Porn Perspectives

I want a roller derby name!

I attended my first roller derby last weekend while in Portland, Oregon. The Rose City Rollers is an all-female roller derby league, and I was lucky enough to get invited to their first bout of the season.

Going in, I had a vague idea as to what roller derby involved, but I was ill-prepared to have my mind blown. Imagine...girls playing a rough sport involving crazy skill. They're knocking each other over, jumping over fallen teammates, strategizing, and being bad ass--all while wearing lipstick, fishnets, and skirts so short you can see their panties.

What do you make of all this?

Research was necessary. I hit up the Internet, hoping that learning the history of the sport would help me figure out what to think. Turns out roller derby has been around since sometime around the Depression, initiated by a film publicist hoping to make a buck. It remained popular through the 1960s, but then died down again until recently. Based on what I saw last weekend, things have definitely changed since the early days. The roller derby I saw was much less this:

and a lot more this:

There is definitely a riot grrl influence in the modern day roller derby, but what I can't figure out is why girls have gravitated to roller derby. Why dress up this sport and not something like rugby or field hockey? Roller derby doesn't appear to have a history of female exclusion or oppression that would clearly lay the ground for an effort to aggressively proclaim feminine presence.

There's no reason to condemn it, but I struggle to understand the message behind this combination of rough-and-tumble and ever-so-pretty. I want to say that sexualizing the expression of feminine strength undermines it, but perhaps flaunting caricature-like feminine signifyers mocks the everpresent sexualization of women.

This latter hypothesis is supported by the fact that most of the girls' outfits are homemade and definitely are an expression of individual personalities. They each have a roller derby name (yes, like a stripper name but cuter). Some of my favorites are Farrah Loathing, Dora Doom, Terror Eyes, Cluster Fox, Goodie Two Skates, Bitchslap Bella, Demolition Dolly. I generally fall on the side of the subject--if a woman is in control of her own represenation, then any objectification others impose is secondary in my book. I loved the roller derby because the girls are definitely in charge of their own representation, no matter how much the audience (at least half of which was male) might objectify them.

No doubt, it's definitley fun to watch:

(Note from the editor: I feel bad for stealing images. Check out the Rose City Rollers site and show some traffic love!)

Learning to Keep your Shirt on the Hard Way

A high-profile article appeared in the Sunday Times about the slew of racy student-produced publications that have been launched in recent years.

Numerous universities, including Vassar, Columbia, Harvard, and BU, have seen students found publications, either magazines or online, which feature other students in erotic and sometimes pornographic photos. This is nothing particularly novel—college has long been a time of sexual experimentation in the lives of those privileged enough to have the chance to attend. What’s new is that now this experimental phase is being documented and disseminated.

One would think that the sober intent to produce and circulate these images would belie a new generation which flouts sexual mores and embraces experimentation. Yet what comes across more strongly in these magazines is evidence that this generation is interested in trying to flout sexual mores, but can’t quite do it—perhaps for lack of courage, but I would argue it’s more for lack of awareness and savvy.

The utter naïveté of many of the students interviewed, including editors of the magazines themselves, struck me most. With the exception of Boink (Boston University), the founders of these magazines, which all feature some configuration of erotic photos of students, articles, and fiction, expressed the desire to limit their audience to the student body itself:

“We try to limit unwanted exposure as much as we can,” wrote [Squirm’s] current editor, Sarah Fraser (Vassar), in an e-mail message. “It’s one thing to know you’re posing nude or writing erotica for an insulated campus, and understandably quite another to know it’s being disseminated widely.”

After a brief initial flurry of publicity, Kimi Traube, one of Outlet’s (Harvard) founders, began declining interviews from noncampus press. “We’re flattered by all the attention but have decided it’s best for the magazine to focus our energies on the Columbia community,” she said, also via e-mail. The current editor of H Bomb, Ming Vandenberg , is especially concerned about the security of the magazine’s content on the Web.

Imagine this—despite having grown up with the Internet, television, and IMing, these students imagine that they can take a naked photo of themselves, publish it in a magazine or online, and expect that it will only be circulated within their close geographical and demographic vicinity. Shocking!

That’s what always bothered me about college. It provides an environment in which one feels like one is doing important, real-world activities—establishing living quarters, making friends, navigating a town-like environment, accomplishing piles of work—and yet at the same time it’s all so contrived that it almost negates these very activities. (Is flopping around in the ball pit at the McDonald’s Playland really learning to swim?) One starts to feel so safe and secure in the little collegiate bubble that one forgets that there is a real world out there with real consequences (not just a C on a paper). 

This false security leads to boldness. Students undertake supposedly risqué projects within this safe, protected environment under the delusion that they have any control at all over the dissemination of content.

With this, I bestow to the world of ill-prepared fresh-faced young adults, The Golden Rule of Making Porn: If you’re not ok with the entire world (including your mom, your dad, your boss and your grandparents) seeing a particular photo of yourself, don’t publish it anywhere. Anywhere. Not even on your Facebook profile. (To quote Dan Savage, Once an Internet porn star, always an Internet porn star.)

Furthermore, I fail to see what’s so liberating about posing for a naked photo, then giving a shit about who sees said photo. Isn’t the point that you’re flouting social convention by performing this act? Doing damage control after performing this act of “liberation” seems to undermine the entire point.

I have to hand it to Boink, however. The magazine itself is pretty boring, as was its launch party (according to a friend who attended). But its founder is putting her money where her mouth is, posing for the first issue and welcoming any and all media attention. The staff of Boink is coming out with a book early next year, entitled BOINK: College Sex by the People Having It (published by Warner Books, a division of Hachette). I’ll definitely check it out….maybe I can finally learn what sex is like in college…