GIRLWORLD, U.S.A.—A one-page feature in the new issue of Glamour magazine titled "Everything's Coming Up Porn-y" clues women into "why soft-core is taking over movie theaters and bookstores everywhere." Or, in more non-troposphere-based terms, the fact that porn exists.
But we have a few questions for the magazine's editors, including: Has anybody at Glamour ever actually watched any porn, and do they even know what "soft-core" means?
The piece starts out, as is so the haps right now, cooing over James Deen, who it identifies as "the massively popular star who appears in thousands of online 'lady porn' videos." Now we know that's the line a lot of press folk have been throwing around about Deen, but coming from a ladies' magazine, it really got us wondering, exactly which of his videos count as "lady porn," anyway? There are thousands of them, so Glamour says—surely it couldn't be hard to locate a couple.
Could the magazine be referring to his scenes on Kink.com's Public Disgrace site, which is advertised prominently on Deen's blog? Or maybe they mean ones like this scene for RealityKings.com that he blogged about, with the eloquent headline "Cute Young Latina Trinity St. Claire [sic] Fucked Hard in Her Ass by James Deen."
No, neither of those seem like they would fit Glamour's definition of lady-like. Perhaps, given that E.L. James' all-the-rage Fifty Shades of Grey factors heavily in the piece, the videos in question might be those found on another Kink site Deen links to frequently, SexandSubmission.com. After all, if Fifty Shades' wild success proves anything, it's that ladies sure love the BDSM.
One problem, though: Neither SexandSubmission.com nor any of the myriad other sites Deen plugs, Kink-affiliated or otherwise, come anywhere within the same hemisphere as anything that could be considered "soft-core." But let's move on.
About halfway through the Glamour piece, we come to this exclamation: "Finally! While men have been getting their fill of racy everything, for, well, forever, it's time for us to get our soft-core kicks."
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Finally?! Has somebody unbeknownst to us been holding all sexually-related material under lock and key and depriving women access to it all these years? Never mind that nasty, super explicit stuff (or "porn," as we like to call it) ... let's talk about something that actually is a little closer to this "soft-core" they speak of (we think):
Candida Royalle's Femme Productions, generally regarded as the first women-friendly adult movie studio, was founded in 1984. That's 28 years ago. Was Glamour's ace reporter on this assignment even born yet? Something tells us not. Oh, but what of the groundbreaking Fifty Shades of Grey that's taken the nation by storm? Well, we know book stores are not as ubiquitous as they once were, but there are these things called Harlequin romance novels that have been around since the 1930s.
Sure, you say, but the Harlequin books don't involve BDSM. Perhaps not, but you know what does? The Marquis de Sade's novel Justine, published in 1791!
Our point is that this "revelation" the female-targeted media is suddenly perpetuating that (are you sitting down?) porn isn't just for dudes carries about as much insight as reporting the news that Liberace was gay.
Don't get us wrong, we're delighted to see magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan giving porn a little ink. We're simply a bit puzzled as to why they seem to just be stumbling onto it now.
Ironically, the Glamour report closes out with this passage: "Oh, America—you clearly need a good therapist to work out your sex issues. ... In the meantime, we'll be opening a bottle of red wine and googling James Deen."
A) Hey pot, call the kettle black much? B) Shouldn't you have googled James Deen before you wrote this? C) Or did you mean to say "ogling" but got all verklempt?
