mellysblog

Melly's gonna talk about porn now. Women in porn, women who hate porn, women who love porn, etc. As a woman in this day and age you can't leave your house without being bombarded with sex, (in New York it's cleverly disguised as a lifestyle promoted by American Apparel) it's sort of just inevitable.

This week I found myself at Lucky Cheng's a drag bar in the Lower East Side. I was there to watch a drag show with my bf, his MOTHER, sister and 16 year old niece. An evening with those parameters has the potential to be quite awkward, no? But by the end of the night, after many orgy bowls of liquor were consumed, Matt's sister was crowned with the title of Whore, after winning a catwalk and lap dance competition, and his mother was wearing a balloon hat with two gi-normous cocks on it. Stunned, we bundled up and headed home, but not before our drag queen host begged me to sing karaoke Barbara Streisand and Celene Dion covers, which I was only able to do with the help of Matt's mom, affectionately dubbed as "Mama Bear" by our host "Japanese Fucking Bitch." Yeah, so I'm feeling a little more confident about sharing my views of porn and the culture that surrounds it.

If you read this blog than you must be aware of the less than conservative opinions I have towards sexuality. I think it's great that the younger generation of women are taking their sexuality in their hands, even if dumb bitches like Laura Sessions Step will link their efforts to the rise of erectile dysfunction in college aged men. Women in our media are using pornography as a tool for enhancing our sexuality. You may not know that I LURVE sex-blog writers like Violet Blue, and Tracie Egan aka Slut Machine. It's so refreshing to hear women that like sex talk about sex, since there's entirely too many frigid women yapping incessantly about the values of abstinence education.


In the days where the "rabbit" is becoming a household product, you have to admit that porn has done something for the sexual emancipation of women. Some porn is good, some is not so good. I admit, I only watched my first film in October, and was fairly catatonic throughout most of it, but whatevs. As a woman who is very much at the helm of her sexuality, I find pornography, and it's related accoutrement's incredibly empowering. I've taken three of my girlfriends shopping for their first toys. One is single, one is married, one had never (prior to her purchase) had an orgasm. As a GGG lover, I'm happy to dress up like a pirate and throw coleslaw at you while reciting the Bill of Rights if that's what does it for ya, but I may ask that you do a little something for me, and that confidence in sexuality has been largely influenced by the adult entertainment industry.

Last year I was the lead in Yoav Gal's electronic opera Venus in Furs, which was adapted directly from Leopold Sacher von Masoch's (ie MASOCHIST) novel. Basically, I played a cruel, beautiful and intelligent woman who enters into a contract with Mascoch, and agrees to be his lover and indulge him in his fantasies of being dominated by a strong woman. I wore fur coats and a corset while whipping him and tying him up, hence the title Venus in Furs. Not exactly a production to bring the folks to. However, this opened up the door for me to explore my own feelings about the psychology behind the willingness to be dominated, and then the reverse, that of the Sadist. Oddly enough the novel ends with Wanda wishing to be the submissive to another man, and the arrangement with Masoch, well, it just didn't do it for him anymore.

S&M culture has been on my mind recently because of Ensemble de Sade, which basically stemmed from Matt reading a lot of de Sade at the time that I was working up another Venus in Furs production. S&M relations extend far outside the boundaries of the bedroom. They are simple expressions of power present in the smallest of interactions, and it's this philosophy that we took with us when we started planning our concert series.

So bringin' it back to porn. A gay male friend of mine (whom you may have seen in the ball gag at the de Sade concert) mentioned that in one of his undergrad courses on gender theory a professor asked what the definition of pornography was, and a girl responded "The physical representation of the objectification of women in the media." to which he replied, "Then what the hell have I been watching?" Yeah, he's totally right, and while some of porn does a tremendous disservice to women (more in that it teaches young boys that they can basically crawl on top of a woman and hump her like a jackhammer), it's opened the door for a lot of women and men to explore their sexuality. And to be clear, I'm anti the objectification of women, BIG TIME, but I don't think I need to align my sexual preferences with the vanillas in order to be a good little feminist. In fact, I couldn't disagree more. Isn't that what feminism is all about, equality on all fields? In and out of the bedroom?? Is it possible for women to "reclaim" pornography??


So here's the link that started my rambling. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this video.....It's been circulating around on various feminist blogs. Mine was deposited into my Google Reader via Feministing, and came with the following disclaimer: If you hate playboy you'll love this, if you love playboy you'll hate this... and if you're on the fence, it'll get the wheels turning... Well, I've been thinking about it ever since, so, I guess in a way it's doing it's job.