Photo by Ara Maye McBay from Filamentmagazine.com

I mentioned last week that I’d ordered a copy of the first issue of Filament Magazine because their regular printers had found interesting excuses for refusing to print their second issue.

Filament, in case you’ve missed their booming word-of-mouth campaign, bills itself as a non-fashion magazine for straight women that features erotic photos of men that are also for straight women.

The articles are great. They’re more like something you’d read in Ms. or Utne Reader than something specifically designed the way Slate’s Double-X or Gawker’s Jezebel are to capture advertising for the “women’s market.” (I spotted only two ads — one for an online sports-bra retailer, another for vision-protecting vitamins.)

The photos are pretty cool too and that’s a surprise for me. I’m usually pretty neutral about men’s bodies but also often a bit squicked by the way men are presented in porn meant for men. I don’t identify with the men in gay porn, and I really don’t identify with the contortions men in straight porn are put through in order to preserve lines of sight to their partner’s bodies.

The photos in Filament are kind of eye-opening even though or maybe because they’re not for me! I look at them and don’t think “where would I fit in” the way men are sort of meant to in for-men porn. Instead I keep thinking is that how a partner would like to see me? or did I look like that when I was 20? Also (blush!) I kept thinking what would I do but what would a partner want to do to me! Or want me to do to her! A feeling I really don’t get from porn for men because, at least for me, porn for men is about knowing exactly what I’d like to do next.

There’s also a cool sense of drama in some of them — not so much scenarios or the fabled “plot lines” as visual and atmospheric context that goes beyond “m’kay, here’s what the model looks like with out a top; here’s what the model looks like in undies; here’s what the model looks like lying on a bed; here’s what the model looks like giving/getting/watching this or that sex act” you see more of in industrial porn for men.

Point being that I enjoyed reading the articles I was inspired by the photography.

Bottom line? It’s the sort of magazine I’d enjoy reading in bed. With a partner. Not so much one-handed reading as three-handed. :-)

Kristina Lloyd of Erotica Cover Watch has a fun post about an erotic romance anthology for women that went from a bottom-seller to best seller when they changed the title and cover art.

Cecilia Tan, editor of the anthology, got in touch with Erotica Cover Watch to tell about this ‘victory for the female gaze’. When MILF Fantasies was first released as an ebook early in 2009, it barely sold. Cecilia was informed it was one of Ravenous Romance’s worst selling anthologies. Then the book was repackaged, the pretty woman on the cover vanished and along came three young dudes baring their rock hard abs – result! Within days, the book shot into RR’s top ten.

Read the quote in context here.

She explains a bit of publisher insider strategy and adds

Ravenous Romance are primarily an erotic romance publisher. As we know, there’s beefcake aplenty on romance covers because, in catering explicitly to women, the genre doesn’t have to worry about deterring male consumers. But RR are also publishing straight erotica such as Young Studs (contributors include names familiar to anyone who reads smut: Rachel Kramer Bussel, Elizabeth Coldwell, Andrea Dale, Sage Vivant) and, because these are ebooks, again the publisher needn’t fret about passing guys going all weird at the sight of another guy with his kit off. As Cecilia wrote: ‘What [RR] have found is that the ebook audience is so overwhelmingly female that the “normal” rules of erotica publishing (you know the ones, the ones that say a woman has to be on the cover) Do Not Apply.‘

I think this is progress. Sure, we want to see men and couples on covers that exist in spaces other than those reserved for women. We want men to be sexualised in the way women are sexualised. We want het erotica for men and women to be represented by men and women on the covers. It’s called equality. And if ebooks can nudge erotica publishing in that direction, I’m happy.

I think it’s progress too. If the shoe was on the other foot I’d be pretty vexed if the cover of every erotica title for straight men featured only straight men on the cover. Not because I wouldn’t identify with the men, and not because I’d be squicked, but because… c’mon, identifying with and being interested in are pretty different things. And since men and women tend to be more alike than different, I have to assume you’d feel the same way.

Oh, one last thing, dear to my own personal, self-interested heart. Lloyd concludes here post with

Ravenous Romance are boldly targeting their erotica at women – and the strategy is clearly successful.

Look what’s riding high in their charts right now: The DILF Anthology

I mean, no one would dream of designing a book like that to market to straight men, would they?

Far be it from me to complain about that!

Via Petra Boynton, sex researcher Shere Hite, writing in The Indypendent, tackles a subject that’s very near and dear to my heart: the representation of hetero men in conventional pornography.

Pornography, it seems to me, presents a highly distorted image of men. While my research with thousands of men shows a different picture of “who men are sexually,” pornography imposes a rigid ideological view on male sexual feelings, expression and behavior. They are not the monolithic beings depicted in most porno images, nor do they find their authentic selves in pornography.

Ironically, pornography seems friendly to men — more than to women — but its underlying message makes fun of men. Subliminally, it tells men that their sexual expression is ridiculous, base, insensitive, even grotesque. Visually it frequently makes men look ugly and coarse, foolish and unappealing.

She said it here.

It’s almost cliché that women are presented as one-dimensional and cartoonish in porn. Critiques of women in porn are practically an industry unto itself. Extending that critique to men is rather refreshing.

An emerging criticism of her column and, presumably, her underlying work is that she misunderstands how men are depicted in porn. And while a quick tour this morning of popular porn upload sites like YouPorn and RedTube (we really are presented as almost voiceless, as always having and keeping erections, as uninterested in emotional contact or even non-penis physical contact) suggest she’s not that far off the mark.

But reading deeper into her column that’s not really her point. Even if everything that’s presented about men in porn was sexually enjoyable¹ to do, what’s really important is that it’s a really, really limited set of the full range of sexually enjoyable things that men can do with a partner.

Hite speaks in particular to something I think men (and, often, even our partners) tend to shy away from in real life and, evidently, avoid like the plague in porn. Here’s Hite.

Men say they enjoy masturbation because they can fantasize about whatever they want and there is no pressure on them to perform. During masturbation, in my research, men stimulate themselves in many more places than they do when with a partner.

...

But many men cut short foreplay because they are afraid they may lose the erection which they have been taught is necessary to enjoy sex and which would be “shameful” to lose. More men could reach much higher peaks of feeling and arousal if they did not feel anxious about how they should behave sexually.

The great middle of the bell-shaped curve of porn never goes there, never treats men as interesting or, especially, complicated or, quirkily, fun to play with. We’re remarkably fun to play with though.

I think it’s great that Hite has raised the question.

And hey, just in time for Kristina Lloyd’s Man Candy Monday photo over at porn-for-straight-women Erotica Cover Watch. Oh, and check out comments on this porn-for-women post by Jessica Freely.

And if you’re an adult you can click here for yet another entry.

[1: Although seriously, what’s fun about stopping everything to wank out a “money shot” when you’ve got a partner right there who, in real life, would welcome your orgasm in contact and would almost certainly enjoy more active participation in creating it? Especially when it’s done over, and over, and over, and over. And over! —fl]

One of the evening activities after Sex 2.0 (Twitter tag #sex20con) this evening was a screening of award-winning porn, including Matinee, directed by Jennifer Lyon Bell, from the Cinekink 2009 event. Here’s a synopsis of Matinee from Cinekink

Actors Mariah and Daniel play lovers every night, but their onstage romance lacks spark. One slow afternoon, they discover that today’s matinée performance will make or break both of their careers. Daniel wants to make big changes, and Mariah starts to wonder: are Daniel’s suggestions reasonable? Or has he lost track of the boundary between actor and character? Rushed to the stage, in front of a live audience, they must figure it out together.

They said it here.

I came in late and, because the room was very crowded, I didn’t stay long. And so I don’t know much about the premise or plot. But the one sex scene I saw was in my opinion a real eye-opener.

The female lead leads! Every step of the way she’s the active party. The point of view focuses on both of them but she’s the one doing the foreplay, stroking him hard, eating him, unwrapping the condom, pulling him toward her, guiding him into her. Even when he’s on top she’s actively moving up against him as much as he’s moving into her.

They separate before either of them come. She climbs on top of him. He holds himself this time, but more to hold himself steady as engulfs him. Once they’re joined he leans back and she moves. As she gets more excited she reaches down and rolls her own clitoris.

Again they stop before either of them come. She rolls back. Their hands join over her vulva. He strokes her to a well-acted but persuasive rather than porn/theatrical orgasm. Rather than jump to the next scene there’s a really nice enactment of the pause for “aftershock” care.

There were a lot of highly non-vanilla people present and I didn’t think the film was well received (they may have just been really rowdy, or else perhaps the into scenes, which I didn’t see, were unbearably hokey.) But I thought from a gender-role perspective its hetero/vanilla veneer made it all the more transgressive. She put the condom on him even before she began to eat him. The pace and tempo was in regular-intercourse tempo rather than the conventional hyper-porn bippity-bippity-bip pace that, I think, is pitched more for the tempo of male masturbation. There was no money shot. No calling anyone a bitch or grimacing out “give me your fat rutabaga you big stud.” At least while I was there she came and he didn’t. In fact except that there was nudity, PIV penetration, and couple of porn-style moans and groans it missed most of the tropes I remember driving me to give up on video porn.

That last bit is kind of interesting: any bumpkin in porn can cough out a money shot, and many do. The standard routine is, roughly, that the director gets all the shots he or she needs, all the positions, acts, and angles, and then they stop everything re-arrange the shoot, and the actor stands or kneels and quickly wanks out an ejaculation. Usually on somebody else’s body or face. Whee! Just how I always want to finish when I have sex (but, to be fair, it probably helps the target-male customer identify since at that point he’s probably masturbating too.) What’s different about Matinee is that she has the “money shot” using only his hands — considerably more difficult even for porn actresses to produce in male actors (given how rarely they do it instead of him.)

An important point that I probably wouldn’t have picked up on if I hadn’t been watching with other, perhaps more porn-savvy viewers: I get the impression is more of a masturbation aid than representative sex. And so, I think, maybe the stylized, 7-minute naked-step-aerobics of “real” porn is more effective for people who use it to get off than the stuff regular people do. (Sort of like you might enjoy seeing a whole top-chef episode worth of effort to prepare your meal even though you probably wouldn’t want to cook under that kind of pressure yourself every evening.

But by and large? Although personally I like a little more turn-taking when I have sex it was all in all the kind of slow comfortable, cuddly, orgasmic screw I’d thoroughly enjoy spending a matinee-long afternoon doing with a partner.

Anyway, cool scene in what looked like a cool movie. (The Cinekink jury evidently agreed. They gave Matinee the award for best narrative short.