Emily Witt

Emily Witt's new book is Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love. From her Q&A with Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

You write a bit about porn, and in one passage you say, “Watching porn left me more confident about my body.” That feels very different from what many people feel about porn.

Spending a lot of time at watching people make porn made me realize they were beautiful people, but they weren’t models. They weren’t Cindy Crawford or something. They were normal people with attractive bodies, and their bodies have imperfections and asymmetries, and they were really comfortable being naked, and joking about the noises their bodies made or the weird things that they might do during sex.

And then, watching porn, when you go on these tube sites, you just realize it’s so much less oppressive than it is to look at a fashion magazine. For me, as a woman, I guess the range of fetishes is vast. The things that I had always thought of as shameful or gross parts of my body are just really celebrated in porn. I don’t know. There’s just a lot of assholes. There’s a lot of hair. There’s a lot of things that, for me, compared to fashion and the world of fashion or reading Vogue where you have this vision of beauty that is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue