Wednesday, September 14, 2011

re-visioned porn by women reflects growing gender equality

A new study on the correspondence between a country's relative gender equality and the degree of female "empowerment" in each country's porn had me thinking about my chapter contribution to Generation P?. As I show in this article, women have been re-visioning porn to match a time of greater gender equality for years. And it's their porn that appeals to the sexually emancipated and empowered young modern female porn consumer.

As I also argue in my After Pornifed book, this kind of porn is becoming a surefire counterweight to all bad porn and pornified media that discriminates against women as well as men.

Unfortunately, this was not the kind of porn considered by the research team at the University of Hawaii, which instead looked at images of naked women "from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation," those being Norway, the United States, and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1st, 15th and 54th on the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM).

Nevertheless, the research team found that porn in Norway shows more signs of female empowerment, but porn in all three countries still depicts women in equally demeaning positions and scenarios.

"It's remarkable that they found no significant difference among these disparate countries in terms of disempowering pornographic images of women," comments Salon. However, that's a misleading statement. The research team even notes that a "challenge in cross-cultural comparison arose in the difficulty of ascertaining what constitutes mainstream/bestselling pornography in Norway." And here it is worth noticing the growing popularity of new re-visioned progressive porn by women.

In my article in Generation P?, "A vision of new porn: How women are revising porn to match a time of greater gender equality," I point out how the porn that appeals to the sexually emancipated young woman in today's more gender equal Norway, is new re-visioned porn that shows women who're sexually in charge and empowered. It is also porn of a raunchier kind compared to other new re-visioned porn by women. Anna Span's Easy on the Eye porn is especially popular: porn that features women who're comfortable with their sexuality, "frolicking in some jolly good sex mainly for the fine fun of it." Which depending on who's watching may either resonate as empowered or not. As I comment:
Span brings sex down from its romantic pedestal and shows how sex can be simply about having a good time. Often the sex is between friends, of the same sex or opposite, or between people who know each other casually. Whatever the case may be, the attraction between people is incentive enough and sufficient basis for both the women and men to have sex. This may resonate well with young Scandinavians, e.g. in Norway where the norm of being in love as the sole basis for a sexual relationship has been challenged.
And where friends with benefits, or fuck buddies (pulevenner), are considered by third wave sex-positive feminists as a valid modern form of relationship, as I also note.

To read more about Span's re-visioned porn and how it speaks to Norwegian tastes and customs, compared to the re-visioned porn that may speak better to values and conventions in the US, as I also discuss; check out my chapter article in Generation P?: Youth, Gender and Pornography. The article is listed on my select publications page (scroll down) where you can also find a link to purchase the book, and a link to a longer excerpt from the article.

You can download the article reporting on the new study by the University of Hawaii research team here (pdf) on the publication page of the team's lead researcher, Elaine Hatfield, Ph.D.

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