Why don't women blog about porn?

A handful of men-penned posts on porn this week raise the question. The answer may be ugly.

Ever notice how many male tech bloggers defend porn like it was their religion?

This week, two big B-list bloggers, MG Seigler and Ryan Tate, came out waving the fleshpot flag with gusto.

Tate's piece takes the now-common tack of crying hypocrysy over Apple's ban on porn apps. He notes that Phillip Shoemaker, Apple’s man in charge of the App Store, had among those he follows on Twitter several “escorts” and porn “actresses”. Tate finds great irony in this, since Shoemaker is charged with keeping the App store free from porn. Of course, it’s very possible, as Tate admits somewhere in paragraph 15, that this could be because Shoemaker autofollows those who follow him, which makes this book-of-a-post a complete non-story. No matter. Any rhetorical tool to get porn in the App Store is a good one for Tate.

On Monday, MG Seigler, another porn advocate, wrote a glowing piece about a partnership between Playboy and Zivity, a site that uses a veneer of artistic "classiness" to lure women who might not otherwise partake in amateur porn to denude themselves for the masses.

MG didn’t mentioned in the story that Zivity CEO Cyan Bannister is also employed by a host on TechCrunch TV. That may have something to do with his gushing story: “Zivity is a great site for women and photographers who aren’t afraid to get a little racy to express themselves and potentially be discovered.” Hmm. Interesting that no women tech bloggers have expressed similar enthusiasm for this story. Try a Google blog search on Zivity. Nothin from the women.

Why is that?

MG’s colleague at TechCrunch Evelyn Rusli did once hint at an opinion on the subject in general. In April, she dared to use the qualifier “gross” in her post about an SEC regulator who spent 8 hours a day at work ogling porn. That post drew some charming comments from TC readers, like “Chris”:

Is this a report or an op-ed? Who the f*ck cares if you think porn is "gross" or "disgusting"? You're attacking and opining on porn in general, which is perfectly legal. (No I'm not a porn hound. And yes, those words make you seem like a cold sexless b!tch.)

Charming, no?

Thank heavens for brave men willing to stand up for... Zivity?

Turns out the likes of Chris may have something to do with the general silence among women. Stanford scholar Mary Eberstad notes that women who blog about porn are regularly beaten into submission, verbally speaking:

Blogging recently about the subject on National Review Online, for example, Kathryn Jean Lopez remarked in public about the quality of the torrent of emotional e-mails her comments provoked. Many of them, she reported, were “terrifying.” Cathy Ruse, who worked on the issue of pornography during the mid-1990s for the National Law Center for Children and Families and again later for the Family Research Council, reports similarly: “I have been involved in various public policy debates in the United States for twenty years and I have never encountered anything like the pornography debates. . . . I have never experienced attacks that were so abusive and personal, including angry ranting messages on my home telephone and horrible e-mails.”

Too bad all the chivalry has gone to defending the “great sites” that help women “express themselves.”

MG, I do like your writing, but I think you could find a better cause.

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