I am too burned out for writing at the moment, you guys, but in the meantime, here are some fun links for your perusal!
1) A profile of Axel Braun/article on Buzzfeed about the burgeoning superhero porn parody genre. An interesting read for those curious about how and by whom these wacky wank films are made.
2) For those who already know all about how it’s made and are curious about what it takes to start up in the porn industry as a performer, a Vice article by Stoya entitled “So You Want to Perform in Porn.” (One thing she doesn’t mention that I find a lot of men I talk to don’t think of: be sure you’re cool getting naked and sexy [ie, erect] in front of a camera. A lot of people just cannot do this no matter how much they want to, and it’d really suck to find out too late.)
3) An article on the new video game that wants to teach women how to masturbate. In theory, I’m all yeses about this. For female-bodied people, masturbation is a lot less of a foregone conclusion than one might think. I didn’t learn how to do it effectively until I was well over legal age, but I’d wanted to since long before that. But, living as I did in an extremely repressed area/family/time/culture, and not having access to any information about my clitoris, I’d been going about it all wrong. Lots of women just don’t know how to do it, or think it’s “icky” and get themselves into all kinds of actually icky situations trying to get someone else to get them off. So, yes, by all means–the more paths to pleasure in the world, the better! But the article I linked to makes the good point that using sorta-kinda-condescending language (“Gals, you can do better!”) and presenting EVERYTHING in pink puffy graphics is a little on the lame side. And another thing: this game is all about teaching women about their anatomies, but it mislabels the vulva as a vagina. I am so sick of this. It’s not that there’s necessarily anything damaging in doing so (I guess? Not really sure, haven’t thought much about it.), but why won’t anyone just call it a vulva? Is there some anti-vulva conspiracy going on here? What’s so wrong with “vulva” instead of “vagina”? Eve Ensler, help! We need The Vulva Monologues to familiarize everyone with correct terminology again! …sigh.
4) Not so “sigh”-worthy: All that stuff people say about how people in the BDSM lifestyle are “broken” or crazy or “working out childhood trauma”? (Which, now I think about it, is similar to what people say about porn stars… hrm…) Probably not so much true. I’ve been saying this for a while, and so have many others. But now… so says (one study of) science. I haven’t actually read up on this, but the headline and info in the HuffPo article linked to piqued my interest. I welcome thoughts in the comments!