Complicated Love

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.

Radical Feminists Of Gor

Holly from The Pervocracy writes:

I have to stop reading radical feminist writing. … I go nuts when I read stuff like this:

“In a patriarchy, the cornerstone of which is a paradigm of male dominance and female submission, women do not enjoy the same degree of personal sovereignty that men do. This oppressed condition obtains a priori to all other conditions, and nullifies any presumption of fully human status on the part of women. A woman, therefore, cannot freely “consent,â€? because her will is obviated by her status as a subhuman.”

I don’t know what kind of women-in-chains Gor crazyworld this author is coming from, but I’m pretty damn sure that no means no, yes means yes, and throwing up your hands and screaming “we’re so oppressed we can’t even make decisions!” is not actually advancing the cause of female strength and independence.

In fact, it’s an example of something I’ve seen a few times in radfem thought–going so far that they actually come full circle. You see statements like “women aren’t able to give consent” and “women just want love, but men exploit it for sex,” and you might as well be on the Abstinence Warriors forum–it’s the same stereotyping of both men and women and unreasonable fear of sex.

Amen, sister!

I’ve always been surprised to hear so-called “feminist” arguments that are founded in claims of female incapacity or inability to consent, or to discover and to know their own best interest.

(I say “so called”, and use scare quotes, because I’m on record: when feminists stop standing up for the choices women make, I stop recognizing them as feminists.)

Holly may wonder what sort of “women-in-chains Gor crazyworld” these arguments are coming from, but I’m more concerned with the people-in-chains world these arguments are aimed at creating. I’ve said it before in a post defending the, uh, “fully human status” of porn performers, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: once you stop respecting people’s choices, you’ve embraced the ideology of enslavement:

Built right into the postulate that people can’t know what’s good for themselves is the idea that somebody else knows better, and should therefore have the right to control the poor people who can’t tell their own good. A nasty and foul rhetorical trick to justify political power over others, and I reject it categorically.

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Feminist Porn Wars

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.

Orgasmic Rape In Fiction

Offered for discussion, an excerpt from “Nicole Gets An Education” by Vulgus. It (the excerpt, not the story, which is very long and somewhat tedious in the common manner of free internet sex fiction) is a short fictional account of a woman who has her best orgasm ever while being raped, so some of you may want to pass it by:

I am very aware, however, that the second best orgasm I ever had was when Bill Harris was making love to me. He held my hands over my head in one of his strong hands and I felt totally helpless. He stared into my eyes and I felt well and truly taken. He was large and strong and I felt overpowered. It was very exciting.

My best orgasm, however, was when I said “No” to Tom Phillips. We had gone out to dinner and spent a little time at a club. I had to get up early so we couldn’t stay too long. He grudgingly took me home and somehow wormed his way into my new apartment. It was my only experience with ‘date rape’. He took control as soon as my door closed. We had been dating for a month or so and we had sex a couple of times. Tonight, though, I was not in the mood. I was tired and a little pissed at him for being such an ass.

But he started pushing me toward my couch and pulling my clothes off. I was fighting him off, but not screaming or trying to hurt him. Finally he got tired of it and he used the cloth belt from my dress to tie my hands behind my back and he pulled my dress down to my elbows and pulled by bra up over my breasts and roughly mauled them while he held me close and forced his tongue into my mouth. I was struggling and begging him to stop, but he just ignored me.

Finally he pushed me to the floor and bent me over the sofa. He pulled my dress up in back and ripped my panties off violently. Then he held me down while he unbuckled his belt and slid it out of his belt loops.

As soon as it was free he doubled it over and started beating my ass. As he was beating me he was yelling at me, “Don’t you ever say no to be again, god damn it. You fucking tease, you bitches are all alike. You just use men to get what you want and send them home with blue balls and think that it is just great fun. Fucking bitch!”

I was crying hysterically, but he didn’t care, he must have beat my ass for several minutes before he pulled his pants off and raped me from behind.

I knelt there helplessly, my hands tied behind my back, his hand holding my hair in his firm grip and pulling my head up so that he could see my face while he fucked me. His other hand kept moving under me and squeezing and pinching my by breasts and my nipples. It was horrible. And I came harder than I had ever come in my life! Over and over. I lost track of how many times I came. I had never been so aroused in my life. Some of those rape stories I read on the internet flashed through my mind as Tom violently raped me and I screamed in pleasure.

Tom finally came in me. He stood up and wiped his cock clean in my hair. Then he dressed and left without ever saying another word. It took me almost fifteen minutes to get my hands free!

I sat on my dress on the floor for a long time sobbing and sad and furious and confused.

Finally I got up and took a shower and as I washed my sore body I pictured what had happened tonight in my mind and as I washed my sore pussy I was on the edge of another orgasm. Well, I had no reason to disappoint me, so I rubbed myself until I came again. But then I was mad at myself for doing it.

This excerpt is a fairly stark and unequivocal example of a blindingly common meme — the meme of the woman who is overpowered by brute male force, raped with a modicum of violence, and, on a sexual level at least, enjoys it.

There are plenty of controversies swirling around this meme. Many men, for example, enjoy pointing out that it’s a predominantly female fantasy, at least measured by sales dollars — because, lightly prettied up, it’s at the heart (or somewhere lower) of an entire genre of commercial fiction marketed to and mostly consumed by women. In certain feminist circles, this fused grenado gets lit and tossed back over the wall by means of various arguments to the effect that the fantasy is thrust upon women or defensively adopted by them in response to the miscellaneous oppressive mechanisms of patriarchy.

But my interest is not in the question of whether the meme is prevalent — for it surely is — or whether it is popular with women — for it surely is that, also. Readers of this blog will know by now that I am predictable to this extent: memes expressed in erotic fiction, consumed and enjoyed as such, will attract no condemnation from me.

No, my question is: What do you think is the propagandistic effect, if any, of the meme? Do you think expressions of it are intended to convince (or, regardless of intent, do have the effect of convincing) anyone (male or female) that real world rapes are less evil or pernicious than they actually are? In other words, does fiction like this have the intent or effect of reducing the power of “No”?

Of course the forces of censorship — against which ErosBlog lives in opposition — are quick to say yes, and to assume that a “yes” should end the conversation. I think erotic expression is important enough to defend even in the face of real-world negative consequences, could they be established, so I will doubtless continue to oppose censorious impulses. But it remains an important question. Is there danger in the expression of such fantasies? And if so, what’s the appropriate reaction, given the toxic sexual pressure cooker environment you get when a society chooses repression and censorship?

Life In Strip Nation

Here on ErosBlog I ignored, as I tend to, the annual frenzy of “concerned” journalists fretting about how Halloween has morphed into “Dress Like A Slut” day, ohnoes! To me, the phenomenon is obviously just a manifestation (on Halloween, how appropriate!) of the ghosts of Saturnalia and Carnival, which we in the Puritan Protestancies had taken out and shot centuries ago. I approve, as I do, of all liberating influences. Hell, I approve of nekkedness in general, so how could I glower all dour at skimpy costumes?

Surprised I therefore was to find ChelseaGirl from Pretty Dumb Things fretting on the same topic, although I’ll cheerfully grant that she did it with more thoughtfulness and nuance than any print journalist I’ve ever seen tackle the subject. Most interesting and useful in her post, I thought, was her description of a memetic landscape she calls Strip Nation:

Because this trend … also speaks to the seduction of what I’ve come to call Strip Nation.

Strip Nation is the place where little girls wear body glitter for fun, where pole dancing is a fitness pursuit, where chicks have standing appointments for monthly Brazilians, and weekly tans, French manicures and matching pedicures. It’s the place where women purposefully show bra straps and g-strings. It’s where average women have the lower-back tattoo, body piercings, and t-shirts that read “Diva” It’s the where women get breast implants, labiaplasty and anal bleaching. It’s a place where family restaurants have waitresses wearing orange short-shorts, and where drag-queen restaurants have banana deep-throat contests, and where eighteen year-old girls win them.

Strip Nation is where we live now. It’s not a bad place to live. Strip Nation gives us Carmen Electra and body butter. Strip Nation lets us shake our booty with abandon. Hell, Strip Nation, combined with Hip-Hop Nation–it’s a unified country of dual principalities–has given us the word “booty”. Without Strip Nation, we’d still be pogoing and wearing flat shoes and high-waisted pleated pants.

Strip Nation can be a lot of fun, but it’s a deeply problematic kind of fun. I am proud to have been a stripper, but I know that stripping is best kept in the strip club because stripping is about serving up a fantasy based on the most simplistic heterosexual male’s formulation of an uncomplicated woman. Most simply, Strip Nation provides a dreamscape based on a model of a two-dimensional woman and men’s desire for them. And while that is all well and fine for an eight-hour strip shift, it has major issues when it goes rampant, out into the streets, and disseminates like a virus into the culture at large.

I wonder how much women choosing to dress like a stripper for Halloween–whatever the flavor of the specific fantasy–isn’t centered on an unquestioning slide into the happy amnesia of Strip Nation: a place where men will be men, women will be girls, and no one need have a thought cross their untrammeled brows. I wonder how much the Naughty Nurse, the Sassy Satan, the Wanton Witch, the Reform School Drop Out, the Pirate Wench, and all the heaving bosom, exposed thigh rest, has more to with the prefeminist nostalgia that Strip Nation embodies. I wonder how much the naughty Halloween costume hasn’t less to do with getting one’s freak on as it does with doing so in a way that feels like you don’t have to think about it when you do.

Tomorrow, Halloween will just be a bunch of garbled stories and memories, gone for another year, But we’ll still be living in Strip Nation. Look around you, it’s everywhere. Fun, yes. But at what cost?

I think the description of Strip Nation is spot on, but I’m having trouble parsing out the objection. It seems to be something in the nature of “real life is more complicated than that”, but every cultural expression we have is idealized in one way or another; Strip Nation is a fantasy space almost by definition, and it seems odd to me to ask “at what cost?” when the full achievement of the fantasy lies as much out of our reach as do the golden shores of Brigadoon.

“You wouldn’t like to eat nothing but candy and ice cream”, warned our mothers, and we didn’t believe them. If we really lived in Strip Nation, we probably wouldn’t enjoy that either; a steady diet of oversimplified sex is probably not much better than a steady diet of high fructose corn syrup. But what’s really going on here is a whole bunch of cultural expressions reaching toward Strip Nation, but which are counterbalanced by so many other cultural anchors and drags that we’ll never reach the Strip Nation Shangri La, nor indeed get anywhere close to there. We don’t live in Strip Nation; we don’t even live next door to Strip Nation. All we do is live in a place where we can, sometimes, get away with acting as if we do live in Strip Nation.

If you grant that, is it really fair to ask “at what cost?” The only cost I see is to the competing memetic landscapes that are losing mindshare in competition with Strip Nation. I’m talking Burqa Nation, Chador and Hajib Nation, Barefoot And Pregnant Nation, Nice Girls Don’t Nation, It’s Dirty Down There Nation, Leave The Lights Off Nation, Twin Beds Nation, Save It For Marriage Nation, the entire constellation of memetic spaces in which skin must be covered, dancing must be restricted because it could lead to shagging, sex is strictly controlled, and women are (in one sense or another) chattel, not free to make their own sexual decisions.

Here in the brave new century, Strip Nation is out-competing all of those memetic spaces. Is it perfect? Heck no. Is it better? I can’t see how it isn’t. At what cost? I, for one, don’t much care, unless the cost is higher than the rolling human tragedy of the repressive memetic spaces Strip Nation is competing with and struggling to displace.

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Hello, Postfeminism

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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Porn And Meat

I hate to just dump a picture post, so here’s a picture to make you think:

The interesting question is, what does it make you think? Discuss among yourselves.

For me, it raises all sorts of questions. Is it supposed to be funny, in a mock-heroic Great White Hunter sort of way? (Obviously not very* funny, but I think I found it on Urod.ru, where the humor tends to run low. You can’t entirely blame those low-brow Russki misogynists, though, because that truck is an American classic or I’ll eat the hood ornament.)

Or is it supposed to be a deep feminist commentary on the treatment of women in porn? Or on the treatment of women, in general?

Or, contrariwise, might it be a direct reminder message from the Patriarchy on the supposed equation between women and meat?

We might know more if we knew who the photographer was. Which says a lot, all by itself, about the difficulty of finding meaning in a context-less photograph.

Have fun, but be nice.

Internet Porn For The Greater Good

A friend of mine, a real-world meatspace friend going waaay back to my mis-spent youth, sent me a brief email note and a link the other day. This friend of mine is, I’d say, amused to find himself acquainted with an internet pornographer, but I do not think he’s convinced I’m making the best use of my talents and education. The email said, in its entirety but for salutations:

Of the various virtuous roles you might occupy in the greater human scheme, defender of the public peace didn’t come to mind first, but perhaps it should.

Yeah, he talks like that. It’s one of his many charms.

The link he sent was this one, to an article in Slate: How The Web Prevents Rape.

I’d seen previous references to the research documented in the article, but nothing so cogently written. A few excerpts:

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, “More Net access, less rape.” A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

Well, duh.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that’s a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It’s hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

I said “Well, duh” because, as I wrote back to my friend:

To me, that’s one of those studies with a result that’s intuitively self-evident. (Not to devalue it; so much that is self-evident is also wrong.) The crux for me is in the sentences “It’s hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.”

In the canonical feminist view of rape, the brainless chant is that “rape is not about sex, it’s about violence and power.” I’ve always thought that to be arrant nonsense. Rape *is* violent, but that’s a statement about practicality and means, not motivation. It’s always seemed to me that rape must be about sexual frustration. Reduce the frustration, reduce the incidence of rape, quod erat demonstrandum. About as controversial as arguing that feeding people reduces hunger.

(If I had been writing the above for this blog rather than in email shorthand to someone who knows me well, I’d have been more cautious. Specifically, when I wrote “rape must be about sexual frustration” I’d have disclaimered it a bit; “many rapes are”, perhaps, rather than “rape must be”. And I would have been more tactful in my description of the opposing view.)

My own belief is that the internet porn effect is broadly beneficial, whatever its debatable effects on the rape statistics. Peeping Toms in the bushes used to be a staple of the suburban police blotters, but when was the last time you heard of one? Didn’t we used to get more high street raincoat flashers, before the internet came along and offered the sending of unsolicited dick pictures as a safer alternative?

I don’t have numbers to prove any of that, of course. Which is why I find the research quoted in Slate to be so interesting.

Susie Bright On Rape Fantasies

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”!

Consensual Spankings For Feminists

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.

Calling A Gland A Gland

I’ve always thought it silly when I see folks referring to the prostate as “the male g-spot”. To my mind, that usage only perpetuates woeful anatomical ignorance. Rabbit has a slightly different objection:

As a person fascinated with words and phrases, I always find the reference to the male g-spot a little bit humorous. After all, the g-spot literally means Gräfenberg spot and refers specifically to a gynaecologist’s discovery within female, not male genitalia. I’m not certain when the male g-spot became a term used to describe stimulation of the prostate, but I’m running across it more and more frequently on sexuality sites. One part of me immediately thinks, jeez, can’t guys find their own term, or, like early Christians taking over and replacing pagan rituals and festivities with their own celebrations, must dominant cultures constantly turn things into their own personal and empowering definitions? From a feminist point of view, there is a sense of male ownership over female sexuality in their use of the term to describe a man’s pleasure point.

Feministas Against Porn

Charges from RollerTrain apparently likes sticking her face right into the bee hive to lick the honey straight off the honeycomb frames, because she’s taken on the “angry young feministas” who disapprove of porn:

In the American porno bizz, blame pushing pisses me off like nothing else. … I don’t buy into victimhood when it boils down to American porn. Not here and not now. I have little sympathy for anyone who tries to score a profit without learning how to score it, especially when you’re trying to score off anything other than your mind.

When your goal is money, you better be damned sure of three things: You know what you’re getting into, you like what you’re getting into, and if the first two things don’t apply, you learn from your failures. Porn or not, we’ll always fuck up. But if you decide not to learn from your own mistakes, especially in something as simple as porn, you choose your victimhood.

Arguing that “porn victimizes the women who appear in it” disrespects and belittles the freedom of choice exercised by the women who appear in porn. I’d say that sort of infantalizing argument does more damage to women than porn could ever dream of doing.

Farewell, Russ

Edifying Spectacle offers a fitting tribute to “sexploitation” director Russ Meyer. I imagine the forever-frigid feminists would happily affix that adjective to his work, but as the author of the tribute points out, Meyer’s work celebrated American pop culture in a singular way. Here’s an excerpt from Richard’s tribute:

Incompetently I wish to do honor to one of America’s masters of erotica. To hell with philosophers, economists, editorial writers: isn’t enlivening the erotic life nobler and more valuable than the vaporizings of the classes that think themselves thoughtful and useful?

And, a wonderful image of Kitten Natividad, star of Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens:

I doubt I’m the only one with an urge to go make tons of popcorn for a Meyer filmfest tonight …

Men And Sex Blogs

I want to share an interesting set of comments I found over at Steve Gilliard’s News Blog. I’ve commented before on how most of the sex blogs I link to are written by women, and how male voices in the sex blog community are so vanishingly rare. When you do find ’em, they are guys like me ‘n Daze who talk about other people almost exclusively. Or we just link to porn pretty pictures. Now, why is that, exactly?

Steve says:

There’s a new spate of sexually oriented blogs. Some are fascinating, some droll, but they are mostly an outgrowth of women expressing themselves online. Not exclusively, but enough to make it an outgrowth of more political and social expressions of opinion.

But what a lot of feminists and their fellow travelers do not understand is this: it is incumbent upon men to be discrete.

The social code of men doesn’t encourage the sharing of sexual secrets with other men, forget women. Which is why Clinton lied, which is why my toes curl when I’m asked about women I’ve dated. One of the big tenets of an adult masculinity is not bragging. You don’t have to do much to let your friends know you’re sexually active. And that’s all that is required.

He also says:

[M]en are judged when they talk about sex. Yes, men tell sex stories, but they leave out the details. Sure, they’ll tell you what happened, but they leave out the details. Most men do not want to know what other men do in bed. Men do not usually hunt down old boyfriends to get details of what they did before. And, no, most do not want to be friends with the guys you’ve slept with. In fact, they like to ignore them. They won’t think they’re good guys or any such nonsense. It’s physics: two bodies cannot share the same space.

Men withhold details to prevent being judged by their peers. Guys do not say “yeah Bob, I really like sucking her toes and brushing her hair after sex.” That’s not anything a guy wants to know about another guy, ever.

Most of which strikes me as pretty much right on the money. There’s a class of guys who tell graphic lies in the locker room, but real men mostly ignore and avoid that, as the crass adolescent posturing it generally is.

Suspect in Feminist Circles

Mike Snider, a modern (as in, currently alive) poet who actually writes poems real humans can read and enjoy, says that any straight man who writes about sex is automatically suspect in some feminist circles. Yeah, but that’s hardly surprising, since sex itself (at least, sex involving a penis and any female orifice) is automatically suspect in some feminist circles. It may be that Andrea Dworkin never actually wrote the exact words “All sex is rape” — but she wrote some things that sure suggested she felt that way, and the idea has surprisingly persistent “legs” in, as Mike Snider put it, “some (not all) feminist circles.”

But that’s OK. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that too many Dworkinites are loyal readers of ErosBlog.

Anyway, it bothers Mike that “there’s not much explicitly sexual poetry by men about sex with women.” Fortunately, he’s doing something about it:

We woke entangled in new love’s designs
And scrapped a plan to breakfast in the park….

Thank you, Mike.

It’s A Damned Formula

Here is some more sex writing that uses the up-front “this stuff doesn’t turn me on and by the way I’m a feminist” disclaimer. Come on, guys, ball up, find your nuts, and write about sex without all the wussy disclaimers!

It’s right here in paragraph three — this guy wanted to get it right up front:

But I never quite recovered from the blow to my libido, going from interested to bored to downright queasy within an hour. It’s a shameful confession for a sex-positive feminist to make.

From an otherwise fairly decent article on porn.

Marriage Then and Now

There’s a long and fascinating article in The Atlantic called “The Wifely Duty” about the decline of sex in modern marriage. (Alina is owed thanks for the link.) This phenomenon is of interest to Bacchus, who (though never married) once spent more than half a decade sharing a household with a woman he loved who nonetheless somehow usually managed to reject all his sexual advances, or else efficiently deter the making thereof, for up to three or four months at a time. (The article calls this “launching a sex strike of an intensity and a duration that would have impressed Aristophanes.”)

Although interesting, the article is fairly unsatisfactory inasmuch as it whiffs of nostalgia for better days gone by, on the thinnest of evidence that they were in fact better:

In the old days, of course, there was the wifely duty. A housewife understood that in addition to ironing her husband’s shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was with some regularity going to have relations with the man of the house. Perhaps, as some feminists would have us believe, these were grimly efficient interludes during which the poor humped-upon wife stared at the ceiling and silently composed the grocery list. Or perhaps not. Maybe, as Davis and her “new” findings suggest, once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts happily paddling.

Or maybe not. Thank you for playing.

This much, at least, rings true:

Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

Alina’s take on this (scroll waaaay down) is perhaps more encouraging than the author of the Atlantic article:

Marriage without hot sex is like prison, add the mortage payments. A couples’ sex life also matters for the development of their children’s emotional and sexual maturity. I want my kids to see me kiss my husband in ways that indicate there is more between us than a shared mutual affection. Kids who grow up around affectionate, passionate parents tend to be more comfortable and less repressed with in their own adult sexual lives.

Marriage, in this young ladies’ opinion, is about tying your fate and your dreams to those of another, binding yourselves together knowing that sometimes the temptation to cut loose will be agonizing, but that your union is more important than your individual recklessness. Don’t blame marriage for a bad sex life– if you must blame anything at all, blame the notorious Wittle Wabbit. Boys, you’ve got competition. All the more reason to lobby your government for that classic French right to a 2-hour lunch break…

Quick, boys, somebody marry her before she gets away!

Bukkake Feminism: A Critical Analysis

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.