Yes, Rachel Rabbit White. YES! I hope all you readers are signed up and ready to launch for Lady Porn Day, because I am excited as can be. Alas, not enough time on my hands to be very verbosely excited, but hey, you can go read about who is here!
And yes, she’s right. Women have spent far too long, as a collective, ignoring porn because it’s a “a thing that guys do” in a very similar way to how we huddle in the kitchen to make dip while the guys watch football in the other room. But plenty of us love football, too, and have our own Fantasy Football leagues, place bets on games, and eat our fair share of store-bought dip so we can pay attention to the action, right? Well, we need to take the same ownership over what was once an almost entirely male industry: pornography. Porn used to be made by men, for men, because women didn’t have access, freedom, or the desire to watch it.
But the numbers show that we damn well have that access, freedom, and desire now. And the only way to get more of what we want, and find more of what we like, is to be as open and honest about our tastes and desires with each other and with the people who make it as we are about our dip preferences. Porn is still a male-dominated industry, but the more women say out loud, and loudly, what we want to see, feel, and experience through porn, the more it will be made for us and by us, too. The face of porn is a changeable, always fluctuating thing, and it responds to consumer demand faster than almost any other industry (with the possible exception of cell phone apps). We can make change for better porn that gets us off better, but we have to know what we like and want first, and if we all keep our proclivities hush-hush, nobody will know what that is. We’ll get even more stabs in the dark (forgive the pun) than the last few decades have already given us, and we’ll end up with more porn that puts us to sleep or offends us, and the ubiquity of online porn will continue to be mildly disturbing and foreign to us.
Women-folk, we make up 51% of the human population. Technically, we’re a majority. We’ve made our voices heard in politics, business, entertainment, and media, but we are still suspiciously quite on our lusty viewing habits. In a time when our politicians are blatantly trying to take away our reproductive and sexual rights and we are being called upon to stand up for ourselves, talking about porn may seem trivial, but it’s not. It’s just as important to assert our sexuality and desires–our similarity to the men who have long made the rules about what we are supposed to desire (ie, we like porn too because we are also sexual beings with minds of our own)–in our viewing preferences as it is everywhere else. If we are too timid to talk about these things, we may end up being too timid to talk about why we deserve the right to terminate a pregnancy, be sent to a war zone as a correspondent, or decide whether or not we want to make that damn crab dip again and miss the whole game. Now isn’t the time to choose our battles, it’s the time to abandon our hesitation and jump, full mind and body, into the fray.