Lady Porn Day
Rabbit Write is curating the Lady Porn Day project starting today (Feb 22) and continuing all week until Feb 26th.
“At it’s heart, this is about celebrating pornography and masturbation. It is an opportunity for ladies of all genders (or however you identify) to open up a dialog: What is feminist porn? What is your history with porn? What do you find hot?
And ultimately it’s a dare to share your hot links. Because the more we can openly talk about porn and what we like, the more likely it is that porn for women will continue being made. And really guys have been sharing and recommending porn for ages! So help a sister out.
I dare you to start the conversation, ask your friends: “hey what do you think about porn–and what sites can you recommend?” The point is to get women across the globe talking and thinking about porn and masturbation in a healthy and fruitful way.
Join me all week on twitter under #ladypornday where we will be discussing porn as well as sharing our hot finds!”
At PopMyCherryReview we have been discussing porn since our inception. In fact, one of the first posts I ever put up in 2008 was the Anti-porn debate: Chick Flicks-Part 1-Feminist Sex Wars, an essay which grew out of my studies in film school as a part of Feminist Film Critique classes that introduced to me the Canadian anti-porn film/rhetoric of Not A Love Story, “feminist interventions” and Annie Sprinkle. In this essay I talk about my own experiences with porn and my own pro-porn ideologies:
“I believe that women who create porn are able to reclaim their sexuality by reinventing traditional stereotypes as positive sexual role models. Pornography produced by women that breaks social taboos, is diverse and portrays women as positive subjects, empowers both the producers and the viewers. It also serves to engender new beneficial ideologies and iconographies that women can embrace as their own.”
The essay goes on to discuss the Anti-porn debate and Feminist Sex Wars, critiquing the anti-porn rhetoric: “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice” and then discusses why I think women made porn is important:
“Pornography has many benefits including making sexual information/education available to a wider audience; allowing women to safely experience/experiment/ with sexual diversity and embrace their own desires and fantasies; and providing a healthy sexual outlet. Pornography also gives women producers a medium to reinvent traditional stereotypes in a sex-positive way that liberates and empowers women. Using pornography as a tool of self sexual expression women can counteract sexist cultural views by opening up a dialogue about sexism in contemporary pornography and mass media. “Sex is the weapon; Porn is Power”.”
Closely following that essay I also wrote a critique of the film that started all the bed anti-porn feminist movement “Not a love story: a critique of anti-porn propaganda” where I debate how the film manipulated viewers into false conclusions using propoganda.
“Klein attempted (and mostly succeeded) to use her terrorist tactics under the guise of a documentary to illicit horrified responses and to incite the viewer to join her “war on pornography” and censorship. Using an oppressive point of view that advocates censorship, this film is a fine example of the power of film and its ability to use emotion over reason to evoke fascist solidarity from the viewer. But much like other films that promote propaganda and hate, victimizing those it claims to protect, Not a love story essentially obscures the social problem of violence against women that is already deeply ingrained in our society, and issues of power in the real world by concentrating on pornography as the problem. Far from objective, the film is ideologically complicit and uses only specific examples. The film fails to distinguish the difference between sex and porn, or to explore the connection between the objectification of women in porn and the exploitation of the female sexual body in mass media advertising. It never creates any direct causal link between porn and violence against women, or fulfills Dworkin’s agenda that “porn is violence against women.” Still, it remains a provocative use of the film medium as propaganda, and an insightful view of the anti-porn attitudes during the 1980s.”
Since then I have reviewed tonnes of porn for women films, and have invited Garnet Joyce as a regular columnist on PMCR to interview pornographers and porn stars in her Ethical Pornographer’s Series.
For the rest of the week, I will be taking Rabbit Write’s lead and writing about some of my favorite porn films, my experiences with porn and posting porn reviews for your viewing/reading pleasure.
So I ask you: What is feminist porn? What is your history with porn? What do you find hot?
Also, feel free to comment on my essay and critique above as well as Garnet Joyce’s interviews as well. Do you have thoughts about the anti-porn debate? Is there such a thing as “ethical” porn?
What do you think?
