Porn: Classic or Dud?

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pegging to the oldies

Neanderthal, Friday, 23 September 2016 01:15 (seven years ago) link

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.

savvinesslessness (map), Friday, 23 September 2016 01:25 (seven years ago) link

"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 (seven years ago) link

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.

Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, 23 September 2016 01:52 (seven years ago) link

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.

Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, 23 September 2016 01:53 (seven years ago) link

"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.

savvinesslessness (map), Friday, 23 September 2016 04:50 (seven years ago) link

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.

savvinesslessness (map), Friday, 23 September 2016 04:58 (seven years ago) link

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

lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living (Merdeyeux), Friday, 23 September 2016 10:16 (seven years ago) link

Boom

poor fiddy-less albion (darraghmac), Friday, 23 September 2016 11:06 (seven years ago) link

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.

a confederacy of lampreys (rushomancy), Friday, 23 September 2016 11:07 (seven years ago) link

the thing about talking about the damage potentially done by porn is that we try to impose our adult values on our childhood selves, and we do a terrible job of it.

fetishes come from somewhere, sure, but this sort of hierarchy we establish of sexual material doesn't necessarily hold up from a child's point of view. look at all the people who were sexually imprinted by the "disney afternoon".

i was just reading yesterday about earthbound, and about how the whole thing comes from a childhood trauma itoi experienced. he accidentally saw a japanese crime film as a child. you watch it today and it looks kind of hokey and lame, doesn't particularly code as "pornographic". doesn't matter. was enough to scar itoi for life.

a confederacy of lampreys (rushomancy), Friday, 23 September 2016 11:28 (seven years ago) link

i don't know if you're addressing anyone in particular but i for one wasn't referring to bdsm or other fetishes, and certainly not trying to suggest any crude and obvious causal psychologisation of sexual preferences from childhood experiences. i'm not sure what exactly i am getting at though as indeed i do find it quite hard to detach what i'm thinking about from '80s-style sex negativity and all of the reactionary tendencies that came along with that. i suppose my starting point is knowing that during my adolescence a pornographized if not even necessarily pornographic popular image of women had real and immediate effects on how me and my peer group viewed women and it took me well into adulthood to finally (maybe) shake off those viewpoints, and i'm not sure how to translate this perspective towards thinking about modern kids but it seems of some significance

lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living (Merdeyeux), Friday, 23 September 2016 11:47 (seven years ago) link

and as i say, i'm sympathetic to the notion that porn is much more symptom of society's image of sex and gender than it is cause, but i do feel that there's at least some degree of reciprocity, though how to address it i don't know

lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living (Merdeyeux), Friday, 23 September 2016 11:50 (seven years ago) link

I wrote about detective magazines last year; some of it was really pretty fucked up stuff, but in a different way than you might expect:

For all the tales of thrilling adventure, though, there was a prominent dark side to the world as depicted in men’s adventure magazines, and it seemed almost entirely made up of sexual anxiety. Articles with titles like “Is Your Wife A Secret Lesbian?”, “A Psychiatrist Tells: What To Do On Your Wedding Night,” “The Truth About Those Sex Fears,” “Love Survey: How Do You Rate?”, “Losing Your Manhood? Ten Ways To Keep It,” “The Sexually Aggressive Woman—Can You Cope With Her?”, “The American Male Is No Longer A Man, Says A Woman Psychologist,” and more played on male fears that societal trends toward equality would take their women away from them, while treating impotence like the worst thing that could possibly happen to a human being.

Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, 23 September 2016 12:27 (seven years ago) link

"i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about"

the reason that it's not talked about except furtively is that if you watch porn enough to talk about it with some authority, it follows that you have masturbated to it. Although this is a fundamental activity to humankind, no one or very few wants to acknowledge having done so.

Porn has been an enormous part of my life since I was 8: the one and only thing I have ever stolen was a Playboy at that time. Penthouse & Hustler were key to me through the '80s, renting V-tapes and DVDs was huge for me in the 90s and 00s (i"m moving this weekend and made sure my collection went ahead of eveything else… and my wife) and the preponderance of tubes is…troubling. I can find any scene I ever watched and liked or any scene I've wanted to see…it takes up too much of my time for sure. I absolutely would not have known what to do with myself (chortle) were I to be 12 now, but then 12 year old boys are probly desensitized as such. the experience of female and male performers entering the field now, 18-21 years old, when they never knew a time when you could not get porn immediately, is fairly amazing to me. female performers say they loved it as teenagers…this could be true, or it could be female performers knowing what to say to turn on men who masturbate to them.

last year I went to this convention in NJ where I got to talk porn gals that I'm fans of/have J/Oed to many times. I have to say that it was was very exciting and interesting…

the big thing now is fauxcest.

veronica moser, Friday, 23 September 2016 12:50 (seven years ago) link

I also think that porn is both a symptom and a cause of misogyny. I think mass media in general both reflects and reinforces whatever ideas are put into it. Fox News is both a symptom and a cause of reactionary sentiment, for example. And my contention that straight men would generally do well to stay away from porn is just based on the belief that the media we consume and enjoy stands to have some effect on how we behave.

It does seem to be true that kids can be disturbed by material that seems pretty mild to adults. But if anything, that strikes me providing more reason to worry about kids being exposed to porn. By the same token, I think the fact that young kids can be traumatized by the death scene in Bambi only provides more reason to keep them away from Tarantino movies.

JRN, Friday, 23 September 2016 13:01 (seven years ago) link

the belief that the media we consume and enjoy stands to have some effect on how we behave

What's this belief based on - direct observation, personal experience, simply a feeling? The variety of media, the subjects that consume it, the way they consume it, seem so varied (and so conditioned by individual psychology and circumstance) that any generalised 'theory' of media influence is practically useless, imho - and is too often used as an excuse to censor or prohibit.

Foster Twelvetrees (Ward Fowler), Friday, 23 September 2016 13:17 (seven years ago) link

"What's this belief based on - direct observation"

every day millions of men watch stuff that pretty commonly treats women like garbage. every day millions of men are not fighting for women's rights and a world where women do not have to be afraid of men.

that's my direct observation.

porn is status quo.

scott seward, Friday, 23 September 2016 13:27 (seven years ago) link

When people are talking about porn it often seems like they're really talking about straight hardcore porn, which is only a relatively small percentage of what is created or repurposed for sexual excitement (which can be a bewildering array of things that make a mockery of "you know porn when you see it").
There is far far more female models appearing naked or in bikinis than there is women having sex with men. There can be misogyny in the presentation, like the text that goes along with the images. The higher end of business porn effectively saying "here are the most beautiful women in the world, but they're still not pretty enough so we had to photoshop them and blandify them". Maybe the "slutty" make-up too (audiences wanting porn to look crass and vulgar? I've found that porn often has all the ugliest trends in pop music dress/make-up). Perhaps the poses and acting? But it's not difficult to avoid these things if you're making your own porn.
Although I was talking earlier about the prevalence of misogynist trolls in the porn community, I don't think misogyny is overwhelming in the actual material at all. Most of it is selfies.

But lots of female models don't call what they do "porn" because people will assume they are having sex with men on camera. In recent years I've seen efforts to file everything a model/performer does under "sex work" but many don't want to be called a sex worker because people strongly associate that with prostitution. I don't ever see that changing.

"i mean yea it's sex it's obviously not talked about"

the reason that it's not talked about except furtively is that if you watch porn enough to talk about it with some authority, it follows that you have masturbated to it. Although this is a fundamental activity to humankind, no one or very few wants to acknowledge having done so.

― veronica moser, Friday, 23 September 2016 13:50

https://aeon.co/essays/the-body-as-amusement-park-a-history-of-masturbation

The masturbator is often seen as the pornography-consumer and sex addict enslaved by masturbation. The sociologist Steve Garlick has suggested that negative attitudes to masturbation have been reconstituted to ‘surreptitiously infect ideas about pornography’. Pornography has become masturbation’s metonym. Significantly, when the New Zealand politician Shane Jones was exposed for using his taxpayer-funded credit card to view pornographic movies, the unnamed shame was that his self-pleasuring activities were proclaimed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers – thus the jokes about ‘the matter in hand’ and not shaking hands with him at early morning meetings. It would have been less humiliating, one assumes, if he had used the public purse to finance the services of sex workers.

I like that last point, but I don't know if it's true.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 14:46 (seven years ago) link

"What's this belief based on - direct observation"

every day millions of men watch stuff that pretty commonly treats women like garbage. every day millions of men are not fighting for women's rights and a world where women do not have to be afraid of men.

that's my direct observation.

porn is status quo.

― scott seward, Friday, September 23, 2016 8:27 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

TBF, women's rights is not something most men have fought for in almost any society throughout history, and in relative global/historical terms, USA 2016 is not *that* bad for women's rights. Hardly seems like you need porn to reinforce misogyny when you consider sanctioned rape, honor killings, treatment of women as chattel, enfranchisement only 100 years ago, etc.

the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, 23 September 2016 15:12 (seven years ago) link

"Hardly seems like you need porn to reinforce misogyny..."

nobody needs porn. but it totally reinforces misogyny. and i WAS talking about straight hardcore porn above. and i confess i did not know that straight hardcore porn was "a relatively small percentage of what is created or repurposed for sexual excitement" as RAG says above.

and i'm not trying to be holier-than-thou. i am not an angel sent from above. but i do look at straight hardcore porn in the same way that i look at drugs. untold amounts of people have been hurt, damaged, and traumatized to make something that people don't need to live. it's always going to get made. it's just something to think about. and yes, you are right, most men have never fought for women's rights throughout history.

scott seward, Friday, 23 September 2016 15:26 (seven years ago) link

i don't think any porn or even just straight hardcore porn is necessarily misogynist, hurtful, damaging, or traumatizing even if it often can be, pornography is extremely diverse, even straight hardcore porn is extremely diverse. pretty sure we've had this debate before too but obv so called "ethical and/or feminist" porn can be exploitative (or not), traumatic (or not) for people creating or using it, sexuality is extremely complex. people create, use, and are affected by pornography in numerous complex ways

marcos, Friday, 23 September 2016 15:32 (seven years ago) link

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.

― a confederacy of lampreys (rushomancy), Friday, September 23, 2016 7:07 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i agree. also i think that some kind of objectification is an inherent part of sexuality, sexual attraction, eroticism, the physicality of sex entails objectification to some extent imo

marcos, Friday, 23 September 2016 15:34 (seven years ago) link

Anecdotally, I generally feel better, relate to my wife better, and have better sex when I haven't watched any for at least a several days. So I do think there's something kind of psychically harmful about it. I'm not sure if it's so much misogyny as detachment that it produces in me.

the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, 23 September 2016 15:38 (seven years ago) link

On one hand, there is something to the notion that instant and relatively uncomplicated access to hardcore pornography probably desensitizes young men, and might cause them to need ever-increasing amounts of transgression to get the same libidinous thrill.

As a father of a 9-year-old girl, I do worry about what things will be like when she's navigating sexuality while surrounded by boys who've been able to see anal gangbangs ever since they knew how to spell "anal." This may sound heteronormative, but it's not an unreasonable concern. However her life goes, she'll inevitably be dealing with horny young straight men in some way.

I generally want to hope for good things to happen. Maybe those young men (who have been raised on a nuanced dialectic between virtual- and meatspace) will muster the ability to relate to young women as 3D individuals.

Maybe they will grow to view porn as simply a release valve - as a masturbation aid that helps them take care of Mr. Johnson quickly and efficiently, so that they can get on with their day. An orgasm accelerator.

Maybe they will view porn as a subset of fiction, or more specifically like science fiction/fantasy - a thing you find entertaining in an escapist way, but you don't impose its expectations on real people (any more than you expect to fight dragons or find the One Ring or defeat a video game boss level).

Both of those views instrumentalize porn's actual participants, and both absolve the industry, but both are extant points of view. Both also ignore that women and LGBTQI+ individuals have their own enthusiasms, to which they're totally welcome. I'm just speaking as a straight dude about the very prevalent uses and abuses of porn in a predominantly straight mainstream context.

For myself, I'm not anti-porn at all, and have often found it useful. But I think I've always been able to compartmentalize sufficiently - almost as hygienic as tooth-brushing - and not have it intrude on my relationships with actual people.

FWIW, like some posters upthread, I had a fairly typical 70s/80s childhood, where a glimpse of boobies was looked on as something shocking (in the best possible Phoebe-Catesian way). I am too culturally relativist to say that that was an incontrovertibly better way to experience titillation. I say this merely to report that that was the path I followed, and that my thinking is informed by that path.

inimitable liver (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 23 September 2016 15:55 (seven years ago) link

As a father of a 9-year-old girl, I do worry about what things will be like when she's navigating sexuality while surrounded by boys who've been able to see anal gangbangs ever since they knew how to spell "anal." This may sound heteronormative, but it's not an unreasonable concern. However her life goes, she'll inevitably be dealing with horny young straight men in some way.

I have daughters and am def concerned about this.

the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, 23 September 2016 16:00 (seven years ago) link

incidentally, I think that's also connected to the fact that I've spent less and less time with porn over the last few years to the point that it's a pretty minimal/rare presence in my life

the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, 23 September 2016 16:01 (seven years ago) link

Answer to the thread title? Despite all the aforementioned horror and the overwhelming amount of bad photography, ugly clothes, excessive make-up and overall bad presentation, porn is completely classic to me. Although I have given a lot of crappy stuff more time than it deserves (written and drawn mostly), the good stuff (95% softcore naked women, solo or with other women) genuinely enriched my life and expanded my ideas of what a beautiful person can look like enormously. It completely blew my mind seeing all these types of faces and bodies that you rarely see in any other media.

Even if there was no prejudices and no body shaming, I think porn still develops your appreciation for different types past where it would go without.

I find it really weird that so many people who spend a huge amount of time in the online porn fan community seem to have such a low regard for porn. It's "just porn" to them. Not just that they are spending too much time on it or looking at depressing stuff but they don't seem to really value any of it.

Maybe they will grow to view porn as simply a release valve - as a masturbation aid that helps them take care of Mr. Johnson quickly and efficiently, so that they can get on with their day. An orgasm accelerator.

I don't think that's good either. Porn should be beautiful, not a banal disposable thing.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 16:11 (seven years ago) link

To ruminate further: right now it's a reasonable SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy) thing to be down on porn because it makes oversexed young men approach potentially vulnerable young women with oversexualized and unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, why stop at porn?

Orthodox religions have been policing sexuality and women's bodies for a long time - far longer than there have been SNAGs to suddenly up and say "hey wait" about online porn. Some of the same arguments can easily be used (and certainly HAVE been used) to say that being able to see women's ankles and legs and hair and such have trivialized those things.

On that view, If you've never seen your beloved's hair uncovered, then seeing her hair for the first time - presumably on your wedding night after a long courtship and betrothal - is incredibly erotically charged. Or so I hear.

Surely there is a middle ground, and I don't want to traffic in false equivalencies, but if you follow some anti-porn arguments to their logical conclusion, you might start overlapping uncomfortably with anti-bikini arguments.

inimitable liver (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 23 September 2016 16:19 (seven years ago) link

I don't really see a continuum between erotic nude photography or even something like playboy -- even with all its chauvinism -- and mainstream hetero porn. Even if a lot of the actual material seems playful/harmless the sites are ridden with pop ups for material that seems a lot like hate speech. Add to that the fact that so many performers speak of their time in the industry in very negative terms... idk. I don't think its good for people to associate sex and degradation, especially people who have poor critical thinking skills either because they are in a formativr stage of life or just dumb.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 16:26 (seven years ago) link

Just seems bleak and sordid in a way that young guys drooling over Phoebe Cates isn't. I don't think that scene with the red bikini encouraged viewers to think less of Phoebe Cates in the same way a Bangbus scene does with the anonymous star. Again, there's nothing inherent about explicit depictions of sex that makes it this way but it seems to be how it works out. Porn stars are seen as taboo -- a "sex class" -- and the films themselves seem to internalize this value system rather than challenge it, in most cases. If that makes sense.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 16:35 (seven years ago) link

Maybe the answer is the full mainstreaming of porn. No longer taboo, it would then be beholden to certain ordinary standards of decency vis a vis embodying hateful perspectives. The fact that it is a form of media people consume privately, and that they don't feel a need to synthesize their consumption with an overall story of themselves that speaks to their values and whatever, is certainly part of the problem.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 16:39 (seven years ago) link

I don't think that scene with the red bikini encouraged viewers to think less of Phoebe Cates in the same way a Bangbus scene does with the anonymous star.

I think if you observed the way porn fans interact with porn stars IRL, when given the opportunity to do so, you'd change your mind. Lining up for hours, giggling nervously, digging toes into the carpet like schoolboys...the virulent misogyny may show up when typing comments into a little window, but when male porn enthusiasts are interacting face to face with female porn performers, they're totally respectful 99 percent of the time. Frankly, what people think about while they're jerking off is their business, and I don't think someone thinking "Yeah, punish that bitch!" with his dick in his hand on his couch at home is any worse than someone shouting "Yeah, fuck his ass up!" while on that same couch watching MMA. The level of dehumanization is exactly the same.

Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, 23 September 2016 16:53 (seven years ago) link

I think selfies are the mainstreaming of porn if anything is. Again, there is probably more selfies than any other type of photographic porn. Stigma isn't going away yet but it has to be less of a big deal than in the 90s.

It's odd but the anonymity (if you mean it in the sense of the audience not caring about the star) of models/performers varies with each genre. In some genres the models are seen as expendable and in other genres they are canonized for the ages and in regular circulation since the 40s and still have fans writing to them.
I just can't grasp the mindset of people who don't care about the model/performer. If they're worth looking at why wouldn't you want to know their name?

I don't really see a continuum between erotic nude photography or even something like playboy -- even with all its chauvinism -- and mainstream hetero porn.

― Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:26

In what aspect? There is some separation but there's lots of crossover too. It's not as separate as something like non-photographic porn. But it's only in recent years that I've seen much male/female hardcore (not that much), I avoided it easily for a long time.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:03 (seven years ago) link

There isn't really a lot of "punish that bitch" type language in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. It embodies a very different vision of sexuality than a tube site, taken in its totality, where you can't really avoid seeing ads or thumbnails for stuff that plays to a pretty harsh view of how men and women relate to one another sexually. You can say it's just fantasy -- I agree all sorts of fantasy can be fine -- but it's all so banal and commodified that it seems like it might be normalizing these attitudes.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:09 (seven years ago) link

I definitely think that if you want to analyze this you have to account for the fact that porn is this thing that happens within a certain roped-off space, and that humans compartmentalize, which is not to say things don't seep from one space into another, but there's a difference between "men fantasize hatefully about women in a sanctioned area" and "men hate women."

the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, 23 September 2016 17:16 (seven years ago) link

Treeship- Yeah, I never saw a lot of the horrifying stuff until the tube sites, tumblr and clips4sale. Even if you were watching lots of hardcore you could easily avoid all that junk. I miss a lot of things about the only slightly earlier days.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:17 (seven years ago) link

SI swimsuit edition is problematic in other ways, but there is a veneer of decency to it, idk. They don't depict themselves tricking the models into stripping down to bikinis and them dumping them off on the side of the road.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:17 (seven years ago) link

I just remembered that when we had AOL and porn images were findable but hard to come by, I got a huge thrill out of making the desktop image into a porn image on our Apple IIGS when my parents weren't home, and that once I accidentally left it up and got caught. I guess there was something erotic and subversive about putting a sexual image in a place where it didn't belong.

the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Friday, 23 September 2016 17:21 (seven years ago) link

SI swimsuit edition is problematic in other ways, but there is a veneer of decency to it, idk. They don't depict themselves tricking the models into stripping down to bikinis and them dumping them off on the side of the road.

And yet they're both purchased and enjoyed by the same exact male population! Crazy, right? It's almost like people are multifaceted creatures!

Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Friday, 23 September 2016 17:25 (seven years ago) link

Where did I say anything to the contrary?

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:26 (seven years ago) link

I never said we should ban porn or that it destroys people or anything like that. At most I encouraged more critical consumption -- like thinking about porn the way we think of all other aspects of the media, as an entertainment product. No television show would get away with being as racist or misogynistic as a lot of porn.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:36 (seven years ago) link

I've never really looked at Swimsuit Illustrated, do they photoshop a lot?

The one positive thing about the tube sites is archiving things that are no longer commercially available. DailyMotion used to be great for this and it was so much more pleasant yet I have no idea why. I don't think it was just moderators cleaning up the place and a lack of nasty adverts.

Clips4sale is great but I hate seeing women I like doing the cruel and racist stuff.

I think more than any other site Tumblr connected models with their fan base and writing about their life and all their interests and opinions rather than just about their porn.
But it also has some really nasty communities and the piracy is unstoppable there.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:37 (seven years ago) link

idk i think certain kinds of pornography (plenty of which is on tube sites) can be far more body-positive, sex-positive, welcoming and diverse than the SI swimsuit issue, where models fit almost exclusively into just a few (at most) body types, ages and races

marcos, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:47 (seven years ago) link

Yeah, it's problematic but for different reasons. The erotic charge doesn't come from hostility. Not to say that the latter is the case with all clips on tube sites -- far from it -- but it's an attitude that's prevalent enough that it's worth noting.

Treeship, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:50 (seven years ago) link

Yeah, I've always thought regular mainstream men's magazines were worse in many respects than the average porn magazine. Especially the photoshopping.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 17:56 (seven years ago) link

I don't look at a lot of solo men (not into men enough) but I can't stand the amount of men posing like "I'm a fucking badass". Do a lot of people find that sexy or is it the male equivalent of duckface?

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 18:02 (seven years ago) link

for me it depends on the dude and if i want to see somebody posing like "a fucking badass" in the moment idk lol

marcos, Friday, 23 September 2016 18:04 (seven years ago) link

the reason that it's not talked about except furtively is that if you watch porn enough to talk about it with some authority, it follows that you have masturbated to it. Although this is a fundamental activity to humankind, no one or very few wants to acknowledge having done so.

makes sense

marcos, Friday, 23 September 2016 18:17 (seven years ago) link

Anyone else love porn and consider it important? And I mean anything from bikini stuff and art nudes to explicit stuff.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, 23 September 2016 18:20 (seven years ago) link


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