But hell, I might as well say it now...the porn that everyone is complaining about? Eh, that's the kind I both do and watch. And for both myself and a whole lot of people I've talked to who both do it and watch it-male and female- it's an outlet. Some people take their daily angst and rage and not so shiny happy feelings and put them into music, or art, or poetry, or sports. Some put it into sex. And in such cases, I think it is far preferable and yep, more healthy that they are doing it in a controlled environment with consenting adult people. They say art imitates life and all, and if porn is considered art, well, life isn't all roses and long walks on the beach and all.

I've been wanting to reply to this Ren, but I've been really busy. One of the hazards of working as co-founder of this site is that I often spend more time on the backend than doing the writing that's my real first love. Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that I wasn't trying to insult or diminish your work in mainstream porn. I complain verbosely and in detail about the tons and tons of shit that Hollywood regularly shovels onto the heads of the American public as well; scratch that curmudgeonly surface, and you find a really passionate lover of movies. Same with the porn thing. Porn, like anything else, is ruled first and foremost by Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap." I object less to the silicone and bleach jobs than I do to the simple lack of imagination and passion in most films. My great love for Belladonna's work comes from the fact that, although I'm not generally into assholes, she's so obviously into them, so passionate about a beautiful asshole, that you can't help but get swept up in her enthusiasm.

And your last point in that paragraph is one that needs to be made, and I think that that's the real value in porn. The intellectual and moral failure at the heart of the sex-negative movements on the left and right is that they accept the traditional idea of a dichotomy between male and female sexualities: men are insatiable and animalistic, with a rapist lurking just beneath; women's sexuality is sweet and soft, and lends itself to images of seashells, cotton-candy clouds, and long, soft sighs. That this sort of thing should be sold by feminists is particularly shameful, since the movement was launched by a desire to overthrow such false dichotomies. Reading the writings of some of the 19th-century feminists is really instructive; many of them were unspeakably radical for their time in terms of their attitudes toward sexuality and marriage, and probably would be thrown bodily from a meeting of NOW today. Even considering how much of modern porn is banal and mediocre, we would be impoverished by its loss, because it does serve to remind us how much variety there is in sexual desire and how the line between what women want and what men want isn't always so easy to distinguish, and often doesn't exist at all. Women's sexuality, like men's, can often be dark, and hungry, and ravenous, and violent. To say otherwise diminishes the humanity of both men and women, and diminishes sexuality. That's the real danger of pseudo-rads like Dines to me; in the end, they want us all to go quietly back into the same old cubbyholes.

Blog: Literate Perversions

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