The 11th Annual Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival started last night(Oct 12) With The Curiosity of Chance.
Festival schedule here: Click!
I will for sure be seeing:
The Picture of Dorian Gray with 7th Heaven’s David Gallagher!
and also
For The Bible Tells Me So with the stories of Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson, and former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt
Please, please, please support this event! It’s an amazing chance to see and learn about movies you otherwise may not have known about.
Throughout my sexual existence one of the subjects I have struggled to cope with is pornography. Any woman that considers herself progressive or even remotely interested in women’s role in society should consider what the proper role of females in porn is. Hell, men who have progressive views on women’s rights need to be thinking about it as well.
It’s nearly impossible to find business practice information about a company that specializes in “adult entertainment.” The only company I have found to be entirely transparent and open about their business is kink.com. Kink has set a standard for what a porn company should be. They have also taken the term sex positive and embraced it full circle.
Easy to find on their website are Shoot Guidelines letting the world know that things like ass to mouth, condom-less sex, and causing actual harm to models is not okay. Another easy to find document is Model Rights empowering models to stop a scene, and ask questions at any time if they are not comfortable. This is all without fearing non-payment for their time.
My goal in talking about this is not to sound like a kink.com fan girl. However, in looking for information about companies that specialize in pornographic material there is nobody else that has followed a similar model. There are companies one of which is Lupus Pictures who are *known* to treat their models well. They however do not make a point to provide easy access to information about business practices.
After business practices are sorted out I realize my last qualm is that it’s all women. You see women all over the place being sexualized, degraded, fucked, there is an obsession with the female body in pornography no matter where you get it from. While I have seen claims that gay porn makes up an inordinately large part of the market I am hard pressed to believe it. The gay porn wikipedia page cites an article from 1997 with regard to the amount of gay porn that exists. Seriously, 1997? Surely things have changed in the last ten years like, say, a huge boom in the use of the internet.
In the end I asked myself “What do you want to see, a woman masturbating or a man?” The answer is a woman. If the choice was lesbian porn or straight porn I would pick the lesbian porn in a heart beat(save a few exceptional films).
Let’s keep it short.
Romance, porn, sex, prostitution, debauchery, S&M, gay sex, anal sex, fellatio, cunningulus, intercourse, rimming, golden showers, hand jobs, swinging, kink…
However you want to slice it, it’s all around you all the time. A world people talk about under a veil of curiosity, disgust, protecting the young. Whether you live in middle america or the middle of a “sex positive” place like San Francisco you have easy access to what I listed and so much more. Not only do you have the access, you and people exactly like you are accessing it at least one time, if not many times, often on a regular basis.
We as a society need to talk about sex and everything that sex involves in an open, honest manner. Once we are able to communicate honestly, in an unveiled manner, about what makes us “wet”, gets us “hard”, and in general turns us on and makes us want to procreate; well, that is when our misconceptions and fears of intimacy, sex and love will diminish.
Until then you can count on me to rant, rave, debate(with myself at times) and in general make a fuss with regard to the extent that we allow the adult industry to suck. We have created the environment that acts as if only “perverted” men enjoy anything remotely “unique” with regard to sex.
No more hiding, closing my eyes, or pretending I don’t hear what’s going on.
Welcome to PrimalDiscourse.