Porn FAIL.
A girlfriend recently brought a stack of supposedly cute’n'funny books as a gift for a bridal shower I attended. One of them was Porn for Women, whose jacket read:
Prepare to enter a fantasy world. A world where clothes get folded just so and delicious dinners await. Give the fairer sex what they really want beautiful PG photos of hunky men cooking, listening, asking for directions, accompanied by steamy captions: “I love a clean house!” or “As long as I have two legs to walk on, you’ll never take out the trash.” Now this is porn that will leave women begging for more!
Give me a fucking break. Even with tongue planted firmly in cheek, this is a dismal, dated, patronizing, heteronormative sight-gag that reinforces the same tired gender roles it pokes fun at. Ooh, a man’s folding laundry! It’s so hot and crazy! Tee hee! And even worse…there’s a whole series of these books.
Look, there’s obviously no shortage of porn that caters to male sexual fantasies. Hell, there’s so much of it that I get to write lots of posts blaming porn for all kinds of sweeping negative cultural trends. I truly believe there should be more porn for women. We deserve quality wank material that portrays a woman-centered sexual experience. But this isn’t even sexual for fuck’s sake! Yeah, yeah, I know that’s what’s supposed to be the joke, but come on…it’s funny that women get excited when a man acts like a responsible adult? Puh-lease. They must think we have some seriously low standards.
Porn for Women also reinforces the chauvinist vision of women’s sexual arousal as silly and not even physical. Newsflash: Women have the same horny, sweaty, bodily-fluid-producing carnal desires as men. We want to get off, just like men. And just like men, we have wild, hot, nasty fantasy lives that porn should cater to—real porn, featuring real people having real sex. But instead, the makers of Porn For Women claims to understand that for women “sometimes a clean kitchen is hotter than a shower scene.”
Well, it ain’t. Granted, this was just a stupid book given as a gift at a wedding shower, it’s yet another irritating example of commercial crap that reinforces stereotypes that help no one—men or women. We don’t need it, even as a joke.
Hear hear!
http://xkcd.com/714/
Ugh. I saw this same book in a music store with my husband a month ago. I couldn’t help but pick it up to mock. Even my husband joined in. It’s just stupid and insulting to everyone.
Ah, Amy V, you beat me to it!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Amanda Marcotte, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: "Porn for Women": A Rant @ http://bit.ly/9BeG4Z [...]
They carry these in Papyrus, not sure what it has to do with cards but I saw “Porn for Women of a Certain Age” the other day as well. That almost made me more angry.
I have to admit that we used to sell these in the bookstore where I worked, and I found them amusing, but I take your point, Becky. Still, given the reality that so many of us live with, I understand the idea that having your male partner do an equal share of housework without having to be begged and nagged would be very satisfying on a certain level. At least if you were sharing the housework, you both might have enough energy left for more sexytime.
A version of this appeared on 30 Rock – a handsome man appeared on a payperview channel and made agreeable noises. Because men don’t listen and woman talk too much! Hilarious!
Oh, I saw these books, at a Big Lots actually, which gave me hope that they are on the way OUT! I was perplexed, then pissed. Anyway, this post reminded me of an xkcd that I love:
http://xkcd.com/714/
Oh, shoot, that’ll teach me to post without refreshing!
AMEN
@AmyV: I LOVE IT! Thanks for sharing! (and everyone else who posted the same link!)
How ’bout they re-release these books as how-tos for guys called “Put on Your Big Boy Pants &…”?
Nah, probably wouldn’t sell.
As kind of a messy lady, if a guy comes to clean my house, and I am not paying him, it’s going to make me feel guilty for not living up to those external cleanliness standards for ladies.
Yikes, I’ve heard of this book. *gag*
What makes me even more annoyed is that I just know that my friend, who is getting married in a few weeks, would find this book highly amusing. She’s also not the most sex-positive person, so there you go.
Also, AMEN to the xkcd comic that olivia0330 and Amy V posted!
I don’t find this book amusing, per se, but I get it. It’s sad that we live in a world where a man doing laundry is framed as a *fantasy* in the same way as a woman who’ll do whateverthehell it is they do in mainstream porn.
Equitable division of household chores is … maybe not a sexual turn-on, but it’s attractive and the fact that my boyf cooks and cleans makes him more attractive to me. The book doesn’t appeal to me but I see it as a symptom of patriarchy.
I’m with SarahMC – I think to get the (TINY amount of) humor you have to be of a generation where (most) men would rarely do any “women’s work” – except if their wifey was in traction.
I dunno, sybann….I’m not sure the “humor” here is aimed only at the older generation. The book is being marketed to young women as well as Boomers—I saw it at a 29 year old’s shower. I think the stereotype that housework is something men do only to indulge the missus is still pretty strong, even among younger men.
At risk of being shot down, I will say that I actually have one of their postcard books. I think the photos are hilarious because they are just so preposterously overdone. I am not into real porn in any case, so maybe that’s why the book didn’t bother me. Also, while I do enjoy a healthy sex life, I will say that part of what is attractive about my current fiance is that he actually does all of those things in the book without having to be asked. So, indirectly, for me, a clean kitchen is pretty hot. I don’t think it is a problem to hope that a guy will help around the house and that his doing so will be part of the whole package. That’s how I took it, anyway. Perhaps, as one commenter suggested, a different title would help assuage the annoyance.
The blog Sociological Images wrote about this before and included some of the images inside. One of the pages has a photo along with the words: “Ooh look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair.” This goes beyond the “jokes” about housework and implies that people with ladyparts would never want to watch the NFL playoffs.
(Excuse me, WHO dragged her male partner, because we don’t get cable, to a restaurant to watch the ENTIRE Superbowl in a booth while sipping watered-down Sprite? I DID. That’s right. Me, with my ladyparts. We watched the whole damn thing while I alternately yelled at the ref, raved about Scott Fujita, and knit a fuzzy striped scarf. Because, fuck gender binaries.)
Also, there’s apparently another book in the series aimed at new moms.
The word “porn” invokes an unachievable or at least unlikely fantasy. These books reinforce the idea that men doing chores is as unlikely as women suddenly deciding en masse they love double penetration with strangers.
The xkcd comic was the first thing I thought of. I actually sort of found the first one funny… but not porn. I personally would be invailable for porn in which a hot guy cleans my house and THEN we have hot hot sex on the newly vaccuumed carpet. But just vaccuuming the carpet? That’s being a grownup.
And I’m not saying I might be more up for sexy times if someone has helped me with the dishes. But that’s because ain’t no boner killer like resentment and exhaustion, not because I get hot when he gets suds. And it’s not what I fantasise about in my wildest dreams, as Amanda Marcotte pointed out.
“And just like men, we have wild, hot, nasty fantasy lives that porn should cater to—real porn, featuring real people having real sex.”
there is porn for woman and I mean great porn as described in the quote !
for porn and erotic movies made by women or artists or men, this is a gold-mine :
check http://www.cinemasecondsexe.com/
(one of my favorite is Peep show heros)
I laughed my ass off when I first saw these books. In fact I came that close (holds thumb and forefinger a micrometer apart) to buying the calender.
Too right. I’m so bored of my sexuality being represented as either ‘disinterested’ or ‘slut’ – whatever that’s supposed to mean in this day and age. Products like this represent the same fear of female desire as your previous post on, um, vagazzling.
I find laundry to be an odd task to be included in this book. If my husband didn’t do laundry, then how would his laundry get done? I do mine, he does his. As for communal laundry like towels and sheets, I just put them in my husband’s laundry basket and he doesn’t even notice he’s doing them. Pretty simple. Are there women that actually do their husbands laundry anymore?
I know, this is not really the point of this blog, but I’m just sayin’.
I saw this trite little book in a fairly “liberal” alternative metaphysical lifestyle bookstore in Ann Arbor MI and was immediately irritated 1)with the creators of the book for their dated little statement about what women want and 2)with the bookstore for displaying it
I don’t like the lines about the craft fair, for example, because that’s overdoing it, but I like the idea that some guys may start to realize that women like and want men to represent domestically. I mean, if a guy has never taken an interest in it, why not motivate him with the carrot that girls like guys who clean? My husband/father of my children is great in almost every area, and it’s not a dealbreaker that he doesn’t do it well or at all, because I’m not that attenuated to immaculate housekeeping. But, after living with this guy for about a decade and having stupid fights about cleaning the toilet several times a year, I gotta say I thought it was pretty hot my ex-boyfriend took such initiative with his housekeeping tasks. And being domestically skilled is a gender presentation that some guys just aren’t willing to incorporate into their identities, which I warn all my unattached friends about.
One more thing, in regards to having low or high standards. When we break the news that women have plenty of sexual desire, etc., I think it’s kind of important that we also communicate that our standards are high, and we get to choose who we want to share our lust with. It makes me think about how “out” desire for sex in general has been opportunistically misinterpreted by people with whom I don’t want to have that contact. That has happened to me when I’ve made similar statements regarding the myths of male/female sexual desire. Some guys will interpret statements like that as a green light for making a pass. Which is to say, just be aware and explicit and ready to neutralize an oversized ego if necessary!
Ugh. Idiots.
This will be in a blog post. Or perhaps a post all on his own.
[...] cleaning house are presented as a fantasy. I would be loyal for life to any company that presented them as a reality in its advertising. [...]