I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about porn. I find our cultural relationship to it fascinating, partly because it sheds light on some facets of our attitudes towards sex that are hard to see otherwise. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for a company that sells sexually explicit movies […]

There’s an interesting pattern I’ve seen over and over: a lot of people equate nudity and sexuality. This probably isn’t news to you, but I think it has some really important consequences. One of them, of course, is that there are all sorts of laws regulating things like nudity or topless women in public, even […]

This came my way today. I can’t wait to read this book! See below, and pass it on. Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, 2 Volumes Edited by Lynn Comella, PhD and Shira Tarrant, PhD Deadline: July 30, 2012 Co-editors Lynn Comella (University of Las Vegas, Nevada) and Shira Tarrant […]

I recently attended a lecture by Robert Jensen, noted radical feminist,  anti-pornography activist, and one of the producers of The Price of Pleasure, an anti-porn film that I’ve written about here and here. I went because I wanted to see what he was like in person. I’ve read some of his work, and I figured […]

Utne Reader’s new article about Dirty Girls Ministries is getting a fair amount of notice. DGM is an organization dedicated to“helping women struggling with pornography and sexual addiction, which sounds laudable until you start looking deeper. Like many sex educators and sexologists, I have a lot of problems with the ways in which “sex addiction” is […]

When I read the post Some laughter with the lovemaking, please: on porn, performance, and deadly seriousness, I was struck by his observation: If there’s one thing that we see rarely — if at all — in porn, it’s laughter. What strikes me about most pornography is that it’s always so deadly serious. A nervous […]

I’ve been really intrigued by the comments on my post last week, Consent and Public Disgrace. Some folks found that it helped them unpack some of the issue of consent. Others pointed out (rightfully, I think) that the question of what forms of sexuality are permitted in public spaces is deeply influenced by privilege. Homophobia, […]