media: pornography

Captain Crab sent in this image (found here) of pubic hair dye:

Here is a link to the betty website. According to the site,

In less than one year, over 100,000 happy customers are using betty to naturally match their hair above, cover gray or just for fun! Whether you’re a blonde (be a true blonde now!), radiant auburn, rich brunette, raven black or want to try hot pink for fun, our easy to use no-drip formula gives you the perfect finishing touch.

These might be useful for a discussion of the ever-increasing standards for personal beauty: once upon a time, you just worried about gray hair on your head. And taking care of things “down there” meant obsessing over odor and controlling evidence of menstruation. Now women get genital plastic surgery and “vaginal rejuvenation” (those sites aren’t work-appropriate) as they age or after childbirth, shave or wax their pubic hair, and apparently can now dye their pubic hair to be sure it doesn’t show signs of aging (or just doesn’t match their hair)–although the betty website FAQ link does mention that men also use the product. I can’t help but suspect that the mainstreaming of porn and increased access (especially online) to images of women’s genitals is providing average women with a new body part to compare to other women and find lacking.

At least the pink seems like something you’d just do for fun, not out of a concern to hide signs of aging. Although maybe there are 50-year-old women out there running around with pink pubes. What do I know?

Thanks, Captain!

Warning: It’s a Hustler cover. May not be safe for your workplace (you see a woman’s legs sticking out of a meat grinder).

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These anti-statutory rape PSAs were made by advertising agency Serve for the United Way of Milwaukee. They created enough of a controversy that they were pulled (see an article at Salon).
In response to the controversy, the advertising agency put a little over 2 minutes of focus group footage on youtube:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-gu2X_57k[/youtube]

Here is a link to a book called I Love It When You Talk Clean to Me: Porn for Women, published by the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative.

Text: “Ooh look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair.”

Text: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me so you can relax.”

Text: “Why don’t I get a minivan, love, so you can drive something fun.”

Thanks, Jessica C.!

NEW! In a similar vein, the hoax website Porn for Girls by Girls, sent in by Giorgos S., implies that what women really want isn’t sexual material but images of men cleaning, wedding dresses, and jewelry:

Thanks, Giorgos!

Here is a link to a website called Hunting for Bambi that says it is “a highly unique, niched, and controversial comical video series that spoofs hunting.” It spoofs hunting by filming men shooting naked women with paintball guns.

You can buy this DVD. Note that the men are in a Hummer.

http://www.bigcuties.com/

“Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization” (2005) is useful for showing that non-procreational sex and sexual enjoyment are not “modern,” and that using and enjoying sexually explicit images isn’t new, either. I liked the first two episodes in the series, especially the second one, which shows how many explicit images there are in religious buildings and texts from the Middle Ages in Europe. Be warned, you need to watch these before showing them to be sure you can get away with it with your audience–for many students, even the artwork and religious drawings would probably lead to outrage today (which can be an interesting discussion in and of itself).

“Fenceline” addresses institutional racism, environmental pollution, and activism by looking at residents in a town in Louisiana and the divisions that arise between blacks and whites about the possibility of toxic waste contamination. It could be useful for discussing environmental issues or looking at why two groups in the same community could come to such different conclusions about what is going on.