(Yes, Virgina, there is a sexblog.)
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(Yes, Virgina, there is a sexblog.) |
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Things to be thankful for... Usually, I save this entry for Thanksgiving week, but it's not going to wait this year. So much has happened this week and not just in terms of ranting against the machine here at Pursed Lips. First, I owe a big thanks to Roger of JournURL fame for setting up Pursed Lips as its own domain. You might think it's been a long time in coming, but I've had to run this site on a shoe string budget since its inception, thanks to my disabled son's costly care. Almost five years ago, I hit Roger up for some webspace -- a user request that he was totally unprepared for -- and he came through for me. Since then, he's looked for ways to make blogging better for me, kept it on the cheap by passing on savings to me wherever he saw them, and generally endured my fatigued thinking about html with the patience of a saint. The moment it became affordable for him to open the flood gates of domain ownership to me, Roger did, and I'm endlessly thankful to him for his friendship and tech support. I promise never to blame him for the spam I might now start getting. When we brought up the new domain, I wasn't sure exactly how the DNS would filter down, particularly in regards to the old redirect URL. Turns out, it went fine but several bloggers came to my rescue, just in case. So I owe great thanks to Richard, Dan, Evan, Bacchus, and SpankBoss for their aid and for their appreciation of my writing this past week. What a nice community of erotomaniacs we have here and if I missed listing anyone, spank me. (SBoss outta know how to do the job!) Finally, I want to thank the editors and publishers who've worked with me over the last year. You'd think by the looks of your local Borders or Barnes and Noble that the book business must be lucrative for everyone, but I'm here to tell you that those of us who write erotica would make more money cleaning the bird cages of Stephen King. We write smut because we love to and the publishers who print us do so because they're committed to giving us voice. Sure, they make some money off of us, but you'd be surprised how rough a business it is even on the publisher level. Indeed, since last year's demise of LPN distributors, many of my publishers have been struggling to keep their footing. That's why I'm going to list my two newest anthology appearances here on the banner page of Pursed Lips from now on. I'm happily obligated to push the books I'm in -- another instance of me doing my part, I guess! (Call me a gleeful New Media Whore, won't you?) Two things worth noting: I'm going to try to be part of regional readings for Best Lesbian Erotica, once I get my car road trip worthy. Watch for announcements here. As well, many of my current and next year anthology appearances will be in Venus Book Club editions, which won't be available in bookstores. A book club providing roughly 25% of the erotica anthology market is a new publishing development, and I suspect your purchases will ensure Venus Books Club's continued participation in this venue. Memberships work just like book clubs always have, except you can run the entire thing online. 'Nuff said, methinks. So there you have it. Why I'm feeling particularly thankful these days. It's good to be the smut queen. Not quite a fisking... of Naomi Wolf's NYMetro article on pornography, but close. Everybody's been talking about it and I hope you'll pardon me while I indulge in a mild, belated rant. Excuse my heterosexual slant as well. I'm continuing the dialogue in its original vein, made more het by the fact that the personal history I recount here occurred in the days before my queerer sensibilities became better formed in my understanding of self. Wolf, it seems, has a more idyllic memory of coming of age in the 1970s. She was right about one thing: A woman who had a positive enthusiasm for sex was often valued by men. But I found that was only as true as a man's attraction to you and desire to have sex with you. All men weren't made immediately indiscriminant by an offer of available sex; I experienced equal portions of rejections and acceptance from prospective partners back then. Yes, desired sex did often make for grateful partners, but my experience also runs contrary to Wolf's assertion that "mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer." I'm 47 -- a few years older than Wolf -- and while I didn't have fashion-doll hardcore porn to upset me, I did have mainstream men's magazines. Even in the 1970s, Playboy, Oui, Club and others were projecting a certain female image to its male readers and one thing stood out in my mind back then: All the women were slim, shapely, and had flatter tummies and bigger breasts than I did. And, yes, it compromised my sexual self-confidence, not in the ways of making love and seeking erotic satisfaction but in how I viewed my value to men -- same Wolf's young women of today. Wolf forgets that we weren't free of problems back then. Sure, pretty much all of film and a lot of low-end print pornography featured real people engaging in sex, but how much access did I, your average suburban woman, have to that? Nada. The closest I ever got to "normal people" porn in the 1970s was a biker mag filled with ultra-hairy muff shots and a catalogue of porn loops that blackboxed hinted-at facials. (Note to Naomi: Facials have been around a lot longer than you realize.) The fact is, for many of us, we had body image problems because we didn't have access to "normal people porn," and I would assert that film has simply replaced print in which medium most impacts our self image now. I'm even put off by Wolf's claims the frat party girls have to cocktease via "lesbian kisses a la Britney and Madonna" because I remember plenty of twenty-something women in the 1970s going the full-fledged menage a trois route for the very same reason: to secure a guy's attention and, presumably, affection. (Personally, that single trend among my friends put me off track with my own bisexuality for a long time. I found their reasons for engaging in threesomes -- "doing it for the guy" -- shallow and even offensive, espcially since many of them sacrificed their own pleasure and authenticity in the these scenes. And because my own fantasies about other women were separatist in nature -- a man never showed up in my wet dreams about women -- it took me a long time to find imagery that validated my private world view of bi-love. But that's a tangent, isn't it?) Porn wasn't all idyllic normal people/normal fucking anyway in the 1970s. Anyone remember men's fascination with deep throating and coming in a woman's mouth? (Anyone? Bueller?) Remember what sparked that? I dare say deep throating was as compulsive a male desire then as today's male preoccupation for scultured bodies and erotic athleticisms are now. And what about Vanessa del Rio, whose debut occurred in 1975 and made sex freak gangbangs a sensation? A cock in every crevice -- let alone orifice -- typified her films and that was then, not now. Last, I'm annoyed by Wolf's repeated mention of porn interfering with a woman's ability to "hold a guy." Why, I ask, are we still focusing on holding onto a guy? If a man's too shallow to let go of his ignorance and self-interest to admire a woman's natural body, maybe he should hear repeatedly and from many women, "Sorry, if you can't appreciate me as I am, get lost." We shouldn't be teaching our daughters that holding onto a guy is the ultimate goal of heterosexual relationships. It's no longer the be all and end all of a rewarding life. Which brings me to our role as parents. We need to help our children more with understanding sexuality and sexual reality. We should be talking to them a lot more than we are. I've already had a brief talk with my daughter about male-centered sexual acitivies and the importance of mutual pleasure, not because she's interested in them, but because I know she's heard a few things around school (read: blowjobs). We've even talked about how boys are more likely to get their ideas about sex and women's bodies from Internet pornography and how igornant they'll be when and if she decides to date them. But that's as far as I've gotten because, quite frankly, the boys are still more nuisance than curiosity to her and her friends. Believe me, when I mention "meeting boys" as she and her friends head out to the mall, they all shoot me the dirtiest (and most refreshing, reassuring) looks. However, I'm going to be armed with ideas for her when the day comes that she confronts male ignorance. My game plan:
In other words, I'll teach her to advocate for herself. In other words, she'll have to do what I had to when taking on a new lover. Teach him. And guess what? I'll impart the same wisdom in a different slant to her brother. The old fallback of "would you like your sister/mother/cousin to look like and be perceived as" (a porn star) still works, you know. Yes, I agree with Wolf that my daughter may well encounter porn-generated ignorance but unlike Wolf, I don't consider the situation and its remedies a new problem. It's little more than a variation on an old theme. However, there's no reason in this day and age that my daughter should lack power over the pressures she might well encounter. And that's where the real potential for changing the coda of this theme lies. Hell no, it's not work safe... But my Six Ways to Avoid Porn isn't meant to be. Instead, it's one big trangressive Bronx cheer aimed at the federal government's latest fright fest. Sure, fight child pornography; you'll get no opposition from me. But damn it, leave legal, consenting adults alone. Like me. So with no further ado: Six Ways to Avoid Porn. 1. Wear a blindfold. 2. Turn the other cheek. 3. Get out of the house for awhile. 4. Get wrapped up in something else. 5. Focus on your work. 6. Create some art. But whatever you do, don't let the government take away your right to view legal pornography. Check back tomorrow for a longer rant of a slightly different sort, OK? |
