If you’re reading this (and how could you not?) then you may already be familiar with the Feminist Porn Awards, sponsored by Toronto feminist sex shop Good For Her. Several Blowfish productions have brought Awards home to San Francisco in previous years. The 2009 awards have just been announced. There are forty-six nominees, viewable on the Good For Her website. On the list, you’ll see some familiar names, including nominations for The Crash Pad Series 3, Bride of Sin, Barcelona Sex Project and Champion. Hooray!
But there’s a controversial choice the Awards made this year that has me puzzling, and kind of excited to be of two minds. The criteria for nomination for a Feminist Porn Award are as follows, as enumerated on the Good For Her website:
1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction, etc. of the work.
2) It depicts genuine female pleasure
3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn.
And of course, it has to be hot!
Every part of this I can get behind; the Feminist Porn Awards are an audacious, industry-changing enterprise, as evidenced by the coverage they’re already getting in the adult press this year. In a time when the porn industry is reshuffling its deck and having to reinvent itself to stay viable, now’s the time for those of us who give a fuck about quality and diversity to stand tall for not only feminist pornographers, but for everyone who likes hot, audacious porn that ain’t the same old shit.
More importantly, from a consumer perspective, the Feminist Porn Awards have consistently honored quality work by independent artists who are changing the field. So don’t mistake my onrushing puzzlement as disregard for what the awards are doing: on the contrary, I think they’re among the most important developments in the porn industry in the last five years.
But this year they’ve both confused and invigorated me, because that big long list of 46 nominees is not divided by category. It’s all just . . . a big long list, one title after the other. Alphabetical, by director first name.
Why’d they make this choice? Says the site: “The Feminist Porn Awards have not separated films according to category, so we can let each film shine on its own merit.” That’s right — no more “Hottest Dyke Sex Scene,” which The Crash Pad took home in 2005, no more “Best Dyke Scene,” which Superfreak nabbed in ‘07; no more “Best Trans Sex Scene,” awarded to In Search of the Wild Kingdom in 2007, or “Hottest Kink Film,” which Bondage Boob Tube got in 2008.
No categories at all! Just a big fat pile of porn, all mingling together in a puppy-pile. I’m utterly floored — blown away. I don’t know what to think. Enriched or outraged? Both, and neither. I have no fucking idea. It’s a dangerous choice that’s got me genuinely confused about where I stand, something that rarely happens in porn.
Clearly one of the things that makes “feminist porn” important is that it breaks down existing categories — between gay and straight, male and female, trans and cisgender, et cetera. But no categories at all? Chemistry 4 right up there “competing” against Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project? I’ll confess that has me simultaneously invigorated and freaked out.
I’ve had this conversation in relation to the Oscars, where, for instance, documentaries don’t win Best Picture even though they theoretically could. The market is dominated by “fiction” films. If documentaries didn’t have their own categories at the Oscars, they would never win anything. The documentary categories guarantee that productions in that category receive fair consideration against others of their same type, rather than having to compete against profoundly different films that are guaranteed to always get more attention.
Similarly, with the Feminist Porn Awards while I am fascinated by the decision not to slice and dice feminist porn productions into categories, I have to ask whether it makes sense to compare, for instance, feminist trans porn to feminist dyke porn to feminist straight porn. Can you really draw conclusions about what’s hot based on no criteria other than it being hot?
On the other hand, isn’t that the ideal for any boundary-defying erotica? Doesn’t “feminist porn” demand that one be willing to set aside pre-assigned categories and re-imagine not only sex and gender but the very concept of pleasure? Doesn’t it make sense to look at a BDSM instructional video alongside a straight-ahead in-out fuck flick?
I’m gonna be honest here: I have no fucking idea. I am utterly confounded. I can’t decide whether I think this is brilliance or lunacy.
What do you think? When it comes to feminist porn — Categories, or no categories? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and please make them candid!
Thomas Roche blogs about kittens, ice cream and sparkly vampires at Thomasroche.com.
Blowfish is very proud to announce the release of Barcelona Sex Project! It’s smart, funny documentary about half a dozen sexy twenty- and thirty-somethings living in Barcelona Spain. Award-winning Erika Lust is adept at drawing them out, getting them to tell their life stories (including cross-continental moves, divorces, sexual fantasies fulfilled, career dreams and career realities, etc.). While there’s a fair bit of talk about sex, the emphasis isn’t exclusively erotic… until the sex scenes, where these people you’ve gotten to know through their interviews strip and masturbate. This is the first North American release from Lust Films, and we’re pleased to be the exclusive distributor.
So, you may have noticed that our Flavored lube selection has been dwindling over the years. And that’s actually because we care. For the most part, the glycerine or sugars used to make flavored lubes sweet have caused some irritation in the vagina, and UTIs or yeast infections are just NOT sexy.
However, there is one exception we’ve found to this unfortunate rule, and that’s why we’re so happy to have Sliquid Swirl Flavored Lubricant back in our catalog. It’s the one flavored lube we’ve found that doesn’t use these irritating things — just a touch of aspartame (aka Nutra-sweet) sweetens the formula without the scary sugar side-effects.
Just because it’s an artificial sweetener doesn’t mean that the taste is fake — the yummy cherry-vanilla taste is mild enough not to overpower your taste buds, but tasty enough that we were passing around the testing packets like teenagers with a bottle of whipped cream. There’s a very slight chemical aftertaste from the aspartame, but it’s so slight that even the sugar-junkies barely noticed it.
But the best part is that this water-based formula is super slippery and safe to use with your latex, rubber and silicone toys. It’s a great choice for folks who don’t get all their oral sex out of the way before adding lube, people with a sweet-tooth or just people who like their lube to be more than just, well, lubrication. Finally a lube that’s sweet, slippery, safe and sexy! Yum!
It’s impossible to make a porn that works for everyone, and there’s a lot of porn that succeeds by catering to niche audiences, be they fans of a particular fetish or sex act or physical type. As you might guess from the title, Club Head is a blowjob-centric video, featuring an array of beautiful women sucking big cocks, with good production values and a much better class of talent — including some recognized and much-beloved names — than you usually see in a flick like this. It’s specifically a point-of-view blowjob movie, so you never see any of the guys except for their cocks and lower extremities — the better to imagine it’s you up there on the screen, guys!
There are a lot of movies like this, and they feed the insatiable desires of the viewership, which craves something that’s the same — but also different. There’s nothing in the way of plot here, no artsy direction, no frills at all, really, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of aesthetic criteria. We can judge these films by many things — are the performers beautiful? Does the camerawork show us what we want to see? Are the women enthusiastic? Do they look like they love what they’re doing? Is there variety in their approaches (there are, after all, many ways to suck cock)?
Club Head, being a Vivid production, is located at the relatively classy end of the spectrum, so there’s not much in the way of roughness (except a bit with Harmony, who’s one of those girls who enjoys choking herself in the course of deep-throating). While the vibe is gonzo, the filmmakers didn’t just hang out at a bus station in LA attempting to recruit talent. There are some familiar and much-beloved faces here, including Roxy DeVille, Jada Fire, and a couple of longtime personal favorites, Annie Cruz and the impossibly petite Kat. The women are beautiful and largely in control, and they do give the impression that they crave cock immensely. If POV blowjob movies are your thing, this could qualify as the gold standard.
Perfect Creatures: It’s Weird Science with hardcore fucking! Except the perfect sex object is created by scientists, not nerdy high school kids. And said perfect sex fantasy isn’t a girl, but a guy (specifically Christian, performing admirably as usual). And also there are no mutant bikers. So, okay, it’s not Weird Science any more than it’s the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, but all these stories spring from the same central and fundamental fantasy: to create a perfect lover. This time it’s a sexbot. Whoo sexbots!
We get a couple of non-robot-love scenes, first a flashback to scientist Sophia’s boyfriend betraying her by fucking Dana DeArmond’s mouth, cunt, and ass (which are all so gorgeously inviting, it’s easy to see why he couldn’t settle on just one point of entry). That betrayal is the breaking point that leads Sophia to the cutting edge of human sex toy research. Lab assistant Julia Knight tries to make her boyfriend feel inadequate compared to the fuck machine, and he does the old John Henry thing and attempts to prove that no machine can be a substitute for a man (many a woman with the right array of sex toys might beg to differ, and indeed, Julia has to make recourse to mechanical means to finish the job).
Sophia finally test-drives her android love machine, and he’s completely eager to please. He goes down on her, provides hard cock for her to suck and ride, and pounds her to her exact specifications… and he patiently provides foot-rubs, too. (Until you activate his “aggressive mode,” at which point he stacks a couple of women up and alternates ass-fucking them, as any robot would.)
The inevitable three-way has Annie Cruz and Julie Knight using Christian as the world’s most versatile sex toy, with plenty of girl-girl on the side. And the final eight-way — yes, eight-way, three guys and five girls! — orgy scene brings man and machine-man together in a dungeon for a wild combination of couplings (and triplings and…). Of course, there’s the requisite “be careful what you wish for, perfection is in the eye of the beholder” message at the end, but apart from emphasizing the dangers of android/human love attachments, this is a fun flick that plays amusingly with notions of perfect fantasies of gratification. (And also provides lots and lots of anal sex.)
A few years ago an amazing new breakthrough in silicone technology created Vixskin — a firm core of silicone surrounded by a squishier outer core makes for the most realistic dildo to date. And the good women over at Vixen have come out with various sizes of Vixskin dildos since then, but now, finally, they have answered the pleas of butt-play aficionados everywhere and come out with a truly butt-friendly, very real-feeling, Vixskin dildo.
The Backdoor Boi Silicone Dildo is what we’re calling their Spur. And, technically, it’s not really just an anal-sex dildo — it’s perfect for those of us who want something a bit smaller, or who need something thinner for warm-up for vaginal sex (if you’ve ever experienced the “eyes are bigger than your orifice” phenomenon and tried to stuff a huge honkin’ dildo into an un-warmed-up body, you know what I mean). However, because the Backdoor Boi is also absolutely freakin’ perfect for anal play we just had to name it after this delightful practice.
As you may already know, width is the primary factor in anal penetration, so the Backdoor Boi, with its 1-1/32″ wide head, 1″ wide shaft (which gradually widens to 1-1/8″ near the base), is ideal for beginners. If you’re having trouble imagining the width, that’s about the width of most index and middle fingers put together (though, of course, rounder and gentler), so if you can take two fingers, you can probably use this dildo. If you’re worried about texture, rest assured that once you work the head inside (which, given that the ridge of the head is made out of the softer silicone, isn’t too difficult), it’s pretty smooth sailing down the shaft. There is a very slight “foreskin” ridge, and a vertical ridge that runs the underside of the 4-7/8″ shaft. I found this added a bit of stimulating texture without detracting from the easiness of the toy.
The nature of Vixskin — with the firm inner core and squishy exterior — is perfect for anal play, as it’s soft enough for comfort while still firm enough to insert. It has a flat, wide base, which fits nicely in the palm of the hand or will allow you to use the Backdoor Boi in a strap-on harness (not included). Comes in three “skin tones” (Butterscotch, Chocolate and Vanilla) as well as Purple, for those who want something that feels real, but doesn’t look it. A really wonderful addition to the Vixskin line, the Backdoor Boi is welcome at our door anytime!
Easy there, girl! If you haven’t noticed, there is now more than one style of double-dildo that you can strap on, allowing you to penetrate and be penetrated in one handy silicone doo-dad. But the harness industry still hasn’t quite been able to engineer the ideal method for keeping it snugly attached to the wearer’s body.
Made to ride low on the body, the Easy Rider allows you to position your double-dildo of choice low enough so that it easily slips inside your body while you penetrate your partner with the other end. The opening is 1-7/8″ wide, and it comes with a removable 1-3/4″ O-ring to help hold the dildo in place (the O-ring can be replaced with O-rings of other sizes — not included — allowing for a more secure fit with smaller or larger dildos). Great for regular, one-ended dildos as well; the low-slung fit of the Easy Rider puts pressure on the clit of the wearer in this more traditional configuration, for even greater stimulation.
The harness part is made out of soft Garment Leather, which fits nicely against the body and will, over time, conform itself into a custom-fit, just like a good leather jacket does. The hip strap, which is adjustable to fit hips from 28″ to 43,” can be worn low across the hip-bones, bikini-style, or it can be hitched up higher over the hips, depending on personal preference. There are two leg straps, which can be worn together (in a G-string style) or apart (so men can use this harness as well, though it might ride a little low for comfort on men); the length of the leg straps is adjustable via sliding D-rings.
A lovely, functional and well-made answer to the question “how do I strap that thing on?,” the Easy Rider will make your next ride, well, easier.
We get a lot of porn here at Blowfish, and because we’re very picky (in a good way, we hope), much of it is rejected for being . . . well, just not quite our thing. But those rejected DVDs start to pile up around my desk, forming tottering piles that threaten to collapse and bury me in smut.
Won’t you help a poor smut buyer out? For just $9.95 we’ll scientifically select three of these DVDs (read: grab what is on top of the stack) and include them in your order. You read that right: THREE DVDs for under ten bucks! Whatta bargain!
At this amazingly low price, we can’t guarantee what you’ll get. No, there’s no way to know whether you’ll like them or not, sorry. And because these have always been amazingly popular, we cannot even guarantee that this will be in stock (in case we run out before we have a chance to pull it off the web site; no, we won’t charge you then!). These are clearance items, so there are no satisfaction returns on them. If you write to us requesting particular titles, genres, likes or dislikes for your grab bag, we will read your requests with interest, and then ignore them. You get what you get.
There are so few surprises in life these days. This is one way to insert some sexy mystery into your life, and for so little! Why not give it a shot?
Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge is a truly epic film, with hundreds of special effects and great attention paid to elements of costuming and sets, with hordes of extras. It looks amazingly good for porn. Not Hollywood blockbuster good, but straight-to-DVD action-movie good, which is pretty astonishing by porn standards! For those who saw the first Pirates film, the production values are vastly improved here, though some of the characters and the humorous tone are carried over — there are a whole lot of new faces (and bodies) too, though.
The plot is nicely pulp-fictional, with evil pirates seeking a mystical object to raise the dread pirate Stagnetti from the dead, opposed by pirate-hunter Jesse Jane and a ship’s crew captained by Evan Stone at his scenery-chewing best. (Belladonna has an important role as a saucy, sharp-tongued lady pirate.) There are swordfights! Betrayals! Corny jokes! Kidnappings! Stereotypes yelling at other stereotypes! Mystical mind-controlled sex slaves! CGI monsters! CGI monster-fights! It’s great pulpy cheesy fun.
But, of course, if you wanted to see a fun adventure movie with pirates, you’d have a couple of other more obvious choices, so about the sex: the sex is grand, starting with Shay Jordan as a passenger who makes it her job to keep up morale among the crewmen (decks are swabbed and hatches are battened, if you get my meaning). There are about ten sex scenes, the best probably the nine (or so, it was hard to keep count)-person orgy in a harem — what’s more fun than anally violating willing harem girls? The Jesse Jane/Belladonna catfight-turned-sexy is great, too; the classic blonde busty bombshell and the quirky flexible kinky brunette make a fascinating pair to watch.
Truly, all the sex scenes are good, and pretty well integrated into the plot, though the scenes are oddly short compared to most porn — the director actually wanted to keep the plot moving along, so no 20-minute fuckbreaks here. Fortunately, the four-disc special edition includes among its many bonus features a set of extended sex scenes, most of which add significant strokeable material to the shorter versions. There’s also a ludicrous quantity of trailers, featurettes, behind-the-scenes-material, and lots of other goodies. It’s quite the treasure chest.
You may have read or heard this criticism of porn. I’ve heard it more than once. It goes roughly like this:
“All porn is basically the same. Porn may be fun and arousing — but as a literary/ art/ cinematic form, it’s inherently tedious. After all, there just aren’t that many ways for people to have sex. So describing or depicting it is automatically going to become repetitive.”
Now. Obviously, I have no truck with this attitude whatsoever. But it took me a little time thinking about it to realize what exactly was wrong with it.
Not that much time, though.
First, and at the risk of being snarky: If you think there are only a handful of ways for people to have sex, then I feel sorry for your partners. There is quite a bit more variety available in sex than a few standard variations on fucking and sucking. Read any good general sex guide, like The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex or The Guide to Getting It On, and you’ll get a sense of the tip of the iceberg. Or take a look at the entertainingly long list of adult movie genres available for rent at Bluedoor.com. (Admittedly, many of these genres refer to technical formatting and plot devices and whatnot . . . but there are more than enough sexual options to keep an enterprising couple busy for a good long time.)
But second, and far more importantly:
What makes porn interesting isn’t that it comes up with some new and different sex act, or some new combination of previously known sex acts.
What makes porn interesting is that it comes up with new ways to look at sex.
Think about other topics for literature or film or art. Think about, say, murder. There are only so many ways people can commit murder, too. You can shoot someone; stab them; strangle them; poison them; bludgeon, electrocute, smother, or drown them; set them on fire; cut off their head; hit them with a vehicle; throw them off a high place. I’m sure there are more . . . but you get the idea. There are probably no more ways to kill a person than there are to have sex with them. Maybe even less.
And yet murder is a vastly fruitful topic for art and film and writing, one that inspires both fascination and respect. Yes, genres such as murder mystery or true crime may be looked down on . . . but I don’t think anyone would argue that all writing/ film/ art about murder is the same.
Why? Because, while there may be a limited number of basic methods to commit murder, there are a limitless number of reasons to do it. And a limitless number of consequences for it. And a limitless number of ways to feel about it: before it happens, and during, and after.
What makes writing about murder interesting isn’t that it comes up with a new and different physical method of committing murder. What makes, say, “In Cold Blood” or “Hamlet” more interesting than, say, “The Vicar in the Parlor” or “A Deadly Game of Love” or some other generic detective novel of the month is that it makes you look at murder differently. And for that matter, it makes you look at humanity in general differently. It makes you look at what causes conflict between people. What makes that conflict turn murderous. Why some people murder and others don’t. Whether everyone is ultimately capable of murder. Whether murder is ever justified, and if so, under what circumstances. How murder affects the person committing it. How murder affects a family, a community, society as a whole. The relationship between moral responsibility and abusive upbringings or mental illness. Etc., etc., etc.
And what makes good porn more interesting than . . . well, than “The Vicar in the Parlor” or “A Deadly Game of Love” or some other generic porn novel of the month?
It’s exactly the same thing. Good porn makes you look differently at what sex means to people. How sex feels to people. Why people want to have it (apart from the obvious biological drive). What people get out of it (again, apart from the obvious). What about sex can be surprising. What about it can be disappointing. How sex can change relationships. How it can change the way people see themselves. How sex can bring out the worst in people, or the best, or the most complicatedly human. Etc., etc. etc.
Now, I can hear a chorus already starting to ring: “Lord, have mercy. Porn with plot. Shoot me now.” And I’ll certainly admit that bad porn can be bad by being too plot- heavy, just as it can be bad by having no plot at all. Plus, to make things worse, a lot of plot- heavy porn makes the mistake of simply dropping the plot in around the sex, with little or no concern for their relevance to each other, in that Plot/ Sex Scene/ Plot/ Sex Scene structure we’re all so depressingly familiar with.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about weaving the two together. I’m talking about making the sex a central part of the character and motivation . . . and vice versa. I’m talking about sex scenes that get you inside, not just what the characters are physically doing or physically feeling, but that gets you inside how it feels to be these unique people having this particular sex. I’m talking about sex scenes that get you to care passionately about these people and the sex they’re having, and that move their story forward. And I’m talking about non-sex scenes that keep the theme of sexuality alive, taking the changes and discoveries that happen during the sex and running with them. I’m talking about porn where you don’t even divide it into “sex scenes” and “plot scenes,” where it’s all just an integrated part of a compelling and arousing story about sex.
And that kind of porn can come in infinite variety.
Yes, a lot of porn sucks. Porn is just as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as any other art form: 90% of it is crap because 90% of everything is crap. Porn may even be somewhat more subject to Sturgeon’s Law than other art forms — since, like any art form that’s stigmatized or trivialized, talented and ambitious artists often stay away from it for fear of ruining their careers. (A phenomenon with an unfortunate vicious circularity to it.)
But the “All porn is the same” critique is unjust. It marks an unwillingness to explore the more interesting and imaginative regions of it . . . or, in a more generous interpretation, simply an unfamiliarity with those regions. And to roll your eyes and complain, “I don’t want plot in my porn, I just want it to get me off” — and then turn around and complain, “Porn is so boring, it’s all the same” — is unjustness compounded. It’s trying to have your cake and eat it too . . . and then complaining that the fact that you can’t is the baker’s fault.
I grew up in North Carolina, where college basketball is more religion than sport — and, let’s be honest, North Carolina teams frequently dominate the game — and so I followed the NCAA Men’s basketball championship with the customary amount of fanatical devotion (as a beardless youth I was a fan of the Duke Blue Devils, but as a young adult I blossomed into a Carolina Tarheel fan; I was never an NC State Wolfpack fan, though I did date a nice girl who went to State for a while . . .). My devotion has admittedly flagged since I moved to California — somehow losing the cultural immersion has decreased the urgency — but I still follow it a little, and the tournament season of March Madness does still bring with it certain thrills.
And in the spirit of sharing that thrill, let’s talk about the NCAA Champion . . . of Cheerleaders. The sports fans at Faniq.com have put together a competitive bracket featuring the hottest cheerleaders from all the national divisions; I naturally take a special interest in the Southern division, where it’s obvious the ladies in Carolina blue take the day.
Coedmagazine.com has a post on The Babes of March Madness, with a collection of lovely ladies from all 64 schools in the tournament. It’s really an impressive collection of images, combining the tawdriness of girls-gone-wild with some pleasantly competitive school/team/regional spirit. (And once again I think the South wins it, as the poll on the page also reflects.)
Let us not forget that there’s also a women’s tournament. I actually have tremendous respect for women’s basketball, and wish the sport was more popular. That said . . . here’s a look at Hotties of the 2009 NCAA Women’s Tournament. Admire their beauty, yes, yes, but also admire their accomplishment as scholar-athletes, okay? That way I’ll feel less dirty for including the link.
So that’s the sports — let’s talk about competitions in general. Like Playboy’s search for The Girls of the ACC, a quest for gorgeous college girls willing to bare all in a display of school spirit. The search is going on right now, so if you’re beautiful, enrolled in an Atlantic Coast Conference college, uninhibited, and have parents who won’t disown you for appearing nude, hit that casting call!
In similarly sporty news, CollegeHumor.com is looking for America’s Hottest College Girl, with a tournament that mirrors the NCAA championship (ie the Platonic Ideal of championships), so go vote!
Those wacky animal-lovers at PETA are also running a bracketed championship, this one to find the Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door; by the time you read this, the champion will have been chosen, but you can still look at the pretty pictures.
I believe, as do most of my boot-clad, Inanna-worshipping San Francisco friends, that sexual entertainment, aka porn, is unquestionably sex ed. In an age when most people in the U.S. don’t get decent sex ed in school, the vast majority of people are getting their sex information from porn. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing. Porn often shows gross inaccuracies about anatomy, pleasure, and human behavior, and the availability and price of decent pizza in Los Angeles. But porn’s central message is what I would like to see be the core teaching point of all sex ed: fuck who you want, when you want; sure, it might be dirty, but it’s an option.
Don’t get me wrong; while I love that central message, there are too many other weird-ass ones spewing forth from the porn industry to make porn proper a decent sex ed delivery method. Even the “educational” titles put out by Porn Valley are mind-bending in their weirdness; they are likeable at times, but only moderately so to a hardheaded sex ed veteran like me. It’s actually a miserable thing to accept that what most young people learn about sex, they’re going to learn from porn and only porn — except, of course, what they learn from their friends, which could be even more insane. But the fact remains that porn is sex ed whether we want it to be or not.
But sex ed is also sex ed, and did you see what I did in that first paragraph? I referred to “an age when most people in the U.S. don’t get decent sex ed in school,” and I just tossed it off! Like it’s never going to change! Like it’s a fait accomplis! Au contraire! As an Oakland resident, I feel a bit of the warm fuzzies, no pun intended, when I discover that my Representative in Congress, the supremely rational Barbara Lee and New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg, both Democrats (ya think?) this past week introduced HR 1551 and S611, the Responsible Education About Life act, the first comprehensive sex ed bill since 1994 that has a real chance of passing. I and a lot of other folks I know have been waiting to see what the recent Washington change of power would bring for sex ed, and it’s more important than ever that this resolution passes.
I said resolution because, at least in the house, the “HR” designation means it’s not a bill and therefore won’t become a law. Resolutions are used when redirecting federal funding, which is essentially what is going on here. According to the ACLU Blog, HR 1551 provides a federal funding stream for age-appropriate comprehensive sex education — the kind, believe it or not, that includes information about birth control and maybe even sexual pleasure.
Currently there are three federal funding streams for schools teaching abstinence-only education; there are none for those teaching comprehensive sex ed. What that means is that 22 states, including Lautenberg’s own New Jersey and Lee’s California, do not accept federal money for their sex ed programs. The ACLU quoted Lautenberg: “Many places said, ‘Keep your money; we want to keep our teens safe.’” He expressed the same sentiments in his press release. This comes in the wake of the Washington Post reporting that the teen birth rate, after years of decline, increased for the second consecutive year; similarly, HIV rates among poor kids are up disproportionately.
Abstinence-only sex ed does not work. Why would it? Let me clarify that last statement: Abstinence-only sex ed does not work to lower teen pregnancy rates, prevent STD transmission, or help teens learn about pleasure in an age-appropriate manner. The National Abstinence Education Association, however, blamed the rising teen birth rates and STD transmission rates on comprehensive sex education, which the Abstinence Lobby has been doing for years — both before and after comprehensive sex ed disappeared from federally funded programs. From this lunatic group we hear the same old shit
Check these sentiments out NAEA’s web site. As you’ll see above, the landing page features a brunette teen girl in a tight V-neck T-shirt.
I’ll admit, I still can’t get over the shock: In an age where porn is easy to get, and sex information of dubious accuracy is ubiquitous on the internet (behind flashing signs saying “DO NOT ENTER IF YOU ARE UNDER 18!”), the government’s talking about providing teens with the other sex ed — sex ed. It really is a new era.
Thomas Roche blogs about Grand Guignol and other French delights at Thomasroche.com.
This phrase, “good in bed,” has been stuck in my head lately. It’s a phrase I’ve thought about a lot over the years.
And I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like it.
I should get this out of the way first: Yes, of course, there are some basic skills that anyone hoping to have good sex should acquire. It’s more “basic pieces of knowledge” than anything else, really. Knowledge of male and/or female sexual anatomy and response (depending on which gender or genders you’re boinking). The understanding, for instance, that clits usually prefer somewhat delicate and indirect stimulation, and that dicks typically prefer a fairly firm touch. The understanding that most women take a while to get aroused and to come, and that most don’t come from vaginal penetration alone. The understanding that erections tend to not respond well when their owners feel pressured to perform. Where the G-spot and the prostate are. Where it is and isn’t safe to spank. That sort of thing.
But once you have that stuff under your belt?
In my experience, once you have these basics, good sex isn’t about learning a lot of fancy tricks or positions. It’s about communicating: being able to say what you want without pessimism or fear; being able to listen to what your partner wants without getting threatened or hurt. It’s about being familiar with your own body and your own desires and responses, so you can communicate them in the first place. It’s about being perceptive: paying attention to non-verbal signals as well as verbal ones. It’s about giving a shit about your partner’s pleasure in the first place, and being able to get aroused by their excitement as well as your own. (Which, as Ingrid points out, may not be a skill that can be learned . . .)
And it’s about the luck of the draw: having good sexual chemistry together, getting off on the same sorts of things. You can have all the physical skills and know-how in the world, and be the clearest and most tactful communicator of your desires, and the most attentive listener to your partner’s desires . . . and if it doesn’t click for the two of you, then it doesn’t click. If you like it hard and nasty and he likes it sweet and sensual; if you like a marathon every week or two and she likes quickies four or five times a week . . . then the two of you are not going to be good in bed together, no matter how good each of you might be separately. (Not right away, at least. You might get good together if you really like each other and are committed to making it work . . . but it’s going to take some effort, and some willingness to compromise.)
I think the phrase “good in bed” is problematic for a lot of reasons. There’s the reasons mentioned above: people tend to use “good in bed,” not to mean “perceptive and good at communicating,” but to mean “possessing the physical skills required to get their partner off.” This puts the emphasis on physical parlor tricks, positions and gestures and whatnot, instead of perception and communication. And it de-emphasizes the sexual differences between people: the fact that your particular skillset might have worked great with Mary or Mark, but it’s not doing bupkis with Jean or John. Even that “basic knowledge of anatomy and response” stuff won’t always help: knowing that women generally prefer a lighter, more indirect touch on their clits will do you no good at all with women whose clits like it rough. (If you’re doing more complex or sophisticated forms of sex, like BDSM, then physical skills do become more important . . . but I think the basic principle is still the same.)
The “good in bed” trope also contributes to the idea of sex as an achievement, or a competition. We tend to talk about being “good in bed” the way we talk about being good at making cocktails, or good at tennis. It makes it less about pleasure and joy . . . and more about ego. It makes it less about, “We are having such an amazing time together,” and more about, “I am such a hot stud/ sexy bitch. I can turn this woman/ man/ wombat to jelly. I am the bomb.” (Quick tangent: Are people saying “the bomb” anymore? I’m a middle-aged lady, and am kind of out of it when it comes to current slang.)
Which brings me to my final issue:
I think the phrase “good in bed” implies that sex is something one person does to another . . . instead of something two people do together. (Or more than two. I’m not particular.) It implies that being good in bed is a quality that one person has, instead of a quality that two (or more) people have together. It implies that sex is about the power one person has over another, instead of the power two (or more) people can create for themselves and each other. (Not that I have anything against one person having power over another, in a consensually kinky way . . . but you know what I mean.)
So I’d like to see us talking about “good in bed,” not to mean, “possessing the physical skills/ studliness to make their sex partners intensely aroused and orgasmic,” but instead to mean, “good at communicating and paying attention during sex.” And ideally, short of some very basic knowledge and skills, I’d like to see us stop talking about one person being “good in bed” altogether.
I like pretty pictures, though I don’t have a particularly refined palate when it comes to art appreciation — I’m often fonder of illustration work than I am of fine art, which I recognize is probably more a comment on me than it is on art. Nevertheless, I’m always looking to expand my horizons, so I bring you assorted high and low and other art today, all with a sexual twist:
Joe Shuster is best known as the co-creator of Superman, but the truth is he didn’t make a lot of money off that initially, and he had to do other stuff to make ends meet . . . thing like drawing lots of fetish illustrations (though because he did them anonymously there’s some argument over whether he really did them at all). Historian Craig Yoe has written a book about it, called Secret Identity, with drawings of plenty of whip-wielding and helplessly bound ladies. (Sadly, none of the illustrations actually involve Superman; you’ll have to google around for some fan art, or the occasional bondage-y comics cover, if you want to see that.)
Delving farther into the underbelly of pop culture, there’s this Flickr set of hideous retro ’70s artwork, which includes lots of nudity and cheesy cheesecake stuff and, you know, guys with horrible mustaches and women with horrible hair flying naked through space while snorting cocaine.
On the hipper side of things, consider artist Jasper Goodall’s “Poster Girl” series: “Whilst the work itself can be seen as erotic art, it is equally about looking at the world of fetish and erotica with an appreciative yet critical eye. It is erotic art but it is also about erotic art - the images are a result of Goodall’s musings on erotica and sexual fetish.” It’s definitely hot and strange and experimental, though I’d love a look at the ladies holding up the posters . . .
Also hip and hot and strange: the third volume of Grafuck, featuring avant-garde erotic artwork from various groundbreaking artists. My own favorite is probably the smeared-looking Darth Vader lesbian trio by Faiyaz Jafri, but I’m a science fiction geek, so don’t go by me.
Finally, Roseros Erotic Masterpieces.com specializes in erotic variations on famous paintings, including an interesting explanation as to why the Mona Lisa is smiling so enigmatically, and how the Girl with a Pearl Earring earned herself a pearl necklace, and so on. Just makes you want to take brush (or, you know, whatever) in hand and get to work making something beautiful, doesn’t it?
