Girls Like It Just As Much As Boys?

Slate's Laura Kipnis has a refreshingly frank discussion of girls, porn, and their new found freedom to experiment brought on by two new books: Pornified and Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Check it out and you'll get good insights like this:

[B]oth of these books also put me in mind of the Sadeian insight that dictating what people should do in bed, even in the name of virtue, is actually the height of perversity. Read Sade's 120 Days of Sodom if you can bear to, or watch Pasolini's brilliant, disgusting, utterly pornographic film version, Salo, which transplants the story to fascist Italy. The point is that people may like making their own preferences into norms, but that's a bit monstrous in itself.

So, returning to the betrayal question, Meghan, the rather Sadeian problem we find ourselves in, is that dictating the terms of intimacy and desire as stringently as Paul and Levy do invites a level of micromanagement, suspicion, and anxiety that's destructive of intimacy in its own right. After all, maybe the need to control another person and their body is also an intimacy issue.

Bravo, Laura.