Consider this a bridgebuilding post. Yesterday, I wrote about body positivity, fat pride, and the fake cult of “real woman-ness” on Role/Reboot. Next week, I’m planning a piece about the idea of “joyful porn.” Today, linking these two ideas, I want to introduce you to my favorite body-positive, pornographic tumblr.
[This is going to get NSFW if you keep scrolling. Consider yourself warned]
“Joyful porn” is a concept I’ve thought about a lot but have never been able to label with a catchy handle until Caitlin Moran helped me find the words. If you watch porn, which I do (Fun fact: 1/3 of porn is viewed by women), you know that most of what’s out there is shit. Instead of creativity, you find repetition and regurgitation. Instead of playful, you get mechanical. Instead of spontaneous, you get scripted, in both dialogue and action. Anybody who’s ever had sex knows that the kind of sex you have and the kind of sex you usually see are so dissimilar that it seems strange to call them both “sex.”
An Unnnhhh example
There are exceptions of course, the kind many of us spend too much time trying to find, and that’s part of what I’ll be addressing next week*. In the meantime, I want to introduce you to a tumblr I’m really enjoying called Unnnhhh. Try saying it out loud.
Unnnhhh was created by a friend to share his porn collection, except that “porn” doesn’t really begin to convey the variety, diversity, and incredible range of the images (and occasional gifs) he’s offering up.
On the surface, it’s a bunch of naked ladies, except sometimes they’re not naked, and sometimes they’re just paintings, and sometimes they’re wearing costumes, and sometimes all you can see is an elbow, or an ankle, or mess of leg hair. A postcard of vintage erotica, followed by a female bodybuilder, followed by an androgynous pixie in a tux, followed by an amateur fat girl taking her own picture in the bathroom mirror, followed by an anime chick with saucer eyes, followed by a leather-bound woman pegging a dude, followed by a page from a mod 60s catalogue, followed by an ode to hairy armpits.
The point is that variety is sexy, and sex appeal is not limited to the hairless, balloon-breasted, pancake-make-uped porn stars that encapsulate the modern perception of what constitutes of erotica. Nor is it limited to the celebrities that grace our magazine covers or the Victoria’s Secret models striking a pose on the side of city busses. I think it does something pretty awesome to our brain, oversexed as they are, to see this incredible array of images in a row. It scrambles our preconceived notions of what is beautiful, what is alluring, what is sexy.
If you’ve scrolled this far you’re about to see a smattering of the Unnnhhh content, much of which is NSFW, but I think that only the juxtaposition of images will actually convey just how powerful such a juxtaposition can be:
