Saturday, June 26, 2010

TFIFI: Porn!

To quickly get the "porn vs. erotica" argument out of the way, before we even start: I have never heard any definition of "erotica" that didn't translate to "the porn that I happen to like." (Or worse, soft fuzzy wuzzy vaseline-lens porn that's all about cunnilingus and spooning. Because rough sex is evil and all women hate it.)

So, in a post that is apparently rocking the Internet or whatevers, Twisty Faster vs. Porn. Oh, and also science, a little bit.

The setup: a scienceblogger proposes a mostly-tongue-in-cheek "experiment" in which he watches a shit-ton of porn, then reports whether his view of women has changed. Not really scientific, but as a silly little blog-project, seems unobjectionable to me--he also discusses a lot of more real research on the effects of porn.

Hahaha! An experiment where you have to watch tons of porn! That’s a funny joke! It reminds me of real sexology experiments. Like the ones where subjects are naked and “invasive probes and electrodes” are inserted into their vaginas. Those researchers are, of course, totally objective professionals when it comes to getting grant money to make porn right in their own labs.
It would be better to never study what goes on inside vaginas, and leave them as enigmatic, untouchable mysteries forever. To do otherwise is undoubtedly both sexual and wrong.

Also, everyone doing vagina research must be a straight man, because science is like totally a dude thing, right?

You know, the usual. Pornography is “free speech.” Pornography is only harmful to the user when he is a deviant perv to begin with. Male aggression is associated with buttloads of porn use only in a select few previously-messed-up douchebags. ‘Normal’ porn consumers, i.e. ‘most’ men (fully 98% of all men, apparently, and 80% of all women), are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and brimming with contentment. It’s the kook-and-psychopath minority out there who get all compulsive on your ass, or who act out all rapey, giving well-adjusted exploiters a bad name.
Well... yeah. Exactly. Repeating a valid argument in a snotty voice hasn't counted as a counterargument since fifth grade.

(What I did above was a penetratingly revealing rephrasing, okay? Sssh.)

Goldman cites no research on the effects of pornography on the pornulated women themselves, or of porn culture on women’s status within the sexbot continuum.
This is the great paradox of Twisty Faster: the insistence that women should never be viewed as sexbots, combined with continual annoyance that so many dumb sluts go around being sexbots.

What if--I'm just blue-skyin' here--there was a woman who had been photographed naked but was not a sexbot? What if this woman liked to read old science fiction, grew tomatoes on her balcony, had been photographed naked, was afraid of sharks, and loved the smell of the earth after a summer rain? Is calling her a "pornulated sexbot" really an insult to our culture--or to her?

Second question: does updating "been photographed naked" to "been photographed covered in welts and tears with one man's cock in her ass and another's fingers in her cunt" change a goddamn thing above?

In fact, he seems to suggest that there are but two possible stances on porn. You’re either for it, or you’re for banning it. He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.
Yes. The difference is that the former is possible but ill-advised, and the latter is completely fucking impossible. Because the desire for porn is, essentially, the desire to masturbate. I don't get off if I don't fantasize. Why is borrowing someone else's fantasies different? Certainly porn can be unethically produced and often is, but that's not a fundamental problem--the concept of filming consenting adults fucking and then jerking off to the film seems dandy to me.

Anyway, what the hell kind of revolt is this going to be where people won't masturbate anymore? I know, I know, that's twisting the argument, after the revolution people will masturbate strictly to thoughts of cuddles and frank emotional discussions. (Wait... is cuddling exploitative? Like if the woman is only a cuddle object to you? Problematic.) Or while facing a blank wall.

Like all men who claim to have a bunch of sex-poz feminist BFFs and who consider that access to porn is guaranteed under the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women,
"Claim to?" What am I, chopped liver? Oh, that's right, I'm the wrong sort of woman, thus removing my voice and vote is best for society. FEMINISM!

Hey, another question: what about gay porn? Like, with two dudes? Would two-dudes porn be okay? I can usually get off to that.

And a serious question: is it the specific porn actress that we're worried about being used, or the general idea of women? Because if it's the specific actress, the answer is to only watch ethically made porn where you can be reasonably sure that everyone involved is sober and giving informed consent and not paying off a pimp or something. (Yes, this exists. I think.) And if it's the latter, I feel like Twisty is confusing sexual attraction with use. As long as sex isn't the only way someone interacts with femininity, I frankly enjoy it when it's one of the ways.

Goldman doesn’t appear to grasp that patriarchy — a social order predicated on the oppression of women as a sex class — is actually real, and that as such, ours is a culture of domination wherein the ‘art form’ known as pornography is the graphic representation of rape.
No. It's the graphic representation of sex. There's so much footage of so many different kinds of sex out there in Pornland, that saying "all porn is rape" is equivalent to saying "all sex is rape." At which point there is no such thing as sex, at which point we are no longer on Earth-1218.

There's some back-and-forthing about the comments to someone else's blog that I'm going to skip over because at some point it's just not worth it to metametametametablog everything, but what Twisty considers the money quote is:
Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don’t think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture.
But how does the sex life of a woman become rape if someone takes a picture?

Look. I'm not going to wear myself out defending Max Hardcore and Joe Francis here. Sectors of the porn industry--I'm not sure how dominant those sectors are, but they're not small--are sleazy as fuck and treat women like shit. (There are also producers like NoFauxxx and Pink & White that maintain excellent reputations for operating in above-board and decent fashion.) But let's talk about the very concept of porn here, not the execution. I'm naked right now, as I type this, and I'm kind of playing with a dildo, just idly. (My writing process is very complex.) If I take a picture right now and sell it, am I--necessarily, intrinsically, 100% of the time--getting raped?

And don't tell me that isn't porn, unless you want to explain exactly where the line is. If the answer is "it's porn when it's rape!" that would actually be awesome, because then we can still have lots of videos of people fucking! Whee, we all agree now, let's go home.



Comments next! Oh I do love the comments.


POSTSCRIPT: After I wrote this, I went and jerked off to some porn. (Don't worry, I only use organic free-range artisanal porn.) I'm not trying to be difficult or whatever by mentioning this, I just think it's funny. And now I'm much more relaxed. Ahhh.

39 comments:

  1. Feels good to hate idiots, doesn't it?

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  2. I'm not worried about porn turning guys violent, I'm worried about it turning them from heterosexual into, um, pornosexual. Which is to say, I briefly dated two different guys who were really into porn and both of them turned down actual fucking in favour of looking at me while they jerked off.

    Disclaimers: I'm not against being looked at from a few feet away while my partner gets off, or indeed using him for wank material while I get off (but I think it should be a garnish for sex, not a substitute for it!). I don't think porn will magically turn every single guy into a pornosaur (but I think it's a lot more common than it turning guys violent) - a person needs to have a predisposition to porn addiction, probably. And it's not like these guys were sleazy or antifeminist or jerks - both of them were very sweet and treated me well.

    But when I want a good pounding and I start initiating stuff and my partner pushes me off him and says "go lie over there" and jerks off to me like I'm a poster on his wall, every single time...that's just fucked up.

    So now I'm very wary of a potential partner's porn consumption and try to ascertain what's up before things get too relationshippy (one of the pornosaurs I dated worked at an adult video store and the other got off to internet porn several times a day; if a guy just looks at stuff every now and then, I figure he's probably safe).

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  3. This sounds like it was somehow a bad thing to favor other things over intercourse.

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  4. Hey, I love all kinds of things besides intercourse. But the vast majority of them involve interacting - touching, kissing, etc.

    "Go lie naked on the couch while I sit in this chair a few feet away and jerk off" doesn't do much for me. And frankly, I feel that when a guy has access to an actual naked woman who wants to touch and be touched and he prefers to jerk off to her instead - not just once in a while but always - that's a goddamn problem.

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  5. p.s. I use the words "sex" and "fucking" to encompass a whole range of nakedness and touching and orgasms, not just good old P-in-V. Perhaps knowing this will help you understand my first post a bit better.

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  6. Anon - Hey, it's better than hating smart people or loving idiots. I guess liking smart people would also be good, but it seems less popular.

    Perversecowgirl - That does suck. (And it's sort of weird; I've never met a guy who wanted to do that.) Like I said, porn is not universally good in all situations, it's just not an intrinsic evil. There's also a lot of men and women who look at porn and have happy sex lives.

    Classless - It's a bad thing to favor things your partner doesn't like and be inflexible about it--not "go to jail" absolute bad, but definitely "relationship ending" relative bad.

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  7. Speaking of liking smart people. Holly, have you ever come across TED.com. There are some great lectures on there (some that are even about sexy times) that I think you would really enjoy.

    Great post!
    -Sarah x

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  8. There should be a question mark in there. Meh.

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  9. perversecowgirl - My second wife's ex-husband was apparently the same way; preferred jacking off while looking, no touching. It struck me as really weird; that was the only time I'd heard of it until now.

    However, I do like looking for a minute before touching most of the time, kind of first stage of foreplay. And couple of times when she was really tired and I was really horny I jacked off with her, but I always asked her to put an arm around me or something; some contact is better than none to me.

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  10. Or worse, soft fuzzy wuzzy vaseline-lens porn that's all about cunnilingus and spooning. Because rough sex is evil and all women hate it.

    That there is one of the biggest reasons I like this blog. Because that was what I used to think. I thought women's attitude toward sex came in the following categories:

    Women who prefer cunnilingus.
    Women who don't enjoy anything BUT cunnilingus.
    Women who think anything but missionary is dirty.
    Women who don't enjoy any sex at all.

    I thought women almost exclusively masturbated with fingers on clit and dildos were almost exclusively a man's idea of a sex toy for women.

    This blog is helping it sink in that real women are tremendously more varied in what they enjoy, and a lot of stuff that I thought was totally male fantasy is really enjoyed by many women.

    P.S. Holly, my porn collection would bore you to tears.

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  11. Couple thoughts about porn:
    1. What perversecowgirl said. Men my age didn't grow up with easy, hardcore porn (more like finding a Penthouse is the most exciting thing that happens all year, OMG! must hide it! at least that's how it went for me), so I've never been with anyone where it was a necessary part of sexual relationships. More like: it's there if ya feel like it. Don't know if this is a media-created worry, but I do worry about little boys now getting a little bent as saplings by the sheer volume of it and how that will affect my daughter when she's grown up.

    2. My biggest problem with mainstream porn is that it's so passionless. A failure of "Acting!" I guess. I'm also annoyed by camera-angle positions that don't look like they feel good. This is where I start to have sympathy for the radfem position. I believe women should be free to sell their performance, but it's totally depressing and ruins it when she can't convincingly sell that this is sex she wants and is enjoying the hell out of. Then it feels like participating in exploitation and leaves an icky aftertaste. (And if it's M/F porn, there's usually no sense that he is aroused by HER and wants fuck HER.) Although I can't go so far as to call sex that you wouldn't want if someone wasn't paying you "rape," I see the logic trail they're following.

    In my perfect world (therefore, it happens in my imagination) porn would be an extension and playing out in graphic, violent detail of some spine shivering scene from movies or TV (yeah, I'm marathoning True Blood right now). In fact, one recent spark for me was a super-intense rope performance video by Twisted Monk. I hear the kink porn world is much better, but I haven't invested much time into finding things specifically to my taste. It'll be awesome when we can all project our fantasies and computers will gin up the perfect porn for us. :)

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  12. (Apologies if this is a double post, my first didn't show up)
    Twisty said:
    He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.

    Your post advocates a

    ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante

    approach to fighting the Patriarchy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (Your idea may have additional flaws that vary from culture to culture.)

    ( ) Financial incentives are prone to abuse
    (X) There is no central authority capable of managing this plan
    ( ) Men will be oblivious to the plan
    ( ) Women will be oblivious to the plan
    (X) It is defenseless against actual, violent scumbags
    ( ) It will work for about two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
    (X) It prohibits anonymous or casual relationships
    (X) Requires immediate, total cooperation from everybody
    (X) Replacing one tryrant with another is hardly productive
    ( ) It would be too easy to anonymously destroy somebody's reputation

    Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

    ( ) Constitutionality of laws
    (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for culture
    ( ) A great fraction of men being bona-fide nice people
    (X) Life is not like a [(Greek)/English/American/German] [(play)/Novel/Religious Tract]
    ( ) Resistance to forcibly breaking up already-existing relationships
    (X) Just how difficult it would be to overturn the economic system all at once
    (X) Turning a majority of the population into outcasts or criminals is problematic
    (X) Homosexuality
    ( ) Polyamory and non-traditional relationships
    (X) Consensual D/s and other kinks


    And the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
    ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
    ( ) Sexuality should not be the subject of legislation
    (X) Sexuality should be free
    ( ) We should be able to frankly talk about sexuality without censorship
    (X) Why should we trust you and your administration?
    ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    (X) Pervasive cultural bias is very difficult to correct at a single stroke
    ( ) Women are also at times complicit in maintaining the status-quo

    Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    ( ) Sorry, but I don't think it would work.
    (X) You must be an angry, angry person.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

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  13. gave me a checklistgasm...

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  14. ^I second that, fellow anon ;-)

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  15. However, I do like looking for a minute before touching most of the time, kind of first stage of foreplay. And couple of times when she was really tired and I was really horny I jacked off with her, but I always asked her to put an arm around me or something; some contact is better than none to me.

    Please notice that I did say it's fun to use a boy for wank material sometimes (and be used that way in return). I'm highly visual, and when I come home to find my bf waiting for me in stripey stockings (a huge weakness for me) and something tiny, slutty and transparent, I look. And I look and I look and I look. But then, as you said, comes the touching. :D

    It's the impersonalness of the pornosaur wank ritual that bugs me. I prefer to feel included in the proceedings - like by my partner straddling me and coming all over my stomach, or humping my hip until he comes, or both of us cuddled up and masturbating together. But the pornosaur thing completely turns me into an object...one time I started to lie back so I could masturbate, too, but my partner pulled me back up into a sitting position (and I can't orgasm that way) because if I reclined he couldn't get as good a view of my breasts. :P

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  16. Nom de Plumage wins this thread, sorry everyone else, thanks for playing.

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  17. Nom de Plumage totally wins the entire internet right now, not just the thread. And can keep it until someone else wins the internet.

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  18. The fun part of people like Twisty (and the lil' vigilante fantasy she engaged in, and Nom shot the Hell out of) is that they propose what would basically require a fair amount of violence, while decrying the use of same.

    "We want to have our cake and eat it too!" doesn't work in the real world.

    And I'm not a "pornasaur", but can (and have, and will again) get off on watching a partner masturbate. Actually... with anyone but Spoon (or someone Spoon gives permission), that's about all I'm willing to do...

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  19. From the articles that Twisty and her commenters link to, I think they're mainly against gonzo porn, e.g., porn that tries to answer the question of how many dicks you can stick into a woman at once. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't get too angry about porn of two people having ordinary sex that they both truly enjoy.

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  20. Cat - She didn't say that. She said porn. There was no "only the bad stuff" clarification--and in fact, several suggestions that she really meant all porn.

    (Also, what's intrinsically wrong with the question of how many dicks you can stick into a woman at once? Some of us are into that.)

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  21. re Cat
    ...........can someone define 'ordinary sex' please????

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  22. And I'm not a "pornasaur", but can (and have, and will again) get off on watching a partner masturbate.

    It's not like anyone here has directly attacked me or anything (and I'm grateful for that; I ranted about pornosaurs on a long-ago journal post and a bunch of people basically called me an idiot) but I feel like I've been misconstrued as saying guys shouldn't be into wanking, or intercourse is the only fun thing to do in life ever, or something. And I never said that. I just think that it's alienating and weird for my partner not to want to touch me ever because he'd rather jerk off to me from across the room. While I sit there being all ornamental and (in many cases) not being allowed to masturbate in tandem because it'll ruin his view of my body. That's all.

    I like masturbating with my partner, or cheerleading while he does it, or being cheerled while I do (although I greatly prefer us to be snuggled up together while it happens). Sometimes it's even fun to get my partner all riled up by putting on a sexy show but not letting him touch me - but this is a BDSMy thing and I'm involved in it, not being used as human decoration. You guys can see the difference, right?

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  23. ...I mean I feel like perfectly lovely people are feeling weird or defensive about their preferences, here, and that was not my intention.

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  24. It's funny, of course, that the porn actress I know from the blogworlds does gonzo because she personally is into making porn she enjoys ... :}

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  25. I think there are people who have strange tendencies to not touch during sex but I don't think it has anything to do with porn.

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  26. Or in less words, correlation ain't causation.

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  27. Anon: maybe my pornosaur exes were pathologically visual to begin with and this caused both their porn addictions and their bizarre bedroom rituals, it's true. But I'd pretty much stake my life on the idea that the two things are, if not a cause-and-effect thing, at least related.

    Meaning: I don't think it's a coincidence that these two guys who watched porn literally every single day preferred looking at naked women to touching them.

    Oh, also: they both always stared down at their dicks while they came. Gotta have the money shot, y'know, or it just isn't satisfying...

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  28. "Second question: does updating "been photographed naked" to "been photographed covered in welts and tears with one man's cock in her ass and another's fingers in her cunt" change a goddamn thing above?"

    No, but it makes it hotter

    "Oh, also: they both always stared down at their dicks while they came."

    I do that, but because I think it's hot.

    @perversecowgirl: I think you've stepped into a really touchy [heh] area. There's a lot of things that go on in the bedroom that are consensual that may not be your thing. That doesn't make the participants perverts or whatever. maybe your two examples were weird... maybe they weren't. I don't think you can backpedal fast or far enough to stop being mildly insulting towards other people's kinks.

    but I hate to see someone swinging in the breeze alone, so: At least they weren't furries!

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  29. There's a lot of things that go on in the bedroom that are consensual that may not be your thing. That doesn't make the participants perverts or whatever.

    For the sake of argument, let's say "I don't want to touch or interact with your naked body ever" is a kink and not a pathology. It's still not cool to override what I wanna do every single time. I indulged what they wanted to do but they didn't return my courtesy - and all I was asking for was the same vanilla sex they jerked off to on their computer or tv screens five times a day.

    but I hate to see someone swinging in the breeze alone, so: At least they weren't furries!

    Ha ha! "Furries? Those are the people Trekkies beat up!" :D

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  30. ...although, as we all know, the proper non-derogatory term is "Trekkers".

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  31. Aww, c'mon y'all, we can't have a "your kink is okay" space and then start hating on furries. I get a free "aw, she's basically normal" pass for being pissed on and stun-gunned but some poor loser gets endless shit just for wearing kitty ears? Unfair.

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  32. The obvious fix for that would be for you to start wearing kitty ears.

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  33. after calling out perversecowgirl, I was just trying to share some abuse by throwing out the red herring of furries.

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  34. @perversecowgirl, whose moniker is too long and will be referred to (by me) as PVC, I agree that it's bogus that you gave them their kink, and they didn't return the favor. I think it speaks more to the person than the kink, though.

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  35. Oh, I just thought the "Furries are who Trekkies beat up" is a funny quote. I'm not actually anti-furry.

    Welllll...allegedly some furries are into the idea of fucking actual animals, and have deluded themselves into thinking this is okay, and that's NOT COOL. But HELLZ YEAH to cat ears and Avatar cosplay!

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  36. One good thing about text porn is the extremely low probability that anyone was exploited. I still find some of it off-putting, but not as much and not in the same way.

    Perhaps as a consequence, while I like watching my girlfriend masturbate rather more than she likes masturbating while I watch, I like a wide range of other, more interactive forms of sex as well; I wouldn't want me watching to form a major part of our sex life.

    Although I can't go so far as to call sex that you wouldn't want if someone wasn't paying you "rape," I see the logic trail they're following.
    It is, to borrow terminology from other discussions, consent, but not enthusiastic consent.

    My biggest problem with what little porn footage I've seen is the bathos, which isn't unrelated to the passion issue.

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  37. "(My writing process is very complex.)"

    Was I the only one who laughed out loud at that point?

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  38. "What if--I'm just blue-skyin' here--there was a woman who had been photographed naked but was not a sexbot? What if this woman liked to read old science fiction, grew tomatoes on her balcony, had been photographed naked, was afraid of sharks, and loved the smell of the earth after a summer rain?"

    Hi, my name is Bonnie, and I'm only scared of sharks sometimes.

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