Porn: Classic or Dud?

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.

Love too porn

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

look i don't know about you but when i look at porn i want to come

by which i mean that there is VALUE to turning off one's constant critical voice and simply experiencing something without having to get all meta-analytical about it

I do not wish to sound cavalier about this, understand that there are consequences, and do not expect for many reading this to approve.

― veronica moser, Friday, 23 September 2016 20:32

Approve of you valuing the female performers?

can i just say? CLASSIC. love too rush my mancy

to be sure, pubic hair is mostly okay. buttholes are a grey area

― dylannn

well maybe _yours_ is

been reading this thread off and on since it was bumped and the question i keep asking myself that may seem obvious to the rest of you is, is porn supposed to be supplanting actual sex? so people actually prefer it to sex? or is porn just an outlet because a person cannot have or get sex for whatever reason?

not judging, but i thought porn was good when i was a kid. as i got older i usually sought out sex, and if i couldn't get it, i'd just rub one out without watching a video or pictures. maybe there is something to be said for how busy i am for videos/pictures. i'll put in more effort if i'm getting the real thing

but anyway, i do feel porn is generally not the best solution. i kind of believe if you want sex, you should go through the process of trying to get it and without paying for it, because it teaches you a lot of valuable things -- some of which may not be so nice

there's also the idea that watching too much porn or going to too many strip clubs or having sex with too many prostitutes desensitizes you to sex and romantic relationships

in the end like ye mad puffin said, a lot of it is being able to compartmentalize and separate porn, sex, and relationships within their appropriate context, which i think is harder for people to do

look i don't know about you but when i look at porn i want to come

― a confederacy of lampreys (rushomancy), Friday, September 23, 2016 2:39 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is an important point because when it comes to men, there's a very big difference in just wanting to cum and enjoying the pleasure for a long time

(which i think seeps into personality types)

My gut instinct for men is that there are two major styles of porn fandom/viewership - transgressive fantasy and embodiment fantasy. The latter puts the viewer in the position of being the guy in the porn and this is less likely to become progressively more extreme because it's tied closely to real-life sexual desires and experiences. Transgressive fantasy - racist interracial stuff, particularly degrading acts and setups, etc. - gets more and more out there as one's kinks start to feel boring/normal.

milo, i like your categorization. for me transgression has never been founded in sexual activity. like watching somebody stick a fist up somebody else's ass, i don't think that's "transgressive". i'm less and less enamored with the culture of transgression as i've seen how it's evolved over my lifetime as well.

i'll admit that sometimes when i do go looking for porn- a pretty rare event these days- i will get sidetracked and i will find myself listening to weird music. because you have the tube sites sure but for me the internet has never seemed to be divided into "pornographic" and "non-pornographic" bits. you know what, the hell with it, i'll masturbate to james whitney's "yantra". it's more erotic than "bathman dal pianeta eros", more erotic than the vast majority than what passes for pornography these days.

and eventually one gets to the point where one starts making one's own pornography. i've had a couple friends who've written porn, and i do find myself impressed by it, if not especially aroused. that's the point where one should be thinking about the ethics of a thing, when one is creating, rather than when one is consuming. it's probably better that way. fucking money ruins everything.

I think hardly anyone prefers porn to sex, it's just extremely convenient and there are lots of fetishes that are unlikely or impossible in the real world.

Expansion to thread

i've always liked this quote from albee's zoo story:

"What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you’re a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you’re older. It’s that when you’re a kid you use the cards as a substitute for real experience, and when you’re older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy."

interesting dichotomy milo re: trangsgressive and embodiment, but does trangressive necessarily entail violence and/or degradation? i don't tihnk so, things can feel transgressive whatever our boundaries might be.

and embodiment doesn't always mean "putting yourself in the guy's position in (straight) porn..." i imagine many viewers might also imagine themselves in any given actor's position. i watch mostly straight but also some gay porn and embodiment fantasy might entail any of the actors involved. (same goes for music really.... there was a discussion on the fka twigs song about "what perspective do you take as a listener" while hearing a particularly sexual twigs song and i've thought about that question and have concluded that my perspective shifts throughout the song and eventually entails fantasizing about each of the perspectives)

also porn and other erotica isn't really a substitute "when i can't get sex", it's just one aspect of my own sexuality and eroticism that also entails physical sex, imagination, reading, masturbation, idk? this is prob more than i want to share on a message board but these are my thoughts on the subject

I should have clarified hetero guy - that's the only lens I personally have and tbh the only lens through which it's ever been discussed with friends.

I'm sure transgressive extends beyond the few things I mentioned (the extreme edge of offensive transgression), like the pseudo-incest stuff mentioned in the NYer article - (I assume a frisson of bad behavior as an enticement, then pretty standard p-in-v porn once the scenario is set up). The hordes watching that don't want to fuck their moms but the taboo makes it more exciting initially.

The dichotomy, though, seems apt in describing how porn develops and how porn viewing develops. 'Interracial' porn, from what I've read, is always black guy and non-black woman (usually white) and the setup is generally degrading to both performers (or all) - it's hard to see that as something not driven by taboo/transgression rather than the viewer identifying/empathizing with the male performer.

For sure it may not be a structure that stands up to analysis even limited to cis/hetero dudes, as I said it's just gut instinct about the way I've seen porn treated/how the porn sells itself.

'Interracial' porn, from what I've read, is always black guy and non-black woman (usually white)

Not true. There's plenty of black woman/multiple white guys porn, for example.

and the setup is generally degrading to both performers (or all)

This part I can't really argue with.

https://mediadiversified.org/2016/04/20/porn-our-colour-blind-spot-when-it-comes-to-racism/

Been horrified at the (increasing?) prevalence of this stuff, there's even a video site called Apetube. Too many dominatrix custom clips with the "racial humiliation" genre, like videos with a torrent of racist abuse for Asian viewers.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 11 August 2016 19:41

That's me posting on rolling race thread.

It's a shame, whenever I see stuff with black men and white women, it's too often labelled in a racist way and I wonder how often the scene is meant to be degrading in that way.
Only recently I noticed how rife it is Japanese cartoon porn to have a darker man with a pale woman and its sometimes difficult to tell if it's meant to be degrading for that reason.

F sharp infinity, for me it's definitely not either/or but both/and. I am married and like sex quite a lot, but I also value solo excursions that are (as marcos says) simply another aspect of sexuality.

Many xps. Treeship sez,

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.

Sometimes it's the same people under different names, worth mentioning?

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.

In a discussion full of Unspeakable Things, one of the main ones is surely 'Some people shouldn't be looking at this stuff'. People who lack critical skills, people who lack life experience, people who for cultural reasons are going to see porn but not have actual sexual encounters until later ... whoever it is, if they look at it there'll be trouble. Cf the judge in the Lady Chatterly case - 'Would you let your wife or sevants read this?'

I'm not accusing treesh of saying this - I sort of think everyone sometimes thinks this, but we don't often talk about it because we don't want to look like that judge?

Idk man. Teenagers watching stuff like the kink video described in this article? https://nplusonemag.com/issue-16/essays/what-do-you-desire/ Seems fucked up, not to say we should "ban" it or whatever. We live in a misogynistic society as it is, and a lot of this material is eroticizing misogyny. Not just that, it is absorbed unconsciously/uncritically in many cases, I suspect

That's a complex/nuanced article btw, far more so than my posts. Didn't link to it bc i think witt would support my posts but bc it provides a good description of the kind of material that is now widely accessible

Yeah no, young teenagers (or people with equivalent lack of knowledge of how sex usually is for most people that have) watching that sort of stuff is a genuine concern - just really hard to come out and say that without claiming to be more sexually knowledgeable than a teenager which is not a claim I'm 100% willing to make

*that have it

I can't make a causal argument -- idk the effect of this stuff on people. It just seems like it is on the wrong side of the movement toward gender equality. But maybe by exaggerating misogyny it turns it into kitsch and defuses it or something i don't fucking know

this is all very difficult because it's hard to find the real line of distinction between sex as biological drive and the socially conditioned (let's say pavlovian) environment in which sexual desire is enacted/expressed. as everyone has already said there's a two-way street between spontaneous expressions of sexuality and the kind of conditioned responses that porn (arguably) trains us to have. in a positive sense, many have made the argument that porn leads people to have more varied and satisfying sex lives--and yet on the other hand its possible that porn normalizes a kind of sexual performance that most people cannot live up to. so it's equally possible to argue that porn both makes our actual non-masturbatory sex lives more and less satisfying.

add to this the further difficulty of distinguishing between sex as pure reproduction and sex as a way of relating to another person intimately (and let's not forget that the notion "intimacy" itself has its own extremely complicated social history) and you find yourself constantly facing a widening and indistinguishable gray zone.

one other point: there's a notion of "peak libido" from Bernard Stiegler that's interesting to consider in regard to porn, in which porn is merely part of a massive apparatus designed to control/re-direct/defuse desire. (it's also possibly worth considering here that old hoary question as to what extent something like "aggression" is connected to desire and how right/left biases about "human nature" play into how we feel about porn)

I will say this - I'm glad this thread has so many points of view on it. A lot of the discussion on the issue falls into a bit of a binary between praise and blame ... I mean I know this thread is in fact called 'porn: classic or dud' but that's been taken as a bit of a joke ...

and ryan otm.

Treeship getting his knowledge of pornography from n+1 articles is perfect

lol tom

otm

tom otm

N+1 should do a line of small-batch, artisanal porn.

Straight to Hi8, no copies made. Each porn video will be tailored to your needs.

I don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_sex

I just learned about this!

did not realize the kids and the ottoman were part of a japanese tube continuum

Didn't Japan have a game show where men competed to see who could last longer getting a handjob from a porn star?