May 17th, 2000 Sexuality Without Walls | Heather Corinna Whether you know it or not, in the adult internet, the buzzword right now is "for women." For whatever reason, many adult internet producers, and a small throng of independents, have decided that the next new wave of porn consumers will have breasts, overflowing pocketbooks, and an insatiable appetite for naked men. No, I'm not kidding. It's funny, isn't it? It might be anyway, if it weren't so terribly sad. Women -- yippee -- are now being included in being given the same sort of vapid, superficial and substandard material that men have had to put up with and aren't satisfied by. In the words of Woody Allen (or possibly Groucho Marx, who also said, "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it," which fits here as well), "I wouldn't want to belong to any club who would have me as a member." In the last few months, a plethora of new sites sporting a mainstream porn look, with the prototypical language in tow, have been plastering "For Women!" all over their new pages, and moving the "money" shots aside to put beefy, sweaty denizens in their place. Rare minor exceptions (and perhaps brief, fleeing notions that not all women are heterosexual, nor does being so define one as female) going for the lesbian market recycle hetero-male-directed girl-girl photos, and oft employ a shade of lavender so as to demarcate the difference. Is it working? It's tough to say, really, because for the most part, unless they're making millions, most folks in the industry don't like to share their pay stubs, especially if they're participating in the usual shifty practices of trial periods that aren't what they say they are, popup windows of Dr. Seuss proportions, and reusing or purchasing content from the same-old, same-old sources. That aside, as an insider in that industry, I have yet to hear anyone who is ready for a plush retirement based on this new for-women marketing strategy, or see any figures I find anything close to impressive. So fiscally, who knows. But money isn't the most important issue at hand. All of that is pretty standard behavior, and what a consumer has come to (sadly) expect of the industry. We're seeing it outside of the adult industry as well, with channels like Oxygen and others. However, the real question it leaves me with -- and the one I find most interesting -- is this: what is a woman anyway? What can we accomplish when we start to work towards providing sexual material and information for everyone, beyond the money in our wallets, or the fairly meaningless triumph that we, too, are being catered to by being given low-grade material which only touches upon our most infantile sexual identity and desire, and serves to insult more than inspire? It seems simple, doesn't it? But it isn't, really, even when treated as if it were. The approach that we are all easily pigeonholed by being one or the other, male or female, isn't limited to women. Just yesterday, standing in line at the pharmacy, I espied a Cosmopolitan cover (and do they change at all, save which nubile, doubtfully legal model is on the cover?) which promised me ten sexy tips that would drive my man wild. The only thing that distinguished "my" man from any other man that he was "mine." You want to find where men who cringe at the word feminism get that from, don't look at Andrea Dworkin, look at Cosmo. It makes me embarassed to be female. I had a question come in the other day from a young girl who wanted to know "a couple things she could do in public to turn a guy on." She got highly frustrated and upset with me when I told her that I'd have to know the guy in question, and the general dynamics of her relationship pretty intimately to know that. She insisted, nay thundered, that I was holding back information and could just tell her a couple things that women could do to turn on men. It was nearly impossible to explain to her that people weren't pat, and sexual and emotional response had very little to do with gender, race, creed or type, but was as different from one person to another as stars are in the heavens. Of course, she didn't believe me: the messages are everywhere that tell her that people indeed are pat, simple, amoebic creatures. From grocery stores to classrooms, we are all supposed to be somewhat generic in our self-identity, able to easily discern which we are of two options when we hit a public bathroom and have to choose between the fairly shapeless figure in pants, or the one in a dress. It all starts at birth (and more likely, before, when parents wonder if they will have a boy or a girl, and relatives place bets and take sides), where some doctor or another takes a gander at your genitals and (in the movies, anyway) shouts elatedly, "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl, Mrs. Jones!" Thing is, I KNOW I wasn't a girl when I was growing up. Now my sister, she was a g-i-r-l, with a capital G. She played with Barbies, I shaved their heads and put them in nooses in her closet. She liked dresses, I wore overalls. Suffice it to say, on more than one occasion, I, thinking laterally and not figuratively, walked through the bathroom door with the amorphous shape with the pants on. In my life, all the gender stereotypes have hung on a teetering placard upside down. My mother went to work, my father stayed home and home-schooled me. I wanted to be a fireman for a good long while (no, not a fireperson, a fireworker, or a fire attendant, but a fireMAN). I was always the instigator, be it in football, sexual experiment, or getting into trouble. I never spoke softly. I whispered loud. I could have spelled "demurred" on a dime, but not wrapped my brain around the concept. I didn't want to be a Mommy, and my father wanted me to call him Dave. My first girlfriend looked like a boy, and my first boyfriend looked like a girl. My husband likes wearing a skirt, and heck, so do I. The point is, for someone who can often let most things just wash over them, gender stereotypes are just plain silly. In my more sensitive moments, and for those who have far greater challenges in terms of how their appearance and genitalia does or does not coincide with their identity, it can be seriously damaging. In Kimberly Pierce's film, "Boys Don't Cry," Brandon Teena says he/she is having a "gender identity crisis." Really, we all are, we just aren't all that aware of it, or it doesn't appear to pose a real problem, until the day comes when we grow a little, change a little, start to ask some more questions, and get to understand who we are, and how very, very complex a thing that truly is. If we can define ourselves on our own, it is nearly miraculous: to think someone who isn't dwelling in our heads could is patently ridiculous. All of this leads me to the current incarnation of femmerotic. I don't want to make something for men, for women, for pugs or for turtles, and none of the sites within the network do either. Though we are united in many aspects, the single unifying factor among us is that what we are all striving to do is to work from our own experiences, whatever they may be, from our own sense of self and of others, and create material which can empower and enlighten anyone who touches it, whether they like what they touch or not. My own sensibility with sexuality and sexual material is fairly similar to my feelings about my emotional life: if made to choose between feeling and not feeling, the choice is clear, whether I am feeling joy or sorrow. I would rather feel something than nothing, without a doubt. I do not find the grunt, as it were, of sexual material in the world offensive, I find it empty, and that it offers a sexuality that is shallow, vapid and meaningless. I find it does not offer what I know of as sexuality, but some far lesser thing. If most of porn defines sexuality, than people are being ripped off in more ways than one. In my mind, years back when I began working on Scarlet Letters, it seemed to me that what most adult material needed was some feminine sensibility. Here's a hint: I'm not talking about gender, or anatomy, or what the doctor says when you're born. I am talking about an archetype, a quality, something which not only transcends gender, but which transcends human life. In Hindi mythology, Shakti and Shiva, iconical of existence as a whole, are locked in a coital embrace, limbs entwined, forehead to forehead, perfectly balanced. In the most generic terms, Shiva represents the masculine -- energy, strength and linear thinking, and Shakti, the feminine -- nurturing, creativity and circular thinking. Some people find that offensive, but it only is if you misunderstand those archetypes as gender stereotypes, rather than qualities which every living thing has within itself. Looking at history as a whole within the last couple hundred years, we have had a whole lot of masculine energy. That isn't a bad thing, but like any deliicately balanced scale, when one side becomes dominant or overbearing, everything gets out of whack. Check out the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War, nuclear paranoia, or the public education system in this country, and you'll perhaps get a flavor of where I'm going. I very much want for the sexual scale to be a bit more even in terms of what women are getting out of sexuality, and putting into it, and I feel that will benefit absolutely everyone. It is a given that women simply have not had as easy a time with sexuality, given culture as well as anatomy, and Susie Bright recently said it well when she said that "In many years of teaching and talking sex, I have never had a man come up and say, 'I don't know where my penis is and I've never had an orgasm.' " However, I don't think that that is best done by isolating one gender to the cost of another. If it were, we wouldn't have an imbalance to begin with. I feel that the best way to do that is to inform and educate everyone; positively, creatively, and with the love and care human beings should afford one another, even when we don't agree, nor feel we stand on equal ground. Women are not going to benefit from sexual material and information if the partners in whose hands they place their bodies don't have it either, regardless of their gender, nor if they cannot be compassionate, knowledgeable and accepting of their brothers, fathers, husbands, and the masculine aspects of their own psyches. No one can benefit from a sexual spectrum that opens up to them widely, then offers four walls with no windows... no matter what their gender or sexual identity. So, I offer this project up to you, and offer what I intend to be a room with no walls, and plenty of open windows to creep through and hop roof to roof upon in the spirit of adventure. If you read my work elsewhere, you've heard me say what I am about to many times, though perhaps in different words, however I do not think any of us can hear it often enough. Who you are supposed to be is who you are, simply. Your sexuality and your sexual identity was not given to you on a plate at birth, nor is it determined by your anatomy or genetics, or whether you like pants or skirts; like anything else in your life, it is what you make of it, and can be as narrow or as wide as you'd like it to be. I adore the image of Shakti and Shiva wrapped in perfect union inside myself; I strive for that sense of perfect balance. I think were we all to let go of gender stereotype, and separatist, shallow sexuality, we would find it far simpler to see that no one else can determine what is "for" us, nor should they, especially by the size of our bank balance or the shape of our genitalia. Instead, we might get a precious glimpse of the possibility of being engaged -- sensually, sexually, emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually -- with everyone who surrounds us, bringing all the aspects of our being, be they masculine, feminine or otherwise, to every part of our lives. © 2000 Heather Corinna. 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