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The Sex Blog Of Record
Tuesday, December 19th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
I was not previously aware that the late-1970s group Women Against Pornography (WAP) conducted its fundraising by maintaining an office in Times Square and running guided safari tours of the local fleshpots for outraged female tourists. But that’s what I learned while reading this profile of Richard Basciano’s Show World flesh palace in The Rialto Report, which reproduced this 1979 newspaper story about the WAP tours:
As transcribed:
Pornographic Tours
Woman’s Group Tries to Combat Sexual Degradation
NEW YORK (AP) – Behind the liquor bottles lining the dimly lit bar, two bare-breasted young women danced slowly, touching the mirrored wall, twisting to the pulsating disco beat.
At small tables, a dozen well-dressed women huddled over drinks and stared — but not with the leering interest the dancers may have been used to.
“That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen,” said Irene Agnelli), one of the first-timers at the Mardi Gras “topless” bar, the lafct stop on an unusual tour.
The twice-weekly tour of peep shows, “adult” bookstores, and other sex emporiums is run by a group called Women Against Pornography and is intended to raise consciousness as to the effect of pornography on society’s view of women.
“Pornography is psychologically destructive to women’s self-image and endangers our welfare in real life,” says group organizer Barbara Mehrhof.
“The essence of pornography is about the degradation and brutalization of women … in the name of entertainment, in the name ol tree speech, in the name of profits.”
The group, founded several months ago by feminists Gloria Steinem, Lynn Campbell, Dolores Alexander and author Susan Brownmiller, wants to establish pornography as a national feminist issue.
“We’re starting here because it’s the porn capital of the country,” says Ms. Alexander.
The activities of the group, which plans a two-day pornography conference here next month and 20,000-person march on Times Square in October, are applauded but not officially endorsed by the National Organization for Women.
Women Against Pornography believes “women have to be encouraged to look at this stuff and have the support of other women, says Ms. Mehrhof.
So, armed with maps, quarters for peep show movies and a wealth of curiosity, bands of women of all ages and backgrounds gather at the group’s Times Square storefront and proceed toward the blinking signs offering “Girls! Girls! Girls!” and “Topless and Bottomless.”
On a recent night, a guard tried to block one tour group from entering Show World, a sex supermarket featuring pornographic films and “live entertainment.” “No women allowed without escorts,” he said.
“It’s illegal to keep us out,” shouted the women, who eventually were permitted to go inside after they produced identification proving they were over 21.
At Peepland, a similar establishment some of the women giggled and hesitated before crowding together into booths to glimpse films entitled “Leather Porno,” and “The Perverted Professors.” Some of the films featured children, animals, and gang rape.
Other narrow booths contained windows to a live show in which nude women stretched on a carousel and pressed their bodies to the glass.
“I am sick to my stomach,” said one of the touring women, a 54-year-old mother of four daughters. “I find it extraordinarily demeaning.”
“Maybe the courts will begin to see it as a crime against women,” added Ms. Alexander.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that material cannot be judged obscene unless it meets three criteria: that it depict patently offensive, hardcore sexual conduct; lack literary, artistic, political or scientific, value and go beyond contemporary community standards.
The “contemporary community standards” are what WAP is trying to change.
“You can change the climate of opinion so pornography is no longer acceptable,” Ms. Mehrhof says. “If we can change peoples’ attitudes, they won’t want to see it.”
At Pussycat, where men may make $1 phone calls to scantily clad young women in glass booths, the tour group gathered in the center of the floor and eyed the women as they waited for customers.
“Tell them not to take pictures!” shouted one woman employee from her booth. “We’ll break their cameras!”
They look down on us women,” she said. “They think we’re illiterate — but their husbands are supporting us.”
The tour women gathered on the teeming street outside. “Our looking at them was worse than the men,” said Irene Agnello. “I really felt we were looking at them with a kind of judgment, and not giving anything.”
Did you notice that the Associated Press flatly reported the unsourced claim that there was child pornography freely on display in a Times Square peep show booth? In 1979, in Manhattan? If that had been true, the operators would have been led off in handcuffs in no time flat. Possession of child porn was just as big a federal felony then as it is today, no need to worry about getting a community-standards obscenity judgment in order to obtain a conviction. Even the mob did not fuck around with kiddie porn. Much more likely: the reporter bought into some bullshit from one of the anti-porn interviewees, and passed it along uncritically. In 1979 or 2017, any reporter dumb or lazy enough to give a one-sided uncritical profile to an anti-porn activist is too dumb and lazy to be trusted to do basic journalism when they write up the story.
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Thursday, June 5th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
So, the proprietor of one of those “rough sex” Tumblr blogs (this one has “off with thy clothes” for a subtitle) encountered a reader whose poor noggin was croggled by the mix of rough sex and feminism:
sooo you a rough sex blog preaching feminism? fuckin weird
The answer is pretty much perfect:
Look man. I don’t give a fuck if i’m knuckle deep in her ass hole and she’s covered in cum and tied to my bed frame, I still hold her equal to me.
Indeed.
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Holly at The Pervocracy:
I’m also a feminist because I like to fuck, and I resent everything and everyone that would make that a secret shame. I fuck not to make marriages or babies but simply to fuck, and I am sick and fucking tired of the government and beer ads and my friends and fucking Cosmopolitan telling me there’s something wrong with that.
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Monday, January 17th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I’ve seen some sophisticated and persuasive socio-psychological arguments for why feminism benefits men as well as women, but I was entertained by Figleaf’s far more pragmatic formulation, which I am ripping mercilessly from its somewhat ranty context:
I had more sex, more often back when I was an always-hungry, homeless, long-haired, unemployable, usually-needing-a-shower high-school dropout — with a Gomer Pyle hillbilly accent no less — that at any other time in my life. Back then every woman was “high-status” compared to me, but… none of them seemed to mind. Including a statewide “Junior Miss” pageant winner, a diplomat’s daughter, girls from lower, middle, and upper-class families.
You know what they almost all had in common though? (Besides bad taste in men I mean?) They all had the idea that they’d be able to live independently some day and so they generally weren’t as fretful about picking the “wrong” guy who might not turn out to be on the “right” track to support them.
Oh yeah, and since they had ambitions of independence and partnering with the men of their choice instead of the wallets of their choice, they weren’t worried so much about their “reputations” and so they tended to be a lot wilder in bed. More experimental. More up for new stuff. More willing to say what they liked, and more willing to try it again if they did.
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
There’s a discussion going on in the comments over at Tiny Nibbles right now about another in the endless line of hypersexualized deliberatedly-controversial fashion photoshoots. You know the ones I mean — they push the porn line a little bit, wait for the nattering nabobs of feminism to condemn them, pull the ad campaign or claim it was just a conceptual shoot never intended for broad release, and then sit back and wait for the viral controversy traffic to spike their brand awareness among the hard-to-reach internet-active demographic.
This particular social media marketing campaign hit pay dirt when Jezebel condemned their photography as “creepy and porno-like”; by essentially calling porn creepy, Jezebel set off half-the sex positive bloggers in the universe, and it was off to the races. Presumably there will be a big end-of-the-year gift basket arriving at the Jezebel offices from this social media marketing agency in appreciation.
I was going to stay out of it completely — call it my part of the effort to train these people to buy display advertising like their Mad Men ancestors — but in the discussion at Violet’s place, there was an interesting conversation about the submissive poses of the woman in some of the photos, and whether it would be different if the woman were dominant, and just how rare it is for these edgy fashion shoots to feature dominant women and/or submissive male postures.
Now, in fact fashion shoots that reverse the dom/sub polarities don’t strike me as all that rare, but I didn’t have examples at my fingertips. And then, serendipitously, I stumbled over a nice one — so that’s today’s blog post sorted.
This comes from a Marie Claire US photoshoot from last January. I found the photos here, and it’s actually not very sexualized as such things go. The starring model, Miranda Kerr, never shows more than a little side-boob, in one of those stupid “I’m wearing the expensive coat but I forgot my shirt and my bra” photos that fashion photographers love so much. But there’s a surf/beach theme, culminating in this powerful “empress and her slave bearers” shot which is actually kinky as hell if you look at it with any gaze more careful than “Hey, look, she’s sitting on those beefy dudes!”
(Don’t forget to click for embiggening.)
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Of ever again speaking to you, that is. Just show her this article, and give a good “hardy-har-har” when you do it:
That’s right me boyos and cheloveks, stop combing your knuckles long enough to read this article, and you too can learn the secrets of how to “turn a militant protesting unshaven vegan into an actual girl!” Woot, I say, and I say again, woot!
The Tumblr where I found this offers its own sarcastic recipe for a feminism “cure”, structured like the Underpants Gnomes meme from South Park:
Step 1: Show article to woman.
Step 2: Peel woman off ceiling.
Step 3: Wait until she stops spitting and cussing. Offer makeup sex on behalf on entire male gender.
Step 4: Retire to man-cave until balls heal.
Step 5: Profit?
The clipping from Maxim magazine dates from 2003, which is about a year before I stopped even thumbing through the FHM/Maxim style lad-mags on the news stand. Are they still this bad? Do they even still exist?
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Remember last month when I wrote about what I called “unusual romantic understandings”?” As I said then:
People … are willing and able to make the most astonishing compromises and bargains (physical, emotional, financial) in order to get the love, affection, validation (and, yes, sex!) that they need.
I was reminded of this by a stellar example from the pages of the New Yorker, in a review of a book about John Stuart Mill:
Mill said that he had always been a feminist, but there isn’t any doubt that the engine of his feminism was his friend, love, collaborator, and eventual wife, Harriet Taylor. They met at her home, in Finsbury, in the summer of 1830, over dinner among liberal friends. Harriet, a year younger than Mill, was married, to a slow-witted, well-meaning pharmacist named John Taylor; they had two children. She was smart and pretty–”a small head, a swan-like throat, and a complexion like a pearl,” the daughter of someone present at the momentous dinner wrote later–and already oppressed by her very unequal marriage. If you see her pictures, and make allowances for the cosmetic conventions of the portraiture of the time, she still looks pretty wonderful: big Natalie Portman eyes and that fine long neck. She and Mill fell for each other quickly….
For the rest of the decade, theirs was a complicated lobster quadrille of love. If the lovers were just a touch less fierce-looking, Mill and Taylor would make as good a Victorian love story as Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. They were seen everywhere together. Carlyle’s wife, Jane, gossiped that “Mrs. Taylor, tho’ encumbered with a husband and children, has ogled John Mill so successfully that he was desperately in love.” After years of intrigue, the Taylors finally decided on a separation. To test Mill’s love, Harriet went to Paris, and invited him to spend six weeks with her there. The interlude was splendid–but then Harriet, with a rather sweet imperiousness, allowed her husband to come to Paris for his own audition. Harriet ultimately decided–with mingled propriety, uncertainty, and something like flirtatiousness–that they could share her, on an alternating schedule, at the Taylor house, her husband entertaining guests with her on some days, and Mill on others. Taylor paid the bills, while Mill stocked the wine cellar.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008 -- by Bacchus
With a few notable exceptions, this sex blog generally stays away from the feminist porn wars, which always strike me as being in the nature of unhappy negotiations over the way political correctness ought to be defined by and among its most cutting-edge advocates and devotees.
Still, the wars continue, whether I blog about them or not. Case in point: this account from Audacia Ray, about some flack she took for allowing oppressive patriarchal semen to touch women’s bodies in a porn movie she made:
I was on a panel called “Good Porn for Good Girls” that featured some female porn directors. When I first found out about the panel, I was a little apprehensive — the idea of me being a good girl is kind of funny (to say the least), and it’s also annoying that despite the fact that I’ve never called The Bi Apple “porn for women,” other people enthusiastically slap that label on it. I’m a woman, and a self-identified feminist. Ergo, my porn must be for women.
Really, I find this tiresome — I made The Bi Apple for people who want to see a slightly different vision of sexual interaction, people who are queer or pansexual or just plain curious about people and bodies and fucking. Women are of course invited — but so is everyone.
…
Anyway … the panel quickly devolved into an argument about blowjobs. A few audience members questioned the prevalence of blowjobs in Erika Lust’s films and the extent to which giving a blowjob is a feminist act. Erika quickly said that she personally likes giving blowjobs, which is why they are in her films so much, and she personally is a feminist, so do the math. It definitely seemed like the crowd didn’t buy this explanation.
I’ve seen this happen too when people ask “Why do the men in your movie ejaculate on the women’s bodies?” and my answer “I asked the female performers where they wanted the cum, so it’s all up to them where it’s deposited” is often greeted with skepticism. This kind of skepticism is the stuff of “false consciousness” — or the belief that if only we (being Erika, me, and female porn performers who like getting cum on them) were radicalized to better understand our oppression, we would know that cocksucking and money shots are Bad For Women.
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Just doing what I’m told, here. I found this graphic over at Renegade Evolution with the caption: “Say Hello To Postfeminism.”
I think, as captioned, that this is a snarky attack on post-feminism from a traditional anti-porn feminist perspective. But what do I know? It could be a straightforward celebration of a post-feminism that doesn’t automatically equate a little friendly facial cum-shot / bukkake action with subservience and degradation.
Well, it could be. And running with that theory, this young lady could be exploring personal empowerment through post-modern alternatives in beverage dispensing:
Or, for reasons known only to herself, she could be symbolically trying to suck the dick of a man who is (symbolically) busy trying to pee on her face. Yeah, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so maybe she’s just thirsty? Er, but she’s got a sealed beverage in her left hand.
Oh, hell, let’s go all the way and zoom in on that shot, just to celebrate the the triumph of branding that Miller Light has achieved by giving away free pitchers at this particular beach party:
Update: My bad. After reading a little more Renegade Evolution, I’m now leaning toward the “straightforward celebration” theory.
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Saturday, September 9th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I know I’ve been quoting Susie Bright a lot recently, but then, Susie always has been a woman with a lot to say. Her latest big essay grabs firmly ahold of the seeming paradox of women and their rape fantasies:
I didn’t acknowledge having perilous fantasies until I was in my twenties. In a women’s studies college course, our teacher asked us if we had experienced arousing “rape fantasies”?
One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart beat so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was quite kind to her, if misinformed.
Our professor comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said these fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could “overcome” them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.
She was wrong on that count. In fact, I knew she was wrong later that same night. Despite my assertive self-confidence, rock-hard feminist analysis, and weekly shift at the rape crisis hotline, I could still crawl into bed and successfully masturbate to the same disturbing fantasies that had aroused me since I was a child.
Feminism and self-esteem had no more effect on my erotic hot spots than the communion wafers I used to take every Sunday, hoping they would wash away the devil’s seed inside of me. Clearly, religion and linear politics were useless in explaining the unconscious and subversive quality of eroticism.
…
It’s normal, it’s common, to fantasize about the bizarre– the things that in real-life circumstances would trouble us, frighten us, or maybe just make us laugh. Erotic fantasies take the unbearable issues in life and turn them into orgasmic gunpowder.
…
In our fantasies, no matter how much we struggle to deny it, we control every frame. Whether we stand tall in thigh-high boots or kneel breathless on the ground, it’s a matter of our well-lubricated chosen position. We run the fuck in our minds, the exact amount of ambivalence, the perfect timing of climax. When did that ever happen in a real sexual assault?
These are just the tiniest of highlights; there’s much much more. Complete with bonus analysis of Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden”!
Sunday, March 19th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
I’ve commented before (most notably in the comments to this post about the production of spanking porn) that I don’t have much time for so-called feminists who can’t respect a woman’s sexual decisions. When feminists stop standing up for the choices women make, I stop recognizing them as feminists, it’s that simple.
Thus there’s some interest to be found in this Spanking and Feminism thread over at Spanking Blog. The post itself chides kinky men who won’t take ownership of their kinkiness, who can’t admit they want to spank and dominate for the fun of it, so they instead pretend (to themselves and to the world) that the women they are spanking are weak inferior creatures who would be lost without the “guidance and discipline” these ever-so-benevolent dudes are offering.
As discussion simmered in the comments, ranging wider and wider as discussions of BDSM and feminism tend to do, along came someone claiming to “respect individual choices” while simultaneously arguing that “it’s really hard to seperate out cultural expectations and personal choices.” Which, translated, means something like “You say you chose to do that, but I don’t believe you, and thus I’m free to condemn your choice.” I enjoyed the response:
No, it’s really not hard to separate out personal choices from cultural expectations. When someone says “This is my choice” you respect that, absolutely, or you just became part of the problem. If you retain niggling reservations, if you’re willing to question the individual’s self report of her choice, then you are failing to respect her personal choice and you are claiming, in effect, that you know better than the individual. Viewed charitably, the claim is still a version of “Your society has made it impossible for you to act as as a self-actualized individual adult human; you’re so messed up that you can’t even correctly determine or report what you want.” That’s an infantilizing, disempowering, patronizing claim and although it’s often made by folks who claim the badge of feminism, it’s no part of a true feminism that I could respect.
Just so.
Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Here in the United States we are accustomed to a certain emotional transactionalism, a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately style of equitable dealing that, at least in the sexual arena, may not always be a real comfortable fit when it’s wrapped tightly around the different values and responses men and women bring to sex. Men and women steeped in the values of classic American feminism may not approve of the following, but it’s hard to deny that Dora sounds pretty pleased with herself when she writes (at Taken in Hand, link via Spank Directory) about The Importance of Making Myself Available:
It is wonderful when we have sex and I am on fire with passion or I pick up that passion during the act, and it is an important part of our marriage and sex life, but I think the other times are just as important and, in another way, wonderful. Those are the times when it didn’t matter if I was in the mood or not, because he either needed so badly to have that pressure relieved or he just found me so adorable that he had to express it by taking me on the spot.
Those times I do not get any orgasm but I have the pleasure of having a husband who is happy and cheerful and humming. And sometimes he is even able to help decorating the table for a dinner party just because he has got it. To see him like that is a much more quiet and subtle satisfaction than an orgasm, but to me it is just as good.
Maybe I am more practical about it because I am the farm girl I am, but to me it is and always was a very natural thing that the male has different sexual needs than the female. To meet those needs and even enjoy it as much as I can in some way or another has always been a natural thing for me, because I believe that a wife has a duty to be supportive and loyal, to let her husband feel loved and appreciated, to please him and make him happy, and to comfort him and cheer him up and help him to regain his confidence and self-esteem when he needs it.
Compare and contrast: Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You.
Monday, January 20th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
The Reverse Cowgirl is back with actual words on her blog (Yay!) and she links to a story from a college newspaper that’s sort of an overview of the bukkake thing, with a review of a specific American Bukkake title.
All of which is reproduced here because, as noted previously, bukkake is one of those fringe porn things that doesn’t get written about much with any degree of honesty. There are a bunch of wierd, odd, unusual, or downright gross things happening out on the fringes of porn, and folks with the courage to discuss them (perhaps thereby making them more comprehensible to the rest of us) should be encouraged.
However, all that is by way of disclaimer, because the article itself is exactly the sort of sex writing that ErosBlog usually avoids like the plague. When nominally pro-sex authors take great pains to mention and then reinforce that they are not aroused by the subject at hand, and then digress several times into discourses on the feminist implications of their topic, all while maintaining an intellectualized tone intended to remind everyone that they are, ya know, serious… well, the result tends not to be very interesting to anyone who is more interested in sexual topics than in academic pretension.
Having said all that, however, this particular article also contains the history of bukkake according to a director thereof, presented with all due skepticism:
Director [of the American Bukkake series] Jim Powers says, “Bukkake is about discipline.” He also provides background on the practice’s mock Asiatic name. “Bukkake is an ancient Japanese custom where if a woman cheated on her husband, the rest of the village men would take her off to a cave somewhere and jack off on her face and in her mouth. And usually what would happen is the woman would kill herself afterwards,” Powers says with an earnest expression and voice that make you eventually realize he actually believes what he’s saying.
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