‘Conference organizer Taormino insisted that porn is “absolutely” the right word (instead of “erotica”). “By not using the term porn, we’re caving in to this idea that porn is low class, for men, not by us or for us.” She calls her own porn, such as FPA winner The Ultimate Guide to Pegging, “organic, free-trade porn,” and urged consumers and creators to take a page from the organic food movement. “We have to make connections between fair labor practices even when the labor being performed is sex. If you care about the conditions under which your food was made and the conditions under which your jeans were made, then you should care about the conditions under which your pornography is made. You should be willing to pay a little more.”’

14 May 1 Permalink

Last month, a New Jersey middle school banned girls from wearing strapless dresses to prom. Administrators claimed that the dresses were “distracting” — though they refused to specify exactly how or why. Parents reacted strongly to the rule; some supported the dress code while others deemed it “slut-shaming.” 

Not only this is problematic for the girls - but it’s also disrespectful to the male students, as if they are wild animals who can’t effectively use their frontal cortex to prevent themselves from pouncing on any girl who shows up to school in tight pants. 

Let’s create a culture where we expect a little more from everyone, okay?

9 May 5 Permalink

“While still an emerging genre, feminist porn now makes up approximately 10 per cent of the multibillion-dollar porn universe, says Carlyle Jansen, founder of the Toronto sex shop Good For Her, which puts on the Feminist Porn Awards, now in their 8th year and growing in popularity annually. It’s a sign that the tenets of feminist porn are beginning to bleed into the mainstream adult industry. There is also substantial overlap between feminist directors, producers and performers working in the mainstream adult industry, including alongside big companies like Wicked, Vivid Entertainment and New Sensations. It’s estimated that 65 per cent of the actors now act in both alternative and mainstream films.”

1 May 4 Permalink

“Back in 2011, one researcher for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Teenage Kicks said memorably that she kept coming up against the assertion among teenagers that certain abusive behaviour - such as “slut-shaming” on the internet, “back-handing” a girl if she refuses your advances, or passing your girlfriend around your friends for sexual favours - is “technically wrong, but normal”, so hardly worth complaining about. This means that we have to encourage open discussion about abuse, and hold lessons and lectures and seminars about abuse, rather than hoping that any checklist will do the work for us. Identifying abuse is the start - but building relationship education properly into the national curriculum is the only way to seriously target a culture of ‘normal’ violence, assault and mistreatment that starts in the playground and escalates over a lifetime.”

13 April 5 Permalink

“We need to focus on the messages that men are getting and about how they relate to women. We also need to focus on what messaging men are getting about women and about what kind of women get raped”

27 March 2 Permalink

“Aging Stigma #4: Old people don’t have sex.

You’re probably going, “Eww, I don’t want to talk about this, it’s gross!”

Too bad. Everyone has sex. Sex is not reserved for the beautiful, the elite, or the young.

And the elderly still do it too despite what you may think. The sooner we realize that, the closer we come to ridding ourselves of the ageist beliefs we still cling to.”

25 March Permalink

“This is why straight men and straight women can never truly be friends.

The guy is always trying to sleep with the girl while the girl thinks it’s just a friendship. And he’s not the only dude to make this argument:

And you know what? These guys are absolutely right.

So long as we continue to live by and construct our relationships around oppressive, patriarchal understandings of sex and gender, straight men and straight women cannot be friends, and for that matter, gay men can’t be friends with any other men.

If men believe that they have no control over their “biological imperative” to “spread their seed,” then every friendship with a potential “mate” will be defined by a constant game where the man is endlessly jockeying for position to sleep with his “friend.”

The problem with this line of thinking, though, is that it presumes that men are not, in fact, human.”

19 March 1 Permalink

“When I first started in the industry, I quickly saw that the images of women of color in porn were directly related to what the predominantly white male directors thought was sexy and what they believed their (predominantly white) male audience would find sexy. As a result, the majority of African American women on screen were put into one of two categories: assimilated to appear as close to white as possible (“they are almost one of us”) or completely ghettoized to reflect debased images of black culture (it doesn’t matter because “they are only one of them”). The first group was easy to spot: long hair weaves, lighter skin, thinner physi­cal frames, enhanced busts, and smaller hips and butts. These women could also be cast in larger-budget movies. Women with bigger butts, curvier bodies, darker complexions, and more African features were rel­egated to movies with lower production values and often offensive titles. It wasn’t until female and black directors and producers began to influ­ence the marketplace that porn videos started to showcase other aspects of black life and black and/or interracial couples in a more diverse light.”

10 March 11 Permalink

“In the current situation with criminalization, we’ve created situations where sex workers have very little power and control over their lives. Increasing one group of women’s power and control over their lives does not take anything away from other women.”

28 February 7 Permalink

“I’m not talking about mustache twirling, KKK-grade, Hitler level racism that’s so obvious anyone with any sense of human decency would banish it from their mind.

I’m talking about the “little” things, like the fetishization of black men by gay white men, the stigmatization of Asian men by gay men of other races, mainstream LGBTQ campaigns with little racial awareness, and racial “preferences” that can be innocuous, but at times reflect an underlying prejudice.”

Read more….

9 February 14 Permalink