A Brief Missive on Ladyporn and How I Really Feel About Bubble Baths.

After telling our few friends about our blog, not only were they terribly kind and supportive, but it also shifted our relationship dynamic to a point where we're now able to have hours-long conversations about sex. What we like. What we don't. How we feel about porn. Open relationships and threesomes. And why not? After all, that's what we do here, (and they've seen a LOT of us through the blog), so what's to hide? And we've gotta tell you, it's brutally refreshing to be able to have these discourses with people we hang with multiple times each week.

Also, sometimes it leads to you asking if they ever feel like getting some of this on paper and guest posting. And they send you this a mere few hours later. And it's brilliant. And honest. And hot. And funny. And REAL. We hope you enjoy this as much as we did.

Oh, and if you're anything like us, you're gonna read this and say, "MORE PLEASE, NOW!" So let's all refer to her as Red when we do make that request.

A Brief Missive on Ladyporn and How I Really Feel About Bubble Baths.

by Red.

Guys! I want to talk to you about a terrible word. I am sorry that this might hurt, and not in a good way, but it's sort of been following me a lot lately and I wanted to talk about it because Violet and Rye said I could. I want to talk about what it means when we say "ladyporn." 

It has its purposes, certainly. We all know that Rachael Rabbit White claimed this word last year for a celebration of real porn for real women. Or do we? Until I googled the word five minutes ago, I didn't. What I did know was that last month a popular website had a "Twitter party" wherein they encouraged followers to tweet their idea of ladyporn, which included some pretty edgy shit like bubble baths, red wine, and pictures of Ryan Gosling. I know, too that the word came up in conversations about whether the term "chick lit" described a valid literary genre. I know that people I actually respect have used that hashtag in reference to things they regard as romantic or guilty pleasures. People I respect less have used it to talk about Twilight.

You know the problem, sort of, framed through Violet and Rye's own post "The Good Porn Problem." You know it in a slicker, entrepreneurial mindset through Cindy Gallop and Make Love Not Porn. But there is this, too, this slightly separate problem of porn and women: what the hell are we talking about when we talk about porn, and how do we contextualize it? Like you, I want there to be places to go online and in the world where there's a distinction between "good porn" and "bad porn"; I want that content to be as curated to my tastes as the music, art, and lifestyle blogs and publications I frequent. But I also want to know that when I say the word "porn", I'm not talking about a romantic comedy or a bubble bath, and it terrifies me to think that those are dialogues being created by women, who are unwittingly doing as much to create the gap between real sex and porn-as-we-know-it as the men who grow up thinking that sex is about coming on a woman's face.

A bit of personal history for you, because you're not going to get any pictures of my tits. (Sorry guys! Want a visual? Kinda Violet-shaped, smaller booty, liberal use of tattoos.) I'm big on Cindy Gallop's mission statement because, to date, the only sexual request I've ever turned down is to let a guy come on my face. That this has been the only rule has made all of the guys who have seen my tits (or pictures thereof!) surprised by me, even though I have normal desires and they have normal desires and as far as I am aware, I tend to have pretty normal sex. They're surprised to learn that I want to be told what to do, because I am a woman who is fully in control of her life all of the time, who dictates every waking moment, who writes hard and works hard and thinks hard and wants to come home to a place where she doesn't have to think at all in her quest to play hard. The men in my life who've been the best in bed are the ones who understand that it is the only place I will ever let them tell me what to do. When it works well, it works because we both know what I want.

It is scary, I know, to have other people ask you what you want. This is true in sex, in work, in every aspect of life. Maybe that's part of our good porn problem: maybe if we stop to think about what we really want in porn, the answer has less to do with things we happen to like very much and a lot more to do with things we want very badly when we are naked after a long day at work and we are calmly asking our loved ones to shove us up against a wall, already. Or maybe about how we don't really want to do that, but we'd like to look at pictures of that while naked with our loved ones instead. I don't really know what you want, but I refuse to believe that what we are collectively begging for is some good old "chick lit." The truth of the matter is that I generally fucking hate bubble baths, and that maybe you love them, but neither of those sentiments have anything to do with porn. I am interested, always, in what people really want in all aspects of life, and I'm thoroughly convinced that these soft redefinitions are getting in the way.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we need to be able to take the word back, and that those of us who already know this have only been preaching to the converted. I'm not sure where to begin, but we need to know that porn has nothing to do with red wine and bubble baths (although something, probably, with pictures of Ryan Gosling.) I have this terrible fear that until we are able to say out loud to each other than porn is about sex, we're not going to have any satisfying version of either.

In other news, if you haven't read this Very Solid Advice from Thought Catalog on The Thinking Woman's Guide To Threesomes, you should definitely make that happen.