The following excerpt is from the Ms. Naughty Porn for Women Blog. From what I can tell, Ms. Naughty is one of the two women who run For the Girls.
Please make sure to read the rest of Ms. Naughty's post to contextualize the following excerpt (link at the bottom). Also, some of the comments in response to her post (at the bottom) are very interesting - particularly those from women who like rough sex, BDSM, etc. Ms. Naughty is challenged by some of the commenters who practice BDSM on her use of the label "extreme porn."
Ms Naughty's post perfectly exemplifies the difficultly new-school feminists are having when it comes to balancing their own sexual preferences with the recognition that not all women feel the same way. It also brings up the issue of when porn crosses a line from something that's easily supported to something more insidious.
Let’s Talk About Extreme Porn
The other day I saw an ad for a porn site that I found rather disturbing. It was a looped flash video ad that featured a couple having very rough sex. The woman was “fish hooked” (had a finger in her mouth, dragging her head back at a painful angle), a penis was rubbed roughly on her face, she was choked and slapped. She also didn’t seem to be enjoying herself much; her face was red and she was crying.
I didn’t want to see that. Firstly, I’m not into rough sex. Also I also had no idea of the context of that sex scene. Was it consensual? Did she sign up for that? Did she enjoy it?
The porn company that made the ad obviously thinks this will entice viewers to sign up, either out of curiosity or genuine desire. I’ve seen other rough ones like it, including one where it was a woman administering the rough sex to another women. I don’t promote that company, by the way, or any porn site that includes that kind of content.
This is the exactly the kind of extreme porn that Gail Dines discusses in her book Pornland. She says that almost all porn is like this and that it is having a negative effect on men’s sexuality.
The thing is, while there are plenty of problems with Dines’ generalisations and theory, I don’t want to dismiss her concerns with this kind of content. It seems reasonable to be asking questions about bad porn and extreme porn. We should be talking about what it means and how it effects us. I know that my initial reaction to that ad was pretty visceral. I can imagine that a lot of people might find it very disturbing or problematic.
I’ve seen my fair share of what I consider to be bad porn. Stuff that is overtly sexist and cruel, porn that appeals more to negative emotions and hatred than actual sexual desire (take for example the “ex-girlfriend” style sites. Or the ones where the scenarios are primarily about tricking someone into sex and not paying them). There’s porn out there that doesn’t look like it was consensual or ethically created. My stance has always been that I don’t like it and I won’t promote it – but I would never agree with it being censored. I’ve also had numerous online discussions with other adult webmasters about whether sites stepped over the line or not.
Read the read of the post here.