Here’s an extract from an amusing article by writer, lecturer and fetish model Violet Blue, published yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“…It’s the end of a decade, and ten years ago we didn’t have to live like this. Sex at the end of the last century was a different animal: Viagra was a new drug, but the honeymoon was waning by March 2000 when potential side effects (like heart attacks) began to hit the news. In 2000, the US was still under President Clinton, so it would be many years before the public school nightmare of abstinence-only education would be put into place — so well before teen pregnancy and teen STD rates would spike. Despite the bigger emphasis on safer sex, ten years ago condoms were still typically “one size fits most” with the idea that they’re also designed for female pleasure as an ongoing joke (“ribbed for her pleasure, ha!”) Compare that to the past few years, when condom makers like Durex and Lifestyles, began focusing exclusively on the female pleasure market.
If you had a latex allergy a decade back, you had to avoid most sex toys — the market was saturated with that cheap Chinese jelly rubber and finding non-latex condoms outside of two Bay Area women’s boutiques (or one Web site, Condomania) was your tough luck. Similarly, sex toys were primarily cheap, shameful, toxic pieces of mystery (“novelty”) materials mostly imported from China, and no one was aware of potentially harmful chemicals in vibrators (see: tinynibbles.com/unsafe). Nor did we have the ability to choose green, body-safe, and high-end designer sex products from a range of companies and manufacturers around the world. In 2000, women didn’t watch porn unless their boyfriends or husbands tricked them into it — or so you would have believed until we started blogging about it and making our own porn (and ethical porn-viewer resource) sites. There were alt.porn newsgroups, but there was no such genre as “altporn.”
A consumer had little choice, if any, about what the people looked like in the porn said consumer wanted to watch — and hopefully enjoy. Did your fantasy look like Joanna Angel? Sorry for you; the girls beginning the era were Jenna Jameson and Bridgette Kerkove. You were out of luck if you were like most people and wanted to do anything other than put a VHS tape or a (then-new and expensive) DVD in a machine and fast-forward to the action; free porn tube sites weren’t widespread until 2005. And if you wanted to find a site that had sophisticated sex culture commentary of any kind, from entertainment to news to porn to health information or legal news — you’d just have to wait. Go read a solipsistic men’s magazine or a women’s fake-porn mag with gay pornstars in it, and like it. And even then they all seemed to be saying, walk ten miles through the snow to the sleazy corner store to get it, too, you pathetic wanker…
How nice that we’ve only had to wait ten years to the point of having the freedom to choose not to be pathetic wankers anymore (unless that’s your kink, which is like, totally cool). Okay, most have waited longer. But we don’t need to imagine the sexual lamesauce of the past to know our present is, well, deliciously saucier…”
Click here to read the full article.
