Women Like to Watch Porn, Deal with It

In response to a Stop Porn Culture conference held in Boston by the Stop Porn Coalition, a group that claims to be feminist but is actually rooted in fundamentalist Christian organizations (though this fact is hidden on their website and other materials), Violet Blue created Our Porn, Ourselves. The Our Porn, Ourselves mission statement says:

We women are tired of people trying to control our sexuality by telling us what we should or shouldn’t like sexually (porn) based on what someone else thinks is best for us. It’s like keeping women in a perpetual state of being children about sex. And women who say they are feminists make it worse by discounting all the women who find porn to be an empowering sex toy. Or if not, to at least give us the benefit of the doubt that we can make that decision for ourselves, thank you very much.

It's about time there was a counter argument to the anti-porn feminists. I'm not about to tell someone they're not feminist for being against porn, especially if they're exposure to porn is all the violent shit out there. But I'm also not about to judge anyone for what turns them on or tell other women that they shouldn't explore their sexuality to see what exactly does turn them on. There's a great quote by Sarah Estrella, from the Sex & Relationship Examiner, that addresses the compatibility of the feminist label and porn:

...To that I’d add that feminism and pornography are no longer incompatible, if they ever were, and both are becoming more progressive than you might imagine (witness such phenomena as the recent 5th annual Feminist Pornography Awards). As one set of feminists are returning to the old right wing rallying cries of Andrea Dworkin, another set is increasingly participating in the means and ways of production of adult entertainment, and becoming a significant portion of the audience for pornographic material as consumers. As a result, the old charges that pornography is about a male-centric and sexist objectification of women are falling apart. To be sure, there is still plenty to talk about, plenty to protest, and plenty to change for the better in the adult enterainment industry – particularly around violence against and exploitation of women, to the extent that each still exist – but the argument that feminism is by definition anti-porn just doesn’t hold up anymore.

That's what PoolBoy Magazine is all about, acknowledging and accepting that women are sexual and enjoy being so. Instead of being sexualized by the media and society, PoolBoy asserts that women should be sexual and address what gets them hot. How are women to enjoy sex if they're not allowed to explore what it is exactly that turns them on? Or just be judged by what gets them going? Perhaps the underlying message of anti-porn groups are that women are not supposed to enjoy sex, or only be the means that they deem acceptable. Sad face.

Anyway, porn is cool and people, men or women, telling other women that they shouldn't watch it are just as bad as men making laws about what women can or cannot do with their bodies. Why don't you just let decide for themselves? Or, if you don't like the porn that's out there, make your own!

Our Porn, Ourselves is having a video contest with some rad prizes. All you have to do is, "Make a short video that tells us you are pro-porn, and upload the video to your favorite video sharing website. This is where you get to tell us “I’m pro-porn and I vote!” When you’re done, Tweet the location (URL) of the video with the hashtag #proporn. The deadline is June 12, the start of the Stop Porn Culture feminist anti-porn conference." The prizes are listed on Our Porn, Ourselves so check them out and get to making your video!

Happy 50th Birthday to The Pill!

I'm a little late on this, but this past May 9th marked the 50th anniversary of the FDA approval of the birth control pill. TIME did a nice little write up covering the history of the pill, from early forms of birth control (paste made from crocodile dung as a vaginal insert, anyone?), the conception of the idea of a magic little pill (thanks Margaret Sanger!), to creation of the pill, getting FDA approval, and the role the pill on women's liberation and the sexual revolution. This is a must read for women who take or have taken the pill, and really any woman that wants to know about the history of birth control and feminism, because they are so very intertwined.

For more info on birth control check out the first issue of PoolBoy Magazine (hitting the streets in August!) which includes a guide to "Rethinking your Birth Control." Stay tuned for pre-order opportunities!

Here's my favorite quote from the TIME article:

Some of the women who were on the family-planning front lines 50 years ago get a little impatient when they hear young women talking ungratefully about the freedoms they take for granted. But Steinem, for one, takes the longer view. "I don't walk around saying, 'Thank you for the vote,' " she says of a battle even longer past. "I might add, as Susan B. Anthony said, Our job is not to make young women grateful. It's to make them ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody."

There's no time like the present to get radical.

This Just In: Women Want More Sex

all i can say is DUH

 According to a Pacific Magazines survey that will be published in tomorrow's Men's Health and Women's Health magazines, women want sex nearly as often as men. The research asked nearly 10,000 Australian men and women between the ages of 25 and 45 about their sex and romantic lives.


The results suggest that nearly one-third of women want sex every day in comparison to 40 percent of men. However, only 25 percent have sex weekly and a measly 20 percent have sex just once per month!
In terms of getting in the mood, one third of men and women enjoy a romantic dinner and the many (66 percent of women and 50 percent of men) list dancing as a sexual mood-enhancer.  A total of 62 percent of men and 52 percent of women claim that spending a romantic night in is the best way to set the mood for a night of passion.

Sadly, 38 percent of women feel that foreplay is too rushed and 35 percent of men are disappointed by the fact that women do not initiate sex. Over half of all respondents reported that the one thing they really want is to be seduced by a partner. Despite some complaints, participants seemed open to sexual experimentation with two-thirds reporting that they would watch porn or engage in role-play games with a partner.

(reblogged via Carnal Nation)

Beaten to the Bong

It was with excitement and a little disappointment that I learned from Jezebel about Best Buds, a girl stoner movie in the works staring Natalie Portman. I say I felt a little disappointment only because the lovely lady of leisure and I had been working on something similar (and I don't mean just being best buds and smoking a lot of weed, though we do that as well). Best Buds is apparently a stoner lady movie with "a road trip and a wedding at its center, with female friends hitting the road to cure a bride friend's woes with weed."

It's so nice to see movies with female comedians as the stars and also to see the myth about ladies not liking green dispelled in a big public way. Best Buds screenwriter Jamie Denbo feels the same way, and she realized it watching Knocked Up:

The galvanizing moment for Denbo was the scene in Knocked Up when Katherine Heigl's character makes Seth Rogen's give up his bong. "It just seemed like a metaphor of, 'Put down the bong and we can get married.' That's not how it goes in my house. It's more like, 'Hey, you're pregnant, maybe stop smoking weed for fucking five minutes," jokes Denbo, who is the mother of two. "That was never the women that I knew."

Lady speaks the truth! Denbo also knows what's up concerning dick jokes:

...dick jokes may have reached their peak. "They've gotten to a point with dick jokes that now they have to show a dick for it to be funny," says Denbo, pointing to Jason Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

I dream of the day when almost every big actor has shown his dick in a movie, like most women now with their breasts. If it's gotten to the point where ya gotta show some peen now to get laughs from a dick joke then we are well on our way.

Back to Best Buds, I'm glad someone has finally made a stoner chick movie. Fingers crossed that it lives up to such classics as How High and Harold and Kumar, just with dicks instead of all the boobs.

Speaking of funny ladies and weed, remember Garfunkel and Oates?

Hung

So I’ve been watching Hung on HBO.

The new series stars Thomas Jane (uh yeah from the Punisher) as Ray Drecker, a down and out former high school sports star turned loser high school basketball coach who gets into prostitution to support his family.

This show has all the trappings of an interesting series: the premise (a hetero male prostitute?? What!?), an array of supporting characters (pimp, family, ex-wife, neighbors, etc.), and the freedom of cable to show lots of nudity and sex.

Before seeing the show I imagined it was going to be about a "badass" dude who fucks a continuous litany of beautiful, rich models for lots of pay (basically a platform for HBO to show a ton of boobs*) But thankfully, the show seems to mostly steer clear of that empty trap.

I like the relationship between Drecker and his pimp, Tanya (played by the always brilliant Jane Adams). Messing around with the seemingly inherent gender roles of pimp and prostitute really made me stop and think about mainstream depictions of gender within the sex industry.

Hung is an interesting tongue-in-cheek reflection of our current society. The series is set in Detroit, the symbolic city of the modern depression and the characters are people doing illegal and unorthodox things to survive in a crumbling world.

The show does fail in some places, however. Drecker works with some clients with bizarre fantasies not necessarily related to sexuality. Some of these fantasies seem trite and made up and I would rather explore more realistic images of female sexuality than the stereotypical portrayal of the relationship-crazed woman.

This is a show about the sex industry from the perspective of the female consumer! There is a lot of unexplored territory here and yet at times the writing feels like it's falling back on age old, worn out cliches of female desire.

If it can clean itself up a bit and get down to business, Hung does have the potential to be an enthralling satirical narrative, much akin to Showtime's beloved Weeds or the fantastic True Blood. It seems it's too soon yet to tell just how big Hung could get.

check it out:






*Californication