The latest to take porn to task for ruining modern fucking is Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams. She writes,

Convenience, ubiquity, and the goal-oriented, money-shot, male-centric perspective of most porn (hint: women don't need to see that much fellatio) have changed us. Much has been written on how porn's transformation into the modern sexual lingua franca affects women – the pressure to be bush-shaved and adept at pole dancing didn't come from Oprah or Martha Stewart. But porn has changed men too – what we expect of them, what they demand of themselves. And the problem is that thinking you can learn to make to love to a woman from watching porn is like thinking you can learn to drive from watching "The Fast and the Furious."

Her point is that dudes who watch too much Ron Jeremy think that women want to be jackhammered — or, more upsettingly, that they enjoy a man "withdrawing his member at key moments to thump it on" them. Williams's piece is pretty funny; about the latter technique, she writes, "You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? 'Baffling.'" But do men really need to "learn to make to love to a woman?"

Williams writes that "unlike other recreational pleasures — bowling, baking pies — sex, unless you're a swinger, isn't something people get much firsthand observational experience with," and speculates that some turn to porn for its "instructional uses." She also says, "sex isn't just a matter of doing what comes naturally." To which I thought, it's not? Yes, it's true that your first encounter with your high school boyfriend (or girlfriend) is not going to be the most mind-blowing intercourse of your life. And Williams is right about the necessity of communication: she writes, "I have nothing but admiration for anyone who's ever had the guts to simply come out and ask a lover what works and what doesn't." Me too. But the idea that sex is a skill, like bowling, for which we need instructions, actually seems like part of porn culture to me.

To be clear, I don't think Williams is suggesting that guys bone up (sorry) on a million different techniques before bedding women. She seems to be arguing for talking to your partner, not believing everything you see on the Internet, and not taking yourself too seriously — all of which sounds like good advice. What I'm dissatisfied with isn't so much Williams's argument per se as the whole idea that people have to be "good in bed." It's a concept promulgated not just in porn but in magazines, which imply that you don't really have a good sex life unless you know 32 ways to massage the taint. And in terms of commodifying something that's supposed to be fun and (usually) free, convincing us that we need professional advice on sex is almost as bad as telling us we're not allowed to have pubic hair.

Both sex advice and new sexual techniques can be fun and hot. What's less hot is the idea that sex is just one more area where we have to achieve — and where we're supposed to pay other people money to help us do so. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich alleges, late-stage American capitalism has produced the life coach, it's also spawned a crop of sex coaches — magazine editors and self-help book writers devoted to helping us win the game of satisfying a lover. But unlike capitalism, sex should be a game where everybody wins.

Though Williams, with her emphasis on fun and communication, is part of the solution, her claim that guys can't just do what comes naturally is part of the problem. So, of course, is porn, privileging huge dicks and ridiculous moves over actual enjoyment. But maybe the pornification of sex wouldn't be such a problem if we weren't worried about "doing it right." Maybe we could keep porn in its proper place — entertainment, not instruction or comparison — if we weren't constantly told we needed to compare or instruct ourselves. Maybe what we need is not so much to critique porn, but to get past it — to stop thinking so much and just fuck.

How Not To Make Love Like A Porn Star [Salon]

Lucy Davies of the Telegraph interviewed Hef in advance of the publication of his autobiography, and her article focuses heavily on his early life in Chicago. She describes a number of Rockwellesque scenes: "we see him haunting newsstands, devouring comics; lying on his bedroom floor scratching out his own versions of Jekyll & Hyde for his friends" and "he is charming on the subject of his childhood, sprinkling the story with a confection of period detail: soda fountains and hayrides; ping-pong in the basement; girls named Candy and Betty who he tried to impress by jitterbugging in his 'red flannel shirts, yellow corduroy pants and saddle shoes.'" But all was not sweetness and light! Hefner says he grew up in "a very typical, conservative, puritan home… [where he] wasn't getting many hugs and kisses." And indeed, he frames his creation of the Playboy brand as a reaction to a culture that wasn't hugging him enough. Of his early moviegoing experiences, he tells Davies,

In that darkened theatre all things were possible: I escaped into wonderful dreams of adventure and romance. But the Hays Code [strict censorship guidelines governing moral standards in film introduced by Will Hays in 1930] destroyed all that. Eventually even the married couples on screen slept in twin beds. I was very connected to that kind of repression early on.

And when he was thinking of creating Playboy, he says,

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, Great Gatsby and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar; a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up I knew we were in big trouble. It turned out to be a very conservative, serious period – socially, sexually and politically.

Hefner's not without a point here — a culture of sexual repression is bad for everyone involved. But it's telling that he chooses to figure this repression in terms of skirt lengths. Brooks Barnes of the New York Times notes Hefner's commitment to the pro-choice cause and the Equal Rights Amendment, and these shouldn't be discounted. But sexual freedom for Hefner is still largely the freedom of men to look at women, and this is a pretty narrow view both of human sexuality and of how to combat repression. I'm firmly in favor of the right of women to wear short skirts, but the fact that dudes can see our legs doesn't necessarily mean we're sexually fulfilled, and the existence of a soft-core men's porn mag doesn't really do much for women.

Davies's inclusion of Hefner's first editor's letter in Playboy drives this point home, as well as reminding us of how poorly, in some ways, Playboy has aged. The letter reads, "If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you" — Hefner himself now falls outside his original target audience. The letter continues through some hilarious use of the second person — "We like our apartment" — to the famous and now self-parodic-sounding statement, "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Davies calls this bohemian act "delightfully hammy," until you get to this: "If you're somebody's sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion." Ouch — a "female acquaintance" may be good for a discussion of "Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex," but she better not pick up the publication that aims to teach men how to talk about these things. Instead, she should stick to her ladymags.

It's tempting to say, especially after reading Barnes's Times article (with its unbeatable title, "The Loin in Winter"), that Hefner's reign is over. Barnes writes that Playboy Enterprises "said earlier this year that it would consider acquisition offers, something that was believed to be unthinkable while Mr. Hefner was still alive." He also points out that Hefner's ex-girlfriends have embarrassed him by publicly calling him a "control freak" — and while some will always take a "yeah, bra!" attitude to the 83-year-old's "relationships" with ever-younger women, to many these dalliances are beginning to seem ridiculous. Barnes's funniest criticism is of the Playboy Mansion itself, whose game room apparently "smell[s] musty," and whose grotto is now "like a fetid zoo exhibit."

But while Hefner-bashing offers some schadenfreude-y fun, the man did popularize a cultural attitude with disturbing staying power: the idea that a woman's sexual availability is the same as sexual liberation. Again, Hefner deserves praise for his support of actual feminist causes. But when he describes his magazine as a response to "repression," he conflates male desire with social freedom, a conflation that's now so totally ingrained that Ariel Levy wrote a book about it, and women everywhere live with it every day. I'm not against porn directed at men, as long as the women involved consent. But I am against pretending that making such porn and distributing it to a wide audience — as Barnes writes, Hefner "essentially did for sex what Ray Kroc did for roadside food: clean it up for a rising middle class" — is somehow empowering for everybody, and that pretense is Hefner's biggest "legacy." Hefner tells Barnes, "We just literally live in a very different world and I played a part in making it that way. Young people have no idea about that." Unfortunately, I do.

Hugh Hefner: Interview On Playboy [Telegraph]
The Loin In Winter: Hefner Reflects, And Grins [NYT]

Tender meat… bulging and exploding with a surprise inside. All you have to do is put it in your mouth.



Juicy, sticky, sweet and warm.

Would you like to nibble a lean little hunk? Or get your hands on something fleshy and chunky? Ooh, naughty: You want both at the same time, don't you.



Opened wide. Ready, willing. Waiting.

Or do you like it raw? Glistening and pink?

What a tease… Encouraging you to finger those folds.

Put your tongue inside, where it's moist and delicious.

Oozing. Just for you. You know you want it.

Biting is allowed… encouraged.

Can't you feel your heart race? It's dripping and luscious, waiting to be penetrated. [Ugh, Dodai, I'm blushing. -Ed.]

Mackenzie Ltd [Official Site]

Earlier: The Naked Chef: Pfaelzer Brothers Peddle Hot Food Porn

According to Michael Winerip of the Times, Hefner fille is a mover and shaker among Illinois Democrats, having donated $201,000 to Democratic causes over the years. She apparently got Barack Obama to speak at the 2005 Magazine Publishers of America conference, and Gloria Steinem invited her to be on the board of Voters for Choice. Victor Navasky, the former Nation editor who recently tried to recruit Hefner as the publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, says,

She's certainly a liberal feminist and a liberal Democrat. People would say, ‘so what's she doing putting out a magazine and running clubs catering to horny men?' But she found a way to make it work consistent with her values, to serve Playboy and her father and give them an opportunity to do socially useful things.

But it's hard not to see Christie Hefner's position at the head of her dad's sex empire as a little creepy. While he dated women half her age (she's 52), she rebuilt his business. It was in shambles when she asked to take over in 1982, and, she reports, "Hef said, ‘I felt like I had this incredible birthday party and you had to come in and clean up the day after.'" Cleaning up after your dad's birthday party — especially a dad whom you call "Hef" — doesn't seem like the most empowering career.

Then there's the issue of hard-core porn. Winerip writes, "while Hef bragged about not crossing the line into hard porn, she did, buying Spice TV and Club Jenna and defending the move as business." Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors questions whether Spice TV is really "consistent with Christie Hefner's values," and if so, how feminist those values can really be. The answer to this depends on what you think about porn, but it is worth noting that Playboy Enterprises represents a very corporate end of the porn spectrum. Annie Sprinkle they are not.

But Hefner's "values" may be a whole lot simpler than the can-porn-be-feminist debate implies. The words "networking" and "networker" appear over and over in Winerip's article, and it's clear that Hefner has been very successful in making powerful friends. Her job tidying up after her pajama-clad, twin-banging dad may not be particularly enviable, but she's leveraged it to create a high-profile political and entrepreneurial platform. She's appeared on CNN, Fox, and CNBC, she'll be working with Navasky to create a for-profit arm of the Columbia Journalism Review, and she's collaborating with Canyon Ranch on a line of health products. Whether or not she's a feminist, she's certainly doing well for herself.

Winerip's emphasis on this success makes his profile kind of depressing. Bartow goes a little far when she calls it "sycophantic," but it's certainly not critical, and Winerip takes claims of Hefner's feminism at pretty much face value. It's popular lately to claim that any woman who is very successful is somehow a feminist icon (The Onion skewered a similar sentiment in the classic "Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does"). But doing well as a woman doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good for women. Hefner may support liberal causes in her personal life, but where her business is concerned, it seems like her most important "values" are monetary ones.

No Silk Jammies For Her [NYT]
The NYT Adulates Christie Hefner, Delicately Refrains From Substantively Mentioning The Hardcore Porn That Generates Most Of Playboy's Revenues [Feminist Law Professors]

With the lines between fashion, eroticism, and porn becoming less and less clear, it seems perfectly on point for a sexy slew of stylized skin mags to arouse new curiosity.

While most mainstream American magazines tend to be rather modest, magazines like French Vogue (see Lara Stone, etc.), Purple Fashion and Dazed & Confused will often print "artsy" nudes.

Kaufman adds Paradis, the biannual "magazine for the contemporary man"; Jaques, a "fashion-conscious erotic mag" with a no-airbrush policy; the rather self-explanatory Butt Magazine; "smut-meets-art" pub S Magazine and Purple Sexe to the list. These publications are "high-end," and along with the bare breasts of model Lily Cole, you'll find an interview with Damien Hirst and photography by Juergen Teller.

It's interesting to think about the subtle intricacies that make a nude photograph "highbrow" or "fashion." When Agyness Deyn poses without clothes, is it automatically a fashion shoot? When a woman poses for Straight Stuntin, is it automatically porn? (I also wonder about the sexualization we place on womens' bodies; a woman with D-cup breasts can have just as much or as little sexual experience as a woman with an A-cup, but chances are, we'd read a nude photograph of a woman with D-cups as "sexier" or "raunchier." And do some people automatically think a naked woman is wilder, sexier, raunchier if she is black?)

And why is it that crotch-centric American Apparel ads can be so distasteful, but the crotch-centric cover of Paradis (with strategically placed peacock feather) can be so pretty?

A New Wave Of Erotic Mags Blur The Line Between High-Style and Smut [Refinery 29]

Earlier: Advertising Taking Cues From Porn: What Is The World Cumming To?
Why French 'Vogue' Is Better Than American Vogue, Part I: Boobies
The Emperor Model Has No Clothes
American Apparel Will Satisfy All Your Crotch-Covering Needs (But Just Barely)

The book went to press within 48 hours after the King of Pop's death, and rocketed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list last week. Hastily thrown together, Unmasked is rife with typos and questionable "anonymous sources." Shoddy, shady, and sleazy, I think I read it almost as quickly as author Ian Halperin typed it up.

Halperin claims that he started the project a while back because he was out to prove, once and for all, that Michael Jackson was a pedophile, but in his research, discovered that he was not. (The resulting work is pretty biased, but some evidence presented makes for some decent-albeit comparatively crude-rebuttals to Maureen Orth's thorough and persuasive reporting on Michael Jackson for Vanity Fair.)

Much has been made of Jackson's infamous sleepovers with young boys at his Neverland Ranch, and Mark Ronson, along with his friend Sean Lennon, participated in some of them. One anecdote of Ronson's - which he originally told on a British TV show - appears in the book:

We used to watch the porn channel because we were like, ten, and, 'Oh my God, tits!' So Michael was in bed. And me and Sean said, 'Michael, do you want to see something cool?' We turned the dial to the porn channel and there were strippers shaking their tits around. We were like, 'Michael, Michael, how cool is this?' We turned around and he was cringing, saying, 'Ooh, stop it, stop it, ooh, it's so silly.' We were like, 'Michael, you have to look, maybe you're not seeing it right, it's naked girls!' He was not down with the program whatsoever! I think he had really strong feminist views on porn.

He's cute. Anyway, while the story doesn't prove that Michael always behaved appropriately around his young guests, it does kind of point to something that I always thought: He was probably gay. Halperin thinks so, too. In fact, in his book, Halperin actually claims that Michael hit on him at a pizza parlor (more on that in sec).

Halperin claimed to have spoken to two of Michael's "gay lovers." (Redundant term!) One was a "Hollywood waiter, the other an aspiring actor." He claims to have seen photos "corroborating" the relationships. The best bit comes from "Lawrence," the actor:

He was very shy, but when he started to have sex, he was insatiable. He was a bottom, but he was so thin, I worried that I would break him. The very first time he blew me, he said, 'The King of Pop's going to lick your lollipop.' I still laugh thinking about that.

Me too.

One of Halperin's sources was supposedly someone who worked in Jackson's camp. The source tipped him off that Jackson and his children were going to a Hollywood pizza parlor, so Halperin "got in [his] hairdresser's disguise" and sped over there. Of the encounter Halperin said:

We talked about old Hollywood movies and hairstyles, which I had researched for months before I took on this undercover persona. Michael went on and on about the Hollywood hairstyles of the silver screen during the forties and fifties. 'No one has come along with such class and style since Deborah Kerr, Dorothy Lamour, and Susan Hayward,' he said…At one point during our conversation at the pizza joint, Jackson put his hand over mine. I then wondered if the singer was hitting on me. After staring at me for over a minute in complete silence, he told me my blue eyes reminded him of Frank Sinatra…It was one of the most intense moments I have ever experienced looking into another man's eyes.

This was also good:

I had been trying to persuade [Jackson] to change his look to a platinum blond wig with a streak of ocean-blue down the middle.

But my absolute favorite passage was in regards to Liza Minnelli. After failing to score an interview with Jackson's best friend Elizabeth Taylor, Halperin, again, went undercover as a gay hairdresser, and hung out at a dance rehearsal studio he knew Liza frequented, cornered her, and told her he had been Ava Gardner's hair and makeup artist before she died. That was the clincher, and Liza invited him to hang out with her in the back room of the studio, where she shared a joint with him and some other dancers. Despite the fact that she was stoned, Liza didn't really give up any of the goods on Jackson, but she still sounds like a fun hang:

I told her that Ava was a huge fan of Jackson and used to practice some of his dance moves. At that, she let out a trademark Liza Minnelli laugh. It proved to be infectious…especially after Liza stood up and did an impression of Ava Gardner attempting to moonwalk.

First off, Blue admits that a lot of porn is just really bad, as in: too lame, too campy or too cheesy. She says:

For me, the real problem with most porn is its hokeyness — the ridiculous costumes, the awful cinematography, the ludicrous story lines, the terrible acting (not to mention how scary the close-ups sometimes look, how fake the boobs are, how some starlets really sound like injured animals...).

Though, for some people, those things aren't a turn-off, for plenty of people, they probably are.

Blue also says that some people compare themselves unfavorably to the porn stars on-screen.

And yet in my research and experience, the biggest roadblock for women (and men) to enjoying explicit imagery is the fear that they don't "stack up" to the bodies and abilities of the people onscreen. Erotic models and actresses bring up a whole range of adequacy issues, from breast size to weight, from what you look like "down there" to the adult acne we all periodically fight.

Many of us recognize that seeing images of thin models and actresses can make us more insecure about our own bodies. But with pornography, which involves explicit, sexual nudity of women often surgically enhanced to fulfill some unattainable ideal of female attractiveness - and participating in the portrayal of an act that many women have issues with already - personal discomfort can be taken to a whole other level. Pornography plays into the false idea that to be sexually attractive to men, or good in bed, there are certain things women have to do, be, look like, act like or enjoy, whether or not we actually can, are, look like, act like or enjoy those things.

Blue also takes note (although not by name) of Canadian scientist Meredith Chivers' research showing that women exhibit physical arousal by sexual imagery even when they consciously report not feeling it. From this research, Blue draws a relatively logical conclusion.

But that's the hitch: Even when our bodies respond to what we're seeing, not every woman feels empowered to enjoy the show. For years we've been told that we won't — or shouldn't — be turned on by porn, end of story, sleep tight.

The message has come from all sides — from conservative Christian organizations ("Traditionally, women are far more likely to engage in wistful, romantic fantasies than crude scenes of people engaging in sexual acts," Kathy Gallagher, cofounder of Pure Life Ministries, has written) to the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon (who says porn exploits and discriminates against women, and encourages rape).

When everyone tells you that what you might be curious about, or even secretly like, is wrong, bad, sleazy, and shameful, you don't have to cast a line very far to land a set of inhibitions.

While not exactly the conclusion Chivers draws from her research (though reporting bias undoubtedly plays a role), there's little doubt that the social messages one gets about porn would influence our desire to watch it, or inhibit our ability to enjoy it.

Blue also acknowledges those feminists among us who worry about issues of objectification, sexualization and exploitation.

I've also heard, plenty of times, that porn degrades women. That argument always makes me wonder about gay male porn, which lots of women appreciate for all its hunky hotties in flagrante. If heterosexual porn degrades women, does gay porn degrade men? What about porn made by women — is that degrading, too?

I think here, actually, many anti-porn feminists would say yes, in fact, porn in general is degrading to women because the actresses allow themselves to be objectified. Speaking for myself, I have difficulty with these arguments because, as Blue implies, it denies agency to the (female) performers and judges their actions based on how other people view them. If porn performers are exhibitionists and enjoying performing sex acts for the benefit of others because they enjoy being seen, then I'm hard pressed to say they're degrading themselves. If the problem is with the way our society views women's bodies, then eliminating porn and sex work won't change that (and, frankly, with exhibitionists and voyeurs in the world, changing the kyriarchy won't eliminate the existence of pornography as much as change its structure).

Blue says that women should view porn as just another sex toy in their arsenal — a visual vibrator, so to speak.

Explicit sexual imagery is an aphrodisiac; it sends a direct current buzzing from our brains to our groins. Like a reliable vibrator, it can be a great tool. With porn, women like me get to experiment with making adult choices and trying on new fantasy ideas, just as we might try a different brand of condom for a change.

She recommends utilizing porn made specifically by or for women, in settings that respect performers' boundaries and make use of people of varying (and non-surgically-designed) body types — which certainly requires more research than surfing porn sites when you're horny normally entails.

Are More Women OK With Watching Porn? [O Magazine]

Related: Word of the Day: Kyriarchy [Feminist Philosophers]

Earlier: What Women Want? To Talk About What Women Want

She invites people to look at their favorite interracial porn clips and see if they can honestly say they're not racist. And she's got some strict criteria.

1. The color, size, or shape of the characters' body parts, particularly genitals, as they relate to his or her race or ethnicity is not mentioned
2. No racist epithets are uttered.
3. The race or ethnicity of the characters (including the white characters) is not mentioned.
4. The background music, setting, and general environment of the scene does not conform to a stereotype related to one or more of the characters' racial or ethnic identity.

I didn't say it was an easy test.

The first thought that popped into my head, having somehow gotten myself onto Hustler's parody review list (and you thought you had problems with Nailin' Paylin!) was their more recent entry into the genre: Not The Cosbys XXX. Although Lux at Fleshbot wasn't a fan (consider all links from here on out NSFW, please), it does feature an interracial orgy scene (two white women, one Asian woman, one white man and a black man, who started out the scene as "Denise's" nominal boyfriend) in which the race of the participants is hardly an issue; the next one features "Theo" and one of the (white) women at a party; the fourth is "Claire" flashing back to her (white) boyfriend; the third is "Vanessa" and Theo's friend "Cockroach"; and the final scene features Denise losing her virginity to a white man whose ethnicity Denise mentions to a friend in passing. Most of the scenes take place in a suburban home or on a campus; there's very little reference to the races of the participants; and there are no references to things like "bootys". Granted, I fast forwarded through a lot, so maybe I missed something mid-sex, but it seemed to keep to the outlines of Muse's rules.

Lux, however, recommends the work of Tristan Taormino, like the film Chemistry 4, to find non-racist interracial porn. (Taormino is already known for her socially progressive pornography, so that's perhaps unsurprising). Lux also recommends Stoya Atomic Tease as a movie that doesn't deal in racial stereotyping to get a viewer off, despite its interracial cast. And, for the lesbians in the crowd, she strongly recommends Champion, which (apparently) won the 2009 Feminist Porn Awards.

Lux has actually been trying to answer the challenge Wendi Muse posed for a long time, having put together a top-10 list of non-racist interracial porn last fall. The one thing that might make it fall off Muse's list of must sees, though, is that 9 of the clips involve a black man and a white woman (the 10th is the interracial lesbian three-way pictured above). So maybe the question to ask is why it's easier to find non-racist interracial sex scenes between black men and white women than it is to find ones of black women and white men?

Dear Porn Industry: Must Interracial Porn Always Be So Racist? [Racialicious]

Related and NSFW: "Not The Cosbys XXX": All That And A Jello Pudding Pop [Fleshbot]
Keeping The "Chemistry" Alive: The Orgy Edition [Fleshbot]
"Stoya Atomic Tease" Makes A Perfect Yule Distraction [Fleshbot]
Champion [Pink & White Productions]
Fucking In Perfect Harmony: Top Ten (Nonracist!) Interracial Sex Videos [Fleshbot]

The high-concept movies of three to four years ago (like the 2006 feature Flasher, in which a woman is driven to exhibitionism "because of the way her mother treated her") have been replaced by short scenes strung together by a common theme, like "glasses." These "vignettes" are easy to separate and distribute on the Web, where porn exec Steven Hirsch says, "the average attention span is three to five minutes."

So are today's consumers so tweeted-and-facebooked-out that they can't even pay attention to porn? Nah, not really. Plotted pornography was popular in the early 70s, but went out of style with the advent of hand-held cameras. Storylines didn't get big again until the introduction of DVDs in the 90s. Nowadays, says Hirsch, "It's almost like we're back to the late '70s or early '80s when the average movie was eight minutes and just a sex scene."

Given the silliness of a lot of porn plots, it's not surprising that customers don't mind forgoing them in favor of good old-fashioned boning. Porn stars, however, are less than thrilled with the change. Savanna Samson (pictured) says that in the good old days, "I couldn't wait to get my next script." But now, "getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn't as much fun."

Lights, Camera, Lots Of Action. Forget The Script [NYT]

The woman is Belle de Jour, author of Playing the Game, and her suggestions pretty much read like pointers for good writing in general. She says,

Arms are flying, tongues are flicking, and where on earth did that extra arm come from? The effectiveness of sex writing depends, as with real sex, on getting from point A to point Z via all the letters in between. Too many stories start on the sofa, then segue straight into a threesome on the beach.

Plenty of non-erotic books fail because the author can't keep track of the rooms in a house or the stops on a bus route, or because the action moves implausibly quickly or slowly. Getting from A to Z effectively: good advice for any writer. So is de Jour's caution not "to dwell on what ruffly garment was worn, the precise glossy shade of a woman's hair, and so on," or to "describe anything that is not in fact chocolate as being 'like chocolate.'" Perhaps her only totally sex-specific tip is this one:

If I wanted to read about the kind of sex I have every day, I would . . . well, I wouldn't. Why fantasise about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable . . . and, therefore, the inherently desirable.

The male sex-tipster, Ewan Morrison, starts off by explaining why women don't write about sex as well as men do (heard this before?). He says, "it's because male writers have a much longer tradition of breaking taboos about sex (straight and gay)." His examples are Henry Miller and Anais Nin. He writes,

Miller is all vigour, urgency and detail. Nin's body becomes relatively anonymous for him. Nin has to make the act seem poetic and address the virility of Miller's 'authorship.' 'His book swells inside of me,' she writes. His penis is, almost literally, the canon of Western male fiction.

Comparing a dick to a book (kinda oblong) doesn't sound all that hot, but is anonymity really the recipe for great erotica? Morrison seems to think so. He writes that,

the bourgeois distinction between erotica and porn [...] is based on an opposition between ethically good sex with 'wholesome, well-rounded characters' (erotica) and nasty cheap sex with anonymous bodies (porn). Porn is omnipresent now and calling a certain kind of porn 'erotica' is a middle-class attempt to set itself against the tasteless culture of the masses.

It's clear here that we're supposed to think sex with "wholesome, well-rounded characters" is less fun than "sex with anonymous bodies." And it sure is, if you make those characters sound like big balls of oatmeal. If, however, a character has an interesting personality or an exciting (or twisted) relationship to the person he's fucking, isn't that more arousing than anonymous tab-a-into-slot-b? Maybe not for Morrison, who seems to take a pretty narrow view of what's acceptable in erotica. He says,

Write from experience, not fantasy[.] Fantastical sex scenes are hilarious, shallow and awful. Follow the masters: Miller, Jean Genet and Nin, who wrote from the depths of lives devoted to sensual pleasure. If you don't have the experiences to enrich your writing, go out and get them or stop trying to write sex scenes.

Pretty much the polar opposite of Belle de Jour's advice, and kind of odd coming from someone who wrote Ménage, a novel inspired by the ménage à trois between Henry Miller, June Miller and Anaïs Nin. Presumably Morrison never actually had sex with any of these people, and thus his writing didn't really come from experience. Perhaps he discovered that imagining sex you could never or would never have is actually titillating? But then again, that's probably just my failure to break taboos talking. Better go back to fucking books.

How To Write Sex: A Woman's Tips [TimesOnline]
How To Write Sex: A Man's Tips [TimesOnline]

Earlier: "Women Can't Write About Sex," Says Female Sex Writer

Note: I speak for myself on that last point. Cooper has intercut footage of his subjects - Lindsay, Benjamin, Kristin, Rafi, Genevieve, and Theodore - talking about pornography with, well, if not quite actual pornography, something approximating it. Or perhaps I should say, his film can be seen as an exercise through which to discuss what exactly "porn" is: I have no doubt that, for many, bearing witness to the facial expressions and reactions of people masturbating while they look straight into the videocamera is far more intimate and less arousing than any of the images these young people are getting off on.

With the exception of one participant, 47-year-old Theodore, the film is also a document of a particular segment of American and English youth, many of whom are so familiar with the genres and lingo of contemporary porn - and their own sexual psychologies - that they put some of us older folk to shame. (Also: speaking for myself here.) Of course, this might also explain why they were willing to be filmed in the first place. The clip is below; thoughts, in the comments.

Video: Robbie Cooper: Sex, Sighs & Videotape [Wallpaper]

Earlier: Up Close & Personal: Wallpaper's Safe For Work Porn Portraits Reach A Thrilling Climax

In our line of work, we do a lot of image-searches, for all kinds of things. Now, there are certain keywords - "girl," "kitten," "doll," anything having to do with camping - that you know are gonna result in a blitz of NSFW, and that's just the way the cookie crumbles. (Note: avoid "pregnant teenager" and "menstruation" if at all possible.) And then there are the things that take you by surprise. Like, when I searched "crying bride" - looking for an image to illustrate a post on depressing wedding coverage - and ended up learning that "the weeping bride" is apparently a popular position in a certain subset of GoG. The more you know! Coworkers report horrifying results from the seemingly innocuous "ponytails" and "homework" and, says Megan, "'woman wearing jeans' and 'adopted Chinese girls' are particularly seared into my brain."

With this is mind, we couldn't help but wonder: is there any phrase innocent enough to confound the porn elves of Google Images? ("Innocent" naturally brings up a lot of seductions and deflowerings.) After much trial and error - "rainbows" obviously equals a bare-assed chick in a pair of striped knee socks; you're safe for the first page of "mustard," and "meninkilts.com" disqualified the seeming front-runner "tartan" - we compiled the following definitive SFW list:

"floral china patterns"

"Puppies"

"birch bark canoe"

"Graham Crackers"

"Queen Victoria"

"yarn"

"gladiolas"

"wide-ruled notebook"

"Unicorn"

"Demijohn barrel"

Happy hunting!

Suraya Singh , says the Independent, developed a desire to see a "a classy erotica magazine that women like her would be happy to buy," when she found herself paging through a succession of interchangeably vapid ladymags during her lunch breaks while"working for an education quango." Men's mags, she observed, didn't seem to have a problem mixing the erotic and the frivolous; why shouldn't a woman's? So, she founded the self-funded quarterly Filament. As the website says, Filament is all about "images of men made for the female gaze," intelligent writing, and doesn't include "fashion and cosmetics, diets, or celebrity gossip."

Marketed as "the thinking woman's crumpet", the first issue features a semi-naked man in a praying position on its cover. Inside, artistic photoshoots of scantily clad male models are juxtaposed next to erotic short stories and erudite articles on off-beat topics such as the merits of being a geek. And if you tire of the sex, there's always a recipe for spicy celeriac bake to keep you busy.

Spicy celeriac bake aside, this is hardly a novel notion; the article describes successful women's porn as "a holy grail" of print media; Playgirl and Penthouse's For Women were, Singh feels, just about repackaging a gay male aesthetic rather than trying to figure out What Women Want, while Cosmo and their ilk treat sex alternately as something naughty or cherry-flavored. "Erotica," meanwhile, has often carried the tinge of "lovah"-inflected purple prose and horrifyingly cheesy images of Joy of Sex-style earnest shenanigans. Singh decided to take it to the streets, and her focus-testing showed that rather than Playgirl-style beefcakes, her target demo was more interested in "toned men with oval-shaped, often quite feminine faces," and she recruited models who met these criteria off the street. (Judging from the images on the website, we dig dudes who look like a cross between Donovan and Russell Brand.) So far, there's no full-frontal, but Singh isn't ruling it out.

But even if she nails the formula (whatever that is), "the thinking woman" can't help but wonder whether a print mag is really a practical concern: whatever the new openness towards female sexuality, surely the internet is a more likely target than a quarterly? As any hardcore mag can tell you, there's not much need for anyone to "buy erotica" nowadays. Perhaps hard-copy helps reinforce the idea of respectable, arty "erotica" as opposed to covert porn, but it seems like a large number of intelligent female sex writers and aggregation sites have already taken pretty large strides towards achieving Singh's goal - and with the web's bounty of media at their fingertips, no less. Of course, it's true you can't exactly read Literate Perversions on your lunch break - and Filament will, obviously, fill this void.

Can an ex-civil servant finally persuade women to buy erotica? [Independent]

The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday, will be released on May 22 in New York and Los Angeles and on demand on the TV network HDNet. It follows an escort named Chelsea who charges $2,000 an hour to act as a client's girlfriend for the night, providing more intimacy than just sex. (In the film's opening scene, Chelsea and her client are shown at a chic Manhattan restaurant discussing the film they just saw - Man on Wire - going back to his apartment and making out, and then having breakfast and reading The New York Times together the next morning.) The story takes place over five days in October 2008, and is partially improvised by the mostly unprofessional actors, who play versions of themselves, like New York magazine staff writer Mark Jacobson, who plays a journalist, and movie critic Glenn Kenny, who plays an escort reviewer. (Some readers may recall that Kenny served as writer David Foster Wallace's editor and sidekick when the duo attended the AVN Awards for a piece for Premiere magazine.) But the casting choice that has garnered the film so much attention is that the main character is played by real-life porn star Sasha Grey.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, Soderburgh explained that he chose Grey precisely because of her porn persona, The Guardian reports. "With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off," he said. "What you can't see is what it's like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that's the fantasy for those who've been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend."

As Soderbergh put it, Sasha Grey is "not the normal adult film star." Grey is 21, but has appeared in 150 adult films and branded herself as a "new" kind of pornstar since beginning her career at the age of 18. According to the Associated Press, Grey is known for "pushing the boundaries of normal sexual acts," but, "she maintains she's always in control." Vanessa Grigoriadis, who profiled Sasha Grey for the new issue of Rolling Stone explains:

Sasha Grey is the adult industry's reigning princess of porn, a rock & roll 21-year-old with an actual mission statement - "Most of the XXX I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically or visually. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies" - and few taboos.

Grey, who is co-managed by former Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro (and appeared in the porn film he directed), has modeled for American Apparel, and sung with the reggae musician Lee "Scratch" Perry. She says she is striving to make porn more artistic; Grigoriadis asserts she is changing the relationship between feminism and porn:

"Porn has been one of feminism's most divisive issues because it hits on such a raw level to so many woman. Here are the fantasies of men, and it's of course better to live out those fantasies through pornography than to try to do them in the real world, but the fact is the real world is impacted by it. Grey says, ‘If you look at me and you think "Here's a woman who's intelligent, cognizant and making her own choices, and you still tell me that what I'm doing is wrong, screw you, because that should end the debate.' "

Grey's appearance in The Girlfriend Experience has been interpreted as the first step in her attempt to go mainstream like former adult actresses Traci Lords and Jenna Jameson, but according to our sister site, Fleshbot, (link NSFW):

If anything, we suspect that Sasha is attempting to remake the notion of what a mainstream star is, and does-much the way she's remade any notions of what an 18-year-old pornstar looks and sounds like .... it's also possible that Sasha could rise to fame in the mainstream cinema while continuing to work as an adult star-perhaps completely remaking our notions of what it means to have crossover appeal.

Though Grey doesn'tactually have sex on screen in The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh says that he felt comfortable casting her because "Porn is beyond everywhere now." He told Time Out New York that he thinks prostitution should be legal and does not consider the prostitute in his film a victim. When asked what he would say to someone who has been roped into a life of prostitution, he replied:

Well, there are people for whom that is true. That's not the case with Chelsea any more than it is with Sasha in the adult-film industry. But, yeah, I think whatever agreement two people want to come to about whatever is really none of my business. I don't know what the difference is between that and what I'm doing for Sony Pictures right now [directing Moneyball].

According to the Village Voice review:

Like Godard, Soderbergh views prostitution as the ultimate paradigm for capitalism. But where Godard saw the hooker as a tragic or exploited victim, Soderbergh suggests there are no victims, only failed traders, in the post-Reagan era of DIY capitalism.

And, says Variety's review, the film de-emphasizes the sex involved in Chelsea's work and portrays her as a woman in control of her own get-rich-quick scheme, much like her clients who strive to make a fortune in the world of finance.

From reviews and interviews, it appears Soderbergh was striving for some sort of meta commentary on how capitalism makes prostitutes and porn stars of us all. The johns in the movie delude themselves into thinking they're experiencing a higher level of intimacy with "the girlfriend experience" than they would by just having sex with a prostitute. Similarly, Soderbergh suggests that audience members, who have presumably seen Grey's porn films, will delude themselves into thinking they are experiencing her on a more intimate level by watching her act in a mainstream film rather than a porn film. But by focusing on a high priced escort who chose to get into prostitution, and having her portrayed by an actress described as an atypical pornstar who feels in control of her career, he conveniently ignores the fact that many women in both industries are exploited. Soderbergh is certainly allowed to use the old fantasy of a sex worker who simply loves her work. However, by ignoring the uglier side of the sex trade, he undermines his argument that his film reflects any underlying truths about sex, pornography, or society.

Trailer for The Girlfriend Experience:



Steven Soderbergh On The Girlfriend Experience: 'I Hired Real People And Turned Them Loose' [The Guardian]
Porn Star Sasha Grey Stars In New Soderbergh Film [The Associated Press]
Sasha Grey, The Dirtiest Girl In The World: The Story Behind The Story [Rolling Stone]
Sasha Grey, Crossover Star (NSFW) [Fleshbot]
Steven Soderbergh Interview [Time Out New York]
Soderbergh's Girlfriend Experience Porn-Star Is A True Character [The Village Voice]
The Girlfriend Experience Review [Variety]

Earlier: Dave Navarro Makes Porno Debut
American Apparel Now Sponsoring Bloggers & Porn Stars (NSFW)
Oprah Learns About The Ins-N-Outs Of Legal Prostitution

Study: Children Exposed To Pornography May Expect Sex To Be Enjoyable

Marilyn made her porn debut starring in the classic Behind the Green Door in 1972. Once filming had wrapped, she told the producers that she was the girl on the cover of Ivory Snow soap boxes, which she shot during her modeling days in New York. They billed her as such when the film was released, and once Proctor & Gamble found out about their cover girl's new career, they quickly pulled Ivory Snow from store shelves. The controversy helped make Behind the Green Door one of the biggest adult film hits of its time.

And thus, a porn star was born. She was one of the biggest names in the industry in the '70s and '80s, and even crossed over, landing a lead role in David Cronenberg's Rabid in 1977, however, mainstream success eluded her.

A quick rundown of her impact on the adult film industry:

• She was one of the first porn stars to shave her pubes
• Performed the first interracial sex scene in an American feature-length hardcore film
• Insisted that her co-stars get tested for STDs, in the early '70s, before people even thought to do that
• One of the first women to demand, and receive a percentage of her film's gross receipts

But beyond all of that, she was one of the first really famous female porn stars (aside from Linda Lovelace).

She recorded a few songs, too, one of which, "Shame on You," was used as the theme for 1980's Insatiable. Rich and I used it in an episode of Pot Psychology that we filmed with sexpert Susie Bright. Susie knew Marilyn personally (you can read her thoughts on Marilyn's death on her site), and when Rich and I randomly began singing the song, Susie was surprised, and said that if Marilyn knew that two people—who were toddlers, and nowhere near thinking about porn, during the crest of her career—were singing her song, she'd be so touched. The idea of that made me smile.

Learning of her death just six weeks later saddened me, and I wonder if she knew that strangers like us (a straight girl and a gay guy who had no sexual interest in her) thought of her fondly, because of her work. Especially considering this interview with her, that appeared on the 2006 re-release of Insatiable, in which she admits that she's kind of bitter about how things turned out for her. As Rich pointed out, it's kind of like she's giving her her own eulogy.

And while Marilyn expressed her displeasure with the porn industry (even though she continued to appear in such films, right up to the end), I don't think it was the cause of her demise, nor do I think it reduced her life to a tragic, cautionary tale. In fact, if it weren't for her films, most of us would never have gotten the chance to fall in love with her. Where ever she is now, I hope she now knows that there are people singing her song.

RIP, Marilyn [FourFour]
Remembering Marilyn Chambers - 1952 - 2009 [Susie Bright]