In Which Carnita Writes a Letter to a Prospective Contributor and Outlines the Concept

Dearest Mr. LaDouche,

So I've been thinking a bit more about things that I would like to typify the blog posts on carnal porridge. If you're truly interested, then maybe it can help inspire some direction for you and this can be a mutualistic relationship. You're clearly talented and may benefit from a safe outlet for some impulses that fall outside the normal range of what society at large sanctions, and I would certainly benefit from having some trustworthy, (preferably) gifted, and motivated co-conspirators. If you decide you're not into it, then no harm done. In fact, I may end up re-posting what I write to you here because I'm trying to articulate something for myself as much as I am trying to explain it to you.

My husband and I were talking today about the things that we find to be lacking in most readily available mainstream porn and/or erotica--especially that which relies on images for its appeal, like video, visual art, and photography--and a few themes emerged. For example, both of us (and many people we know) are pretty grossed out by the practice of obsessive hair removal. It's not just about the fact that it betrays a disturbing fascination in our culture with childish bodies and denies something of the animals that we are, but also because it is just one more thing that tends to reduce the amount of variation that can be found in the human form. In a way, it represents a sort of McDonaldization of sex: pre-packaged ideas of what is attractive, what is "clean," what is sexy, etc. (The weird idea that hairless bodies are "cleaner" is especially irritating to me. Let's not fool ourselves here; there is nothing clean about sex, and in another way, there is nothing dirty about it, either.) This practice also precludes some of the intimacy involved in sexual acts, eliminating the mystery of the literally dark areas of the body that have to be revealed, and also discovered, incrementally. My personal choice not to shave some parts of my body is only distantly related to these ideas, since pornography, erotica, or whatever we're calling it is essentially performance and inhabits its own symbolic world, whereas this is my actual life.

One of the other major complaints I have about what I have been able to find so far--and mind you, I am a novice at finding the porn I want and really don't know where to look yet--is that when there is a subject-position or "observer" in the situation being portrayed in heterosexual porn, it is almost always the man. This is on the one hand a classic feminist concern about objectification, but for me, it is more a simple matter of never being able to assume the role of the viewer as a woman, the one experiencing the woman's position in the scenario.

It is true that it is somewhat more common for men to be interested in porn, but I wonder what that statistic would look like if there were more readily available material made for women. This does not mean that women would necessarily have to make it, but that writers and film artists would need to step up efforts to include women in the "protagonist" roles of pornographic art, photography, and video. Furthermore, I don't think that it's fair or accurate to assume that just because certain scenarios are portrayed over and over ad nauseum in porn made for men that these scenarios are the only things that men are interested in. So in general, my issue with porn is how homogeneous it is although human sexuality, even within the confines of basically heterosexual orientation, is incredibly diverse.

For instance, if you were an alien who had to find out everything you know about human sexuality by watching porn, you might end up thinking things like this:

- Women always love bigger, harder cocks. A man who cannot achieve these ideals at any time a woman wants him to is not worth fucking.
- All women love to be sprayed with lots of cum, especially in the eye, in the mouth, on the ass, or wherever else a man can make it shoot that is close to a vascular area.
- Women always get extreme pleasure from long, drawn-out, rough, and somewhat humiliating intercourse with sleazy guys who don't respect them.
- Women cannot seek their own pleasure; they get pleasure only by doing things that result in getting men off. Also, men only really care about getting off.
- Men can't stand dealing with women's bodies as they are; if she wants to attract a man, a woman must make endless modifications to her natural shape, patterns of hair growth, hair color, skin tone, etc.
- Women's assholes are always cute and pink.
- Only women are bi-curious. Men who are bi-curious are an anomaly and we don't care about them.
- Circumcision is necessary for a man to be sexually attractive.
- Venereal disease and unwanted pregnancy are myths. Safe sex is shitty sex, and if issues resulting from unsafe sex occur, it's the woman's problem.

...and you get the point. So my project with this blog is, at least in part, to be part of the resistance to all these porno lies and to more faithfully represent what is hot about our actual consenting adult sex lives. I am convinced that I won't be disappointed by the array of possibilities that I discover.

The other major thing is more personal, more important than any sort of "work" I expect it to get done. My personal liberation is at stake here. I am a writer, I am a blossoming sexual creature, and my sex life is getting more interesting all the time. I want to challenge myself to embrace all of it and give myself a reason to keep generating good material by living it, if you know what I mean. Wink nudge.

I also have a basic and unsophisticated need to tell my story and validate myself in so doing. I want to see it written down, to force myself to tell it even when it makes me uncomfortable, and to make a commitment to myself to keep at it for a while instead of dropping it like I have dropped every other thing that has gotten difficult in my life. It's one among many other lessons in commitment I am trying to teach myself right now.

One idea, as I mentioned before, is to try to find others who might want to contribute as guest bloggers. I am not planning on asking many people I know in my day-to-day life since this could present a conflict of interests. I don't want to walk down the street and worry that I've been cast as "that sex blog girl," and I want others who contribute to be similarly protected from worries about their privacy.

So I hope that you might decide to keep working on your concept. Let me know what you think.

Sincerely,
Carnita