So, I’m a bit late with my wrap up of 2006, but here it is. Ms Naughty blog has now been a WordPress blog for a year (although it was a little manual number for 18 months before that).
2006 was a bumper year for women’s porn. It garnered a lot more media attention than previous years and women certainly had a lot more erotic material to choose from.
A few highlights:
The Inaugural Feminist Porn Awards
In June the Canadian adult store Good For Her introduced the first ever Feminist Porn Awards, handing out gongs to Candida Royalle, Tristan Taormino, Betty Dodson and Tony Comstock, among others. The awards were a public relations success, appearing in numerous mainstream media articles and raising awareness that yes, there are adult options available for women.
Vixens and Visionaries
Feminist porn awards: the winners
Feminist porn awards follow up + board comments
Growth in Erotic Fiction For Women
The other “news” that enthralled mainstream journalists was the idea that erotic fiction for women was selling like lubricant at an anal sex convention. Or hotcakes. Probably the latter, actually. The big romance companies like Mills and Boon started to bring out new lines featuring explicit sex. Meanwhile, online publishing company Ellora’s Cave went great guns, no doubt due to the lovely publicity from said articles.
Erotic romance novels for women are huge.
Romance erotica contains (gasp!) sex!
Female Chauvinist Pigs vs CAKE
Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs had the opinion writers worked up and making grand generalisations about women’s sexuality willy-nilly. I got a little tetchy about the whole thing, as did my new friends over at CAKE. Shall we say it again: women who like porn aren’t “aping men.” We can think for ourselves, thank you very much.
“A Piece Of Cake” vs “Female Chauvinist Pigs”
The SF Weekly Dislikes Cake
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New Films Finished and Released
2006 saw me regularly updating Porn Movies For Women because so many new titles came on the market. Playgirl’s partnership with Wicked saw the company release no less than 10 porn films for women this year. Nina Lennox and Inpulse Films also released three titles. Candida Royalle wrapped up her latest production in April, while Tristan Taormino launched her own production company which saw two new films released. Audacia Ray finished filming her bisexual movie in New York, Erika Lust started work on her latest as-yet-unnamed feature production and Tony Comstock finally finished Matt and Khym.
Sales of female-friendly porn triple
New Porn Magazines and a Guide For Smart Girls
The year saw a number of indie magazines for women pop up. Blam! Blam! and German mag Gluck both featured “boys next door” (read thin, pale and smoking cigarettes) and aimed to avoid being Playgirl. Sweet Action magazine didn’t manage to bring out any new issues during the year. Meanwhile, Violet Blue’s comprehensive book the Smart Girl’s Guide To Porn made it to the shelves, with plenty of positive reviews.
Women, Porn, Damned Lies and Statistics
I posted about numerous studies, surveys and statistics this year. Seems there was a new article coming out every week about women’s sex lives. A few sample stats:
* 30% of porn surfers are women (link)
* 30% more British women are surfing porn (about 5 million of them, apparently) (link)
* 20% of Christian women say they are “addicted” to porn (link)
* Passion Parties sold $20 million worth of adult goods in 2005 (link)
* 65% of all customers at the Grand Opening adult stores are women (see above)
* Candida Royalle’s movies sell an average of 10,000 copies per month (that’s $3 million a year) (see above)
* Women spend 180 minutes a day thinking about sex (link)
* Women spend one month of their lives perving at men (link)
* Women’s brains react extremely fast to erotic images, according to recent research (link)
Best research of the year could well be the Women’s sexual pleasure survey from Guelph University.
Men Men Men
Daniel Craig was voted sexiest man of the year. Patrick Swayze was voted best on-screen near-naked man. Matthew McConaughey was the man most women wanted to see naked. And Johnny Depp remained completely shaggable in pirate garb.
Film Reviews
This year I reviewed one porn movie a month for For The Girls. My favourites would have to be:
Damon and Hunter
Eyes of Desire
City of Flesh 3
By far the worst was Ranch House Lust. God, there’s 90 minutes of my life that I want back. I was also pretty disappointed with the Playgirl movies, mainly because they still offer formulaic sex and don’t feature female orgasms. Perhaps the hottest film I watched was the Ultimate Guide To Anal Sex for Women, but it doesn’t make my “best” list thanks to the annoying presence of John Stagliano behind the camera.
Some of my better posts for 2006:
The good porn film manifesto – my list of things that I want to see in a porn video or photo.
But what if stereotypes turn you on? – are women who have “stereotypical†sexual fantasies wrong?
Porn reflects US values? – A long bit of musing about reality sites, degrading porn, and American culture
“Ebony, Interracial, Latino, Ethnic”… Race and Porn – Enough with the “booty” thing!
You know you’ve been in porn too long when… – strawberries and cream looks rude.
My vanilla inferiority complex – why I feel guilty about being really, really average.
Read my lips: it’s VULVA, not vagina – a pet hate of mine.
The top 30 most annoying things about porn – it was hard to stop at 30.
Radical feminists versus porn for women – “Porn is not inherently bad or sexist.”
“Slut, Whore, Bitch!” – The language of porn – thoughts on why so much porn uses language in a derogatory way
Ms Naughty is about porn for women – a little rant at Google.
Does it occur to people that the Cake issue is not so black and white? That some people find Cake offensive because they seem to be little more than cunning capitalists? Why is the Magic Wand thirteen dollars more on their site than it is on Betty Dodson’s? Why at every turn do you realize when you read the fine print that they are turning your fantasies into profit? The minute anyone criticizes them they are suddenly against female sexual empowerment. Sex isn’t over till we come? Is that the competitive atttitude we want to instill in women? Come one girls, scratch the surface a little harder!
I’ve seen criticism of CAKE’s commericalism before, and I can understand your point. CAKE does have an obvious commerical/marketing focus and, yes, it can be a little over the top. At the same time, I’ve interviewed Emily from CAKE and I believe she and Melinda really do have a feminist agenda. They really believe they are helping women and honestly want women to have better sex lives.
I too am something of a cunning capitalist. Making porn sites for women is how I earn my living, but I still consider myself a feminist, and I still want to help women to enjoy their sexuality. I don’t think people automatically abandon all their ideals and ethics the moment they try to make money. I believe that it’s possible for capitalism and feminism to co-exist.
I found the criticism of CAKE frustrating because it seems to imply that there is only one kind of empowerment for women, that there is some kind of “official feminist way” or “official female sexuality” and anything that deviates is not quite right. That’s where I was coming from on this topic.
I did not see competitiveness in the statement “sex isn’t over until we come” although I can see it might be read that way. For me that phrase is more about moving away from the penis-in-vagina version of sex, and saying that a woman’s orgasm is just as important as a man’s. If it’s taken for granted that sex isn’t over until a woman comes, then the woman has the power to say “You know, I’m not in the mood, you go ahead.” That’s a better circumstance than him rolling over and her lying there feeling pissed off because “sex is over.”