I doubt that very much. Outanding! Funny as hell, too.

The trend is to equate pornography with normal sexual expressions. In movies, it is usually the wealthy girl who gets the guy, unless of course she's a hooker, so the prince charming fantasy applies both ways. Unfortunately pornography does not. Pornography promotes the debasement of sexuality and promotes women's alienaton from their own sexuality. Most women who work in porno films only do it once because it is so degrading. This doesn't encourage women to feel that sexuality is something for them. It continues to promote sex as violence and hatefulness. It's not a joke. As for that figurine, it's been the subject of a lot of jokes, but it can't be properly evaluated out of its cultural context. Fertility and sexuality were probably linked at that time in a way that is not readily understood by modern humans living in our over populated world.

two programmers on a late night debugging session, cold sausage pizza and warm Mountain Dew cans off to the side, while she and I arm-in-arm debug source code?

Fantasize and let fantasize. Or, as George Carlin said, anyone who drives slower than you is an "idiot". Anyone who drives faster is a "maniac".

Excellent strip..uh, comic strip I meant...geeze.

In one breath we praise the prehistoric venus for our imagining its being a reflection of veneration of the female's magical reproductive capacity and fertility and in the next we condem it as yet another example of female objectification, as if they can't be one and the same.

More astute, however was the observation that something as mundane as nice shoes could be a turn on to perverted fetishizing men (as if obscene spending on shoes by women weren't some kind of equally deranged psycho sexual expression), and consider that the most reviled of sexual perverts in our society, men who would lust after infants and adolescents, can feast on all the visual gratifiers they could desire by looking in any magazine marketted to mothers! We are truly nuts...er, crazy.

It's just not clear what the ultimate message is. At first, it looks like it's speaking to the concept that Men and Women, and even people among the genders, have different ideas of what is pornographic.

Pornagraphy being defined as: Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.

from Late Greek pornographos, writing about prostitutes

But then, reading on, it gets more complex.

Was it that the Archaeologist who made the statement, and I'm assuming he's a male, had a breast fetish, so the large-breasted and over-proportioned figurine triggered his own views of what is sexualized, prompting him to exclaim that it was "bordering on the pornographic?"

Or was it: leave it to a chick-lit female to misconstrue the fact that a missing head on a "pornographic" figurine had ANYTHING to do with a patriarchal mal-intention, rather than an established custom or tradition with respect to human representation in the crude sculpture?

Or is it that "chick-lit females have it all once they don the tiara", meaning that chick-lit females who get their prince have somehow transcended in some way, whether negatively or positively, into a realm where they are actually living their Pornographic fantasies every day?

Or is it poking fun at the fact that males are wired in such a way that a simple visual display could be considered Porn, and females are more psychologically and emotionally tied into a complex fantasy and plot line, showing that there's something wired more into their ideas of security and safety, and that contributes to their sexual arousal as per the definition of pornography. (which feels like a non-chick-lit type of conclusion)

It's provocative, this comic strip, and I like it, I'm just wondering what the hell she's trying say with it - it seems to jump all over the map. Is it snarky? Maybe it's overt, and I'm reading way too much into it?

I rarely post to Salon letters but WTF?

Pornography isn't a joke. Pornography kills. Pornography gets women raped. And this comic strip is equating that with the desire to live securely and financially well-off? WHAT?! Those are not comparable in any way. You're equating the desire of females to not have to marry some mouth breathing blue-collar slob to the desire of some males to gang rape some poor drug-addicted female? WOW. Salon is way overboard on this. Broadsheet readers, WHERE ARE YOU?!

and relies on old, tired ideas about women's desires and female sexuality in general. Many recent studies have indicated that American women's sex drives are equal to men's, and often even higher. There have also been surveys which point to the fact that women find sensual images very arousing (so not just mens' statuses and wallets), they just don't find violent imagery as appealing as men seem to.

As women gain more access and more power in our current society, they will seek out sexual relationships which gratify and satisfy them rather than simply trying to please men or fit into the porn "mold". Unfortunately, as the more powerful gender, men ARE more sexually empowered in current times, hence the fact that porn and movies are generally marketed towards them. Most mainstream porn is designed to degrade not just the women in the porn, but female viewers as well. The more women say NO not just to watching porn which degrades women (unfortunately most of it does), but also say NO to boyfriends and husbands who insist on openly viewing it in front of them and act as if it's "normal" to watch something with the name "Pounding" or "Dumpster Sl*t" in the title, the more empowered we will be as females. We're allowed to say, "I don't accept that you watch that. That is a deal breaker," and we should! We can have high sex drives, low sex drives, fetishes, whatever--but we don't have to accept the mainstream representation of women in porn as waiting receptacles ready to be used, degraded, and thrown away. We are more than receptacles. But we also like sex just as much as men. These things are not mutually exclusive.