Blue moviedom at Bluestockings
Hey New York City! This Saturday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the feminist Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. I’m presenting my new book Pornography. It was published late last year by Groundwood, a Canadian children’s press.
Children’s press? Porn for Kids??
Officially, Pornography is part of a “social issues” series for older high school and younger college students, intended as a tool for writing research papers.
But a funny thing happened during writing and post publication: I noticed that seasoned adults, too, were intrigued when I described my research and later passed around my book.
That makes sense. Pornography is an easy, quick read (and it’s quite stashable in purse or pocket since it’s a little paperback). It’s current-eventsy and analytical. It takes up all the old pro- and anti- arguments from the 1960s to 1980s, updating them to the politics, personalities, genres and technology of today’s age of the hyper-commodity and Internet.
These homemaker pals from southern California manufacture and sell “Erotic Pornatas” — take offs on Mexican party pinatas — as a group hobby. I photographed them at an adult-entertainment trade show in Las Vegas in 2005 while researching my book Pornography.
Caveat: No pix in the book. But I did view lots of material for my research. Maybe that’ll save you the time to do other things. Or, if you’re into porn, you can compare your experience with my comments and interpretations.
Come by Bluestockings on Saturday (or just buy the book! Click here). Follow along as MILR (Mother I’d Love to Read) Deb debunks myths and adds nuance to claims such as:
• Porn is growing financially by leaps and bounds.
• Most porn workers were abused as children.
• Porn industry profit makers are all greedy shmucks.
• Porn endangers women, especially the violent shit being mainstreamed nowadays.
• Porn oppresses performers.
• Porn addicts men.
• Porn is liberating.
• Porn is fun.
• Porn is ruining sex for people in the real world.
• Porn pressures everyday women to get Brazilians and boob jobs.
• Gonzo. Bukkake. Gag Factor. Jenna Jameson. Nina Hartley. Twink. Robert Jensen.
• Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Join the blah and explore why there’s so much of it in the first place! Which may be the real point (also seriously discussed in Pornography).
Here are directions to Bluestockings:
On the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington - 1 block south of Houston and 1st Avenue.
By train: 1 block south of the F train’s 2nd Avenue stop and just 5 blocks from the JMZ-line’s Essex / Delancey Street stop. By car: If you take the Houston exit off of the FDR, then turn left onto Essex (aka Avenue A), then right on Rivington, and finally right on Allen, you will be very, very close.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Hey Debbie,
Have a great time at Bluestockings!
Julie Wilson
Groundwood Books
January 30th, 2008 at 7:27 am
Ms. Nathan,
I caught part of your interview with KUER tonight. It was a re-broadcast, so I was unable to participate in the call-in. But I wanted to visit your blog and post some thoughts all the same.
Without divulging too much info, I am a 33 year old male, born and raised in Utah. I’m LDS (aka: Mormon) and I have been married for 14 years. We have one daughter.
And pornography has been an old friend of mine since I was at least 12 or 13 years old.
Having lived outside of Utah since 1993, and recently moved back to Utah, I had forgotten how sexually puritanical the Utah culture can be. It’s LDS influenced, sure, but much of what passes here is pure cultural weirdness that you won’t necessarily find with LDS outside Utah.
Anyway, I always felt like porn was my “last resort” as a young boy. When puberty hit me, it really HIT me, and from age 13 to 14 I walked around with either a raging erection, or a raging case of guilt over the fact that I always had a raging erection. Anyway, even the guilt didn’t stop me from wanting to explore myself, and I eventually found myself masturbating on the down-low, using “porn” like the Sears catalog (lingerie models) or the classic piece of Utah “porn”: the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
But the time I was 14 and 15, I’d managed to get my hands on some Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Again, on the down-low, since my parents were pretty hyper about checking up on me in this regard. Maybe they knew? I am a parent now and it’s surprising the insight you have.
Anyway, soft porn remained as a “safety valve” for my teenage years, allowing me a way to satiate my sexual desire without going out and trying to have sex with girls my own age, or even older women. To be sure, I fantasized about such. But I was a ‘good boy’ and good Utah boys wait until marriage, so I stuck with my Playboy and Penthouse and a bottle of Vaseline lotion to keep me company.
By the time I was 16 to 18 years old, I’d managed to get my hands on some decidedly harder material. Playboy and Penthouse got “boring” and I started to really get into huge-breast fetish born. I didn’t care that so many of the women had implants, I was just sexually astounded by the size of their breasts. I’d also managed to get my hands on enough XXX porn videos that I’d begun to figure out what I liked about the hard-core stuff (women giving oral sex, taking facial ejaculations, breast play) and what I didn’t like (women being outright abused, pseudo-violent porn, gross guys with bad bodies in too many features) so that I guess I had some bona fide “tastes”.
Anyway, when I got married, the thing that surprised me most was how alien it was to actual be experiencing anything sexual… with another person in the room! Using porn, I’d become totally used to being self-focused during sexual pleasure. Having my new wife there… Well, it was distracting! We had a lot of early problems with our sex because I was so “wired” for porn that I had to slowly train myself out of one kind of sexual gratification, and into another.
I’ll also admit that the porn use didn’t stop when I got married, it just stayed underground. Oh, my wife knew I liked huge fake breasts. She’d seen my porn stash when we dated. But she wasn’t aware that I kept the porn stash, even after marriage, and this too caused us problems with intimacy because I kept seeking porn when real sex was too much of a bother, or too much work.
Anyway, it’s been 14 mostly happy years. I am fortunate my wife has been open and quite liberal about my porn “problem”. She knows I’ll always have an affinity for the stuff, but we’ve also experimented with porn between us enough to know where comfort zones lie, and what is and is not acceptable within the relationship.
If anything, my wife has used the porn as a window into what I enjoy and fantasize about, and she has incorporated this into our sex life, through lingerie and sexy shoes and whatnot. She thankfully has large natural breasts, too, so my breast fetish is fulfilled.
Anyway, if asked about porn, I always have to be honest. I like it. I genuinely think it helped me survive and stay sane as a teen. But there was a cost. And it was not a penalty-free affair.
One thing I think is ridiculous is how so many people (again, Utah…) think porn is like Reefer Madness; that it automatically induces a person to go down this never-ending path to a Dark Side filled with sorrow, depression, depravity, etc.
I’m an upstanding citizen, part-time military, fully employed as a technology worker for a major hospital group, and tend to vote conservatively. I’ve never been in so much as a fist fight, and I worship my wife and daughter. Obviously, porn didn’t ruin my life and did not destroy me.
As with many claims that a “thing” takes over people, I tend to suspect that people are predisposed to this kind of stuff, and all that’s necessary is a trigger, or series of triggers. No “thing” can ruin a person, without that person already being psychologically and emotionally vulnerable to BEING RUINED.
Just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Anyway, at current, I keep porn at a reluctant arm’s length. My wife is not comfortable with us routinely integrating images of other women into our sex play, and I fully respect this. I must also always be wary of falling back into the habit of being self-focused, sexually, and using porn as a crutch when I should be exploring sex with my spouse.
Is porn evil? Good?
I’d say, porn is what people make of it. A person bent on doing harm to themselves, or others, using porn, will tend to do just that.
But for me, porn has been mostly benign. No wrecked life. No psychosis. No obliterated morals. Hell, in my circle, people ding me for being too much of a goody goody! No booze, no drugs, only ever had sex with one woman, and then, after marriage. Church-goer.
What can I say? My story is just one of many.
I hope this was neither too personal nor too lengthy.
I just found your book, and the topic, fascinating, given my personal experiences.
Thanks for the commentary on KUER!