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Susie Bright's comments on Andrea DworkinI thought I'd join in the discussion and add my own thoughts. Unfortunately while I was writing my rather long response, Susie closed the thread. Dang. So I have no option but to post them in my own blog. Thanks for that wonderfully compassionate obituary Susie. Your post, and the subsequent comments have made me think a little bit harder about how I feel about Andrea Dworkin. My initial response was "good riddance, and here's hoping anti-porn feminism dies with her." But now I can see that even my dislike of her ideas has had an effect on me. I run a commercial adult site designed for heterosexual women. One of the aims of the site is to offer a friendly, pro-female space where women can enjoy explicit material. We make use of standard porn pics and movies, but we like to edit out the idiotic bits. The site is not radical in its sexual politics, apart from it's acknowledgement that everyday women like to enjoy the odd dirty picture as well. I've long been a believer that it's not porn itself that is bad, it's the various traditions that have been built up around porn. The men have been making it for so long they find it hard to see any other viewpoint (I constantly get amazed responses from male webmasters along the lines of: women like porn???). Mainstream porn is stuck in a rut of silly stereotypes and tired cliches and a lot of it DOES treat women with disrespect. I came into it with the aim of changing porn from the inside. Doing my best to offer something positive, pro-sex and pro-women. It's a relatively small effort, but it all counts. And I'm not alone. Not only have I been preceeded by such wonderful women as Nina and Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle and you, Susie, but I also have a whole clutch of net-savvy contemporaries. People who are doing their own bit to make porn less, well, dumb. Slowly, but surely, the porn landscape is changing. I look forward to a future where adult material embraces female sexuality and depicts a more realistic view of sex. I had often wondered what anti-porn feminists such as Andrea Dworkin would make of people such as myself. I suspect it would not have been positive. I am, after all, someone who makes money from selling sex... and -horror of horrors - a very vanilla heterosexual version of it as well. Still, I owe her an intellectual debt. I read Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and she argued her case exceptionally well. But I didn't agree with her conclusions. Instead of wanting to destroy porn, I decided I simply wanted to make it better. Posted: Thursday 14th April 2005, 9:31 AM Back to the Blog
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