Description

This paper investigates how female sex bloggers and web mistresses are using the Internet to forge sexual identities online. It specifically asks how this relates to radical feminist theories of pornography as ‘sexist hate literature’ (Jensen, 2004: 247) and how far it should prompt a rethink of theoretical and policy responses to pornography.

Mos t sex blogs are written by women, who post sexually explicit stories, photographs and videos of themselves online. Though they have been in existence since the late 1990s, female sex blogs have reached what Ken Plummer calls “critical take-off point” with the best-known turned into books and TV series. The time is ripe for these stories to be heard and there is an interpretive community ready to hear them.



Computers give women access to sexually explicit material from the privacy of the home, from where they can also become producers. There are no barriers to entry, and the interactivity of the Internet brings women into contact with a community of other like-minded people. As a result, women have become more involved with the production and consumption of sexually explicit material, backing up Jane Juffer’s argument that their traditional absence was a question of access rather than an intrinsic essential difference between men and women (1998).

This paper asks what women are doing with this newfound freedom to participate and what it means for traditional, gender-based approaches to pornography. It analyses the content of sex blogs and amateur pornographic sites, and structured interviews with the female bloggers and webmistresses, to ask how far they are wresting control of sexual representation and how far they are working within existing conventions. It asks whether there is any such thing as a feminine take on pornography/sexuality. Most importantly, it asks how this ties in with the radical feminist theory that – allied with moral conservative approaches – has dominated the debate about pornography since the 1970s.

Radical feminist theory sees pornography as representing men’s subordination of women, and women as eternal victims in sexual cultures (cf Robert Jensen, Simon Hardy). There is new research that accepts women’s involvement as producers and consumers of pornography as an unremarkable fact (Katrien Jacobs, Feona Attwood). However, it does not tackle the anti-pornography feminist arguments head on, and this is crucial because the commonsense discourse that informs policy-making still revolves around the idea that pornography is exclusively male and sexual agency is dangerous for women.

The recent UK act outlawing the possession of ‘extreme pornography’ was hailed as a ‘victory for women’s rights’ by the liberal Guardian newspaper. Pornography for women is still seen as an anathema, and current debates about the sexualisation of culture still revolve around whether it is harmful to women. This paper argues that women’s active participation in graphic sexual representation on the Internet requires a radical rethink of these gender-based approaches to pornography.