newsy porn stuff for women and men who care

Is Mapplethorpe's art arousing?
Depends on who you ask.

Adult sex educator Charlie Glickman has written a post Untangling the Gordian Knot of the anti-porn agenda of professor Robert Jensen. It's a long one, but definitely worth plowing through. Writes Charlie in response to Jensen's "demonizing porn (and by extension, porn viewers):" 

I think his arguments would be stronger if he explicitly recognized that how people think about and use porn isn’t evenly split along gender lines, that there are people who are trying to make porn that shows genuine connection and passion between performers, that the reasons that people have fantasies are complex, that the lines between art and porn are fuzzy, and that the reasons that people feel discomfort around porn are personal as well as political. It might not be as conceptually elegant, but it would be much more honest and that’s what we really need.

I particularly appreciate Charlie's refusal to revert to a simplistic pro-porn stance, calling instead for a more nuanced and complex discussion on porn. I agree that "we need to be willing to look at the ways in which the content and messages of porn shapes how we think about sex." And that while "we need to make room for the voices of people who enjoy being in porn (and not tell them that their choices are inauthentic or that they have false consciousness)," we also "need to make room for the voices of people who were treated badly or hurt while performing in porn (and not tell them that they’re making it up or that it’s their fault for making a bad decision)."

Charlie quotes my point about the potential of a re-visioned form of porn. As I've argued, the re-visioned porn by women I've looked at actually presents the kind of positive thinking about sexuality and instructive role modeling of healthy sexual behavior that I would want my daughter to be exposed to as a part of her sex education when she grows up. Unfortunately, feminist blogger and author Amanda Marcotte fails to take this kind of porn into consideration as she dismisses all porn as misogynistic, humiliating and degrading to women. I definitely share Amanda's belief in the importance of teaching young people not just about safe sex but also pleasurable sex; I just wish she wouldn't be so quick at dismissing porn as such as essentially hostile to women and indifferent to women's pleasure (Kids Are Learning Sex from Porn, Slate). Nevertheless, Amanda's advice to young women whose boyfriends have learned their "technique" from ["standard American"] porn is valuable:

Along with information about birth control, young women do need to be told they can pipe up and say "slower" or "harder" until he unlearns the tricks he got from porn and learns to please a real life lady. Information like that, in turn, can subtly remake their vision of what sex can be, giving them more power in their lives and especially in their relationships, along with more pleasure. Hopefully, we as a society are finally making the move toward providing this proper education for kids, and getting away from the dark ages of abstinence only. 

Speaking against Amanda Marcotte's critique of porn is sex and porn writer Susannah Breslin, arguing that porn is not misogynist; it is human (Forbes). Her position feels more like the simplistic pro-porn stance that Charlie cautions us against taking. I don't think all porn is humanistic. There's a lot of porn I don't like. Simply stating that porn is "an expression of male desire" and "male fantasies" and "they are not always politically correct" ("What men want — in their dreams, in their masturbatory reveries, in their sex lives — doesn’t adhere to what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s sexist and what isn’t"), fails to address how porn, including "politically 'incorrect' porn" shapes how we think about sex and vice versa. As feminist sex and porn blogger Ms. Naughty writes, while one can "acknowledge that negativity may just be someone’s fantasy ... surely we should be able to ask: what the hell is going on if you need hatred to get off?"