Kicking Things Off, Missionary Style

"What's a pro-sex feminist, Mommy?"

"It's a . . . hmm, well, ughhh - I'll tell you when you're older, honey."

Well kids, that was foreplay, this is the real deal. I'm Odessa, a pro-sex feminist writer and artist who writes porn, watches porn, and wanks off to porn, and I'm not afraid to talk about it. Pro-Sex Feminism, as I interpret it, is a fancy term for a movement of people who believe in equality for all, and believe that porn has a place in that equality. This puts it in opposition to the anti-porn feminists who believe porn stands in the way of true equality. I'll get into this more later, but first, BOOBIES!!

The above photograph comes out of the genius of Helmut Newton, the grandfather of kink in fashion photography. He kept taking incredibly sexy shots all the way up until his death in 2004, and his catalogue is far too big for me to begin to document here, but here are some of my favorite images of his:

And lest you think it's all T&A and black-and-whites, here's a shot from one of his tamer medical-equipment-influenced fashion shoots:

I grew up a Vogue-loving fashion junkie, and Helmut Newton absolutely deserves credit for turning me on to corsets and sexy sexy rope bondage - what I didn't see in the magazines I soon discovered through looking up inspirational artists on the internet. He's been criticized for objectifying his female subjects, and I can see where his critics are coming from, but it's hard to look at his "Big Nudes" and think he didn't have some deep seated respect for, even awe of, women - their beauty and the power in that beauty. I think Meg Clark at Good Morning Midnight gets it right when she states:

"Newton’s fashion photographs and portraits always portray the same sort of woman we see in those famous images: languid, haughty, muscled, always with a piercing glare, either expectant, proud of themselves, slyly amused, or bored-to-tears.  Their legs are spread or their shirts half-off but they always seem both aware of and pleased with this.  They do not drown, waifish, naked, and pale, in ponds as modern day Ophelias, or suffer, fragile and contorted with apparently dislocated shoulderblades, at the boots of soldiers. [...] 

Newton’s women unfailingly look back, if not always at the camera, at someone or something in the room.  They have attitude aplenty, and even in bondage or depicted as somehow medically maimed or on crutches, they look back. Newton’s women have a gaze, if you will, which, for me at least, has lent his photographs a depth (dare we say “personality?”) absent from so many others.  In other words, YES PLEASE.  Or in classier terms: if Newton objectified women he did it in a way that I am kind of totally down with."

This brings up one of the key tensions in pro-sex feminism: objectification happens. Sometimes a woman or a man becomes an object for the viewer's consumption, but what the anti-porn crowd refuses to accept is the possibility of a self-actualized, even empowered decision to be objectified. This is not such a foreign concept in the BDSM world; I am just beginning my own exploration of what it means to be a bottom or a top, but from the beginning it has seemed obvious that there is an innate power held by the submissive party. The choice to allow oneself to be used, to be reduced into a sex object - as long as it's within a healthy, communicative relationship and everyone knows the safe word going in, I would say the pro-sex verdict has to be "anything goes."