(Let’s call this part two of three, shall we?)

By some freak coincidence, I had occasion to watch An Officer and a Gentleman the other week after not having seen it since 1983.

Believe it or not, this is pertinent to our (fantastic) ongoing conversation — and my internal one — about the issues I’m seeing this generation have with pornography, the influences I’m seeing it have on them, and how incredibly different things have gotten between me at 13 and my Scarleteen users around that same age.

In 1983, when I had been sexually assaulted twice already, when I had slept on a park bench or under an El heatlamp more than once, when I had just started to find ways to get the bouncers at the Metro to let me into over-18 shows, when I had already had a girlfriend, already had a boyfriend, had already become a habitual smoker, was living with intense verbal and emotional abuse from my stepparent, my father was watching this film one weekend visit I had with him and had no problem with me watching it, too.

Thinking nothing of it myself — to my thirteen-year-old self it was a nice enough movie, but kind of boring — and having NO idea what this would incite, when I came back to my mother’s house post-visit, I mentioned having seen it.

And she FREAKED OUT. (I really hope she isn’t reading this: my intent isn’t to embarass her or to make a public spectacle of our family dysfunction, which I rarely talk about publicly.) I overheard the telephone arguments about it, I wasn’t allowed to see my father again for months, which given the dynamic at my mother’s house, was a terrible, terrible punishment to ME, not my father.

What was all the fuss about? There was some sex in it (so barely: really, there was the suggestion of sex, and rewatching it, the suggestion of the woman getting off, not the guy). There was also some issue about there being breasts, which apparently, it was scandalous I saw, even though I’d been looking at my own since I was ten, and had my hands (unbenownst to my mother) on a set other than my own as well before this time. Most of my experiences to date listed above were also either unbenownst to my mother (and some to my father), or living in the land of deep denial.

So, I rewatch these sex scenes. Mind, this film is a fairy-tale romance: it is an old-school film. While I’d not say it’s misogynist at all (and it does actually have some thoughtful examinations of machismo), it’s certainly not a feminist film. However. The sex and interpersonal interplay in this film is sensitive, pretty darn realistic, and really…well, intimate and tender. I’m not even sure that we see suggested sex scenes like this on film much anymore, and it’s really a shame that we don’t. Debra Winger is a drop-dead gorgeous woman, but not in an inaccessible, unattainable way. Those breasts were real, looking like natural breasts do, gravity and all. There was not just physical but emotional chemistry in there (it helps that this wasn’t porn, it was a film with actors in it capable of acting).

It was nice.

But from my mother’s perspective — and given, I inherit my libertine tendencies absolutely from my father and my life experience, NOT from my mother, with whom my nature and hers have always been in constant conflict — my viewing of this was completely inappropriate and potentially traumatizing.

Setting aside the fact that that perspective was completely out of whack with the actual trauma I’d dealt with and was dealing with, I think we can safely say that we’re very unlikely to find many parents these days who would freak out about their teenage kid seeing a film like this. And obviously, I don’t have a problem with that: I don’t think we’ve taken some sort of cultural fall from grace because we’re now ever-so-slightly more accepting of, you know, breasts. I think it was a silly, out-of-touch and totally uncalled for freakout that had a lot more to do with control than protection.

But I do think it’s really interesting to see how different things have gotten.

I mean, I’m not a TV watcher. Until Mark and I moved in together, I hadn’t had one in my own home since 1990, and I grew up watching movies, not TV. But now that it’s here, I flip it on now and then, either out of an anthropological sort of curiosity, or because I managed to get myself hooked on those damn Bravo shows. It was only on the last few months that I was up late enough to discover those Girls Gone Wild infomercials.

I have to say, it is a very, very strange experience to find yourself, at the ripe age of 36, having had 20+ years of a sort of in-person sexual field research to a degree no one really seems to do anymore (ah, the 80’s and early 90’s), having sat nude for artists and photographers since high school, having reviewed pornography as a gig, having done all the sorts of things I have to find yourself sitting slackjawed, scandalized and incredulous at what is on publicly viewable television.

I confess, my first response TO my response was, “Fuck all, I’m my mother.”

I’m not, of course. But the divide is so great in some respects between my generation and this one (more, I think, than it was between my mother’s and mine) that even someone like me can feel like they’ve been living in a dream world when it comes to some of this stuff. And my shock and awe at something like this isn’t about me thinking it’s terrible for anyone to see the female body or sex, about feeling somehow lesser or insecure because of — or in some sort of competition with — these girls, about concerns or beliefs that I have to mimic a media dynamic in my sexual life, or about the idea that sex is somehow less sacred and important if it’s outside the private sphere.

When Jenny and I were talking about these issues privately the other day, she shared something that I think is relevant and also part of the common experience some of these girls posting worries about porn are having. Namely, that she’d come of age with it so drilled into her head that you had to be okay with porn, that she’d gone ahead and taken that tack — fiercely, even — before she’d actually SEEN any. And when she did, and really started to see the gamut, it was a big-time shocker as to what she had been saying was okay, or she was okay with. I think some of the feelings these young women finding their partner’s porn are having are akin to mine at the GGW commercials: they didn’t even realize what porn WAS, and weren’t really prepared for it. So, when they do, it’s a sort of double-betrayal: they feel betrayed by their partners (especially if they’ve got the sort of strange ideas about monogamy and love talked about in the last entry), and may even feel betrayed by themselves. Even if they weren’t pro-porn, but engaged in any sort of denial about it, or didn’t set limits up with partners about what level of it (if any) they were okay with, or accepted that they had no choices per who they partnered with so far as partners who used porn (because, as they often tell me, in their minds, all men do), they may feel trapped by their own choices/stances. And this’d be all the more prevalent with young women whose esteem is intrinsically linked to sexual/romantic partnership.

My concerns with pornography are about exploitation of those in porn and some avenues of sex work when it occurs, about the way pornography seems to be creating even further divides between women and about how it may be problematic for women as a class, about the misrepresentation and objectification of the bodies and sexualities of straight, queer and/or transgender women, about the commodification and capitalization of sex in general, about how sex work can/may play a part in keeping the wage gap as wide as it is, about the ever-more-pervasive amounts of violence conflated with sex, about how scripting sex to death can inhibit a satisfying sex life and so forth.

And about how it’s being processed by younger people, and what effect it is having on their sexual lives, sexual identities, relationships and sexual esteem. It wigs me out that almost daily, I talk to girls with ongoing or possible infections who, for the love of Pete, have GOT to get their butts into a gynecologist but who are often completely mortified by the idea of showing a doctor their genitals or having a doctor touch them; or who steadfastly state there is no WAY they can masturbate in front of a partner (or alone), ask them to use lubricant when their vaginas are so dry, condoms are tearing, or consider talking about the fact that receptive, satisfying sexual activity that’s also about THEM would be kind of a nice thing.

These are often the same young women who are NOT at all reticent to engage in scripted bisexual performances at a party, or have some guy’s penis in their mouth unprotected who they’ve only dated for a couple of weeks, or consider breast implants or labiaplasty, or learn pole dancing or play little french maid or let a partner tie them up.

It’s these kinds of huge divides and mismatches that confound my mind. Okay, so they don’t confound my mind, I’m a constant observer, a complusive reader and an analytical thinker: I get why they’re there. But I don’t know the magic trick to help them bridge these gaps. I’m not even sure that’s possible at this juncture, because that same divide exists in culture-at-large, not just with them.

But many of MY concerns about pornography, and the concerns of young women the same age or younger than the GGW girls, are usually very different, and that’s another bridge I’m not sure how to cross. Effectively, some of what I am seeing is that their concerns are much more like my mother’s concerns were back when about Ms. Winger and her breasts. That they’re about control — control of partners, control of self — ownership/possession of a partner’s sexuality (which often it seems like they want/claim greater ownership of than their own sexuality — though I think body image issues come into play here; I’m always amazed that older people freaking out about young women giving blow jobs and not getting back don’t bear in mind that giving a blow job means you don’t have to get naked or have a partner see your genitals), and about feeling like their limits and boundaries are or must somehow be dictated by media. (And as one reader observed in the previous big entry on this, I’d posit that levels of intelligence and education and economics come into play here: let’s be frank and accept that there are a LOT of people out there, especially younger people, who do not have the critical thinking skills or self-posession to NOT have limits, boundaries and ideals separate from media mandates.)

They’re not concerned about women being exploited in porn: not because they don’t think they are, but because many of them feel those women DESERVE to be exploited. They not only often do not care about those women, they despise them: they are their enemy. To them, those women are sluts, slags, whores, throwaways. This is one attitude that scares the holy hell out of me.

They don’t seem concerned about the inauthenticness of pornography and what effects that may have because — it often seems — they don’t SEE any inauthenticness, save in the physical appereance of the actresses. This scares me, too, because while it’s a given that there is no one sexuality for all of us, nor any one way we enact that sexuality, so I think we can safely agree that for some people, with some porn, there are levels of authenticity that match, there is also clear and obvious gendernormativity and heteronormativity in most porn, even when you run the gamut, that very much does not represent the incredible diversity that exists in human sexuality, especially when we’re talking about women’s sexuality, and that also includes that of lesbian, bisexual and genderqueer women.

(And obviously, most aren’t concerned about issues like how it may effect women and economics because that’s just outside most of their life experience at this point. Expecting those sorts of concerns in women college-age and younger just strikes me as an unreasonable expectation. I was paying my own bills at 16: they aren’t.)

Because I still want to think and talk more on this, I don’t feel the need to tie this up right now with any sort of conclusion or shiny red bow, so I’ll head off to more book work for now and see where this takes us. Again, I’m really digging the CR going on, so please, by all means, discuss!

posted in Heather Corinna, feminism, pornography | permalink | comments (10) »

I seem to be unable to get anything else done today because of endless ruminating on this issue and how to deal with it. Even a very productive hour-long talk about this with Seska hasn’t exorcised it enough to let me do other work (Seska, with Cheryl, is often my go-to gal when I want to fiddle with theory and approach when it comes to issues about pornography, because she’s one of the few people I know who isn’t really polarized about the issue despite personal investment and very strong personal feelings: it’s very tiresome for me that so many people in general tend to be so unable to put their personal agendas aside when it comes to discussing the matter in a more general way). So, I’m going to leave this open as a sort of running notebook today where I can bring it and toss thoughts on it as they distract me.

Yeah, one full paragraph later, I’ll actually fill you in on what the topic at hand IS.

Apparently, Strunk and White are on vacation today. I hope they’re having a lovely holiday.

The issue is pornography, the culture of pornography, and some of the effects I’ve been seeing both having on some of the generation I work with at Scarleteen, namely, the first batch of folks in the world who have grown up with it as a pervasive, all-access given from day one of their lives onward.

Back when, in the middle of writing the book, I did a big batch of surveys of teens and young adults about sexuality in general and their experiences with it. At that point, we’d had enough discussion about it at Scarleteen that I had a pretty good idea about the different places this generation stood with it, but I found that in the privacy of the surveys, a surprising number of them — guys and girls alike — were more anti-pornography than I’d have expected. Not really a giant surprise. After all, for a lot of them, even the way they were introduced to porn was some degree of having it pushed in their faces rather than having to search under beds and in the backs of closets for it more electively. In other words, for many of them, they didn’t even get the chance to have a curiousity about it: it was sated before — or without — a need to be.

But I think I’d kind of figured that, if anything, that would have resulted in an apathy, more than anything else. And for some of them, that is the case. In fact, based on what I see at Scarleteen, in other young adult venues and the few studies that address this, and what I found in those surveys, I’d say that the range of response to porn, across the board in this age group (let’s say 14 -22) now is generally apathy/blithe acceptance to disdain/opposition. I don’t tend to see a lot of users that are super-excited, fascinated with or blissed out about porn. They’re either “whatever” about it or pretty negative. Of course, that’s a pretty common range of feeling about a lot of things for teenagers, but ….well, whatever, as the kids say.

Anymore, we get a post nearly identical to this one and the other linked within it maybe once every week or two. Even given our volume, when a pretty specific repeat happens that often, I need to start paying attention and really examine it as best I can. I’d say that posts like these, over the past five years or so, have been cropping up more and more regularly, and they have a lot of common threads among them.

(And per one of the posts in there with the young woman who advises just making porn for a partner instead, yes, we get that a whole lot, too, which, as I said there, is obviously pretty disturbing. Even when you set aside the legal climate we live in which makes that SO volatile and dangerous for them, and when you set aside the fact that so many of them have a hard time envisioning their utter lack of privacy in this respect and where this stuff can go long-term, there are still some elements of this that are troubling. But that’s a topic for another day, or a little later here.)

This is sticky for me. See, I can’t just apply whatever my personal opinions about pornography in theory and practice (which, when it comes to my opinion, are two pretty different arenas) are. I had the same conundrum when it came to the part of the book that addresses porn. I have to do what I can to hear what their needs and experiences are, and put those first, and think much more broadly. Certainly, there is room for some of my personal feelings, but I have to work to not make them paramount or be too influenced by them, which is, of course, always a challenge. I’d say that the approach I took in the book, as well as in interactions like this, was slightly more porn-critical than I personally feel, because given what needs they express, and what the pervasive messages they most often get are — in short, either a puritanical approach that’s just tantamount to nudity-and-sex-are-evil, or the opposite tack, oh-relax-you-big-prude-and-kiss-that-other-girl-for-my-personal-entertainment-already — it seemed like the only appropriate road to take to really do my job in serving them.

In part, that’s because my personal opinions and experiences with this are just not that relevant.

These young folks aren’t me. (Would that they were: it’d be so much easier to apply what were my easy fixes in my teen years and just tell them all to go out to a club, jump up and down all night in big stompy boots, drop a dose or smoke a bowl, take a long hike, and have some really fun, mutually-beneficial sex in the cemetary.) Their experiences have been different than mine, their relationships and the context they engage in them in is different than mine is or ever was. Really, the older I get, the more I feel like it seems that the appraaches to porn someone like me takes — who has SO much context and information to process it in, who has such a vast array of relationship, emotional and intellectual experience, who is and always has been so outside the box of mainstreaming in so many ways, including in relationship and gender models and approaches, and also, who grew up reared so clearly to question mandates and the lot — is of limited use to the vast majority of the populace. In all truth, years back when I first started working doing sexuality advice, I think I brought way too much of my own opinion to the table, and was a lot more cavalier with women who’d ask the sort of things these young women are than I should have been, merely because I couldn’t really get that where they were and where I was were two very different places.

But alas, you live, you work, you learn, and hopfully, over time, you get better at it all.

There’s so, so much to touch on with what I’m seeing in these kinds of queries. One of the tough bits for me is that I, personally, can understand (and to a large degree, agree with) objections to pornography in practice (rather than theory) when we’re talking about aspects of the industry, about porn under capitalism, about exploitation, about some of the cultural messages a lot of it sends, about women, specifically, but also about sexuality and sexual partnership in general. I can also understand, in some respect, concerns about porn per barriers it might present and sometimes does to intimacy.

But when the objections aren’t about that, but are about insecurity, body image; about feeling porn is a threat to idealized monogamy or a sort of sexual ownership or control, while I can intellectually wrap my head around it, those sorts of concerns just don’t resonate with me at all. When adults bring that sort of the stuff to the table, it strikes me as somewhat juvenile, as…I don’t know, emotionally infantile to some degree, but even if those impressions are anything but surface (and they may well be: it even sounds patronizing to me to hear those thoughts in my head), they aren’t applicable when the people I’m serving ARE juvenile or very, very new to sexual and intimate relationships. And when we’re talking control issues, this is of special import to a generation of young women who, from everything I can see, are having a notoriously hard time expressing limits and boundaries, having them respected, or feeling they’ve any right to have them in the first place.

To step towards the more remote before I go to the more obvious, one of the things I’m seeing in situations like this is that pornography — and even masturbation and sexual fantasy, though to a lesser or less potent degree — becomes even more of a sticky wicket among young women (not esxclusively, but mostly) whose sexual fantasy IS absolute monogamy, not just in action, but in thought; not by choice, but because “that’s what love is.” As I addressed in that post, it’s just so foreign to me to think of monogamy as anything but an active choice in which we are choosing to only be with one partner, in person, in a romantic and/or sexual context, and to think of it as anything but an option, rather than an ideal or default. I don’t want to say that I don’t believe these young women who tell me that they never-ever-never think of anyone in a sexual contaxt but their partners…but I really kind of don’t. My impression, instead, is that what they’re actually doing is engaging in an extended fantasy themselves in which they have effectively fantastized a reality into being for themselves. Do you know what I mean?

Related to that, I also keep seeing, again and again, a sexual dynamic in couples like this (and they’re always hetero) in which the sex they are having is SO male-directed, so all about service, about getting off (if they do: plenty don’t, like, ever) on delivering their partner’s every immediate whim to them: in other words, sex which is really porny.

So, what I start to think is that maybe it makes quite a bit of sense that they are so personally threatened by porn — again, nearly all of them object based on how it makes them feel, on their insecurity, rather than to exploitation and the like — if, in fact, the only difference between their sex life and porn is that they don’t look like the actors in it; if they behave like them, sexually interact like them, but can’t match their appearance.

Yet again, if these things are so — and I’m inclined to believe they are a lot of the time based on what’s being discussed and reported — then I have a personal disconnect. The idea of a sex life that resembles what’s often represented in mainstream porn is either totally laughable to me or just plain sad, depending on my mood and the type of porn we’re actually talking about. The idea that the people or activity we see in porn is any sort of ideal just confounds my mind: of course, I wasn’t reared with the idea that that was an ideal, and I’m inclined to think that not ever being heterosexual or gendernormative might make a difference, too. (Especially since one of the things I had validated for me in other studies I found in researching the book was that for this generation has much stricter ideas about gender and gender roles than the one previous, believe it or not.) I don’t even think there is a disparity between me and them: I think it’s a generational difference, all around.

It’s such a huge bummer that there really isn’t much study yet on this particular generation’s issues with pornography: I really don’t like flying solo in this respect.

That said, I’m going to stop here for today, with designs on picking it up a couple more times over the next few entries.

I’d be very, very interested in discussion in the comments on this, especially from readers with kids or who work with teens or college-age students (or who ARE college-age students themselves). It’s very easy for me sometimes given the massive volume of Scarleteen users to forget that when we’re not talking about users who just hang out there that I’m often seeing users in some form of crisis, which does color things somewhat per making generalizations. Sure, I read up elsewhere, because I’m well-aware of the risks of myopia, but there’s never a danger of hearing too many perspectives.

(Just be cool and calm about it, eh? I feel silly even asking that, because overall, I’ve almost always seemed to have a readership better able to handle thsemlves in comments than most I see out and about, but no harm in tossing a reminder out there with a provocative topic.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, feminism, pornography | permalink | comments (25) »

Six days until deadline.

Amazingly, I think I’m going to make it — maybe even early — which is shocking as hell, even to manic, workaholic me, because it’ll mean that in less than two months, my editor and I edited and completed around 600 single-sided pages of really in-depth material, all while doing a million other things on the book and our other projects.

(And in case I haven’t said it in a few days? I LOVE her. Love her, love her, love her. I got so lucky.)

Yesterday, I had my game on, big time, from 7 AM until just after midnight, with only a short break. (We needed to go grocery shopping and prepare for my being a shut-in for the next week, since my ass leaving my office chair is highly unlikely. Times like this are the great rarities where it’s unlikely I’ll be eating anything but frozen Amy’s veggie bowls.)

As of yesterday, I was through all but the last two chaps, including updating all of the BC information since the last time this ms. was finished. In a better world, one where women really mattered, that would NOT have been such an easy job: my queendom to have a myriad of new, safe methods to add every time we revise this puppy. But alas.

Today, I finish up yesterday’s work, move the rape and abuse information that was part of one bigger chapter to its own chap (I’m worried about it getting lost, and with the rates of young adult abusive relationships rising as it has been, and rape being as prevalent as ever, I need to assure it’s very visible), move quickly through the STI appendix and then the reproductive options/pregnancy/parenting chap to finish their edits, then start some work on either the summary, acknowledgments and/or the resource list.

Per usual, a lot of really cheesy music from my rollerrink days is buoying me along. Pat Benatar, 10CC, Journey, ELO, Wings and Abba are — whether they know it or not — avid supporters of young adult sex education. I know, because they sing those power ballads JUST for me.

I’m starting to get excited. This has been such a long, long journey, with so many long, hopeless periods, thinking I’d either never find a publisher or a good editor who’d really let me say all that needs be said as plainly and balls-out as I do, who’d get what I do and why it’s so vital, and who’d be of size enough to really get this out there. For various reasons, when my last publishing arrangement — after so much work and so much trouble in making things work between them and me — totally blew up in my face last summer, I didn’t speak to how completely shattered I was. It was such a hard blow, one I really wasn’t prepared for, and I earnestly felt that this was dead in the water. I think I didn’t let myself get 100% excited about this until very recently out of nothing but self-protection: it’s so great to be able to let myself feel that now.

What I’m doing now is not all that different from what I do every day. I’ve seen it on the page before in its various incarnations. But for some reason, only now that I’m nearly at the finish line am I seeing some of it on the page and going, “Holy CRAP, this is really, truly revolutionary stuff they’re letting me say.”

Which is fuckin’ awesome when it’s revolution you aspire to.

(One other favor? I now have pretty much all the consult I need, but I’d really, really like at least one feminist woman with a more second-wave sensibility to look over some parts of the book. My own feminism straddles the waves in — I think — a pretty balanced fashion, but I still always like more eyes, and per looking at aspects of the book from a feminist standpoint, I’ve got third-wavers a’plenty, but I’d really, really like someone more old school to peek at it. I’ve sent out feelers elsewhere per this, but to no avail. Anyone up for it?)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, feminism, s.e.x. | permalink | comments (7) »

I have a list of good news bits today I want to get to later, but since I can’t stop getting all choked up about it, nor stop squealing her name, I just have to say….

Nancy. Pelosi.

And all other sorts of really encouraging political gains for those of us who, you know, actually give a shit about people, their rights, and our collective well-being.

But the idea that some little girl somwhere was able to have the first election she saw involve a woman, winning the third most powerful position in U.S. politics — an unapologetic feminist, no less; such an awesome woman, too, and don’t think it doesn’t get me extra beamy that she’s an Italian-American — has just got me so damn loopy, I cannot stop happydancing and weeping.

P.S. I love Wordpress with the burning passion of a thousand firey suns.

posted in Heather Corinna, Happy!, feminism | permalink | comments (2) »