This post, about this post and some of the comments in it, brought some things up for me this week, so I’m going to unpack  some things.

Through most of my life, the majority of my long-term partners have not been porn users or those who have used porn with any regularity. That’s nothing I purposefully screened for, asked for or did intentionally, it’s just been the way it worked out, which has been pretty surprising to me, since you hear all the time how unlikely that is, particularly if you’re dating men. And yet. To boot, in my own sexual history, it’s been more common for my female sexual partners to be porn users than my male ones.

“Porn user” is a common but weird phrase, mind, and it carries negative implications. So let me be clear: they have not been people who generally or habitually utilized/perused pornography in our sex life or in their own masturbation. With my casual partners, I really couldn’t tell you. It’s something I just don’t know about some of them because it just never came up in the brief hours or days we were schtupping. My sense is that it’s been pretty all over the map.

In general, I’ve never been someone who has a preference when it comes to whether or not a sexual/romantic partner uses pornography. It’s a fluke that most of my long-terms have not been into porn much in the same way that it’s been a bit of a fluke that most of my long-term partners wanted to be monogamous with me: both things I often don’t have any strong preferences about and have a lot of flexibility with.

Mind, I was a written erotica author and publisher for many years, I have and still do work in erotic art and fine art nudes with my photography. More than once, I’ve had staples in my own navel. So, if someone else wanted to be with someone who had little or nothing to do with pornography or erotica, I’d have been a poor choice for them. However, personally, I’ve never really been much of a visual pornography user myself, though. Lord knows I had the chance: for a handful of years, I got sent a lot of porn to review for Scarlet Letters.

My own lack of porn use has not really been about ethical objections so much as the fact that I find most porn either a) grossly comedic (in a bad and not so-bad-it’s-good B-movie kind of way) b) really un-sexy (especially when you bear in mind that I don’t find most cisgender men attractive and I also don’t find myself attracted to femmes) c) full of dynamics, language or approaches that either gross me out or make me depressed or d) downright boring. In other words, so much of it has been either a turn-off or felt so nonsexual to me that I’ve rarely had the chance to even get to the part where I make personal ethical considerations. The visual porn that I actually have found sexy and stimulating has generally been made in such a way that I don’t have ethical issues with it, though I don’t think that’s the big reason why I liked it. I know that Shar and Jackie and Nan made and make their material in a way that works with my ethics, but while that’s a big plus, I think why I like their work has more to do with the content, style and vibe of it all (which yeah, okay is probably also about ethics: clearly compartmentalizing this stuff is only so doable).

I think I’m also influenced by being a visual artist and finding that what I see visually in my head when I fantasize is a lot more interesting, complex and purty to look at than what has been committed to film or video or because it’s possible that some of what I see in my head just isn’t possible with the limitations of those mediums (or the limitations of physics, for that matter).  And when I’m photographing other people, it’s not a sexual experience for me (even if it is for them, which it often isn’t), it’s not really about erotica so much as body image, and when I photograph myself, unless a partner was involved, it’s the same story. Not always, but most of the time.

Written erotica? That’s offered me a lot more, and was something I far more often have found arousing, but I stopped reading erotica for the most part years ago because I just lost interest.  Editing and publishing it for such a long time probably played a part in that. My porn these days, if you can call it that, tends to be things more like cooking or music. Toss a porn vid at me and you’ll probably get a 0 on the Richter scale. Make an ungodly good and beautiful cake or pick just the right batch of tunes and then you get the quivering thighs.  Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’m bloody boring. Who knows. Who cares?

Because I work in sex, I also often feel like I’m probably a bit off-the-grid with any of this stuff.  When sexuality is your job, you’re just in a different mindset with all of this in my experience, than people are for whom it isn’t or has never been work. I see and hear enough about sex all day, and often not things that are sexy either, that when it comes time for sex I just want the physical contact, pronto. I want to get right to it.  Perhaps impatience is part of all this for me, too. I’m not often an “I need to be finessed” type: I’m more a “Stop fucking around and get on with it!” gal.

Anyway, on the whole, I don’t know how much difference a partner using or not using pornography has really made in the vast majority of my relationships. I’m inclined to say little to none, in either direction.

Of course, I also find it tough to even define that criteria. For instance, one longtime partner of mine didn’t have any purchased porn of any kind (and this was pre-internet), but often, as an illustrator, illustrated erotic images were something we sometimes made part of our sex life or our general sexual consciousness: that’s porn. And like I said, some of the art I made has been about erotic experiences, even though the arousing part for me was the-making-of (and the sex that often continued after) rather than looking at anything later.  But then, I’m also a process-not-product person in most things.

The one way issues have come up that have been problematic for me hasn’t been about porn or no-porn, but about attitudes around or about porn.

In other words, the one time a partner’s porn use really was a problem for me was when that person’s attitudes about the people in porn framed them as less-than-human, as commodities, objectified them in a way that I just wasn’t comfortable with. And sometimes those attitudes bled over into our sex life, particularly if that pornography had been used very recently. I did put a kibbosh in that relationship on having porn be used as foreplay (either with me or alone) in our sex life because when it was, I did experience a bleed-over of those dynamics in our sex that created a dynamic I really wasn’t comfortable with, and made me feel like I was in some way also kind of nonconsensually being made part of the sexual dehumanizing of someone else.  And that’s neither okay with me nor was it sexy to me: it was a really big turn-off.

If someone wants to bring sexual fantasy of someone else into sex with me, I’m totally down with that (and as someone who has enjoyed sex with more than one partner at a time far more than once, that’s a goodie for me, and plays a part in my own sexual fantasy life a’plenty), but not if that fantasy involves framing others as products or goods, not people. Mind you, I would never have asked that partner to change their porn use that had nothing to do with me and that I walked into the relationship knowing about, even if I didn’t know some of the flavor of it. And setting that limit with it did seem to put an end to the dynamic I experienced coming into our bed sometimes.

I’ve also not done very well with sexual partners who don’t use porn and have strongly negative or objectivist attitudes about people in porn or sex work. I don’t know how much that really impacted my sex life with those folks, but it certainly impacted the relationship as a whole, mostly due to my own history, to the fact that some of my friends are “those people,” and the fact that I just don’t connect well with people who hate on other people as a whole, or who feel very insecure about their sexual selves.

I’ll be honest and also say that — in my experience, which isn’t to  say jack about anyone else’s — with my partnerships, when I think hard and try and find any differences, I’ve found my partners who are not big with the porn tend to be a bit more imaginative, full-sensory oriented lovers who I experience as a bit more tuned-in to the present sexual moment. There have been exceptions, but on the whole, for me, that’s one commonality I’ve found, though it usually hasn’t been a chasm of difference, but something more often more subtle. That personal experience may well bear no reflection on regular porn users as a whole, and I don’t know of any broad, credible study that has been done with that kind of criteria to make any kind of statement on if that holds true for others or most people or not. In my experience, partners who are not frequent users of very mainstream porn also tend to bring a bit less of some porny conventions or norms to the sexual table.  Given how gendernormative and heteronormative most porn is, so much of the attitudes there just don’t fit me or what I want in a sex life that’s rally about me or the kind of people I partner with.

I’m also not a fan of things being secreted away, so if and when I have had a partner (which has been rare rare) who came into the relationship with a pre-existing pattern of being very sneaky and secretive about porn or masturbation, that also hasn’t worked out for me. I wound up feeling like I was living in my Irish-Catholic grandmother’s house, which was not at all sexy and deeply unpleasant.  I just don’t do sex-sneaky of any variety or find that jibes with my sexual ethos or the kind of vibe around sex I want and need.  Unfortunately, I also don’t find that simply saying “Hey, you don’t have to hide that, in fact, I’d really prefer you didn’t, it’s no biggie,” fixes it.  Same goes with expressing that we can make room for privacy without anyone having to hide things.  Most people have learned those kinds of patterns in childhood and they’re often pretty darn cemented by adulthood (and sometimes the hiding and sneaking is part of the allure: you take that out, and you take the excitement out for them).

People who really need or want porn during partnersex also hasn’t worked for me. But that’s mostly about the fact that I don’t dig TV or computer screens being in my sexual or relaxation spaces in general. Having a monster TV screen nearby (even in my house at all, frankly) is a total buzzkill for my own libido. Plus, I don’t have any interest in acting out most porn scenarios, since most of them bore the living crap out of me. Watching women fake orgasm also just reminds me of the depressing parts of my day job.

So, all that said, how do I feel about what the pattern has turned out to be?  I really think I’d be copacetic either way, honestly, and that what was fine and what wasn’t would be unlikely to be as simple as porn or no porn.

But here’s the thing: I’m me, and someone else who writes in with an issue like this is someone else.

Even if someone who writes in on this is someone very much like me, I don’t advise people my age or people like me: I advise young people, and they’re almost always very, very different from me.

There’s no one right preference or set of preferences here, and while I feel just fine most of the time having partners who utilize pornography (or don’t) that doesn’t mean everyone else is fine with that. While I have not found that pornography use, on the whole, or a lack of same, has made any huge differences in my relationships or my sex life, not only may that not be true for someone else, anyone else is just as entitled to whatever their process is of finding out what works and doesn’t for them as I have been.  While I haven’t had strong preferences here, that doesn’t mean someone else isn’t entitled to them.

I’m not on board with some of the reasons young people, mainly young women, are uncomfortable with porn. For instance, with a lot of the young hetero women, it often seems to do with them hating on other women and seeing other women as sexual competition instead of as allies.  Something else that seems to loom large is that porn tells the truth about the fact that no, most people, including those who choose to be sexually exclusive with one, are not only attracted to one person. Young people of all genders often really, really want to think that they are the ONLY person a partner or love interest is attracted to, rather than acknowledging that no, that’s rarely so. Even when I gently explain that if they find monogamy to have a value, that value must surely have root in the fact that even though they and their partners are attracted to others they are still choosing to be with but one, that tends to go over their heads and not be what they want to hear.  As well, there clearly is a certain virtue they attach to the idea that only that one person in the world is found attractive, even when I explain that that kind of fully-single minded attraction is actually often pathological and leads to stalking, not love.

If in doubt they idolize this mightily, please reference sales figures for the Twilight books.

But despite the things like this that I’m not okay with, and think they do need to work through in order to feel good about themselves and have healthy relationships,  I don’t see any reason it’s not okay for someone to choose to date or become intimately involved with only partners who do or don’t use porn or based on what they think is going to create a relationship that makes them feel best and works best with who they are and what they want right now.

And this is a particularly big issue since I’m me at almost 40, and most of the people I advise are just starting their sex lives and just starting when it comes to intimate relationships.  They haven’t had the decades-long learning process I have yet, the kind of vast sexual history or even the opportunity yet to have a relatively diverse dating pool to choose from and figure out what their preferences really are.  And a lot of them also — be the constraints internal or external — haven’t had a lot of the kinds of freedoms I have had to explore all of this. Even something as seemingly small as my never having felt pressured in my life, by a partner or culture, TO have a given stance on porn, to look at it or not, to be okay with it or not, is a pretty critical difference.  Young people right now have grown up with a very different environment when it comes to porn than someone my age or older did: young women right now often express feeling very strong pressure to both be okay with porn, to include it in their sex lives or even to create it of themselves for partners.  Young people today also often didn’t find porn after searching high and low for it, led by their own curiosity: many see it accidentally before that curiosity ever happens.

If what any of them need in their process with porn or sexual relationships is to try to only be in environments sans porn, then they get to decide that and find out whatever they learn doing that.  I don’t think telling a young person it’s okay for them to have that criteria is sex-negative, shames anyone who uses or creates porn, or enables a culture of shame. I also don’t think telling a young person they can choose not to enter or stay in relationships where there is porn use is telling them they can or should regulate a partner’s solo sexual behavior (something I unilaterally tell them all the time isn’t okay). More to the point,  I think it’s really vital that all young people hear that they ALWAYS have the right to choose only the kinds of relationships they want based on their own criteria, especially since so many of them (and more female than any other gender) express that they do not feel entitled to that freedom.

* * * * *

Some of my reactivity to this piece and some of the comments is also about this thing that happens all the time when you’re a person who does what I do for a living.

That’s the common assumption that because I said X to this person, my personal sex life must be driving the car.  And often, they’re really not.  In fact, part of doing my job well (which is why sex educators do things like SARs) is doing my level best to be mindful of what my own experiences have been, what my own sexuality is, what my own biases are, and to take them into account, then try and screen them out while still also bringing the person I am to the table so that I can still connect with someone well.  That’s sometimes very hard to do, but I always try.

When I answer people’s questions, what I try and do is put myself into their shoes and their heads as the share the contents with me and suggest what I think seems would be best for them, based on what they are telling me about their values, their wants, their ideals and experiences in their sexuality or sex life. I also have to bear in mind everything I have learned more broadly about this generation in the time I’ve worked with them. I certainly can’t leave myself at the door in that wholesale, and sometimes I feel like my own ideas might help them think a bit differently if it seems the way they’re thinking is problematic for them or limited, but what I say is mostly about them and my estimation of where they’re at.

The assumptions people make in public about my sex life who clearly know zip about my sex life get very tiresome, especially after more than a decade of hearing them.  And it’s adults who usually go there: the young people I work with tend to ask me questions more often than just making assumptions if and when they really want to know what my deal is (and they usually don’t). Same goes for the assumptions adults make who a) don’t work with young people and b) haven’t spent a lot of time working with a lot of young people and their sexuality.  It’s not the same as children and it’s not the same as full-stock adults, and the rare few of us who do this full-time for a long time as our job understand that in a way other people who don’t do not.

Plus, I’d by lyin’ if I didn’t say I always get a hot streak of irritation when I see long written responses to sexuality information and education to/for young adults, so people can take the time to discuss it, and how well they’d do it, amongst their adult pals, but don’t show up to volunteer to actually do the work with young people themselves, something all of us who do could really, really use some extra hands with. Seriously: if you could do it so much better, and feel you know exactly the right thing to say, please send me an email to start volunteering, because I could really use the extra help.

Back to those assumptions. For example, based on some of the angry email I sometimes get from men who resent what I say about female-bodied people and intercourse, it’s common for people to figure that the reason I say that the majority of women can’t orgasm from intercourse so often is because I don’t get off that way, and want to keep other people from doing so in my horrible bitterness about the ways I can’t get off. “You frigid old bitch” is not a phrase which I am unfamiliar with as a greeting in some of these responses.  I get that enough that I’ve even considered signing my correspondence with Heather Corinna, FoB.

The fact of the matter is that I AM someone who can come that way and always have been. I’m a very multi-orgasmic and easily orgasmic person, and I reach orgasm from fucking all the time, always have, be the member-in-question attached to someone’s body with sinew or with straps and D-rings.

But I also know from talking to many, many female-bodied people over many years, from anatomy, and from doing my homework on actual study around this that I am a minority in that: just because that works for me isn’t going to incline me to discount what’s clear for vagina-toting folks as a group.

One of my fave assumptions I get from some conservatives is the idea that because I give information on anal sex, and don’t say it’s icky or gross or dirty or always painful for women, I must be having receptive anal sex nonstop. Possibly TMI, but alas, no. Unfortunately — and I say unfortunately, because ideally I’d like to be able to have every single spot on my body have the potential for pleasure — due to one of my sexual assaults, receptive anal sex is simply not something I can do.  It is physically and emotionally intensely painful and triggering for me, and that seems unlikely to ever change. I very much enjoy providing anal sex and play for partners who dig it, to be sure, but I can’t ever be a catcher.  But again, that doesn’t mean I’m going to project that and state that my experience is everyone’s experience: I know better, and I study more than my own sex life for my work.

The assumptions about Heather and BDSM have always abounded, like that one that I have “condescension and hostility” for sexually submissive women, an interesting theory considering that for a few years in Chicago in the 90’s I was thick in the BDSM scene as a switch. While I moved away from BDSM in my sex life, it had squat to do with…well, not what I think that person seems to assume it did. I moved away from that per my Buddhism and where I was/am at with it, and I also have had some issues with how many BDSM communities present those communities as automatically immune from any abuse occurring there, as if there is any community in the world anyone could say that about.  In the early 2000’s,  I was also overwhelmingly awash in several years of submissive women as friends, friends of friends or anonymous emails coming to me — I really don’t know why– who were unilaterally a hot freaking mess. Either a mess because their partnerships really were not negotiated, because those women were not understanding that being sexually submissive as a woman was an option, not a requirement, or a mess because abuse was going on. I had a very close friend at the time where a BDSM community was knowingly and actively hiding the abuse that had gone on in her very visible relationship to protect the abuser.  My expressing somewhere at the time, which I did, that I still had yet to personally meet a female sub (I have since, by the by) who truly had her shit together was absolutely true for me at the time, and I had been asked for a personal opinion/experience in that post. Then, that was mine. I qualified it, though perhaps not as well as I could have. On the other hand, silence on that may have been my only other best option, since otherwise, I would have had to have lied about what my experiences had been. Maybe silence would have been better: I don’t know. It’s tough to make these kinds of calls, and in a space where I constantly tell people they can tell their truths, I don’t know how I feel about any of mine being somehow totally unacceptable (inappropriate is one thing: unspeakable is so something else).

What Vinnie who commented on Greta’s post first linked to, though, was a post way back when from a user who, likely unbenownst to him (as he probably didn’t take the time to look through her post history), was in a pattern of rotten relationships where she said yes to all kinds of things she later expressed she really didn’t want to, but was basically scared to death to be single or alone. She was in a space where she postured a lot, kind of setting herself up as “the girl who would do anything for love,” to prove she was worthy to herself and to partners. That particular post was her asking about a pretty 24/7 situation that, based on what we knew about her and this guy from her past posts, was not at all likely to be healthy for her, specifically.  While I thought it was possible she was a kinky person in general, this particular scenario wasn’t a good one, particularly in her headspace at the time. I did my best with it, with the knowledge I had at the time personally and professionally, and with what I knew of her to date.

You won’t find that original post now because Vinnie came into the community without any history there and made a reply in it that she felt very uncomfortable with — and in general, often when older adults come out of nowhere to talk to our users they feel understandably uncomfy, especially if they come in with a beef  that’s really more about themselves or me than the teens –  and which led her to finding his journal where he talked about her some more. She asked me to make her post at ST go poof from public eyes because of that and because she was basically being assigned a sexual identity from unknown adults she wasn’t sure was hers, so I did. The idea I had “disdain” for her was bollocks and a clear projection.

In that journal entry of his, Vinnie said, “I think you will not see Heather say [that intercourse poses no issues per consent and gender role pressure] because Heather has had pleasurable and fulfilling heterosex…what I enjoy is what’s good for everybody.”  Yet, I’ve actually had fulfilling all kinds of sex, and have also frequently discussed (including in one of the old posts he linked to) that consent and assumed/assigned gender roles are a potential issue in ALL kinds of sex, those I enjoy or have enjoyed, and those I have not or do not.  This is exactly the skewed root assumption I’m talking about.  That motivation — what I sexually like or don’t myself — doesn’t lead how I advise people.  If what I liked and enjoyed sexually led how I advised people, Scarleteen would be a very, very different place than it is, I assure you. It also very much would not have the broad appeal that it does, and would serve a far smaller portion of the populace, particularly since one of the big things I have never done/been is heterosexual. I’ve been queer since I’ve been sexual. And when it all comes down to it, Heather has had a whole lot of different kinds of sex with a whole lot of different people in her lifetime, and Heather has tended to like the vast majority of that sex, be it kinky or vanilla (not distinctions I use, but other people tend to, so), queer or less-so, genital or otherwise, whatever.  If I have any strong bias in the sexuality work that I do, my bias is that I like sex.

By all means, if I — or any other person giving sexual advice — am not doing my job well, as can happen, but hopefully infrequently — then my own preferences and experiences may wind up being more of the picture than they should be.  Many sex advice columnists and writers are legendarily bad at that, though that’s likely less about sex work specifically and more about the fact that people in general often aren’t so great about awareness and management our their own biases. There is a learning curve here, mind: we all tend to get better the longer we do this when we’re trying to get better.  We all have a process: none of us are born fully-formed from the head of Zeus, after all.

Of course some people will tend to simplify things. A couple years back, I wrote an entry about how I felt like my own efforts in sexuality activism were best made outside of trying to change or make better pornography or erotica, which got translated by a bunch of people into “Heather is totally anti-porn.” Not true (and pretty strange if a person has any idea about the scope of what I do and have done in all my sexuality work), and those making the assumptions didn’t usually engage with me in any way to flat-out ask me that, either.

I’m not saying, for the record, that Greta is making these assumptions. I’d be surprised if she did, even though I do think she misrepresented my response.  I think I was very clear that I did NOT think it was okay to try and “regulate” a partner’s porn use.  Rather, what I said was that anyone gets to make a choice about who they date and get involved with, and if someone, as this user was, felt very uncomfortable with porn, she got to choose to only date people who didn’t use it if she wanted. Mind, I also made some strong suggestions that porn may not even be her issue here at all, as I suspect, when it comes to the heart of the matter, it probably isn’t. But if she wants to find out by only dating folks who don’t use porn, she gets to do that, just like if I only wanted to date other vegans or other Buddhists, I’d get to do that, too.

I was on the fence about whether or not to cross-post this at Scarleteen, but have landed on the best-not-to side. Why? Because, again, one thing I think older people don’t realize is how much pressure is put on young women to be okay with pornography and things like strip clubs. When I did some surveys for S.E.X. years back when I was writing it,  was pretty surprised to see how many young people, of all genders, had some pretty negative feelings about pornography, and how many of them really were strongly anti-porn and felt very strongly unsupported.

Those who felt that way tended to describe feeling pressured to like it when they didn’t.  Because of the respect young people tend to give me, statements I make like I have in this entry can be interpreted by young people, correctly or not, as “Well, if Heather is okay with it, then I should be,” or “Heather says it makes no difference to her, so I must be a prude because it does for me. I want to be more like Heather, so I need to just suck it up.”  They tend to feel similarly about those of us who have had a lot of sexual partners: talking about a big sexual history can make them feel pressured, even if that’s not what we intend. I also really pick and choose carefully when I make statements about my observations around my own sex life, because sound boundaries are important and essential, especially between older people and younger people when talking about sex.

Ultimately, I want them to feel as supported in their own sexual life and ethos as possible, and am always trying to be very mindful per how what I say may or may not really be supportive in whatever their own journey or process is.  That’s the foot I try very hard to lead with.  I think I get better and better at it as the years go by, and I think some of my reactivity to a crit like Greta’s comes from hearing that critique at times when I think I’ve actually done exceptionally well, and had to work very hard to bypass my own experiences and my own feelings in order to address and try to understand hers.

Had it just been my guts talking, my guts would have said that I don’t personally get the big whoop with feeling insecure about porn like she does, especially since porn is so often so freaking dumb, and that while she was 100% entitled to choosing partners who didn’t use it (and on that, Greta and I may actually disagree), I highly doubted porn was her real issue.  But my guts in that regard would not likely have been helpful to her, acknowledged who she is now and where she’s at now, or made her feel at all comforted.  My guts probably would have gotten in the way of her process, and probably would have cemented her negative feelings even more, especially since my guts aren’t her guts, and I’m supposed to be looking mostly at hers, not at mine. My guts usually say, “Eh, porn, whatever.”  But that’s not what hers say to her, and I think someone like her can find ways to have relationships in alignment with her wants that don’t also trample, dismiss or exclude someone else’s.

posted in Heather Corinna, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints, sex/life, pornography, rantapalooza, workworkwork | permalink | comments (11) »

(This one’s for Andrea, who asked. Slight swerve form the ongoing topic, but only barely.)

Why I Stopped Putting All (or most) of My Efforts into Erotica and Decided the Revolution Didn’t Hinge on That, Groovy as That Would Have Been. (I really wanted to work “On My Summer Vacation” into that, but alas, it just wouldn’t happen.)

So, Scarlet Letters has just been sitting for a really long time now. (And I haven’t been able to actually touch it or have it forward elsewhere in part because it was important it stayed as-is during the ACLU/COPA case.) I’ve okayed a couple of reprints on some of my photographic and written erotica, but per the written, I haven’t done anything new or particularly wanted to. With the photography…well, I’ll get to that.

I also haven’t done the constant networking I used to do with other women working in erotica and pornography, in part because there are fewer of them (when we’re really talking women-owned, women-centered, women-directed) than ever. And yes, I know that some younger women think there’s a surge of it online these days, but I assure you, it ain’t nuthin’ compared to what we had going around 2000/2001.

I’ve declined, over the past couple of years, a lot of offers for features/joint projects in the arenas of porn and erotica. I’ve even gotten to the point with features on my photography where if the approach is, at all, to have me presented as a pinup or a babe, it’s just not workable for me.

In a word, I’m outta much of this arena, or, what is generally defined as this arena. How it’s defined and how limited I feel that is an entry or twelve for another day.

Now. There are first some secondary reasons for this.

• Some of the why of this is simply that Scarleteen just took the heck off (ST gets a minimum of twenty times the traffic anything else I ever did did, even during the best years), and because I’m an activist at heart, so when a need expresses itself very loud and clear, that’s where I’m going to go. And that one shouted out way louder than any “needs” anyone ever had for women-centered erotica/porn.

• Another part of why is that set a standard at SL that we would not publish crap. That even if it meant skipping deadlines, or publishing less, that what we did publish needed to be exceptional, original, and of real quality. And as the years went on, we found that we just kept using the same artists and writers again and again because (and any erotica publisher or editor worth their salt, and being honest, will tell you this) the vast majority of what we got in was mediocre at best, and the Worst Shit You Ever Read/Saw at worst. And it gets really, really depressing (or, at a minimum, bloody boring) seeing what even the smarter, more creative eschelons of the populace define as sexy or erotic.

(It’s amazing, really, how sex can make everyone so stupid. Even really good authors and artists sometimes, who rock any other subject, can suddenly turn into the worst hacks on the planet when they tackle sex in their art.)

• USC 2257 didn’t help. While I often prefer suggestion to explicit work, our editorial policy had always been to really look at things artistically, and judge them on that merit, so that included all kinds of work. A big, big deal to me when it came to working in women’s sexuality is, was and has always been that privacy for women is a huge issue. So, the last thing on earth I would do is cooperate in compromising the privacy of female subjects in any photographic work.

• It also stopped paying even its own meager bills. After the first year or so, for a good, what, four years? Something like that… we did pretty well with CPM banner ad contracts for Scarlet. Between 2000 and 2002, for a woman-owned and run business that did not compromise itself in any way, or get into bed with anyone it didn’t want to 100%, I did pretty darn well. Again, at the time, there were enough other people and companies with the same aims, so while finding harmonious adverts wasn’t easy — bear in mind that woman-centered and focused means that 99.9% of the types of ads available to sexuality publications were big fat nos to us, because we didn’t want to have misogyny or male-directed sexuality on the site — but I worked it well enough for a while there. Then there were less of us. Then the bottom dropped out of the web, period. Then there were less still. Then, just not enough to have it be workable at all.

• We could probably have paid more bills — obviously — if both the publication and myself as its editor were willing to play something close to the more acceptable part when it comes to marketing sexuality. If I/we had been willing to talk like porn stars, to have less personal privacy, to hold the poses, always wear the heels and lipstick, “oh baby” somebody, set politics aside, care less about quality and more about quantity, and get seriously into bed with the male-run or driven affiliates and publications. But I wasn’t, and we weren’t. For me, I’d always said when I started doing work in sexual media that if it didn’t feel true to me, I wasn’t going to do it. If it conflicted with my personal/political ethics, I wasn’t going to do it. And if I just plain did not feel 100% okay about something, I wasn’t going to do it. And in time, part of what has happened is that it was that or let Scarlet and most of erotica period sit on the shelf until we could figure out a different way. Those pressures got greater, while at the same time, I began to feel like in some respects, I needed to be more cautious about what I/we were cavalier about, even considering that I was rarely calavier about anything. At this point, even with my own site here, I’ve since accepted that to do what I want to do with writing and art, I have to have zero reliance on the small funds it generates anymore, and NOT try to have it make more money, because pretty much anything that would guarantee better subscription sales would also guarantee lesser creativity and authenticity, and it’s just not worth it for a few hundred extra bucks a month.

I’ve also since worked on accepting that the comfort and security of any one “camp” is a luxury which someone who aspires to be a truthful revolutionary cannot afford.

You just can’t be authentic or nurture authenticity and autonomy in your life and your work when you always have to check in with someone else’s agenda — even if it’s the same as, or similar to, yours. I need room to be critical of any given media or issue, in whatever ways I feel critical and want to express that, and I don’t have enough room if I have to worry about betraying one camp or another.

Which is part of why it’s sitting. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m still thinking about it. I think I know a good way it can go at this point, but I want to do it right, so I’m taking my time.

Those, believe it or not, are but the smaller issues. Here’s the big one, and it’s no happy ending.

Ultimately, this is the conclusion I’ve reached, which of course seems way more obvious in hindsight, as most things do.

Women can’t possibly reclaim pornography — which is an expression of sexuality — before we’ve reclaimed sexuality, period.

That is a logical given. And we have NOT, in my mind, “come a long way, baby.” We’re a long, long way off.

(Before you go there, I don’t think porn/erotica of any type cannot make the same kinds of strides TOWARDS women reclaiming/owning our sexuality the way something can like, say, Hanne’s upcoming book on the cultural history of virginity, the cessation of rape or getting EC freely and easily available to everyone. Entertainment of any type is obviously powerful in many ways, but unless it accomplished aims like that through it as a channel, it’s power — however far its reach may be, and however much it enthralls — is far more limited. Most of what is produced as sexual entertainment, as compared to even mediocre films in every other genre, is what Olson Twins films are to Thirteen.)

While I think we can absolutely take steps, and while I think that some of us can get decently far with this individually (especially women who can have the most distance/respite from the usurpers of their sexuality, individual and collective), I’m afraid I think that at this point, most of what we can do is to provide band-aids until we’re just plain not living under patriarchy anymore. Not just in sex: full-stop.

(While I’m going off like a rocket and probably pissing people off anyway, I may as well say that I’m of the mind right now that anyone who thinks we’re even close to reclaiming or discovering our sexuality is either naive — as I was — delusional, or pretty self-absorbed. The assumption or assertion that a given women’s sexual behaviour must be 100% authentic to her just because she’s female — which oddly, usually also comes from people who will talk a bluew streak about how men are sexually conditioned, something I guess somehow women are immune to? — is as intellectually anorexic as the assumption or assertion that any choice any of us women make is feminist because we’re female.)

That isn’t so say that band-aids aren’t a good or needed thing. Much in the same way that Affirmative Action is a band-aid until (oh, salty optimism abounds) people aren’t racist anymore, I absolutely think all the reclaiming and rediscovering (and in the case of women’s sexuality, so much of it isn’t re-anything so much as trying to really find it for the first time) one can do is a Very Good Thing, and is really, really important. By all means, I think that we and women before us working in this arena have actually made some incredible strides that I wouldn’t ever dream of dismissing or discounting: even if it’s just individually rather than collectively. But even when those strides are made, they still often can’t benefit a great many women — a majority of women — because there isn’t an allowance made for them in their/our lives and world.

I mean, even if we reduce things to a lowest common denominator – okay? — it’s only so useful to know where your clitoris is and what it does if a) you weren’t reared with and/or aren’t still surrounded with a culture, community or relationships that shame the hell out of you (or cut your clit off, or stone you, or rape you) for touching it and/or b) partners who will be all that interested in it beyond figuring it might be a good way to get you to say yes to the sex they want if they pay a minimum of attention to it.

(Some time back, there was this new miracle cream — right here in the states where apparently everyone knows all about the clitoris now and thinks it’s the shit — that came out for women designed to increase arousal, right? It apparently had these totally amazing ingredients that would just drive every woman wild and make her a wailing walrus of love. The instructions explained that for the cream to work, it had to be, I kid you not, “rubbed on the clitoris for ten to twenty minutes.” I don’t think I need to expand on that one, do I?)

Maybe in my case some of it is that focusing primarily on YA sex education feels like I can accomplish this better, since most of my “students” aren’t set in their socio-sexual conditioning or attitudes yet, and if so, certainly not as solidly as people older than them are, just because of the passing of time spent under seige. That makes me feel kind of lousy sometimes, like I abandoned women of my generation or older, but I’m often pragmatic in my activism: above all else, I just want it to be effective.

I got tired of watching people come into this genre anew saying they had the best of intentions, asking for my help, getting it much of the time, and then either jumping ship when it didn’t make them oodles of dough, or selling myself and other women out to net the cash. I got tired of seeing male-owned orgs give their sites a female face or front and saying they were women-run or about women because some male pornographers/venture capitalists figured out that they could benefit off of the backs of women this shiny, new way, while the guys were setting the direction and making the big cash. I got tired of listening to men and women alike talk trash about women in porn or sex work, and either treat them like commodities or speak on their behalf — discussing negatives OR positives about the experiences they haven’t actually had themselves — without invite to do so. I got tired of listening to women outright bullshit about doing things for other women in their porn/erotica when it was so freaking obvious that that was not their concern: it was just popular to say, got you more approval from women, and made it easier to sleep at night.

I am still so goddamn tired of reading comments from men at women’s sites/blogs who work in sex and ID as feminist where the men cannot shut the hell up about what GREAT feminists they are, ever telling a woman who is questioning her feminism or choices not to…

…because their feminism does not challenge these men at all, it benefits them, and only for that reason.

Note to Guys Masquerading as Pro-Feminist Men: it is NOT feminist or pro-feminist to aim to silence the thoughts in a woman’s head. Just sayin.’

I got tired of some of us working so effing hard for so damn little and getting shit from all sides for it. I’ve talked about this before, but it is seriously draining to have porn-people and male culture demonize you because you’re apparently in bed with radical feminists, while radical feminists won’t quit with how in bed you are with the guys. Hell, in high school and college, when everyone accused me of being in bed with absolutely everyone, at least they they were right AND I got to get very well-laid all the time. I got tired of people trying to manipulate me into doing something for their ventures — work they’d sometimes, without informing me, put in a context that was totally abhorrent to me — by playing on how I “owed” something to women, because they knew I actually gave a shit, when they really just wanted to use my name (something which a few people seriously overestimated the power of, big time) to make some cash or feel important.

I got tired of noticing that when I really pushed the envelope, and really did what I felt was challenging, original and outside-the-box (as it were) work when it came to photography, people sometimes got angry with me, and when I did light and fun or…well, let’s be honest, work that was fluff or just fell short of what I’d hoped, people loved it. If I’m really reclaiming — and people really want that — and I’m really expressing my sexuality as a multi-dimensional whole, then when work I do didn’t/doesn’t meet someone’s ideas of what they want to see or are comfortable seeing that should NOT be a conflict. And if — as this has happened — I decide to shoot a series in the shower where I am processing a rape flashback, or share actual sex I am having with the actual latex barriers I use to avoid chlamydia of the throat, or shoot subjects I think are beautiful who don’t fit a certain body ideal, or the sex I have with a girlfriend doesn’t look or sound like girl-on-girl porn people should NOT be sending me angry or whiny letters or cancelling subscriptions if, in fact, they support reclaiming and earnestly exploring women’s sexuality, because ladies and germs, stuff like this is part of that gig.

I got really tired of seeing what I was told was reclaiming which looked so incredibly similar to how men have presented sexuality or women’s sexuality (hate to say it and sound like a straight-girl basher, but when I did see what seemed like successful reclaiming, it nearly always came from dykes. You know, the kind who learned to have sex with each other from each other, rather than from porn).

I’m not immune from that either: some of the reason I shoot and publish a bit less than I used to is that I found even for myself that reclaiming is a lot of work. If I didn’t put a good deal of thought into it, if I rushed it out, if I didn’t try really hard to see/think/feel differently (or make a point of questioning what seemed different on first glance/imagine), if I couldn’t view my own work really critically, I discovered on second glance that even what I thought was my reclaiming sometimes looked quite alarmingly, frustratingly, like rehash. And this even coming from me, who’s done her dyke-time, who seriously could give two shits what men think of her, her body or her sexuality, and who had all kinds of diverse sexual conditioning and counterculture and blah blah blah. You get it.

(I also got tired of feeling so damn bitter all of the time and feeling so alone in it. If you’ve gotten this far into this entry, you may also have some idea of how tired I was of the way I was making some of my friends and colleagues feel when I went on about this stuff.)

Point is, women reclaiming sexuality under patriarchy is exactly akin to people of color reclaiming their culture and identity under white supremacy: you are incredibly limited, at best, in what you can do, and that really is just that.

Not a very hopeful sentiment, I know. And it’s some of why I feel like a real asshole sometimes, and let me tell you why.

I HAD some older feminists almost telling me this almost verbatim when I started working in that arena. I’m stubborn, sure, but generally I really am very good at listening to a wealth of perspectives, and to respecting those of people who have done longer time on this earth than I have. I was never one of those folks who thought that if every woman could have a really good orgasm, the whole world and all of culture would change: I can be daft sometimes, but I’m not THAT daft. But for whatever reason, I really, really, truly thought that not only could we forge some really important cultural changes by getting our sexual expression out there, by all sisters-doin-it-for-themselves-ness when it came to sexual media, I just for the life of me could not wrap my head around the fact that a LOT of other things needed to happen first before we could not only forge those changes, but before we could even do the kind of work that could possibly create them.

Lemme tell you something: eight years of sex advice letters en masse, mostly from hetero women, and sometimes from men, will teach you a thing or two about what state of affairs we’re really in when it comes to this.

I think some of the rift created between myself and some other feminist women years back had to do with two misunderstandings: one theirs, one mine.

• Theirs was that I did not think every other aspect of women’s equality and work for that equality was important (and that some of them just didn’t really get what I was trying to do, or didn’t think my efforts were especially valuable). I did, I always have: it’s just that I earnestly thought — and given the caveats above, still think to a degree — that women’s sexual equality and identity was ALSO important, and that I could do the most effective work there, and make real strides doing that.

• Mine was that I thought I/we could do a lot more in that arena than I now think we can, and also that what some of them were trying to tell me — that I couldn’t hear — was that making changes in those other areas of equity was ALSO work for sexual autonomy and ownership; that it’s a lot more likely for larger, more tangible, basic changes to create improvements in women’s sexuality and the room all of sexuality makes for it than the other way around.

I think that is most likely correct. (And, of course, that hardly means you can’t still have your orgasms while you’re doing that other work.)

None of this is to say I plan to stop the work that I’m doing right now and have been for the last few years. I think that everything I do right now is important, and I’m feeling very good about the new projects — like the AGA — which I’ve added to the roster in the last year. I think my direction right now is a bit more sound and well-rounded than it was at other times. But that also means that I have to be careful about easy distractions and careful about not undoing my own work with other work.

It means that all of the work I do in sexuality, women’s sexuality and feminism is a lot harder than I’d like, hurts my brain and heart a lot more, and demands a LOT more of me. It means that I have to come at this stuff from both angles: I have to find ways to work on the sexuality aspects while also still working on the bigger context our sexuality lives within. I have to remind myself incessantly that if any of this seems like a no-brainer, it’s probably just me being lazy or wanting to take the easy way out.

But, more challenging as that is, it feels better to me. It feels more right, it feels more productive, it feels more truthful.

That’s probably more than you wanted to know, Andrea, and others of you who have asked over the last year or so, and likely way more than anyone who didn’t ask me about it wanted to know, but there it is: ashamedly, that’s the short version. Would that it were the streamlined one. Per usual, when there aren’t easy answers, there are rarely easy explanations, either.

P.S. For the Greek/Latin scholars out there, or other words of wordsmiths, I still need a word to replace pornography to better describe what I aim for in visual work: I need a word for sex and women, and I need a word which describes not visual entertainment or the intent to create arousal, but visual art/exploration of sexuality and women.

posted in Heather Corinna, soapbox, feminism, sex/life, pornography | permalink | comments (26) »

Okay. Back to these thoughts and discussions. It’s mostly a day-off for me, but like any irritating intellectual, it’s actually quite relaxing for me to have the time to just kick back and work things out in my brain; ruminate a bit without time constraints.

I’m really glad we’ve been having the discussions, because they’re really helping to diversify and clarify my thoughts on the matter. (And by “the matter,” I don’t mean the overaching and huge issue or pornography, which I always vex people on all “sides” of the debate with by making clear that many years of thinking of it in passing, and many years of thinking on it, having experiences around it in a very concentrated matter still are not enough for me yet to feel sound in making any sort of broad prescriptions or conscriptions. By “the matter” I mean the specific issue of the conflict porn is posing for a lot of the young people at Scarleteen in their relationships.)

I am in agreement with many of the readers who have brought their thoughts to the table thus far in terms of the fact that it may well be self-esteem and sexual/interpersonal passivity that is the bigger issue here: bigger even than the porn, and I feel comfortable saying it’s a direr issue, period. Far more young women are at risk of dangers and inequities due to passivity or lack of self-esteem that profoundly limit or endanger the qualitiy of their lives than what dangers porn can pose, even to workers, and that’s interrelated, anyway. If we have scores and scores of young women with low or no self-esteem, who are more and more passive, those women are also in greater danger of being exploited in or via porn or ANY arena. Even if there was no more pornography whatsoever, no porn culture whatsoever, those women would still be greatly endangered.

This morning, one of my volunteers in one of those recent posts said something to one of the posters that resolanted with me, about porn triggering her body image issues. That very much helped me connect emotionally to the matter, because while I have not had body image issues triggered (my own body image issues are often more about concerns about my body working properly or optimaly than how it looks), I have had rape and abuse issues triggered. Spam email is actually my undoing sometimes.

Imagine, if you will, being a rape and abuse survivior. You wake up, toss some water on your face, take the dog out while the coffee brews. You grab a hot steamy cup, sit down in your office and open your email to see what’s on your plate for the day. And you are greeted (I’m not going to trigger anyone myself here, so I’ll be vague) with a line of language that is textbook abuser-speak, or which alludes to some from of sexual violence against women or girls. So, there you are, in what you presume to be the safety of your home, just going to do your work, and you get the panic attacks, the sick feeling in your stomach, the elevated breathing, that reminder of fear. More than once, I have hit upon a piece of spam whose language or approach managed to be so triggering and specific that it’s seriously ruined my whole day and made getting back to work a profound challenge.

Actually, over the years I have earnestly wondered if there was any sort of class-action suit which could be organized and won on this situation. If I don’t ask for these things to be sent for me, and the commentary — as most porn spam is — is written in such a way as to also be directed at me, and the content is what it is, is it not sexual harassment? By my way of thinking and my undertstanding of the harassment laws, it absolutely is. The beauty of a case like that is that you’d wind up connecting women who on very few issues could connect: a lot of right-wing women and left-wing women alike would be right there on the same page.

But I digress. And I’m just going to let my mind wander where it is inclined to go here, so please don’t interpret any of what I say as some sort of grand proclomation. Rather, consider these the observations and hypotheses of a given anthropologist, jotting notes for herself to try and make sense of what she’s observing.

The problem with trying to solve this matter when we’ve got low self-esteem, passivity and porn all coming together is that separating any of them completely becomes very problematic and very chicken-and-egg. For sure, we had issues of esteem and passivility in women before the great swell of pornography and the mainstreaming of some of it into culture. However, a great lot of that passivity and lack of esteem was both culturally and politically enforced, still. A lot of intentional pornography, in many respects, is just one more cultural enforcement or reinforcement of many.

If we have a partner who we know has triggers due to rape or abuse, or due to an eating disorder or self-image disorder, we’re going to do our level best NOT to trip those triggers, right? And if we’re not up to adding those extra cautions and considerations in our lives, then we’re going to elect not to choose or be with partners who need them. If we ARE that partner, then we should be actively choosing ONLY partners who ARE able to make those considerations, or whose behaviours and nature are such that they’re already a good fit. That isn’t, for the record, about any abuse, assault or disability being our fault: it’s about the fact that it’s still up to us to choose to be in relationships that are best for us, healthiest for us, even if it’s a shitty situation that what someone else did to us makes us have to even need to have these things be issues.

That said, what do we do when we have a growing population of young women who have low self-esteem and are inclined (as well as in some regards, encouraged) to passivity, and a generation of young men (when we’re talking opposite sex relationships, which is the only context in which these conflicts have appeared thus far at ST) whose sexual upbringing/conditioning, habits and choices in some aspects of sexual behaviour not only trip those triggers, but also sometimes sexualize and/or celebrate tripping them?

Too, what about the development — or continuance, let’s be smart and sound and acknowledge that in many respects, porn right now hasn’t really added any new, lousy elements to the mix, it’s just magnified them and made some of them more pervasive/obvious — of a culture as a whole, and one which, per still being dominated by men is in some respects, most directive to them, that celebrates and/or sexualizes tripping those triggers?

What about the fact that a great, great portion of the populace’s sexuality is still so juvenile (and I don’t mean that as a snark, I’m speaking developmentally) as to have taboo doing the most driving at the sexual wheel? When what’s arousing or sexually exciting is still what’s bad/naughty/conflict-based, isn’t it perhaps obvious that — especially with women over the last 100 years slowly making more gains towards equality — a profound taboo at play is going to be things like a stronghold on the age-old whore/madonna motif, keeping women off balance, having some degree of ownership of women (regardless of what is shown in a given piece of pornography, there is also a certain ownership/possession involved when one collects porn, and/or can simply view/sexually involve themselves with a woman how and when they want to based 100% on them, and not the woman), reducing women to less than they are, encourging passivity when it has become more of a choice than a mandate? (And for some women, the taboo is theirs as well, if and when they elect to play/play into that?)

* * *
I was optimistic in thinking this would be but three entries. If y’all don’t mind the focus on this for a bit more right now, I’m going to save some additional thoughts and questions I have at this point for a little bit later today.

I may have even spun myself off up there in a direction that isn’t productive or sound, but I don’t think so (especially since it’s also brought me to some other thoughts I know are productive which I’ll share some time after I make a nice fire, make some breakfast, do a phone interview and get a nice, long walk in). Need more time to mull it over. Talk!

posted in Heather Corinna, surviving abuse, pornography | permalink | comments (1) »

(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) »

While we’re on the topic (and people are still rocking the comments from the last entry, and I am actually getting more editing/biblio work done today), it occurred to me last night as I laid in bed reading a Starhawk novel and feeling a bit ashamed about it that…

Utopian novels are pornography for activists.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually think Starhawk is an incredible woman who is really inspiring and has a great take on…well, everything. And she’s not a bad novelist, not at all: I like her style a lot, and I liked her books a lot. Still do, in spite of myself.

But, in explaining to Mark that while I felt the need for a novel — having over-read work-related stuff and nonfiction lately — I wasn’t in the mood for say, Vonnegut, I summed up why The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury had express appeal as being because “queer crunchy granola ladies try and save the world, have many challenges, but ultimately, succeed due to butt-busting, queer crunchy granola awesomeness.” I can’t fathom that part of the motivation to write utopian novels, and to read them, is not to validate our idealist fantasies.

In other words, my butt-busting, queer, crunchy granola-lady self just needed some activist porn.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, home, pornography | permalink | comments (4) »

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) »