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Even though I'm a huge horror fan, I'll be the first to admit that most horror movies fellate the patron saint of boredom in a drudging limbo of their own making. I freely acknowledge that for every À l'intérieur there are ten thousand and one Prom Nights, and for that, I'm truly ashamed. But my blood is red, and I remain a proud supporter, reasoning that I can't dismiss the entire circus simply because I hate the clowns.
To a lesser extent, I feel exactly the same way about pornography. Lesser, because porn has a much higher appalling-to-watchable ratio, and personally, I find that after 10 minutes or so of feverish appreciation... well, let's just say I'm all porned out. Watching porn is a relatively perfunctory experience that does its job so efficiently you could comfortably slot it in during the ball change in a women's tennis final.
Porn has a reputation of attracting lonely men, when a lot of the time the converse is true: attached men simply don't get the opportunity to watch nearly as much porn as they'd like.
This is because the industry has made it something of a tradition to churn out misogyny on a grand scale. Most pop-porn of the ‘00s seem to be shot in some gang-banger's living room, with a cast of with a fake-titted trailer park escapees and repulsive, high-fiving gym-jocks who's single talent seems to be the ability to maintain a marathon semi-chub for a razor-burnt labia.
Women are literally spat on, quadruple-teamed and showered with protein. It's not exactly first date material.
There are exceptions of course. The Private movies, for example, are about as classy as ass-to-mouth can get, but despite their best intentions they remain tainted with porn's "boy's club" aura. They're still made by men, for men, so many women feel justifiably excluded, and this can be expressed as anger, jealousy, or making their man feel that being a lascivious voyeur is somehow a bad thing.
But the assertion that porn degrades women is as dismissive as declaring that cars kill people, or that children ruin your social life. Of course porn degrades women – but it doesn't have to. And given that fact that, according to Oprah.com, Hustler claims 56% of the customers at their video stores are women, it really shouldn't. Empowering more women to feel that they can enjoy porn as much as men is clearly good business practice.
Women pornographers like Maria Beatty and Anna Span are now following in former starlet Candida Royale's footsteps, making features from a female perspective. Royale's work is couples-driven, Beatty's is artsy, kinky lesbian-core, and Span's is just as down-and-dirty as the boy's stuff, only with more eye contact.
They're essentially doing for the porn industry what The Body Shop did for cosmetics. Span and her all-female crew are addressing women's reservations and exploding preconceived notions of drooling perverts exploiting homeless crack whores in seedy hotel rooms, by creating clean and consenting working environments in which they produce ideologically sound smut for our guilt-free pleasure. Effectively, they're reclaiming het-core porn for all of us to enjoy, and that'll probably be as good for guys as it is for the girls.
To a lesser extent, I feel exactly the same way about pornography. Lesser, because porn has a much higher appalling-to-watchable ratio, and personally, I find that after 10 minutes or so of feverish appreciation... well, let's just say I'm all porned out. Watching porn is a relatively perfunctory experience that does its job so efficiently you could comfortably slot it in during the ball change in a women's tennis final.
Porn has a reputation of attracting lonely men, when a lot of the time the converse is true: attached men simply don't get the opportunity to watch nearly as much porn as they'd like.
This is because the industry has made it something of a tradition to churn out misogyny on a grand scale. Most pop-porn of the ‘00s seem to be shot in some gang-banger's living room, with a cast of with a fake-titted trailer park escapees and repulsive, high-fiving gym-jocks who's single talent seems to be the ability to maintain a marathon semi-chub for a razor-burnt labia.
Women are literally spat on, quadruple-teamed and showered with protein. It's not exactly first date material.
There are exceptions of course. The Private movies, for example, are about as classy as ass-to-mouth can get, but despite their best intentions they remain tainted with porn's "boy's club" aura. They're still made by men, for men, so many women feel justifiably excluded, and this can be expressed as anger, jealousy, or making their man feel that being a lascivious voyeur is somehow a bad thing.
But the assertion that porn degrades women is as dismissive as declaring that cars kill people, or that children ruin your social life. Of course porn degrades women – but it doesn't have to. And given that fact that, according to Oprah.com, Hustler claims 56% of the customers at their video stores are women, it really shouldn't. Empowering more women to feel that they can enjoy porn as much as men is clearly good business practice.
Women pornographers like Maria Beatty and Anna Span are now following in former starlet Candida Royale's footsteps, making features from a female perspective. Royale's work is couples-driven, Beatty's is artsy, kinky lesbian-core, and Span's is just as down-and-dirty as the boy's stuff, only with more eye contact.
They're essentially doing for the porn industry what The Body Shop did for cosmetics. Span and her all-female crew are addressing women's reservations and exploding preconceived notions of drooling perverts exploiting homeless crack whores in seedy hotel rooms, by creating clean and consenting working environments in which they produce ideologically sound smut for our guilt-free pleasure. Effectively, they're reclaiming het-core porn for all of us to enjoy, and that'll probably be as good for guys as it is for the girls.
