Bondage

Today I had my first experience with real bondage. It was amazing. And I am exhausted. I will write more later. Snoooooze!

Critics Make Me Meditate on BJs

This morning I got up, turned on my computer, and saw a tweet referring to this article on PopPorn by Bobbi Starr, referencing my blog entries on blowjobs in queer porn a while back (Part I and Part II) and referencing me as an ivory-tower gazing academic who thinks all blowjobs are rooted in misogyny.

I was like. Woah.

I was like, "I don't think that at all! What the hell! I was trying to say in those posts that I was surprised to see rough blowjobs in queer porn because it's easy to see them in straight porn as misogynist, but maybe they're not misogynist. Here's why it's easy to think that they might be, but here are people who aren't coming from the same background doing it... maybe people just like it." I was all sad, because I thought people were attacking me without reading what I was really writing. But then I re-read the posts and, though I do think I made the points I was going for, actually, I realized I didn't make them very clearly. I spent way more time talking about why it's easy to see a lot of blowjobs in porn as gross and upsettingly anti-female than I did talking about why maybe they're not that way. I think, in my mind, I was trying to explain how I got to the point of turning these assumptions on their heads by explaining why those assumptions might be made, but kind of forgot to make my own point.

And so, Bobbi, touche. I deserve the criticism for not saying what I wanted to say. So now I'm going to say it, and explain a little bit more about my perspective.

My entrance into the porn industry as a professional (rather than a casual masturbator, which I'd been before and which had given me my only exposure to pornography hitherto) was as a DVD reviewer for a print magazine. As a sometimes-online-porn user, I'd been hoping that "real" porn wasn't quite as violent and wild as online porn; I had it in my head somehow that they came from different places, or that some of the upsetting images I saw on my computer screen were the most extreme stuff out there. That "real" porn would be a little more relaxed and less intense. Cause honestly, we've all been there. We're clicking around finding video clips and jerking off and then when we've got our rocks off and start thinking about the things we just masturbated to, we're like, "Woah, that was... I might be a bad person for liking that."

Of course, I come from an incredibly rigid background when it comes to what makes a good person vs. a bad person. I'd been raised in an environment where not just irresponsible or violent sex was bad, but all sex outside of marriage was bad, and where anybody who enjoyed thinking about it or doing it was bad, too. So I'd found myself particularly vulnerable to recalling the gaping buttholes I'd just seen on my computer screen and thinking, "I am terrible. How could I have found that sexy?" I think I still do have serious issues with enjoying some of the things I see while watching and thinking about and writing about porn, and that's where a lot of my perspective comes from. I'm trying to deal with my own puritan past, and it's tough.

But anyway, back to the career in writing about porn. The thing is, when I got my first DVD review assignment, I was all chipper to see some "real porn" and feel better about things. And when I popped that DVD into the player, one of the first things I saw was a really intense, gagging, choking, mucousy, almost violent, gonzo-style blowjob. Even with all my online porn clicking, I'd never seen anything so extreme involving a mouth and a penis, and, well, it kind of terrified me. I realized all at once that: 1) "real" porn was the same as online porn and I was going to have to overcome some of my conservative upbringing to deal with it, 2) I was going to be watching a lot of this, and 3) there was a lot I had to learn.

I'm still learning. But put yourself in my place at that point: young, naive, starry-eyed, and with absolutely no knowledge of went into actually filming a porno. When I saw a girl choking on a penis and gagging, coughing up mucous, etc, my instinctual response was, "This doesn't look like fun. It looks like she's about to vomit. And that guy is saying things like, 'Suck it, bitch' to her. It seems like she's being abused. Holy crap. Should I be watching this?"

I think this is an instinctual response that many people might have. It's like when you accidentally walk in on your parents having sex when you're a kid; it looks, sounds, and seems very violent and upsetting at the time. And if they don't bother telling you later that they were actually enjoying themselves and that everything's ok, you might walk away from that experience thinking that Mom and Dad have some serious issues they need to work out, and that sex is primarily a bad thing. It takes a while to get past this idea, based solely on how little you know and what you saw: sex itself is an almost-violent act. It's intensely physical, often aggressive, and accompanied by sounds and facial expressions that are very much akin to those we make when we're in pain.

I had the same kind of gut reaction when I saw that first "real" porn blowjob: looking back I realize a lot of things I thought weren't true. That woman wasn't being abused--she was on that set being filmed because she wanted to be. She'd signed the paperwork, voluntarily performed the BJ, and gotten paid for it. That guy saying rather impertinent things to her didn't hate or think she was just a hole to fuck: he was playing along and enjoying himself and doing what he was getting paid to do. And the act itself, with all the mucous and gagging, was most likely being very much enjoyed by both parties. In later years, I've talked to and heard many performers talk about how much they love sloppy, extreme blowjobs. They love to give them and receive them. It's a way to make the experience of sex more extreme, it pushes their bodies further, it's hot that they're so into it that choking is just part of the performance. And I realize all this is true; gagging on a cock can be just another way of showing one's devotion to getting your partner off, and it can be really erotic in its own way, just like being spanked or tied up or called names or any number of other things that, to an outsider, can seem really negative.

And here's where I think I got mixed up in that last blog post that Bobbi took offense to. I'm no longer as much of an outsider as I was when I reviewed my first DVD. I realize that extreme blowjobs are not necessarily acts of misogynist rage, and as a matter of fact, particularly when they're on film, they are almost always the exact opposite of that. Both performers want to be doing what they're doing, or they wouldn't, duh, be doing it. But when I was an outsider, they appeared different to me. It looked, from the outside, like this woman was being degraded by this man. Like she was being humiliated and made to choke against her will. And that illusion alone can be really hot. But when I first saw it, well, I was traumatized.

And I think a lot of other people might easily feel the same way when they see their first gagging blowjob scene. From the outside, they very often look like unpleasant experiences. Depending on how they're filmed and presented, they can look like anything from the abject debasement of the woman being "forced" to take them, or like a woman with rabies is devouring a poor, unsuspecting man with an erection. The physical acts being performed don't always scream "super erotic and really fun." And that's where my hesitation around blowjobs like this comes from: my own first, traumatic experience and the realization that other people with my same type of mindset and upbringing, who know nothing about the process of filming pornography professionally, might have the same kind of reaction to it. It's hard to show someone with no background in these things a video of a girl gasping for breath, drooling, coughing, and gagging and say, "No, really, she's having a blast!" She probably is having a blast, but all outward appearances don't tend to show it.

So I think about the outsider, the person who doesn't know about these things, watching a scene where someone is doing this, and I think that this person might assume a lot of things. Firstly, that this is misogynist. At the practical level, it's kind of anything but. But from a viewer's perspective, it can very easily be interpreted that way. It looks like, in many cases, a man is force-feeding his penis to a woman who is gagging on it. And that looks kind of un-PC. And un-PC kind of makes people uncomfortable. Of course, the point that can be made here is that what's PC and what people want to do in the bedroom are only very tangentially related, and that lots of women WANT to be force-fed cocks. (Big reveal: I like giving sloppy, gaggy blowjobs, too. I really do. Ask my boyfriend.) But what something looks like and what it actually is are very often miles apart. So when the uninitiated viewer sees this stuff, especially if that person is a woman who was raised like I was, wrong assumptions are easily made and porn can easily be labeled as "bad" and written off.

And that would really be a shame. Andrea Dworkin and her posse of anti-porn early feminists sure thought that porn was "bad" because it objectified women, probably based on similar experiences of seeing something and misinterpreting what they saw, then developing a philosophy around it. I'd dare say we've come a long way since all that crap in the 70's. But the visuals of a woman on her knees choking on a dick can easily misled women now to think those same kinds of thoughts.

My first experience of giving a blowjob was a little traumatic, too. I didn't know what I was doing or even want to be doing it, but I sure wanted to make my boyfriend happy, and he sure as shit shoved that thing as far back into my throat as it would go. And that made me incredibly unhappy. It made me choke. And I didn't like that. Of course, that was long ago and at the time I was in no way ready to deal with that, but the experience traumatized me and made me have my first startling thought, as a rebellious teen, that maybe my mom was right and sex was shameful and bad, because I felt pretty ashamed that I'd let him do that to me. Looking back I realize that the shame I felt was primarily a result of being forced to do something I didn't want to do, whether it was sexual or not. It was the loss of dignity in not being given a choice that upset me, but because of its nature I wrote it off as sexual shame. And I know that I'm not the only person out there with an experience like this in her past. We are so conditioned to find sexual things shameful that we often overlook the realities of the situations we're examining. Like blowjob scenes in porn. We've heard for years, most of us for our whole lives, that porn is demeaning to women and full of mancentric images, and then when we see these blowjobs that are so easily misinterpreted, we can project our own shame issues onto it and think that the woman must be feeling ashamed and debased. Not empowered and super sexy, like she probably is.

And so, though I obviously have some biases based on experience and some deep-rooted issues with my own sexuality in general, the main issue I have with blowjobs that include gagging isn't that I think it's impossible for people to enjoy them. (Again, I do enjoy them, myself.) The issue is that people already have a tendency to think badly of porn, and it's very easy to project seriously wrong-minded ideas onto the things we see porn performers doing, based on our biases and cultural conditioning. I've done it, and I'd like to think I'm working on overcoming it. But it's worth thinking about that people might come into an experience trying to be open-minded and come away thinking that Dworkin and her minions were right, that porn DOES degrade women and that it IS bad.

It's not. I LOVE porn. I think porn is necessary, important, vital. I think that porn is a reflection of who and what we are. And many of us are lovers of extreme blowjobs. But it's all about context, and sometimes it's jarring. It can particularly jarring, or it was for me, when it's in queer porn, where the gender binary I was expecting not to find seemed to be mimicked in women given women blowjobs with fake cocks. I thought there could be no point, and why would a woman do something to another woman that can so easily be misinterpreted as misogynist?

But when I saw that, I started questioning my own assumptions about why people do these things. I didn't see any evidence of misogyny in these scenes; maybe the performers were just so used to seeing more mainstream performers do this that they thought they had to... Or maybe gagging blowjobs are just ubiquitous now. Maybe there once was misogyny in the act, but now it's just what we do because we've all seen it done, tried it, and liked it. I realized that I, little miss conservative-upbringing, give head with mucous, gagging, and intensity. That I like doing it. And, holy crap, by extension, I finally realized that most of the time, when it comes to sex, people do what they do not because porn tells them to or because they hate other genders, but because they want to. And even though watching someone drooling and gagging might make it seem as though blowjobs and porn itself are both evil, they're not. They're just complicated.

Do Porn Performers Get Gas? No, I'm Serious.

Today is going to be one of those "running around like crazy all day" days during which I will surely have many fascinating ideas to blog about but few opportunities. But I want to leave the possibility that I may get back to blogging later tonight open, so rather than writing a big, thoughtful post at the moment, here's a question:

What happens if you're a female porn performer and you're suppose to be doing a scene shortly and you have... well... gas? Like painful, swimming around in your guts gas that you know will want to be expelled soon but isn't quite ready yet? This just occurred to me because I got an e-mail from a friend this morning who was supposed to go to a class and who was worried because she had monstrous gas pains and was afraid she'd let one rip in the middle of her MFA class. That would be embarrassing. And it got me to thinking. We've all been in a situation at some point in our lives when we had an unexpected bout of gas and feared going into a public situation, but think how this must compounded if that public situation involves taking off all your clothes and letting some poke you with things. It must be nerve-wracking.
And then I thought, well hey, maybe porn performers have some advice for the rest of us! I've never heard a story of a woman having a massive fart-attack during a scene (although maybe I'm just missing out on some of the funniest stories in porn history). Maybe porn people have the best gas cure in the whole world! Maybe they know some move you can perform in the bathroom that will take care of it!
Then again, maybe they just eat carefully the day before to avoid these situations, but that's not nearly as much fun to imagine.

Anyone out there know any details? Anyone have any fart stories? Help a girl out here!

Madison Young and Me

Aw hells yeah! Every time an article of mine goes up on TheWomansPOV.com I get all tingly. Here's my review of Triangle Films' River Rock Women's Prison, which absolutely astounded me. Kathryn Annelle is one hell of a writer and director. Regardless of the fact that I LOVE lesbian and queer porn and she makes it, she puts together erotic films that hold together as artistic wholes better than, well, just about anyone else working out there at the moment. And, um, Syd Blakovich is SO hot. And, speaking of ladies I like, working with Madison Young is such a privilege; that woman blows me away.

And I mean it. I just watched a scene of hers in another Triangle Films movie (which will be reviewed on TheWomansPOV next month), and you know, at first I was thinking that she kind of terrifies me. And she does. But in a good way. In that "She's my boss kind of, but I've never met her, but I've HEARD about her, and she's a legend, and I really want to impress her" kind of way. And also in that "She's such an empowered woman, I don't want her to think I'm nearly as naive and lame as I really am" kind of way. And even in that, "This woman would TEAR ME UP in bed" kind of way. But mostly, mostly, Madison makes me crazy impressed and scared at the same time because of her ferocious performances.

Madison Young is fearless. I mean really, totally, completely goddamn fearless. She is into just about everything that would usually earn someone the label of "freak," and she owns all of them with pride and passion. When she goes on camera, she leaves behind every ounce of inhibition and self-consciousness, does what she's there to do, loves every second of it, and to hell with what it looks like. Well, that's not entirely true: she's an artist in that she cares very MUCH what her films and scenes look like. But Madison makes the exact opposite of "pretty" porn. When she goes into a scene with another woman, she gives not one iota of a flying fuck about what's traditionally thought of as "nice" to look at. She doesn't give a hoot what people think a woman is supposed to do to look "sexy." She doesn't bother with fluttering eyelashes or pouty faces or cute gasps or soft, demure actions. She is the opposite of "gay for pay" lesbian porn, the antithesis of socially acceptable femininity. She doesn't care if what she's doing is really intense, or if her body isn't shown at its most aesthetically pleasing angle, or if her face is contorted because she's so intent on what she's experiencing. She doesn't do things quietly or cutely; actually, when she gives head she kind of sounds like a dog lapping at a water dish, panting and slurping and lapping. She's balls-to-the-wall into what she does. And, you know, it's really kind of scary.

I'm just being honest here, and I'm glad I realized that the intensity of her performances is daunting to me. It jolts me out of that "Oh my god, why is she making that face?" mentality that my experience with super-feminized "lesbian" porn (and a larger culture that tells us women should always look cute) has ingrained in me. It makes me realize that I'm still expecting women to look and act a certain way, and you know? That's bullshit. If I was with someone in a sexual situation and they told me I was making too much noise or not looking pretty enough with my O-face, I'd storm right the hell out of the room. But part of me, until I started thinking about what it is that intimidates me so much about Madison, was still expecting women in erotic films and porn to look "cute" for me all the time. And that wasn't cool. I don't want to be a sexy-time hypocrite.

So, thanks, Madison! And just know that, when I finally meet you, even though I'll try to use my brave face, I'll be quaking in my boots.

My Super Bowl Sunday

You may not be surprised to learn that I am not a big football fan, my dear readers. I can watch a game and get into it if I really try, but my attention span is only about as long as one typical play, and I'm only ever in it for the chips and dip. So today, instead of ogling heavily padded men in helmets piling on top of each other (which, I'll admit, can be funny and sexy at the same time), I'm going to see Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, and Lindsay Duncan in Henrik Ibsen's "John Gabriel Borkman" at the BAM Theater in Brooklyn. And then I'm going to come home and do naughty things to myself while thinking of Alan Rickman because, frankly, he makes me all gooey inside. Squee!
So have fun with your chips and dip! I'll be having fun with this:




Prrrrowr!

Networking and Sex Working Awareness

Hm. Twitter will not work for me at the moment. It's been a day and a half, and when I load the page it says it's "Done" but there's nothing there. Is this an issue everybody's having, or is it just me?

Anyway, so I can't advertise my new FB page on Twitter. So I'm gonna do it again here. HEY YOU! Go LIKE ME on Facebook! I can promise no NSFW photos and only small words like "porno" and "sex" in my updates, so you won't get stared at by your next-cubicle-over coworkers. Really. A promise is a promise.

At any rate, last night I was super-excited to attend the "Sexy, Speak Up!" fundraiser at Madame X on Houston Street. The fundraiser was to support "Speak Up!" media training for sex workers. I attended as press for WHACK! Magazine (and you'll be able to see the super sexy footage there within a few days), so I can't give all the horny details to you here, but I was excited to meet a whole lot of really amazing people, from burlesque dancers to a Ninja Sex Poodle & Ronin of Love to the founder of the CineKink festival, Lisa Vandever! Oh hell yeah, networking is my middle name, baby.

The most exciting part of the evening for me, though, was getting an invite to Momentum, a conference in April in Washington, D.C. which is "geared toward anyone interested in intelligent conversations about the influence of new media on sexuality." Presenters will include Ducky DooLittle, Dr. Carol Queen, Dr. Ruth, Dylan Ryan, and Tristan Taormino. Suffice it to say, I'm going. And it's going to be absolutely incredible.

I'm a big fan of what Momentum and Speak Up! both are doing: opening up the conversation about sex workers and those involved in the sex community to themselves. Speak Up! trains sex workers on how to deal with the media on all levels, from talking to journalists and media about their own work in conscious and empowering ways that give all sex workers a better image, to using social media and the internet to their best advantage. Sex workers are still the one class of person that many of find it easy and nonprejudicial to look down upon and speak about with contempt. But, as cofounder Tess pointed out to me last night, sex workers are brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons. They are human beings with lives and minds, and it's absolutely behind the times to treat them as anything else. One important way to elevate them out of the dregs of society, where so many are willing to leave them, and to shine a light on the fact that they are thinking, breathing human beings is to give the power of positive representation directly to them. And I'm all about it.

I just read a great article on these same ideas at GoodVibes magazine, by Penny Barber, about raising children to understand sex workers are people, and it really rang true with what I talked about last night. More to come on this topic, I'm sure. In the meantime, give that article a read; it's great stuff.

DVD Cover Ponderings

Today's hangover is brought to you by cheap two-for-one vodka martinis with disappointing olives. And it is a killer. I shall blog through it! And let me tell you, nothing takes the edge off like digging through a brand new box of porn! I just got a MASSIVE shipment of DVDs, eleven altogether, from a porn company for review, and... well... wow. I have obviously been dawdling too long in the world of high-end erotica and plot-driven queer porn, because leafing through titled like "Cocked and Loaded," "Ass Mounted," and "Big Addiction" came as something of a shock. I'd forgotten how sleazy the covers of porno DVDs can be!

And I mean suh-leazy! And ok, that's all well and good. Not every DVD needs beautiful art design and breathtaking backgrounds, but some of this is just... Well... Maybe it's a matter of taste. Maybe I'm just not your average porn consumer. But I can't help wondering exactly who in the damn world would find appealing the image of a young woman, shot from below as she spreads her legs wide, with a HUGE veiny and unattractive penis (not all penises are unattractive, but this one I've got in mind REALLY is) originating somewhere behind the camera and disappearing into a kind of grotesquely stretched orifice. It's just. I mean, it's so gratuitous. Like, obviously there are going to be close-up shots of this woman being penetrated from every possible angle during the movie, when one will ostensibly already be aroused and images like this will be more sexy than disturbing. But on the box cover? It just looks like she's being impaled on the world's ugliest dong, in a totally unattractive way, and from the look on her face, the pressure of the thing is so intense it's making her eyeballs pop out, and she's not enjoying that sensation one bit.

I'm at a loss as to who sees that DVD cover in the video store and says, "Yes, this is the one I want to buy." Obviously somebody, or this type of image wouldn't be as prevalent as it is (though, thankfully, it's not all that prevalent; the cover of "Ass Mounted" was actually very tastefully done, comparatively). But I wonder if people do market research on this kind of thing. If so, I'd love to read some of it. How popular are DVDs with covers like this when bought based on box cover images? It'd be fascinating the demographic information on who purchases what, because I'm just having trouble picturing the person who sees the monolithic cock shooting off into the middle distance and thinks, "Oh yeah that's hot."

Anybody know anything about this? I'm super curious.

Oh, speaking of being curious, remember those posts a while back about blowjobs in queer porn? Totally doing interviews with some hot studs of the queer porn world for an article for TheWomansPOV.com! You guys are gonna love it.

I Got a Facebook!

1) I finally managed to figure out the damn "celebrity page" on Facebook, people! Look me up, and "Like" me! ...does anyone else think just "liking" your favorite celebrity is hopelessly dull? Just sayin.

Check me izzout! Miss Lagsalot!

2) Violet Blue serves up yet another insightful helping of response to pop culture: this time to NY Magazine's "He's Just Not That Into Anyone." Good stuff, thought-provoking, reassuring. I love this woman.

The Not-Doctor Is In: Fellatio Fix

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Don't Take Porn Lying Down (hehehe) NY Magazine!

I'm going to do a quick and dirty response to this week's issue of NY Magazine here, so once again, folks, if you haven't read it: do so. Now. Click on that link. It's fascinating stuff. I'm excited to say that the magazine's coverage of porn--from its online pioneers to its effect on the male sexual experience to how teenage girls are handling its effect on themselves and their boyfriends--isn't, as so many other articles have recently been, purely negative. It's a nuanced look at what porn is doing these days, to us and to itself, not really flinging criticism or bemoaning its mere existence or falling all over itself to be PC or cite the latest studies and numbers. NY Magazine was wise to avoid the pitfalls that the Atlantic recently stumbled into and that many other publications have been tiptoeing around for months, but it brought to light an almost unavoidable suspicion that's been plaguing mainstream culture's ever-closer relationship to the world of porn for some time: we're almost at a breaking point and something's gotta give.

Davy Rothbart's insightful and thankfully not-too-sweeping article, which mercifully avoided sweeping generalizations in favor of personal accounts, brought up the idea that how we deal with the online porn juggernaut that is such a staple of many of our lives these days isn't necessarily something we all have to figure out together or legislate about: it's something each of us needs to figure out for ourselves. Similarly, Alex Morris--a reporter after my own heart--bit the taboo bullet and actually spent some time talking to teenagers about how porn culture is affecting their lives, and came away with the idea that today's porn-soaked teens are both more aware of what porn is doing to them than we may have thought, and also just as awkward and uncertain about what they think of it as I'd suspected. Neither article vilifies nor martyrs pornography, and I'm happy that's the case.

But they both are the result of our country's increasing discomfort with our seemingly helpless descent into pornography's smutty hands. Over the past five years, journalists and commentators, along with pornographers themselves, have been trumpeting the idea that porn is getting more "mainstream," that "everyone uses online porn now," and generally making light of the fact that we are basically having our faces smashed up against porn's smooth, shiny glass surface and made to look inside by our own depravity. With the media ever more willing to talk about the issues porn is bringing to our collective table, and with more of us than ever willing to talk about our own experiences with it, articles like those in NY Mag seem to point to the fact that we're all kind of freaked out right now. We're not sure what's going to happen or what we should do in the face of this new sexual superpower that's co-opting our youth, sex lives, and relationships. The amazing thing to me about all this media hysteria, and something I'm hoping to bring up in some magazines very shortly, is that most mainstream commentators on our crash-course with ubiquitous porn seem to portray us mainstream consumers as completely helpless against the tide of smut. As if the porn industry, or what's left of it, or what's becoming it through amateur porn, tube sites, cam shows, and indie film companies, is not open to changing to suit what we, as consumers, decide we want.

For years now, it's true, the landed aristocracy of the porn industry, sitting pretty in porn mansions (or so we all like to think; at least I know I do) somewhere in Chatsworth, California or thereabouts, have handed down to us, the slobbering masses, their own personal visions of what it is we want to see in our blue films. Tan, hairless bodies, blondes with fake breasts and blue eyes, cleaned-up sexual encounters with nary an awkward position or funny sound, starlets with no desires of their own except an overwhelming need to live up to every male fantasy their costars and directors think their buyers want to see played out: heteronormative sexual fantasy, pure and simple. And as the internet allowed porn online to explode, the motto seemed to be, "Make what you know will sell," which has largely proved to be more and more extreme interpretations of what the Porn Valley moguls had been making all along. Heterosexual male fantasy became the order of the day in DVDs and online, in multifaceted clips, pay-per-view videos, amateur movies, and every other type of porn you can imagine, with new bells and whistles occasionally joining the usual repertoire. But one thing has remained largely the same, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned: it's all what men want to see, and it's affecting all of us in largely negative ways. And oh my god, what will we ever do against such an impossibly huge behemoth of boners?

The answer provided by most seems to be... well... nothing. There's nothing we can do. Porn is like a tidal wave, and all we can hope to do is save ourselves and our loved ones, or try to get Congress to pass some kind of restrictive law that nobody will listen to anyway.

But I call bullshit. That's ridiculous. Porn is possibly the most malleable industry on the planet; it's nothing more than the reflection of what those who make it think those who watch it want to see. And as the porn-consuming public, all we have to do is realize this is the case in order to change the onslaught of too-violent, too-sexist, too-whatever content out there, and get a little vocal about it. Porn isn't a monolith of unbending rules; it's a writhing, seething, ever-evolving mass of bodies who want to do what feels good and make other people feel good watching it. It's changeable, and since profits are dropping in most sectors like the panties of its Barely Legal starlets, it's open to suggestion. Whatever happened to "The customer is always right"? When did we, as the consuming public, lose the power to complain about not getting what we want? Rather than shaking our fists at some smut-streaked sky like cavemen, why not give the porn community some feedback about more female-positive scenes? Why not spend some time (and money--money really helps) on porn that shows women taking power, taking the camera, taking their sexuality... taking over? Why not say we want to see more porn where both partners are respectful and enjoying what they're doing? Why not boycott companies and sites that show the things we don't think are healthy for us to watch?

The point is, porn isn't going anywhere, and it's probably not going to veer off course suddenly and decide it doesn't want all of us to watch it anymore. But porn isn't some invading species of beetle that can only respond to drastic measures; it's a collection of people who want to make what we want to watch, and the only way it will know we want things to change is if we TELL those people. Quit bitching about it, mainstream media, and do something about it. It's so, SO doable.