost the debate. And the fact that they can no longer dictate the sexual choices made by other people pisses them off almost as much as the fact that overwhelming majorities of the people they claim to speak for—the straights, the Christians, the heterosexuals—disagree with them and think they're ridiculous.

The deadline for HUMP! 2013 submission is Monday, September 30, at 3 PM. Details here.