Porn: Classic or Dud?

EDB, if you have never been in a relationship or had sex at all, focusing on porn may be a cart-before-horse thing imo. It may be that fear or something else is stopping you from pursuing the relationships and porn is a crutch.

Especially if you've only come to feel addicted to porn recently but have avoided or not pursued intimate relationships for a longer time.

fwiw i think "addiction" is a fraught term when used to describe sexual behavior, there was a period in my life when i identified as a "sex addict" and felt like a 12-step/addiction model of approaching sex/porn was helpful for me but i really don't feel that way anymore. it took a number of years of therapy and hard work to figure out what healthy sexuality meant for me and i now feel like the addiction model is really damaging. i know a number of people who do find it helpful but i just don't think sexuality is the same as drugs or alcohol. growing up in a sexually repressed catholic family had a lot to do w/ shame i felt about various aspects of my sexuality and the addiction model was a convenient way of dealing with that shame but ultimately didn't work. i think there are a lot of conversations worth having about the effect of porn on our lives but really i dont see porn as a wholly negative thing. if you are enjoying it and feel like it is a healthy sexual expression for you then i'd be wary of describing yourself as an addict.

Good point. If I can expand on that? Addiction has a medical definition. It's also a useful word to grab for in order to name, and so make a start on tackling, various other types of problem, that are not addiction in the official medical sense. Especially if that problem resembles medical addiction in one or more ways. However, the things you'd do to beat an addiction might not help you with an 'addiction'.

I'm not, and have never been, in a relationship or having sex with anyone, but not out of a lack of serious desire for both of those things, so it's not getting in the way of my life, but I can't imagine this indefinite cycle of porn and compulsive masturbation is good for me (possibly including my ability to pursue intimate relationships with people).

^ Here I've struck out the bits of what you said that seemed less important, and left what seemed to be the key point (to my eyes). I have no pro qualification whatsoever and this is just my take on it, one person's.

how old are you, edb? i think marcos is kind of otm about addiction/sexual behavior. i think there are red flags, if it goes beyond jerking off and watching a lot of porn and you're getting into dangerous/compulsive behavior around it, like looking at illegal things or sinking money you can't afford into watching girls in eastern europe suck on stuff.

looking at porn is one of my earliest memories. i was about four years old and i can still remember pages of the magazine, the smell of my parents bedroom, the smell of the magazine, the light in the room. actually, lots of vivid memories of porn. i can still remember pages i cut out of magazines, folded up, put in my top drawer, the smell of the medicinal ointment i received for some skin condition on my ankles and that i used to beat off with. i can remember scenes downloaded from limewire over a decade ago. there were times when i'd spend maybe an hour looking at porn but it was... still okay, i think? the, like, worldview of the porn i was consuming was no worse, i think, than what you'd find in an updike novel or a z-ro album. still look at pornography maybe every day or every couple days, but it's become more utilitarian, find a video, thirty seconds, beat off, and maybe "academic," where i check xhamster 7 days most viewed/commented out of interest in the same way i keep up on literature or whatever by reading like the paris review blog. internet porn is a topic that i know a lot about. i've watched thousands of hours of pornography. i don't have any shame about it and i don't think it's fucked up my relationships with women, which have been kind of fucked up but always due to other things.

lol i remember reading some bob mould interview about his first experience using the internet, here i found it

Bob Mould

Do you remember your first time using the internet?

Yes

Where were you?

My office in Austin, Texas

How did you access it?

AOL 14.4K

What did you search for?

Porn

What was your first impression?

Slow

otm imo

http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9520-our-bandwidth-could-be-your-life/

i don't have a ton of pre-internet memories, though the ones i do have are super vivid definitely. i remember feeling like really nervous hanging out w/ a friend who had a bunch of playboys he took from his dad, and some matchbooks he had w/ nudes on them lol

i like the story about the guy getting obsessed with 19th century awls. and much respect to owen pallett for his serious old school cred.

my dad loved porn. loved loved loved. this was pre-internet, and in fact he could never get a computer to work right because the first thing he did when he got on the internet was look for pregnant rubber nuns and get his computer full of all kinds of viruses.

so he spent money on it, which i've only done once in my life (a friend came over with japan with some hentai, which was a novelty back then, so i bought one of those off him). i'm perversely proud of not spending money on porn, though i'm not sure exactly why i should be. he had all kinds of catalogs come to his house under assumed names, which kept going for years and years after he left. we would look through the catalogs and laugh at the bizarre stuff they had in there.

occasionally he would, either through guilt or just being sick of clutter, junk his porn. one of my brothers has a story about taking a trip to visit him and spending the whole trip throwing out his old pornography.

i wasn't sure what i would find when i went to visit the home he was staying at after he died, but he kept things pretty light. no porn. just a railway catalog, a couple bibles, and a copy of "spanish for dummies". he'd found jesus a couple months before, but one never knows what that means. i guess it's more that the circumstances he was living under didn't give him the opportunity for clutter.

i get nostalgic for porn of the past. i don't know, maybe i just like old shit, when i was young i was listening to all that classic rock so i guess it makes sense that i'd be into '70s porn. which actually reminds me that i did pay for porn one other time, i bought this giant box set of the old "something weird" porn loops. they came on dvd-rs and a bunch of them won't rip but i don't really watch them, or much of anything, anyway.

but i also get nostalgic for the old porn sites, the sort that were just set up by one or two weirdo entrepeneurial types and had 640x480 pictures. by today's standards they look like shit, but i can't relate to any of the kids today and their approach towards sex. i'm kind of sad that those things are all gone now. nobody has anything remotely like an archival approach to old porn like they do towards, like, aphex twin. i guess that's the future of all the present, when the curatorial instinct fades, just random unlabelled pictures popping up on tumblr or wherever.

what i miss most though is just being able to talk about sex, openly and honestly. maybe you still can and i've just become old and repressed, but being honest on the internet seems a lot more dangerous than it used to be. all the crap i said twenty years ago, nobody cares, nobody will care unless i somehow get mega-famous, which, spoiler alert, isn't going to happen.

When I was a teenager in the mid/late '90s, the sites with stills or short clips of movie nudity were mind-blowing. Showgirls and the movie where Neve Campbell and Denise Richards make out topless and etc.. The filthiest stuff I was exposed to was via Penthouse Forum, so the orgies and stuff were written rather visual and looking back relatively tame. I don't think I even saw filmed penetration until the Pamela/Tommy Lee video.

I can't imagine being a 14-year old boy in this environment.

"sinking money you can't afford into watching girls in eastern europe suck on stuff."

ha, that Wild Things scene is very much a generational touchstone, isn't it? I think you could also mention Anna Nicole Smith in Playboy to men my age and you'd definitely get a reaction.

I taught a few short stories last spring with some explicit sexual material in them, to 19 year olds. they seemed less impressed with this than I was...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/making-sense-of-modern-pornography

every time i read something like this i always come away feeling like for something which is undeniably a huge part of our contemporary lives (arguably a far bigger part than other forms of "culture" for which we have endless thinkpieces and trend spotting) there's comparatively little said about it--seemingly so little to be said about it. it's like the dark matter of culture, or the iceberg under the water line.

what a weird article. why was it written? felt like the writer got a very broad brief to write "about porn" and make it a certain number of words

I wonder a lot how much culture conditions boys to be obsessed with nudity vs how much of it is just "innate" or whatever. I mean I remember stealing the victoria's secret catalogs that came to my house when I was 11/12, even the National Geographics if they had topless women from some amazon tribe or something. I have a strong early adolescent memories is getting the measles on vacation and getting to stay in the hotel room and watch Lethal Weapon 2 (or maybe the original, that part I'm not sure of), and the excitement at just getting a few-second flash of breasts in a sex scene, and thinking that the breasts looked pointier than I expected.

I guess I mean that the level of obsession I had probably would not be brooked by a lack of internet porn, in fact maybe it would have been worse for longer.

i can't remember the entire argument, but there's a bit in Julian Jaynes' "Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (one of my favorite books but also possibly/likely 100% fanciful) where he theorizes that humans are the most sexually obsessed of all animals (which only seem to care about it during breeding periods) and that this obsession emerged at the same time as human consciousness. (this is a distinct idea from saying we fuck all the time, it's more that we think about it all the time...)

slightly less fancifully, you might look to Foucault's notion that sexuality as a kind of constant cultural obsession began much later. the idea being that the increased attention to sexuality was hand-in-hand with the emergence of modernity--and i guess you could say that the saturation of pornography is the culmination of that.

I guess I mean that the level of obsession I had probably would not be brooked by a lack of internet porn, in fact maybe it would have been worse for longer.

I have this vague idea that having to work harder to get hold of their porn (secret glimpses of playboy, sneaking into adult movie theatres etc) may have made teenage boys of yesteryear slightly less entitled when it came to real sex, but I don't know if there's anything in that.

new yorker article wasn't v good imo, apart from talking a little about mindgeek and the tube site near-monopoly it really could've been written in 2005? though i guess it was also a book review?

every time i read something like this i always come away feeling like for something which is undeniably a huge part of our contemporary lives (arguably a far bigger part than other forms of "culture" for which we have endless thinkpieces and trend spotting) there's comparatively little said about it--seemingly so little to be said about it. it's like the dark matter of culture, or the iceberg under the water line.

― ryan, Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:26 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but yea ryan i totally agree, it is kind of weird to see things with like 157,000,000 views on a tube site and it's one of many with view counts in the millions and yet porn isn't really talked about at all in casual conversation, i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about but the fact that it is core part of our media culture but not really outwardly acknowldged is weird

what a weird article. why was it written? felt like the writer got a very broad brief to write "about porn" and make it a certain number of words

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Thursday, September 22, 2016 2:52 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i mean it like talked about "we're not in the golden age anymore" "dozens of porn categories exist now" "amateur and amateur-style production has proliferated" "oh look there is some 'ethical' porn too like the organic food movement" but didn't really do much of anything as an article that hasn't been said in the past 10-15 years

also i don't really understand her saying "the porn industry is in decline" ... the industry is changing obv and it is a different industry than 70s-90s but ... there is a porn industry that has millions and millions of consumers ... it is not in decline

i don't really understand her saying "the porn industry is in decline" ... the industry is changing obv and it is a different industry than 70s-90s but ... there is a porn industry that has millions and millions of consumers ... it is not in decline

The industry is definitely in decline. If 90 percent of those millions and millions of consumers are getting the product for free, you're in trouble. And this isn't just trouble for the production companies; it's a problem for the performers, whose pay rates have gone down sharply. Getting your Twitter followers to buy you things from your Amazon wish list isn't gonna make up for that.

^ And the point about how they increasingly do other sex work to supplement the money they get from filming

^ And the point about how they increasingly do other sex work to supplement the money they get from filming

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Thursday, September 22, 2016 3:53 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hasn't that been the case for a long time though?

Could be? I got the impression from the article that there was a period like so -

The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors.

where they were full time doing porn, could be wrong tho

the piece doesn't mention it but one thing there's been a huge rise in, what with higher quality cameras and broadband etc, is 'cam' stuff. which is to say amateur (and some times pro) performers doing personalised scenes live on camera for $10 a pop or whatever. i mean i'm guessing that barely existed a decade ago. i'd imagine that's where a lot of this is all heading; people paying the performers direct for one-to-one stuff based specifically around what they want to see. it all seems pretty healthy and safe too. i mean comparatively.

yeah um I've heard from a friend that cam sites are popular these days

i've never gone to a cam site, they kind of weird me out tbh

i've never gone to a cam site, they kind of weird me out tbh

Agreed. (I've never been to a strip club either.)

ha me neither

Doing porn to drive your escorting fees is the new touring because Napster stole all your sales?

I used to buy a lot of magazines but I haven't bought anything in years. It's hard enough to keep up with the sample photo material and the constant flow of revelatory new models so I never feel like getting anything because I just don't have the time and I'm extremely wary of online payment methods for porn sites because there's always stories of fraud, sometimes even the porn sites not working or fulfilling their end. I'd like to buy magazines but the remaining ones have photography that I really dislike. I wish there more photo ebooks on amazon because I'd go for that.

A lot of models are going for webcam shows and custom clips so they've got more control and can do everything from home. Recently heard of some making their clips for streaming on the website only, to try fighting piracy and of course it's annoying buyers who want to keep the clips.

I find online porn browsing more depressing than ever because it's increasingly reflecting the worst part of the audience. Models constantly trying to defend themselves from trolls, arrogantly entitled thieves and stalkers (and you get to see it all unfold on forums, blogs, tumblr, twitter, instagram, youtube). In the custom clips there's a lot of racism and really cruel fantasies that a lot of those same models wouldn't be doing several years ago.
I think a decade ago there used to be a much better standard of conduct on forums and blogs. There may have been sexism but at least there were a lot more old guys who believed in acting like a gentleman.

Are most of these trolls younger guys?

nobody has anything remotely like an archival approach to old porn

I think it's safe to say the following things about porn aimed at straight men, which is to say most porn:

1. A comfortable majority of it is, to one degree or another, overtly misogynistic in what it depicts and how it depicts it.
2. Associating overtly misogynistic imagery with sexual pleasure probably has some kind of negative effect on the person who does it, especially when they start doing it at a young age.
3. Given that it produces a largely misogynistic product, it stands to reason that the porn industry is, to put it mildly, not generally kind to the women who work in it (and plenty of anecdotes bear this out).

In light of this, I think straight men (myself included) would do well to stay away from porn as much as possible.

the piece doesn't mention it but one thing there's been a huge rise in, what with higher quality cameras and broadband etc, is 'cam' stuff. which is to say amateur (and some times pro) performers doing personalised scenes live on camera for $10 a pop or whatever.

also a lot of customized and very niche stuff on sites like clips4sale.com . that seems to be the new angle

1. A comfortable majority of it is, to one degree or another, overtly misogynistic in what it depicts and how it depicts it.

Is there a compelling explanation for why this is so? Is it because it is so underground, like people feel guilty about their sexuality anyway so they end up associating guilt with eroticism and seeking out material that violates their sense of decency? Or is there some other reason? Maybe I don't want to know the answer to this question but ryan's right -- porn has a huge reach but it somehow evades the kind of critical scrutiny television and movies get.

think of how many porn movies devolve into the female receiving some form of punishment from a guy in a position of power and her just going along w/ it

those could also just be Eli Roth movies

one of the fastest rising genres even in the mainstream is female domination of men. there's an absolute ton of that stuff covering all manner of fetishes, all of it about humiliation and degradation. it may not be a 2 way street and hey i've no desire to get into MRA style 'but what about'-ery but it's certainly starting to cut both ways.

pegging to the oldies

I think it's safe to say the following things about porn aimed at straight men, which is to say most porn:

1. A comfortable majority of it is, to one degree or another, overtly misogynistic in what it depicts and how it depicts it.
2. Associating overtly misogynistic imagery with sexual pleasure probably has some kind of negative effect on the person who does it, especially when they start doing it at a young age.
3. Given that it produces a largely misogynistic product, it stands to reason that the porn industry is, to put it mildly, not generally kind to the women who work in it (and plenty of anecdotes bear this out).

In light of this, I think straight men (myself included) would do well to stay away from porn as much as possible.

― JRN, Friday, 23 September 2016 00:21 (twenty-two minutes ago) Permalink

this kind of argument is cart-before-the-horse and just replicates repression under a different moral code imo. male superiority / female inferiority is a default worldview that shapes every part of life. of course the compartmentalized little fantasy spaces we allow ourselves for sexual imagination are going to draw from that. it doesn't follow that we should cut off those spaces. the source of misogyny enters the picture way before this, and i don't buy that porn does a lot to reinforce it. i think if anything it tends to suggest possibilities that might lead away from misogyny, even though they're rarely explored by creators or consumers. but mainly i don't think porn is much of a force for anything, it's just a sedimentary layer.

a related thought about why it's discussed so little, it's kind of like talking shop about some industry or profession, maybe. there's nothing really to say about it except that it does what it does, there are different trends in the market, bla bla. there isn't some profound hidden effect, it changes with the culture, and it's just another topic to organize a professional convention around.

"the source of misogyny enters the picture way before this, and i don't buy that porn does a lot to reinforce it."

!!! For real?

I'm somewhere in between JRN and map on this. The problem with most articles on porn, and most analysis of porn, is that it focuses (unsurprisingly) on the largest porn industry, which is in the US, and takes that for the whole. Also, it takes the highest-profile stuff, and takes that for the whole, with some token nods to fetish material or "feminist" porn along the way, but always treating those like the exception that proves the rule.

(Note for those who don't know: I worked in the porn industry for five years, editing a magazine. That was over a decade ago, though, and a lot has changed, obviously. The magazine I worked for didn't even have a website.)

There is a lot of misogynist/verbally and physically abusive/rape-fantasy porn out there, and/but there is a lot of "male humiliation" porn these days too. The term "cuck," which is so popular in right-wing circles these days, comes from cuckolding porn, where (usually) a meek-looking white guy watches his white "wife" get railed by a black guy.

Sorry, forgot to make my other point, which is that I would really like to see a serious, in-depth analysis of porn from other countries - not just the UK and Europe and Japan but also other parts of the world. See how it compares to US porn in terms of trends, degrees of misogyny, etc., etc.

"the source of misogyny enters the picture way before this, and i don't buy that porn does a lot to reinforce it."

!!! For real?

― scott seward, Friday, 23 September 2016 01:29 (two hours ago) Permalink

this is probably where my experience as a gay man limits my pov, but there is a lot of misogyny in gay porn too, it's just coded differently. to be honest i'm just extrapolating from my experience of eventually finding patriarchy/misogyny in porn to be really boring. you have to keep escalating it over time and eventually it's just like you can't really go any further and maybe you realize it's a farce, there's nothing there, what you're really looking for isn't there. unless you're in a really charged and traumatic environment as far as gender is concerned that is constantly reinforcing your toxic beliefs all the time, then maybe you're always pushing it further, but i mean good luck you're already part of a deranged death cult at that point anyway, porn is just a symptom of your profound illness, you should cut off everyone you know, go to the desert and trip on ayahuasca.

anyway obviously this is all extremely subjective, but i do think misogyny is this unfortunate part of the water we swim in, and that porn is a way that we encounter it in a distilled form, play around with its ramifications and the desires it emanates from, and ultimately put it in its place and move on to different territory if we have enough of a positive and non-judgmental habitat to do so.

and i don't mean to disparage JRN's take or suggest it's wrong to steer clear of porn because of misogyny, that is probably right for a lot of people. this is just my experience as someone who has undoubtedly looked at way too much porn and become numb to what looks like painfully forced projections of erotic energy most of the time.

huh so cuck is a racist term too. the more u know.

map i'm generally sympathetic to yr claim that porn is much more symptom than cause and for that reason i find strong anti-porn sentiments (in the absence of other political analysis etc) quite suspect, but i do feel there's something reciprocal going on as well. perhaps especially with boys and young men - i recall the effects of media representations of women and sex on how i thought about women even in the much tamer times of my youth and can't help but unscientifically feel that this is operating at a higher level with all the fucked up shit 2day's kids have access to. i don't think those charged and traumatic environments you mention are really so hard to come by. lots of people are in a deranged death cult, and that deranged death cult is called heteronormative masculinity. #trenchant

Boom

sigh. now we're back to the place where we were in 1985 where people talk about bdsm as if bdsm desires had to represent a generalized gender-based hostility.

i guess i understand it. back in the '80s there were these "detective magazines" that ed meese was campaigning against, and i'm not a huge ed meese fan but those things were some sick shit, and cultural trends sort of suppressed that sort of thing for a while. and now i think there's a resurgence of the sort of thinking behind them, the sort of nastiness they represented.

but the impression that gives is that there's no such thing as a decent pervert, that the way male dominants think of women, as a gender, is qualitatively different from the way male submissives think of women, as a gender, which in my experience is not really true. no fetish is inherently empowering. having a fetish for dominant women isn't any different from having a fetish for asian women. fetishes are about sexual objectification, and people need to learn to deal with the fact that this is a thing that happens and doesn't make the person with the fetish a misogynist or a rapist.