Couples talking about porn.

Interesting piece in The Cut, from New York Magazine (via Violet Blue):

What Porn Means to Us: Twenty Couples on Tentacles, Baywatch, and the Skin Flicks They Share, Fear, and Imitate

A man I was dating told me that he liked watching anime scenes of sea creatures raping schoolgirls with their tentacles. His arousal bothered him. I was surprised to discover that it didn’t bother me, but my live-and-let-live attitude gave me pause: Was I colluding with misogyny?

Conflicting studies have suggested that porn leads to aggression, divorce, and depression — as well as lower rates of rape, better sex, and deeper commitments. We only know for certain that since the start of the Internet’s reign, porn has moved online, diversified, and sped up: Every day nearly 20 million viewers visit Xvideos, the web’s most trafficked porn site, and YouPorn is six times the size of Hulu. With porn consumption ubiquitous — and, by most reports, increasing and evolving — I asked couples and individuals how they discuss porn with their dates and partners. The result: twenty conversations about porn.

1. Porn is fantasy.

Jill “has no idea” what kind of porn her husband of two years watches, but she “doubts it’s anything that would bother” her. Tom says he doesn’t want to “expose Jill to all the craziness” of the videos he stumbles upon — like a woman riding a dildo-studded bicycle. He explains: “If she saw the porn I’m watching, she’d probably think I’m holding something back, but I’m not. I don’t want to bring what I see into the real world. It’s like how you don’t actually want to kill your boss.”

Unlike sex, “masturbation is a win every time,” Tom says. His threshold keeps changing: “When you’re a kid, a nipple is enough for five years, but once you start seeing girls climbing out of clown cars, you want more clown cars.” He’s glad his wife “doesn’t like anything gross” because he doesn’t think he’d want to be with someone who watched what he sometimes watches. Every so often he pretends he and his wife are in their own porno.

Jill occasionally uses her imagination to “sneak quickies” while her husband is in the shower. She read the whole Fifty Shades of Grey series, mostly on airplanes. Reading erotica means her husband “isn’t beholden” to what she likes, which she imagines “is tamer than what he likes.” She’d love for him to put on a favorite video and masturbate in front of her, but she suspects “it’s his private thing.”

2. Porn is quick.

Now Anthony really does read Playboy for the articles. The Internet has killed his interest in pictures. He rapidly surfs through porn, which he describes as fast food. He doesn’t hide the regular habit from his wife Anjuli, a dietitian. She doesn’t mind it except when he gets off to really fat women — “They are not obese,” he interjects. “But they have huge boobs,” she replies — and Indian women, because she’s Indian. “I don’t want to think he has a fetish,” she says. “I don’t!” he laughs, “They just pop up sometimes!”

Read the other 18 conversations here.

One feminist porn producer's perspective on 'extreme porn.'

The following excerpt is from the Ms. Naughty Porn for Women Blog. From what I can tell, Ms. Naughty is one of the two women who run For the Girls.

Please make sure to read the rest of Ms. Naughty's post to contextualize the following excerpt (link at the bottom). Also, some of the comments in response to her post (at the bottom) are very interesting - particularly those from women who like rough sex, BDSM, etc. Ms. Naughty is challenged by some of the commenters who practice BDSM on her use of the label "extreme porn."

Ms Naughty's post perfectly exemplifies the difficultly new-school feminists are having when it comes to balancing their own sexual preferences with the recognition that not all women feel the same way. It also brings up the issue of when porn crosses a line from something that's easily supported to something more insidious.

Let’s Talk About Extreme Porn

The other day I saw an ad for a porn site that I found rather disturbing. It was a looped flash video ad that featured a couple having very rough sex. The woman was “fish hooked” (had a finger in her mouth, dragging her head back at a painful angle), a penis was rubbed roughly on her face, she was choked and slapped. She also didn’t seem to be enjoying herself much; her face was red and she was crying.

I didn’t want to see that. Firstly, I’m not into rough sex. Also I also had no idea of the context of that sex scene. Was it consensual? Did she sign up for that? Did she enjoy it?

The porn company that made the ad obviously thinks this will entice viewers to sign up, either out of curiosity or genuine desire. I’ve seen other rough ones like it, including one where it was a woman administering the rough sex to another women. I don’t promote that company, by the way, or any porn site that includes that kind of content.

This is the exactly the kind of extreme porn that Gail Dines discusses in her book Pornland. She says that almost all porn is like this and that it is having a negative effect on men’s sexuality.

The thing is, while there are plenty of problems with Dines’ generalisations and theory, I don’t want to dismiss her concerns with this kind of content. It seems reasonable to be asking questions about bad porn and extreme porn. We should be talking about what it means and how it effects us. I know that my initial reaction to that ad was pretty visceral. I can imagine that a lot of people might find it very disturbing or problematic.

I’ve seen my fair share of what I consider to be bad porn. Stuff that is overtly sexist and cruel, porn that appeals more to negative emotions and hatred than actual sexual desire (take for example the “ex-girlfriend” style sites. Or the ones where the scenarios are primarily about tricking someone into sex and not paying them). There’s porn out there that doesn’t look like it was consensual or ethically created. My stance has always been that I don’t like it and I won’t promote it – but I would never agree with it being censored. I’ve also had numerous online discussions with other adult webmasters about whether sites stepped over the line or not.

Read the read of the post here.

Tristan Taormino, the ethical pornographer.

From Xtra!:

Ten years after falling into the adult film business, Taormino has carved a successful career producing what she calls “organic, fair-trade porn” through her company, Smart Ass Productions.

Her movies have earned critical acclaim for challenging contrived stereotypes in what is admittedly a boys’ club, putting women in charge of their sexual encounters both on- and off-camera.

“For me, feminist porn is all about having a filmmaking process that is intentional, ethical and responsible and creates a really good work environment,” says Taormino, who is nominated in four categories at this year’s Feminist Porn Awards.

“It’s about respect and choice.”

Much more, including discussion of her various hardcore films and her sex education work, here.

Dirty Magazines by Heather Bradley.

From Sex Etc.:

Pure sexiness, 1980s porn-style.

an actual, unedited clip from a porno movie, circa 1985. i call this dance, "the moist maker". aka "the cocaine shuffle", "mullet mayhem", and "these shorts don't fit: the dance".

They Shoot Pornstars, Don't They?

Susannah Breslin is a very successful journalist who has published piles of work on the sex work industry. She's also put together several interesting projects which I'll be posting about next week.

One her best known pieces is an exposé on the Southern California porn industry. She doesn't candy coat what she sees - she reports the real deal, and it isn't always pretty. As a matter of fact, some of her accounts are disturbing (trigger for sexual violence!). The piece is long, but very much worth reading.

Here's the opening:

At a certain point during the week that I spend in Los Angeles, interviewing adult performers, visiting adult movie sets, and talking to those who live in the San Fernando Valley and work in the adult movie industry about the recession and how the current state of the economy is affecting their livelihood, I find myself in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of the Valley, the residence of a man who requested I not reveal his identity.

It’s a quiet, warm afternoon. Outside, a woman whose hair has been dyed the color of cherry Kool-Aid is smoking a cigarette on a narrow balcony overlooking a half-empty parking lot. In the living room, the man and I are sitting on a dingy beige sectional sofa, watching an adult movie playing on a laptop.

The movie set into which we are peering is your garden variety, run-of-the-mill porno fare: tan sofa, white walls, hideous curtains. In all likelihood, this is one more cheap hotel room located somewhere in the greater Los Angeles territory that has come to be known, colloquially, as Porn Valley.

At the center of the screen, a young woman is perched on the edge of the couch, alone. As the camera closes in on her, she smiles tentatively and crosses her arms protectively.

Her look is that of a 21st century Bettie Page. She has long, dark hair with short bangs and bright blue eyes rimmed with heavy black eyeliner. She wears a cropped black top with a plunging v-neck, a baby pink plaid miniskirt (not unlike the one worn by Britney Spears in the schoolgirl-themed music video for “… Baby One More Time”), and white high heels—otherwise known as “stripper shoes.”

“OK, so what are we going to do?” a man standing off-camera asks in a voice that sounds as if it has been digitally altered. “Should I just beat the shit out of her?”

Read the rest of it here.

Snatchly.

Last week I posted about Tumblr users who collect and post porn on their Tumblr pages. This is, apparently, the next new thing (NSFW, and for academic purposes only!).

From MSN:

Snatchly is the Pinterest of porn

Pinterest is aimed mostly at women. You "pin" items to another user's pinboard, thus creating a community based on sharing pictures of your wedding and videos of your dog. It's become so ubiquitous, even Michelle Obama has an account. Snatchly (totally NSFW and not pictured, so search on your own), on the other hand, is like most of the rest of the Internet, a place where men swap and share porn. On Snatchly, you "snatch" (get it?) content (porn) and post it to your page. It's a site where you can "personalize your porn," and hey, it conveniently links to all the best smut-related video sites. Snatch away.

Porn, porn, and more porn.

Over the next week or so, I'll be posting piles about pornography, ethical porn, arguments against porn, etc. Some of you have requested more information about ethical porn specifically (for academic reasons only!). Obviously, there's way too much to include in one post, so I'll be adding stuff as I dig it up. The ethical porn movement has been driven largely by women who describe themselves as sex-positive feminists. Many more women are now producing porn, which has had a significant effect on the market. Not surprisingly, most of the porn sex-positive feminists discuss, promote, produce, etc. features men with women, or women with women. As of yet, the ethical porn movement has not really ventured much into gay male porn. If anybody out there is familiar with a similar trend in gay male porn, please let me know!!!

I should also make it clear that the ethical porn movement is, in no way, anti-hardcore. As a matter of fact, ethical porn can be EXTREMELY hardcore (or softcore). What makes it different is that it's ethically produced. Also keep in mind that the vast majority of mainstream porn, some of which is considered ethical, is still produced with men as the intended consumers.

More to come...

2012 nominees for the Feminist Porn Awards.

From Good For Her:

The Nominees for the Seventh Annual Feminist Porn Awards are in!

The nominees on this year’s list continue to strive to provide erotic entertainment that is smart, sexy, and appreciates women as viewers. In addition to featuring over 40 nominations, the 2012 nominee list includes the highest number of nominated websites ever at 16.

The nominated films for the 2012 Feminist Porn Awards show the true diversity of feminist porn - from the sultry art direction in Erika Lust’s cinematic masterpiece Cabaret Desire; to Buck Angel’s dynamic and insightful docu-porn Sexing the Transman; on to the raw sexual power in Hella Brown by breakout director Nenna; all the way to Tristan Taormino's fabulously informative and hotExpert Guide to Advanced Anal Sex; let’s not forget local talent N Maxwell Lander who draws us in with the sensuous short Emile. These are all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the talent and sharp erotic eye of the feminist porn creators in the 2012 nominees list.

These nominees are under consideration for categories including: Sexiest Straight Film, Hottest Trans Scene/Film, Most Deliciously Diverse Cast and many more. The Nominees for the 2012 Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards are (in alphabetical order – film title first):

To see the list of nominees (recommendations), click here.

Santorum art.

Rick Santorum is one of the frontrunners in the Republican primaries currently underway in the US. He's about as far right on social issues as one can be. He's anti-gay, anti-birth control, anti-abortion, and anti-just-about-everything-else. A few years ago, he drew the ire of Dan Savage when he compared homosexuality to bestiality and a bunch of other things. In return, Dan Savage held a competition to find a sex act which could be labelled with the name Santorum. Try searching Santorum and you'll find out what sex act won, or alternatively, click here to go to the Spreading Santorum webpage.

Recently, a married couple of who are members of the blog community Unicorn Booty made a collage of gay porn, depicting Rick Santorum's head. To see the post, click here. To see the full-sized image, click here.

Fanny Hill.

As a follow-up to the email and poem sent along by Chantel, showing that the Victorian era may not have been as sexually repressive as I painted it to be, I did a little more digging around and discovered the novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill). It is considered the first prose pornography ever published, at least in the English world. The author, John Cleland, wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure while in debtor's prison. The novel, which was published in two instalments, is a series of explicit letters written by a very young woman (15) to another woman.

Here's an representative excerpt from the book:

...and now, disengag’d from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant. Its prodigious size made me shrink again; yet I could not, without pleasure, behold, and even ventur’d to feel, such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory! perfectly well turn’d and fashion’d, the proud stiffness of which distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet softness might vie with that of the most delicate of our sex, and whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root, through the jetty sprigs of which the fair skin shew’d as in a fine evening you may have remark’d the clear light ether through the branchwork of distant trees over-topping the summit of a hill: then the broad and blueish-cast incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its veins, altogether compos’d the most striking assemblage of figure and colours in nature. In short, it stood an object of terror and delight.

But what was yet more surprising, the owner of this natural curiosity, through the want of occasions in the strictness of his home-breeding, and the little time he had been in town not having afforded him one, was hitherto an absolute stranger, in practice at least, to the use of all that manhood he was so nobly stock’d with; and it now fell to my lot to stand his first trial of it, if I could resolve to run the risks of its disproportion to that tender part of me, which such an oversiz’d machine was very fit to lay in ruins.

Anti-porn flowchart.

Courtesy of Maggie Mayhem:

Exploitation and super-skinny porn.

While many defend pornography, especially ethically produced porn, I can't imagine that anybody would be willing to suggest that anorexia porn is anything but reprehensible and exploitative in the extreme.

From The Guardian:

Anorexic women targeted by 'super-skinny' porn websites

As the use of pro-anorexia websites increases, some vulnerable women are finding themselves the targets of grooming by the porn industry. Nicola Hobbs reports

'As you know, beauty has one name: being thin. Our models are underweight, skinny, thin, bony – just like you. We want you. Regardless of the costs, we want you to join our agency. Let's face facts, on anorexic porn websites, men are masturbating watching your pictures. You are a superstar of starvation and if you were selling and marketing your frame you would be more wealthy than most of us because men would pay any price for watching those pictures."

This was the email Sasha McDonald was sent last year from a pornography agency specialising in anorexic images. McDonald was 15 when she was first diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. "I was very lonely and felt worthless," she says. "I retreated into an online pro-anorexic [pro-ana] community and shared everything. I didn't realise the danger I was putting myself under." Despite receiving professional support, McDonald found herself becoming more entrenched in the online anorexic world. She wrote a blog of her battle with anorexia, recording the small amounts she ate and publishing photographs of herself in her underwear as evidence of her emaciated body.

Read the rest of the article here.

And to see to see an example, click here (WARNING: if you're struggling with an eating disorder, or have recovered from an eating disorder, this site may act as a trigger).

Dylan Ryan interview.

For Queer Porn TV, on queer porn, sexual athletics, unreal expectations, BDSM and more: 

Porn SuperHero SuperStar Dylan Ryan, who'se worked for everyone from mainstream mega-company Hustler (as Lindsay Lohan's butch dyke girlfriend Samantha Ronson) to Crash Pad Series, No Fauxxx, and now Queer Porn TV, Dylan talks about her butch and femme counterparts, misconceptions about the glamour of the porn industry, and being intelligent.

Dodson and Ross on pornography.

From two of my favourite lovely ladies: 

http://www.dodsonandross.com It's Lady Porn Day compliments of blogger Rabbit Write. Women masturbate and they use porn to fuel their fantasies. We talked about our favorite porn and filthiest fantasies.

And a couple more - make sure to watch the clips right to the end to contextualize their earlier comments.

"I think it's time to replace the old porn with the new porn..."

Dodson & Ross answer your questions on the uses and abuses of pornography.

Dodson and Ross answer your questions on porn addiction, women competing with porn stars, and lesbian fantasies.

Pornkins.

Via Gizmodo:

Carving pumpkins with scary faces is kids stuff. Carving pumpkins with sexual scenes more explicit than you ever thought possible (for a pumpkin)—that's what mature witches and warlocks do.

For more Porkins, click here.

Or you could DIY it by making your own stencils - probably more fun.

Buried Treasure: first porn?

From Dodson and Ross:

The year was 1929, and while it may have been a bad year for the economy, it was a red letter year for animation. That was the year that the first porn cartoon, Buried Treasure, was made. This short, animated feature concerns the exploits of Eveready Harton, and his attempt to bury his "treasure" in every cozy orifice that he finds - be it that of man, woman, donkey, or cow. Of course, what else can you do when you're stuck as a castaway on "Pecker" island.

The movie was so controversial that US labs refused to process it; so, it was developed in Cuba instead. Rumor has it that it was made in the late 20s for a private party honoring the venerable animator Winston McCay. And according to Walt Disney animator Ward Kimball:

"The first porno-cartoon was made in New York. It was called "Eveready Harton" and was made in the late 20's, silent, of course—by three studios. Each one did a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Studio A finished the first part and gave the last drawing to Studio B [...] Involved were Max Fleischer, Paul Terry, and the Mutt and Jeff studio. They didn't see the finished product till the night of the big show. A couple of guys who were there tell me the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it..."

Later, the work was attributed to the efforts of George Stallings, George Canata, Rudy Zamora, Sr., and Walter Lantz. One thing I noticed while watching this film and The First American Porn Film: "A Free Ride" Circa 1915 was how male defined porn was from the outset. In this film, it is all about the dick with no clit in sight. At least, this movie takes a rather satirical view of the whole thing. And it is rather amusing to see the aptly named Eveready being led around by his fifth appendage. So, here is the first porn cartoon - what your great-great-grandparents used for wanking material.

Girls watch porn, too.

See more http://www.collegehumor.com Girls on girls watching porn.

UPDATE

From Lux Alptraum at Fleshbot:

College Humor just released a PSA promoting the fact that women like porn too. Which would be great if a) the video weren't intended as a joke and b) it actually sounded like it was written by porn-loving ladies. But rather than sit around and complain (which we could do all day!), we're going to do the video one better: we want to make an actual, for real PSA featuring porn loving ladies. And we need your help.

Are you a porn loving lady? Do you know porn loving ladies? Well, step right up and tell us why you love porn—and what you think is missing from the pornographic equation. Tell us if you like gay porn, straight porn, queer porn, feminist porn, gonzo porn, parody porn, POV porn, online porn, amateur porn, any porn; tell us what gets your engine revving, tell us when you like to watch porn, tell us how often you like to watch porn—tell us anything and everything we need to know to create an accurate picture of all (or at least a bunch of) the ways that ladies watch porn.

Find the rest of the entry, and contact info, here (NSFW!).