Heads up: because I’m taking on an inherently gendered phrase (porn for women), today’s post is a smorgasbord of gendered language and references assumptions that are frequently made along the (bullshit) gender binary. It’s all going somewhere, I promise.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a huge porn fan, it’s often just not my bag. But, as we’ve discussed before I have found some super-fun uses for internet porn that have enhanced my sex life substantially and for that reason, I do hold a special place in my heart for the sexy stuff. That’s why today I want to talk about the most disturbingly misused phrase in the world (as far as I’m concerned) when it comes to porn: Porn for women.

When I was in college studying directing (that was my first career!) my professor told me how one of his former students went on to a career directing feminist porn and I immediately got that that meant she created porn in which women were not simply holes to be acted upon for male gratification- awesome, that sounded like porn I would enjoy! Then folks started throwing around the phrase “porn for women”which seems like it would mean the same thing as what I was just talking about, right? In some cases that’s true but an unfortunate trend I have noticed is the frequency with which that term is used to mean “cute things women like because women wouldn’t actually like real porn, with all the sex and stuff!”

There are so many issues here but perhaps the biggest is that this mentality feeds the idea that sex is something men enjoy and women suffer through. Ergo porn with sex is “porn for men” and pictures of shoes or some other nonsense is “porn for women”. So now we’re left with the tired, done to death image of people of different genders speaking COMPLETELY different languages about sex. Languages that put them at odds with one another and make it so one half of the world needs to fight to get what they want (sex) and the other half needs to deal with sex to get the things they really want (shoes, chocolate, babies, and some other bullshit).

So, let’s just clear this up right now.

Definition of pornography
1: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement

I think the folks over at Merriam-Webster will have my back when I say that the following things should not be called “porn” for ANYBODY.

• Romantic comedies
• Food
• Shoes
• Pinterest
• HGTV
• Men doing chores
• Men holding babies
• Men talking to women like normal humans
• Ryan Gosling doing anything that isn’t having sex

Things that are porn:

• Naked people having sex

I’m not here to judge what you’re into. If HGTV gets your motor running, sure, get down on it! But, you see, when it comes down to it, declaring that “porn for women” is a completely different (devoid of sex) beast than regular porn propagates the notions that

1. Women don’t/shouldn’t like sex
2. Men and women are locked in an inherent sexual struggle – men to pursue sex, women to use sex to try to get men to do laundry or something.
3. Men like a certain sex that women will never like.

Ultimately, as far as I see it, this is a huge recipe for continuing rape culture as it feeds men the message that women (the consumers of shoe-based “porn”) are inherently not into sex and thus MUST be “conquered”, as it were, to get the sex they (the consumers of the actual porn) need.

In short, it’s bullshit.

Lots of things are nice, but only porn is porn. No matter who it’s for.

This post was sponsored by Bellesa. All opinions are my own.

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