July 31, 2012

This Is My Body {featured video}

Watch this and be empowered and inspired. The video and its resources speak for themselves.


This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.

This Is My Body Facebook Page.

Story on This Is My Body from Ms. Magazine blog via Care2.

July 18, 2012

After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters {featured book}

Since pre-ordering at Amazon US and Amazon UK is now available for my book After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters, a note about it here seems appropriate. After Pornified — where female pornmakers lead the way, empowering women to claim their bodies and sex against a pornified culture — seeks to empower and inspire women, and men, to own and explore their bodies and sexualities against pornified media, erotic clichés, and claustrophobic gender stereotypes.

Zer0 Books — the Culture, Society, and Politics imprint of John Hunt Publishing — is my publisher. I am proud to be a part of their team of authors whose discourse is "intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist." The Guardian ran a feature on Zer0 Books this past winter, describing Zer0 Books as "One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment. ... Zer0 titles are commissioned, edited and published quickly — and that energy and velocity carries through to the writing itself. Zer0 writers share an ability to write passionately, avoiding the clunky prose of academia and generating new lines of inquiry rather than just regurgitating critical clichés."— This seems like a good fit for me.

From the publisher's page:
Porn brings up a lot of negative images in our sexualized, pornified culture. But today a growing number of women are radically changing porn to authentically capture with respect and realism the sexual lives of women and men, empowering and inspiring the viewer to claim her sexuality against a pornified culture, and creating a real counterweight to pornified media and porn as it’s been known. Porn affects us. Today, women are leading the way to make those effects positive. After Pornified lets you see how.

July 10, 2012

Magic Mike: A Frolicking Celebration of Male Sexuality

Salon staff writer Tracy Clark-Flory accuses Steven Soderbergh's new movie "Magic Mike" for "devaluing women’s sexuality and desire" while turning male stripping into an "unsexy" "parodic" thing: "goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive." On the contrary, I would argue that "Magic Mike" — marketed as a stripper rom com — offers us a frolicking celebration of male sexuality enjoyed both by the male strippers and their female audiences.

As a university student in Seattle, I joined a few of my male friends at a female strip club. What saddened me the most, was the lack of joy in both the women's performance and among the male audience. Sure, my friends were laughing, yet not for joy but derision. Derision at the other guys who'd slink into their seats, and derision at the detached, formulaic performance by the female strippers.

July 2, 2012

More Women Enjoy Sex Postpartum {featured news}

Women's sexual desire is so often either criticized as absent or derided as uncontrolled: rarely is it respectfully approached in its wholesome wholeness, especially in the case of new moms' sex. Which is why this new study documenting women's sexual desire and behavior postpartum is so welcome to me. Yes; women postpartum are often too tired and over-touched for "sex." That does not mean they are not sexual or that they do not experience sexual desire and pleasure.

I labored for 64 hours before giving birth to my child due to some scar tissue on my cervix; intercourse hurt for a year after that. That said, a sexual life and sexual pleasure returned to me before those 6 recommended weeks of "abstinence only."

Below are a few quotations from an article reporting on this new study on what new moms reveal regarding the truth about postpartum sex that rung true to me:
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