On porn, feminism and sex-positivity (incl queer porn fangirl squee)

Posted: November 21, 2010 in Culture, kink, Psychobabble, Sex

For anyone interested, here’s the talk I wrote for the porn & feminism discussion in Oxford last night. If the  other speaker hadn’t got on a train to Bath, it might have been more sensical; the first bit is just headings to riff off in refutation if necessary…:

Practical problems with eliminating it

Fantasy isn’t reality

Perfectly plausible men sit at home wanking rather than going out raping women

Binarises and essentialises the genders – big strong threatening men and poor cowering women

Industry, regulation, etc – if you bring things into the mainstream they are taxable and shit.

Writes women into the passive role

You’re assuming all porn is het.

How dare you impose your own (patriarchal) constraints on other genders’ sexual expression?

Chicken/egg argument – while bad porn may open up space for dysfunctional relations to women, whose to say cause/effect are that way round?

‘Generation gap’ arguments probably have more to do with difference in experience levels between late teens/late 20s: if ppl are focused on conquest rather than connection, they probably wd’ve been anyway, regardless of watching porn

Talk proper – or one version of it – begins here:

I had no idea what Matt was going to say, and so when I was writing this I scooted over to the Anti-Porn Men website to have a look. A lot of the stuff seemed to hinge on a) heterosexuality and b) assuming ‘porn’ equalled ‘bad porn’. [For example: because I am a good little journalist, I followed a link to Wendy Maltz in Therapy Today, writing about her experiences with porn as a sex therapist.  Admittedly, she and her husband wrote The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (HarperCollins, 2008), so I wasn’t expecting a completely neutral viewpoint, but still, I was underwhelmed.] (on the anti-porn men network), Maltz, therapist as she is, assumes that *all* porn ‘portrays sex as a commodity, people as objects, and violence, humiliation, and recklessness as exciting’; all porn is ‘self-centred, sensually blunted, loveless sex’. Which is frankly bollocks. She throws away her porn novels, for example that notoriously unsensual, impersonal and objectifying travesty Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose perceptibly sex-positive narrative is précised on Wikipedia as: ‘Lady Chatterley moves from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in sensuality and sexual fulfillment.’ Not everything that depicts sex is objectifying and damaging. Nor does it depend in the type of sex: hardcore BDSM pornographer Pat Califia is as romantic as they come […] showing love and sexuality as healing and redemptive, sometimes all the more so for including bullwhips.

A lot of the problems Maltz, and others, choose to blame on pornography – young people growing up unsure how to negotiate the fantasy and reality divide, or to manage the emotional side of sex – strike me as not so much problems caused by the porn (because, once again, teenagers pre-interwebs arrived at puberty fully emotionally mature, secure in their own varied sexualities and with absolutely no issues around negotiating society’s expectations of sexuality whatsoever) as issues about communication, intimacy and social expectations. Strikes me that giving teenagers access to trusted adults and a social reality who don’t have hang-ups or taboos or expectations about others’ sexuality – and respectful representations that validated and endorsed their various sexualities – is a much more important goal for us as a society than handwringing about access to porn. (And also, while I’m at it, ‘radical feminist is neither an insult not a synonym for anti-porn, Wendy.)  

PORN AND COMMUNICATION AREN’T ANTHESES. Some of my most communicative relationships have been with men who were regular porn users. If one of the problems supposdedly ‘resulting from increased access to porn is that (het) men are secretive about porn and it’s supposedly damaging their relationships, then by all means let’s open up the relationships, make discussing porn and sexuality normal and acceptable rather than a guilty secret. Because, y’know, sixty years ago when porn was supposedly less violent, there was so much more gender equality. Men were tender, communicative and saw their partners as equals. (That was sarcastic, anybody who doesn’t know me well.) With the best will in the world, as per my favourite t-shirt, I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

If you want to wipe out the mainstream het porn industry, then go ahead. Not quite sure how you plan to do it, or how you’d prevent the obvious resurgence of unregulated and probably even more exploitative pornography, but that’s fine by me. But equating all representation of sex ever with objectification and damage is frankly ridiculous. A lot of mainstream, heteronormative internet porn is shit, I’m not arguing. It’s dull, exploitative, prescriptive, formulaic and sometimes inexplicably and non-consensually violent. But the answer isn’t a blanket ban on pornography. It’s to make better porn. If it’s a problem that porn functions as sex education for a whole generation now – which it does – give proper sex education in schools about the emotional aspects of sex as well as the biological, facilitate open and honest communication, and *make better porn*. Make porn that shows people of all genders (cos there aren’t just two) as desiring equals. Make porn that’s consensual, and consensually violent if you want. Make porn with safe sex and rough sex and tender sex and weird sex and just about everything else. Make porn where people communicate. Because if heterosex isn’t intrinsically misogynist and evil – I’m not even sure how you could construe queer sex as misogynist and evil, and queer sex exists, you know – then representing it isn’t, either. Maybe the way it’s currently represented is often constructed that way, so change it, don’t ban it. There are other ways.

All of this equating ‘porn’ with ‘bad and exploitative porn’ is immensely damaging on lots of levels. It completely ignores the immense potential for sex-positivity and education that good porn could offer. And to demonstate that actually, ‘representing sex’ doesn’t have to equal ‘objectifying damaging and evil’, here’s a list of contexts in which porn really isn’t objectifying and damaging and evil, but joyous, intimate, liberating, sex and body positive, and a load of other things too. For the record, I’m not convinced that ‘heteroporn’ necessarily equals ‘bad porn’, either: there are some sites out there, often run and produced by women, who use volunteer models who choose their own activities and shoot scenes freestyle, including friendly interaction with producers and other models before and after the shoot: burningangel.com would be one example, although its quality is quite variable. But there are several contexts which I felt deliberately resisted or problematised the notion of all porn ever as meaningless, unemotional, and objectifying, and here they are…

1)      Historical porn. I’ve written about this at much greater length on the Lashings of Ginger Beer blog, which you shd all check out if you don’t know it, cos it rocks. Basically, there’s a night in London called Artwank which shows porn from 1895 to roughly 1960, and it’s brilliant. I wanted to get some clips, but Ophelia Bitz, the curator, is doing Erotica, so it’s the trailer or nothing. (I do have it, but it’s tiny clips, so you don’t get much of a feel for it – how pushed for time are we? Do people want to see it?) So, erm, yeah. Sex here looks loadsa fun, nobody’s coerced or violated (not that I have any problem with clearly consensual coercion, ftr), everyone has real noticeably realistic bodies, not conforming to any particular cultural stereotype, people laugh and smile and eat (and also, btw, reverse gender dynamics). There are fewer close-ups than standard het porn today, you can see a lot more than just anonymised body parts, people are people.  It’s refreshingly unformulaic: blowjobs don’t necessarily mean deep throat, and so on. Of course, there are no guarantees that the actors were not secretly being exploited, or in fact living in a society I’d argue could be vastly more sexually oppressive than ours, but they certainly seem to be enjoying themselves. And frankly, given that sex is represented in these vids as something fun and mutual, I’ll forgive the participants for not having thrown off the shackles of patriarchy yet. Most of the stuff I’ve seen is Artwank’s tbh, but there’s a site called RetroRamming that’s dedicated to vintage porn. Unfortunately, it’s subscription only except for 7-second sample clips and no way can I afford to pay for my porn, so I certainly can’t vouch for its content, but if you’re interested there’re another couple of Artwanks in January and February at the RVT, I shall be going with as many fellow reprobates as I can, and you’re more than welcome to join us. Facebook me or something. I don’t bite without pre-negotiation.

2)      Anyway. Next up in the list of non-[evil] pornography, my personal favourite, queer porn. Queer as encompassing the whole LGBTQ spectrum. Writing this talk on Friday night, I commented on everyone’s favourite social networking site that although my sexual experience has predominantly (although by no means exclusively) involved cis men, the majority of porn that I actually found arousing was queer, and the response was universal, including that from cisgendered heterosexual men. The majority of straight porn is soulless, formulaic and awful. Queer porn has people genuinely doing stuff they’re enjoying and making is up as they go along, and it’s really fucking hot. This seems positive for everyone, but I think the independence and variety of queer porn is particularly important when it comes to porn as educative.  Strikes me as really important that young people – or in fact anyone whose sexuality is fluid and evolving regardless of age or anything else – are able to see representations of bodies and sexualities like theirs. One huge advantage of rule 34 is that representations of pretty much everything *exist*, and so anybody concerned about their attraction to a particular gender or a particular sexual proclivity can go out there and find it. If you’re worried because you fancy girls or boys or genderqueer people or you or your partner is trans or you’re one of the debated percentage of people born to some degree intersex or you feel in any other way differentiated from the heteronormative mainstream, there are people like you on the internet, having sex. And in my experience, sites focusing on a specifically queer audience tend to do so a lot more respectfully and joyously than a lot of mainstream het sites.

( I’m focusing rather on women and those of genders other than cis male here, because the impression I got from the anti-porn men’s website was that it was concerned primarily with heteroporn and its representation of women, but I’m pretty sure that queer masculinities and porn is a whole other lecture, partly because in my head I’ve written it.)

There’s an awful lot in this category, so I’m just going to pull out a few sites which I think are doing awesome and very feminist-friendly work. First up is Nofauxxx, which probably a lot of you will’ve heard of – it was set up by Courtney Trouble, who seems pretty much the fairy godmother [..] of all things queer and netly, in 2002 as ‘a space to explore sex beyond straight, gay, lesbian and gender binaries’.  It mixes alt, gay, lesbian, straight, trans, kink, and BBW stuff in pretty glorious harmony, and has featured some of my favourite genderqueer and trans porn stars, people like Jiz Lee and Buck Angel. A lot of it is also quite consent-focused, which is pretty awesome. Pretty much the whole Trouble network is awesome, actually. It also includes next recommendation, Queer Porn Tube (which has brilliant free stuff! Google it…), which does pretty much the same exciting combination of stuff as NoFauxxx, but amateur and for free. In fact, I think if I could get people to go to just one site, that would be it, because the sex is hot, but it also has things like 20-minute fisting instruction videos and a 26-min butch/butch scene called Yes Please which really eroticises consent. It’s the visual equivalent of someone like my beloved Patrick Califia, who writes queer, usually kinky porn a lot of which involves non-normative and transgendered bodies. All these – particularly when they’re free and thus accessible – seems to me to be doing something incredibly important. They portray alternative sexualities as joyous and loving and fulfilling, as well as acting as a kind of how-to manual for everything from sexual acts to consent negotiation. The world, and queer sexuality, would be a poorer place without them. Next site is something slightly different, but something else I think is really important – it’s abbywinters.com, which uses – I quote – girl next door types, women with various, non-enhanced bodies that don’t conform to any particular type or shape or size. Some are shaven, some aren’t. It’s mostly solo or girl-girl stuff, although there seem to be a commendable variety of presentations within that – not everyone’s femme, for example. And what they do is leave the cameras rolling, so you get the sex, but you also get the intimacy and the conversation as well. Its schtick is ‘natural’, and it does it ever so well. Again, it’s big on full-body shots, and short on invasive close-ups, and the girls in couples or groups seem genuinely to know and be comfortable with each other. There’s lots of laughing, silly jokes, and occasionally getting covered in clay. Whilst some of it’s downright bizarre, and I’m sure it’s possible to argue that the girls’ willingness to share their sexuality with the world is in some sense a dysfunctional reaction to the problem of patriarchy, or that associating sex with other people’s genuine emotional intimacy rather than one’s own is problematic, in terms of representation of sex, it’s fun, comfortable and human.

Lastly, because I am running out of time, is another personal favourite, Shine Louise Houston’s Crash Pad Series. Which won several Feminist Porn Awards, by the way. To quote Houston, ‘there is power in creating images, and [I think it’s necessary] for a woman of colour and a queer to take that power.’ She uses it to showcase – another quote – ‘real dykes, femme on femme, boi, stud, genderqueer and trans-masculine performers, transwomen, transmen, queer men and women engaging in authentic queer sexuality, whether it is with safer sex, strap-on sex, cocksucking, kink and bdsm, gender play and fluidity’, and the site does exactly what it says on the tin. All the performers choose their co-stars, and the site is a joyous and affirmative space for those of alternative sexualities as well as, well, pretty damn hot. Some, although by no means all, of Crash Pad Series’ content is kinky, which leads me neatly onto my third category of ‘not exploitative, actually’ porn, kink.

 

3)      It may seem a bit incongruous to say that BDSM porn – an acronym usually held to stand for bondage, dominance and submission, and sado-masochism – is actually notably less exploitative, when it focuses so explicitly on the manipulation of sociocultural power dynamics for erotic effect, and frequently physical violence. If you want me to talk about practising it and feminism and empowerment, I’m more than happy to, but it’s a bit of a diversion, so I’ll leave it for now. In the context of porn and representation,  I wanted to, uh, bring it up because kink is a culture that (ideally, and when it’s working) runs on and is powered by consent, and this comes through in its pornographic representation. Of course, a lot of the amateur stuff is unregulated, and BDSM dynamics often hinge on the appearance of coercion, so it’s hard to see consent negotiation, so I’m going to focus specifically on the those sites that come under the umbrella of kink.com, undoubtedly the dominant –[…] pun intended – professional kink site on the web. Based in San Francisco, it does pretty much everything, gay, straight, fetish, various bdsm specialisms. Most of its output is too much for me, frankly. But hearteningly, it also has admirable ethics, an extensive list of models’ rights and rules for directors, and specifically highlights all models’ consent to various acts and experiences during the shoot. [Note, eg, the extensive and nuanced rules regarding crying, no.17]. A number of acts that come up repeatedly and with (at best) questionable consent in a lot of ‘normal’ mainstream het porn are explicitly banned here. Models have a safeword [we know what that is, right?], and an alternative for if their mouths are otherwise engaged, and a number of acts are specifically banned. Crying from pain, or during forced blowjobs, for example, immediately halt the shoot. Likewise any activity resulting in bleeding, choking or coughing. Any person on a shoot is encouraged to halt scenes to check on a model’s welfare if they feel it necessary, and downtime including reassuring the model that they can safeword is compulsory, while taunting is banned. The importance of aftercare is highlighted, and each clip includes a pre-scene interview that establishes age, consent, limits and preferences, and a later post-scene interview where the models discuss their experiences. Of course, I cannot personally guarantee that no model has lied. But every site under the kink.com umbrella emphasises the importance of consent in sexuality and the authenticity of its models’ desires, whatever their gender, and given that I’m fundamentally opposed to assuming the right to pass judgement on anyone else’s sexuality, I think that’s the very opposite of exploitative.

So, yes. There’s also het amateur porn – I hesitate to pronounce on anything both so widespread and so unregulated, but I’d like to think that at least some of it features people who genuinely want to fuck each other doing things they genuinely want to do because they genuinely enjoy them, and not simply going through the motions […] with a complete stranger. Above all, though, if you want to see porn being done right, with willing and sex-positive participants, watch some queer porn. Some of it models communication and consent to an extent that warms my heart. And other bits.

 

Just because I can, here are some of my favourite sex-, porn- and/or feminism-related blogs

www.sexisnottheenemy.tumblr.com http://purrversatility.blogspot.com/
http://courtneytrouble.com/myblog/ http://lashingsofgb.blogspot.com/
http://jizlee.com/wordpress/ http://intersexroadshow.blogspot.com/
http://pandorablake.com/ http://siliconevalley.tumblr.com/
http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/ http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/
Comments
  1. Matt Wiltshire says:

    *make better porn*

    Indeed. A fantastic talk.

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  2. Great overview – would be very interested to hear how it went down! Thanks for spreading the word about the variety of positive and woman-run porn which is out there. So many people think porn is synonymous with 90s mainstream Californian productions, without knowing the good work independent producers are doing. The higher profile we can give people like Shine Louise Houston and Courtney Trouble, the better.

    Thanks for the link, too 🙂

    A couple of things to add:

    1. Courtney Trouble’s newest site is http://www.queerporn.tv and it’s worthwhile – relatively high production values, creativity, variety, brilliant body diversity and even (gasp!) one or two scenes between cis male and cis female couples. Full review forthcoming on my blog; keep an eye out for it.

    2. I can see why you’re pointing to Kink.com as the most famous kink porn company in the industry – as a “lowest common denominator” type thing, i.e. even the most mainstream company are still pretty ethical and non-exploitative. But gender equality is more than “female performers not being exploited”, and in terms of social responsibility and equality of opportunity Kink.com are considerably less shiny than you’re making out here. No, they aren’t exploitative of their female sub models, but they also exemplify a lot of problematic cultural patterns within the BDSM scene, especially the San Francisco semi-public BDSM scene (ie. people who go to munches, events, play parties). Specifically they recreate a lot of the gender inequality which exists in the global scene, valuing female subs over anyone else of any orientation as sex objects, and valueing both female subs and dommes over male submissives.

    I started out keen to promote Kink’s male sub sites because I was so pleased they had them. But I can’t bring myself to promote MeninPain any more because … well, would you know what I meant if I said it’s not malesub porn, it’s femdom? I get sick of not seeing male subs on The Upper Floor or on any of their sites other than Bound Gods and MeninPain, and on the latter half the time the camera is looking at the latex clad blonde (and she’s looking at the camera rather than her sub). MayMay has lots of good critique on this: relevant articles include this one and this one.

    Kink are trendsetters and game changers and they have the power to be able to take risks. They’re refusing to take this one. We can praise producers for being ethical and non-exploitative (actually, this is true of almost all kinky producers) but feminists shouldn’t be content with the industry until female subs aren’t valued more than male subs, because implicit in that is the idea that submission suits women better than it does men, and if we want to fight for our right to choose submission freely, we have to resist that idea wherever we encounter it.

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    • Goblin says:

      Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and relevant comment. 🙂 It went down…variably, generally positive response and a very interesting discussion. I hope a number of people were on board with queer porn, but some people disagreed with the idea of consent, felt female submission was anti-feminist, etc. Tbh, I hope people who were there comment with their ideas! *hint hint*

      1. Word. I did show queerporn.tv, briefly, but I’d just missed the free access window, so we could only see the trailers.

      2. Absolutely. There are a lot more issues there than I wanted to go into: I wasn’t quite sure how kink-friendly my audience would be, so I focused on queer porn to avoid too much digression into ‘kinky sex is inherently antifeminist’. I chose kink.com partly for the very reasons you suggest – even people making industry porn do it better kinky – but it’s certainly true that there are huge issues with presentation even within that. Many thanks for the links/fantastic precis..

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      • 1. Having made the most of their free access window I’ve confirmed that not enough of it is to my taste to merit a subscription, but I suspect you’d like it a LOT. Particularly the scenes with Jiz Lee, Dylan Ryan, Courtney herself and Ned/Maggie. (There’s a reason the famous performers are popular: when your scenes don’t have much in the way of plot/setting, everything hands on the energy of the performers. And OMG Jiz has good energy.) Actually have you checked out Ned/Maggie’s new site MeettheMayhems.com? Porn – and SCIENCE!

        2. Yeah, sure, I realise that I’m used to preaching to, if not the choir then at least the congregation. You’re still on the street getting people to come through the door. Actually I’m going to move quickly away from this church metaphor now because, ugh. But I’m glad that you are doing the really hard outreach on the outside; it frees up people like me to try and change things on the inside. 🙂

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  3. 3. Kink don’t need your signal amp, but small independent kinky sites, especially those run by women. If you want to prove that female subs/bottoms in the kinky porn industry aren’t exploited, point to the ethical, consensual sites where they’re running the show. Tell people about [links removed because WP thinks I’m spamming. but they’re all on my blog] Madison Bound, Padded Kink, DarkPlay, Nimue’s World, Sarah Gregory, and Northern Spanking. (More examples here.)

    4. You say, “no way can I afford to pay for my porn”. Can I flag that up? Either you mean “I can’t afford to subscribe to every porn site I want to reference” in which case fair enough, but you could have been clearer. Or you mean “I choose not to pay for my porn despite not living below the poverty line”, which equates to “paying for porn is not something I prioritise within my personal budget”. The reason I want to flag that is because a lot of women think the same thing when actually, you know what, NoFauxxx have a $9.99 membership option and how much do you spend a week on e.g. coffee?

    I have a personal rule, which is that someone who has never paid for porn has no right to criticise or comment on the type of porn which is available. I don’t know if this describes you or not but independent producers trying to do it right are fighting against a tide of cultural expectation which teaches women not to identify as porn consumers. They might watch it, but they won’t pay for it. This makes producing porn for women, producing ethical, fairtrade, feminist porn which appeals to the female gaze, almost impossible because however much women talk about what they want to see, in reality most of the people actually paying for stuff are men.

    Please be careful about unwittingly contributing to the expectation that a woman would never pay for this stuff. If every woman who claimed not to be able to afford porn bought one one-off subscription to their favourite site once a year, the producers who ARE making better porn will have less chance of going bust, and be more empowered to take creative risks and produce better porn. It won’t happen unless you – unless everyone who gives a shit – supports the people who are already trying to improve things.

    *steps down off soapbox*

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    • An interesting post, and between it and Pandora’s comments there lots of lovely links to explore.

      As one of the non-porn-buying majority, I want to speak up for our right to criticise. Honestly, I’m willing to buy porn, wanting to buy porn, waiting to buy porn. I’ve got quite a lot of eighteen century pornographic literature, I’ve got a bit of contemporary erotic writing, some magazines I got for an essay on race in porn, but nothing at all on film, because I’ve never found anything that felt worth the money. I have gone looking, I just haven’t found it. This isn’t a criticism of any of the sites you’ve listed, it’s just a recognition that my personal preferences are difficult to meet. Show me something I find ethical and hot, and I’ll pay to watch it.

      I don’t think any of the above inhibits my ability to evaluate porn as a cultural artefact, and it certainly doesn’t mean I can’t criticise unethical practises in the industry. I understand your frustration, Pandora, at women not identifying as porn consumers. I see why you don’t want anyone to contribute to the expectation that women won’t pay for it. However, you do risk silencing people who can contribute to the discussion, people who could have some input into the creation of porn they would spend money on.

      Rant over. I enjoyed the post and the comments, thank you both.

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      • Hello! I specifically mean the right to complain about there not being anything you like, rather than the right to complain about workers’ conditions or the political ramifications of particular trends, but you’re correct that my criticism only holds if someone has said they’d buy X, a producer has made it, and that person then hasn’t paid for it. This trend is responsible for a lot of woman-targeted porn not being as profitable as market research suggested it would be: turns out a lot of women are a lot more willing to complain about porn than pay for it.

        It can be very hard to find the stuff you’d like, I’ll admit, but Rule 32: it’s probably out there. If not, talk to the people who are making similar stuff and see if they’d be interested in branching out. What are you looking for?

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      • Also, this rant may or may not have been informed by radical feminists talking about what “porn” is like in general without ever having sat down and watched any feminist porn, because the only porn they’ve seen has been downloaded for free and yes, okay, quite a lot of the free stuff is quite dire. Oftentimes the criticisms they’re making of the porn they hate has *already been answered* by feminist pornographers, who are struggling to become widely known while feminist writers gleefully ignore their existence and instead focus on the kind of porn they can have a proper rage-wank over. Which they’d never PAY for, god.

        So, um, yes. Not really directed at people who know what they like and keep an eye out, intending to buy it when they see it.

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  4. Goblin says:

    3. You rock. Thank you.

    4. I meant I couldn’t possibly subscribe to all the sites I reference, but I take your point. As it is, I don’t buy coffee out (or music, or tickets to things either) but a subsciption to CrashPad *is* on my Christmas list. (I had one last time I worked on this, and one to abbyw, but they ran out.) It’s complex though, because as last night demonstrated, some women are so put off by mainstream content they don’t really look for stuff that isn’t. The expectation that already porn-viewing woman wouldn’t pay for this stuff is a problem, but I don’t think it’s the only barrier by a long chalk – it certainly doesn’t apply to me. or a significant proportion of my friends. The lack of a perceived need for it, or an unwillingness to commit to relating to sex in those terms, or a belief that paying people to have sex, however ethically, contributes to the problem (I personally disagree strongly, but several people mentioned that last night), or fear of what partners will think (obviously, see above, I feel communication is paramount, but I suspect a number of women would be very reluctant to admit porn consumption to partners, let alone discuss it – ‘but what if x found out?’, as one person at the pool I discussed this with responded), or a feeling that using porn is somehow a betrayal of their feminity/sexuality/feminism/whatever – it’s terribly chicken and egg. I wish I had more of a handle on perceived issues outside lefty academic circles, as I suspect I represent a (numerically) fairly small market. I also think that preventing anyone who’s never paid for porn for taking issue with things is problematic – they may have not chosen to watch but been triggered by something, f’r example, and the mass of bad porn out there *is* an issue, and complaints *are* a weapon….

    Baseline, though, yes. It’s a problem, and I’ll be doing my best to do my bit.

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    • A subscription to Crashpad should be on *everyone’s* Christmas list. It’s on mine 🙂 Oh, and having had one before is OK in my book – I don’t expect people to maintain recurring subscriptions; dipping your toe in and out as and when budget permits is totally okay.

      Really love your list of other reasons why people don’t buy porn. Food for thought! I think the more signal amp feminist-friendly porn can get, the more we can break down these preconceptions. It’s come a long way in only ten years. And once it breaks into the straight female market rather than only catering to queer women, that will help a LOT.

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  5. Goblin says:

    People have also linked me to:

    Good Dyke Porn (http://www.gooddykeporn.com/)

    Madison Bound (Pandora mentions it above, but someone else emailed me too, so special mention):http://madisonbound.com

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