Recently in Pornography Category
Via Jaded Hippie and Being Amber Rhea, Kate at Shapely Rose has a great post about men who go along to get along. It ends with
But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.And that guy? Thought you were on his side.
For instance, as a libertine prude I'm totally into the care BDSM sites like Kink.com put into making sure their work is *produced* with consent, consideration, and respect for all parties concerned. For instance I completely trust Calico of Dominatrix Next Door when she talks of her experiences there, and Renegade Evolution is downright cheerful about her participation in similarly "extreme" porn. Nor are they alone, at all, at all. But as a prudish libertine I'm pretty relentlessly concerned that the *audience* for those forms of porn seems to be far larger than the alleged target demographic of men and women educated to the give and take of consensual BDSM.
I'm not sure how to deal with that dichotomy. But as I've been saying a lot lately one way or another, the way to gain respect and acceptance for the former is to figure out how to confront the latter. I have a feeling thought that the Kate's post points in the right direction.
[Note: I'm beginning a new extended series of photo posts. They'll appear roughly once a day, generally arbitrarily attached to the day's first post. Some are entirely safe for work, others not. Nothing in this set is particularly "explicit" but, as usual, if something come up I'll include a notice before the "continue reading..." link so that people who'd rather not see more know not to... well... continue reading. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user hbruinsma. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[This seemed relevant to HNT folks so I'm posting it today. --fl]
Lauren of Feministe takes an issue raised by Jessica at Jezebel...
One day, you’re exchanging promise rings, and the next thing you know, you’re prosecuting your ex-fiancé for putting photos of your boobs on MySpace. The perils of modern love! Richard Morgan delves deep into what he terms “Revenge Porn,” i.e., when men distribute pornographic images of their exes without consent, on Details.com, and it ain’t pretty. The most insidious form of revenge porn includes the woman’s name, phone number, and address along with the naughty video for ultimate public humiliation. The worst part of the whole thing? Revenge porn is notoriously hard to prosecute.
... details her own experience of "revenge porn" and then makes a couple of excellent and obvious points
I don’t want to get into another feminist porn war on the blog, yet I think it’s pretty safe to say that most will agree that this is Not Okay. That being said, there is a market for this, so much so that there are several free and for-pay sites that capitalize on the “revenge porn” market, wherein dudes can post pictures and movies of their ex-bitches along with “that’ll show her!” messages meant to punish the little amateur sluts. The article linked in the blockquote details some of the issues victims run into when they try to get the movies and pictures removed, and moreover, the inability to prosecute their exes.
I'm... pretty sure that anyone who thinks it's ok to upload intimate images without the subject's permission, with or without identifying text, needs to have their corneas flared. As a highly visual person myself that's about as harsh a fate as I'm likely to wish on anyone but... seriously!
I mean...
You know how I talk sometimes about how *both* sides of the feminist porn vs feminist anti-porn sides are *mostly* right? About how on the one hand "pro-sex" feminists are right that exercising agency and challenging centuries of pressure to appear, or even better to *be,* chaste and sexless empower women? And about how on the other that "anti-porn" feminist are right to point out that the *reception* of that exercise is often perceived by men not as power for women but privilege for men? Yeah, well revenge porn? That kind of puts the shoe squarely on the anti-porn foot.
It's *obviously* a pain (although in kind of an "I told you so" sort of way) for anti-porn activists. It's also pretty obviously a pain -- real, heartfelt *pain* pain -- for the victims. And it's a serious jab in the eye for pro-porn activists as well. (And perhaps paradoxically it's also a black eye and a setback for the dickwad choads who upload the stuff. I mean because, seriously, *people have sex!* And, with digital cameras being nearly universal they take pictures of each other too. The mere existence of such photos reveal nothing at all about the actual victims beyond their contemporary humanity. That their erstwhile partners upload such photos, meanwhile, demonstrate only the victims *incredibly bad taste* in partners. Also, whereas nobody really "deserves" to be humiliated, that someone's ex uploads such photos is reason enough to recognize they made a rational choice in dumping them. Therefore the uploader betrays and humiliates only himself. Something to consider next time one contemplates pressing "send," m'kay? But I digress....)
Anyway, because I'm very much in favor of voluntary sexual photography but bitterly opposed to coercion, exploitation, and denial of choice, and because there are plenty of people doing it willingly I'd like to point to an article by Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors that outlines how a) current copywrite law makes it very difficult for victims to limit such "revenge" uploads but b) how the law could easily be changed. I may be perpetually banned from commenting on Bartow's site because we don't always, um, agree, but this seems like a reasonable undertaking, especially since the goal is to put the decision to post photos in the hands of the actual subjects. (Such requirements already being routine and well-established in commercial porn.)
See also Whatsername the Jaded Hippy.
Photo by Flickr user 30003019. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[Yeah, it's not Thursday but I didn't feel like waiting or post-dating this. --fl]
Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors raises an issue that every decent, right-thinking independent sex blogger and HNT participant ought to take personally. It's about the circulating video footage of wingnut Vice-Presidential candidate in a bathing suit when she was around 20 years old.
Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women points how here that blogs linking to Sarah Palin’s 1984 beauty pageant swimsuit competition are attempting to trivialize her for doing something traditionally feminine when she was young, using this HuffPo piece as an example. Of course the odious Daily Kos is all over this as well. Actually one of the bloggers at Kos manages to ramp up the sexism an additional notch by comparing Palin to this then teenaged South Carolinian, who certainly gave an oddly rambling and incoherent answer to an interview question during a beauty pageant, but who, last I checked, was not running for political office. And, it should be noted, who turned out to be fairly poised and mature in the face of aggressive widespread mockery.
Seriously!
The first blogger I "outed" myself to was Blogher co-founder Susan Mernit. She was giving a presentation on anonymous sex-blogging at Gnomedex 2006, an über-tech conference. one of her points was, first, that while they were all gathered to talk about developments in, primarily, Web 2.0 infrastructure what she was finding most remarkable were the resulting *social* developments (often almost dismissively shorthanded in nerd speak as "content.") In particular she said people... men but especially women...
As I said in my old post, the audience responses from men were pretty uniformly alarmed, and knowledgeable enough about details of on-line sex-related security to have practiced some of it themselves. They were also nearly as uniformly certain that "if you're not careful" then writing about sex, or posting your photos, or even looking at them when you're young could come back to bite you later when employers or admissions offices Google your background.
On the other hand, in a way that surprised me at the time, the relative handful of tech women in the audience, ages ranging from twenties at the low end to maybe fifty at the high end, were perfectly sanguine about it. Which, in retrospect, strongly reinforced Mernit's thesis. Their reaction was "no big deal, more and more people are doing it and when 'in the future' happens it'll be no bigger a deal than having a tattoo is today.
Well, two things come to mind immediately after contemplating the Palin pagent video. #1: To paraphrase William Gibson, "in the future" has already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed yet #2: Whoever initially posted that video was probably a man who still imagined it's a "gotcha."
But here's the deal: chances are *very* good that if you're a blogger reading this post you've written about your own sex life. And chances are pretty good you've participated in popular and consequently non-scandalous Osbasso's Half-Nekkid Thursday meme. Which, incidentally, started... roughly around the time Mernit made her presentation! And therefore chances are the immature troll who posted that Palin video is the kind of asshole who whacks off to your photos in private but would discriminate against you in public. And whoever snickers along with them saying "yeah, she was a *beauty contestant,* what a bimbo" is also insulting *you!* Oh yeah, and they're also threatening you. So yeah, they're not just sexist, they're immature, knee-squeezing, not-caught-up-on-the-21st-Century assholes who'd do the same to you given half a chance.
So! Governor Palin is a corrupt, imprudent, professional-line-crossing wingnut. Fine. Governor Palin is scary-unprepared to uphold the Constitution and administer the executive functions of the United States of America (or even, it would seem, execute the far more limited functions of President of the Senate -- the VP's day job till the President's unanticipated departure.) Got that too. But unlike every one of her many, many "fail stamp" flaws, that she ever paraded in a bathing suit... or for that matter birthday suit... or had Teh kinky Sex... or had Teh Sex at all... either in her youth or last week is *not* a blot on her character. It's *not* a disqualification for office. It's *not even a big surprise* since people have been doing those things since long before Edward Land introduced the first Polaroid camera. Instead it's what ordinary people do, and have done. If certain asshats got a problem with *that* it's *their* problem, not hers. If they think it's a point against her, surprise! It's a point against them.
Action item: when you see the future isn't distributed properly like that leave a comment saying get over it. Even better? Get *used* to it. Sod off works too.
I mean, yeah, most of us still post under internet aliases, and most other people don't post anything at all, because the future still really isn't well-distributed at all. Yet. Challenging mouth breathers who think that video, or who's in it, or how they got there is significant is one way to help break up the lumps.
---
Also see: "The Price of Profanity" (not.)
Image: Cafe Risque courtesy of Online Athens
The city of Lavonia, Georgia decided that $997,000 was not too great a price to pay to stage its own Bonfire of the Vanities. Using the subterfuge of an unnamed third-party, the city officials succeeded in purchasing the Cafe Risque, a local strip club which the council has tried to shut down since it opened in 2001.
According to the City Council, Jerry Sullivan, the deceased owner of Cafe Risque, had obtained their approval for a family-style restaurant. However, once the establishment opened, it was advertised as Cafe Risque and seven years of legal proceedings by the town could not put the club out of business. When the owners of Cafe Risque announced their intention to sell the property, it was no secret that the owners refused to sell the property back to the city. Fearing that the weaknesses in the zoning ordinances would allow another adult business to operate in the same location, the city officials decided to buy the land and building through the guise of a third party. When the first transaction was completed, the city immediately purchased the property from the third party.
By that night, Lavonia's council members were having a victory party at the cafe, burning the business' signs in a parking lot bonfire. On Wednesday, Fesperman and city officials giddily began gutting the building"We all took turns daring each other (to slide down the strippers' poles)," Fesperman said. "But nobody would actually go through with it."
You can read the entire article in OnLine Athens here
While the residents of Lavonia are celebrating the demise of Cafe Risque, here are some facts to consider.
- The population of Lavonia is less than 2,000.
- For 2003 Lavonia's crime statistics, according to city-data.com, were: 1 murder, 4 rapes, 4 robberies, 23 assaults.
- With a population of less than 2,000, Lavonia has a small tax base to support its annual expenditures of $1.8 million (based on the 2004 budget).
- The financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2002, which are the most recent statements available online on the city's website, indicate that Lavonia held $1.9 million in cash and certificates of deposit in the fund established for its water treatment operation. The water treatment facility had been financed through the issuance of long-term bonds totaling $4.1 million. According to City Manager Gary Fesperman, the $997,000 used to purchase the Cafe Risque came from the city's reserve fund which was slated to pay off those 1997 bonds used to build that water treatment plant.
The investors who hold the debt securities issued by Lavonia and the bond rating agencies will not be as jubilant as its citizens when they learn that $1.0 million of the liquid funds set aside for retirement of those obligations had been used to invest in an illiquid asset, i.e., real estate, during one of the worst markets in over a decade. While I do not know the specifics of Lavonia's debt covenants, I hope that this city will be able to meet its obligations to investors and creditors. But in the event that Lavonia defaults on its scheduled debt repayments, I would not be surprised if the city's use of those funds earmarked for the retirement of the long-term debt could be construed as fiscal mismanagement.
After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town's bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?
Seems a shame, doesn't it?
Tony and Peggy Comstock of Comstock Films may not catch as much unnecessary grief for producing Bill and Desiree: Love is Timeless as he did for Ashley & Kisha: Finding the Right Fit or Damon & Hunter: Doing it Together but in a lot of ways what he's doing is way more radically "transgressive" of social norms.
Contrary to popular belief sex doesn't stop at 25. Nor does it stop being beautiful. And since most of us live for the better part of a century *past* 25 that's a darn good thing. Time people stopped treating it like it was a circus side-show or, worse, like it didn't happen at all.
As the Comstock motto says "Real People, Real Life, Real Sex."
Photo by Flickr user Robert Crum. Used under a Creative Commons license.
A 1973 Supreme Court ruling set the ground rules for obscenity prosecutions in the United States based not on an absolute or nationwide definition (since, Justices agreed, such a definition isn't practical and might not be possible) but on "contemporary community standards."
At the time "obscenity" might have been a vague concept but "contemporary community" was pretty easily defined. Large swatches of the now-ubiquitous interstate highway system were still under construction, airplane tickets were scarce and bloody expensive, even cable stations rarely had more than five or six channels and most of those were just local stations with better reception, long-distance phone calls were also bloody expensive, there was "top 40" radio and syndicated news but most stations were strictly local, and a bookstore magazine rack was considered huge if it offered more than 40 titles. Most people lived within a day's drive of their parents, and very often never moved from the towns they were born in. Outside of a handful of metropolitan areas, in 1973 "contemporary community" in other words meant "within the city or county limits."
More particularly, if a prosecutor was going to bring an obscenity charge he (most lawyers and almost all prosecutors were men back then) could be pretty sure a) what "contemporary community" and b) "community standards" meant in his community.
Twenty two years after that, in approximately the summer of 1995, the internet happened. Airlines had been deregulated and flights to *Europe* could be had for the cost of a 1973 flight in the same state. The nationwide telephone monopoly had been broken up and long-distance calls became so cheap that cell phones, then "no bigger than" a soda can, threw in long-distance for free. Newspapers were already in decline but "boutique" magazine publishing had exploded. Car mileage was way up, the 55-MPH national speed limit had been lifted, the economic upheavals of the 1970s -- "stagflation," union busting, the near irrelevance of factories and therefore factory jobs, Ronald Reagan's infamous admonition to say "fuck you" to your family and community and "vote with your feet" -- made Americans more mobile both in terms of travel and relocation. Pressure from Ted Turner's cable empire had finally broken down the broadcast/rebroadcast oligopoly and now hundreds of channels were available, many never "originally" broadcast over airwaves at all. The definition of "contemporary community" was becoming a lot more fluid.
Some thirteen years after *that,* here in 2008, the internet is ubiquitous and "contemporary community" may be even more ambiguous than "obscenity" was in 1973.
As we may or may not be about to find out... Via non-sex blogger Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly it looks like Defense attorney Lawrence Walters has an idea for an obscenity trial in Pensacola, Florida.
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like "orgy" than for "apple pie" or "watermelon."...."Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, "we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed," he added.
I'm not sure Walter's strategy is going to work -- prosecutors in the case evidently plan to argue "how many times [community members] doesn't necessarily speak to standards and values" and therefore that the popularity of sex-related web searches in the local community has no bearing on whether the defendant was in violation.
And it's possible the prosecutors might prevail. Many similar self-described "Bible belt" communities have standards, church dicta, and often laws against alcohol sale and consumption... while overall consuming no less alcohol than communities with nominally "lower" standards.
My strong feeling, though, is that those kind of two-tone "standards" are set so high not in hopes that anyone will stick to them but in order to *cover up* what's actually... pretty normal activities with the consequence that, too often, the scandal isn't the activities themselves but the sometimes extraordinarily brutal attempts to a) punish and b) circumvent and c) avoid punishment for circumventing and d) so on.
I happen to believe there probably *are* contemporary community standards for Pensacola. Google just happens to be just one inadvertent but universal demographic tool for determining what those standards *actually are!*
---
Oh yeah, quick anecdote: Also back in 1973 there was approximately one well-known manufacturer of specifically-designed running shoes: Adidas. A few years later then-upstart Nike, which believed itself a hopeless niche player in the running-shoe market. Then at a trade show Adidas, in a confident show of clout, announced their annual running shoe sales worldwide... which the Nike execs in attendance realized was barely equal to their own *monthly* sales! Nike, who had been playing defensively and afraid they'd be crushed, had been the world leader in sales.
Rather than continue trying to follow Adidas's genteel, Eurocentric, and slightly leisure-class-activity footsteps Nike began aggressively pushing their own everybody-can approach. (For better or worse considering their occasional forays into gangbagger fashions and sweatshop manufacturing, but also positively their active promotion of exercise as a universal *recreation.*)
And my point being that *if* Pensacola, or any other community, based their policy on what is and, especially, what policies *work* instead of what they *wish* was and what policies make them *feel* really good** there might wind up being far less overall harm. And a lot fewer silly prosecutions.***
I'm obviously not a lawyer, and the contingencies of bringing prosecution can necessarily resemble watching sausage being made. So there may be more to this case than meets the eye, even in Pensacola. This post, however, isn't about the merits of the particular case but about determining, acknowleging, and therefore establishing *actual* community standards so we can create more grounded-in-reality policies that match those standards.
[** Hmm, reactive policy as porn... sounds about right --fl]
[*** Evidently the pornographers in question "had to be" charged under racketeering statues because... um... the statute of limitations on what they'd actually *done* had expired. And what they're charged with actually doing was paying actors and models which in Florida is evidently considered misdemeanor prostitution. As is, evidently, hosting routine non-child porn. *Conspiring* to pay actors and models and then posting the results, on the other hand, is a felony with a longer statute of limitations and so... that's what they're being prosecuted for. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user SpacePotato. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[This is more of me being a curmudgeon about critic's, *and producer's* narrow-minded and occasionally pig-headed definitions of pornography. (Sheesh, and people say John McCain's cranky! :-)) --fl]
When I was a kid growing up trying to listen to rock and roll under the shadow of Nashville, Tennessee, I'd get really sick and tired of the attitude of one of the local stations proclaiming "we play *both* kinds of music, country *and* western." It wasn't that I didn't like country music I just like *other kinds too.* So just to let you know, wherever else this post seems to ramble it's all about that same point: I like other kinds too.
Tony Comstock, an independent pornographer and author of The Art & Business of Making Erotic Films has been having a bit of a flame war with Australian art critic Alison Croggon over why, on the one hand, she and other Aussies are protesting a photographer accused of child porn when she and some of the exact same people stood by when Australian police broke up a showing of his (self-proclamed) porn film Damon and Hunter at the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Documentary Film Festival in 2006 and then having his Ashley and Kisha ordered removed from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2007.
Part of the problem, explains Croggon, is that while Comstock might not like it
"...the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice..."
I don't like it either. In fact, can I just hold my hand up and say that's the stupidest excellent explanation I've ever heard? I'll have more to say about this in a moment but first...
See... I'm just such a curmudgeon about porn. On the one hand I really want to enjoy it, and do enjoy some of it, but on the other hand so much of it just seems... achievement oriented, which is fine for professional sports, or maybe the Olympics, or even Johnny Knoxville, but it's like those Qigong demonstrations where martial artists pull buses with 100 people on it with their penises. Amazing, yes, and stuff you do with your sex organs too. But, sort of like pole vaulting or shot put it always *sounds* way more erotic than it turns out to be. Crab, grouse, gripe, mope, that's me.
Anyway, TBK of The Beautiful Kind, who unlike me is just *so* not a prude gets in the spirit of Teh Nastiness of porn with a brilliant new, even nastier-than-ass-to-mouth porn idea.
You know how they have A2M (ass to mouth) porn? It’s not really my thing, but I suppose the allure there is that the person is doing something sooo dirty.
That got me to thinking about other dirty things. I’ve heard that the kitchen sink is one of the filthiest places in a house, way more so than the toilet. So I want to come up with my own porn niche - KS - Kitchen Sink Porn.
Here’s a typical scene: a woman is standing there washing dishes in an ass-flattering dress, or maybe just panties and a bra, and a guy comes up behind her and grabs her roughly. She drops the plate she’s washing and it smashes dramatically. He rubs his crotch lewdly on her, and then he forces her head down and makes her lick the sink counter top. And then all around the metal. It will culminate with him bending her over and fucking her from behind, but she’ll have the kitchen sponge stuffed in her mouth. Ewww! And then he will cum on the counter and make her lick it up.
People will totally get off on that nasty shit.
By Croggon's definition kitchen-sink porn, since it's even less hygenic not to mention even more stereotypically lay-shit-on-hetero-women-but-not-hetero-men than ass-to-mouth porn aficionados ought to like it even more.
It's a hypothesis I'd dread to test, by the way. Because there's bound to be someone out there somewhere who's just dead sure that there's nothing wrong with (only women) sucking the juice out of cellulose sponges and that I should just lighten up.
If so then duely noted. But just to be clear I'm not objecting to people *doing* stuff like that (certainly not) or even getting their rocks off on it since none of us get to choose our (genuine, non-rubbernecker) kinks.
What *does* bug me though? The fact that so many producers seem to agree with *anti-porn activists* as to what constitutes "pornography!" That anyone out there actually *making* the stuff that "the *defining* essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice!"
I dunno. I guess that *if* that's going to be everybody's definition of "pornography" (I get the *very* strong impression this is indeed the definition some critics like, say, Robert Jensen uses) then I guess I'm against it too: since most people including lawmakers and law enforcers aren't as clued in to those subtle differences. And so they confuse salacious photos of naked people fucking, sucking, licking, masturbating, caressing softly or sharply, stroking, undressing, fondling, expressing, teaming up, going solo, inserting, rubbing, gasping, shuddering, quivering, jiggling, moaning, dripping, seeping, humping, drooling, and coming individually, in pairs, and in groups of all sizes, shapes, and persuasions without making anyone else feel bad with Jensen's and Croggon's (and "Max Hardcore's" by the way) definition. Which kind of sucks for the rest of us.
Clue: Tony Comstock makes porn. Red Shoe Diaries is porn. "Soft porn" is porn. "Erotica" is porn. Suicide Girls is porn. Fleshbot is porn. And, sorry, even romance novels are porn. Meanwhile, ironically, by the time you get to what Croggon and Max Hardcore are talking about? Even if the sideshow carnies are touching each other's pee-pees while they bit the heads of of chickens, if that's porn at all it's a *tiny, tiny* slice of it, not the whole shebang. Therefore claiming you like, or hate, "*both* kind of porn, sick *and* disgusting" just doesn't cut it. M'kay?
Photo by Flickr user notcub. Used under a Creative Commons license.
The other day in Tampa, Florida, Federal prosecutors got a huge obscenity conviction against Paul Little, a.k.a. "Max Hardcore," an industrial pornographer who lives in and, evidently, works only in California. The man in question may never have been to Tampa himself but prosecutors charged him there instead of California because, they say, his web hosting company had servers that physically resided in a Tampa-area data center. Oh, and also because "community standards" in Tampa are much, much more conducive to an obscenity conviction than anywhere they might have brought charges in California.
The specific convictions evidently weren't for *producing* videos containing representations of violent sexual assault that evidently included either him peeing on his fellow actors but jamming his fists into their mouths till they vomited. (Reverse Cowgirl has kept up with the story.) Instead the convictions were for "10 federal counts of distributing obscene materials over the Internet and through the mail." (Again, via ReverseCowgirl.)
Maybe I'm just feeling curmudgenly here but my contempt for that kind of scurrilous venue-picking by prosecutors is exceeded only by... Paul Little's conceit that his stupid little niche-market novelty acts could be considered "hard-core" pornography in any real sense. Beyond, perhaps, the "x-tremely" narrow sense of "still able to offend somebody's sensibilities somewhere even if they look at lot of porn." And the even narrower sense that, as one of his collaborators (in the constructive sense of the word), Ashley Blue of Emotional Audience, put it "some adults partake in consensual piss-guzzling, ass-fucking** and vomiting." Sure, and some adults partake in blowing up and sitting on balloons (mildly nsfw) but nobody calls *that* "extreme,* or "outrageous," or, especially "hard-core."
So... incredibly narrow niche fetish for violence and vomit? "Hard core!" Equally niche-market balloon porn or clown porn? Evidently *not* "hard core," but why not?
Gee, you'd think "hard core" had gone from being a euphemism for keeping the camera focused on the genitals during penetration or engulfment to a synonym for "transgressive violence." Against women, right? (Rhetorical question: what are the odds Paul Little gets consensually ass fucked, drinks anyone's pee or vomits while geting his mouth fisted in any of his movies?) And transgressive violence, when you think about it, is indistinguishable from the attitudes of the feebs, dweebs and morons who dreamed up and cheered on... the obscenity trial against "Max Hardcore."
Fine. Whatever. Seems like a stupid misappropriation of a great word though.
So. Just to be clear as a prudish libertine I think it's inexcusable for prosecutors to bring to trial, let alone a jury to convict, somebody for making what amounts to slightly more tasteless episodes of the original version of Fear Factor. I'm sorry it happened and I hope his convictions are either overturned or his sentences are reduced to time served. But as a libertine prude I think it's equally inexcusable to call what he was convicted for "porn," let alone "hard core" porn.
[** And by the way don't you have to be at least a little bit mainstream to lump anal sex together with urolagnia and vomerophilia? Even on a Tampa jury? Or was Ashley Blue misquoted?
And an update: Lynn Gazzis-Sax, who's post takes up the issue of "free speech" vs "workplace safety" makes a point that vomiting as opposed to anal sex differ in terms of worker-safety: "Terri Schiavo didn’t wind up in a coma by having butt sex; she wound up in a coma by having bulimia, and vomiting her electrolytes out of balance. Big difference between something that’s just a (rather large) minority sexual taste, and something that’s actually unsafe." Interesting. Again it's not knocking people with a vomiting fetish, and *definitely* not excusing anyone in Florida which isn't exactly workplace friendly anyway. It's just pointing the amusingly prim conflation of very different acts. --fl]
And with perfect timing as a follow-up to this post Via Alex of Neatorama, Time Magazine has an article by Michiko Toyama about Japanese "elder porn"
Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 74-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years
ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that’s because he’s kept his part-time job — as a porn star.
...
Tokuda is rare among Japanese porn stars in that his name has become a brand. The Shigeo Tokuda series he’s just completed portray him as a tactful elderly gentleman who instructs women of different ages in the erotic arts, and he boasts a body of work far more impressive than most actors in their prime.
As A from France put in in comments on that previous post, "We feel exactly the same as we ever did but people judge us from our outward appearances, or our birth certificates." It's easy to mock John Derbyshire's claim that women are already "over the hill" after puberty but if he'd said instead that men and women are over the hill considerably later -- say 65, or 75, or so how many people would have mocked him then?
In a post titled "Once a Stripper, Always a Stripper" Lux Alptraum of BOINKOLOGY says of a promo for a new HBO series.
"It’s being written by smart stripper Diablo Cody, and produced by a man named Steven Spielberg. Great, just what we needed—another reason to watch TV."
Get it? Diablo Cody took her clothes off! That’s all you need to know about her. Isn’t it funny? She was a sex worker, and now she’s a screenwriter! That’s so cute!
It’s a laugh a minute, all right.
Yeah, I always wonder if my more political posts would get linked back to more often if a) I was ever right or b) if I'd never posted photos of my booty or c) both.
Shoulda thought of that years ago though.
Oh well, since I did and since Lynn Gazis-Sax and Sungold are still celebrating female desire week I've included three of the photos most often marked "favorite" from my Flickr photo stream after the "continue reading" jump.
(Oh yeah, and while the first image isn't as not-work-safe as it appears, you probably still wouldn't want to try explaining it to someone else from work.)
Quick follow-up on my post about the lack of erotic representations of men in pro(gressive) porn sites.
It all started out when Laura Woodhouse of The F-Word Blog asked "why are there next to no 'sexy' images of men on sex positive sites, or sites focusing on porn for women etc?"
It seems to have been one of those great Rorschach questions where your take on what she could have meant depends on your own perspective and perhaps on your assumptions about feminist bloggers. Based on her responses to other people's comments she seems to have mostly just meant she thinks women would enjoy more naked men.
And yet when I checked out one of my favorite Porn for Women websites there were roughly three images of women for each image of a man, with only one man really visible and he was only there from the waist up.
There are plenty of good reasons why images of women would show up on pro(gressive) porn websites, including (as Belledame points out) the fact that many women porn consumers are bisexual or lesbians. But you'd think they'd be balanced by interest in images of men from straight women and bi and gay men. And yet, not so much.
Anyway, while mulling a discussion hosted by Caroline of Un-cool one obvious answer occurred to me. (Though technically it couldn't be obvious if it took so long for me to remember it.)
For myriad reasons straight women don’t much mind images of other women. But for one primary reason straight men *really* shy away from anything with dedicated images of other men. And so while you'll find a lot of images of gay men for gay men and a fair number of bi and straight women, maybe it's just that site that's interested in straight men visitors might just wind up needing that tipping-point-avoiding 3-1 ratio?
Anyway, I'm surprised it didn't soak in sooner because the effect really shows up when I post photos here. But speaking of which, and since CassandraSays is (enthusiastically) still celebrating Female Desire Week, after the "continue reading" jump I've pasted three of the photos Flickr has deemed "most popular" from my photostream.
"Tile, Towel, Tub 038" from my "Tile, Towel, Tub" photoset on Flickr.
Also, why these photos?
Laura Woodhouse of The F-Word Blog says
The Sixth Carnival Against Pornography and Prostitution is here, while the Fourth Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy is here.
Both offer plenty to get your teeth into, whatever your perspective!
While I'm here, can I ask: why are there next to no "sexy" images of men on sex positive sites, or sites focusing on porn for women etc?
It's a *really really* good question. Several years ago I started taking my own photos because the little bits that pass for "porn for women" didn't seem very sincere. That they were way more successful that at least *I'd* ever expected suggests there's considerably more demand, or at least potential demand, than there is supply of erotic images of heterosexual men based on what hetero women seem to respond to instead of just trying to avoid what they turn away from.
At any rate I'm not saying that the overweight of women to men on pro-porn sites is suspicious -- sexualized women outnumber sexualized men in almost all media representations from newsreaders on CNN to the cover of Reader's Digest. To, of course, virtually all mainstream porn. And fashion magazines. And therefore it could just be that women are just as conditioned as men to respond to sexualization, and therefore even progressive "porn for women" sites might lean way towards representations of women.** Not *suspicious,* but still indicative of societal, if not individual, bias.
The good news is that there really are a lot more men, a lot more sexy men, and seemingly a lot more interested in what women want men out there posting their own photos for Half-nekkid Thursdays and other occasions than when I started. (Sort of a good thing -- if there'd been more then I wouldn't have bothered to take my own, and it's actually been pretty good for my self-image that I did.)
But anyway, when I say it's a good question I'm not saying it's actually a good *criticism.* At this point anway it really is just a good *question.* What's your take?
Oh yeah, and shameless plug: You can find out more about my images here.
In the face of yet further attempts to censor the internet, Anastasia of Sexualité makes an excellent point about one major anti-porn bugaboo.
More on the current wave of adult/porn paranoia and calls to ban adult content. There always appears to be an argument that web sites lure people, and it’s something I don’t really understand. It’s an incredible assumption to make, and it’s hardly logical. A porn site ‘luring people.’
My experiences as a blogger of adult content indicate the opposite. People actually enter key words to arrive to their desired destinations
That "luring" thing goes two ways, by the way. For reasons both explicable and inexplicable, beginning when I first posted it the most popular page on this site has been Two Straight Men Doing Anal. It's about colon-cancer awareness, which, I'm guessing, isn't what most searchers have in mind when they enter all the possible permutations of, well, "two straight men doing anal."
Moving in the other direction, while it would take a long time to check carefully, a cursory search through my server logs suggests no one searching with the key words "colonoscopy" or "colon cancer" has been accidentally "lured" to that page. Instead, as Anastasia says, the people who find it seem to know *exactly* what they're looking for.
---
Note: I might add that for the most part pornographic spam, which often *really is* objectionable, isn't actually *selling porn!* Instead spammers use the *promise* of porn to lure victims to everything from viruses to discount airline tickets!.
It's very uncommon for me to overhear real-life people having sex when I'm not one of them, which makes my weekend even more unusual in the sense that I managed to overhear people not once but twice. Once through hotel walls, another while standing in the driveway of one person's house and hearing their neighbor or neighbors through a partly open window.
And you know, while it sounded very nice... like people were having a very nice time... it was a pretty strong reminder that the noises people make in porn are really different from the noises people make in real life.
In particular in porn there's this pretty consistent tendency for, especially, women to do this sort of begging/needy sort of "yeah? there? uh-huh?" patter pretty consistently in a higher-than-normal vocal register. Meanwhile regular people tend to be much more in their normal voice range in a much more announcing/encouraging sort of "yeah! there! mmmm!" way.
Anyone else notice that difference?
Hmmm, and while I'm at it, anyone else notice that compared to men in real life men in porn are pretty consistently silent as they approach ejaculation? If so then what do you suppose that's about?
One of the nice things about being a stay-at-home dad is you get days like (now) yesterday. I'm going to tell you a couple of possibly boring things and then a potentially salacious bit.
Yesterday, inspired a little by recently-stumbled-upon 30DayGourmet.com ("The Leader in Freezer Cooking" and also, unfortunately, some kind of pay site) I plopped down and made a couple of gallons of homemade chicken stock (2 pressure cookers, about ten pounds of free-range chicken backs and other *cheeep* parts) and then skimmed, clarified, and boiled down to four pints that, once frozen, I'll divide further, pack into vacuum-sealed cubes, and deep freeze.
I also made three full recipes of scratch eggplant parmesan (my favorite-in-the-world dish, vegetarian or no) with a gallon and a half of scratch, simmered-for-hours tomato sauce with sweet red peppers, onions, celery, carrots, "wild" mushrooms, garlic, Mexican oregano and Italian herbs, with a bit of anchovy paste and balsamic vinegar for complexity. As an experiment I sliced the eggplants lengthwise into little planks instead of crosswise into circles. Then I breaded them in egg, fresh breadcrumbs and fresh-grated parmesan cheese, and then fried them before layering them up with a ton of mozzarella and my sauce and baking them up. Once those are frozen I'll break them into individual vacuum packs as well.
I also took the car in to the shop, called around looking for someone who can do some "handy-person" work around the house, cleaned the kitchen, managed a couple of play-dates with other children, made breakfast, school lunches, and supper (surprise, the children don't like eggplant parmesan so I made them quick macaroni and cheese.**) I also cleared some space in the converted garage that used to be my data center and is on its way to becoming a library, music room, detached guest bedroom. I read a ton of blog pages, read about the election, read about some of the divisiveness over whether gender loyalty ought to trump strong policy differences, and wrote a couple of posts in response to all that.
Now for the salacious bit. I think there's a drinking game where you type random words into Google, add "porn" and then see whether there's a porn site dedicated to that particular combination. If there's a match everyone takes a drink. (If you played it the other way, where you drink if there's no match, then teetotalers could play without anyone ever being the wiser.)
Anyway, as I was skimming chicken broth, and dividing it into containers for freezing, and as I was spreading tomato sauce over layer after layer of crusted eggplant and cheese, I became fascinated with the rhythm and sensuality of the ladles I was using to dip, pour, swirl, and pat everything into place. I became enamored with the polymorphous qualities -- the phallically rounded wood and metal handle of my (Chinese) ladle, the breast-like/buttock-like curves of the cup. I reflected on the gorgeous flow of luxuriously thickened broth pouring forth as I divided it into containers (mmm, it would be lovely to be ladled like that with massage oil or warmed-just-right fresh water after a salt scrub. And as I spread sauce in widening circles with the rounded, polished underside of the ladle I fantasized about spinning similar circles over slippery naked flesh.
If I hadn't been so busy I'd have taken photos.
When I Googled "ladle porn" I found no associated websites. I felt so proud! (Everyone gets a drink, though it it was up to me I'd suggest juice, tea, or coffee rather than booze. Use good judgment in any event.)
[** I use spaghetti noodles for my mac n cheese, boiling it for eight minutes in lightly salted water, then draining and immediately tossing it with a cup or so of freshly grated cheddar cheese, a tablespoon or so of butter, and a tablespoon or two of milk. You just keep tossing and the heat of the noodles takes care of the rest in a minute -- it's faster, much tastier, and even cheaper than Annie's or other boxed versions. Oh, there's nothing special about spaghetti noodles by the way -- elbows or shells work just as well. --fl]
And speaking of masturbation and acceptance, can I just say how completely surreal it is to watch a self-made masturbation video clip?
I'm exploring this idea that we've got *so* many misconceptions about ourselves anyway, and so many misconceptions about sex, and so many romance-novel-, literature-, chit-chat-, Hollywood-, television-, and porn-based misconceptions about sex, that (not to caricature any Libertarian readers) the answer might be to watch one's *self!*
And no I'm not likely to share it, at least not at this stage of the experiment. (And maybe never since I'm pretty sure that's not the point. It's not that I wouldn't at least consider it after posting about about the importance of acceptance. It's just that I think other people seeing us probably wouldn't be the biggest benefit.)
Definitely not what I expected. It's not what I expected in a good way, or a bad one, just not at all what I expected. Which in a big way is a *big* point about reality and porn. I may or may not have more to say about this (at least more to say directly) depending on levels of interest. Otherwise I may just fold it into more general conversations about porn vs. reality. If you've tried it and care to share what you got from watching I'd like to know what you think or thought.
[Whether reassuring or exasperating, the image behind the "Read more..." link is not otherwise related to this post. :-) --fl]
According to an article on MSNBC, John Hopkins University had programmed its computers to ignore abortion as a valid search term when utilizing a publicly financed database.
A prominent public health school has restored the word "abortion" as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.The restriction on the POPLINE Web site — "population information online" — had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.
"I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore 'abortion' as a search term immediately," Klag said in a statement. "The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction."
You can read the entire article by clicking here.
Dr. Klag's decision received the support of the American Library Association. According to the ALA's press release, Loriene Roy, President of the American Library Association, stated:
We applaud Dr. Klag's swift action to restore full access to the POPLINE database. We are dismayed, however, at the circumstances that caused the administrators running the POPLINE database to begin blocking any and all searches on the word "abortion." Any federal policy or rule that requires or encourages information providers to block access to scientific information because of partisan or religious bias is censorship. Such policies promote ideology over science and only serve to deny researchers, students and individuals on all sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information.
The American Library Association has vigorously opposed the use of internet filtering and filed suit to overturn the restrictions of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) on the grounds that the Act violated the First Amendment rights of patrons of public libraries. The ALA claimed that the search filters required to comply with CIPA restrict from access a wide array of materials, including medical information. In 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld CIPA, with the provision that libraries must comply with requests from adult patrons to disable the filters. The ALA continues to provide assistance to libraries that must implement CIPA to comply with federal funding requirements.
To determine if internet filtering did restrict access to health information, the Kaiser Foundation conducted a large-scale, scientific study designed to help determine whether Internet filters would block young people’s access to non-pornographic health information. The results of the study, released in 2002, supported the ALA's claim concerning filters:
But as filters are set at higher levels, they block access to a substantial amount of health information, with only a minimal increase in blocked pornographic content.
The full report, in pdf format, is available for download here.
The Kaiser report also included a list of health sites blocked by the search filters such as suicide hotlines, the CDC pages on sexually transmitted diseases and diabetes, an FDA article on testicular cancer and a site dedicated to preventing teen pregnancy. Do teenagers really look up information about health? Yes, they do, according to an earlier Kaiser study that indicated 70% of 15-17 year-olds have used the Internet to look up health information, including 40% who have researched sexual health issues such as birth control or sexually transmitted diseases.
So when you are done with your Sunday morning coffee, please write to Dr. Michael Klag, Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Loriene Roy, President of the ALA, and thank them for protecting your reproductive freedom. Am I exaggerating? Not at all. You cannot use federal funds to pay for abortion and, if not for advocates like these, you could not use federal funds to even read about an abortion.
There's an open discussion post up called "Can There Be Feminist Porn" at Finally Feminism 101.
Sara, one of the first commenters, suggested that the heavy-duty (potentially triggering) BDSM site Kink.com is ethical due in part to it's model rights form and rules for directors. Perhaps not surprisingly she was challenged for potentially writing an "advertorial" but at least based on a quick bit of Googling and a review of her three blogs there really doesn't seem to be any connection between the writer and the website except, possibly, they're both from the Bay Area.
At any rate, Kink.com isn't my cup of tea (because I'm not partial to tea, not because tea is bad) and (like society in general) seems partial to the fetish of gender dominance (a compelling term that comes up elsewhere in comments on the post) but I think Sara's got a great point.
I think the answer would have to related to the possibility of agency in the eye of the beholder. If, as I think is currently true, most pornography is created with an exclusively male audience in mind then any possibility of identification by women might occasionally happen but certainly not on purpose.
And that’s where Sara’s observation comes in. To the extent Kink.com creates an *appearance* of participation for women then there’s at least the *possibility* that -- unlike a lot of other theoretically less "objectionable" but otherwise thoroughly androcentric sites -- some women could imagine making a decision to participate as opposed to simply having the situations imposed on them.
And therefore even if some of the post's commenters were right that Kink.com's guidelines and accommodations are a publicity stunt (which they might be) and even if for them it was an outright intentional scam (I really don’t think it is), I still think it *models* the behavior that a feminist/gender-conscious porn site ought to follow: active agency for all parties; the possibility of personal identification for all represented roles; and a direct intention to arouse all potential viewers within the broad categories of orientation and individual proclivities, of course.
Another way of putting it would be that *if* there were other, less power-exchange-y sites that implemented the same policies then Sara’s point would seem way less controversial. Assuming there are any. (I'm not aware of them if they are.) If there is such a thing as feminist porn (and I certainly think there can be) then it should at the very least meet if not raise that bar.
Holly of The Pervocracy says
There's no masturbation for kissing. Kissing your hand just makes you feel like a dork. There's no good kissing in porn and there's no kiss fetish community. Kissing on screen, even the kind of kiss that shoots straight to your groin and makes you gasp and clutch the back of your partner's head, is G rated.
The rest of her thoughts about kissing are cool too. Read about them here.
All excellent points, of course. And while even "mainstream" movies don't necessarily capture the intimate majesty of real kissing, but considering the ways they tend to botch cunnilingus or intercourse in porn it's probably better all around that pornographers don't bother trying. :-)
Photo by Photobucket user Wolf2Roger. Copyright Photobucket.com
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead --
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
'If this were only cleared away,'
They said, 'it would be grand!'
'If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,
'That they could get it clear?'
'I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
from Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter
Samara Ginsberg of The F-Word Blog reviews the Seduced exhibition of sexuality in ancient and modern art at the Barbican museum.
By far the most interesting installation from a feminist point of view was Requiem - k r buxey's answer to Andy Warhol's Blowjob (a 35-minute film of a man's face as he receives oral sex). Buxey films herself receiving oral sex from an unseen partner to the soundtrack of Fauré's Requiem. The idea behind this is a subversion of mainstream porn, in which female orgasm is either fake or irrelevant.
I see it as an irrelevance whether or not buxey is "conventionally attractive" (she's not). But what is very relevant is that she has made no effort with her appearance. She wears no make up. Her hair looks truly abominable. And she is totally unselfconscious. She does not look at the camera, she does not pout or lick her lips. She pulls really weird faces. Sometimes she almost looks as if she's in pain. In fact, at one point I started thinking that if I didn't know any better I might guess that she was giving birth.
That for me is the difference between sex-based art and porn. Porn exists to get the (usually male) viewer off. Art depicting sexuality has no such purpose - sex is just a subject matter. If it gets you off, good for you, but that's not what it's there for. In theory Requiem is an incredibly interesting idea, but the reality was really rather dull to watch. Afer I got over the initial, "Oh my God, she's actually filming herself getting head", I just wasn't interested any more. It wasn't the slightest bit titillating, and the heterosexual male friend I was with said exactly the same. And the fact that watching someone having an orgasm can be so dull when it's real and not intended as a show is fascinating in itself.
Before I say a ton of positive things about Ginsberg's response to k d buxey's content can I just quickly say WTF to her contention that buxey's not "conventionally attractive?" If you can handle modestly not-work-safe pages you can judge for yourself here (she's most visible in the lower-right video) or here or, grouped together with Alan Rickman, and other notable Londoners, here (again bottom row, second from the right.) Point being that I think women are taught to hold other women to standards far, far higher than men do. And also note that while she says buxey's appearance is an "irrelevance" to her, Ginsberg's "making no effort..." packs quite a bit of judgment. But while I have a serious quibble about that, it's still just a quibble. (Another quibble: Face-only orgasm porn isn't that uncommon, see for instance the fairly long-running Beautiful Agony that's dedicated to nothing else.)
But ignoring my ignorable petty quibbles, Ginsberg's got some great points, the biggest one being that *we don't look like movie stars when we have sex!* We often don't make eye contact. We almost never look demure or rugged or coy or... mostly any of the ways sexy people look in glossy advertising and other forms of porn. Yeah, we often don't notice because even when during sex with the lights on (still not all *that* common) we're often glasses off, or too close to each other's faces to focus, or too busy kissing, or at odd perspectives when sucking or licking our partners (and they're necessarily at least partly obscured when they're mouthing us), or depending on position we might not see their faces at all. And even when we could focus clearly on our partner's faces we're generally pretty caught up in our own erotic reality with it's own delightful perceptual distortions.
Which means that, unless we videotape ourselves or our partners, or accidentally catch our own eyes in a mirror, we rarely have any idea how we, let alone others, really look when we're *really* approaching our climaxes.
As Ginsberg says "Sometimes she almost looks as if she's in pain. In fact, at one point I started thinking that if I didn't know any better I might guess that she was giving birth." Which requires a little additional unpacking. First, because without knocking her at all, to say "if I didn't know better" is an accurate statement for almost all of us: we literally *don't* know better. First because, of course, we really don't see that many people giving birth, but second because we really don't see that many people having orgasms either. We do look more like we're in pain than not, though, and for that matter, during the early stages, when our focus is shifting from neurons at the top of the spine to those towards the bottom, our expressions more closely resemble anxiety, fear, or deep distraction.
Which all boils down to we're not particularly *pretty* when we're authentically aroused, and we *certainly* don't look like properly appointed members of the gentility... [Aside: in this respect, at least, we *do* resemble people giving birth: just as there's no way... or reason... to maintain one's carefully composed, um, composure while pushing a baby, neither can one, nor does one need to, maintain composure during sex. But I digress... --fl]
As I was saying, we may not seem terribly genteel when we're rocking our own or each other's worlds, and we may not look conventionally "pretty" when we're there, but oh my are we awesomely, amazingly, immediacy-of-nature *beautiful.*
Finally, it's worth noticing that, as opposed to contrived conventions of what we're taught arousal *ought* to look like, unless we ourselves are aroused or prepared to be, *real* arousal can draw our attention, yes, but without arousing us.
All cool insights that a) make me think that porn would be improved by Hollywood and b) make me wish for ways we could all become *less* self-conscious of our own arousal in the face of c) so many photogenic, perhaps, but therefore idealized sources.
Photo by Flickr user ellawaiin. Used under a Creative Commons license.
When Robert Jensen writes about porn speaking to men in a whisper, saying "if you come into my world it will all be there, and it will all be easy" in Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity)
Now the assertion that romance novels are just "porn for women" is old, the sides firmly entrenched, and defenders of the separation are *extremely* touchy about it. And while I wouldn't wish to rock that boat along the established lines, I would point out that *by Jensen's definition* of porn speaking to the deepest vulnerabilitys as well as the entitlements of masculinity (as socially constructed) then romance novels speak no less deeply to the construction of femininity. (Remember, according to both Jensen, me, and most genuinely radical feminists, male and female human beings exist independently of the artificial and too-often bogus notions of "masculinity" and "femininity.")
Anyway, drawing lines in the same dimension as Jensen, Calico of Dominatrix Next Door, responding to a comment to her main post, says
I picked up a romance novel at work the other day and read most of it before I realized it wasn’t horror.
The protagonist was convinced she was fat, stupid, hideous, socially inept and unlovable. (Although she was none of these things.) She hated her thin, pretty, vapid housemates. Men swarmed all over her and eventually her true love proposed and she realized she wasn’t that bad after all.
Apparently, the writer thought this plot would strike home with the average American woman. ugh!
It’s absolutely true that what physical preferences vary. It’s also true that you don’t always need to care. Sex is about what you do, not necessarily what you look like while you’re doing it.
In other words, if porn whispers in men's ears about a world where even strangers on elevators are attracted to you, and in fact so attracted to you that even dry-fucking their asses is "strangely" a turn on for them... then romance novels that whisper in your ear about everyone falling all over your beauty even though *by your incredibly high standards* you're not attractive enough... well...
Both ways those are actually whispering right past us as actual human men and women and into the ears of our constructed gender dummies on our knees, the exaggerated mannequins of "manliness," of "womanhood," and whispering so seductively that we're sure that if we only had one that was a little more full up top or a little longer down below; if we could but move our lips *even less* when we spoke; if we could just find the right wig, or a bushier mustache for our dummies *then* people would finally see the *real us.* And want to spend the rest of their lives with us.
---
Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying *all* porn, or *all* romance novels merely help us shellack our ventriloquist dummies. But I would like to suggest that to the extent they do so then to that extent they are indistinguishable.
Photo by Flickr user lickyoats. Used under a Creative Commons license.
A semi-live-blogging review of Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity)
Chapter 3: "Where We Are Stuck"
Mostly a discussion of contemporary masculinity.
First, a couple or three scenarios outlining different effects of masculinity indoctrination: a macho-clouded confrontation in a bar; a Male-Answer-Syndrome confrontation at an academic setting; an exercise in reflexive "she has authority so she's a bitch" misogyny. Well interpreted as attempted domination by a) force b) argumentativeness, c) insult.
Next, a nice set of distinctions between biological sexual identity (e.g. "male" and "female") that's based ultimately on chromosomes and the shape of reproductive organs (with an acknowledgement of ambiguity in a small percentage of individuals.) By biological he means "based on the material reality of who can potentially reproduce with whom. ... That is what typically is called 'sex.'"
Beyond "sex" is "gender." Gender is socially constructed and can include: assignment of social, political, or economic roles; expectations of different dress or behavior; and traits or "virtues" where one gender is expected to be aggressive and another to be "gentle." For men the aggregate term for all this gender association is "masculinity." For women it's "femininity."
Jensen goes further and says men are also stuck with a special characteristic called "manliness," for which there really isn't a counterpart for women.
Then he says that while he's "fond of many human persons who are male ... [he doesn't] much care for men, manhood, or masculinity." He obviously means he doesn't care for those distinctions.
Now, given that those distinctions exist primarily as *limits* on men's behavior (you *can't* wear this, you *mustn't* do that, it's "unmanly" to think this other thing) then yeah, I don't care for the murky layers of masculinity tradition has shellacked over the freedom of being male. (Heck, *even inside the manliness tradition* the idea that men should be afraid to do this or that for fear of being "unmanly" ought to grate intolerably!)
Jensen doesn't mention it but I have to believe he also doesn't care much for "women" or "femininity" since those too would be social constructs that drastically limit what real female human beings can be.
But back to manliness:
Jensen seems to think one key component of manliness is "the struggle for supremacy in interpersonal relationships and social situations" is strictly a manliness... meaning, presumably, that he believes women and "unmanly" men are innocent of such aspirations. And this is turning into my biggest issue with this guy -- he's clearly bright as a tack, and extremely well-intentioned, and I really *really* want to be able to just nod and smile, but then he comes up with these daffy assertions that make you wonder how much experience he's got with non-male enterprises.
Another out-of-the-blue-ism: "No matter who is playing, [king of the hill] is a game of masculinity." No, no matter *who* is playing, kind of the hill is a game of *hierarchy,* and yes, in a game with that objective there ultimately can only be one king of the hill and he or she is always subject to usurpation. But hierarchy and masculinity are neither identical nor inseparable.
After these non-sequiturs Jensen returns to the perfectly reasonable point that the pressures of masculinity certainly exacerbate competition with the result that to be successfully masculine is also to be isolated, paranoid, "broken and alone."
---
Next he says that, based on his experience, most people hold clear feminist values but of those most are reluctant to actually *identify* as feminist. One obstacle he perceives is that for many people being "feminist" means undermining established gender norms, especially masculine ones, and since that's perceived as a threat to men most people don't feel comfortable going there. Especially when addicts like Rush Limbaugh aggressively attack perceived threats.
I think you sort of have to define what "threat" means here. For instance, taking a page from the old, real, pre-MRA activism: it does no one a favor to fail to challenge a facade if it's really so rotten that a few shed tears or a little responsibility or a little authentic generosity or a little less cheating with demands for "male prerogative and family wages" would bring it down.
---
Near the end of the chapter Jensen again hits a patch of ice, trying to use the generally very solid work he's doing on the very real issues of the limits the artifice of gender imposes on male and female humans for leverage into a problem he has with pornography.
"Pornography seems to shout out at us, crudely. ... But in reality, pornography speaks to men in a whisper. [saying] "...'if you come into my world it will all be there, and it will all be easy.'"
He says pornography isn't about sex but about reassurance that men are still men, that they can dominate women, that no matter how crass or crude, ugly or cruel, women will never call bullshit.
That I can handle, not least because I think it's true. But then he skids with "But for most men, [porn] starts with the soft voice that speaks to our deepest fear: That we aren't man enough." And at this point my marginal note says "Huh? Are you mental?"
Because I hate to break it to you but the *whole point* of his analysis heretofore is that the problem with the "manliness" fetish is that *everything* fucking whispers... shouts even, that we're not man enough. And not to put too fine a point on it, but everything out there from porn down to the lawnmower selection in the local Sears garden shop says "if you come into my world [manliness] will all be there and it will all be easy." That's the whole fucking point of advertising.
So yes. Let's shout it from the rooftops: porn plays on mens inherently fragile, built-on-sand images of manliness and falsely makes problems that not only can *it* not keep *nothing* can keep them because the inherent premise of masculinity, as entirely distinct from male humanity, is inauthentic.
And having said that let's follow it up with a big fat "so what?" Because so does an ad for The Gap and any declaration one can make about exploitation in porn can be declared, in spades, about our garment industry -- from exploitation of children (why do we *keep hearing about* forced child labor year after year?) to insatiability (through most of history all but the very richest have had one garment for regular days and one for "Sundays") to alienation from the main point (and we need to buy our clothes pre-worn-and-torn, with non-utility seams, pockets, and findings because...?) And trust me, I happened to pick The Gap completely at random and on the spur of the moment -- virtually everything dealing with commerce and male humans either undermines or bolsters men's fears about masculinity just as all virtually everything dealing with commerce and female humans plays up or plays upon fears about femininity. And we're supposed to pick porn out as special because....?
---
The main thing that's coming through for me is that Jensen's real purpose is to crawl out of the masculinity trap -- a very real problem for men and boys that, frankly, kills way too many of us before we turn 30... ok, and after 30 too! The problem is he keeps acting as if destroying porn is the only or best way out instead of a way that worked for him.
And I don't even think he's *wrong* about industrial-style porn -- most of it isn't just "99% crap" in Ted Sturgeon's famous phrasing it's 75% sociopathic, worse-than-conservatism, hate-filled, spite-filled, powerless-rage-creating, *unwanted* pain-celebrating bullshit. The consumption of which is to libido satisfaction as seawater is to dehydration. And Lord knows that if he, like *waaayyyy* too many other kids had to rely on porn for his sexual education then yeah, that's a huge problem too.
But at least as far as I've read his discussion of porn is way more flashy/noisy/button-pushy but less important than his myth-of-masculinity work. Which is a shame because guess what keeps getting everybody's attention?
Again, live-blogging something like a book has its risks, not least the possibility that in later chapters the author will make clear what seems misguided now. (Another risk, of course, is that I reveal myself as talking through my hat, but hey, this is a blog and the contract says somewhere that we're supposed to do that anyway.)
But at least so far the detours into porn are distracting from what ought to be the real point: if we really dealt with masculinity our problems with porn would probably take care of themselves, whereas if we dealt with porn our problems with masculinity would be almost entirely unaffected.
Photo by Flickr user Slice. Used under a Creative Commons license.
So years ago some friends of mine took high-tech jobs in a little mini-Silicon Valley in, of all places, Provo, Utah. Coming as they did from places like Chicago, Santa Cruz, and Albuquerque there were some cultural adjustments. One evening early on, after a close examination of the Yellow Pages, they made their way to the deli in town (*the* deli in town!) for snacks. One of my friends asked what kind of cheeses they had. Brimming with pride the clerk informed them they had *both* kinds of cheese, yellow *and* white... Velveeta.
That story sprang to mind when I read about Audacia Ray of Waking Vixen and director of a very nice alt-porn video called The Bi Apple wrestling with the reality that is the, er, industrial porn industry.
In pornoland, bisexual means that the dudes touch each other too. And that’s what I wanted my movie to be. In pornoland, bisexual films fall under the rubric of "gay," they aren’t included in the world of AVN, they are the propriety of GAYVN. Pornoland is trying to teach us something here: you’re either straight or you’re gay.
I knew, of course, that bisexual movies are weird things, that porn companies don’t understand who the market for these kinds of movies might be, but I also learned from Adam and Eve that without any promotion whatsoever their series “Fine Bi Me,” which is pretty bad porn but is bisexual, has sold briskly. I knew people wanted to see this stuff, and that it could sell, and when Adam and Eve Pictures gave me the chance, I was on it.
...
This week AVN announced the nominations for the awards that will be given in Vegas in January. Reading through the titles of these movies, with classics like “Slant Eye for the Straight Guy” (a nom for Best Asian-Themed Series) and “We All Scream for Ass Cream 2″ (a nom for Best Internal Release), is truly a trip through crazyland, even for someone jaded like me. This year, the list of noms is 58 pages long. ... The GAYVN nomination process is wrapping up this week, and the list of categories is a long too - there are 39 of them.
...
Wow. I’m trying to figure out what this is about, and I know it is not about demand - The Bi Apple has been a best seller for Adam & Eve on a consistent basis since it became available in February, and other bi titles (even bad ones, which is most of them) sell well. It’s really just got to be about the close-mindedness of the adult industry, and the refusal to find space for different kinds of titles.
Got that? The porn staple "bisexual woman" is actually straight, and movies like Dacia's that feature men and women, women and women, men and men, and FMM and FFM three-ways are gay. And while such movies sell steadily and well they're an invisible 4th dimension to those who market and distribute them.
In other words, industrial pornographers make porn for *both* kinds of people: straight *and* gay!
And you can't say it's for lack of imagine on their part. (Trust me, I like to pretend I have imagination but I doubt I'd ever dreamed up a title so creatively sexist, racist, stereotypist, and pop-culture-derivative-while-simultaneously-tin-eared as "Slant Eye For The Straight Guy.") Instead it's just that for any marginal talk of "liberated" or "sexually revolutionary" (or other words borrowed from the early 1970s) pornography *as an industry* is as thoroughly culturally conservative as the 700 Club... and as thoroughly invested in it.
In terms of the porn/anti-porn debate as articulated by, say, Renegade Evolution on the pro side and Robert Jensen on the anti side, the reality of industrialists like AVN and GAYVN need to be confronted -- not just acknowledged but *confronted!* -- by people who think porn's either harmless or cool. Conversely, the reality of dissidents like Dacia Ray needs to be acknowledged -- acknowledged *not* confronted -- by those who think pornography can only be a threat or a menace.
This post is partly in response to an email message from a reader who asked why I post an erotic or semi-erotic (and occasionally approaching-pornographic) photo a day, especially since most of my posts, while about sex, aren't so much about the erotics of sex but gender issues and social theory of relationships. I'm not sure I can explain *everything* but I can explain how those photos started.
It's funny about these photos. I started them with a *huge* amount of trepidation soon after I started my blog when it finally soaked in that a) contrary to everything I was taught women are as aroused by images they find erotic as men are and b) they were mostly drawn to gay porn and part of that was because so much of straight porn *isn't* particularly erotic for women. So anyway, after chewing on that for a while it occurred to me that while there's gay porn (for men) and straight porn (also for men) there wasn't anyone actually trying to create erotic images of straight men *for straight women.* After chewing on it further I summoned up *a lot* of courage, got out a camera with a remote control, and took a handful that, I hoped, *didn't* focus on what most male, or male-interest-serving photographers focus on.
I took photos of myself because I really didn't have any other models, and, taking them, I was dead afraid my skinny, ugly, un-conventional body type would distract and/or turn off people so much they wouldn't recognize what I was trying to say. And the results were both overwhelming and, the big surprise for me, overwhelmingly positive!
I *still* think a lot of the appeal has to do with me just trying to be interesting and not so much me as all that attractive (where that means even if I *wasn't* attractive since people insist I am.)
So anyway, after I posted that first series I thought I was done and so I stopped. And received a lot of queries and complaints. And so every now and then I take another series, usually of me doing ordinary things around my home but always mostly just about the small erotics of everyday life and not the exotic worthiness/achievement-linked stuff that's nearly always a part of porn for men. And then I just post one photo a day from the set.
It gets a little problematic for me sometimes because often I'll be in a randy mood... or at least rowdy one... when I take the photos, and then thirty, or ninety, or one-hundred-and-ten days later I'll be distracted or aggravated or wrapped up in ideas instead of erotics... and the next photo in the series will be more, um, naked than usual.
I try to keep going but sometimes I chicken out. For those of you who are into seeing those you can let me know either in comments or email and I'll send you an invitation to go behind the "friends-category" firewall where I'm more comfortable because nobody's seeing anything they didn't expect or ask to see.
And *that's* how the photos come to be there. It's part political, part illustrative, part accomodation, part personal, part arrogance, part payback, part self-education, part self-expression, part force of habit, part self-image verification, part tweaking the "women aren't 'visual'" part of the paradigm... the list goes on and on, and so, till I run out again anyway, will the photos. I'm totally
A semi-live-blogging review of Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity)
Chapter #1:
Andrea [Dworkin] was the first person to understand that the contemporary pornography industry and the images it produces are a place to look squarely into the consequences of patriarchy and masculinity.
Yeah, I still don't think people give Dworkin the credit she deserves for the transformation she wrought on society through her critique of pornography as it stood (and, far too often, stands) and, more importantly, her distinguishing the idea of consent (where even the most whole-hearted "yes" is meaningless without a corresponding and irrevocable right to say "no.")
Chapter #2: The Paradox in the Mirror
People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women.... And that is much more difficult for people -- men and women -- to face.
My main quibble would be that industrial pornography today certainly is primarily about men's cruelty and/or indifference to women (though cruelty with a point that I'm afraid might dishearten Jensen even more than he already is. More on that later.) But it has not always been so. (For instance in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, photographic porn was either not cruel at all or was nervously cruel to the intemperate men who "spent" their precious bodily fluids.)
Later in the chapter Jensen asks
How do we explain the simultaneous appearance of more, and increasingly more intense, ways to humiliate women sexually and the rising popularity of the films that present those activities?
Jensen maintains that while we've had strong support for individual rights the U.S. has also always been culturally brutal and cruel and therefore an increase is only par for the course. As explanations go that disappoints because if he was right then there'd be no increasing intensity to explain.
My own feeling is that the increase in violence coincides extremely well with the advent of sexual autonomy in 3rd-wave feminism which autonomy, by the way, was made possible in large measure by Andrea Dworkin's work on consent. The problem being that if, as I contend, the dominant male paradigm is that women are the "no-sex" class.
And if men remain largely unreconstructed and trapped inside the paradigm, then to the extent women find newer and more adventurous ways to enjoy themselves sexually we're going to see men working harder and with greater desperation to extract the "no" their/our paradigm expects and demands of women.
I've mentioned this effect early on but in a post from last summer called "Anal is the new 'third base,'" Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy editorialized about this perpetual ratcheting in search of "no."
Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality — getting jizz in your