"It's like a big Mac truck cut across three lanes of my soul"

Lindsey over at Theology & Geometry has been kicking my ass in the smart, insightful feminist department. See her take down that whiny Maureen Dowd. Watch her kick the abortion debate's ass. And today, she brilliantly takes on pornography. Lindsey, I tip my hat to you. Wow. Anyway, with all this cooter talk, I've been thinking a lot about porn, because, obviously, part of what's going on here is that all these cooters are being turned into camera-ready cooters. And I was just coming to post about porn, and there's Lindsey, smarter and more insightful. Read her first. Then let's talk about what, in the end, bothers me about porn. What bothers me about porn is that it presents such a simplistic and false notion of what it's like when we want you*. And then, it seems like, in order for you--and sometimes us--to recognize our real, complex desires for you, they have to mimic that falseness. Now, I know that porn is mostly created by men to be consumed by men** and so expecting it to accurately reflect women's desires is probably asking too much. But there's a way in which I'm like "Dudes, we're having a huge barbecue right here. Come have some beer" and y'all are like "but we really like eating these flowers. They're so young and tender and beautiful" which just leaves me dumbfounded. How is that filling? Let's talk bluntly. In most porn, the ideal girl is in her early twenties and beautiful and willing to fuck any man that comes along. Now, I don't blame you for the "beautiful" and "willing to fuck any man that comes along;" it's the "early twenties" part that just baffles me. And this is nothing against girls in their early twenties. I have been a girl in my early twenties. But god damn, what did I know about my own desire at 18 or 20 or 22? Had I ever wanted someone so much that it jolted me from a dead sleep at that age? Did I ever smell a certain brand of cigarette smoke and have to sit the fuck down? Did I ever lay there on my living room floor listening to you trying to catch your breath next to me wondering, with delight, "what the fuck am I doing and when can I do it again?"*** No. I spent my early twenties drunkenly groping whosoever would grope me back. I had a good time, but nothing as earth-movingly powerful as it is now. And, to hear my mom and her friends talk, it just gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view). And I'm thrilled and amazed by it. It's awesome. Which makes me even more confused about why your commodified fantasies feature girls who are so young. Why, in your fantasies, do you choose to miss out on this? * For the sake of this post, we're talking about heterosexual desire. **and--woo hoo--we could go into some interesting shit here, but we won't. ***In all fairness, I also thought "shit, I wish I'd vacuumed."