This piece had a bit of a delay on it, but it was originally written back in December as one of my first submissions to GirlzPorn.

What’s the Word?

Part of working for a small business means that your job is… flexible. One day I’ll be writing press releases, the next day I’ll be advising for a shoot. It’s kind of rad. One thing I do regularly is help with keywords/descriptive SEO, and a lot of that involves essentially setting the linguistic tone for the way our sites are perceived online. For an industry that is dominantly visual, words have great weight for how classify and interpret porn.

I’m lucky because I work for a sensual porn company, so the language is inherently softer, relying on primarily physiological terms and gentle, loving action words. There’s even a part of me that balks over words like pussy or the difference between ass, butt and bottom. Small potatoes. (For the record, I enjoy bum, but that doesn’t have the same connotation in the states, so it’s not great for SEO purposes.) None the less, it’s sometimes a bit of an uphill battle to get people to use the same respectful terms when referencing our sites, and that’s been a bone of contention for me.

To be perfectly honest, I like a little name-calling in bed. I enjoy dirty words, the way they feel and the way they load a situation… But I like them on my own terms, and my partners have always understood and respected why we use the words we use and when it’s okay to use them. The issue with the vast majority of porn is that the discussion surrounding the words we use is largely absent, or it’s subjugated by what people think will sell the best.

I don’t mean to sound like one of those alarmists who prattle on about how rappers call women “bitches and hos” and how that’s disrespectful. This is an entirely separate issue, and that discussion, while still valid, is a little played out. What frustrates me is having to remind other sites, blogs, tubes, forums to avoid calling the women on our sites sluts, talking about how filthy they are and often finding very creative ways of degrading what they do.

Allow me to get all women’s studies here for a second, because I feel this is a feminist issue. The vast majority of porn caters to the male gaze, so the actions of the male are universally valorized to the point that it’s assumed/ignored and the focus is on the women. For some reason, there’s this natural inclination to denigrate a woman with sexuality, so much that it’s become the absolute norm in porn. It’s the automatic setting for porn copyrighting. If you do not ask someone to use specifically non-demeaning language, it will be demeaning. It hardly matters what’s actually going on in the content… If there’s a sexualized woman, they’ll trot out that same old tired vernacular.

That said, I think there are lots of cases where calling someone a nasty pig-whore is part of the game. It’s part of the eroticism and it fits with the content. The performers are on board and ideally love hearing those words applied to their performance. There are many people out there like that, it’s just all about contextualizing the language. There are sites out there that do a good job at it, such as including little interviews with the performers or blogging about these issues. Hopefully this will become a bigger trend in more hardcore porn.

As for the rest of porn, that’s where sites like GirlzPorn come in. The more women take up space in the porn world and the more we solidify our place as a broad audience base for porn, the more it will shift away from catering to a uniquely male viewpoint. Then, there will be a time and a place for raunchy names, and a time for more erotic and descriptive language. It will make all language more special, more tailored to the situation and it will serve to enhance the pornographic experience for everyone.