Oprah has Evolved!

I nearly choked on my tongue upon seeing this month's issue of O magazine (a fabulous mag, by the by). A regular feature is Cindy Chupack's advice column, and this month the question is about porn.

Sheila from Illinois writes, "Am I the only woman in the world who likes watching porn with her husband?" and instead of shutting this woman down, Cindy gets down with porn. She says this reader's question inspired her to start asking women friends whether they watched porn, and also to start researching methods of obtaining it.

I, Cindy Chupack, used to be slightly pornophobic myself. I thought porn was something a man watched alone in a dark room and then stashed away so his girlfriend wouldn't find it....

Okay, I admit it. Until Sheila challenged my thinking, I'd only watched porn surreptitiously, in the name of research. (You know; meet his parents, meet his pals, meet his porn.) But most women I recently asked admitted to watching porn with a boyfriend or husband. I began to wonder if I should be writing Sheila for advice rather than the other way around.

Cindy does her research and determines that reader Sheila is "enlightened and cool." She goes on to mention Blowfish.com ("as user friendly as Amazon.com") and the glory of On Demand (a great friend of the housewife).

This is a HUGE jump forward for Oprah, whose talk show enraged me two years ago when addressing purported porn addiction. In the November 2005 episode, Oprah spouts misleading and unfounded statistics about the "growing epidemic" of porn addiction, effectively perpetuating marital alienation around sex and porn consumption. Rather than encouraging women to talk to their spouses to understand the role of pornography in their husbands' lives, she armed women with misinformation. If your husband watches porn, he must be addicted. If he's addicted, he is psychologically ill and the only means of recovery is absolute abstention from pornography.

Oprah is so incredibly redeemed...between her magazine's two-page feature on women-friendly porn penned by Violet Blue, another show encouraging consumption of erotic material, and the aforementioned feature, she is finally doing what I'd always hoped she would--use her position of extreme influence over American women to further sex positivity and communication about sex between men and women. This is no small thing.

Comments

[Brian]

Wow, that is great to hear, especially following Violet Blue's magazine article as an antidote to the debacle of Tyra Bank's recent show focusing on women watching porn. Thanks for reporting on this, Rebecca! As a guy, I don't really flip through "O" magazine too often... :)

[Rebecca R]

yeah, apparently Tyra needs to get with the times like Oprah...