Why is sexy still so synonymous with white?
Today’s independent porn industry challenges
the sex-positive movement to break barriers
and make more space for women of colour.
Mainstream porn perpetuates the dominant or
prevailing representations of sex and sexuality.
White, thin, straight people are the only
bodies which can give and receive pleasure.
The dominant depictions of race in porn
often rely on harmful racial tropes.
Asian women are portrayed as being young,
submissive, and eager to please.
Black women are shown as hyper-sexualized,
or “ghetto.” Latino and hispanic women are
depicted as voluptuous, fiery-tempered vixens.
Invitation to Walk on Her Lawn
“Do You Want Me?”
She Brings out
the Beast in Me
Lick Your Lips [Anticipation]
Innocence & Desire
False Sexual
Revolution in 1960s
Sexual Liberation [Men Only]
After the stifling sexual prescriptions of the 1950s, the sex advice of the sexual revolution proper (which came to the fore in the 1960s) appeared to be about liberation and equality. But this wasn’t the case.
There was a lot talk about losing sexual inhibitions. It ended up forcing women to adjust their sexual behavior to cater more effectively to male demands.
The focus was now firmly on celebrating the pleasures to be derived from sexual intercourse and the male orgasm.
It didn’t seem to matter that sexual ‘liberation’ was constructed to maintain a patriarchal status quo.
In fact, the sexual revolution was a counter-revolution and constituted a timely adjustment to the fine-tuning of the heterosexual institution.
Women were now expected to lose their sexual “inhibitions,” which was code for losing their sexual autonomy.
A new sexual liberalism was being constructed, based upon a moral relativism that meant that all sexual activities were now deemed natural.
If a woman didn’t like a sexual activity, whatever the basis of her objection, whether personal, political or aesthetic, she was considered to have had some problem in childhood which created the inhibition.
In such a climate, power differences between partners were rendered null, and all sexual practices were equally morally neutral.
The sexual ‘revolution’ by those who saw themselves as politically progressive and avant-garde.
Longstanding ideas about the repressive power of sexuality were resurrected. The prophets of this revolutionary revival, promoting sexual liberation in the name of socialism, were Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich.
Sexual repression was the problem.
The sexual revolution was the solution.
Reich saw the orgasm as the measure of health. He believed that neurotics fell ill because they could not achieve a satisfactory orgasm.
Reich defined orgasm as “the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body.”
Orgasm had to be of the right type and heterosexual. Most people, according to Reich, were not having the right type of orgasm with full discharge, and suffering as a result.
In Reich’s mind, the expression of this unsullied natural sexuality meant more frequent sexual intercourse.
This was in keeping with the sexual orthodoxy laid out by the likes of Kinsey, who asserted the need of the adolescent male for sexual ‘outlets’ because of a biological drive.
What caused the sexual revolution?
Many factors may have been implicated, such as improved contraception (the pill which gave women more control), but effective condoms had been widely used for a century. Marriage prospects and careers were the key.
Women’s marriage prospects worsened steadily throughout the sixties and there were only 80 men of marriageable age for every 100 women thanks to an echo effect of the baby boom a generation earlier. Women also postponed marriage as they developed careers.
The net result was a large and increasing population of women who were sexually active outside marriage. Facing stiffer competition for men, women upped the ante by offering increased levels of sexual intimacy outside marriage.
In addition to complying with the masculine desire for sex without strings, women today adopt a more masculine sensibility regarding issues of number of sexual partners, sexual variety, and sexual satisfaction.
Which gender is more pleased by those circumstances? Whose evolved psychological needs are being catered to? From an evolutionary perspective, the so-called sexual liberation of women looks more like sexual liberation for men. They get more sex and more sexual variety without making an emotional commitment.
Because they are over supplied, and less in demand, women enter into the spirit of men’s penchant for recreational sex. This psychology is at an extreme on US campuses>
There are only about 75 men per hundred women and hooking up (some level of physical intimacy that lasts for just one night) has largely replaced dating.
As women’s bargaining power declines, they must behave more like men if they wish to remain active in the romantic sphere. Women certainly gain in sexual freedom compared to their grandmothers but they lose out in emotional commitment.