***
A one-time member of Hefner’s harem tells all, and randomly selected snippets like that one above will provide minutes of fun/nausea to anyone who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the history of the last hundred years. Take, for example:
“It was way more strict than my parents had ever been” — you can roll that one around in your brain at length, like a lozenge.
That American Spectator piece ponders other men who’ve felt obliged to rationalize their personal sexual preferences by turning them into a lifestyle/religion:
John Humphrey Noyes crafted a religion out of his sexual impulses. (…) Noyes is credited with coining the phrase “free love.” Love at Oneida was anything but.
Women are not immune to this impulse, but being women, can never seem to figure out how to significantly monetize it, or even care to.
And it often seems to come down (sorry) to them wanting no sex for anybody, whereas their male counterparts want more (also money.)
So you have your “penetrative sex is inherently violent” feminists. (A dispute exists as to the authenticity of the phrase “all sex is rape” — which, er, is TOTALLY different.) And the anti- vs pro-porn feminism of the 80s and 90s.
Seemingly unaware of either mass movement, one Cindy Gallop recently unveiled her “Make Love Not Porn” whatsit. As I posted here before, it started out as a TEDTalk in which she complained about the bedroom habits of her much younger lovers.
It seems these 20-somethings have been watching way too much porn and were trying to act out stuff on the screen with her.
She found some of this yucky and… decided to start a whole movement about it!
What I found most fascinating about her talk wasn’t what she said. It was the forced giggling by the audience. These supposedly cutting edge, sophisticated hipsters had never heard anyone talk about sex in public before, and reacted accordingly.
(I would be willing to bet $1000 that 90% of that audience voted for Barack Obama. That goes with the TedTalk territory.)
For someone who presents herself in public as a communications “guru” (and has the expensive New York diggs — and TEDTalk invites — to prove it) Cindy Gallop’s “Make Love Not Porn” website looks like it was created by somebody’s “Take Your Daughter To Work Day” tweenster, in the ten minutes between someone yelling, “Shit, the client’s in the lobby” and said client exiting the 27th floor elevator. Any resemblance to a 1999 Hello Kitty MySpace page is either accidental, or “ironic” in a manner so rarefied that my redneck brain cannot fully appreciate it.
The first time I visited her site, the comments section was bulging with comment spam, which hadn’t been cleaned up by the time of my second visit a few days later.
(For a woman who doesn’t like men coming on her face…)
Let’s give Cindy Gallop credit however. Not only is she selling t-shirts with her cutesy/tired slogan (how 1999 again!) but she “would also like to hear from farsighted and broadminded investors interested in funding my development plans for both MakeLoveNotPorn.com and for MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.”
Now: I concur with much of what Gallop has to say, and have posted here before about the confusion porn is creating in the minds of many people.
However, a) these objections date back as far back as Not a Love Story, but Gallop seems to think that they sprang fully formed from her brain last year and/or from one of her young partner’s penises;
and b) as a radical call to arms, how is this even a “thing”?:
PORN WORLD: Women love being called ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ while ****ing
REAL WORLD: Some people like dirty talk, some don’t. Some do it naturally, others can’t bring themselves to. Some women get turned on by abusive terms, others don’t. If you don’t like what’s being said to you during sex, say so. If you do like what’s being said, say so.
Wow, that is so, er, deep. With a few vocabulary changes, this could almost be something I’d have heard in my Grade 11 “Marriage and Family” class.
Note how difficult it is for “progressives” to write about their supposed favorite thing THEY invented and own the exclusive rights to — sex — managing at the end of the day to say absolutely nothing.
On every page of the Make Love Not Porn site, we are exhorted not to be “judgmental” — but isn’t the word “abusive” “judgmental”, at least by progressives’ own standards?
Such examples multiply as you browse through the site.
Or take this:
PORN WORLD: Women come all the time in positions where nothing is going on anywhere near the clit.
REAL WORLD: There has to be SOME sort of rhythmic press on the clit in just the right way to make a woman come. Can be pubic bone, tongue, fingers, something else entirely. But it has to be there.
Neither of those statements is entirely accurate. For someone who purports to be all about “nuance,” there’s a lot missing there.
You know… maybe Cindy doesn’t get out as much as she lets on.
Or just needs to “date” men her own age…
