We at www.StopClownPornNow.org, and our militant wing, the Stop Clown Porn Brigade, mince no words over our mission. We are out to bring an end to clown pornography both in old media and on the World Wide Web.
We recognize that, from its origins, the dramatic character of the clown and the cultural archetype that was to spring from his performances were associated intimately with sex and sexuality. The first recognizable dramatic ancestors of the clown are the comic characters from Ancient Greek comedies and satyr plays. They are depicted on surviving vases as wearing padding that emphasizes the size and plumpness of their bellies and buttocks and/or strap-on phalloi that the Ancient Greek audience considered inseparable from comic performance.
In the Middle Ages, the clown emerged as a particular character type, an imitator of the court jester that participated in numerous holidays in which the day-to-day drudgery of Christian morality was turned upside-down in vestigial expression of pagan Saturnalia. Needless to say, sexual buffoonery took center stage in the clowns' festival performances in which the teachings of the Church were given over to bawdy farce.
Although remnants of the archetypal connection between clown and sex still appear in modern clowning (e.g., the ubiquitous pants-dropping of circus clowns and the ominously named "Harlequin" romance-empire), the clown has in recent times become primarilly an entertainer of children, and has thus rightfully been stripped of overt sexuality, concentrating instead on wholesome, violence-centered entertainment. The prominent phallus of the Greek comic actor had by the 19th century been replaced by the oversized clothes that made the penis lost in a fabric sea of bagginess.
However, there currently exists a strong undercurrent in certain sick circles of Western subculture that seeks to reunite the clown with his explicitly depicted sexuality. During the late 1980's, the practice of "clowning" (or "clown sex") became fashionable in the San Fransisco area. In "clowning," consenting sexual partners would dress up as clowns in order to express to one another the unabashedly silly sides of each other's carnal desires and actions.
Like all fads, "clowning" was soon replaced with something new that entailed another run to the minimall to purchase the appropriate accessories, leaving the old clown costumes behind to spend the rest of eternity on Salvation Army shelves. But this supposedly harmless practice left a sizeable number of clown fetishists in its wake, unable to become sexually aroused without the fool's bells and whistles (not to mention juggling clubs and unicycles).
In a fateful twist of history, just as these fetishists were combing the streets with their unfulfilled pathological desires, Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey announced that it would close the doors of its internationally reknowned Clown College because of the market glut of clowns it had produced in the past decade. Thousands of clowns were now wandering the streets of America with no place to call their own, no job for which they could be themselves and demonstrate their truly remarkable talents.
More and more, the clowns and the fetishists were bumping into one another as they wandered those streets.
Although rumors of the danger inherent in "clowning around" with the fetishists * spread quickly throughout the makeshift Clown Alleys popping up in the shantytowns of every major American city, desperation, hunger, and that interminable clownish curiosity led a handful of wig-wearing whitefaces to their last gag.
The mafia-backed Porn Industry, always willing to shill whatever floats whomever's boat, was not far behind the actual fetishists in their acts of clownsploitation. It is through these moguls of mass advertising that we have the unfortunate reality of smut films like The Sex Lives of Clowns , Johnny Toxic's Clown F**kers , New Wave Hookers IV , and the most deplorable mafia-backed porn-cadre of all, HBO's Real Sex .
During the mid-90s, individuals trying to tap into the gold-vein that is the internet jumped on the clown-wagon. Lonely webmasters herding the only viable www cash-cows, porn sites, regularly include "clown" in their pages' keywords (+clown +sex currently yields nearly 8000 pages in a simple AltaVista search). A failed strip-star began parading around as a Knockers the Klown and professing the health benefits of "clown sex" with the credentials of a self-delivered doctorate degree. Her outlet for this smut: the World Wide Web.
Haven't the clowns suffered enough? They make their work out of self-humiliation, but should they be forced to go this far?
We at www.StopClownPornNow.org, and our militant affiliates at the Stop Clown Porn Brigade, think not.
* The most dangerous real threat--aside from the repetitive stress of the pratt-falls clowns were forced to perform by the fetishists--are veneral diseases which target the clownish subspecies of humans while leaving the physiologically "normal" fetishists without apparent symptoms. One of these VCDs left clowns with their faces "stuck like that."
