Comments
Please wait...
Comments are closed.
Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.
Editors' Picks
is a proud member of the
media network
media network
All contents © Index Newspapers LLC
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Please, oh pretty please do this as part of a video for Hump!
{/sarcasm}
I don't hear it much now among the circle of friends I have, but when I was younger, I would hear lots and LOTS of women complain bitterly about porn, how it was misogynistic, gross, offensive, morally corrupt, etc, etc. Lots of guys who's girlfriends demanded they not look at porn. *yawn* These letters are completely typical and utterly believable.
This fight has probably been going on since the first cave man drew boobs on the wall of a cave. It will never end.
remember when women were pushing men's backs against doors all over the country and laughing at them for falling forward when they tried to touch their toes and women did it with ease and a haughty sneer? well, that stopped the nanosecond it got around that it was due to men's center of gravity being high and women's being low -- which suggested THEY WERE FAT and the wheels flew off that buggy!
I think that plenty of mistakes are made with generalizations:
A- Most A people like X, so if you are A and don't like X your experience is invalid to the conversation.
B- Most A people like X, but I'm A and I hate X so therefore most A people don't like X.
C- "Everyone knows" most A people like X, and I don't have to back that up with the slightest amount of evidence because "everyone knows" most A people like X.
D- You said "A people like X". As an A person who does not like X I reject any further arguments because you failed to explicitly mention exceptions and therefore, while I know most A people like X, I still will refuse to engage any further arguments. So nyaa.
And on and on...
Please go back on your medication. Nobody remembers that. Except, apparently, you.
The way the drill that I remember worked was to lower yourself, using a chair for support, until your back was perpendicular to the wall and the top of your head touching the wall. Then take the chair away. Then stand up, unassisted, without using your hands. Men can't do it, women can. And yes, it does have to do with center of gravity, but also with physiology of the female pelvis. But I don't remember anything about a suggestion that it was because women were fat.
"Men are generally more interested in and responsive to visual sexually arousing stimuli than are women. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that the amygdala and hypothalamus are more strongly activated in men than in women when viewing identical sexual stimuli."
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v7/n…
I mean, guys even look at other guys crotches more, regardless of sexual orientation: http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2007/…
Apparently, that makes me 'Nobody'.
The question is not about eyeballs and their relative accuracy. It's about what turns you on.
Men are also verbal. They speak languages. They write books, they write poetry, even erotic poetry. Yet, when it comes to sex, a higher percentage of men is turned out by images than is turned out by mere scene descriptions. And specific images: specific sex acts, specific body parts, often with very specific details.
Women are also visual. Women paint and appreciate paintings, they enjoy photographs, beautiful landscapes; they certainly look at people, their faces, their clothes, and find them attractive or unattractive. But when it comes to sex, women don't show the same tendency to be quickly turned on by images. They seem to prefer ambiance, music, environment, imagination; explicit images aren't that much of a turn on. Descriptions, fantasies, words work better.
Is this natural/genetic or cultural? Or both? Beats me. I'll leave this question up for the willing researchers.
The final point is that there is nothing offensive either way, because (a) being more visually excited in sex is not better and also not worse than being verbally aroused or being sensitive to atmosphere, and (b) yes, there are millions and millions of exceptions -- so, in your own life, with your own sex partners, you may very well have your own specific problems/tendencies that don't necessarily align with the majority (like gays, who are about 10% of the population).
Why the drama? If Dan had said that most people are straight, and gays are a minority, this letter writer would not have found that bad. Why think that saying "men are usually more / more often visually aroused than women" is offensive?
Okay, here's the dealio, kiddies. Most sex work is enslavement. Most representations of women in porn and the media are objectifying, demeaning, and misogynistic. This makes many women sensitive because this kind of shit ultimately comes back and hurts them through sexual harassment, assault, and a general devalued status in society.
You ask most women who watch porn or masturbate or who have lots of sex or talk openly about sex and how they got there, and they will tell you a long story of shame and fear. It has nothing to do with being visual.
So when I moved out here in my 20s after having just come out of a bad longterm relationship I wanted to casually date lots of different people. I assumed guys would be fine with that. I must have dated 20 guys, all of them your typical generic Capitol Hill hipster-type. Only one of them was ok with my seeing others. The rest were all seriously freaked out and insecure about it. I was shocked, especially when some of them were themselves total flirts who sometimes saw other girls.
Of course there is some variance... I have guy friends who have been screamed at for "cheating with porn", and that's just some crazy right there. Its also true that some dudes are addicted to porn, so there's crazy on both ends.
You should do what is best for you. If not reading Savage Love brings you more peace, then go for it. I'm personally too besotted to walk away, and when I disagree with his opinion it doesn't trouble me. I consider it an opportunity for introspection. Just my $0.02.
After that I just heard a bunch of mewling.
So:
"All men are visual creatures".... doesn't appear in Dan's response.
"All men" ... doesn't appear in Dan's response
"All women" .. doesn't appear in Dan's response
Did you just think 'omgsomeoneisdefendingporn' and copy paste a response? Was it really so much effort to come up with a rant that is actually consistent with what was written? I know it's fun to get angry at people on the internet, lord knows I'm doing it right now, but unless you actually address the points of your counterpart, you're letter is really just a masturbatory exercise.
women are more picky.
That should be in the Sex at Dawn book somewheres. You know, evolution n stuff. Like lotsa male animals will screw anything - as long as it has some mild resemblance to a female, they'll do it.
But female animals are famously harder to fool. You have to have a perfect, convincing copy of a male, or you have to pump her full of hormones (ie, make her DESPERATE) in order to fool her.
So male men don't even need a model. They just need a picture. Like sage grouse. Someone told me that male sage grouse will screw cow patties bc they are brown and lumpy like female sage grouse. Not makin it up.
More functional, actually. Women's eyes have better color sensitivity due to more rods (or cones, I don't remember which) on the retina than men's eyes.
When I was in college, I worked in a job for a brief while where I sifted through sand-like material with a binocular microscope, looking for mineral grains of a particular color. I was the only guy in a team of about a dozen, and was informed early on that EVERY guy who got hired on wound up quitting or getting fired because they just couldn't do the job up to their standards. And yes, I washed out, too. But then my ex always told me I had no color sense, and he was right!
This is so obvious, and such a crucial part of the problem, and yet it never makes it into these discussions about porn. Why is that?
I mean, this is why I mostly watch gay porn. The vast majority of straight porn does not make me feel sexually empowered. It makes me feel sick, and angry. This is not for lack of trying; I've got a strong libido and an appetite for sexy porn. There is something really wrong with this picture, and I think it deserves to be discussed.
Whatever's in that magic underwear desperately wants out, folks.
Lots more men than women look at porn/require visual stimulus to become aroused and orgasm than women! There are studies proving this!
There is more variety of porn catering to mens interest than women! This supports the previous case!
THUS the end result is more men seeking visual stimuli for erotic purposes!
No one is saying NO men get off on thinking about Harry Potter and Draco getting it on, or that NO women get off watching skinny women with giant fake boobs get ejaculated on, but lets be serious! There are some obvious societal trends going on here...
I agree with this. I can see why women may be put off anyone watching porn, when so much of it is so fucking awful in its attitude to women. I mean, fetishes are one thing, but the points are right, much of it (way too much of it) is about humiliation.
"Um...how many?"
"That's not funny!"
I get the impression some of you, like me, are transferring our own feelings of what we'd feel like if we were in porn actor/actress X's position to the porn. That can be valid but it can be problematic too. Especially if someone starts using how they feel about the porn to infer other peoples' motivations for watching it, or the actors' feelings about making it. I don't think that is happening in this discussion but I think it's something to keep aware of.
Having said that, I see mainstream porn as staged (obviously) and I suspend my disbelief when I watch it. And I, like others here, also prefer alternate porn which has some humour and doesn't have face shots. C'est la vie.
@41 Exactly!
@51 "More porn objectifying guys"? Mainstream straight porn already objectifies men completely! Objectification is not a zero-sum game: more female objectification does not mean less male objectification, or vice-versa. The men in mainstream straight porn, with very few exceptions, are just penises with bodies attached. I think it's a fairly safe bet that women would like mainstream porn more if it objectified men *less*.
Also, Dan is giving advice to a specific person in a specific situation. It's really you, the reader, who is making most of the generalizations.
And, really, when you're in the bedroom it is a lot more fun if you check your ideas about what is demeaning to women at the door and just let yourself be turned on by whatever it is that does it for you.
There, rant over.
Porn is fine. Love it. Really REALLY wish I could find actual decent lesbian porn...but that is like wishing for unicorns apparently. Whatever.
Your dude looks at/likes porn and still wants to fuck you? Where is the issue? I don't get it, personally.
Girls complain they don't look like the girls in the skin flicks. It's "unrealistic". Why don't they ever understand they have every right to point out to the porn-watching-unrealistic-expecting dude that HE has NOTHING even close to the skill or size of the GUY in the movie???
"Hmmmm. Let's fuck now, Lil' buddy. Did you see that guy's cock?...Think it's real?...Can they ACTUALLY airbrush THAT???...Of course size doesn't matter, honey...harder please..."
Just sayin'. Sweet dreams, Sleepy.
Well said. I fail to understand why some women seem to get so upset when it is asserted or suggested that there are general differences in sexuality or sexual interests between men and women. Take kinkiness for example. If it is true what Dan has written (and I believe) that "men are more likely to be kinky than women", that doesn't mean women are inferior to men because they are less likely to be kinky.
Same thing with the desire for sex. I happen to believe men are more likely to think about sex more often than women and to want sex more often than women. But again, assuming that's true, it doesn't mean women are inferior for not having the same level of sexual desire (nor does it mean men are inferior for thinking about and wanting sex more than women.) There's no rule stating the "right" amount of sex to have, the "right" number of hours to spend thinking about sex during a week.
While plenty of women like visual porn, the porn that seems to appeal to women most is the written word. Erotica. Romance novels. I'm a guy and while I've no interest in romance novels, I enjoy erotica (the more explicit stuff) as much as visual porn so I get the appeal. Words can be very powerful. And erotica can be visual in its own way. It's just that you use your imagination to visualize things, instead of having the visuals "fed" to you. Anyway, I think women like porn as much as men. It's just that their preferred type of porn tends to be different, more sex-romance porn as opposed to straight-ahead-fucking porn.
This, of course, is the classic (or a classic) anti-porn feminist argument against porn, that porn causes men to harm women.
There are two questions to be asked here. First, does porn cause men to harm women? I don't know if there are any definitive answers. I'm sure anti-porn feminists and others can cite studies which show it does and pro-porn (or anti-censorship) feminists and others can point to other studies which show it does not. My feeling is that porn may be a factor in the harm some men cause to women. But I think that these men were probably likely to do this anyway. I don't think porn turns gentlemen into monsters (and, yes, gentlemen look at porn.)
Second, even if it was proven that porn causes harm to women, would that be sufficient reason for censorship, justification to ban it? To anti-porn feminists (and others) probably yes. Just like the harm that alcohol caused in society caused anti-alcohol crusaders to campaign for Prohibition. Look at alcohol. There is absolutely no question that it causes harm to women (and to men.) Tremendous harm. Drunk drivers slaughter thousands of people every year. And there are countless more people killed or abused every year in drunken rages. (In fact, I bet a man who drinks a lot but doesn't look at much porn is much more likely to abuse his wife or girlfriend than a man who drinks very little but looks at a lot of porn.) So, should we ban alcohol for that reason? Modern day prohibitionists would argue yes. But I suspect very few people would agree with them.
Instead of what anti-porn feminists argue, that liberal attitudes toward porn go hand-in-hand with a "devalued status" of women in society, I think one could argue the opposite, that liberal attitudes toward porn go hand-in-hand with a liberal view of women in society.
Not Suprisingly, almost all men claimed that they were sexually aroused afterwards, but only a small amount of women said the same. But because they had everyone wired up down there, the scienceguys could actually messure the amount of arousement going on- and, needless to say, most of the women who claimed to find the pictures unsexy would still show clear signs of aurousment.
So much for the social component - Women are taught not to be visible, i.e. shallow, as someone pointed out earlier. and of course, a lot of het-porn is totally gross - doesn´t make it easier to confess, that it does in fact turn you (and me) on.
Here's the deal, lady teacher. Don't assume that ideology equals knowledge. Go check things every now and then, and keep an open mind. That's the secret of life.
For a quick smorgasbord that shows you a lot of what's around, in all kinds of porn, have a look at the collection at
http://tmv.proto.jp/#id=sexisnottheenemy…
There are options. Have a look at Vivid Video. Try some straight porn made by women (e.g. Ms Royale). You may find stuff that you'll like more.
Also, vote with your dollars. The less people buy certain topics ('demeaning', etc.), the less their makers prosper. The more you buy other topics ('empowering porn'), the more their makers prosper.
Having said that... Don't forget that what is 'demeaning' to one women is 'empowering' to another. Remember, there are submissive women who want to live their erotic lives as they choose -- not as part of some 'empowerment' fetish that some other women may have.
All in all, all those discussions about "mainstream porn is demeaning" sort of miss the point that porn has been diversifying enormously in front of my very eyes -- it's already not what it was like 10 years ago, and I see it only getting even more diversified.
It is difficult to know if all comments about "porn" refer to the same thing. If the stuff were more mainstream it would get labelled by type the same way books are in a library (i.e. mystery, westerns, romance, horror etc.).
It seems clear to me that some porn is psychologically unhealthy, and I do think that it can push watchers towards more unhealthy attitudes about women and sex in general than the watcher would have had if they had not viewed such unhealthy porn.
That having been said, however, I do not think that visual images of sex are automatically unhealthy just because sex is being depicted and watched. The foolish lumping of all sexual material into a single class called pornography has made it hard to discuss the subject with any clarity or usefulness.
While I still wish I saw more middle-aged people represented and a bigger variety of body types more equitably distributed, it was nice to see people SMILING as they were sexual.
If I had to identify my biggest objection to the mainstream porn I've seen (admittedly not too much), it would be the lack of joy.
I've seen a lot of porn over at least 4 decades and most porn definitely fits that category. While the acting is generally quite bad, you can usually suspend disbelief, put yourself in the male actor's position and pretend he is getting pleasure. Not so much for the women. For most porn, I can't look at what is happening to the woman and think I'd want that happening to me - the horrific positions, the facials, the extremely bad, fake orgasms, just leave me cold. Yes, there are some women who may like what is going on in those (there are exceptions to every rule), but from what I've heard from a heck of a lot of women, mostly no.
BUT - I agree there is porn out there that does do a better job of portraying women getting pleasure. Amateur porn seems to have a much higher portion of it and I suspect it's because the people doing it are doing it strictly for fun since there is no profit to be made. I've seen quite a few female orgasms in amateur porn that look real. I love that porn because I can imagine myself in the woman's position getting that pleasure. It's HOT! It looks like there's also some commercial porn like that too now. But, again, it's not the porn that most women are going to encounter and form their opinion off of.
However, I don't necessarily like the assumption that if a man is "humiliating" a woman, that it is against her will or somehow degrading to her. I, myself, like to feel like I'm being used as a fuck-toy purely for my husband's sexual gratification. And I like to watch porn on a fairly regular basis that enacts the same type of scenario. When my husband practically rapes me, he isn't degrading me or being sexist -- he's fulfilling my desires. And, in fact, because he's somewhat of a feminist himself and is generally opposed to objectification of women, he had to work to get to the point where he could make me feel sufficiently "used." And I don't believe the desire to be dominated sexually is all that uncommon among women.
I understand that male domination over women in pornography mirrors still-prevalent misogynistic attitudes in society, but a woman choosing to be dominated is just as empowering as a woman choosing to be dominant.
I'm calling bullshit. In porn, yes. But that should come as no surprise. It's porn.
But to say that in the media, generally, representations of women are objectifying and demeaning is a grossly outdated caricature, and it's high time that we recognized that. It sounds nice and plausible enough to say, but that's about as far as it goes. It's like, I heard someone say the other day that our culture glorifies rape. ...really?! No.. really?
There are now countless examples of positive representations of women in popular culture (especially in your state, represented as it is by a female governor and two female senators), so many that to begin naming them would be an exercise in overkill.
Sexists and sexism still abound, as is to be expected. But your comment needs to be more upbeat. To quote Earl Warren: “Where there is injustice, we should correct it. . . . And wherever corrections are achieved, we should add them permanently to our storehouse of treasures.”
But frankly, I never understood how guys identified with the men in porn - how can a guy with a 5-inch dick compare himself to one of those 9 or 10" monsters? That always confused me... unless it's just wish fulfillment and reality be damned!
@62: You say it's problematic "if someone starts using how they feel about the porn to infer other peoples' motivations for watching it". Well, we all do this all the time, about everything, but okay. I think the best solution is for men to really talk, openly and honestly, about porn and its problems. What I find so often in these discussions is a reluctance for people to admit that it has any problems at all; instead, people are slotted into pro-porn (men) and anti-porn (women) categories, and the whole thing devolved into an argument about freedom of speech. The issue of the representation of women in porn gets obscured; in fact, it gets stigmatized ("so you believe in censorship, then??") What if we took censorship out of the equation and just discussed the problem @38 brought up:
For the record, I don't think straight men are turned on exclusively by sadism. But surely you can understand why someone would start to wonder about that, especially when so many of us don't get that vibe from gay porn.
I should add that I've seen enough good porn to not be put off by "porn" in general. But that shit that all the college boys watch? It's garbage, and no, I don't think it's good for their souls. And there's no fucking way anyone can tell me it has no effect on their attitudes toward women.
Part of the dishonesty of both feminist and fundamentalist Christian attacks on porn has been that they tend to find the most offensive photographs they can and then speak about all "porn" as if it were those images. Even the studies purporting to show porn's influence on behavior were very selective about what images they chose, favoring violent scenarios for their experiments so they would stand a better chance of producing the desired result ("porn makes men violent.")
Look at Kersy's ridiculous generalization above, saying that not just the majority of porn but the majority of media representations of any kind demean women and encourage violence against them. With so many educated women taking a similar stance (and a great many less-educated women sticking with the traditional religion-and-family-values-based stance) is it any wonder that men learn early on to lie about this topic? It's just too risky to tell the truth.
Only in a forum that allows anonymity would you find this many men openly defending porn.
As for the people who say Dan is awesome: my mind chooses to agree.
All I know is, my girlfriend/partner likes to look at and watch porn. Specifically kinky stuff. Although she often does that alone and wacks off at home while I'm unavailable & at work, we do also look at/watch it together sometimes, it's fun! Makes for some hot sex. Meow.
"You ask most women who watch porn or masturbate or who have lots of sex or talk openly about sex and how they got there, and they will tell you a long story of shame and fear. It has nothing to do with being visual. "
So, I guess my mom was right, after all: good girls don't and girls who do are damaged goods...
So what if they are?
I think it's pretty juvenile to insist that somebody who is turned on by sadism in a sexual context is therefore sadistic in all other aspects of his life. Do you think that being turned on by thoughts of sex with an Asian means that all you ever want is sex with an Asian, or that you only want to hang out with Asians, or that you'll only buy things from Asians, or whatever? I doubt it. Why, then, this ridiculous insistence that porn, which can gratify a sadistic urge, causes men to treat women like shit all through society? It's exactly these pat little cause-and-effect constructions that jaundice my opinions of these porn naysayers.
If you think that porn causes these misogynistic reverberations throughout our society, consider some societies that are largely porn-free and then consider how feminist they are, and then get back to us.
Who did that? He just asked an innocent question, because he thought it was weird, and not like gay porn. As for me, I think the answer to his question is "no", as I said. But a number of people on this thread have admitted that the humiliation of women in porn is a problem, and a lot of porn relies on the humiliation of women. If the big question is, "why does she have a problem with me watching porn?", don't you think that's kind of important to consider?
Mainstream porn depicts these acts because it is fantasy personified by actors and actresses. It serves a demand for men fantasizing about these acts because many guys have no hope of actually participating in these acts with women. If lots of women loved facials, then it wouldn't exactly be novel, would it? Not many women are so lusty that they actually want a guy to spray his load all over their face. Most women would find that rather gross.
Women hold all the cards, sexually. Some men enjoy seeing them portrayed as enthusiastic "sluts" because it allows them to escape that reality, however briefly. Don't be surprised that type of porn doesn't always turn women on; it isn't made for women.
I don't think it's any inherent sexism beyond what old fat white guys just sort of automatically have; it's the same mindset that creates a year in which there are twenty movies that are lame remakes of lame TV shows and comic-book sequels, and one movie for grownups. It's the same mindset that causes car designs to keep getting larger and larger and LARGER until you have the fucking Tahoe.
Porn-as-business movies don't generally do much for me. The outliers sometimes do - the stuff Candida Royalle made, for instance. Some of the Vivid Video series. Some amateur stuff is good. I think part of the reason gay porn is often more interesting (read: arousing) is that it isn't quite as big a business, so it hasn't gotten as commodified and homogenized.
And I agree with @50 - until they get rid of those horrific talons on the women, I cannot bring myself to watch mainstream porn. I'm really squicked by long fingernails near delicate parts. It'd be like making a blowjob video where all the fellators had long, sharp fangs, or showing guys masturbating with bear traps.
I really want to google "vampire blowjobs," because I expect it exists. But I'm at work and they're uptight here.
Being pro-porn and wanting to discuss its implications or what porn might reflect about its watchers (or might not) are not mutually exclusive things.
Porn is a vastly diverse industry, though like most media industries it has some tendencies in the mainstream. Being critical of the film industry doesn't mean I want movies to stop existing. Being critical of porn doesn't mean I want it entirely eradicated. The difference of course is that porn is taboo, so it makes it easier for some people to derail the entire conversation and try to make it some black and white issue.
*sigh* I'll stick to gay and otherwise happy porn, and the men who like it, thanks.
Most mainstream porn is marketed on the hotness of its actresses, not the amount of humiliation they are willing to endure. And most of it is pretty middle of the road, as far as sex acts go. You may find the inauthenticity of its actresses distasteful, but remember: It isn't being produced to empower women- it's being produced to help guys that can't get any action jerk off.
Now, there are men who consume porn which specifically depicts the degradation and humiliation of women. There are also men who consume porn which specifically depicts the degradation and humiliation of MEN. The porn world is incredibly diverse, as diverse as human sexuality.
As long as porn is being produced consensually and legally, there is no point in tsk-tsking and moralizing about the fantasies people want to see enacted on screen. Being disappointed that some men don't consume what you, personally, find "happy" porn is just plain silly. Let them have their fantasy.
Another reason porn got more degrading, though, is probably just crassly commercial: it's easier for porn peddlers to stand out in a crowded market by constantly pushing the envelope. At this point, though, there's so much rougher stuff out there that this may not be such a good strategy anymore.
On a more serious note: I'm female. I use porn. (But not the kind with the faked orgasms. Ew.)