Sex and Sexuality

The ever-brilliant Kate Harding brought this train wreck to my attention via her post on Jezebel:

Let's discuss after the jump!

The reader response to "Rear Ended by Porn" was big and vocal, and frankly, pretty awesome, with plenty of you bitches bringing up aspects of the debate that I didn't write about in the original post. There was hateration, too, but I chalk that up to the fact that when you encourage women to take a critical look at their sexual behavior, they're going to resist. Our society feeds us a constant diet of shame and negative messages about sex, so a lot of women automatically default to feeling judged as soon as you suggest that their sexuality might be influenced by something other than their own very special personal free will. But I loved (nearly all) of the responses that I got, especially the one from our righteous feminist sister Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. Read on...

Recently in Sweden, adult film director Mia Engberg received 500,000 kronor ($69,000USD) in public funding from the Swedish Film Institute to create a collection of feminist pornographic films. Just before the final product—entitled Dirty Diaries—was released, conservatives in the European country expressed outrage at their tax dollars being used to fund the film. Ironically, the protesters weren’t upset that the money had paid for the production of pornography, but rather that it was used to further a feminist agenda. When I read about the controversy surrounding Engberg’s film, I couldn’t help being pleased about the Swedish media's engagement in a discourse that escapes so many on this side of the pond.

If you don’t know who Courtney Trouble and Bren Ryder are, it’s probably because you’re not into queer and feminist porn. Here’s a snapshot for the uninitiated: Courtney is an American avant-garde feminist porn director and the founder of No Fauxxx, the longest running queer porn website and social community on the ‘net. Turning away from her pursuit to become a firefighter, Bren decided to create a queer inferno through the adult films made by and shown at Good Dyke Porn. For those interested in what the Anti-Feminist Initiative Swedes were up in arms about, I interviewed two of North America's leading ladies of lasciviousness to engage in a discussion that is pro-porn, pro-queer, and pro-feminist.

From the reader mailbag: Curious to know what you and Bitch readers think about threesomes. I tried a threesome, and feelings got hurt just like I'd feared they might. I think you gotta be very sure there's no competition between the three, and everyone really is into it (probably obvious, but you know...)

She’s certainly not alone in her curiosity. In my dating life I seem to encounter a lot of guys who are not shy about hinting—or just plain asking outright—that they would like to have a threesome with another woman. And apparently they are in good company:

"Threesomes are undoubtedly the new 'Holy Grail' of sex," says Vicki Vantoch, author of The Threesome Handbook: A Practical Guide to Sleeping with Three (Thunder's Mouth Press). "Most people have either had a three-way or thought about it. Yes, even women." (ed: because all women are vanilla and only men have kinks? FAIL.) A recent ABC poll ranked threesomes as the most popular fantasy in America."