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Tag Archives: sexuality

#comingoutday: the thread

12 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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sexual identity, sexuality

Yesterday (October 11) was #ComingOutDay and I shared some thoughts on Twitter. Here is that thread in blog post form, lightly edited to address a few typos. 

Twitter wants to make EXTRA ‘SPECIALLY SURE that I know it’s #ComingOutDay so I thought I would say a few words about what my coming out experience(s) have been like. I have spent a lot of time in the past couple of years reassuring newly-out queer adults  (💗🙌🌈💗) that our process of “coming out” can be both like and unlike the mainstream cultural narrative of coming out.

First I want to say: Coming out is sometimes unsafe. If it’s unsafe for you, I hope you care for yourself as you can in the moment. You still count, and you still matter. I hope in future it will become safer and more possible to come out to at least some people who love you.

Also: here’s a thread I wrote earlier in the year about how coming out can still be hard and scary for many of us. That doesn’t make you any less queer. That’s structual cisheterosexism still making our lives difficult.

So in this thread I thought I’d describe my coming out experience as a Midwestern queer kid during the 1980s-1990s. Keep in mind that I didn’t have an email address until I was seventeen. I had the public library and my parents’ bookshelves. The avenues for finding queer thought, queer options, queer community as a young person have changed radically since that era.

Some queer folks can look back into their childhood and find strong evidence for having been “born this way.” That’s a favored narrative for many reasons. But it isn’t a narrative that has been particularly useful to me. Sure, I was born “this way” in the sense that I was born me, and likely always had the capacity for same-sex as well as other-sex desires. But I also didn’t experience the gender policing many queer adults remember from childhood. I wasn’t made to feel non-normative in that way.

As a queer adult, looking back, I would say that my experience of passionate same-gender friendships might fit into a pre-history of queerness. I remember since early childhood imagining an adult life that involved establishing a home and family with another girl. Sometimes a boy. (And, you know, sometimes both.) But I didn’t have the language for same-sex desire/romance/relationship until I was about eleven and some girls at a sleepover were giggling about using the word “gay” in a Scrabble game. So I asked my mother for a definition — which she provided in very straightforward, not anti-gay, terms. It would be a few years later, in my early teens, when I began to observe that — unlike some of my friends — I didn’t feel romantic interest exclusively towards boys. Although the way I interpreted my feelings, at that point, was that I struggled to tell the difference between friendship and dating.

What does “coming out” look like for someone who hasn’t ever really been deliberately in the closet, but also hasn’t had the language to talk about who they are that resists presumptive (cis)heterosexuality? It’s a slow and halting process. As a teenager, I gathered more language. I read my mother’s edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves that had a whole chapter on lesbians! Our library had a copy of Annie On My Mind in the teen paperback rack (thank you librarians!). ElfQuest comics had gay and poly elves. 🤔

A piece of this story I often reflect on is that while I personally knew very, very few (out) queer people in our community, I knew a lot of single people — and single women specifically — who had created lives for themselves without following the dictates of the marriage plot (and/or parenting). One aspect of queer adulthood that I think we don’t talk often enough about is that our milestones and families often look and feel very different from the heteronormative imaginary. Sometimes they’re the same, or similar. And that’s okay too. But often they’re not! And for a child or young adult looking to grown-ups for possibilities … it felt in the early 90s (and I suspect often still feels today) like none of the life paths out there quite fit.

From 1997-2005, I was a commuter college student, living off-campus and working plus attending school part time. My campus was a hostile environment for queer people and feminists (I was vocally the latter, quietly the former). This is the period I think of as my “over-invested ally” period. I had no problem identifying as a lefty feminist, but I skirted the edges of campus queerdom because I lacked enough coherent evidence to identify as lesbian or bisexual (the options that felt available). I had no partnered sexual or romantic experience to point toward as evidence of my desires. It was all nebulous internal knowledge (knowledge I would tell any person today, who asked, is absolutely valid evidence … and anyway you don’t need a case file to identify as queer!). But at the time, it felt to me like you needed to prove the negative of being “not straight” (and I imagine many people feel a similar need to assemble their casefile for being “not cis”).

Me circa 1997-2007: It would be super awkward to go through the process of telling everyone you were queer and then have that be WRONG.

(Yes, 2019 me agrees with you that’s … not how this works.)

How does the concept of “coming out” (of hiding) fit into a story like this? The language and act of “coming out” can be found in the gay liberation moment of the early 1970s. It was originally a bold and brave call to political assembly. If you were a queer adult in the early 1970s you had lived through an era of intense persecution that had the goal of placing you outside the body politic. Claiming the public square was raucous street theater demanding that we be seen. This is also why Pride was, and continues to be, so important. Taking up space in public, being loud, being visible, is a political act:

We’re here. ✊

We’re queer. 🌈

I think a lot, though, about how those Big Coming Out acts we engage in as members of a queer body politic work in tandem with all the Little Comings Out we engage in as individual queer people. And how “coming out” is, maybe, in those quieter moments, more of a coming in — or settling in — to the self.

In order for me to make the shift (circa 2007-2009) from being an over-invested ally who understood herself to be “mostly straight” to being a queer bisexual I had to engage in so many small acts of letting that case file mentality go. I had to reject the straight-until-proven-queer framework that is cisheterosexist normativity at is most pernicious. I had to let go of the fear that unless I tried and failed at being straight I couldn’t properly prove I wasn’t.

I know this experience isn’t unique to bisexual folks. But I do think, perhaps, that understanding yourself to be queer involves less self-gaslighting doubt when you very obviously are not interested in people with whom you would appear to be in a heterosexual relationship. In a cisheteronormative world that prioritizes hetero desire, if you have some desires that seem to match up with that script, those desires can drown out the queer ones through cultural amplification. If my passionate friendships with men are read by the world around me as romantic, but my passionate friendships with women are read as platonic, it can be very hard to overrule social expectations and say: NO I LIKE THE LADIES IN A SEXY WAY TOO.

In the end, my Little Comings Out happened through so many moments like this:

*The day I referred to “my girlfriend” in front of a colleague.

*The day I said “we” meaning queer people.

*The day I said to my mother, “I’m falling in love.”

To me, being queer is both about the Big moments and the Little ones. It’s about finding your way through the cacophony of straightness to the right queer harmony that resonates with you. And it’s about acting in solidarity (whether visibly or not; visibility isn’t always safe) with others under the queer umbrella.

Coming out — in big ways, and little ways, helps us find one another, fight for one another, find language that helps us illuminate our souls.

Welcome home. 💗

Happy pride. 🌈

recommended reading on #obergefell

03 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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marriage equality, politics, sexuality

obergefell_smIt’s been a week since the Obergefell v. Hodges (pdf) decision came down from the Supreme Court. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to quit sporting the rainbow-hued lenses of the past week. On this 4th of July eve, as I made out with my wife on our back porch in full view of the neighborhood I thought to myself that today I agree with President Obama that “our union is a little more perfect.”

Still, a lot of excellent commentary has come out in the last seven days — not all of it joyous. And I thought I would take a moment to share some of my favorites. Every major legal and social change has its complications and landmines — and no, I’m not talking about the feelings of anti-gay Christians forced to reckon with the fact they share this country with people whose values differ from their own. Below are the perspectives I found eloquent, entertaining, or otherwise useful in placing Obergefell in perspective.

Continue reading →

26.06.2015

26 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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family, history, marriage equality, married life, politics, sexuality

wedding_hands#LoveWins

 

virtual book tour: best lesbian erotica 2015

23 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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sexuality, virtual book tours

Today I am hosting another Cleis Press virtual book tour, this time for their new anthology Best Lesbian Erotica 2015, edited by Laura Antoniou. A collection of twenty short stories by twenty-one different authors, this volume contains a refreshing variety of stories. Among my favorites were a tale of sexual flirtation told through an exchange of emails; the story of USO performer who seduces a WASP in the dressing room; a weaver who’s seduced by a Goddess; a lesbian elder narrating the beginnings of a long-term relationship to her lover; an arranged marriage to a queen; and a tattoo sitting that ends up entangled with sex. Having enjoyed the finished product, I was pleased to have the opportunity to interview the editor who had curated the collection. Without further ado, here is Laura Antoniou.

Best Lesbian Erotica 2015 cover imageOne of the things that really impressed me about Best Lesbian Erotica 2015 was the variety of stories. Too often, in my experience, erotica collections end up feeling very one-note. I think, often, it’s assumed that erotica readers are not very adventurous — that they’ll only read stories around sexual themes they themselves enjoy. But this volume has many different flavors and settings — including historical and fantastical. What was your thinking in bringing such disparate tales together?

Antoniou: Sometimes I do see a sad sort of sameness in genre entertainment, and lesbian erotica is nothing if not a very niche field. And publishing is a very conservative industry. Editors and publishers want exactly what sold well before – even as they wait for the next big hit to change the game. Add this to the fact that readers of erotica have a narrowly defined goal – to get aroused – and you have a formula for…formula. Two ladies meet. They engage in one sex act from column A and two from column B, leading to a sweet and wry ending after the explosive climax. Or multiple climax.

But in reality, lesbians aren’t this monolithic cookie-cutter production line of similarities. Gather ten of us in a room and you’ll have ten sets of turn-ons, turn-offs, experiences and desires and a range of fantasies that would make Nancy Friday blush. (I’m SO dating myself.) Our erotic literature should reflect that. And an anthology is the best way to do so; it allows for some stories to get immediately dog-eared (or bookmarked on a reading device?) and some to elicit fond or different kinds of thoughts and some that will be skipped over every time the reader pulls that book out. That’s freedom to me.

You write in your introduction that “one of the things I love about a sexy tale is an unmooring from reality.” That got me thinking about the pressure from some quarters that depictions of human sexuality be “realistic.” I get where that impulse is coming from, pushing back against performance anxieties around sexual intimacy and public health concerns. But we don’t demand that other genres — high fantasy, horror, poetry, fiction — be realistic. What do you think is lost with this demand that sexual fictions aspire to realism?

Antoniou: I never wanted my erotic fiction to have to stick to reality, whether in depictions of safer sex or physical capabilities for the same reason why I don’t demand my swords and sorcery or stalwart detective mysteries to adhere to objective reality. Fiction was not designed for truth. It is, in fact, more designed for what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness,” – a feeling that something could, or should be true, or is close enough to accept for your purposes. Erotica features characters who are super-model gorgeous, with the stamina of an Olympic athlete and responses a porn star would envy – and sure, that could be intimidating to we common humans. But erotica also contains sexy vampires and werewolves, impossible coincidences and magical things like the mind reading required for two strangers to get each other off exactly according to their desires. Or, despite them. If readers can accept magically perfect sex, then they can accept magically perfect sex with a goddess. A don’t know how different a Greek or African goddess is from that track-star, super-model, sexual dynamo, any way.

As someone who enjoys writing and reading erotic stories involving established relationships, I appreciated that you included some of those tales in 2015 and acknowledged them explicitly in your introduction. Why do you think erotica as a genre is so wedded to early relationship, “first time,” or hook-up encounter narratives?

Antoniou: First time narratives are awesome! They include joys we treasure. The mystery of this amazing person you’re going to be intimate with. The discovery process of flirtation or negotiation. Being surprised is wonderful. First time or stranger stories can include an element of doubt or danger, and the invention of a new connection. Of course they’re standard stories, especially in short form.

But to rely ONLY on first timers, or those elusive one-nighters means we ignore the steady and passionate strength of people who DO know each other well. Stories using characters who have already gone though the awkward or the sex-all-the-time honeymoon stages are more deliberate, and to me, more romantic. They show how knowing someone really does give one a sense of magical connection, that mind reading so unbelievable in a first time story. And I love how they show the scars and the ribbons from past experience. Sex with a long time lover isn’t as frantic or frightening as with a new one…unless, of course, that relationship came with more scars than ribbons. That’s how I could include the sweetest of stories about sexuality when your love is weak and ill, versus the hate-sex of people who really shouldn’t ever talk to each other because they just make things worse.

As an editor, what are one or two tropes in erotica you think have run their course?

Antoniou: I think we should have been over vampires even before Twilight, but whatevs, as they say. I’m also kind of over the expectations of butch = neanderthal and femme = fatale or selfish. I love me a good butch/femme dynamic, but some things are just old, not to mention hackneyed.

What are one or two things you’d like to see more of in the erotica you read?

Antoniou: Oh…gosh. Well. My personal taste differs from my editorial taste a great deal. Personally, I read the trashiest sort of things, and have no care for literary quality. But in general, I really would like to see more variety in setting. I love how I am seeing more queer romance set outside of the usual A) Big gay friendly city/gay neighborhood enclave of mostly white girls ready for a Netflix adaptation or B) small town girls getting it on in a setting that seems like it came out of a tourist brochure rather than genuine experience in such a setting. I’d like to see more than contemporary stories with contemporary language and mores. Different periods is a great place to hang out, especially if the author can evoke a time and place with just enough detail to let a reader feel like they could be there, too. I’d like to see some more fantastic settings, as in unreal, or completely alien, to challenge our own tropes and expectations. And I’d like to see more darkness, too. Erotic horror and dark fantasy, with edginess that makes a reader feel a little guilty for enjoying it? Oh, yeah, baby. That’s my kind of tale.

You can check out Best Lesbian Erotica 2015 at Cleis Press, your local bookshop or library, or one of the many online retailers. Find out more about Laura Antoniou’s work at lantoniou.com.

virtual book tour: the right side of history

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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history, sexuality, virtual book tours

rightsideselfieI’m giving a copy of The Right Side of History away! Check out the end of the post for details.

I recently finished a review of Lillian Faderman’s forthcoming The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster, 2015) for Library Journal. In that review, I observed that “if Revolution has a weakness it is a by-product of Faderman’s laudable ambition: big-picture narratives inevitably short-change individual stories.” The day after submitting my review, The Right Side of History: 100 Years if LGBTQI Activism, an anthology curated by Adrian Brooks (Cleis Press, 2015) arrived in the mail to address this shortcoming.

A “willfully cacophonous” collection of essays and interviews (as the forward by Jonathan Katz observes), The Right Side seeks the opposite of a coherent historical narrative. Instead, it offers us windows through which we can peer into queer lives past and consider under what circumstances our forebears lived. From Isadora Duncan and The Cradle Will Rock to an interview with Matthew Shephard’s mother and Sultan Shakir’s reflections on being “Black, Gay, and Muslim,” this anthology resists presenting us with a march toward a near future gay liberation. Instead, we are asked to consider the freedoms and constraints of individual lives; instead, we are confronted with LGBTQI individuals who may, or may not, be poster children of queer equality achieved. I appreciate the authors’s divergent voices, some first-person reflection and some more scholarly in tone — and I appreciate that queer activism is not always the primary focus of each piece. Instead, we see queer individuals involved in the struggle for racial justice or better labor conditions as well as their rights as specifically non-straight citizens.

The Right Side of History is not an original work of historical scholarship. The essays, when they aren’t first-person pieces or interviews, rely on secondary sources for most of their historical claims. However, as I was reading it I thought of myself as a twelve-year-old, and how I likely would have benefited enormously from having a copy of The Right Side pressed into my hands as a birthday or Christmas gift. I was the sort of child who voraciously read young peoples’ biographical sketches of inspiring women of history (some of whom I now know were decidedly queer). This collection would have helped me see possibilities for myself in a similar way as those women-of-history collections did — helped me find language and historical context for longings I was just beginning to form. I suggest you consider this book for the queer, questioning, and just plain historically interested teenagers in your life; it’s never too early to start peering through the windows of the past and considering how and where you might fit yourself.

GIVEAWAY!

Cleis Press has generously offered one free copy of The Right Side of History to readers of this review. If you would like to put your name in the hat, please comment (here on this review) or Tweet (to me @feministlib) sharing the name of an individual or an event that you feel is under-recognized in queer history. If you had been tasked with writing a chapter for Brooks’ anthology, whom or what would you have chosen to write about? Deadline for entries is 5pm Friday 6/12 and I will contact the winner* on Monday 6/15 to obtain a mailing address.**

*I will use an online randomizer to select one out of all valid entries.
**Cleis Press will only mail to a U.S. address.

booknotes: three of hearts

28 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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sexuality, virtual book tours

Welcome to today’s stop on the virtual book tour for Three of Hearts: Erotic Romance for Women, a new collection of short stories edited by Kristina Wright for Cleis Press (2015). As the title and cover art suggest, Three of Hearts is an anthology about threesomes – so let’s talk about the complexity of writing poly porn!

I was invited to participate in the book tour for Three shortly after diving into my own first-ever pass at writing an “OT3” — the fan fiction world equivalent of erotic, romantic threesomes — so I thought, hey! maybe I’ll get some ideas. If only about what not to do — because, to be honest, I struggle to connect with a lot of original (non fanwork) erotica. As it turns out, I have some positive as well as frustrated things to say — so congratulations to the editor and authors on that score!

In terms of Three‘s positives, I was particularly impressed by the relative diversity of situations and perspectives contained within this single collection. Continue reading →

“come as you are” is finally here!

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

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books, npr, sexuality

[UPDATE: The embed function isn’t working so for now, here is the interview I tried to embed: 7 Sex Education Lessons From Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are]

Back in 2010 I discovered this quirky blog, Emily Nagoski ::sex nerd::, that that gave me a term, “sex nerd,” for how I approach thinking about and exploring human sexuality. Over the past five years, I’ve had the pleasure of engaging as a commenter on Emily’s blog, discussing human sexuality via email, and serving as a reviewer on early drafts of what is not being published as Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life (Simon and Schuster, 2015).

(Emily, I’m so glad you stuck with this title, as it has been a playful favorite of mine since you first tried it out!)

I haven’t always been a fan of every population-level generalization Emily makes about cis female sexuality — that is, some of her generalizations haven’t rung true with the way I, personally, experience arousal and desire — but hey, that’s what scientists mean when they talk about what is generally for the population under discussion. (See? Because I read ::sex nerd:: back in the day, I can make that distinction now!)

So I’m pleased to see all of the exposure that Emily’s getting, what with her recent op-ed in the New York Times and the extended conversation above, which appeared on the local WBUR show “Radio Boston” last week. I hope if this is the sort of thing that interests you (or you think it will interest a person in your life) you’ll take a look at or listen to what she has to say!

virtual book tour: ultimate guide to sex after fifty

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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gender and sexuality, sexuality, virtual book tours

Today, I am participating in the virtual book tour for Joan Price’s The Ultimate Guide to Sex After 50 (Cleis Press, 2015).

Price, author of the book Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex (Seal Press, 2011) returns to book format with a compilation of advice and information drawn from her extensive web presence and experience educating others about the joys of life-long sexual pleasure. The eighteen chapters are thematically organized around such topics as “Sex With Yourself and Toys,” “You and Your Doctor,” and “Cancer, Cancer Treatment, and Sex”; each chapter has a brief narrative interspersed with anonymous quotations drawn from Price’s online discussions and breakout sections with advice from experts, case studies, and further resources. The back of the book provides a brief recommended resource section, though some of the subsections of the bibliography are sparse and the selection criteria is unclear — could she really only find one recommend resource on the subject of body image, for example? And no trans- or gay male specific sexuality resources under the LGBT heading?

My reader’s response to The Ultimate Guide was mixed. Setting my age aside for the moment, I did not feel like I was the target audience for this book. My crunchy granola queer feminist sex nerd attitude toward human sexuality was unevenly represented within its pages. I agree with Price’s premise that we must counteract our youth-centric culture with targeted sex-positive resources for those whose bodies and experiences are not shaped, for example, by the college relationship scene or decisions about whether or not to procreate (and how). Yet I remain unconvinced that The Ultimate Guide (or its like-minded successor) will be my resource of choice in thirty, forty years’ time.

Continue reading →

presentation @ boston college

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in my historian hat

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history, professional gigs, religion, sexual identity, sexuality

On March 29th I attended the Biennial Boston College Conference on History of Religion and presented a paper that tried, for the first time, to offer up some analysis regarding my current project. A big thanks to the conference coordinators for a great experience!

This project is, broadly, exploring the ways in which the Christian left negotiated sex, sexuality, and gender during the thirty year period between 1960 and 1980. Narrowly, for this paper, I looked at a ten-year period of the Methodist publication motive for clues regarding mainline Protestant conceptions of gender and sexuality. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, I’m particularly interested in what the magazine had to say about sexuality because after breaking with the church, the publication’s final two issues focused on the topics of gay liberation and lesbian/feminism (their terminology). Rather than seeing this break as a natural, inevitable conflict between a traditionalist anti-gay church and more radical youth activists, I am asking why Christian left theology ultimately failed to provide a hospitable atmosphere for meaningful, nuanced discussion about queer sexual morality.

At least, that’s what I’m fumbling my way toward asking. I’m not sure how close this one conference paper gets to that goal — but it is a start. So for those who’ve been following my research this past year, I offer this work-in-progress as a reward.

Access the PDF online via Google Drive.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to my two excellent and inspiring co-panelists, Trevor Burrows (Purdue University) and Casey Bohlen (Harvard University), both of whom are working on aspects of Christian faith and political action during what we might term the “long Sixties” — looking back into the 1950s and forward toward the 1980s.  I look forward to watching their progress as scholars and writers in the field.

yep, I’m pro-porn. like I’m pro-fiction and pro-food.

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

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feminism, politics, sexuality, smut

Having just submitted my first work of original erotica for consideration for a Cleis Press anthology, I decided it was apropos to work out the writerly shakes by posting a bit of a rant about the recurring moral panic around pornography.

This is what a pornographer looks like.

That is, the idea that a body of work (sexually-explicit material created with at least a partial intention to arouse the consumer) might be studied using diverse methods of data collection and analysis, a wide range of primary source material within the genre, and theoretical lenses, adding to our body of knowledge about the human condition or the world we inhabit.

Last night as I was going through my RSS feeds, I noticed that The Guardian has discovered that some scholars study porn and that others object to the idea that porn can be studied as one studies, say, English poetry, American history, or cellular biology.

And they’ve discovered that some of those scholars who study porn have decided to start a journal dedicated to the subject (PDF), to be published by Routledge starting in 2014, and that anti-porn activists have accused these journal editors of being “biased” and “pro-porn”:

The journal, which announced its call for papers a month ago, and will be published by Routledge next year, marks a turning point in the academic study and treatment of pornography. It is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject and its editors – Feona Attwood, professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University, and Clarissa Smith, a reader in sexual cultures at Sunderland University – say it will offer a fresh cross-disciplinary approach and provide a focus for researchers working on porn.

However, a petition accusing the journal of bias, and demanding that Routledge either change its editorial board or rename it “Pro-Porn Studies” has attracted 888 signatures, including from senior academics in North America and Europe, people working with the victims of sexual and domestic violence and health professionals.

Gail Dines, a British professor of sociology at Wheelock College, Boston, and the author of Pornland, said that, while it was vital that pornography was studied and research published, she had grave concerns about the editorial direction of the journal.

Some of you may remember Gail Dines from my 2012 series on her Boston University appearance along with Carol Queen at a screening of The Price of Pleasure. It’s my personal opinion that she does nothing to enhance the discussion around the ethics of sexually explicit material because her own position has become so dogmatic that she is uninterested in genuine conversation with those who think about pornography in more nuanced ways.

I’m honestly kind of creeped out that she teaches and lives here in the same city I do. But that’s life.

I want to offer two inter-related thoughts about the anti-porn faction’s framing of Porn Studies as biased because it’s “pro porn.”

1) Pornography is a genre, nothing more. “Pornography” is the word we use to describe sexually-explicit materials, most often visual materials, created or used at least partially for the purpose of arousal. Pornography is a genre, just like fiction or poetry is a genre. We can talk about porn being unethically or shoddily made, or we can talk about porn that didn’t do it for us — I’m honestly not that into Longfellow’s epic poems or anything by Ian McEwan. I think Phillip Pullman let his atheist agenda impede good storytelling toward the end of His Dark Materials and after reading a couple of reviews of Lionel Shriver’s latest it sounds to me like she’s given in to unacceptable fat hatred.

But that doesn’t mean I’m “anti-poetry” or “anti-fiction,” and I certainly wouldn’t accuse my father-in-law who loves Ian McEwan of “pro-fiction” bias because he loves an author whose characters give me hives.

This is the sort of nuance that Feona Attwood, Clarissa Smith, Tristan Taormino, Violet Blue, and the others involved in Porn Studies, scholarship on pornography, and creating porn are advocating. There’s crap porn out there, I don’t think anyone is denying that — though like with fiction we’re all going to disagree on what constitutes “crap.” (As librarian Nancy Pearl once reminded her readers, one reader’s bad sex award-worthy scene is another person’s hottest fantasy.) There is also unethical porn, which “pro-porn” feminists have been vigorously discussing and working to advocate for decades — for the most recent discussions, check out The Feminist Porn Book and associated website.

If I had to sum up what I see as the “pro-porn” feminist stance on bad and exploitative porn, it would be the following: make better porn, and empower workers in the porn industry (including your own, if you’re a porn creator) to demand (and achieve) non-exploitative working conditions.

Dines and company, on the other hand — apparently over eight hundred people! — don’t see porn as a genre. They see porn as a single, monochromatic thing which in its entirety is harmful. They see pornography as a public health harm much like smoking while the Porn Studies folks see it more like pastry or even alcohol. Inhalation of smoke increases your risk of cancer; there’s nothing you can really do to make smoking healthy. Eating a brioche, on the other hand, or enjoying a glass of wine at dinner or a cocktail at a party is not per se a self-destructive activity. It’s all about how individuals relate to the food or drink. Do you eat compulsively? Do you shop at a bakery that sells stale rolls? Pays its employees under the counter with no benefits? Are you using whiskey to mask your depression? Has the chardonnay you opened last week gone off in the interim? Wine tastings and French pastry-making classes abound in our neighborhood, testament to the fact that people see alcohol and baked goods as two classes of foodstuffs that can be made well or poorly on a number of levels.

Which brings me to point number two…

2) Scholars are nerds, and we’re generally passionate about our subjects of study. You say “pro-porn” like it’s a bad thing. If pornography is a genre, like poetry or fiction, then it stands to reason that the people who  choose to study it — to build a scholarly career out of studying it — and/or are creating it are “pro” the genre. Don’t we want them to be? Accusing a pornographer or porn scholar of being “pro-porn” is like complaining Seanan McGuire is “pro-fantasy fiction” or the people on “America’s Test Kitchen” are “pro-food.”

Uh … yes? You’re point being…?

Back in the 18th century, there was, in fact, a moral panic about the effects of reading fiction — particularly its effects on girls and women (we’re flightly like that). Fiction, of any sort, inflamed the imagination and the imagination turned to sex. Reading fiction, in other words, led straight to masturbation and other lewd behaviors.

When I listen very long to those who protest against the production of porn, any porn, regardless of the context of creation, quality of production, or content, I admit that they sound about as shrill as the eighteenth-century moralizers with their warnings about how reading fiction leads to depravity.

It’s disappointing to me that so many people continue to take them seriously, instead of re-framing pornography as a genre like any other … one which we can choose to shape and reshape as we please. And study endlessly, like we study Shakespeare’s corpus or Buffy or the human genome.

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"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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This work by Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

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