I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the ways in which we - meaning consumers of heterosexual, lesbian and to some extent bi porn - are trained to look at the women in visual smut and overlook the men. Looking at, admiring, and sexualizing women is the default setting of our cultural eyeballs. Women are everywhere, and they are dressed (or undressed) to impress. Straight women are a part of this too - they look at women in a sexualized way that would be entirely unacceptable for straight men to look at one another. Is it necessary to break with this way of looking in order to be liberated or to have porn for women? A woman who commented on my blog Waking Vixen a while back seems to think so: Read the rest of this entry »

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The madonna/whore treatment is a time-honored tradition - and as with many traditions, it’s worn out but somehow always being reinvented. On one hand, women are revered for being pure and nurturing, models of good morals and all that - but on the other hand, women are revered for being muses made up solely of sexual energy. This duality of course has led to another time-honored tradition: married men who respect their wives as the mothers of their children and are afraid to get real (and real dirty) with them, while they keep mistresses for the fun and dirty stuff on the side. This isn’t news.
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The internet is for geeks with bad acne and missing limbs. Internet dating is a last ditch effort and can attract stalkers. People who do cybersex don’t have healthy sex lives. The sex industry is using the internet to exploit women.These are all mildly to majorly ridiculous stereotypes of people who use the internet, stereotypes that will shatter this coming weekend in Atlanta. The first Sex 2.0 conference, primarily organized by blogger and podcaster Amber Rhea, is being held at BDSM community space 1763 in Atlanta on April 12th, and people from all over the United States will be there. The thing they all have in common is their interest in the conference’s subtitle: the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. Hopefully most of them are also interested in hearing me talk, since I’m the keynote speaker and will be delivering a short (but fierce!) talk promptly at 9:15 am.
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I was not a porn consumer or seeker when I was a teenager. Though I was sexually precocious and promiscuous in many ways, porn wasn’t really on my radar. In fact, when a high school friend found me on MySpace recently and discovered that I’d become a porn director, he was pretty surprised. But since I’m a bit of an extremist, when I began to explore porn, I really did it up. And I wanted to find porn that was like me – bisexual.At my first job in sex, I lucked into a treasure trove of porn with obsessively categorized videos, magazines, and mementos: the Ralph Wittington Collection at the Museum of Sex. I started as a researcher at the Museum and then became an assistant curator the year it opened – and in addition to jump-starting my career as a sex nerd, being exposed (ahem) to the wealth of smut in the Wittington collection plus meeting a delightful array of sex industry legends got me started on my own personal journey.
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What words strike you as “bad” ones? Maybe that’s a kind of weird way to start off a column on a porn site, because, let’s face it – you’re here for the bad words. And pictures. Or at least, the ones that are so bad, they’re good. But what about words that give you that “bad touch” skin crawly feeling? Everyone’s got them. For me, the phrases that make me feel icky are a few genital descriptors: “meat curtains” for labia and “blue veiner” for penis. Just writing that makes me feel gross, but luckily on the average day I can avoid any mention of those phrases because they aren’t especially common.
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The idea of pornographers with ethics and strong political convictions seems ridiculous to many people. After all, isn’t porn just about overly-tanned hedonism, driven by the desire to make a mint while surrounded by swarms of hot chicks who wouldn’t otherwise give you (assuming the portly, fiftyish male “you”) the time of day? Not so fast, assumption-maker.”I think a lot of folks are surprised that what I produce even exists,” says FurryGirl, “especially lefty/liberal sorts of people who have a condescending attitude towards the sex industry and people who work within it.”
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If there’s one unifying force that brings together female porn makers on either side of the Atlantic, it is a commitment to thinking through the process of making porn before diving in headlong. Maybe that seems kind of dull - why spend all this time thinking when you could be coaxing local hotties into stripping down and showing their stuff in casting sessions? - but the proof is in the pudding. Erika Lust runs her ever-growing Lust Films out of Barcelona, while Julia Ostertag’s independent filmmaking projects are based out of Berlin - both women work against the grain to create unique films that showcase male and female eroticism in a carefully considered way.
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