Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:
“Younger women today are growing more comfortable with their sexuality,” she said, “and it makes perfect sense that they’d want to create a hip corner of the pornographic universe where they can express themselves.”
A hip corner of the pornographic universe where younger women, who are more comfortable with their sexuality, can express themselves. … So it has come to this, I thought. Pornography, which only a generation ago had been assailed by feminists as the ultimate act of objectification, subordination, and dehumanization of women in a capitalist, patriarchal society was now being offered as an entertaining tidbit in the “Sunday Styles” section of the [New York] Times, surrounded on the same page by ads for Prada luxury goods and followed by photographs of the social elite at their charity functions on the next. As is so often the case these days, the world appeared upside down to me and I almost felt like laughing, so absurd was the spectacle of naïvete being paraded around as the last word in sophistication.
But, before I knew it, I was feeling something more like nausea…
More here.