Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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]

You’ll have to go to the page to unwind the links, but Megan of Jezebel spends a bit of time quoting an interview of author Daniel Bergner about his book on fetishes. Between this interview and his recent New York Times Magazine article Bergner seems like a pretty straight-up writer who actually gets it a little better than the sources he draws his material from.

Or at least that needs to be his excuse for repeating the following canard…

You mention that there are very few true female sadists. Why is that?

Well, that’s my understanding, and it seems to be true. There are very few women with paraphilias, in general, by which we mean outlying sexualities.

Read the quote in context here.

To the claim that few women are genuine sadists, combined with the claim that few women have fetishes, period, leaves one wondering what to make of women masochists. Because if masochism in women isn’t a fetish then… WTF would be the implication there?

—-

Also, while I’m too lazy to look for it, when the subject of women not having fetishes came up a few years ago I wondered whether that might be because for maybe thousands of years have been under… quite a lot of pressure since childhood to “powerfully and persistently displace sexual interest onto objects, behaviors, or situations other than in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners.” Such as, oh, I don’t know, chastity, marriage, children, and domesticity (a.k.a. “Porn for Women“ a.k.a. the no-sex class.)

And incidentally I’m not saying that women sexually fetishize housework either. I’m saying the assumptions that only men have fetishes are so ingrained that I think mostly nobody bothers to check.

“Jeans 020” from my “Sizing Jeans” photoset on Flickr.
Also, why these photos?

Ms Naughty of Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog raises an issue that’s dear to my heart

[Note: All links go to pages containing nudity. —fl]

Thanks to The Girl for pointing me in the direction of Erotica Cover Watch. This is a new blog that asks the question: why are only women featured on the covers of erotic books?

It’s a very good point and the topic naturally delves into the whole feminist issue of the male gaze and the continued way that straight women are still considered to be non-visual.

It all comes down to official marketing wisdom which says that women on covers sell and men don’t.

...

I’m glad someone is making a fuss about this. Maybe next year’s Best Women’s Erotica, which is absolutely and utterly aimed at women, should have a guy or a couple on it.

She said it here.

I’m not as diligent about it as I used to be but I got started posting my own photos because I was frustrated that, while it was conventional wisdom that “men are visual and women aren’t” it seemed like nobody was even bothering to try to make erotic representations of men specifically for heterosexual women. What made it frustrating was the number of women bloggers, then almost exclusively anonymous, who said they were frustrated. And it seemed to me (as I’ve said elsewhere) that since virtually all visual porn was made for straight or gay men, and almost always made by men, that nobody was even trying. Men in straight porn are usually featured as either foils (comical, non-threatening) or proxies for the assumed viewer and in almost all cases they’re positioned as accessories to women. In gay porn men are at least presented as erotic in their own right but even then the representations were (obviously) still coming from a male perspective. (Incidentally a lot of those anonymous bloggers said they preferred, and could more closely identify with, the activities in gay porn to the stylized hump/thump/dump male antics in straight porn.)

So anyway, since I was a lot more daring in my youth (ok, three or four years ago anyway) I swallowed quite a lot of reluctance and took photos I thought might appeal to, you know, actual straight women. Actually since I didn’t really know what that would even mean my main method was trying to avoid what mostly shows up in conventional porn and self-photography. And mostly that seemed to involve photos and poses that created space where the viewer could imagine putting herself instead of being put, of acting instead of just being acted on, of having agency instead of subjectivity. (Not that big a leap, actually, since, after all, that’s what photos tend to do for men in their porn.)

No one was more shocked than I that it hit a chord. It was popular, and since in real life I’m kind of shy and unassuming, a little embarrassing. Web stats suggest some of those photos have become very popular with other posters. (Yikes! If I hadn’t been anonymous I don’t think I could have done it at all! And good thing I’d probably submit a job application to the Obama Transition team!)

I still post photos now although to be honest I feel like I’m losing my touch. I’m also getting pretty restless about my anonymity. And so except for Thursday photos I think I’m slowly winding down. Which is fine — it looks like people like Ms. Naughty and the folks over at Erotic Cover Watch are taking up the torch.

One last point: whereas I don’t think more erotic representations of straight men is especially progress if everyone just winds up being objectified I do think it’s progress when assumptions based on what stereotypes “want” are broken down. I’d also suggest that what’s traditionally made the “objectification” in porn so objectionable has been its highly unilateral, not to mention exclusive (“you’re a woman, you’re not supposed to like it!”) nature. And finally, creating erotic imagery that acknowledges women’s erotic agency (something conventional male-oriented porn decidedly and consistently fails to do) helps break down the really terrible idea that women don’t have agency of their own… and that consequently their fallow sexuality is available for male appropriation.