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"the amount of kids that end up homeschooled because they and/or their parents are neurodivergent is LARGE because some parents don't want the weirdness abused out of their weird kids by teachers or other students and then those kids? they STAY WEIRD! they don't learn how to people please or conform or mask or any other word for hiding themself so others will accept them and the neurotypical kids ALSO don't learn those skills and it turns out neurotypical kids can be weird TOO we're all weird if we aren't taught how to be 'normal' in the homeschooling groups I've seen about half the kids were really weird and half were really christian and the overlap was considerable"

I was homeschooled up to fifth grade and I've never seen a low support needs autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!," my mom and her partner didn't know what autism was at the time but I think they had a sense that I was different, and what the OP said definitely rings true for what my 11 year old self was like even though the details are different.

Yeah, I get the impression homeschooling parents are a pretty horseshoe-y group, i.e. if somebody's homeschooling their kids it's likely they're either a conservative Christian who wants to "protect" their kids from the ideas and enticements of Otherness meme culture (I don't endorse everything in that essay by David Brin but I like David Brin's basic idea of the Otherness meme) or they're a liberal/lefty-ish hippie-ish possibly neurodivergent bohemian type who wants to protect their kids from being abused and having their individuality squelched by the school system, and some homeschooling parents have odd mixes of both of those sets of traits in the same person. My mom and her partner were definitely on the hippie-ish bohemian side of that spectrum.

If I have a kid in the future I'm leaning toward homeschooling them if it's feasible for me and my future partner(s) and my future partner(s) agree to that and my future child doesn't express a contrary preference, cause from what I've read autism is probably basically genetic so a kid with some of my DNA would have a way above general population average chance of having it and I wouldn't want them to suffer through what I suffered through in middle and high school.

It's not that people are incorrect when they say homeschoolers are weird, it's that they get the brand of weird wrong. Sure some of them might be "papa bade us never have mirrors in the house lest we give into the Sin of Vanity" but you're more likely to be confronted by an eleven-year-old carting around a huge collection of Norse Sagas in translation. She can spell synagogue. She plays rugby. She talks just a little bit too much like an adult in a way that is just slightly uncanny. She primarily watches TV from the '70s. She has an intimate knowledge of whisky because her parents tell her about it. She is wearing a mismatched shirt and skirt. That's the one bit people are spot on about.

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@sequel2heaven: I think that's very insightful and it crystalizes some of my own thinking, thank you for making this post!

I think that kind of 2010s SJ thing of being careful to avoid microaggressions and very gentle and accommodating of people's psychological sensitivities etc. is the closest thing I can think of to an explicit politics of trying to reduce the amount of humiliation in society. I think thinking of it that way is a pretty good steelman of it! And, relevantly, I actually kind of like that thing and think I might actually really like hanging around with people who have those social norms and apply them consistently. One of the prominent themes of my politics and general ideas of how I'd prefer humans to relate to each other is I like rules and behavior and expectations and norms and practices that a lot of people are inclined to condemn as "coddling" and your post has helped me articulate one reason why.

@nunuisancenewt: I'm more optimistic. I don't agree with everything in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, but I think the "decline of violence" phenomenon Steven Pinker talks about is real and one of the major world-transformational themes of the last three centuries or so (the others are the scientific and industrial revolutions, which I think it's entwined with), but relevantly, I have a little dissatisfaction with the "decline of violence" framing (and I'm not talking about the objection that the expansion of livestock-raising actually made human society much more violent, though that's an objection I'm sympathetic to, you can amend it to "decline of intra-human violence" to account for that), I think decline of violence is a very important part of it, but I feel it leaves some significant dynamics undescribed. For example, USA racial desegregation and the thing where it's gotten a lot less socially acceptable to call people racial slurs and it becoming more normal for women to not take their husband's last name when they marry feel like they're very much part of what Steven Pinker calls the "decline of violence" process, and they can be analyzed in terms of segregation being violent because it was enforced violently and denied black people access to the best services and facilities, racial slurs being implicit threats of violence, etc., but I feel that's a bit of an epicycle, misses something at the heart of what was going on there. And seeing these posts clarified one of the things think it misses: what's happening is not just a decline of violence but also a decline of normalized humiliation. Jim Crow racial segregation involved material harm to black people but it was also systematic humiliation of black people, it implicitly communicated that the social consensus was that the company of black people was undesirable and black people didn't deserve access to the quality of goods, services, and facilities white people enjoyed. Calling people racial slurs humiliates them.

I suspect the decline of violence and the decline of normalized humiliation are both downstream from improvements in technology giving the lower classes increased access to persuasion-enabling and coordination-enabling technologies. I suspect the average human today experiences significantly less humiliation than the average human in 1950, who in turn experienced significantly less humiliation than the average human in 1850, who in turn experienced significantly less humiliation than the average human in 1550. And I see no reason to expect that trend to end with our generation (I mean, it might, because AI-enabled surveillance states might enable the upper classes to consolidate power in a new way or something, but I see no reason to think that's more plausible than the trend continuing).

I feel like it's extremely common for political positions and tribes to be downstream of feelings of humiliation, but there is rarely an effort put forward to explicitly minimize humiliation in society. Maybe there ought to be. People really don't like being humiliated.

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electroreception in monotremes is extremely old, 130 mya, and may have evolved to deal with hunting in the 3-6 month darks of the south pole forest.

echidnas may have evolved from a platypus like organism that became fully terrestrial, as evidenced by their flatter bill as embryos (and lack of echidna-like organisms in the fossil record past 2mya)

there was a 60 lb tree-climbing echidna in the pleistocene

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Like many bug species, the white beach tiger beetle is easy to overlook for most people. They’re remarkably fast and can dart across the sand so swiftly you’ll lose them in the blink of an eye. As you can imagine they’re very difficult to photograph (and even harder to film- I’ll post evidence of my attempts later) so I’m quite pleased I finally got some good photos of this species.

These beetles are even easier to overlook when they start life in their larval state, tiny and worm-like. Despite their unremarkable appearance, beach tiger beetle larvae do something that almost no other animals do. Like lots of incredible phenomena in the world of science it was discovered entirely by accident!

A graduate student was taking some time off from her studies with a trip to the beach on Cumberland island in Georgia, USA. After she returned from her vacation she was excitedly telling her advisor the neat things she’d seen at the beach, including the Tiger Beetle larvae rolling down the beach. Her advisor was confused… beetle larvae “rolling”? These larvae were known to hide in tiny tunnels along the beach but their behavior was considered to be almost entirely sedentary; the advisor was baffled by his student’s descriptions of what she’d seen. There was only one thing to do- they went back to the beach.

Intensive study of tiger beetle larvae on that beach confirmed what the student had seen. In order to escape predators, a tiger beetle larva could be observed leaping upwards into the wind, curling into a circle, and catching a draft to literally roll like a hula hoop down the beach at high speed. This movement (where the animal rolls forward along a central axis) is called wheel locomotion and true examples of it are amazingly rare in the animal kingdom.

Here’s a Video that discusses this discovery and includes footage of the leaping larvae in action.

Whenever I see tiger beetles on the beach I think of this story and am reminded to embrace my curiosity in every way I can! Noticing the things that other people overlook can become a superpower if you let it.

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It’s crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles

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the het shipper experiences self denial far greater than the fujoshi does i find it fascinating how many like popular m/f relationships defined by their like camaraderie and like viewing each other as equals in a job or profession where they have separate yet entangled lives and like its a drawn out subtextual tension or whatever like in many ways this is straight yaoi like the introduction of women into the professional workforce in jobs previously reserved for men gives this chance to have the fantasy of the woman treated with the same level of respect as the man and like to see this flavor of like the buddy trope now envisioned with its full romantic subtext when one of them is a woman or whatever but the het shipper denies themselves their true desires and works to make sense of this through basic romantic milestones like why do so many people want mulder and scully to get married or cohabitate or have kids like ur fully insane the operative fantasy is the fact scully never has to wash mulders socks you know like its that its entirely divorced from the home and allowed to be an equal partnership and you can literally see this break down in the show itself like the well loved amongst shippers episode where they go undercover in suburbia and its like normal mulder and scully goes out the window for bad jokes about domestic work and wanting scully to take care of certain things like in many ways the romantic fantasy of their relationship entirely disappears if u try and make it conform to these specific milestones but like they literally can be in a relationship but live in separate places they dont have to get married like you could open your mind and realize what you actually like and desire about this fantasy and thing about whats necessary or unnecessary here but people are so trapped in their normative ideas of romantic relationship milestones they cant imagine them both respecting each other and having sex and also choosing to prioritize each other forever without like marriage and children entering the picture which again completely defeats what people find desirable about them in the first place and this is a place of imagination you know anyways the ideology of the heterosexual mind..

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Yeah, this is kind of how I feel too. I think a lot of y'all are more influenced by liberal ideas than you realize or would enjoy admitting and that's fine, good even; there are a lot of good ideas in the liberal tradition, ideas from the liberal tradition were the foundation of modern democracy, modern slavery abolition, socialism, feminism, and almost everything else that makes our world suck less than the world of 1500 and isn't just better technology. Insofar as socialism is superior to liberalism, it's that it's more liberal than liberalism, in its best form it strives toward the goal of a form of society that's more democratic than liberal democracy (I'm paraphrasing something @friendshapedhole said once here), it takes good and revolutionary foundational ideals of the liberal tradition (egalitarianism, suspicion of hierarchy, etc.) to places classical liberalism did not take them. I think much of what I like about Tumblr leftism is precisely a product of the ways it's cross-pollinated with liberalism; on an averaged out group level we have a stronger commitment to rights and freedoms and thrive values than the twentieth century Leninists/Maoists did, we put a high priority on sexual liberation instead of thinking that's a decadent trivial bourgeois priority, we have a "work sucks and most of it is a necessary evil at best and we should basically be trying to figure out how to have a society that has the maximum amount of leisure compatible with making things such as electricity and surgery with anesthetic available to everyone in it" ethos and aspire toward a FALC society of self-actualizing playful artist-intellectuals having a good time instead of being Stakhanovites, we have an Otherness meme mindset, etc.; I suspect given the opportunity people like us would have built a substantially more culturally vital and appealing version of a communist society than the USSR; probably still very far from perfect (and possibly with some serious liabilities compared to the USSR in e.g. ability to quickly ramp up war-fighting capability), but, like, maybe one that would have been more competitive in the struggle for hearts and minds vs. the enticements of Hollywood and capitalist consumerism. A "pure" leftism purged of liberal elements as much as possible is probably not desirable.

well i think the leftist principle you're citing is actually basically just liberalism

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Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other telescopes have shown what appears to be a supermassive black hole forming right between two merging galaxies. There have been multiple hypotheses surrounding supermassive black hole formation, but these observations support the hypothesis that suggests these behemoths are the result of immense clouds of shocked and compressed gas collapsing in on themselves.

“If our proposed scenario is confirmed, the Infinity galaxy provides an empirical demonstration that direct-collapse formation of [super-massive black holes]s can happen in the right circumstances—something that has so far only been seen in simulations and through indirect observations,” Brammer and van Dokkum said.

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A devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on July 29, 2025, making it one of the most powerful seismic events ever recorded. The massive tremor, which occurred at 23:24 UTC, has earned its place in the record books as tied for the sixth-strongest earthquake since modern seismic monitoring began.

Despite its strength, early reports indicate that there have been no deaths or significant damage from the event and that recorded tsunami waves reached a maximum of 9.8 to 13.1 feet in Russia, 4.9 feet in Japan and 5.7 feet in Hawaii.

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I'd have to see demographics of other social media sites to know for sure, but I suspect that other social media sites with a similar social niche to Tumblr (Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, etc.) have similar user population racial demographics to Tumblr and the idea that Tumblr is an exceptionally white website comes from a mix of:

1) A lot of the people using this talking point don't realize how white the global north is. They think Tumblr being 70% white is some huge deviation from the norm that demands special explanation (which they supply with theorycrafting about this being somehow an exceptionally racist and/or exceptionally sheltered affluent white suburbanite website), when it's actually ... about what a person who's bothered to Google some racial demographic data would expect of a site which's user population is mostly people who have English as their first language. If the actual point is that these people think it's noteworthy and reflects poorly on us that we don't have more people from the global south, I'm not without sympathy for that and would be to open to suggestions about how I could help make this site's culture more welcoming to people from the global south, but LBR this discourse comes off as mostly driven by a mix of global north PoC resentments about global north PoC conditions and white Tumblr user angst about their positioning in global north racial politics.

2) While Tumblr has about as many white people as a statistically informed person would expect of a site mostly used by English as first language people, it does actually have relatively few black and Latino/a people, and I suspect what a lot of these people are actually noticing and talking about is that Tumblr has relatively few black people (like LBR I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening like a month after that "Tumblrinas too white and sheltered and racist to enjoy rap" discourse went around). On this point I think they have a legitimate point and I have sympathy with them and would be open to suggestions about how I could help make this site's culture more welcoming to black people, but I think talking about it in terms of Tumblr being exceptionally white probably doesn't really accurately describe what's happening.

3) Rap discourse was going around like a month or so back, and because Tumblr is the moral OCD and moralistic girl bullying website some people defended their not enjoying rap music in moralistic terms and this ironically made them much more vulnerable to credible accusations of racism than if they'd just said rap wasn't to their taste (if you do the Chad and likely more honest move and just say a genre of music isn't to your taste people trying to socially pressure you into listening to it anyway for anti-racism points expose themselves to normal people as obviously unhinged petty authoritarian wannabe commisars, whereas resorting to talking points about rap that would more-or-less sound at home in the mouth of a Republican church lady makes accusations that you're racist much more credible), and other people got annoyed by that and extrapolated a big social trend from like one or five people who annoyed them on the internet (many such cases!).

4) Tumblr is the "woke"/lefty politics website and, I repeat, also the moral OCD and moralistic girl bullying website, so "Tumblr so white (derogatory)" is exactly the sort of talking point that becomes a fashion here.

5) You know that thing a lot of right-wingers do when they, like, take a look at a barista in Seattle and go "You're not working class, sure you're materially poor and precariat/proletariat, but working class is when muscular socially conservative white men bust rock or tighten bolts in big smoky factories, you went to college and aren't culturally conservative so that makes you part of the coastal elite that's oppressing real salt of the earth working Americans like me, a car dealership owner with a master bedroom that's bigger than your entire apartment and a yacht"? I honestly suspect part of the driving force of this discourse is a lefty-ish equivalent of that that's about making assumptions about people's race and class position and how racially segregated their social environment is based on whether they participate in certain specific forms of Anglosphere black culture. Like, yeah, what I'm about to say is uncharitable and maybe kinda paranoid, but, like... Assigning anti-racism points based on what music you listen to is a stupid game, and I'm not sure whether Azam Ali would consider herself not white and hair-splitting over whether somebody counts as PoC is also a stupid game, but I feel like if we're going to play those games if you're a US white person listening to Azam Ali probably should get you at least about as many anti-racism/cosmopolitanism/open-mindedness/Otherness meme points as listening to Megan Thee Stallion (Azam Ali is visibly not somebody the kind of person who wants to privilege "heritage Americans" would consider a member of that category, Wikipedia says she was born in India, her art draws heavily from Middle Eastern traditions, most of her songs are in languages other than English including non-European languages), but I suspect listening to Azam Ali would vaguely feel white to a lot of the kind of people who say Tumblr is uniquely out of touch with non-white culture because as an artist Azam Ali has vibes closer to Heather Dale than Megan Thee Stallion.

I don't want this post spread to a million people and will turn off reblogs on it if it looks like that's starting to happen, but I do kind of want @clevercorvidae to see this.

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I've seen references to most people getting their food pre-prepared from markets and only the rich having their food cooked at home in the context of a book and documentary that discussed conditions of Medieval Middle Eastern cities and late antiquity/Medieval Constantinople. I've also seen references to most bread eaten by common people in e.g. Medieval Europe being baked in large communal ovens. Also, IIRC a lot of the records we have from the earliest civilizations are ration lists for laborers and those often seem to refer to distributions of finished ready-to-eat food (e.g. bread and beer), not raw ingredients people were expected to use to make food themselves. I also remember once watching a Rick Steves travel documentary where he visited some old building in the Netherlands and noted it had no provision for making fires because at the time of its construction that would have been a huge hazard in the high-density neighborhood of mostly wooden buildings. This is obviously not rigorous but it is consistent with the idea that there was a lot of communal food preparation in history.

"In some Medieval and ancient cities most people mostly ate their time's equivalent of take-out, most bread eaten in Medieval Europe was baked in communal ovens, etc." seems plausible to me. IIRC a lot of old-timey poor people food was breads, soups, porridges, gruels, etc. of various kinds, and cooking that kind of food has strong economies of scale; compare cooking a huge pot of lentil soup to feed 50 people to 50 people cooking lentil soup for themselves on 50 smaller fires with 50 smaller pots, compare baking 50 loafs of bread in a big oven to 50 people each baking one loaf in their own personal oven, etc..

That said, I think lots of people living mostly on food that wasn't cooked in their household was mostly an urban phenomenon (of only some cities?) and in the countryside (where most people lived) households usually cooked a lot of their own food. I base that on a combination of basic logic (communal cooking is more efficient with denser populations) and seeing references to cooking within the home in discussions of old timey peasant lifestyles and habitations.

So I think the reality is nuanced, "being expected to cook your food at home is a weird modern thing" is not correct but "being an able-bodied adult who doesn't have to do a lot of labor-intensive food preparation is an amazing luxury that would have been impossible or reserved for the highly privileged in just about any time and place before like 1950" is also not correct.

I'm fairly sure that the people who e.g. prepared food sold in Medieval urban souks and worked in Medieval European bakeries were often not slaves.

I also think there's another nuance that kind of supports Ada Palmer's point but also kind of forms a counter-argument against it: the impression I get is a lot of preindustrial agricultural society poor people food was stuff that could be uncharitably described as various forms of grain and pulse based slop. Rice, soup, stew, porridge, gruel, dhal, etc. are all slop in this sense; you prepare it by putting stuff in a pot with water and heating it until you get the kind of mass suitable for putting in a bowl and eating with a spoon. I have an impression that the modal kind of human diet for most of the last few millennia was mostly slop or bread and slop. This was at least partly because grains, pulses, and starchy roots were the cheap calories, but in the context of this discussion it also occurs to me that slop is relatively easy to prepare and that might have been very helpful to people with labor-intensive modes of subsistence. I have the strong impression that the typical meal eaten in the global north today is historically unusual in the degree to which it isn't basically just a bowl of some sort of slop with maybe a piece of bread on the side. We stopped eating mostly bread and slop because food gets substantially more nourishing and pleasurable if it isn't mostly bread and slop. But I suspect this also means modern global north people who cook at home do legitimately in a sense face a substantially harder normative task than their ancestors did. When your fifth great-grandma cooked dinner she made a big pot of slop and broke a loaf of bread and served that out. You probably want and expect your dinner to be something more interesting than slop, so you might prepare a nice dinner with sausages or meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas, sour cream, a nice dessert, etc., and that involves a lot of complications your fifth great-grandma didn't have to deal with when she made the noon slop which was also going to be the evening slop and the morning next day slop. I figure you probably still come out ahead in terms of effort, cause of all the labor-saving devices you have (plus, of course, you get a more appetizing meal out of it), but there is legitimately a raised bar that cancels out some of those gains.

I think there might be a legitimate point that a lot of poor people eat a lot of take-out, canned food, pre-prepared frozen food, etc. because the plausible alternative given their life conditions is something resembling the bread and slop diets that have been the historical norm for poor people in high population density agriculture-dependent societies, and thus the idea that everyone or poor people should cook most of their food from scratch is another out-of-touch cruel fantasy of well-fed people (this is one of my guesses for what @frances-kafka meant when she said burrito taxi hate is class warfare). With the technology and wealth of the present global north they could probably manage a bread and slop diet that includes a lot more meat and spices and fresh vegetables in the slop and a lot more fruit than was historically typical (so a more pleasant diet and better nourishment than Medieval peasants got), but it'd still be a significant step down in standard of living compared to eating a lot of corner store Chinese take-out and pre-cooked frozen food and so on.

It was slavery, Ada. The food was cooked by slaves.

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With 17,397 reblogs and 102,202 votes so far it seems pretty likely these poll results are actually pretty representative of the demographics of this site (i.e. this is probably a sample size too big to be seriously distorted by social network effects).

So far Tumblr is apparently 72% white, which makes Tumblr somewhat whiter than but in the ballpark of the general population of the United States, which is 58% non-Hispanic white. So Tumblr is very white compared to the world, but about as white as I'd expect a social media platform mostly used by people from the global north who have English as their first language to be (the 14% difference seems plausibly accounted for by people from more solidly supermajority white European and British Commonwealth countries and by the non-white population of the USA skewing younger than the white population so USA teenagers and adults are probably closer to Tumblr).

Compared to USA demographics, what seems really noticeable is we have relatively a lot of Asians but relatively few Latino/as or black people.

Anybody have similar data for other social media platforms that fill a similar-ish social niche to Tumblr, e.g. Reddit? I expect a lot of them have a similar skew toward global north English as first language people (and hence also have a lot of white people), with the main exception being the really big platforms such as Facebook, i.e. I suspect the talking point that Tumblr is an exceptionally white website is pretty much bullshit, but I might be wrong.

People on twitter have been saying this website is extremely white and tbh its making me very curious what the demographics of this site are (of my own reach anyway) so

DISCLAIMER: Race is a non scientific concept with no exact definitions. It is a social construct primarily characterized by how society treats you and thus this is an imperfect poll. If you feel none of the options here reflect you and your experience I implore you to reblog this with your experience as I am curious about that and want to hear about it.

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Israel has said it is prepared to open humanitarian corridors to allow UN convoys into Gaza, following weeks of international pressure and a growing hunger crisis. In a statement on Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had allowed air drops of humanitarian aid to resume, the first of which consisted of seven pallets of flour, sugar and canned food provided by international organisations.

The Israeli military has announced it is starting airdrops for aid into Gaza, and will establish so-called "humanitarian corridors" to allow for United Nations convoys to take food through the strip.

I heard about this on the TV this morning. Looks like they're walking back the "the 'Gaza Humanitarian Foundation' which is basically an arm of the Israeli government will handle all humanitarian aid to Gaza" thing and letting the U.N. back in. On the TV (I was watching some English-language French channel with my mom and her partner) there was speculation that this might have been a concession to international pressure. This seems like a step in the right direction. Let's hope so.

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Something a lot of Ranma fanfiction writers misunderstand is the whole thing about Soun needing one of his daughters to get married so he can secure the future of the dojo. This has nothing to do with casual misogyny, it would actually be the exact same if he had all sons. It's the marriage that's the important part, specifically giving the dojo as a wedding gift, because in Japan putting real estate in your will is basically donating it to the government with extra steps. The inheritance taxes are harsh. Giving the home your family lives in as a wedding gift is a loophole that Japanese parents have been using for so long that they didn't feel the need to explain it to a young teen audience.

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i think it's important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency

in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn't have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don't have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can't just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion

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https://gofund.me/b632ab50

I'm out of money until I get my next paycheck again on wednesday and need about 60$ to not overdraft, anything would help, im kind of struggling to stay positive balance in general without borrowing money from friends

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[“I’ve heard that “women aren’t visual” line countless times over the decade. It’s an idea that originated with Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s 1950s research and has become embedded in our culture as a biological truth. More current research has shown just how wrong Kinsey was on this point.

Dr. Michael Bailey’s oft-quoted study performed at Northwestern University in 2001 found that women were aroused by a wide variety of erotic images, as opposed to men who were more focused on erotic imagery aligned with their particular sexual orientation. In 2004, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine found that women became fully aroused within two minutes of watching a sexually explicit film—faster than the average man. Similarly, in 2006, researchers at McGill University used thermal imaging to measure the arousal rates of both men and women when watching adult films. They concluded that there was no difference between men and women in the time it took to become aroused.

I knew women were turned on by porn and I had the statistics to prove it. Critics asked me what porn for women looked like. I argued repeatedly that facial cum shots didn’t appeal to women; women wanted more romance, kissing, intimacy, and realism. I must admit I became prescriptive at times about what kind of content constituted women’s porn. It seemed easier to just talk about naked men and sensual couples than to get into philosophical discussions about “what women want.” Even so, I often did my best to explain that porn for women was about the audience and the perspective, not the sex acts involved. In 2003, I wrote, “My definition of good porn for women involves depictions of sex where the woman’s pleasure is paramount. It has to be about HER experience of sex, HER pleasure, and HER orgasm. Everything else is really just window dressing.”

The research conducted in 1994 by Ellen Laan at the University of Amsterdam was especially useful in summing up why I was making porn for women. Laan studied whether women’s subjective responses to porn were different to their physical reactions, by showing her subjects different types of porn, including the female-friendly film Urban Heat by Candida Royalle. She found that while their physical arousal was constant, “subjective experience of sexual arousal was significantly higher during the woman-made film. The man-made film evoked more feelings of shame, guilt, and aversion.” I wanted to offer the good stuff without all the shame, guilt, and aversion.”]

Ms. Naughty, from My Decadent Decade: Ten Years of Making and Debating Porn for Women, from the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, edited by tristan taormino, constance henley, and celine perreñas shimizu, 2013