KaPLOW! I got back to civilization just in time to find out that there will soon be an academic journal about porn! Editors Feona Attwood (Middlesex University) and Clarissa Smith (University of Sunderland), and Routledge are currently looking for “innovative work examining specifically sexual and explicit media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to the broader spheres of (sex) work across historical periods and national contexts,” ranging from 5,000 to 8,000 words, for Porn Studies the journal.
There have been lots of academics studying porn for a while now, and lots of nonacademics doing lots of very thinky work (ahem…) on the topic for ages, and now the tipping point has been reached at which a journal is needed to collect the thoughts of the academics and put them into a conversation with one another in a very highbrow form. Fuck. Yeah.
I’m fighting the urge to rub my hands together in an air of finality and smack my lips and say, “Well, my work here is done.” I want to walk off into the sunset, book contract in hand, wearing a badge that gleams “Legitimate,” and give similar badges out to the people I know through my writing life. I want to shake everybody’s hand and congratulate them for being part of a totally legit, recognized movement that has reached a plateau in the recognition of the validity of writing, thinking, and talking about porn as a very real and very serious part of our culture and our deepest selves.
But, oh, dear friends. To do any of the above would be to stay in the bubble I like to curl up with while reading The Feminist Porn Book or talking with other pro-porn, sex-positive folks about why we’re sooooo right about everything. It would be a mistake. Because this. The same old wink-wink nudge-nudge, eye-rolling, “It’s fine if they want to do that privately, but do they have to tell everyone about it” mentality at play. All over the place. And then of course this, because anti-porn people really don’t want conscientious discussions of porn raining on their hate parade.
Sigh. But hey, we’re getting somewhere. This is real ground being covered. And I’m psyched! My job may not be done, but it feels much more like it’s worth it today than some days.
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