Why is it that “women expressing their sexuality” always involves being looked at rather than doing the looking?

Might “feminist porn” require a bit of equality with regard to which gender is displaying their bodies for the pleasure of the viewer?

I’m afraid I find “sex positive” or “pro sex” feminism suspect because I inevitably hear its proponents talk about some form of female sexuality in which the women get looked at but don’t do any looking. I do not hear discussions about porn, stripping, or prostitution that involve serving (tittilating? benefiting?) women in the same way that men are served.

Do other straight women like to look at naked men?

Am I out of touch with reality? Am I missing something?

The site’s common practice with ex-models is to keep the photos archived, but delete the journals. The hypocrisy of this cannot be overstated for a site which actively distances itself from “mainsream” porn through the pro-feminist tropes of giving “voice” and “control” to the women depicted on the site.

I’m glad there’s a shitstorm over this latest, bulk defection, and that more follow. As has been remarked, at least Larry Flynt’s upfront about being a patriarchal exploiter. The SG team’s hypocrisy sickens and revolts me far more, because there’s a chance people will buy into their “empowerment” spin.

Someone on Hugo’s blog said that the criteria for truly different sexual expression be that the models 1) control the content and context; and 2) that it’s not financially exploitive, and preferably not even commercial. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. The financial motive is far and away the one that is most likely to produce oppression masquerading as empowerment. What is produced for free just because the producer wants to speak, we can count on mostly to faithfully represent someone’s vision.

Of course, there are not exactly a lot of places I know of where women put recognizable images of themselves being sexual in a public space other than for profit.

Nonetheless, what Suicide Girls demonstrates is something that we’ve known for a long time in a lot of contexts– that “feminism” is easily co-optable, at least in the sense of the broad notion of “female empowerment”. The Dove ads, for instance, are not by a longshot the first time that Madison Avenue has used quasi-feminist rhetoric to sell products; a particularly outrageous example from the past was Virginia Slims cigarettes, which were marketed under the slogan “we’ve come a long way, baby”. Virginia Slims also sponsored the women’s tennis tour for many years– the first (and perhaps the only) sports franchise that affords women athletes a shot at comparable compensation to what their male counterparts get.

The point is, of course, that the customers of purportedly “feminist” commercial products often don’t discern– or sometimes don’t even care– whether the actual product benefits women. That is certainly the case with Suicide Girls– the guys who pay to see naked women on that site may feel elevated by the feminist message, but they are still logging on to see the naked chicks. They aren’t going to spend much time figuring out if the site actually lives up to its rhetoric.

This makes it very hard for people who actually do advocate a pro-porn, pro-sex feminism and want to recast sexual expression in a more feminist direction. If the customers are making their purchasing decisions based on the surface veneer and not an actual commitment to feminism, it’s always going to be really easy for men who care about money rather than feminism to step in with Potemkin feminism along the lines that Virginia Slims sold 30 years ago.

It’s not as if there are not women who want to see naked men — but the overwhelming audience for naked men is gay men. It’s also not as if men won’t do sex work — there are plenty of men doing gay porn for the money. So either women cannot afford to consume images of naked men, which is a problem, or cultural constraints still prevent women from doing so, which is a problem.