Tristan Taormino

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

       Laura :
       In short, Taormino in particular strikes me as being a 
       feminist, though most porn industry women are 
       presumably no more or no less feminist than the 
       average woman and are strictly in it for the paycheck).  
       Regardless of the explicitness of TRP's sex scenes, 
       I don't think his intention in writing them was 
       specifically to induce orgasms in his readers.  Maybe 
       that's ultimately the difference between erotica and 
       porn:  the first is meant to be arousing, the latter is 
       meant to cause orgasm.

Thanks for being willing to brave these macho waters. I feel pretty much the 
same about TRP's niece. Annie Sprinkle strikes me as a saint among the 
pornographers, a bonafide feminist who has arousing work, not only in the 
usual purely functional sense, but in mind-expanding aspects as well. We have 
centuries of repression to overcome, and Annie Sprinkle functions as a
spiritually conscious sexual educator, opening up the possibilities of what we 
can do with the gifts we were born with. I think that Tristan Taormino has been 
influenced by Annie, and in a good way. Of course, this sort of discussion
always manages to push people's buttons, and there are regions of comfort/
discomfort all over the ranges when sexual acts are graphically depicted,
particularly those sexual activities that do not interest us or perhaps even repel 
us. Sometimes, there is something inherently repellent in some of these "arousing" 
depictions---this seems to be a particular specialty of Pynchon, the degree to 
which the author is willing to have these truly obscene scenes is pretty mind-blowing. 
But once you get over that, you realize there's a potential evolutionary aspect
to all these depictions, perhaps we will understand in time how fundamentally
different we are from each other in so many ways, our impossible diversity
of need and want.