As one my recent entries should make clear, in many regards I'm often a fan of explicit depictions of sex: I can appreciate them for their artistic and erotic value. But I'm not a fan of most porn, either in theory or in practice, because I find most of it joyless, predictable and exploitative.
Within the corner of the Blogosphere concerned with sex and gender, there are only five bloggers who haven't already commented on the infamous Details blog piece from the summer asking if it's OK for men to demand anal sex from women. As I'm one of those five, I should probably get that duty out of the way before the year ends. I'll do it, however, by seconding everything Twisty Faster says about it in her critique. Twisty argues that the phenomenon "is an escalation of porn culture," which seems likely enough to me. And in this piece from The Guardian UK, Marina Hyde makes the same argument about another way men are showing contempt for women during sex: they apparently feel entitled to ejaculate on a woman's face, without asking, on the first date.
I especially like this statement from Hyde: "porn is screwing up sex. Not sex in relationships, but the kind of casual sex in which it would be nice to think people could indulge in a mutually enjoyable, non-exploitative fashion." From what I hear from young women in the dating trenches, I think that's right, and it's no doubt one more reason educated, successful women who have aquired an appropriate sense of their own worth and what they deserve in a relationship are more likely to have orgasms during sex than their less educated female counterparts, and one more reason feminists have the most rewarding sex lives.