free-range porn or how to be a woman

In How To Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran delivers a naked and entertaining portrait of herself and our time that makes a compelling case for the need for feminism not as theory but practice. For instance in terms of sex education and better porn. The problem is as Moran points out that in the 21st century, the majority of children and teenagers grow up with an understanding of what sex is all about based on Internet porn: mainstream hardcore porn that "blasts through men's and women's sexual imaginations" with its formulaic predictability vending a "porn monoculture" so embedded in our culture we don't even realize it when we're looking at it. (BTW, Moran does allow for the availability of "niche stuff.")

Yet as Moran points out; "it's not pornography per se that's the problem here. ... The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just some fucking, after all. The act of having sex isn't sexist, so there's no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist.

So no. Pornography isn't the problem. Strident feminists are fine with pornography. It's the porn industry that's the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt, and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth, at an extremely conservative estimate, $30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb."

I really wish Moran would pick up a copy of my book After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters. Because as Moran argues too, "what we need to do is effect a 100 percent increase in the variety of pornography available to us." A porn that also caters to women's desires. A porn that features sex with an element of joy to it. A porn that shows people who really want to fuck. Had to fuck each other.

Dubbing it "free-range porn," Moran envisions a porn that "shows sex as something that two people do together, rather than a thing that just happens to a woman when she has to make rent. Someting in which—to put it simply—everyone comes. ...

And that's why we need to start making our own stuff."

Exactly. And that's precisely what the women whom I feature in my book are doing. Moran calls for a "female pornography" that "when it really gets going will be something wholly other: warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic, with wholly different parameters to male porn."

She needs look no further.

In After Pornified, she will find the porn she's looking for; porn that shows "two people screwing at that early, white-hot stage of attraction when your pupils dilate just looking at each other, and you want to melt each other's bones so bad you're practically eating each other's clothes off the minute the door closes."

Among other good stuff.