We regard art as sensual and pornography as more overtly sexual.

Warding off the charge of pornography, photography, sculpture and painting often veil the human body, especially the more eroticized female nude, by representing it in aesthetic poses and allegorical situations that evoke thoughts, emotions and dreams, not only carnal desires.

But we also have to ask: What are we protecting them from?

My book says that sexuality is a fact of life, and a potentially wonderful part of growing up for children at all stages of their lives.

It's not sex itself that is harmful to children, but the conditions under which they might express themselves sexually that can leave them vulnerable to harms like HIV, unwanted pregnancy, or sexual violence.

Judith Levine - from Univ of Minnesota Press interview

> about her book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex

> photo : Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968)

They're the people behind abstinence-only education, the child-pornography laws that get people arrested for taking pictures of their babies in the bathtub, or laws that make abortion risky and traumatic for young women. These so-called protections are more harmful to minors than sex itself.

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as "porn-worthy."

Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it.

For how can a real woman -- with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond "More, more, you big stud!") -- possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women.

For the first time in human history, the images' power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography -- and now Internet pornography -- has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value.

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John Waters - about plans to develop a Broadway play of "Cry-Baby"  [Entertainment Weekly, Aug 8 2003]

Dubbed an "exhibition in a book," the profusely illustrated trade paperback features works by almost 70 artists, from the raucously pornographic Keith Boadwee to the pastoral Maureen Gallace. 

In between are six "rooms," or chapters, accompanied by a transcribed conversation between the two authors. JW: All sex is messy. BH: And comical.  [artnet.com]

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From Bring it On to Ten Things I Hate About You to Legally Blonde to Freaky Friday (the new version), if there was a plucky teenage girl heroine, Hollywood could count on me plunking down good money to sit in the theater and cheer her on. I could identify.

My inner sixteen-year-old girl was achingly lonely and needed some encouragement. She was still waiting for someone to take off her glasses, give her a makeover and turn her from bookworm to prom queen.

I sat in the theater on a Saturday morning, surrounded by teen girls and their parents, and I suddenly felt like a dirty old man. 

Partly because a single man my age in a sea of underage girls tends to look suspicious, and partially because, as I watched the movie, 

I didn't identify with Lindsay Lohan. I lusted after her. I sat there thinking, "Damn, she's hot," and not in my normal, "Damn she's hot in that fabulous outfit!" kind of way.

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....Longing to Tell : Black Women Talk About Sexuality 
and Intimacy - by Tricia Rose

Tricia Rose [Professor and chairwoman of the American Studies department, University of California at Santa Cruz] ... has published her second book, "Longing to Tell.."... the first compilation of black women's oral histories about all aspects of sexuality. 

It has been applauded by scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. 

Mr. Gates said black sensitivity to stereotypes of hyper-sexuality has too often meant silence on sexuality or excessive policing of it in popular culture and among scholars.

Ms. Rose, 41, said her second book is not simply a departure from hip-hop [subject of her first book] but a continuation of her fascination with representations of black women and men. ...

"This book began as an attempt to answer a scholarly question: how has the history of race, class and gender inequality in this country affected the way that black women talk about their sexual lives?" Ms. Rose wrote in the foreword.

She herself interviewed the 20 women featured, choosing them from a range of ages, classes and experiences. Using pseudonyms, they discuss how skin-color distinctions among blacks shaped their lives, as well as discrimination and sexual harassment by men of all colors.

The only general conclusion that Ms. Rose draws from the stories is that many of the issues the women discuss, like being considered "exotic," cannot be untangled from the larger context of economic and sexual exploitation of black women and men, sexism and sexual myths. 

"The stories we know help us see who we are," Ms. Rose said... "If we don't take those stories seriously and understand them as part of our social and political formation, then we may be increasingly manipulated in ways we may not want to be."

I am saying that the tension and conflict between those two traditions account for the enormity and grandeur and staggering variety of Western art. Hence I want to encourage and intensify that conflict, since I think it crucial to Western achievement.

I'd spent the best part of the afternoon reading the book and had to have it. This is a perfect example of what my father calls, thinking with your dick.

I think that's one of the great reasons adolescence is the best times to read. There are so few people for children to talk about sex with, especially any deviation from the norm. ...

Pornography, the good parts at least, bears rereading better than most "great literature." A good pornographer can really touch his reader. Unfortunately, most of it is written for idiots or psychopaths.

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Sex has been a commodity for generations and pornography is the perfect thing for consumerism.

There's been this real denial of desire, particularly female desire. 

I'm so sick of seeing stories of women who have no desire for anything, much less sex. There's been so much controversy surrounding the explicitness of this film [Center of The World (2001)]. 

I'm not interested in taking my top off to titillate an audience. 

I think I take these kinds of roles on because I know how far I can go with it and I'm not interested in doing them unless I think the point of view, the gaze, so to speak, is from someplace that I feel comfortable with as a feminist.

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We are ashamed of what turns us on. ///

Mainstream porn, a lot of it I don't like, so I don't watch it. ... I like more innovative, more intellectual kind of porn..

But I think there is room for everything. I am glad that there is so much out there because we learn about what we don't like and what we do like by seeing something, rather than just hearing about it or conceptualizing it.

Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D.

There is alternative porn out there -- porn produced for women by women, artistic porn, porn representing all shapes, sizes, sexualities, fantasies, and colors of the rainbow -- you just have to find it. 

Check out production companies like House O'Chicks, and Femme Productions, look up feminist porn-makers such as Scarlot Harlot, Candida Royalle, and, our featured interviewee, Dr. Annie Sprinkle.