Don’t ask how I got here, or why, but I’m in New York tomorrow (Thursday) and early Friday. I arrived in time to catch the last hour of NYC Feministing Happy Hour, sponsored by the bloggers at Feministing and ParadigmShift NYC (their motto: “Use the F word.”)

As usual I was too shy to introduce myself to anyone I hadn’t met before (if there’s anything more useless than being a shy extrovert) but then someone else, another newcomer, introduced herself just as I was about to leave. We talked for a few minutes and then I saw Rachel Kramer Bussel (who for some reason I keep running into all over the country) and suddenly had two people I could introduce. :-) And suddenly, ice broken, we had a nice conversation about erotica for women.

Rachel’s got a new book out, and I mean literally just out — she’d just gotten copies herself, called Fast Girls: Erotica for Women. I didn’t take a copy, though she generously offered me one, because I seriously don’t know when I’d have time to read it. But it looked pretty good.

It was good to talk with her about that — she felt a little singled out last year by Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd in their issue-advocacy blog Erotica Cover Watch. Madden and Lloyd were forcefully advocating for what they called “man candy” on the covers of books and magazines when their content is written by and for heterosexual women. The tendency in the publishing industry, even for highly-progressive women-owned, women-focused publishers, is to put women on the covers. Rachel is generally sympathetic to the sentiment but said that when she’d brought it up in the past publishers told her that in genre-branding terms consumers assume men on the cover signal that the content is written for gay men while women on the cover signal more general-purpose porn… which incidentally may contain gay-male content. Rachel, who’s pretty pragmatic about it (and points out that authors and editors rarely get more than “no, not that one” veto power over covers anyway) while Madden and Lloyd were specifically trying to rock that boat.

Anyway it was pretty clear that whether that was the intention or not she felt like she was being attacked and not just her ideas. I personally happen to believe, strongly, that Madden, Lloyd, and others are right that that boat needs to be rocked I think it’s also important to remember that the people on the receiving end exist as, well, people as well as online personas. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should back off when we feel strongly that someone else is mistaken. It does mean, though, that our posts often have more impact than we imagine.

For the record, Rachel’s new book does have the genre brand of a woman on the front cover. What struck me, though, is there’s another picture of the same woman on the back and in that one she’s making direct, intelligent, and confidingly confident eye contact with the reader. Which, if publishers are going to insist on their genre cliché‘s might be a nice way to “brand’ the sub-genre of erotica for women. Assuming their faces are shown at all — not a safe assumption in the first place — women on the covers of most general-purpose erotica are generally shown looking inward or away.

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Oh, and because I stayed to talk instead of shyly going home early I was there for a raffle drawing. And I won a gift certificate for my choice of writing and ethical-leadership workshops from the Woodhull Institute! Which looks cool but also looks like they’re all set in New York (one’s in San Francisco) so if you’re interested and in or near New York and you’d like a $100 discount to one of the workshops drop me a line and I’ll mail you the certificate.

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Shyness notwithstanding I had a great time. Maybe next time I’ll introduce myself to someone else first. :-)

Summary: After skimming thousands of images one pattern that’s emerging is it’s striking similarity to religious imagery.

I’ve glancingly mentioned it several times that I’ve undertaken a really massive review of porn and/or erotic photos on the web as digested and reposted and redigested and reposted on the Twitter-like photo-blogging service Tumblr.com. It’s been neither as enlightening, nor as distracting as I thought it might be, and obviously the format of any one site, and the obvious tendency of linkers-in-common of photos to have tastes in common as well. So I can’t call the experience at all random.

That said, after skimming something close to 10,000 images on more than 100 sites a couple of points (beyond a lot of probably obvious ones) stand out.

The biggest one, one that finally percolated through this morning, is…

Golly but a lot of porn looks like church.

Downturned heads, skyward gazes, repose, shadows, and over, and over, and over the “Jehovanist” facial expressions (interrupted most often by transgressive but equally gnostic ones), the drapes, the sheets, the clothes, the marble or tile or even the peeling wainscoting and dingy lamps speak as much of the attributes of worship as the attributes of sex. The models often appear as saints, or sinners penitent or unrepentant, taking each other’s offered bits as much as sacrament as satisfaction. Even the stylized agonies and ecstasies of bondage mimic the mortal endurance or higher-purposed stoicism of saints. And then there’s the highly church-like lack of non-ritual eye contact with either camera or each other. Ritual eye-contact, yes, as in “take this may it serve you well,” or “am I doing this right” or during moments of “do you take this person as your lawfully-wedded…?”

That’s totally subjective, of course. And perhaps porn isn’t intended to be consumed in such tremendous gouts, any more than words are meant to be repeated over and over and over till all that’s left is the sound in your mouth.

But if you were to ask me now what porn most reminds me of… what the spatial grammar seemed most like… I’d say church.

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Doh! Just to be clear, I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong, at all, with taking sex very seriously any more than it would be wrong to be serious about church. It’s just that…

I guess…

Thing is that it’s not so much about what happens in bed, any more than what happens in church.

It’s a correspondence in the ways both are presented in photography.

Because in church as in bed, and in bed as in church, more happens in reality than in our representations of it. Again that’s all fine — when we approach events as institutions we tend to filter strongly for that which meets our expectations.

What’s interesting (or maybe just revealing about me if I’m the only one) is that the representations seem so similar.

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What’s also interesting is how thoroughly refreshing it is when little bits of humanity poke through the solemnity. When it looks like people are having fun — not “behind the scenes” between-takes fun but old fashioned “I love this part” or “let’s remember that for next time” comfort/contact fun.

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And a final disclaimer: I’m not so much being critical as curious. When I take my own half-nekkid Thursday photos I’ll usually chuck ten or twenty pictures for every one I post, and I’m sure if I photographed other people instead I’d end up hewing to much the same doughty/dreamy seriousness I’ve been talking about. But now I’d be a lot more curious about what could be found in the spaces between poses.

Hmm. Something to think about.

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!

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.