what my kind of porn can do for you

Some pornographers are marketing to women.

Author Stanley Siegel claims that your favorite porn says a lot about who you are. I'm sure that's true, but the way he presents his case about those who watch porn makes me as one who watches porn feel like his claims and statements about porn watching people has nothing to do with me.

Siegel is a psychotherapist with an "unconventional and tradition-challenging approach to psychotherapy." What interests Siegel is a specific porn user for whom porn is an opportunity to reenact traumatic emotions from his or her childhood. For instance, if you grew up being shamed, you might want to reenact that shame in your erotic feelings, positioning yourself in the position of one who is being humiliated while making the experience into a sexually pleasurable one. Or, on the contrary, by "sexualizing the idea of becoming the aggressor, perhaps delving into themes of incest or other extreme sexual behaviors to attach pleasure to unthinkable acts."

Certainly, these may be valid reasons for why many people view the sort of porn they do. I do not deny the therapeutic potential of porn in this regard or others more extreme. But Siegel's discussion here completely ignores other motivations for watching and promoting porn as empowering, inspiring, healthy, positive, and pedagogical.

I was certainly sexually shamed by my parents when I was a child. But I was never drawn to either of Siegel's proposed ways of dealing with that. And for the longest, I never wanted to watch porn. When a former boyfriend years ago showed me some of his “glossier” porn, as he put it, I was completely grossed out.

But then I found something radically different.

From Candida Royalle's "The Tunnel"on Sensual Escape

What I have found are films that have empowered and inspired me. Films that feature women I can identify with. Women who like me had somehow or another been raised and shaped to feel sexually shamed, insecure, and out of touch, yet longing, sensing that those messages bombarding them were wrong and to be defeated. Women who muster the will and guts to conquer and confront unhealthy family histories and culturally imposed sanctions regulating their behavior, and deeply felt issues shaping their lives. Women who claim their sexuality and explore their sexual selves beyond their chained shamed past. Women who reject the speed limits of desire enforced upon women. Women who refuse to be labeled.

This to me is the third way disregarded by Siegel, a man for whose work I otherwise hold much respect. A path that is not only therapeutic as his two are, but also liberating on a fundamentally different level as it sheds the restrictions of always reincarnating the past, breaking through the membrane to explore a self on the other side.

That is what porn has done to me. That is why I keep promoting re-visioned, transformed, and feminist porn to others too. Because of how deeply it resonates with my bones and gut, my flesh and soul, my psyche and body me. Raw, real, true, to me. And perhaps to somebody else.

Yet "feminist porn" keeps being diminished as a sanitized form of pornography, "like Tipper Gore's ratings system for music lyrics" -- a definite "buzz-kill," as Erika Christakis put it the other day at the Huffington Post. Christakis is an educator, public health advocate, and Harvard College administrator, and her post on fair trade porn is otherwise quite compelling to me, and a timely follow-up to this Utne featured article on fair trade sex work. As Christakis argues, fair trade porn might finally allow us "to call a moratorium on assertions that women aren't aroused by visual imagery." "And market forces could eventually affect the aesthetic standard of pornography."

Which is actually one of my key points about feminist porn. As in, how the growing popularity of women's re-visioned and transformed porn is helping change what porn is all about, both in terms of esthetics AND content, turning porn into something radically more empowering and inspiring than porn has ever aspired to be, reconnecting us to a "better relationship with the human body."

Photo: Are more women OK with watching porn? CNN.com via O, The Oprah Magazine © 2009