Porn: Classic or Dud?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

"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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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!

Where did I say anything to the contrary?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

i think some porn is erotic, exciting, and enriches my own sense of self/sexuality/eroticism/beauty and some porn is repulsive and gross and some porn is banal and depressing

They don't depict themselves tricking the models into stripping down to bikinis and them dumping them off on the side of the road.

bikinis! good heavens. but um i've always thought that the internet 2016, even the tamer corridors, you come across really fucked up offensive shit and rape threats and racist slurs and whatever. in comparison... even the more foul tube sites are pretty soft! look at the http://xhamster.com/rankings/weekly-top-viewed.html -- the top 40 most viewed videos this week, read some comments: i mean, like the language is fucked up sometimes but lots of this shit like your bikini scenario, the viewer knows it as a stock scenario and they're familiar with how porn is shot and they recognize the female talent from a half dozen other films and they know that what's being depicted is basically, hopefully consenting adults putting on a show. just escaping from the narrow focus of "things people say on the internet," i think the average male jerking off to a tube site in 2016 is probably far more educated about sexual health, feminism, shit like that, than the dude jerking it to a vhs in 1996 or 1986, even if the content of what they're jerking it to is more "offensive."

which brings me to, if i had to pick a first problem to look at with porn, i think it's the treatment of talent more than whatever philosophy it supposedly represents. whatever the content is, softcore girl-on-girl stuff or the people out there having sex on film / doing related sex work are definitely being exploited and put in dangerous situations.

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.

this is said a lot in contemporary porn criticisms ("men start off looking at softcore images, then hardcore videos, then anal, then on and on into various increasingly extreme and violent forms of pornography and ultimately into potentially illegal stuff") and it's a convenient narrative especially when advocating an addiction-based perspective ("it all started with weed and alcohol and then pills and then heroin") but i don't know how accurate it really is

i also want to say: i live in japan, where porn is everywhere, more mainstream than anywhere else in the west, i think, or at least more obvious and just fucking EVERYWHERE. regularly see dudes browsing porn on their phones on the train, still sell hardcore porno mags in the regular magazine rack at 7-11, porn stores still a thing, and also prostitution is something that's completely mainstream. it's also a place where women have far lower status, worse legal protection, fewer opportunities at work, and the big deal conversations are literally like: should women hold jobs after having children? i think i feel it more here that the pornography, which is far more insidiously and completely about degrading women is definitely a product of the larger culture.

I'll confess that I find the PG13 near-nudity of Maxim or GQ or Sports Illustrated kind of hypocritical.

A picture of Alyssa Milano (or whoever, feel free to update for the current century) where she's posed all faux-seductively, but her breasts happen to be covered by a wisp of gauzy fabric? I doubt that's in some different moral universe from a fully nude Penthouse-style nude who's permitting a more, ahem, gynecological view. It's just a matter of how much the viewer needs or wants to engage his (his!) imagination.

I don't fault these outlets for serving their audience, it's more that it highlights the very knife-edged nature of how people use sexualized images. Really, context is all. One can see extremely nude nymphs cavorting in a Baroque painting, and be primarily engaged with it in the context of art appreciation. The viewer of a fetching bikini model, or of artistic nude photography, can choose to do the same thing.

Obiously, there's a difference in degree between those images and AnalGangBang.com. Is it a difference in kind? Not sure.

dylannn -

Japanese porn still pixilates out penises, female pubic hair, and insertion shots, yes?

yes. a lot of uncensored domestic content is available online of course but it's not likely to feature your favorite starlets, and dvd/magazine sales + big studios + star system are still stronger here than anywhere else.

to be sure, pubic hair is mostly okay. buttholes are a grey area-- more liberal producers keep them uncensored until something is going in them or there's vaginal penetration or closeups on the vagina, usually.

"Anyone else love porn and consider it important?"

I do. It's important to me. I follow femaie performers, feel like many if not most that I like share something of their sexuality, and have certain practices that I find deeply hot that I like to masturbate to. There are many multitudes of musicians who have been taken advantage of and whose lives were ruined, yet they still shared something authentic about themselves and whose contributions are valuable…to me. I can cite multiple porn gals that have been fucked over, and I can cite many that have not…but they are valuable to me. I respect and care about them the same way I would about anybody who does something I care about and value. I do not wish to sound cavalier about this, understand that there are consequences, and do not expect for many reading this to approve.

I have never watch Rocco Sifredi or Max Hardcore because I understand that their shit is too hostile for me. Same would go for Bang Bus, I think. I would talk more specifically about this here if I thought there was interest, but I am slightly nervous in that its very easy to find out who I am.

and I want to make it clear that scat is not a fetish for me…me and my bandmates discovered my screenname-namesake in the late '90s; she is the scat queen of Germany. I found it completely fascinating, but not in a dick-hardening way, more a OHMIGAWD way… pursuant to Dylann's comments… I thought at one time that losing WWII did something really long-lasting and devastating to the sexual psyches of German and Japanese, but for all I know it's based on much more deep-seated truama.