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There’s an interesting pattern I’ve seen over and over: a lot of people equate nudity and sexuality.
This probably isn’t news to you, but I think it has some really important consequences. One of them, of course, is that there are all sorts of laws regulating things like nudity or topless women in public, even when there’s nothing sexual going on.
I suspect that one reason that a lot of folks freak out about women breastfeeding in public (or in photos on Facebook) is that if you equate uncovered breasts with sex, seeing a mother feeding her child is going to make you think of both infants and sex. If you can’t separate breasts-as-erogenous-zone and breasts-as-food-source, then you can either avoid looking at breastfeeding …
Continue reading Nudity, Sexuality, and Censorship
This came my way today. I can’t wait to read this book! See below, and pass it on.
Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, 2 Volumes
Edited by Lynn Comella, PhD and Shira Tarrant, PhD
Deadline: July 30, 2012
Co-editors Lynn Comella (University of Las Vegas, Nevada) and Shira Tarrant (California State University, Long Beach) are seeking submissions for a two-volume edited collection under contract with Praeger.
Description: New Views on Pornography is a two-volume collection of the most current scholarship on pornography. This edited series presents empirical research on a range of contemporary issues regarding pornography’s politics, psychology, cultural and legal debates, providing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the field of porn studies in one convenient location …
Continue reading Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law
I recently attended a lecture by Robert Jensen, noted radical feminist, anti-pornography activist, and one of the producers of The Price of Pleasure, an anti-porn film that I’ve written about here and here. I went because I wanted to see what he was like in person. I’ve read some of his work, and I figured it would be useful to check his talk out.
I have quite a lot to say about his lecture. In fact, there’s so much to untangle that this post is split into multiple pages, which is a first for me. But it isn’t until all of the different threads are teased out that the larger pattern becomes apparent. So stick with me and see how it all fits …
Continue reading Untangling the Gordian Knot: An Analysis of a Lecture by Robert Jensen
Utne Reader’s new article about Dirty Girls Ministries is getting a fair amount of notice. DGM is an organization dedicated to“helping women struggling with pornography and sexual addiction, which sounds laudable until you start looking deeper.
Like many sex educators and sexologists, I have a lot of problems with the ways in which “sex addiction” is framed. For example, the issue is usually discussed in the context of how many partners someone has or how often they have sex, rather than looking at the deeper motivations behind their behaviors. It’s also used to attack people whose sexual desires or practices fall outside the “norm”. (As if the “norm” has any meaning besides the strictly statistical.) It’s often based on pseudoscience …
Continue reading Dirty Girls Ministries: This Is What Sexual Shame Looks Like
When I read the post Some laughter with the lovemaking, please: on porn, performance, and deadly seriousness, I was struck by his observation:
If there’s one thing that we see rarely — if at all — in porn, it’s laughter. What strikes me about most pornography is that it’s always so deadly serious. A nervous giggle is permissible in a few instances (such as those ghastly “casting couch” videos that are evidently ubiquitous, in which “innocent newcomers” are interviewed and then fucked for the first time on camera.) But laughter during sex, a shared joyful recognition that getting naked and sweaty and contorted is frequently hilarious? Nope. For too many, porn reinforces the obligation to perform, which creates anxiety, which creates in turn a
…
Continue reading Sex in Porn is a Serious Business
Much of the writing about porn rests on the assumption that porn causes harm to the viewer, even though there isn’t actual research to support that claim. A new research project showed up in my in-box and I think it has the potential to finally answer some of the questions about porn.
Porn Research is a new project that wants to find out about people’s relationships with porn and how they feel about it, without assuming anything one way or another. It’s not the first time that someone has tried to find out about how viewers experience porn. For example, David Loftus’ book Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography describes what his research came up with and it’s not what you usually hear …
Continue reading Call for Participants: Research on Experiences With Porn
The other night, I was watching a cop drama. The story centered on a murder case (as they often do) and the cops uncovered information that the victim had been blackmailed for hiring a sex worker. So they tracked the escort down, thinking that she’d been behind the scheme. But as it turned out, she not only didn’t know about it, she was really worried when she heard about it. Rather than following the usual “sex workers lure men into these schemes to ruin them” plot, the writers decided to change it up a bit. The escort explains that she has dreams and plans of her own and having it be known that she’s working as a sex worker would destroy them just as …
Continue reading Why Aren’t the Anti-Porn Folks Standing Up For Tera Myers?
This seems to the the day for me to get requests for research participants. A former student of mine is gearing up for her dissertation and she’s looking for women who watch or read sexually explicit media to take a survey. Here’s the info:
Are You a Woman Who Views, Reads, or Listens to Pornography, Erotica, Romance Novels, and/or any other Sexually Explicit Materials?
If so, please share your experiences!
Complete a Short Survey (30 min or less) and Contribute to a Scholarly Understanding of Women’s Experiences with Sexually Explicit Materials
My name is Kari Hempel and I am a female psychology graduate student who is doing my dissertation research on women’s experiences with sexually explicit materials. For too long women’s real experiences with these …
Continue reading Call for Participants: Research on Women’s Experiences of Porn
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
When most people talk about the women in the porn industry, they’re talking about the performers. There’s usually an assumption that all the other people, from the camera crew to the editors to the folks in the offices & warehouses, are men. That’s not the real story, and porn researcher Dr. Chauntelle Anne Tibbals recently published her study Sex Work, Office Work: Women Working Behind the Scenes in the US Adult Film Industry, to offer a look at the experiences of the women behind the scenes in the porn world.
Did you know that only 1200 of the estimated 6000 people who work in southern California’s porn industry are performers? I didn’t, but it …
Continue reading There Are More Women in the Porn Biz Than Show Up on Screen
In all of the discussions, debates, and arguments about porn, one of the few things that most people can agree on is that most porn is terrible sex education. And this is even more important when we’re talking about how teens and young adults, who often lack access to accurate sex-positive information, end up copying porn.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are hesitant to open up a conversation with young people about porn. Maybe they don’t know how to start. Maybe they don’t feel confident in their abilities to talk about sex. Maybe they think that they don’t know enough about porn or that they don’t know how to talk about it without showing sexually explicit images. Maybe they have their own judgments about porn …
Continue reading Porn Planet: A New Resource For Talking With Youth About Porn
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