You didn’t? How on earth were we supposed to take these lines then?
Women do not write men’s porn. The percentage of women in the professional male porn market is minuscule. From what I can tell, the percentage of woman in the free amateur online porn market is also extremely tiny.
There is a huge woman’s erotica market, which can be very explicit, the great majority of which is written by woman, both professional and amateur.
Absolutely nothing in Playboy is porn, and having women run the magazine says nothing whatsoever about Playboy, porn, the men’s magazine market, or men. I don’t know what’s in Hooters magazine but from your quote “women can do sexy without tipping into actual sleaze” I’d say that women there aren’t writing porn either.
Porn is not the same as erotica. It is a different genre. Porn is extremely sex-linked and always has been. Asking what porn would be like if women wrote it is a good question, simply because women do not write porn. Now or ever. And your examples don’t say for a minute that they do.
(Don’t bring up Gloria Leonard, either. She was a front with little to do with the operations of her magazines.)
I would expect quite the opposite. If I were reading porn, to the extent that I thought about the author at all, I would prefer that she be female. A porn author is a person who’s attempting to turn me on, and I would much prefer that a woman make that attempt than a man.
In Japan there’s a genre of manga called yaoi. Well, okay, we can get into an argument about what it’s called there, but here we call it yaoi. Anyway, it’s guy on guy porn written by women. There’s a big fuss here because many yaoi mangas have the ‘seme’ and ‘uke’ stereotype. The seme is the big, strong man and the uke is the meek, feminine one (and those stereotypes both leak into the sex itself). People wonder why if they are just going to make one man into a romance novel heroine why don’t they just make male/female porn?
If I wrote porn there would be a lot less throbbing things involved in the story. I don’t think throbbing is sexy. When my head hurts it throbs, when I smash my thumb with a hammer it throbs; therefore throbbing is just not sexy. To me a throbbing manhood means the guy must be in pain. Okay, he probably is in pain if he’s not getting any, but this is porn so he’s definitely going to get something, no need for throbbing.
We need less heaving breasts, too. Heaving is not sexy.
Right on!. What matters is not the writer’s gender, nor race, nor creed or sexual orientation. We must judge pornography writers solely upon the smuttiness of their character.
Tangentially related, because someone mentioned the anatomy of movie porn: Am I the only one who enjoys watching porn, but has to close their eyes for the “money shot” because it makes me physically ill to see women with cum all over their faces, drooling and spitting and slurping up semen?
Fascinating conjecture, but I’m inclined to think that the significance is muted by the vast scale of porn and media. Is there really a picture of male sexuality that is portrayed in the media? What media do you have in mind? It just seems that an awful lot of permutations are catered to these days.
Mind you, I’m astonished at how provincial and constrained the depictions of “mainstream” sexuality are in the USA today, as rendered in such fare as “The OC,” “The L Word,” etc. Having grown up in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s remarkable that we have kept such a puritanical lid on our depictions of human sexuality. But beneath the polite and repressed conventions of a society in which the word “tits” will get your broadcasting license suspended by the FCC there is a thriving market for every flavor of erotic experience you care to imagine.
Check out Youporn.com. The availability of authorship to each of us is dramatically altering our understanding of what we really like/want/need/desire. I’m not sure the “traditional” depictions of gender role sexuality will hold up for long with such a sea change in media.
I’m not sure what bug flew up your butt; however, I find it highly amusing that you would take me to task for implying that Ms. Atkinson wrote porn when you want to split hairs (beaver, probably) over whether or not Playboy constitutes “porn”, and whether editors and publishers are also “writers”.
OK, now that I’ve given this way more thought and effort than seems necessary, here’s the line that prompted me to write my (apparently objectionable) OP:
You’ll also note that she states
which seems, to me, to imply that Belinda Riverin is, personally, writing sleaze.
And what, exactly, is this:
Either they do or they don’t. Which one is it?
Here, you want to change my OP? I was not aware that women wrote for “Non-Pornographic Male Market Magazines That Happen To Feature Women’s Breasts and Buttocks in Sexually Alluring Poses” using male pseudonyms, as well as writing a minuscule amount of porn (which, by the way, is extremely sex-linked and always has been), and editing and publishing magazines such as Playboy and Hustler.
The difference between ‘erotica’ and ‘porn’ is a marketing device, and about as useful as saying that men ‘sweat’, and women ‘perspire’. It was just a way to make women supposedly comfortable about reading porn, which of course is supposed to be nasty and for men only.
This sounds fascinating, and horrifying at the same time - nothing kills the mood more than polite, politically correct porn/erotica.
It must be awful to be a woman and get turned on by something stronger than a man who “Says ‘I love you’ and then they cuddle for hours”, knowing you’re a porn freak
I don’t have a problem per se with the idea of women having an increased if not slightly dominant position, but the notion of government-produced porn just turns me off, as it was a minor element in Orwell’s 1984. Was the agency competing with privately-published material, or had that been restricted or outlawed?
As for The L Word, I’ve caught a few episodes and come away with the impression that the members of a group made up entirely of women are just as capable of being pointlessly destructive to themselves and each other as any mixed-gender group ever was. Watching them screw each other isn’t enough compensation for watching them screw each other, if you get my meaning.
By the way, the two things I love most are commitment and changing myself.
I won’t speak to visual porn here, but in written form I’m going to disagree. It’s totally possible to write steamy stuff that actually never describes “preferred characteristics” like fabulous boobies, giant mantools, etc. but still manages to get the reader (and sometimes the writer!) very hot and bothered. It’s all in the word-smithing, baby.
And in my (admittedly) limited experience, the guy reading is either not going to care about/notice depth of detail. As with swimsuits and evening gowns, leaving a little purely to their imagination goes a long way.
Damn straight - give the man a cigar! Or, er, something…
