Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog

Archive for June, 2011

A couple of videos have come out in the last week or so that celebrate women’s genitals. Or, to use their term, the vagina.

Both of them are attempts at viral videos from companies that sell “feminine hygiene” products (that term always makes me cringe). The first one features a talking cat advocating the use of the word “Vaginal” as a substitute for “awesome”. The second one has a nice lady singing various euphemisms about the female genitals, similar to Eric Idle’s Penis Song (and, dare I say it, my own Paddling The Pink Canoe short film).

I like the vocabulary change that the cat is suggesting but I can’t in good conscience take it up since the company behind it is Summer’s Eve, which produces lots of sprays, gels and soaps for down there. They want us to celebrate our cunts while simultaneously telling us they’re filthy and smelly. That’s quite the mixed message. Summer’s Eve has previously had trouble by suggesting the best way to get a promotion was to douche.

The second one is better and it’s from a company I feel more comfortable with. The Mooncup is a silicon cup designed to be inserted inside the vagina during menstruation. It collects the blood in a more environmentally friendly way than disposable tampons or pads. I use a similar cup from Diva and they’re great. They’ve saved me a lot of money and it’s a much easier way of dealing with my period.

The comment I did want to make about both these videos is the use of the word “vagina” to describe a woman’s genitals. I’ve had my rants about this before here and here. Suffice to say, there’s a good reason to be pedantic about semantics here: put briefly, the emphasis on talking about the vagina implies that it’s the main source of female pleasure and it means the clitoris can be neglected when it comes time to stop talking and start humping.

When the cat talks about how fantastic the vagina is, I don’t disagree. The vagina can do lots of interesting things like accommodate both a penis and a baby. But I think the clitoris is far more impressive and worth celebrating. Wouldn’t it be cool if “that’s clitoral” was a replacement for “that’s awesome”?

The thing is, both videos are talking about “the vagina” as a region rather than as the specific birth canal. And that’s the colloquial term for a woman’s genitals; it’s what most people use to describe the cunt.

As much as I hate it, perhaps I’m just going to have to give in on this one. The Skepchick argues that insisting on “vulva” makes me a “pussy pedant” because language changes. It’s a fair cop.

Still, poor old vulva is sitting in a corner feeling very neglected. And I’m still going to picture speculums when people say “You can see her vagina”. Perhaps I need to start being obtuse and refer to men’s genitals as “the scrotum”. It’ll be a bit of fun, if nothing else.

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There’s a logical fallacy called “cherry picking” which is essentially this: you come up with a hypothesis. You then seek out data to back your assertions. You ignore any contradictory evidence and only use the stuff that supports your theory.

Then you write a book about it. Cue the articles in major newspapers and interviews on TV. Suddenly, your delightful theory is accepted uncritically as fact.

Thus, we come to A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. It’s subtitle is “What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire” and it’s main idea is that the authors have revealed fundamental differences between men and women by looking at internet porn (or, specifically searches for internet porn). You’ll never guess what that fundamental difference is. Yep, men like sex, women don’t.

I’m a bit late with this blog post. Plenty of other bloggers have already pointed out the various problems with this book and the methodology used and I figured I didn’t need to add my voice to the protest. Indeed, I didn’t pay a lot of attention when it first came out.

But today I discovered that the researchers had asserted that the (alleged) lack of popularity of For The Girls was proof that women are only interested in romance fiction. And well, fuck that, I’m kind of angry.

Before I go there, let me direct you to the article (and assertion) in question. It’s this: Censored by the Wall Street Journal: The Female Sexual Brain in Psychology Today. Yes, the same Psychology Today that recently published an article saying black women are objectively less attractive.

Here is the main thing they have to say about the differences between men and women when it comes to sex:

“Men seek out visuals and go straight for orgasm. Women prefer stories and often favor conversation over culmination.”

Sound familiar? It’s the same thing Kinsey was asserting 60 years ago, back when there was no porn for women. It’s the same idea that is repeated ad nauseum in any discussion about women and porn. And it’s the same idea I’ve been battling for the last 11 years.

Note the blanket statement about what men like and what women like? No detail, no nuanced acknowledgement of the wildly varying sexuality and tastes of men and women. And no concept of bisexuality or homosexuality or queerness or transgenderism at all.

(Let me say this – I’ve been called out on this in the past, saying “women like this sort of thing”. And they were right. I’ve done my best to change my views. It’s wrong to say “all women like this” because it’s just too broad a statement to be accurate).

This use of search statistics to support the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” idea was apparent from the very beginning of their research. This was posted on Slash fan fiction sites in 2009:

We’re deeply interested in broad-based behavioral data that involves romantic or erotic cognition and evinces a clear distinction between men and women. (my bold) Fan fiction matches this criteria perfectly. Let us make clear, however: fan fiction is not the subject of our research. Our subject is the human brain. For us, fan fiction is a wonderfully rich source of data–like single-neuron recordings in rhesus monkeys–albeit a unique and invaluable one.

Suffice to say, the researchers fell foul of the fanfic community on whom they based many of their conclusions about women and romance – the response can be seen here.

So, on to the bee in my bonnet. It’s this:

The five most popular adult sites for men are all within the top 100 most popular sites on the entire Internet. All are webcam or video sites featuring anonymous graphic sex, such as PornHub, the most popular adult YouTube clone, which draws about 13.9 million visitors a month. In contrast, the most popular adult video site for women, For The Girls, draws a meager 100,000 a month (and up to half of those visitors are gay men). All across the planet, with women free to access any erotic content they wish, they mostly seek out character-driven stories of sexual relationships: romance novels, erotic romance (sometimes called EroRom or Romantica®), fan fiction, slash fiction, gay romance novels, and erotic stories.

The most popular “erotic” site for women is fanfiction.net, featuring more than 1.5 million visitors a month and more than two million stories, about half of which are tagged as “romance.”

The bit in bold is their assertion about For The Girls. According to them, FTG is a minnow in terms of traffic and half of our members are gay men. That’s quite the statement to make when you have never contacted the owners and don’t have access to a site’s statistics or membership details. Let me say this now: it’s totally inaccurate.

Today I sent them an email asking where they got the data to make such statements.

I can only assume they’ve come to this conclusion by looking at the figures on Alexa, an Amazon-owned company that keeps track of people’s surfing habits via a toolbar. As alluring as that data can be, it’s not very accurate. It relies on people willingly installing their software, allowing themselves to be tracked. And the info is often 3 months out of date. Interestingly, Alexa says our main audience is 65 year old women without children – exactly the kind of person who would unknowingly install spyware or a toolbar.

But wait! Here I read that the authors contacted fellow women’s erotica site Sssh.com. Interesting. Did Sssh give them the figures on FTG? If so, why would the authors listen to a competitor site who also does not have access to our stats? And if they contacted Sssh, why isn’t THAT site the one they quote in their Psychology Today article?

I’m not about to publicly bandy about the traffic figures for FTG. That’s given out on a need-to-know basis. But rest assured, we get a shitload more traffic that 100,000 visitors a month. A metric shitload.

To be honest, though, I’m more offended about the assertion about the gayness or otherwise of our membership. Assuming they relied on the dodgy data from Alexa… there’s absolutely NOTHING on there that discusses the sexual orientation or otherwise of site visitors (and if there was, well, damn, there’s bound to be a human rights violation in it). I can only assume this assertion is based on Playgirl’s readership figures – which have absolutely nothing to do with us.

The fact is, I have no idea how many of our members identify as gay. We don’t collect that kind of data. Asking would be rude. And, what’s more, it doesn’t fucking matter. What I do know is that the majority of names on members’ credit cards are female.

Yes, we do get men joining For The Girls but I don’t know whether they’re straight or gay. Given that our content is half straight hardcore and half nude men, I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to say we resemble a gay site or that we are trying deliberately to cater to gay men. Our target audience has always been straight women. I do get emails from straight men thanking us for offering a more positive version of porn or saying they joined to share the experience with their wife or girlfriend.

Beyond this, let me say that comparing FTG to a fan fiction site (or free mainstream tube sites) is not even remotely comparing like to like. Notice how the authors called us an “adult video site” as if we’re the same as Pornhub? We’re a membership site that requires people to be aged over 18. A great deal of our visitors arrive there having clicked on an ad, knowing we’re a commercial product. We self identify as a porn site and offer hardcore content but we’re also a magazine with articles and fiction. Compare that with your average free fan fiction site. It’s apples and oranges. What’s more… FTG doesn’t offer slash or gay fiction (although we’re changing that soon). So right there you’ve got a vast difference in individual tastes.

And that’s the problem with this research. It doesn’t seem to understand the idea that women’s tastes ARE different and different women will seek out different things on the net depending on who they are, how old they are and what turns them on at that very moment.

So to use For The Girls as “proof” of the assertion that “women aren’t visual” and are more turned on by romance novels or “conversation” is just a nonsense.

By the way, let me say I’m so disappointed in this research. The idea of looking at internet porn searches IS interesting. For one thing, it seems to suggest that Gail Dines’s assertion that men are seeking out violent porn is way off the mark. But I couldn’t in good conscience use this data in a debate.

If they can’t get the facts right about For The Girls, what other information did they fudge or fuck up?

If or when I get a reply from the authors as to the source of their assertion, I’ll add it to this post.

* Note: I thought I’d include the above image from the Billion Wicked Thoughts website. Nice indication of the gender stereotypes they’re selling.

——————-
Update 25th June
I’ve had a reply from Sai Gaddam. He says they emailed us in July 2009 and got no reply. I searched back, couldn’t find any emails from them. Perhaps they went into spam.

Sai says:

We used the web analytics services Quantcast and Alexa to obtain traffic and demographic estimates. Both report a monthly traffic of less than 100k.

Quantcast also reports that 54% of the visitors are male and the most correlated site are freebuddymovies.com and outpersonals.com, which are both categorized as Gay.

We understand that these numbers rely on random sampling and are estimates — but reasonably useful ones.

We will be happy to update these articles with more accurate information about your site if you can share any relevant data with us.

Quantcast is an analytics service that relies on websites to volunteer their own data by inserting code onto their pages. When a website does not use Quantcast (and For The Girls doesn’t), they estimate. I have no idea how they estimate, but the figures they apparently pull out of thin air look impressive. Thus, according to Quantcast, 54% of our traffic is male and the majority of our surfers are black. Uh, OK.

There’s also an “Audience Also Likes” feature which says “The people who visit forthegirls.com are also likely to visit these categories and sites.” Apparently our surfers are “likely” to visit Outpersonals, Ebaums World and Urban Dictionary.

The truthiness presented by this information was “reasonably useful” enough for our intrepid authors to present it as fact and then use us to prop up their assertion that women aren’t visual.

Not good enough. As I said, if they fudged the stats here, what else did they fuck up?

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It’s been in the news for weeks and I thought I’d finally weigh in on the whole Anthony Weiner penis photo drama. Not because of all the glorious jokes that can be made about dicks but because of the above video from The Daily Show.

It’s mostly great. I especially like the point Kristen makes that men who send unsolicited penis photos labour under the misapprehension that more information about their penis will seal the deal with desirable women. Rest assured, fellas, it won’t. Sure, we may be curious about your penis and maybe even want to see it one day. But there’s a time and a place for knowing about it and seeing an uninvited photo on one’s phone isn’t one of them.

What I didn’t like about the above video was this exchange at around 2:30:

Jon Stewart: To be fair though, sometimes women send men risque photos as well.
Kristen: Well, because the female body is beautiful and penises look like a species discovered on the undersea floor living near sulphur jets.

This whole “penises are ugly” thing has been repeated fairly often during the whole affair. And it’s a common trope that women’s bodies are naturally beautiful but men’s bodies are undesirable and unappealing. It’s an idea that reinforces the idea of the male gaze, where men do the looking but are not to be looked at.

I for one would like to speak up for the penis. I think cocks are lovely. They’re a fantastic piece of the human anatomy and we should celebrate them.

And I should know. I’ve been looking at them constantly for ten years. I think in that time I may well have seen at least ten thousand examples of the male member in all shapes and sizes and in all states of being. They all have their own personalities and unique characteristics. And they all look glorious when they’re erect.

I didn’t always think this way. I remember feeling a little squeamish about cocks when I started out. I enjoyed looking at handsome faces, muscles, hairy chests, gorgeous legs and pert butts… but the penis didn’t really thrill me. I may have considered them to be a little ugly to be honest (although, to be fair, I didn’t find female genitals all that appealing either). I was a typical example of my culture at that time; as a woman I wasn’t encouraged to look at men nor was I exposed to male nudity very often. While female nudity was common, the cock remained secret and hidden. Especially images of the hard cock, which were (and are) regularly censored.

What’s changed is sheer exposure. Over the years I got to know the penis and I finally came to appreciate how lovely it is.

I think more and more women will begin to feel the same way, especially now that we have easy access to a plethora of cocks on the internet. It’s time we stopped deriding the male body and started admiring it.

Consensually, of course.

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I have, once again, been busy hand-editing content for the member’s area revamp of For The Girls. Yes, it’s still going. One of the good things about this arduous task has been the way it’s forced me to look at every single photo in our entire site. I’ve become re-acquainted with a lot of pics I’d forgotten about. I’ve also re-enjoyed some of our newer ones.

I thought I’d do a blog post with some sample photos of recent male centerfolds. These pics are all by the talented photographer Nancy Murrian and the guys are just gorgeous. Enjoy.

You can see the full sets of photos (with erect cocks) at For The Girls.

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Are you a writer? Enjoy writing erotic fiction? Then I urge you to consider entering Filament’s music-themed erotic fiction competition.

Suraya and the lovely people at Filament want you to “write a fantastic, filthy, luscious, delightful piece of fiction that meets our guidelines and suggest the theme music.” For The Girls is sponsoring the whole thing and I’ll be judging the contest so get your entries in before the deadline on July 31.

Over the last few years FTG has run its own fiction competitions and I spend a lot of time reading hundreds of erotic stories. In the process I made a list of what I thought were the best things for aspiring erotica writers to do:

How to win an erotic fiction competition.

I’m looking forward to reading the entries. Good luck.

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“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” – Evelyn Beatrice Hall (attributed to Voltaire)

I thought I’d preface this post about censorship with that (overused) quote because the film I’m about to write about is exceptionally distasteful, disturbing and, most likely, trash. The Human Centipede 2, which has just been banned by the British censor, could well be the most horrific movie to be made in many years.

Someone made a comment on a Guardian article about it saying “You should pick your battles and this is not a good battle to pick.” And this piece points out that the film is made expressly to shock and, by writing about it, I’m helping to sell it. Still, I wanted to blog about the issue because it raises some important questions about censorship and the assumptions behind governments making decisions about things adults can and can’t see.

The official press release from the British Board of Film Classification is here. The article describes some of the horrific acts depicting in Human Centipede 2 (including masturbating with sandpaper and rape using barbed wire). It says the film must be banned because it focuses too much on explicit sexual violence.

This Guardian piece questions the double standards of the board: why is the torture violence of “normal” horror (e.g. Saw) OK but sexual violence not OK? Why does the presence of sex tip this film over the edge into “obscenity” when common or garden variety flayings, disembowellings and murder easily get the nod?

I’m no fan of horror and the thought of watching either Centipede films is stomach-churning to me. And there’s a little voice in my head that almost agrees that something so disgusting should be banned. Why would anyone want to watch that? I mean, really?

But what’s prompted me to write this post is a single line in the BBFC press release that stuck out like dog’s balls:

It is the Board’s conclusion that the [film] poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.

Got that? The BBFC thinks that watching Human Centipede 2 will harm you. Really harm you. Not just some “fanciful” made up harm which has apparently motivated the banning of other films in the past. Nope, this time, this sucker is going to fuck you up big time.

Let’s think about this, shall we? Watching a movie is going to cause harm. What kind of harm? Vomiting? Nightmares? A pathological fear of sandpaper?

Is it more serious than that? Are they saying it’s going to cause people to want to replicate the disgusting scenarios in the film? Copycat crimes?

Or are we talking “psychological harm”? That mysterious, difficult-to-prove concept that insists that watching a film will irrevocably alter a person’s mental health and way of thinking? According to that theory, seeing this kind of film degrades the viewer, encourages negative or pathological thoughts and makes them less empathetic or emotionally insecure. This is the kind of harm that Gail Dines talks about when seeking to ban porn. No doubt it’s the kind of harm that motivated the banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I don’t know what kind of “harm” the BBFC is talking about because they don’t elaborate on that point. Nor do they provide any actual proof for their assertion.

And what’s interesting is that they all managed to view this film without suffering harm themselves. No doubt this proves they have very mild superpowers which the rest of us don’t possess.

This point illustrates the underlying assumptions about class and intelligence that underpin censorship regimes. The censors themselves can watch films without “psychological harm” because they’re better people than the riff-raff plebians who’ll watch it. They’ll have all the proper reactions like disgust and horror and they’re completely immune to sexual arousal because they have special states of mind.

But the rest of the film-going public? Well, you can’t trust them, can you? They’re not smart enough to think critically about what they’re seeing. They might not understand that it’s just a story or a fantasy. You’ve got to make their decisions for them, protect them. It’s for their own good.

Is “psychological harm” real? I don’t know. I haven’t researched the topic so I don’t know if there are any peer-reviewed studies looking at whether viewing media causes *actual* harm to adults.

What I do know is that more people need to be asking that question. If the government can ban something based on the concept of “real, not fanciful, harm” it would be really useful to see proof of their assertions.

* You might also want to read this piece about how the British censors classify films.

* I’ll be interested to see what the Australian censors do with this film.

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Petra Joy has spent over a year working on her latest erotic film, The Female Voyeur. She encountered huge difficulties in getting it made and ended up in hospital halfway through. Thankfully, though, it’s finally ready for release. She’s put the trailer for it here.

I downloaded it and took a few screenshots. The whole thing looks visually amazing and the fantasies on offer are very different from the usual porn fare. I can’t wait to see it.

Visit Petra’s site for more info. Or check out my Petra Joy page at Porn Movies For Women.

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June has rolled around again and that means it’s now 8 years since we launched For The Girls.

Allow me to stand around in wide-eyed astonishment for a bit. Eight fucking years! That went quick. It’s also been a bit of a slog, especially over the last 18 months with the never-ending struggle to revamp our member’s area (still going). But wow. I never thought when we started out with our little “porn for women” site that it would still be going strong eight years later. I’ve seen so many changes in the adult industry and porn has practically fallen to pieces over the last year or so but we’re still here and still going strong.

We considered having 8th birthday competitions but we’re going to hold off for a bit. When the revamp finally goes live, we’ll do something big. Because by god that’s going to be worth celebrating.

Thanks to all the lovely women and men who have joined FTG over the years. I hope we made you happy. And thanks to everyone who has supported For The Girls and what it stands for. I still believe that straight women want and need porn that caters specifically to them. It empowers, it entertains, it includes and it satisfies.

Time to open the champagne and eat cake. Who cares if its 10am?

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