Friends

Gail Dines and her anti porn slide show infuriate me. 

It not the Christian right, same shit different day bullshit

It not the dehumanising of sex workers, when she talked about how porn makes men rape, however “she’s not walking down the street we are” pointing to a soft porn model, as if sex workers get some magical pass when it come to male sexual violence.

It the fact that is her world, at least her utopia I don’t exist, and you know what, I like me. In her lectures she talks about men who use porn, never women, about how porn shows “body punishing sex” with the assumption that no real women would ever like body-punishing sex, You know what I woke up sore this morning, most of my body hurts because of the sex last night, and my mouth is sore from how stupidly I have been grinning all morning. I like my life, quit standing in my way.

I can tell you the moment I started collecting porn, my father had gotten a new laptop from work when I was 14, and I inherited the hand me down laptop, it was a Pentium 2 266 with I think 32 megs of ram, it had a four gig hard drive and a internet connection. 

I was conflicted, I wanted things which where wrong, I considered my self a feminist and a social justice activist so why did I want thing which where so violent?

On of the arguments I hear from the rad fem crowd is that soft porn, vanilla porn is a gateway drug, once the (male) viewer has seen people fuck he needs something more, harder more violent, more body punishing, that has not been my experience, one of the first pornographic videos I downloaded was cool devices (serious not safe for work, or most humans). Lets make no bones about this, the kind of porn I want to watch isn’t nice, it isn’t appearing at any of your local video stores. It is dark, rough, violent, it often contains descriptions of non-consent, my earliest sexual desire was to be tied up with a girl, naked, pushed up against her unable to get away.

Crucify me or do you wanna save me yes, no maybe...
It doesn't matter baby you are so clean
But I can't make you wanna scream scream, scream, scream with me...

Bright red scream – my ruin

I went through cycles of downloading watching and deleting in disgust that I could want that want to see that done to people, I was meant to be a feminist right.

Most of the sex that I had as a teenager sucked, I had partners who where everything that would for me, a young feminist women. Unfortunately it was dry, painful and boring and I put up with it because I wasn’t sure that I could be a good feminist and enjoy myself sexually. I had the sex my partners wanted me to have, and that my feminist elders wanted me to have and tried to forget about the kind of sex I wanted to have, in the name of women’s rights and opportunities. I am yet to forgive Gail and those like her for that.