Everyone else is doing it... right?

Now someone, somewhere, thinks it's
normal to slut-shame a steak.

Rowdy and I watched porn together last night.  Because Rowdy is a gentle soul in ways I am not, I tend to watch hardcore kinky porn and he tends to watch porn of real couples having sweet lovey sex.  We were watching his porn.

The woman in the video had sex the way I do.  When she was on top, she didn't pump her whole body up and down, she just moved her hips rhythmically.  And she didn't stay on top forever going poundpoundpound like a champ; she did it for a few minutes and then switched positions.  I think that's the first time I've seen a woman in porn do that.

The part that blew my mind: the guy in the video was way into that.  And Rowdy was way into that. And it was in porn, which gave it the official stamp of People Think This Is A Sexy Thing.  I was astonished, because I always thought wiggling my hips on top meant I was incompetent at sex.  I thought you were supposed to bounce full-length on a guy until he came, and since my thigh muscles can't do that, I thought I was too weak to do me-on-top sex correctly.  It was amazing to see people accepting a less athletic method as a totally valid, hot way to have sex.  Hell, it was amazing just to find out that I wasn't the only person on Earth who has sex that way.

It was also amazing, although it probably shouldn't have been, to voice these thoughts to Rowdy and have him reply basically "you think there's a wrong way to ride my dick? and you've been doing it less because of this?" *facepalm* (He was more polite than that.)  A few minutes later, we were having delightful sex with considerably better understanding of each other.



The point of this story is not "if you see something in porn then it's good sex."  Oh god no.  The point is that it's easy-- especially in areas as private and emotionally loaded as sex--to have a totally skewed idea of what everyone else is doing, and to try to conform to that skewed idea.  (Not that conformity is a great thing.  But being able to make realistic comparisons to others, then decide whether you want to emulate them or not, is still useful.)




And I'm probably going to make a whole post about this so I won't belabor the point right now, but this is why feminists care about media and memes that normalize rape.  (Or that stigmatize the words "rape" and "rapist," but enthusiastically normalize the act of forcing sex on people, as long as you don't call it that.)  Because it tells people that rape  is normal, that it's a popular and accepted way to express romance and/or dominance, and we can't assume that everyone absorbing this culture knows "of course that's not how it really works."



It's easy to look around your little corner of the world, and the bits of patchy evidence you get from other places, and think that you know how the world is.  It's easy to conclude on the most threadbare evidence that you're hideously abnormal or that the suffering you're enduring or causing is normal.  The ultimate solution to this is to transcend "normal" and replace it with "good."  But the proximate solution is to be conscious and careful of what we normalize.

Being imperfect is normal.  Being miserable is not.  Being a predator is not.  As long as "normal" is a thing that people care about, we need to get this news out.

The problem with porn.

Porn could be so good. It could be so simple. There's lots of sexy people in this world having hot sex just for the fun of it. Find some people who already do hot things together, pay them to sign model releases, and point a camera at them. Hooray, you've made porn!

Unfortunately, most porn doesn't seem to work this way. I think the fundamental problem with porn is that it didn't evolve out of the sex world, but out of the film world. As a result, porn producers generally cast performers as individuals rather than as couples (or groups), and they contrive scenarios rather than capturing scenarios that already happen. I've seen porn casting calls; they ask if you're willing to have anal sex, not if you enjoy anal sex. (For a variety of reasons, 98% of them fucked up, anal pays more.) Most porn seems to be desperately--often unsuccessfully--attempting to manufacture sexiness when there's so much sexiness in the world already.

I don't think it's inherently wrong to pay someone to have sex, but when pay is the only reason they're agreeing to the sex, a can of worms pops open. And it only gets wormier when there's a stigma attached that performing in porn marks someone for life as... um, a porn performer, but for some reason that's icky and bad. I'm not going to claim that all porn performers are drug addicts or trafficked women or whatever--for some of them it's conscious iconoclasm and for many more it's just a job--but they're definitely at risk of financial exploitation and sexual coercion. I'm not ready to declare that conventionally made porn is always wrong, but it's... wormy.

And frankly, it's often just ugly. When people are having sex that doesn't turn them on with partners whom they're not attracted to, it shows. Not only is it no fun to watch, but it's the worst role model imaginable. When you watch porn and you're not experienced in real sex, it's easy to come away with the impression that sex isn't supposed to feel good, that hollow moans and joyless pounding are how normal people do it.

The last time I had sex with Rowdy, he pulled my hair, bit me hard enough to leave a bruise, held me down while he fucked me... and at the end we were kissing and giggling. I wish I could see something like this in porn. What I'd like to see isn't sweet soft sex necessarily, but sex with humanity, sex where people are being rough because they both get off on it.

Some "amateur" porn already fits what I'd like porn to be, and things like RedTube and alt-porn are advancing that as well. Not always as well as I'd like it--the porn producer idea of "amateur porn" often seems to be "amateur women"--but there's definitely real sex getting put on video out there. But you know who really does this well? Comstock Films. What they do isn't just amateur porn but documentary porn, and it's awesome.

I don't think people consume porn like movies. It's a running joke that you don't watch it for the story and you often don't even watch it the whole way though. So why is porn made like movies? If porn doesn't need plots or drama (and based on the few "dramatic" porn films I've seen, it really, really doesn't), then porn doesn't need actors. It just needs fuckers. And people already do that for fun.

Guilty pleasure.

Confession: this guy's stories get me off like nothing else.

It's terrible. His web design is worse than incomptent-some of those letters don't even have any stories, the story links aren't lined up with the titles and descriptions, and I think some of the stories are posted in .doc format. His writing is terrible and the grammar is bad, and the stories almost never have proper endings. And the content is incredibly offensive and misogynistic stories of violent rape.

These stories get me off. I don't even know why. But I read them and masturbate and they just work for me. I hate the writing, hate the guy, am annoyed with myself--and wet as all hell.

I would kind of like to find some replacement erotica with the same themes of protracted struggle and assfucked innocence, only written by a sane person who knows how to craft a story and a webpage and doesn't make me worry that they're a sex offender, but... so far I haven't found one that has quite the same effect on me.

Short iPod post: Free Porn.

An ex-roommate came by and gave me free porn. I'm somewhere between proud and dismayed that it holds no interest for me. I mean, I'll watch it, once I have a computer again, but it really will just be to see if I can get a blog post out of it.

Because... well, it's just people fucking. Whatever, you know? I'm not so jaded that I don't still like to be just fucked myself, but in the absence of any other context or activities it seems pointless.

Actually, come to think of it, I don't like to be just fucked, and the reason has less to do with being jaded and more to do with needing my real-life sex to be based in something more interesting than "hey! These parts interlock!" If I wouldn't want real sex from a random stranger who doesn't have anything interesting about them, why would I want to watch them fuck?

Short iPod post: Appearances.

I was watching some BDSM porn lately where a guy was verbally humiliating a girl as he fucked her. As she started getting up to her "gonnacomegonnacome" faces and noises, he really ramped it up--you're a worthless fucktoy, you're only good for getting fucked, you're just a hole for me to use.

And all I could think was "aw, what a sweet guy, he's really doing all he can to make it good for her."

TFIFI: Porn!

To quickly get the "porn vs. erotica" argument out of the way, before we even start: I have never heard any definition of "erotica" that didn't translate to "the porn that I happen to like." (Or worse, soft fuzzy wuzzy vaseline-lens porn that's all about cunnilingus and spooning. Because rough sex is evil and all women hate it.)

So, in a post that is apparently rocking the Internet or whatevers, Twisty Faster vs. Porn. Oh, and also science, a little bit.

The setup: a scienceblogger proposes a mostly-tongue-in-cheek "experiment" in which he watches a shit-ton of porn, then reports whether his view of women has changed. Not really scientific, but as a silly little blog-project, seems unobjectionable to me--he also discusses a lot of more real research on the effects of porn.

Hahaha! An experiment where you have to watch tons of porn! That’s a funny joke! It reminds me of real sexology experiments. Like the ones where subjects are naked and “invasive probes and electrodes” are inserted into their vaginas. Those researchers are, of course, totally objective professionals when it comes to getting grant money to make porn right in their own labs.
It would be better to never study what goes on inside vaginas, and leave them as enigmatic, untouchable mysteries forever. To do otherwise is undoubtedly both sexual and wrong.

Also, everyone doing vagina research must be a straight man, because science is like totally a dude thing, right?

You know, the usual. Pornography is “free speech.” Pornography is only harmful to the user when he is a deviant perv to begin with. Male aggression is associated with buttloads of porn use only in a select few previously-messed-up douchebags. ‘Normal’ porn consumers, i.e. ‘most’ men (fully 98% of all men, apparently, and 80% of all women), are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and brimming with contentment. It’s the kook-and-psychopath minority out there who get all compulsive on your ass, or who act out all rapey, giving well-adjusted exploiters a bad name.
Well... yeah. Exactly. Repeating a valid argument in a snotty voice hasn't counted as a counterargument since fifth grade.

(What I did above was a penetratingly revealing rephrasing, okay? Sssh.)

Goldman cites no research on the effects of pornography on the pornulated women themselves, or of porn culture on women’s status within the sexbot continuum.
This is the great paradox of Twisty Faster: the insistence that women should never be viewed as sexbots, combined with continual annoyance that so many dumb sluts go around being sexbots.

What if--I'm just blue-skyin' here--there was a woman who had been photographed naked but was not a sexbot? What if this woman liked to read old science fiction, grew tomatoes on her balcony, had been photographed naked, was afraid of sharks, and loved the smell of the earth after a summer rain? Is calling her a "pornulated sexbot" really an insult to our culture--or to her?

Second question: does updating "been photographed naked" to "been photographed covered in welts and tears with one man's cock in her ass and another's fingers in her cunt" change a goddamn thing above?

In fact, he seems to suggest that there are but two possible stances on porn. You’re either for it, or you’re for banning it. He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.
Yes. The difference is that the former is possible but ill-advised, and the latter is completely fucking impossible. Because the desire for porn is, essentially, the desire to masturbate. I don't get off if I don't fantasize. Why is borrowing someone else's fantasies different? Certainly porn can be unethically produced and often is, but that's not a fundamental problem--the concept of filming consenting adults fucking and then jerking off to the film seems dandy to me.

Anyway, what the hell kind of revolt is this going to be where people won't masturbate anymore? I know, I know, that's twisting the argument, after the revolution people will masturbate strictly to thoughts of cuddles and frank emotional discussions. (Wait... is cuddling exploitative? Like if the woman is only a cuddle object to you? Problematic.) Or while facing a blank wall.

Like all men who claim to have a bunch of sex-poz feminist BFFs and who consider that access to porn is guaranteed under the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women,
"Claim to?" What am I, chopped liver? Oh, that's right, I'm the wrong sort of woman, thus removing my voice and vote is best for society. FEMINISM!

Hey, another question: what about gay porn? Like, with two dudes? Would two-dudes porn be okay? I can usually get off to that.

And a serious question: is it the specific porn actress that we're worried about being used, or the general idea of women? Because if it's the specific actress, the answer is to only watch ethically made porn where you can be reasonably sure that everyone involved is sober and giving informed consent and not paying off a pimp or something. (Yes, this exists. I think.) And if it's the latter, I feel like Twisty is confusing sexual attraction with use. As long as sex isn't the only way someone interacts with femininity, I frankly enjoy it when it's one of the ways.

Goldman doesn’t appear to grasp that patriarchy — a social order predicated on the oppression of women as a sex class — is actually real, and that as such, ours is a culture of domination wherein the ‘art form’ known as pornography is the graphic representation of rape.
No. It's the graphic representation of sex. There's so much footage of so many different kinds of sex out there in Pornland, that saying "all porn is rape" is equivalent to saying "all sex is rape." At which point there is no such thing as sex, at which point we are no longer on Earth-1218.

There's some back-and-forthing about the comments to someone else's blog that I'm going to skip over because at some point it's just not worth it to metametametametablog everything, but what Twisty considers the money quote is:
Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don’t think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture.
But how does the sex life of a woman become rape if someone takes a picture?

Look. I'm not going to wear myself out defending Max Hardcore and Joe Francis here. Sectors of the porn industry--I'm not sure how dominant those sectors are, but they're not small--are sleazy as fuck and treat women like shit. (There are also producers like NoFauxxx and Pink & White that maintain excellent reputations for operating in above-board and decent fashion.) But let's talk about the very concept of porn here, not the execution. I'm naked right now, as I type this, and I'm kind of playing with a dildo, just idly. (My writing process is very complex.) If I take a picture right now and sell it, am I--necessarily, intrinsically, 100% of the time--getting raped?

And don't tell me that isn't porn, unless you want to explain exactly where the line is. If the answer is "it's porn when it's rape!" that would actually be awesome, because then we can still have lots of videos of people fucking! Whee, we all agree now, let's go home.



Comments next! Oh I do love the comments.


POSTSCRIPT: After I wrote this, I went and jerked off to some porn. (Don't worry, I only use organic free-range artisanal porn.) I'm not trying to be difficult or whatever by mentioning this, I just think it's funny. And now I'm much more relaxed. Ahhh.

Kids and porn.

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iPorn.

So there I was, searching the iTunes App Store for some mindless fiddly-fiddly games to while away the workday, and what's topping the "most downloaded apps" charts?

iPasties - Women wearing pasties!
Pocket Girlfriend - A woman wearing underwear! (And she says "dream girl lol" snippets about loving shopping for tools and hating foreplay, hurrr. I never got the whole "guys hate foreplay" meme, most guys I've been with seemed to be having a pretty good time, perhaps they were all just great actors. Geez, now I'm going to worry.)
Naughty Hotties - Women basically just standing there!
Beautiful Boobs - According to the reviewers, one single picture of a woman and she has clothes on!
Naughty X-Mas Hotties - Women in Santa suits!

Now I've got no problem with boys liking sexy women, I kind of enjoy it when they include me in that category, but there's something missing here, isn't there? So I searched on "sexy men," and to my surprise, there were a few apps listed. Nothing compared to the giant heap of million-download "sexy women" apps, but a few. To my total non-surprise, more than half of them were tagged "gay."

The explanation I usually hear is "oh, women are horny, but they're just not visual." Frequently followed by bemoaning how women never notice them because they don't look like Hugh Jackman. Also, I haven't noticed any sleazy iPod apps where you simulate a deep emotional connection with a sexy man. (Well, there's some Twilight apps. Eurgh.)

And then again. Much as I want to deride this thole thing as sexist and ridiculous, there's an inconvenient fact here--I found the sexy men apps, I noted them for blogging purposes, and then I didn't buy them. I don't collect pictures of sexy men. I don't Google for them. Looking through my computer and my DVDs, you'll find plenty of porn of couples having sex, but not a lot of standalone men. Most pictures of a guy just standing there posing don't appeal to me that much. The other women that I surveyed in a recent intensive five-minute study of my house (n=2) don't really fixate on man candy either. We like our men to look good, yes, but we don't go nuts about them if that's all they do.

So maybe women aren't visual, at least not in the centerfold-admiring way that a lot of men are. I really hate to admit any kind of psychological gender difference, and I can feel my brain already scanning for ways to blame it all on Society, but this one seems to be staring me in the face. And it's wearing a sexy Santa suit.

My First Porn Site.

When I was thirteen years old, my best friend and I started a porn site.

Well, an erotica site; it didn't have photos, but there was a sizeable selection of written and drawn erotic (or more often "erotic") material. It was hosted on GeoCities, and hamfisted in every way--the layout was a mess of big purple text and teenagerish babble, the pages were random collections of anything we thought would be cool, and the content was an unsorted hodgepodge of things we'd made, things stolen from other amateur sites, and things stolen from the free sections of professional porn sites. We had no concept of copyright and would post anything that CTRL-C could grab.

We did have a PayPal account set up and linked to the site, but (fortunately) the technical intricacies of a password-protected paysite were way beyond us and we charged on a "donation" basis, which of course never made us a red cent.

We were both virgins, and I was about to make fun of how this must've affected our writing, but looking back at the old TXT files, honestly, we were pretty damn good at theorizing. Knowing these files were written by thirteen-year-olds makes me feel all dirty. I didn't realize until just now that at age thirteen I knew exactly how buttsex works. (Also, my spelling and grammar were quite good. I'm so proud of little proto-Holly.)

So as fairly young kids my friend and I were so immersed in porn culture that we were not just avid consumers, we were trying in our puppyish way to join the production side. Three questions that come up in retrospect:

1) Where were our parents? Clueless, of course, not because they were negligent but because we were wily like foxes. We knew when and how to sneak computer time and cover our tracks, and "parental control" filters barely slowed us down. Our parents could have disallowed all unmonitored computer use and probably stopped us, but that would have put a considerable enforcement burden on them, and thirteen is probably too old to be so draconian--we used the Internet for legitimate purposes all the time.

2) Were our views of women or sex skewed? Probably not too badly. We looked at a lot of gay male porn, which was fairly equalizing, but also a lot of Japanese and anime straight porn, which was chockfull of humiliation and rape. I think we took it in fairly good humor--we understood the difference between rape fantasies and real violence, and I don't remember ever thinking that real rape was sexy or that humiliation fantasies were literal. Certainly I don't ever remember feeling or expressing any ill will toward the women in porn--hey, they're just actors.

3) Were we harmed? I don't think so. I'm not really sure what kind of harm to check for, honestly. I don't regret anything other than the copyright infringement and the poor web design. If we'd been a little dumber we might've posted pictures of ourselves, and that might have had consequences legally and socially, but I don't think the act of posting self-kiddy-porn would have done much to us psychologically. Even though it was sexual, we were coming at this from a pretty innocent place--we just wanted to entertain and get a little attention--and there was no sense of exploitation or debasement. We were in control of the whole project, after all.



So when people get all panicky about kids under eighteen being exposed to anything remotely sexual, pardon me if my monocle doesn't exactly fly off. Kids getting into sexual situations with older people is a different matter, but kids experiencing sexual material on their own or with peers is as natural as the morning dew and about as hazardous. Hot Coffee, sexting, racy scenes in library books, Janet Jackson's nipple, gay marriage taught in the schools, putting condoms on bananas? Yeah, whatever, I was younger than that when I ran a goddamned porn site.



In fact, the only thing that did get dangerous was a result of society "protecting" us. We could download pictures and text, but this was dial-up-era, and being under 18 we couldn't buy porn videos on our own. We had a friend who was 18, though, and he would buy porn and invite us over to watch it with him. Now that was some sketchy shit.

The Boner Line.

There's a lot of bemoaning the inability of media to include sex without being all weird about it. Books, movies, and TV shows tend to fade to black or to tasteful montage even if it completely clashes with the style. Video games have to be even more circumspect, and even mentioning that sex exists in a game is pretty much a guarantee of scandal or disreputability. For the most part, a creative work is either erotica or totally non-erotic, and there's little integration.

Some of this is societal hangups, there's no question. And some of it is justifiable; a lot of the time, we don't really want to know exactly what fictional characters do in bed, not down to specific body fluids and muscular contractions. But I think some of it is also due to the Boner Line.

Because, I don't know about everyone, but I don't really watch or read porn. I use it. I don't just sit there thinking "yep, that's some sex there all right," I get physically aroused by it and I masturbate. Consequently, about five to ten minutes in I'm not going to want to find out about how the characters' relationship has changed or where their adventures take them next; I'm going to lose all interest and probably want a nap. Or if I'm looking at porn somewhere I can't masturbate, I'm going to feel very awkward about my arousal or have to devote a lot of attention to suppressing it.

There are few questions more awkward than "Should I be masturbating to this?", when I'm watching or reading a work of fiction. It's a significant gearshift. An action scene may feel different than a comic banter scene, but at least neither one physically takes me out of the story.

So I don't think it's sex-negative or buckling under to Moral Guardians to leave sex out of art--while it may be wrong to tap-dance around the very existence of sexuality, if you try to present sex as matter-of-factly as you'd present an intense conversation, you run into the Boner Line. If you don't want to badly distract your audience, you have to do a little tap-dancing. Sex and non-sex can never completely be integrated in art, not while audiences are susceptible to boners.

Speaking of experimenting...

Also, I can fit four fingers in my butt.


It's weird how quickly an act can go from being something I've only heard of, something that's only in the really extreme and nasty porn, to being part of my own life and as natural as a kiss on the cheek. I'm capable of so much (and I don't just mean physically) more than I ever expected and it's very exciting.

It's also increasingly weird seeing anti-porn advocates cite sex acts that are so horrible they're meant to essentially serve as proof that no woman would freely consent to such things, and realizing that, shit, I do that stuff for fun.

The Porn Myth.

Bruno sent me this article by Naomi Wolf on how porn may be changing sexuality. This is one of the rare cases where I can't go "fuck yeah sister" or "haha what a nut"; the article touches on real concerns before veering off into things I can't agree with.

Where Wolf touches a nerve is with the idea that porn (and sexy-ladies-as-decoration culture in general) is making humans look dumpy in comparison. I see pictures like this and this and think fuck, I'm a human being with muscles and fat and texture to my skin and hairs on my body, and even when I'm trying to be sexy I don't dress or pose like that--if you look at Gisele and then me I'm a complete troll. (This isn't just simple jealousy, because if you look at Gisele and then Gisele in the real world with no Photoshop and normal clothes, real Gisele might be no one's troll but she still pales in comparison.) Hyper-sexy images are the high-fructose corn syrup and monosodium glutamate of sex, and real food is bland beside them.

So I've got to admit I'm pretty enthused by the idea that in recent history
it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman... If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up.
Of course men still do have fun with normal women all the time, but you do get a sense, sometimes, that they're settling. That they're thinking "eh, spotty and chunky, but she'll do." Whether that sense is a creation of modern synth-porn, or an age-old insecurity since the tribe had two women and you were the scruffy one, I'm too young to say.

What Wolf is pushing is low standards for female sexiness, and that's an appealing idea, because unmeetable standards leave real-world women and men unhappy. I don't know how it could be achieved, though. You can't tell pornographers and advertisers to stop using women who look too good because they're making it hard for the rest of us. Making women look good is their business, and in the last couple decades they've gotten good at it. Maybe the only hope for civilization is that the trend continues until the ideal Photoshopped woman is an inch thick with three-foot breasts and normal women are so obviously different that they're no longer compared. It's like when dog breeds split into show lines and working lines.

But then Wolf goes too far. In trying to say that vaginal missionary should still be a big deal, she makes it sound like women who do other things are always giving in rather than exploring for themselves.
Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene.
You have to consider the possibility that I like threesomes and come on my face, not that I'm reluctantly "offering" them because all I really want is mish and everything else is a compromise.

And then the weird part.
I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.” ...And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Or so constrained. I have--or mostly had--Orthodox friends too, and the way they hide women away isn't sexy. I went to a Hasidic friend's Bar Mitzvah once and all the women in the congregation had to sit behind a screen, looking politely at a goddamn white sheet as the sounds of the service sort of drifted through. Being sexier in private (if that's even true) isn't worth that shit. It's humiliating. And when I'm asked to cover my hair, I don't think it's because my sexuality is special, it's because my sexuality needs hiding. My very identity--which is being treated as synonymous with my sexuality--needs hiding.

FUCK THAT.

Gisele and her cohorts and their Photoshoppers may be unfair competition, but ultimately I can't ask them to hide their light under a bushel. I'm sure as fuck not hiding mine.

Not For Sale: The Crazy Parts.

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American Psycho bleg.

If there's anyone out where who understands the prostitute threesome scene in American Psycho, could you please explain it to me? Every time I watch that scene and things like "now wash your vagina" and "I'm going to call you Christie" I feel like there's something I should be getting about Bateman's particular psychosis that I'm not. (Well, I get the mirror-flexing thing, that's just awesome, but that's not all, is it?)



On an unrelated note, Saran Wrap is underappreciated as a bondage material. It's see-through, touch-through, requires no special knowledge to apply quickly and thoroughly (I suspect this is a secret negative for a lot of people), you can get a ton of it for three bucks, it looks pleasingly seedy and bizarre, and it's quite effective if you use enough passes. Okay, if you don't have a fetish for your submissive sweating like a racehorse there's one drawback, but really, it's a minor one.

Not For Sale.

For some goddamn reason (well, probably "hey, I can write a grouchy blog post about this!"), I picked up Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant's Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography from the library. I kinda knew what I was going to think just from the title, because "resisting" is a weird and weaselly word for it. "Opposing" makes sense, "resisting" makes it sound like they're valiantly fighting a powerful compulsion to run out and start selling $20 blowjobs on Pac Highway.

Personally, I think legalization is the only way prostitution can be made safe. Prostitution isn't inherently dangerous because it's sexual; it's dangerous because it's marginal. Predators don't attack people in sex shops or strip bars or or swingers' clubs, they don't go where sex is, they go where women with no legal protection or organizational safety measures are. Likewise human trafficking gravitates to prostitution because it's outside the law anyway; they don't smuggle people in to work at Safeway, because that's a legitimate, regulated business.

(Also, streetwalking isn't all of prostitution, and a high- or middle-class escort with high fees and client screening is in a very different business and far less prone to abuse.)

I also think pornography shouldn't be lumped in with prostitution. Porn stars aren't fucking random strangers. Sometimes it's not strangers at all--some porn stars perform with their real-life partners, for chrissakes, adding a camera to what you do anyway hardly seems problematic--and when they are strangers, they still come with a guarantee they're not going to be diseased or abusive.

Finally, I think a lot of objections to prostitution are really objections to capitalism. I've never sold my ass, but I sell my body five days a week--I do physical things I don't enjoy and say things I don't mean because I need the money to live. I risk violent assault and exposure to diseases at my job. I have to touch and be nice to strangers off the street with no right to refuse unpleasant ones. The vast majority of the money I take in is kept by my employer.

But l I provide a socially valuable and economically productive service, and I'm in the same boat with most anybody with a job. (How I differ from hookers, other than the obvious: I have the ability to call the cops, to file an L&I claim, and to sue my employer. And because my employer knows this they provide safety systems. Legalization would save lives, people.) Doing un-fun things to meet survival needs is a condition of life outside the Garden of Eden, and I'm not convinced that selling sex is a uniquely horrible way of doing that.

In short, a vagina job is really just a job, but "resisting" it makes it unnecessarily sketchy and dangerous. That's my overall view, snarky commentary on ridiculous quotes from the book are coming in the next post.

Can gay be hot?

Date tonight. Whoo. This one seems rather less losery and more my "type" (blond, square, geeky, kinky, funny) than most of the dates I've had recently, so I have my hopes up. By "hopes up" I mean "condoms in the cargo pocket." Although I usually do. Knife, phone, flashlight, mobile Internet gadget, mace, condoms, I go around Prepared these days, and my pants are pretty close to falling down. Which is the plan anyway, really.

Anyway.

I know a lot of straight women are into gay porn, and the affinity of straight men for naked lesbians (or "lesbians") is legend. But I always feel a little weird about being turned on by gay men. Not that the sight's unappealing--god no--but it seems wrong somehow, intrusive even when they're willing performers, to be getting off on someone who wouldn't get off on me. I feel like a voyeur, like I'm nosing in on something that's none of my business.

Maybe this is just my own crazy neurosis, but I'm curious if anyone else feels this way. (I realize plenty of straight male porn stars and actors wouldn't be interested in me either, and to be honest, sometimes that bothers me too. Not that I think they should, just that I feel weird ogling someone who wouldn't want to look back.) Watching gay sex turns me on, but feeling like a gatecrasher to the boys-only party is awkward.

This is one of the reasons why bisexual men are so utterly hot as fuck.

Looking at men.

It always bothers me when straight guys claim they "can't tell" if another guy is attractive. It's such an annoying form of overcompensation. (It's also not true; maybe a totally straight guy can't make fine distinctions or have a "type," but he can tell you whether Gilbert Gottfried or Brad Pitt is more attractive.) I didn't ask if he gave you a boner, all you have to do is use your eyes and a completely detached, theoretic sense of attractiveness. It won't make you gay.

Likewise, it's really dumb when guys think they have to react to any image of a naked or sexualized man with fifth-grader-ish squeals of "ewwwww!" Is there some rule that if you aren't aroused by penises you must be disgusted by them? Can't you just go "oh, huh, that's a penis alright" and be unmoved, like you were looking at a picture of a deer or a bulldozer or whatever? That also would not make you gay.

I'm always impressed--maybe unduly, considering that straight women and gay men have to do this constantly--by straight guys who are okay with sexy things that don't fit their orientation. A straight guy who can look at gay porn and be amused rather than act like Dracula encountering a cross is Officially Awesome in my book.

I'm not turned on by (most of) the images of half-naked women that pervade media and advertising, but I don't recoil in eye-shielding disgust from them either. The least men could do, in the rare instances where the tables are turned, is show the same decorum.

Parental Control.

Man, there's nothing like Dad coming to visit your usually-private little den to make you realize just how many things you own need to be put in opaque drawers right quick. How many books and DVDs need their spines turned to the wall. My roommate and I both have our lube bottles right on the nightstands where they're handy, but now we have to put up a pretense that we don't have anything to lubricate. It's like being fourteen again for a day. I'm even going to clear my browser cache after this entry.

Not that he really cares. It's not like Dad ever ordered me not to have sex or porn, and I'm sure as my parent (as anyone's parent) he's already developed excellent skills in selective blindness. It's just a matter of courtesy and taste, two things that I have to work very hard to fake.

It's not "a condom? you WHORE!" that I'm worried about, it's just "uh, I see you left something out... never mind, well, tell me about your work now..." Which, in a way, is worse.

"The Paramedics."

Hooray, my gay ambulance porn is here! Y'know, I've never really watched much gay porn before this. There's something sweetly egalitarian about it; the actors, the director, and the presumed audience are all gay men and so there's a sense of "hey, we're all on equal footing here" that you'd be hard-pressed to find in straight or girl-girl porn. You can still have domination and submission in the sex, but it comes off a lot more playful and respectful when top and bottom are both fundamentally coming from the same place.

(In fact, this movie seems to be set in an alternate universe where every man, even if he's not involved in the nudity or sex, is gay. It's almost a utopian fantasy...)

Also, maybe it's just this movie, but the actors seem a lot more genuinely attracted to each other than most straight-porn couples. They're even kissing and cuddling and stuff!

Some of the actors claim to be "straight." They are not convincing. I'm okay with that, though; better than girl-girl porn where the claim to be enjoying themselves is the dubious part.

(Hee, one of the "straight" guy's girlfriends just showed up and she's a drag queen. I appreciate this kind of honesty.)

An ambulance is an awfully uncomfortable place for sex. That might make it sexier though. (It's also not somewhere I'd want to expose my nice clean naked body, but let's not think about that. Nothing kills a buzz like getting MRSA on your ass.)

Some of the non-fucking acting in this movie actually isn't terrible. I'm impressed.

What is terrible: during plot segments, the screen freezes, and titles come up explaining exactly what's going on. Then the movie unfreezes and the actors tell you exactly what's going on. It's like this:

A uniformed MAN walks into frame.
FREEZE
TITLE: This is Kevin, the senior paramedic with the hots for Jason.
UNFREEZE
MAN: Hi, I'm Kevin and I'm the senior paramedic. I'm so horny for Jason!

Since the plot is hardly complex or crucial to begin with, I'm not sure why it needs to be beaten in with a sledgehammer.

The paramedics are horrible at their job. I understand that's not really the point of the movie, but geez, the poor bastards don't even know how to lower the stretcher. (Also, real paramedics generally wear undershirts. :p )

Man, blowjobs are boring. I mean, they're not boring to give, and I understand that time just flies when you're receiving one, but I hate watching them. Up, down, up, down, slobber slobber, I get it. Fast forward. I can empathize enjoyably with the buttsex, but not the blowjobs. Dunno why.

OH JESUS CHRIST THAT MAN JUST STUCK HIS DICK IN HIS OWN BUTT. I... I learned something new today.

He doesn't look very comfy though.

Is it some sort of rule that gay porn actors must have retarded tattoos? I guess porn actors in general have bad tattoos, but this movie is a goddamn cornucopia of scrawly pot leaves and lopsided Celtic knots and incoherent swirly things.

Man, these guys are good-looking. Straight porn actors are never this cute. Even the guy who stuck his dick in his butt was freakin' gorgeous.

Whoa, they just stuck two dicks in one guy's butt! It makes for a very visually confusing picture. All you can see is testicles. It looks kind of difficult, and kind of wrong, but... really really fucking hot.

The ambulance pretty much goes away after the first scene. By halfway through the paramedic theme gets kind of forgotten too. This is disappointing; I was hoping it would be sort of a uniform or medical fetish thing but it's really just generic. Feh.

But damn, those are some sweaty sexy naked men. Damn.

Mystery porn.

Someone mailed me an enormous catalog of gay porn. Not emailed, physically mailed to my house. I'm really hoping this was unrelated to the blog and is just a mysterious gift from the Porn Fairy. Thank you, Porn Fairy! Unless you're stalking me or something. In which case: this house contains a pitbull and a lot of guns, Porn Fairy!

But it was awesome, because if I didn't have a Porn Fairy I would never have found out that yes, there is paramedic porn.

I'm ordering this.