A Terrible Imposition, That Sex Thing

So this Monday's XKCD made me happy:



The "Porn for Women" under discussion is a series of calendars and day planners put out by the Cambridge Women's Porn Collective, and it's available on their sugary, paternalistic, condescending website, if for some reason you feel like being treated like a child. If you hadn't guessed, as a woman, I'm angered and offended by this crap. It makes me equal parts nauseated and furious.

I'm a woman, all right. And I enjoy sex. And because of things like this, it's hard for me to admit, even to myself, how much I enjoy it. Being told that "women's pornography" shouldn't contain any actual sex is being told that women shouldn't enjoy sex--they should enjoy looking at (but not touching!) pretty men doing housework and offering purely platonic affection. And at least once in every collection, saying "Let's NOT have sex."

Digest that for a moment. "Pornography" for women is hot guys saying they don't want to have sex.

DOES. NOT. COMPUTE.

Seriously. I have a lot of fantasies, but a guy with abs I could grate cheese on saying he doesn't want to fuck me is somewhere near the bottom of the list.

The thing about this is, the idea that women don't like sex? That really messes people up when they want to have sex. If you want to have sex with a woman and she is expressing only tepid interest? If all you know about women is that they don't really want to have sex, a reluctant yes may seem like the only yes you'll get. If the idea that a woman "allows" men to have sex with her is the only one you have, a lot of things start making more sense--like nagging her until she lets you, like pushing her past her comfort zone, like taking advantage of her when she's too intoxicated to really say no.

And even if you don't think that a tepid yes is the best you'll get, there's the other feeling--the feeling that this fantastic thing you want to do, the thing that feels really good and you want to do as often as you can, is a terrible, horrible imposition that your girlfriend is just giving into in order to be nice.

I think that we do need to take pornography back from being a word that conjures up the most tasteless, lowest-common-denominator fake tits and big dicks downloads. People like different things in their porn--some of them even like housework. But we shouldn't assume that women are such different creatures from men that none of their pornography can have sex in it.

Transcript of the XKCD strip:

Panel 1: Woman sits at computer, typing an email: "To the authors of Porn for Women: Your book features pictures of hot, clothed guys cooking, doing laundry, and vacuuming.

Panel 2: Email continues: "The idea seems to be that my deepest fantasies, like the rest of my life, likely revolve around housework."

Panel 3: Email continues: "So I wanted to write in to clarify: In my porn,"

Panel 4: Email continues: "People FUCK."