Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog

Archive for July, 2010

This great video details The Bechdel Test, which is a way of measuring how mainstream movies treat women. To pass the test, a movie has to:

(1) have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man.

The test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel’s comic Dykes to Watch Out For.

This site has a growing list of films that do pass the test. Films from 2010 include: Toy Story 3, Sex and the City 2 and, perhaps surprisingly, The Karate Kid. What’s more interesting is applying the test to your favourite movies. It makes you realise that the male point of view has become so normalised that we’re often blind to the marginalisation of women in films. Worse still, this whole attitude seems to be entrenched in Hollywood and is actually taught in film schools.

The idea of applying the Bechdel Test to porn films seems almost ludicrous; porn films are usually about one or more women “discussing” a man, nice and hard. Still, it’s another useful way of revealing just how male-oriented most porn can be.

via Erika Lust.

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In yet another example of their opaque censorship policies, Facebook has removed Violet Blue’s Our Porn, Ourselves page, even though it had over 3000 members and was obsessively policed by Violet. It seems the anti-porn zealots may have been behind it. Read more about it over at Violet’s blog.

Like other member’s of that group, I’m reposting Violet’s letter to Facebook, questioning the page removal. A shit storm is about to get started, folks. Will be interesting to see how FB reacts.

Hello,

I’m Violet Blue: bestselling and award-winning author, and educator who speaks from UCSF and UC Berkley (Boalt) to Google Inc. Tech Talks on my field of expertise — exactly what this Facebook group page was about.

My page did not violate any of the reasons stated for deletion. It was under constant attack by people who disagreed with our point of view, and constantly reported our posts and images, even though we were very careful not to violate your Terms. May I find out why the page was removed? It is my utmost priority to follow and uphold Facebook community rules and standards. With national media attention to the page, questions will be raised and I hope to be able to furnish answers. Especially with a higher minded page of over 3000 members seeking community and discussion around a topic that did not target any group, threaten anyone, or link/depict/suggest inappropriate content. In fact, I policed the posts hourly for spam and attacks on our members, of which there were many. We never posted obscenity in links or images, though innocent user photos seemed to be increasingly mysteriously removed.

I feel that our page was targeted, and that we did nothing to violate the community standards of Facebook, which we sought to uphold. Any help to find out why this has happened would be deeply appreciated. I do not want to be talking to press about this in the next few days and be left guessing. We sought a safe place to discuss sex culture in media, and that is all.

I sincerely hope we can resolve this. Salon and Examiner wrote about our page as a signifier of community organization around women’s empowerment, calling it a new movement for women’s rights. I could tell we were under attack by those who violently opposed our discussions and representation as a community intersection for enriched discussions about important women’s rights issues. This development is confusing and saddening.

This fostering of group community around female empowerment and the page topic stems from my work as a talkshow guest (Oprah), international conference speaker, and columnist for various national and international magazines and publications (Oprah Magazine, Forbes.com, MacLife, etc) and media pundit (Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Esquire, Redbook, Wired, etc).

Please help me understand what I can tell media outlets asking about this, and the over 3K member we had in the page group.

Sincere thanks,
Violet Blue

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2010 was going to be a fabulous year for me. After winning the Petra Joy Award in Berlin in October 2009, I had big plans to make more erotic films including a feature. I had planned to travel to the US to make the movie and do more business there. I was also going to do a lot more with For The Girls and maybe get a book organised.

And yet here I am nearing the end of July 2010 and none of that has happened. Instead, I’ve been mostly sitting in my office, completely stymied, feeling angry and helpless and incredibly frustrated.

There is one major reason for this: a bunch of rip off artists called Multistream

In November last year we hired this company to revamp the member’s area of For The Girls. Seven months later, the job is still not done and we are having to start all over again.

A bit of background: Jane and I started For The Girls in 2003 and designed the whole site using simple html with a few includes. Seven years later, it’s still pretty much the same. We add all the galleries, movies, articles and stories by hand and it can be very time consuming. Knowing a change was long overdue, we put out a call to find someone who could create a content management system (CMS) for FTG which would automate tasks like gallery building and movie conversion as well as make the site more interactive. We were also keen for a nice new, snazzy look.

Because FTG has been around for a long time, there’s a lot of content in the member’s area. A LOT of content. We’re talking thousands of photos and movies and over 1000 individual articles. We wanted someone who could take our existing written content and put it into a database so the new CMS could use it.

We put out a call on the webmaster boards and Multistream stepped up and said they could do it. Article database? No problem, they said. CMS? Easy. We’ll just adapt Joomla for you. Vast amount of content? Sure, we’ll transfer it all over for you. We were promised a completely updated new member’s area with all content ready to go. All for the bargain price of $3000.

So we hired them, paid them a $1500 deposit and eagerly awaited the delivery of our new member’s area. We’d hoped we could launch the site on January 1 but given it was Christmas, figured it would be done by the start of February.

How to best sum up the subsequent seven months of lies, obfuscation, frustration and endless waiting? As you can probably guess, there’s a lot to tell. I have pages and pages of emails, including very lengthy ones written by me asking, demanding, pleading and often swearing, trying to get some kind of a result. A few highlights of the whole saga:

* ************, who runs Multistream, repeatedly promised me the site would be done “by tomorrow” or “by this afternoon” or “by Friday.” I counted back and she actually made this promise a total of 19 times. (Fool me once… Well, yes. I’m obviously some kind of idiot for putting up with that many lies.)

* In late January I asked why nothing had happened. After repeated emails, Multistream told me they’d were unable to automate our article database and were subsequently doing it by hand. Turns out that the article database doesn’t exist and never did.

* In late February they said the site was ready to go and we just needed to give them the final payment to finish it. So, stupidly, I paid them. The site was actually nowhere near ready.

* In late March, after more delays, they finally told us there was a problem getting the CMS to work with our existing server. We tried to troubleshoot the problem and then managed to set up a new server for them after a couple of weeks. Ever since then ************ has used the problem with the host as their excuse for not doing the work as promised.

* From April they had unfettered access to the new host with all our content transferred over. Nothing got done.

* Throughout May and June I sent demands that the work be done. More promises with very little progress. In mid June I started threatening to take this public and to tell other webmasters not to hire them. That got them moving, at least. A few changes were made… and then nothing.

* I have been making repeated demands for a refund since May. They refuse.

* These people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever encountered. Days and weeks go by without replies. There was one point where they didn’t reply to any of my repeated emails for three weeks. And then they said it was because there’d been some kind of email glitch. Funny, but they always seemed to get the emails when I said I was going public with my problems.

Start of July I left a very, VERY angry message on their answering machine. Suddenly, the emails worked again and work was being done. It looked like we might finally, finally, get a finished CMS.

Alas, no. They disappeared again. Barely a tenth of our content has been added to the site and I haven’t heard from them since the 12th July.

They seem to think the job is done. It’s not. What we have is a nice-looking site with almost nothing on it, no further information on how to work it and a company who is not interested in fixing the semi-working CMS they’ve created.

I have been threatening to take this public since May; this is overdue. The reason I held back is because the threat to ruin their reputation seemed to work for a while. But I’m over it. This farce has gone on for long enough. Now we just have to walk away from the whole sorry affair and start again.

It hurts to be financially ripped off but that’s not the real problem. For me, it’s the complete and utter waste of seven months of my time – time that I could have used doing something useful and positive. Instead I’ve been sitting here waiting for this thing to be finished.

I’ve got so many things that I want to do with FTG. Unfortunately I decided I’d put off any changes until we had the new member’s area up and running; it felt like I’d be duplicating work otherwise. So I’ve been spinning my wheels, frittering away my time on a few side projects, wasting time on Twitter and Facebook and waiting. Waiting for “tomorrow”, for “this afternoon”, for “this Friday”. It’s pretty easy to lose half your life waiting for someone else like that, especially when you expect things to be done in the near future.

It’s been very hard for me. I would lie awake at night composing angry emails to these people, trying to work out how to make them do what we’d hired them to do. At one point I went to bed for several days, crying because everything seemed pointless. I’ve had to delay travel and delay my plans to make the film because I felt I had to clear up this mess before moving on to other things. I had every intention of spending the summer in the Northern Hemisphere; instead I’m here, cold in my office as the sun dips below the horizon.

And I do wonder if I’m the most gullible person in the world. Surely I should have known better than to let it all drag on for so long? The problem was that they kept saying they were working on it. And I’d get a bit here, a bit there… the hope was always dangling in front of me that maybe, just maybe, it really would be done by Friday. Maybe we hadn’t wasted all this time and money and we could move on with our lives. It was always just there, over the horizon, if only I’d be patient and give them a bit more time…

And while ************ have been untruthful and uncommunicative, I suspect they’re not really scammers. It’s just that they’re massively incompetent. They took on a job that they didn’t really know how to do and then they wouldn’t front up and be honest about it. If only they’d said: “Sorry, we can’t do this after all, here’s your money back,” then we could have been spared this disaster. But no. Instead they’ve lied, ignored me, treated me with contempt, wasted my time and, ultimately, not done the work they were paid to do.

So, Google spider, chew on this please: ************ and the parent company ************ ripped us off. Do not hire them. Do not use them for any design or programming work. They are dishonest and have treated us very badly. Do not hire or work with ************.

I will be posting a full timeline of this saga on a blogspot blog. It details every email and every broken promise. ************ will say that it’s our fault for expecting too much, or the fault of the host, or any one of the myriad of excuses I’ve been given. None of them wash anymore.

The fact remains: we paid ************ $3000 to create a new member’s area for For The Girls with all our content ready to go. They have not delivered it after seven months. We have been ripped off. There’s no other way to look at it.

So there it is. The full sad and sorry saga. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 19 times over 7 months and the story goes up all over the internet. Fair’s fair.

Yes ************, it turns out that you really do value your reputation at $3 grand.

Update: 9.40pm Friday night. The company has contacted me offering a partial refund. I have therefore redacted their name from this post. If they don’t come through with the refund, it goes back up as originally posted.

I’m not going to delete this post. It expresses the stress and frustration I’ve experienced for 7 months. Getting a refund does not compensate me for my lost time and lost opportunities. No amount of money will make up for that.

Update 23rd August: The designers have contacted me and said that unknown persons are making threats via email on my behalf. Let me state unequivocally that I have nothing to do with this, I do not know who these people are and I’d very much like them to stop. It is not helping. I am still waiting on most of this refund but I do not need shit like this getting in the way. I also have no control over any other webpages that my link to this post or who have reproduced my original Tweets on the topic. I also have no desire to make threats to this company or the people involved. I simply want my money back.

Update 23rd December 2010: I still haven’t received the refund they offered me. I got a paltry $150 via paypal and that was it. I’ve been meaning to get back to them but it has felt like I’d be making myself stressed again for no real gain. I will contact them in the New Year and make a final demand for a refund. Then their name goes back on the post.

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Gorgeous cartoon from Stuff No One Told Me, via Erika Lust.

I think we need to make this point a little more often. Romance novels are often derisively called “porn for women” and, while this is inaccurate in a lot of ways, it does make a point about unrealistic fantasies. Both porn and romance/fairytales offer a fantasy version of the opposite sex and depict sex and relationships in a very unrealistic way.

Interestingly, there isn’t the same moral panic about girls reading teenage romance novels as there is about boys looking at porn. But maybe it’s something we need to talk about more.

Just speaking from personal experience, I used to love Sweet Dreams and similar girly romance books when I was 14 and it led to plenty of confusing experiences when I finally got boys to pay attention to me. I expected them to act a certain way and floundered when they didn’t. I wouldn’t say it was a major problem, really, but it meant I was somewhat deluded about how this whole “love” thing was supposed to work.

Thankfully, it all worked out OK for me in the end and I did marry my Prince Charming. I just had to get used to the fact that he farts.*

Still, it’s a question worth asking: do romance novels encourage girls to have a warped view of men? Of relationships? Of sex? And does it feed into the general world view that sells Men Are From Mars-type books? Does it encourage the Cosmo-style idea that men are mysterious creatures who are afraid of committment and must be seduced with feminine wiles?

Or is this another case of not giving young women enough credit? Are romance novels, like porn, just a bit of easy entertainment?

And since I’m asking questions, here’s one: why don’t boys (in general) read romance? Is it because, like porn for women, there are no books that actually dare to offer male-friendly stories that focus mainly on love and relationships?

It’s an intriguing idea, romance for men. I’m now wondering what it would look like. Excuse me while I go away and see if I can find anything like it on the net.

* As do I!

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If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Every generalization is false, including this one.

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

A classic is something that everybody praises and nobody has read.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

I have found solace in profanity unexcelled even by prayer.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.

From this page.

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I’m about to run away for a few days and thus this blog and my twitter feed will be mostly neglected. So here’s some hot pics to tide you over. This is Brad, the June Centerfold at For The Girls. Posting these pics I realise I haven’t been putting enough nice smut up for you to enjoy. Been busy with other things and with the ongoing saga of our new member’s area – which I will elaborate on when I return.

In the meantime, enjoy the smoky fabulousness of the lovely Brad.

PS – Remember to check out The Female Gaze erotic film competition! Time’s ticking away, the competition closes mid August! Get those cameras out and let’s see what you find erotic!

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It keeps popping up on TV talk shows and is used as a debate silencer by right-wing pundits. Religious groups use it to put pressure on politicians to create greater censorship. It’s the term “sexualisation of children” and I suspect that it’s bullshit.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post on this for a while but today I’ve found that Australian researcher Catherine Lumby has pretty much summed things up. Catherine is part of a new research group called Onscenity which is looking at the new climate of sexual openness in the media and researching its effects – without the usual moral hysteria.

The Register reports on a recent conference held by the new group. I’m going to get a bit quote-happy with this as it has a lot to say:

The real problem, though, is that no one knows what “sexualisation” is: it is a convenient label used to position the child as always the victim, and then to pile every problem imaginable on top, including paedophilia, body image, sex trafficking and self-esteem. Once that particular juggernaut gets rolling, it is almost impossible to have a sensible debate about what’s really going on.

Too many so-called experts – most famously, Dr Linda Papadopoulos – were speaking well outside their field of expertise. Eating disorders get ascribed to “sexualisation”, despite the fact that most dietary experts would question that conclusion. Worse is the way in which this debate is almost always framed in moralising terms, and a key question must be what political motive lies behind such framing.

Equally of concern was the way in which “healthy sexuality” is so often equated to “non-commercial” – as though sex alone can be an activity free from all commercial influence.

[David] Buckingham’s contribution was echoed closely by Professor Catharine Lumby, Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. She warned that a key driver to debate in this area is a parental view that “it must be possible to stop information getting out”. The current panic in Australia has its roots in a report – Corporate Paedophilia – which set the ball rolling in terms of claiming that children were being “sexualised”.

However, the report lacked all scholarship, being based on an inadequate sample, and contained no definition of sexualisation – or even what was meant by “child”. It was dominated by vox pop submissions from the Christian right, feminists and high-profile social commentators.

The entire debate was a trap, since as soon as someone declares an image erotic, it is then analysed in that context, as opposed to being viewed for whatever it is. In fact, Lumby suggested, it is arguable that analysing images by imposing an adult viewpoint on childhood activity is itself abusive.

Like Buckingham, Lumby felt that it was necessary to look at the political motives and context of the current panics. Buckingham suggested a concern with female working class sexuality, which was viewed as dangerous and in need of control. Absent from most debate was any view of boys or their sexuality, other than as a threat.

Lumby went further, expressing her utter surprise that some of the main proponents in this arena claimed the title of feminist, since in practice the whole debate was about policing how femininity should be performed. Moral critiques of imagery are highly normative – and therefore not in the interests of most women.

Finally, Clarissa Smith, programme leader of the MA media and cultural studies at the University of Sunderland, took issue with terms such as “pornification” and “pornographication” which, like sexualisation, are rarely defined, but assumed to be universally understood.

I do recommend you read the whole Register piece. I applaud these researchers for trying to see past the moralising bullshit and actually properly study this whole thing.

The word “sexualisation” really needs to raise a red flag because it is so regularly used by religious people, anti-porn feminists and conservatives. It’s a word that has an agenda behind it and it’s a word that is used to inflame emotion; it’s a “somebody think of the children!” diversion, a way to derail sensible discussion by creating fear.

The pic above is the book by Maggie Hamilton called “What’s Happening to Our Girls” which is often used to back up these moral panics (and it should be noted, Maggie Hamilton is a Christian who conducts “spiritual healing” workshops). I haven’t read it but I do have one critique already: the use of the words “our girls”. This book is saying that todays girls and young women are “ours”, not their own selves. Apparently it’s our job to make sure they conform to a certain sexual stereotype, one of virginity and “niceness”. The panic over “slutty” clothes, drinking and promiscuity is laden with expectations about how “our girls” should behave. We expect them to keep a social norm. “Sexualisation” is somehow breaking that norm.

The other thing about “sexualisation” is it assumes that children are sexless and that they should somehow be kept in a state of perfect innocence until they’re 18. Either that or there is a set age at which they should discover sex; “growing up too soon” indicates a standard that is not being met. And yet we know that children are sexual from the moment they are born and all children grow up differently. And, indeed, different cultures, societies and religions demand that this growing up occur at different stages. So “sexualisation” is also a culturally relative term.

One more thing that gets me about this particular moral panic: we see the “experts” calling for greater censorship of adult material (e.g. Australian group Kids Free 2 B Kids demanding that R-rated magazines like Playboy only be sold in adult shops) but they don’t seem to have a problem with “tween” magazines that encourage young girls to conform to a certain idea of femininity: fashion and makeup, to be specific. Surely teaching girls to paint their faces and obsess about the “right” clothes is teaching them to be sexual as well? Where are the calls to ban Dolly magazine?

If we are going to be concerned about “sexualisation”, where is the outrage over the “Shine” program, a fundamentalist Christian outreach program that is currently being introduced into Australian schools? The program sees older women teaching girls as young as 9 how to put on makeup and make themselves “nice” for the boys. It also re-enforces stereotypical gender roles and, of course, seeks to “bring girls to Jesus” through the wonder of fashion. We don’t see Kids Free 2 B Kids campaigning against that.

The question is, what is the “right message” about sex that girls and young women should be receiving? As a sex positive feminist, I’m always on the side of education, not censorship. You can’t blindfold kids or put them in a burka. They’re living in the 21st century and the media is part of their everyday lives. So, talk to them about it. Teach them how to interpret images and think for themselves. Encourage self esteem so they are more confident and able to cope with the conflicting information offered by advertising, TV, films, magazines and the internet. Don’t create expectations of rigid gender roles or physical or mental conformity.

And don’t react with panic when the topic of sex comes up. If there’s one thing that is GUARANTEED to harm kids and teenagers with regards to sex, it is negative parental attitudes and a repressive home environment. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the ongong drama about “sexualisation” is actually doing more harm than good.

Update 22nd July
Dr Petra Boynton has written an excellent post called Sexualisation of Young People report released. How useful are the findings? Here’s your chance to find out. She urges the media and anyone else who’s interested to read the reports and take the time to analyse the findings. There’s a lot of reading to be done but Dr Petra does make an interesting summary of the Scottish research which seems to have started from a less biased background. Maybe it’s confirmation bias but this paragraph stood out at me:

‘Sexualisation’ is not an issue that immediately worries parents or teens, but when prompted it seems parents are far more worried about it than young people, and are often more concerned about the sexualised behaviour of other children rather than their own child. Indeed their work suggested a lot of parental anxiety over Sexualisation manifested itself in parents talking about how girls should behave and act in appropriate and modest fashions. Young people, meanwhile, seemed more aware of the media and potential sexualising influences than expected, although the authors acknowledge there are still issues about sexuality needing addressing. In short they concluded sexualisation is a complex issue that can’t be fixed with simplistic suggestions for policy change.

It does seem to be a feature of much of the discussion about “sexualisation” that young women are assumed to always be victims without any agency or media savvy whatsoever. It’s obviously a flawed idea, especially when so many young people are completely immersed in their own media environments and aren’t wide-eyed babes in the woods. One of the wonderful things about the internet is that is that it has been able to provide a wealth of educational content about sex and also a wide variety of opinion and criticism of mainstream culture.

As always, education and critical thinking are the key.

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It was my birthday yesterday. I’m now 37. This is a prospect that is not very promising. I’m rapidly heading for 40 and the wrinkles are getting deeper. Before I was in my mid-thirties which is perfectly respectable but I think 37 is a bit of a tipping point. Like most people, I still think I’m really only about 21 inside and I don’t think anyone really accepts the age they are. It’s kinda scary the way the years creep by.

Still, I had a great time going out to a restaurant and going on a river cruise complete with Dixieland jazz. Today was the inevitable big hangover.

Every year I quote T.S. Eliot:

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

But this year I should add a spot of Yeats:

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

And maybe a bit of Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Here’s a little promo I made for For The Girls with a bit of hot guy footage.

I’m putting it up here because I’ve neglected my blog for a week. I meant to write up something new but my PC decided to fail today. Thankfully I’ve got it back from the geeks and it’s OK.

I’ve had a small adventure with The Guardian – they quoted me in an article about the .xxx domain here. I also have made a number of comments on the story. In the process I attracted a bunch of lovely new Twitter followers – hi there – but haven’t been giving them anything good on the blog. This will have to do for now. I have numerous long-winded things to write, just need the time to get them out of my head.

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