Cam across while looking for stuff to suport the discussion with gilles about "imbalance of sex", but seeing as another thread is now heading in the direction of female consumption of explicit materials thought I'd post it after all.


A porn channel for women blossoms

Dutch station Dusk discovers that women like to watch sex that looks real.
Paul AmesFebruary 10, 2011 06:27Updated February 12, 2011 11:44

HILVERSUM, Netherlands — The play needs spicing up, and critics have panned the sexual chemistry between actors Daniel and Mariah.

Then in one afternoon performance, she changes the plot, stripping off her silk robe and pulling him on to the bed. Soon they are naked and enjoying real sex in front of the delighted theater audience.

Welcome to the world of Dusk, the Dutch TV channel which claims to be the first in Europe providing non-stop pornography and erotica targeted at a female audience.

“We call it porna, to give the idea that it’s porn made for women, something different from traditional porno,” said Martijn Broersma, the man behind Dusk.

Set up three years ago, Dusk, with its distinctive chili pepper logo, now shows 24/7 on three Dutch networks including the Netherlands’ two largest cable providers, making it available to 1.2 million viewers.

“Women really like to see explicit content,” Broersma explained. “They want to have proof that it’s really happening, that it’s not fake.”

Surfing the networks on the flat screen in his cool, white office in Hilversum, a city east of Amsterdam where much of the Dutch media is based, Broersma shows off some of Dusk’s content.

First up is an S&M scene featuring a leather-clad woman and man tied to a chair wearing nothing but a kitchen apron and a gas mask. A click of the remote changes to the soft-focus eroticism of the Hollywood series "Black Tie Nights" (for daytime viewing, explained Broersma). Next up, comes a clip from "Matinee," the award-winning drama by American erotic filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell which stars those daring onstage lovers.

“Holland is lucky to have Dusk. There is definitely a market of under-served women [in the United States] who would love to have something like this,” said Bell. “There is a revolution going on right now in porn, in alternative and feminist porn, and yet there aren’t a lot of outlets for it to be sold.”

A Harvard-educated psychologist, Bell is now based in Amsterdam. Besides making female-orientated porn for her Blue Artichoke movie company, she teaches a course in erotic film at the Dutch Film Academy.

While working in the cable industry, Broersma heard networks complain about the lack of erotic content for women. With a partner, he investigated the market and found that just a little over half of Dutch women watched porn and 78 percent would welcome a channel showing female-orientated erotic content.

“We sat down together and decided that we don’t know what it is, but it’s about time we figured it out,” Broersma said.

Dusk viewers can join an online panel to give their opinions on the films shown, and Broersma bases his scheduling on that feedback.

The viewers’ current top 10 include the cougar adventure "My Mother’s Best Friend;" "Barcelona Sex Project," a documentary involving inhabitants of the Spanish city describing (and filming) the intimate details of their sex lives; and "The Gift," a 1990s classic directed by the godmother of women’s- perspective porn, Candida Royalle.

Broersma says his viewers’ tastes vary from hard-core lesbian bondage to soft focus romance, but a number of qualities set porna aside from traditional porn. They include realism, respect and inserting the sex into a storyline.

“You want to see that people are actually having fun,” he said. “Often in porn you can see that the woman is thinking ‘when do I get paid,’ or ‘do I have to get the groceries.’ She is not there with her mind.”

Pornography | Porn | Porna | Erotica | TV | Dusk

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a little over half of Dutch women watched porn and 78 percent would welcome a channel showing female-orientated erotic content.

This is a rather higher figure than I've seen before, and it would be insteresting to know how this was determined.

... with or without boyfriends ought to be a question as well. IME, women enjoy watching porn as a prelude to actual sex... and are less likely to consume it on their own.

But that might be changing as the female masturbation habits evolve...

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Why doesn't Jacqui Smith take a relaxed view of pornography? | Kristina Lloyd | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Quote:

Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary who stepped down after making an expenses claim for two adult movies ordered by her husband, is to present Porn Again, a documentary exploring the porn industry. In a radio interview, Smith claims not to have realised porn on the internet was so ubiquitous. One can only assume she and her husband have had their safe-search filter on all these years. The internet is awash with porn but then it's the internet; it's awash with many things. Smith's concern that unregulated, widespread availability of adult material means "people of all ages can look at porn day in day out, for hours on end", ignores the fact that most people have jobs to attend, lives to lead or homework to do, and that hours of porn-watching would be pretty damn boring. Smith's sentiment typifies the "think of the children" scaremongering which seeks to construct an adult morality around the need to protect the innocent, and to deny adults the right to act as adults, making adult choices . And what might happen if people watched porn for hours on end? The implication is that this would be personally harmful and socially destabilising, a conclusion based in part on the notion that sexual pleasure is inherently corrupting. A great deal of lazy thinking, myth making, poor research and anecdotal evidence surrounds debates on the sex industry. A recent Cambridge debate asking "Does pornography provide a good public service?" saw prominent, anti-porn campaigner, Gail Dines, taken to task for supporting her argument with shoddy stats from unreliable sources. The Lilith report of 2003 used inaccurate statistics to conclude that an increase in lap-dancing clubs in Camden led to an increase in rape. The report, challenged by Brooke Magnanti, remains influential, presumably because to many people it sounds right. In the arguments for and against porn, those critical of the industry claim porn is violent and degrading towards women, and that those involved are often trafficked or working under duress. Pornography, like any multibillion dollar industry, has its dark corners, but many of the anti-arguments are centred on, and gain credence from, the belief that women prefer not to have sex; that we do not have sexual autonomy and agency; that women in porn are only ever coerced into being there. On the other side of the debate, there's often an uncritical examination of available porn and a failure to campaign for better, more inclusive porn. As Jacqui Smith has discovered, the internet offers a wide range of pornography, catering for many tastes. It'll be interesting to see if Smith, in talking to feminists, is talking to feminists both for and against porn and to feminist producers of porn. Undoubtedly, the bulk of porn is aimed at the straight male market but an increasing number of women are watching porn too. Today is "Lady Porn Day", an initiative by blogger Rabbit White, promoted via Twitter, to highlight how women are excluded as consumers of porn and to explore what we want from our stroke material. I don't know what conclusions Smith will reach in her documentary but from her reassurances that her husband hasn't watched porn since the expenses scandal, it doesn't sound as if she's turned into a pro-porn advocate. Ours is a culture in which sex is the enemy, in which fear, prejudice and presumption inform legislation. We have the notoriously vague "extreme porn" laws that saw a man in court defending himself against charges of possessing an obscene video featuring Tony the Tiger from the Frosties ad. We have Ed Vaizey wanting porn sites to be blocked, again for the sake of the children. It's a shame Smith couldn't display a more relaxed, tolerant attitude to adult viewing. As she says, many people don't like the idea of porn, yet millions watch it. If we could remove some of the shame and stigma attached to watching porn, we could maybe escape from the muddled thinking, easy bias and misleading figures which clog up explorations of the pros and cons of pornography.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Ours is a culture in which sex is the enemy

YouTube - Garbage - Sex is not the enemy

Quote:

Smith [is] concern[ed] that unregulated, widespread availability of adult material means "people of all ages can look at porn day in day out, for hours on end"...

Yes... And?

Very good article, btw... Well done, Ms Kristina Lloyd...

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I feel sorry for the husband - he takes a bullet when his kid gets caught out watching gay porn (if you believe the rumours) and now his ever loving wife's making a career out of what a filthy pervert he is.

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Survey sets out to pin down nation's pr0n habits ? The Register

Quote:

A ground-breaking and timely survey of how individuals use porn was launched yesterday. The aim of this survey, available online at pornresearch.org, is to collect evidence around the everyday uses of pornography and find out how the people who use it feel it fits into their lives. Ultimately, the data may be used to challenge some of the assumptions now current in debate around the "sexualisation" of society. Critics of the research have questioned whether such work is necessary, claiming that "everyone knows how porn is used". Those behind the survey, Professors Martin Barker and Feona Attwood, and Dr Clarissa Smith, reader in sexual culture at the University of Sunderland, reckon that the real problem is that we don't have the answers, and society is attempting to legislate in a vacuum. While not denying the moral dimension of many of the questions, the researchers are concerned that the voices of users and enjoyers will be swamped by a prevailing critical assumption that the only issues worth considering are how problematic porn use is, or how it might affect children. The researchers believe that there can be many different and complicated reasons for looking at pornography and that not all the materials that go under that label are the same, only to be distinguished by how ‘extreme’ or ‘explicit’ they are. Dr Smith told the Reg: "Although there is much speculation and plenty of academic work which insists on porn having demonstrable and problem 'effects' on users, I've been struck by how often researchers have told me there is no need for any empirical research on how and why porn is consumed. "Apparently, everyone knows why people look at pornography and that looking leads to bad behaviours, so to want to research what people have to say about how porn fits into their sense of self, their relationships and their everyday lives is to simply waste energy on measuring the obvious. "At a time when governments are seeking to close down adults' access to adult materials in order to 'protect children' and, at the same time, ensure that supposition and assertion will be all that is necessary to get bad laws passed, it seems to me and my fellow researchers that research of this kind has never been more urgently required." This approach was given weight at the weekend by Dr Brooke Magnanti, more widely known for her writing as Belle de Jour, who recently debunked widely cited "research" that claimed a link between lap-dancing clubs in Camden and violence against women. Attacking the certainties of those who believe they have all the answers in respect of sex, she argued: "When it comes to the public discussion of sex there’s a lot that’s wrong. The main problem is misinformation, with biased sources spreading information that is at best poorly researched and at worst completely incorrect." The survey results are to be published at the end of the year. ®

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I'm kind of doubtful about how useful this'll really be. For a start the researchers are obviously biased (though in the oposite direction from normal), and for another thing it still doesn't disprove all the vague, unscientific rubbish about pornification of children or whatever the hot moral panic is this week. For that you'd need to study correlations/causation (which has been done - they'd be better off going through old studies and checking their results).

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Although ironically, the "pornification" is far and away the easiest to demonstrate, and it's only a moral panic if you want it to be. Blue Lagoon, as mentioned the other day, which dates to 1980, and Flashdance from 1983, were both considered very provocative and pushing the boundaries of decency at the time. Neither of them would cause an eyebrow to twitch today.

Or in ancient Greece or anyone of a hundred other times and places.

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