Are you a porn enthusiast?
In the past I have had a love/hate relationship with the word "Porn". To me it has always described the worst offerings of sexually oriented videos, photos and stories. In my mind, I would substitute the word erotic when I found a particularly classy and well done video like this one, a very sexy film of a perineum or taint massage. To me, this is far from "porn", I would call it an erotic film. Actually I would call it a very erotic film...one that left me wanting more. I found them; a few more gorgeously filmed, very classy and intensely erotic films from Coco de Mer's website . However I would never call this porn. I would mail this link to all my sex-positive friends, but never call it porn.
Similarly - poorly written and crude stories are porn in my mind, whereas classier stories (and of course I like to think I fit in this category) are "erotica".
However, the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines pornography thusly:
"Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal."
Well Hell's Bells, I guess I am in the Porn business. Because that is my intent here, ladies and gentlemen; to excite you, get you hard and wet, make you squirm. Perhaps I am a porn enthusiast.
Violet Blue spurred on all of this wordsmith-level exploration, and Violet is oh-so-comfortable with the word "Porn". She writes it, defends it and celebrates it. Violet learned about an anti-porn feminist conference scheduled in Boston this month. She decided she'd had enough...
"We women are tired of people trying to control our sexuality by telling us what we should or shouldn’t like sexually (porn) based on what someone else thinks is best for us. It’s like keeping women in a perpetual state of being children about sex. And women who say they are feminists make it worse by discounting all the women who find porn to be an empowering sex toy. Or if not, to at least give us the benefit of the doubt that we can make that decision for ourselves, thank you very much."
"Our Porn, Ourselves is a resource that aims to create an alternative and constructive conversation on the use of pornography by women, and in turn offer balance to the anti-porn feminist agenda."
Take a look at her resulting facebook page and website both named "Our Porn, Ourselves". Violet Blue rocks...and I line up behind her in defense of porn in general. Also in defense of women who love porn, who write porn (yours truly) and have no desire to be stereotyped or included in the category of porn that is truly unethical or abusive. While you are at her website, if you enter the short video contest in which you say you are pro-porn you could win some very sexy prizes.
So I blame the sex-negative whackos for grouping all porn together in a mindless sex=bad knee-jerk reaction and then perpetuating many negative myths and blatant lies. There is sex-positive porn. There is such a thing as healthy porn use as well as healthy porn. And there are women who love porn just as much as men love it. And if you are here reading this, you probably fit in that last category. It's time we had a voice...because when it comes down to it, threatening my porn is right up there with threatening to take away my coffee or my chocolate, only worse...because I not only enjoy it with passion, I create it. And I am indeed a porn enthusiast!
Suddenly, I'm kinda warming up to the word...Porn.
Ruby Ryder
