Speaking Sex

One of my favorites in this collection is "Joy. To the World" by Dragonfly, which is a meditation on her style of domination. She employs a series of rhetorical questions to interrogate the reader's preconceived notions of domination and submission:

Could a golden shower potentially become a baptismic ritual of reward and redemption? Is cross-dressing a secret ceremonial celebration of the unattended feminine psyche within the repressed middle-aged heterosexual male? Is it possible that the taboo and traditionally exploitative practice of financial domination could become an incubator for revolutionary divestment and ethical generation of abundance?

And she concludes with a benevolent blessing: "In the name of spirituality, sensuality, and sexuality, I bid you kinky blessings, because everyone and everything deserves to cum. Awomen." Joy expresses herself and her woman-positive ethos through her writing with beauty, grace and a sense of humor.

Self-expression and the telling of one's own story in one's own words takes ultimate precedence throughout the collection, but the moments of connection with others occasioned by the storytellers' work are equally poignant. The best example of this is "Old Man Douglas," by Elle Stanger, a story about a strip club patron, "a sixty-something man who looked two decades older. Born Jewish in the South, he was now a Buddhist in the Pacific Northwest. He walked everywhere through Portland in his floppy hat, and never drank more than a few sips of whiskey on ice. He gave gentle, deliberate hugs." Her story of their relationship through her pregnancy and his illness and eventual passing shows how someone who sees the greatness in us can change the way we think about ourselves.

This is the first in a series of essays about sex work in America by Melissa Gira Grant.

Whether or not we mean for police to have this job, they use the power with which we've endowed them to control the lives of sex workers. Police stop-and-search women they suspect of being sex workers, and if they find condoms, use them as "evidence" that they intended to sell sex (as has been documented by Human Rights Watch, in partnership with advocates across the country). From San Francisco to Chicago to Atlanta to New York, police conduct sweeps on the street, profiling people based on race and gender identity and using vague anti-prostitution laws against "loitering with intent" to justify their arrest. Federal law enforcement agencies monitor sex workers' online advertisements and websites, in conjunction with local law enforcement, posing as customers to conduct surveillance. They say they're investigating trafficking, but arrest many more adult sex workers than they file trafficking charges against those who may exploit them. The result is that many more women than men go to jail on sex crime charges, and carry criminal records for the rest of their lives.

I'm posting this link because I love Jiz Lee and I like to support feminist-identified porn stars, though I did have an issue or two with the listicle itself. First off, I really disagree with the sexualization of consent typified by the slogan "consent is sexy." Consent is not sexy. Sex is sexy. Consent is mandatory. Consent is what you need to have before you get to the sexy. Second, this quote:

It is certainly true that a good portion of content created by the porn industry is directed by men, marketed for men and designed to be enjoyed by men. However, it's reductive to say that acting in porn disqualifies you from being a feminist.

I hope the irony of positioning a reductive statement before disparaging reductiveness isn't lost on y'all. Twitter friend @chead and I were parallel-tweeting about these topics earlier today and I think he hit the nail on the head with these two:

"It's so weird to make generalizations about porn when some porn is just a person whispering"

"porn is such an important avenue for representation for lots of people and thats erased when its generalized as cishet, white, and violent"

I would like it if we could stop treating porn like some heterocisbro-dominated anomaly when, for all I can tell, it mirrors any other media industry in the ways in which it is male-dominated. I'm not saying that we shouldn't get mad about how central male desire is in mainstream porn, but I am saying that porn shouldn't be specifically and disproportionately derided because of it. What if, for example, I dismissed all of the French New Wave because a vast majority of the mainstream French New Wave directors were men?

Anyway, lots of mainstream directors are women nowadays. Check out Aiden Starr. Check out Dana Vespoli. Lots of woman performers get chances to direct and to show the things that turn them on. And there's a whole wave of feminist queer porn, headed up by people like Courtney Trouble and Shine Louise Houston, to turn to if the mainstream isn't where you're finding what you need.

And maybe in addition to all that, we can stop seeing desire and sexuality as so specifically gendered and enjoy people's expressions of their sexual curiosity for what they are and how we can relate to them.