Ladyporn Day! Women Speak Out About Porn
Ladyporn Day kicks off with twitter discussion of what porn means to women.
Feb. 24, 2011— -- "I love porn, the more hardcore the better. Costumed, stylized, fake, major genital zoom-ins…"
"I want porn with some dang romance! I want to watch The Notebook with just a lot more skin involved!"
"I have a love/hate relationship with porn. Sometimes it makes me nauseous and other times makes me feel inadequate about my own sex practices. I have to find specific stories… in order to enjoy."
These are just a few of the perspectives women are sharing on their relationship with porn, thanks to the first annual Ladyporn Day.
For decades, pornography has been thought of mostly as a man's game. But Rachel Rabbit White, sex journalist and blogger, has set out to change that with an online movement/forum/twitter debate on how women experience pornography. Technically falling on Feb. 22, but celebrated all week-long on White's blog, Rabbit Write, Ladyporn day was created to "open up a dialogue about women and porn," White, 26, says.
The "day" has included a Twitter discussion organized at #ladypornday, a series of "porn secrets" ( like those above), where women's anonymous thoughts about pornography have been overlaid on vintage soft core porn photos, and something White has deemed the Jilling Hall of Fame, where women share their favorite porn sites.
"It can be a really daunting place to think you have to start [looking for porn] on Google. To think we have to be ok with just that kind of porn is daunting. It's important to know that there is porn for women being made out there," White, who is pictured below, says.
But Ladyporn Day isn't necessarily about female-friendly porn appreciation. It's about discussing how women feel about porn. Whether they love it, whether they wished it were more geared towards their desires, whether they feel it's de facto degrading -- all views are welcome within the Ladyporn Day discussion, White says.
The Porn Secrets aspect of Ladyporn Day involves sharing an array of viewpoints on women and porn. One woman writes on how porn helped her realize that "men truly don't only want skinny girls. In porn there are girls of literally every body type, and the men seem to think they're all beautiful." Another woman feels the opposite, writing: "porn makes me feel inadequate, ugly, and unsexy."
"We're socialized as women not to own our own desires, to not like porn. There's also a lot of anti-porn feminists from the second wave of feminism in the 1970s who say that porn is wrong and porn is degrading. While I want to totally empower women who already like porn or want to find porn they like, I don't want to erase the voices of women who don't like it. That's an important push-back to have as well. Ideally, this day is for people who do and do not like porn…because it's about the discussion."
