The problem with current porn

This week, I've read a lot online about Cindy Gallop, the innovative and ambitious founder of MakeLoveNotPorn. Like me, Cindy enjoys watching sex, but has found the porn that currently exists to be lacking and dangerous in its insistence upon providing a generation of young people with unrealistic expectations about sex, their own bodies and their partners' bodies.

She seeks to find an alternative, and claims that "Real World Sex" offers just this. The site is currently on an invitation-only basis, but promises to be excellent. Cindy's other site is aimed at teenagers and exposes some of the myths that porn sells to us and the areas in which it fails to accurately represent reality. The site itself is inexplicably designed in girly pinks and purples, seemingly excluding the boys who so badly need to read it, but its aims are more than laudable.

Cindy Gallop's vision inspired me to seek out a plausible alternative to the singular, plastic view of sexuality presented in mainstream porn. A friend suggested Kink.com, a group of BDSM porn sites that venture to offer plenty of alternatives to the wham-bam-vanilla sex presented in the mainstream, and that allegedly does so without exploiting the women involved in making its films (a criticism often quite rightly directed at production companies in the industry).

Upon coming to the front page of Kink.com, I was disappointed to find link after link aimed at straight males (in fact, just one type of straight males). Whether the women on these sites are depicted as submissive, dominant or otherwise, they are always the passive object of the male gaze. The taglines range from "Beautiful girls bound, fucked and humiliated in public" to "Brutal dommes use, abuse and fuck pussyboys". This binary "See subby girls get fucked / See scary dommes fuck you up" plays solely to male fantasy, objectifying and completely ignoring the needs of the women who are just tools in the enaction of male desire.

Down the very end of the page, Kink.com claims to cater to the gay community. By gay, of course, I mean gay male, since that appears to be all the word signifies. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that many women are gay. In fact, very little genuine lesbian porn exists. I exclude here the "lesbian domination" link on Kink.com, since I exclude girl-on-girl-for-straight-men from the definition "lesbian".

I was immensely disappointed with the lack of options offered to me by a site that claims to cater to a sexuality like mine. Like Cindy Gallop, I like to watch sex and am by no means anti-porn. Let's leave that kind of thing to Andrea Dworkin's followers. What I am against, is a situation in which the only porn that exists provides unrealistic representations of sex or caters solely to one gender.

Anna Span has attempted to provide an alternative in the past, with little success - her films use the same old camera angles, body types, positions and representations of female sexual orientation found in most mainstream porn.  Her description of the only lesbian scene in one of her films is as follows:

Crystal Lei and her mate Emma B play the sluttiest blondes on the estate, attempting and failing to drag a guy back to their council flat for sex, and settling for experimentally lezzing it up.

The suggestion that lesbianism is a second-rate consolation prize in the wake of the failure to find a man to fuck is enormously insulting.  Lets hope that Cindy Gallop's project will do better.  Her insistence that "We are not porn" is a good start.