Sex Tips for Restless Youth
CrimethInc.
Do you experience sexual problems? Do you have trouble getting aroused, or having sex that is fulfilling, or simply meeting the right partners to share that aspect of your life? Chances are you do—just have a look at the magazine rack in any grocery store, and it's clear from all the advice columns and feature articles just how sexually lost and frustrated modern men and women are. Unfortunately, these magazines only offer symptomatic treatment (otherwise, they wouldn't have to run the same articles over and over every month!), no real, radical solutions. And to date, few people have really dared to be open about their troubles, thanks to the social pressures to be "successful" in all affairs. So, in keeping with our general program of providing aid wherever it is needed, we offer some tips:
--Stop trying to make your sexuality serve in your efforts to be a good citizen (responsive lover, macho man, etc.)—it won't, it will just go on strike. Better to serve it, if serving must be done.
--Stop trying to make your sex life (or romance, or anything else, for that matter), by itself, provide you with qualities that should be intrinsic to every moment of your life. It is not the role of your sexuality to be your sole source of excitement, or intimacy, or pleasure—it is the role of sex to be just that, to be sex. If you feel trapped or insecure or bored everywhere else, you will probably have a hard time shaking off those feelings in bed.
--If your idea of seventh heaven is having perfect sex with a beautiful partner, dispel it. Heaven cannot be an isolated moment of life; it has to be a complete way of living, or else it will be just another barren myth to denigrate and impoverish the moments of our real experience. Better that we find ways to make every moment of life as exciting as great sex can be (and believe me, it can be done!), considering that we can't have sex all the time—such a thing would get boring, anyway, since living has so many facets we must not neglect! You can feel and share passion as deeply while building puppets for street demonstrations together, sneaking onto rooftops for late night conversations, or stowing away on ferryboats. Most people just haven't had the chance to be free and wild together anywhere outside the bedroom yet—and consequently, it hardly comes naturally between the sheets.
--Rescue your sexuality from the definitions and delineations slipped around it like a noose by external forces: the leering billboards and romantic comedies, the expectations of your friends and parents and paramours, the television programs and other social programming devices that would dictate desire and limit the erotic to the strictly sexual. The powers that be have everything at stake in keeping your sexuality emaciated and confined to the specific act of physical intercourse, to one routine and one partner and one ghettoized category, so you won't discover in it the freedom that you could be living around the clock, outside their control, beyond their target markets. But one step outside the lines, and the world is yours.
--And that means throwing out your pornography. Pornography isn't obscene because it's sexual, but because it's not—replace the representation with the real, in every instance, for maximum possibility. Masturbation is a beautiful thing, but don't let the pornography industry buy out your libido. A two-dimensional woman, no matter how trangressively posed, will do exactly what you command her and no more: that means she can never challenge you with her own needs or perspectives, never open new doors to you, never assert her selfhood. That refusal to be challenged is a rejection of the vast expanses of freedom that can only be reached with others. We should be wary of giving our fantasies such slaves to rule over, lest we learn to fetishize the violence of domination implied by such one-sided sex—and end up living in the sterile, determinist world of control mania. Do you want to explore, to reach unimaginable climaxes, to try out things you've never seen in movies? Do it with other people—they are out there. Let them know you're ready.
Sexuality as art—now there's a start. But more art "about" sexuality? It's doubtful that the world of images will ever belong to us again . . . that's just another diversion of our attention to that domain from this world, where we should be practicing doing, being, feeling with one another, not with the dangerous safety of an object. Make love and speak about your best kept secrets, your blackest needs, the demands the culture of fear places on your sexuality, held hostage as it is (never fear, you're not the only one who thinks you have things to hide—your secret's safe with all of us!) . . . We can get out of here, together, but first we have to be honest to figure out where the fuck we are!
To find indulgences that simultaneously satisfy and subvert our programmed, poisonous desires, and thus remake ourselves—that is the key.
Link to the Text
Showing posts with label Pornography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pornography. Show all posts
Monday, February 07, 2011
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Jon Lewis: Real Sex -- Aesthetics and Economics of Art-House Porn
Real sex: aesthetics and economics of art-house porn
by Jon Lewis
Jump Cut
...
The most successful U.S. real sex film to date is John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which opened on just six screens in October 2006, then on positive word-of-mouth expanded to over sixty screens in its third week of release. The film eventually grossed nearly $2 million, a respectable run for any art house film, let alone one with ample gay-male content.
What distinguishes Shortbus from previous real sex indies and imports is its exuberance, the notion that sex (and sex on film) might actually be fun. This hearkens back to the “different strokes for different folks” spirit of the groundbreaking 1972 porn film Deep Throat, which promoted an egalitarianism, a democracy of on-screen sex. Several mainstream reviewers celebrated Mitchell’s novel approach. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:
With regard to the film’s orgy finale, Ansen shrugged off all the real sex on screen, concluding,
The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis similarly commented upon the film’s happy feel:
Dargis went so far as to assert that the final scene in Shortbus offers not only an answer for the lonely twentysomethings in the film but a model for filmmakers in Hollywood:
Parting glances
Regimes of censorship are inevitably capricious, ambiguous, and inconsistent, yet they reflect upon the culture they serve in ways that are at once telling and troubling. The Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which rates films for the MPAA, makes possible the wide release of R-rated torture films like Saw and Hostel, yet offers no “legitimate” designation for a sweet-natured (adults-only) real-sex film like Shortbus. Saw IV, the R-rated installment of the popular torture film series released during the same twelve month period as Shortbus, opened on more than 3,000 screens nationwide and grossed over $60 million in its first 2 months in release. That’s 2,940 more screens than the reigning real-sex box office champion Shortbus reached at its peak and roughly thirty times its theatrical gross.
There’s more to this than the obvious double standard at the MPAA regarding sex and violence. The Shortbus/Saw IV comparison reveals the ways in which industrial policy and practice drives cultural standards. In the marginalization of art-house porn and in the mainstream commercial success of disturbingly violent horror films, we find our society not so much mirrored but reified by MPAA censorship policies and procedures. We are fascinated by violence in even its most extreme and hideous representation, and we are willing to indulge this fascination with few (if any) limits. Sex, especially real sex, makes us nervous … so nervous that if it can be shown (in any legitimate venue) it must be, it better be “art.” Art has become as much a matter of commerce as aesthetics. That is, by labeling something art you pretty much guarantee a small audience, one that is marginal to (and systematically marginalized by) U.S. pop culture.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Jon Lewis
Jump Cut
...
The most successful U.S. real sex film to date is John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which opened on just six screens in October 2006, then on positive word-of-mouth expanded to over sixty screens in its third week of release. The film eventually grossed nearly $2 million, a respectable run for any art house film, let alone one with ample gay-male content.
What distinguishes Shortbus from previous real sex indies and imports is its exuberance, the notion that sex (and sex on film) might actually be fun. This hearkens back to the “different strokes for different folks” spirit of the groundbreaking 1972 porn film Deep Throat, which promoted an egalitarianism, a democracy of on-screen sex. Several mainstream reviewers celebrated Mitchell’s novel approach. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:
“Other films (mainly foreign) have certainly given us totally explicit sex before. Think of Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy of Hell. Or the grittily aggressive Baise Moi. But these were all films that rewarded prurience with punishment (in the form of either graphically unpleasant sex or windy French philosophizing). Mitchell brings an all-American cheerfulness to his sex romp, a native-born faith in the therapeutic benefits of unfettered desire.”
With regard to the film’s orgy finale, Ansen shrugged off all the real sex on screen, concluding,
“This is XXX with a happy face.”
The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis similarly commented upon the film’s happy feel:
“Mr. Mitchell isn’t the first nonpornographic filmmaker to incorporate sexually explicit material into his work, but he may be the most optimistic and good natured.”
Dargis went so far as to assert that the final scene in Shortbus offers not only an answer for the lonely twentysomethings in the film but a model for filmmakers in Hollywood:
“Mr. Mitchell finds his happy ending in raucous music and warm caresses, in an oceanic feeling in which everyone is free to be freakily you and me. His idealism is pleasingly touching and just maybe a bit naïve. It’s an idealism that feels out of place next to the hot-to-trot television housewives, panting pop divas, cringingly graphic memoirs and novels in which sex is an index of late capitalism at its most bleak. Certainly it’s deeply, if promisingly, at odds with an U.S. movie mainstream that has grown progressively more prudish about sex over the last three decades, while its representations of violence have grown more obscenely violent. Hollywood says let it bleed. Mr. Mitchell would rather we get off on life.”
Parting glances
Regimes of censorship are inevitably capricious, ambiguous, and inconsistent, yet they reflect upon the culture they serve in ways that are at once telling and troubling. The Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which rates films for the MPAA, makes possible the wide release of R-rated torture films like Saw and Hostel, yet offers no “legitimate” designation for a sweet-natured (adults-only) real-sex film like Shortbus. Saw IV, the R-rated installment of the popular torture film series released during the same twelve month period as Shortbus, opened on more than 3,000 screens nationwide and grossed over $60 million in its first 2 months in release. That’s 2,940 more screens than the reigning real-sex box office champion Shortbus reached at its peak and roughly thirty times its theatrical gross.
There’s more to this than the obvious double standard at the MPAA regarding sex and violence. The Shortbus/Saw IV comparison reveals the ways in which industrial policy and practice drives cultural standards. In the marginalization of art-house porn and in the mainstream commercial success of disturbingly violent horror films, we find our society not so much mirrored but reified by MPAA censorship policies and procedures. We are fascinated by violence in even its most extreme and hideous representation, and we are willing to indulge this fascination with few (if any) limits. Sex, especially real sex, makes us nervous … so nervous that if it can be shown (in any legitimate venue) it must be, it better be “art.” Art has become as much a matter of commerce as aesthetics. That is, by labeling something art you pretty much guarantee a small audience, one that is marginal to (and systematically marginalized by) U.S. pop culture.
To Read the Entire Essay
Friday, December 11, 2009
Jon Lewis: Real Sex -- Aesthetics and Economics of Art-House Porn
Real sex: aesthetics and economics of art-house porn
by Jon Lewis
Jump Cut
...
The most successful U.S. real sex film to date is John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which opened on just six screens in October 2006, then on positive word-of-mouth expanded to over sixty screens in its third week of release. The film eventually grossed nearly $2 million, a respectable run for any art house film, let alone one with ample gay-male content.
What distinguishes Shortbus from previous real sex indies and imports is its exuberance, the notion that sex (and sex on film) might actually be fun. This hearkens back to the “different strokes for different folks” spirit of the groundbreaking 1972 porn film Deep Throat, which promoted an egalitarianism, a democracy of on-screen sex. Several mainstream reviewers celebrated Mitchell’s novel approach. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:
With regard to the film’s orgy finale, Ansen shrugged off all the real sex on screen, concluding,
The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis similarly commented upon the film’s happy feel:
Dargis went so far as to assert that the final scene in Shortbus offers not only an answer for the lonely twentysomethings in the film but a model for filmmakers in Hollywood:
Parting glances
Regimes of censorship are inevitably capricious, ambiguous, and inconsistent, yet they reflect upon the culture they serve in ways that are at once telling and troubling. The Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which rates films for the MPAA, makes possible the wide release of R-rated torture films like Saw and Hostel, yet offers no “legitimate” designation for a sweet-natured (adults-only) real-sex film like Shortbus. Saw IV, the R-rated installment of the popular torture film series released during the same twelve month period as Shortbus, opened on more than 3,000 screens nationwide and grossed over $60 million in its first 2 months in release. That’s 2,940 more screens than the reigning real-sex box office champion Shortbus reached at its peak and roughly thirty times its theatrical gross.
There’s more to this than the obvious double standard at the MPAA regarding sex and violence. The Shortbus/Saw IV comparison reveals the ways in which industrial policy and practice drives cultural standards. In the marginalization of art-house porn and in the mainstream commercial success of disturbingly violent horror films, we find our society not so much mirrored but reified by MPAA censorship policies and procedures. We are fascinated by violence in even its most extreme and hideous representation, and we are willing to indulge this fascination with few (if any) limits. Sex, especially real sex, makes us nervous … so nervous that if it can be shown (in any legitimate venue) it must be, it better be “art.” Art has become as much a matter of commerce as aesthetics. That is, by labeling something art you pretty much guarantee a small audience, one that is marginal to (and systematically marginalized by) U.S. pop culture.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Jon Lewis
Jump Cut
...
The most successful U.S. real sex film to date is John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which opened on just six screens in October 2006, then on positive word-of-mouth expanded to over sixty screens in its third week of release. The film eventually grossed nearly $2 million, a respectable run for any art house film, let alone one with ample gay-male content.
What distinguishes Shortbus from previous real sex indies and imports is its exuberance, the notion that sex (and sex on film) might actually be fun. This hearkens back to the “different strokes for different folks” spirit of the groundbreaking 1972 porn film Deep Throat, which promoted an egalitarianism, a democracy of on-screen sex. Several mainstream reviewers celebrated Mitchell’s novel approach. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote:
“Other films (mainly foreign) have certainly given us totally explicit sex before. Think of Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy of Hell. Or the grittily aggressive Baise Moi. But these were all films that rewarded prurience with punishment (in the form of either graphically unpleasant sex or windy French philosophizing). Mitchell brings an all-American cheerfulness to his sex romp, a native-born faith in the therapeutic benefits of unfettered desire.”
With regard to the film’s orgy finale, Ansen shrugged off all the real sex on screen, concluding,
“This is XXX with a happy face.”
The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis similarly commented upon the film’s happy feel:
“Mr. Mitchell isn’t the first nonpornographic filmmaker to incorporate sexually explicit material into his work, but he may be the most optimistic and good natured.”
Dargis went so far as to assert that the final scene in Shortbus offers not only an answer for the lonely twentysomethings in the film but a model for filmmakers in Hollywood:
“Mr. Mitchell finds his happy ending in raucous music and warm caresses, in an oceanic feeling in which everyone is free to be freakily you and me. His idealism is pleasingly touching and just maybe a bit naïve. It’s an idealism that feels out of place next to the hot-to-trot television housewives, panting pop divas, cringingly graphic memoirs and novels in which sex is an index of late capitalism at its most bleak. Certainly it’s deeply, if promisingly, at odds with an U.S. movie mainstream that has grown progressively more prudish about sex over the last three decades, while its representations of violence have grown more obscenely violent. Hollywood says let it bleed. Mr. Mitchell would rather we get off on life.”
Parting glances
Regimes of censorship are inevitably capricious, ambiguous, and inconsistent, yet they reflect upon the culture they serve in ways that are at once telling and troubling. The Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which rates films for the MPAA, makes possible the wide release of R-rated torture films like Saw and Hostel, yet offers no “legitimate” designation for a sweet-natured (adults-only) real-sex film like Shortbus. Saw IV, the R-rated installment of the popular torture film series released during the same twelve month period as Shortbus, opened on more than 3,000 screens nationwide and grossed over $60 million in its first 2 months in release. That’s 2,940 more screens than the reigning real-sex box office champion Shortbus reached at its peak and roughly thirty times its theatrical gross.
There’s more to this than the obvious double standard at the MPAA regarding sex and violence. The Shortbus/Saw IV comparison reveals the ways in which industrial policy and practice drives cultural standards. In the marginalization of art-house porn and in the mainstream commercial success of disturbingly violent horror films, we find our society not so much mirrored but reified by MPAA censorship policies and procedures. We are fascinated by violence in even its most extreme and hideous representation, and we are willing to indulge this fascination with few (if any) limits. Sex, especially real sex, makes us nervous … so nervous that if it can be shown (in any legitimate venue) it must be, it better be “art.” Art has become as much a matter of commerce as aesthetics. That is, by labeling something art you pretty much guarantee a small audience, one that is marginal to (and systematically marginalized by) U.S. pop culture.
To Read the Entire Essay
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Leigh Goldstein: Documenting and denial -- discourses of sexual self-exploitation
Documenting and denial: discourses of sexual self-exploitation
by Leigh Goldstein
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In December 2008, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com published a report summarizing the findings of a survey they had commissioned on adolescents, twenty-somethings, technology and sexuality. Entitled, appropriately enough, “Sex and Tech,” the report and related articles were made available on each organization’s website, along with press releases highlighting some of the statistics that the survey of 1280 subjects had generated. The report was immediately followed by an Associated Press article citing its findings. The story was then picked up by several newspapers, online magazines, cable news programs, each calling particular attention to one statistic: twenty percent of teens overall (i.e., boys and girls) have “sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.”[1][open endnotes in new window]
Judging from the spate of articles that have followed since its publication, the “Sex and Tech” study seems to have lent statistical credence to a practice that legal scholars and some journalists have been addressing for the past few years.[2] Generally referred to as “sexting” or “self-produced child pornography,” this practice involves adolescents taking pictures of themselves naked or barely clothed or engaged in a sexual act and then posting the images online or texting or emailing them to friends. As the label “self-produced child pornography” indicates, the production, distribution and possession of these images is a criminal act if the subject photographed is under eighteen. Minors participating in this seemingly innocuous form of flirtatious or erotic exchange have been formally charged with production and distribution or possession of child pornography.
For example, in a 2004 Florida state case, a sixteen-year-old girl (A.H.) was adjudicated as a delinquent for taking pictures of herself having sex with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend and then emailing them from his computer to hers. And in 2002, in Seattle, Washington, August Anthony Vezzoni, then sixteen years old, was adjudicated as delinquent for showing nude photographs of a former girlfriend to friends at school. Or, to take a more recent example that has received much media attention, three teenage girls in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, were charged in January 2009 with producing and distributing child pornography for taking and then sending nude pictures of their own fourteen and fifteen year old bodies and then texting the images to their friends. Three boys (aged 16 and 17) who received the images were charged with possession of child pornography. In the last six years, similar charges have been brought against minors in Alabama, Connecticut, Denver, Florida, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin.[3]
These cases, and the media coverage they receive, all attest to the fact that child pornography has become a crime in which minors are constructed as perpetrators as well as victims. This paradoxical stance towards minors, predicated on a construction of children as innocent and punishment of those who defile that construct, is propped up by complex argumentation on the part of judges and legal scholars as well as some equally convoluted thinking on the part of journalists. Before further engaging with both those forms of discourse and the ways in which they construct children, I would like to address the question of statistical research and the dearth of up to date studies on child pornography within U.S. academia.
The circulation of dubious statistics and conjectures regarding child pornography should be read as an inevitable consequence of the legal penalties for having any encounter with pornographic material featuring subjects who are minors. The very act of approaching persons under eighteen and asking them if they produce, possess, or distribute erotic material featuring themselves (or another minor) constitutes a crime. One’s standing as scholar or researcher makes no difference from a legal perspective. Ask a minor about naked photos and you are soliciting contraband and harassing a child.[4]
While the current legislation against child pornography is certainly a research hurdle, I want to make clear that its consequences extend beyond the fate of the minors who produce it or the scholars who would hope to study them. By criminalizing self-produced child pornography, our government has effectively censored minors’ right to record their sexualities or erotic identities. It is as though the existence of underage sex dealt a bad enough blow to our culture’s construction of childhood; the production of a visual record of such acts has been designated as beyond the pale, a social practice that must be eradicated.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Leigh Goldstein
Jump Cut
In December 2008, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com published a report summarizing the findings of a survey they had commissioned on adolescents, twenty-somethings, technology and sexuality. Entitled, appropriately enough, “Sex and Tech,” the report and related articles were made available on each organization’s website, along with press releases highlighting some of the statistics that the survey of 1280 subjects had generated. The report was immediately followed by an Associated Press article citing its findings. The story was then picked up by several newspapers, online magazines, cable news programs, each calling particular attention to one statistic: twenty percent of teens overall (i.e., boys and girls) have “sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.”[1][open endnotes in new window]
Judging from the spate of articles that have followed since its publication, the “Sex and Tech” study seems to have lent statistical credence to a practice that legal scholars and some journalists have been addressing for the past few years.[2] Generally referred to as “sexting” or “self-produced child pornography,” this practice involves adolescents taking pictures of themselves naked or barely clothed or engaged in a sexual act and then posting the images online or texting or emailing them to friends. As the label “self-produced child pornography” indicates, the production, distribution and possession of these images is a criminal act if the subject photographed is under eighteen. Minors participating in this seemingly innocuous form of flirtatious or erotic exchange have been formally charged with production and distribution or possession of child pornography.
For example, in a 2004 Florida state case, a sixteen-year-old girl (A.H.) was adjudicated as a delinquent for taking pictures of herself having sex with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend and then emailing them from his computer to hers. And in 2002, in Seattle, Washington, August Anthony Vezzoni, then sixteen years old, was adjudicated as delinquent for showing nude photographs of a former girlfriend to friends at school. Or, to take a more recent example that has received much media attention, three teenage girls in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, were charged in January 2009 with producing and distributing child pornography for taking and then sending nude pictures of their own fourteen and fifteen year old bodies and then texting the images to their friends. Three boys (aged 16 and 17) who received the images were charged with possession of child pornography. In the last six years, similar charges have been brought against minors in Alabama, Connecticut, Denver, Florida, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin.[3]
These cases, and the media coverage they receive, all attest to the fact that child pornography has become a crime in which minors are constructed as perpetrators as well as victims. This paradoxical stance towards minors, predicated on a construction of children as innocent and punishment of those who defile that construct, is propped up by complex argumentation on the part of judges and legal scholars as well as some equally convoluted thinking on the part of journalists. Before further engaging with both those forms of discourse and the ways in which they construct children, I would like to address the question of statistical research and the dearth of up to date studies on child pornography within U.S. academia.
The circulation of dubious statistics and conjectures regarding child pornography should be read as an inevitable consequence of the legal penalties for having any encounter with pornographic material featuring subjects who are minors. The very act of approaching persons under eighteen and asking them if they produce, possess, or distribute erotic material featuring themselves (or another minor) constitutes a crime. One’s standing as scholar or researcher makes no difference from a legal perspective. Ask a minor about naked photos and you are soliciting contraband and harassing a child.[4]
While the current legislation against child pornography is certainly a research hurdle, I want to make clear that its consequences extend beyond the fate of the minors who produce it or the scholars who would hope to study them. By criminalizing self-produced child pornography, our government has effectively censored minors’ right to record their sexualities or erotic identities. It is as though the existence of underage sex dealt a bad enough blow to our culture’s construction of childhood; the production of a visual record of such acts has been designated as beyond the pale, a social practice that must be eradicated.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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