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 (34) »

Okay, I can add the other good news now. Yippee!

1) I got the final okay from my publisher on the phenomenal illustrator I wanted (and who, lucky for me, wanted to do this, too!) for the Scarleteen book. So, three cheers for the insanely talented Molly Crabapple and what I know will be her fantastic, whimsical and gorgeous sexual anatomy, safer sex and birth control illustrations (as well as the illustrated menstrual charting page we’ll do together which I know I’ll henceforth be using)! Dacia, thanks so much for introducing us to each other.

2) And on that note, pre-orders for the book have begun! So, now you can get your little tucases over to Amazon and pre-order the book — S.E.X. (spelling out all you need to know about your sexuality) — pronto, to have it in your hands in the spring!

I’m going to go ahead and give you a schpeal I’ll give again when the actual release happens, and that is this:

If and when you order a copy for yourself or the young adult in your life you adore, I ask you also consider ordering an extra copy to donate that extra copy to your local public, school or university library or your local GLBT youth group, young adult or teen shlter or community center. Getting good, inclusive young adult sex education into the hands of those who need it isn’t so easy, especially for the teens and young adults most at risk, for those who cannot afford to buy books on their own, or who would be in deep shit if their parents found a sex information guide in their bedrooms. If every library and YA community center could have one for teens to use — with the sort of accurate, all-orientation, all-gender, feminist and friendly sex information we’ve always given at Scarleteen — I believe it’d make a substantial difference in our world and theirs.

So, if you’ve the means, please buy two and go deliver that other one to the library of your choice. Thanks much!

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, s.e.x. | permalink | comments (8) »

I wouldn’t call what I had the other night a meltdown. Meltdown equals some sort of crying or wailing and the strong desire to consume a lot of tequila and play Joni Mitchell all night on an out-of-tune piano.

I suppose, despite it sounding flip, what I had was instead a sort of existential crisis.

In a word, I am feeling very concerned about the book. I am not concerned about the edits: those continue to go really well, my editor continues to rock the house, even to the degree of, in places, allowing me to be a bit bolder in some not-so-popular statements which my previous editor would NOT have supported. Even to the degree of sending me a book full of recipes for vegan cupcakes. I am also — so far — not concerned about the marketing issues. When I came into this agreement, I was very firm on some title (nothing cutesy, nothing too woo-woo, salacious or attempting to be outr? or purposefully provocative) and cover (NO photographs, no objectified women/teens, no “token” couple illustrations, given that unless you had ten couples on there, you’d likely be stuck with young, middle-class, white, pretty as the only representation) issues, which my editor backed me in 100%, and she is all kinds of scrappy. You can never control, entirely, the art department and marketing, but I feel pretty confident I’ll be supported in my limits. I’m not even all that concerned about it doing well financially/sales-wise or not: it’d be great if it did well, both for how much I think it’ll benefit the readers, and because making a little money after six years of working it would be swell, but my world will not end if it happens to bomb, especially since at a certain point, I managed to get decently unattached to the idea it’d ever find a publisher ballsy enough to put it out there at all.

None of that stuff or anything like it is my big worry.

My big worry is that I will fuck this up. That what seems dead-on to me misses the mark. That everything I thought I learned from, effectively, millions of Scarleteen readers over the years, and tens of thousands of emailers and board posters, is somehow wrong. That I’m either talking over or under their diverse, collective heads. That it’s too late, in the world where they grew up fed on Girls Gone Wild, cosmetic surgery as a change of clothes, and crappy gender roles that somehow have made a comeback since 1955; where 80% of girls who are sexually assaulted by their partners continue to date them, where the best a lot of these kids feel they have to look forward to with sex is maybe an orgasm and maybe a partner they can have some small measure of trust in, to really do something good for them. That something this one kid needs the most will be the thing I forgot or didn’t have room for. (And I have this new weird niggle where I feel like part of this has to address the teen that was me: like this has to somehow make things better for her in this regard which is… well, it’s a good thing I’m not in therapy right now, because that’s so textbook it’d put a therapist right to sleep.)

That I will blow what really is a unique and amazing opportunity. Few writers with a first solo book know their audience is already alert and listening before their book even gets advance press, let alone hits the shelves. I already have my readership, internationally, in droves. I already have the best targeted marketing possible, and since I built it, I don’t even have to pay for it. More to the point, I already have the trust and faith of my readers.

Which means that they have given me the opportunity to make a profound difference in their lives and in the world, and I am starting to feel profoundly fearful that someone, some way, I will waste that opportunity and not do the very best I can for them, and that their trust has been sorely misplaced.

Okay, it may as well be said, because we all know this about me already. I have a severe heroine complex. I know, I know. I have absolutely put a lot of responsibility for the world on myself, by myself, and while I certainly don’t think it’s up to me to save the world alone — or that I even could, or that absolute physical and emotional sexual health and well-being worldwide could fix all that’s wrong in the world — a lot of the time, I take more responsibility as one person than is probably sane.

But lord gawd, if I didn’t think it could make a really big dent, there’s no way I would have worked in almost nothing BUT sexuality for the last eight years. I mean, sure, I can be a horndog, but not enough of one to work as hard as I have for so little, be as isolated from every camp possible because of it as I have been, and sacrifice some of the vital things in my life I have to do this. I can’t tell you how many times over the last couple months of burning the candle at both ends with this, the ACLU case and then everything else I already do I have sat sighing with a great big miss-on for my Montessori classroom of yore, wistfully wishing I could be giving a simple, totally uncontroversial lesson in math with the red rods instead of explaining other sorts of rods entirely, and with a lot more at stake.

So, here I sit, right? I have this amazing open door. I have the goods, crafted painstakingly for years — years of writing and editing, years of broad, direct field research — and a great person to help me refine them even more and get them out there. And I really do have faith that if it were in any way possible to rear a generation or two with some WAY healthier attitudes and approaches to sex and sexuality, to their bodies, to sex and gender issues, to sexual orientation, to sexual relationships, it WOULD be a truly revolutionary thing, for all of us.

(But especially for them. The longer and longer I do the work I do with them, the more and more it emotionally burdens me and wears me out, the more I really, really want everything to be better for them in this regard. If a genie gave me three wishes, this would be one. Another would probably be for the ability to make my pug immortal. I’ll get back to you on that last one.)

It’s just that, you know, I get sent books on sex that come out for teens. And to say that sparing maybe one exception, to say I’m beyond disappointed most of the time is a substantial understatement. A lot of the time, I just want to throw the book against the wall, whether it’s because of sexism, heterosexism, a total mind/body disconnect, commercialism, a serious lack of respect for the readers and their intelligence, classism, what have you. People usually fuck this up, and that’s not just because some people are stupid. It’s because it is really fucking hard to get this right. Teen sexuality is a big-time sticky wicket, and all the more so in our culture and, from my vantage point, right now, at this point in time.

Given that, and given my various complexes, suffice it to say, I remain unconvinced that I, too, will not muck this up like so many other smart, kindhearted people have before me.

Fuck all, is that terrifying.

And I know, it’s also kind of stupid. I am as much an overachiever as ever, and thus, have in no way scrimped on research, fact-checking, and all the legwork to do this to the best of my ability. I have worked this field in a way I don’t know anyone else has. SO many people — and I’m mostly talking to myself here, to try and convince myself, but feel free to listen in if you want — have now read all or parts of this book in various stages. I have a nice focus group of ST readers on it again this time around. I’ve learned what I have per what to address and how to address it from what THEY have asked me — not what I’ve decided they need to know — and from answering them, en masse, for years. My editor has 100% faith in me. My partner has 100% faith in me, Some friends and colleagues — even some idols — I really respect and know wouldn’t do me the disservice of bullshitting me have 100% faith in me. So do these readers.

Why don’t I?

Wish I knew the answer to that.

I mean, look, I think this is probably healthy. I think anyone who really cared deeply would have this concern, and that anyone who didn’t have it likely doesn’t care as much as they should. I think my being this concerned about this will be one more thing to assure that this IS as great as I hope it can be, and do all I think it can do. I think: I also am a little worried that if these concerns escalate or go off course they might have the opposite effect of causing me to have my vision obscured by some sort of self-absorbed obsession with failure or anything less than utter heroism. I mean, I baked a pie the other night that didn’t turn out right by my standards, and despite the fact that I have anything even approaching a cooking blunder maybe once every year or two, I was totally annoyed with myself and apologizing left and right to everyone who just happened to be trying to enjoy my pumpkin-flavored self-assigned disaster.

Ai carumba. This? Right now? I didn’t need. I shouldn’t be surprised: I have an awful lot all coming together at once, and on the heels of some big changes for me, including living clear across the country and that Love of One’s Life thang kicking my rump in the (best, but) most alarming way. I’ve been so overcommitted and overworked that I haven’t been able to have any time at all to do any artwork. It should come as no great shock to me that with a project like this, all of my various complexes about responsibility, accountability, caretaking, adolescence, working-enough-to-be-found-worthy and overachieving would come to a big, puss-filled head.

I have the psychological equivalent of the world’s biggest zit, right on the tip of my nose, on the eve of the most important date of my life.

Isn’t that fitting.

(Other comments for this from the original html copy live here.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism | permalink | comments (0) »