Friday, January 7, 2011

What Can We Learn from Porn?

It’s probably not the most burning question about porn, but Natasha Vargas-Cooper is correct to try to understand what pornography tells us about male sexuality. I daresay, she has written an excellent article about it, one that I recommend highly. Link here.

As I read it, her short answer is: nothing good.

For a very large number of boys, pornography has surely become the most prevalent form of sex education.They watch porn to learn how sex is done and to see what it looks like while it is being done. They are also being influenced to do it themselves-- to make porn, that is.

From watching porn boys learn something about the functioning of their bodies. They also find in porn ample fuel for their masturbatory tendencies.

It's no secret that males are the greatest consumers of porn. Women view it sometimes, in order to be informed about what is being demanded of them, but, left to their own devices, women are not especially drawn to pornography.

Of course, boys are fearless competitors, natural-born risk takers, and they often want to try what they are watching. They are prone to emulate their betters, and male porn stars are sexual performers of the first order. Vargas-Cooper writes: “But pervasive hard-core porn has allowed many people to flirt openly with practices that may have always been desired, but had been deeply buried under social restraint.”

She imagines, no doubt correctly, that greater exposure to porn has persuaded more people to try anal, but I doubt that it has led too many of them to try midget fetishes.

I am less persuaded than Vargas-Cooper that human beings have always wanted to do double anal but that social restraints were preventing them from living their dreams.

Of course, Internet porn is not the first sexual instruction manual. To the best of my knowledge, that honor belongs to the Kama Sutra.

Where the Kama Sutra is limited to the multitude of positions in which a couple can perform coitus, the Internet porn has largely surpassed and superseded such plain vanilla sexual advice.

And where the Kama Sutra directs its attention to heightened conventional pleasure, one suspects that Internet porn, which is largely fetishistic, involves a competition to see who can perform the most outrageous and disgusting sex acts.

Then again, the Kama Sutra is not porn. It does not pretend to be satisfying in itself but directs its readers to try it all out at home.

As I’ve written in the past-- here and here -- pornography is like wine. It is fine in moderation, but in excess it rots your liver.

Men and boys who are overly exposed to porn, who become pornoholics, might find that their sexual responsiveness is numbed. Thus, these men require stranger and more degenerate images to elicit  sexual arousal and release.

Pornography is the problem for which it pretends to be the solution.

If pornography is really a male domain, why would a woman be interested in studying it? Vargas-Cooper suggests that by studying porn a woman can learn that feminism has gotten sex completely and drastically wrong.

It has propagated an ideologically-driven myth based on the illusion of human sexual equality.

In her words: “But the reactionary political correctness of the 1990s put forth a proposition even more disastrous to women than free love: sexual equality. With the rise of PC culture, the notion of men and women as sexual equals has found a home in the mainstream. Two generations of women, my own included, soared into the game with the justifiable expectations of not only earning the same wage as a guy, but also inhabiting the sexual arena the way a man does.”

Feminist ideology has created unrealistic expectations, so women did not learn how to accommodate sexual difference, but focused their attention on trying to recondition men, to teach them how to make love like women.

As Vargas-Cooper says: “This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril. Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression. The Internet has created a perfect market of buyers and sellers (with the sellers increasingly proffering their goods gratis) that provides what people—overwhelmingly males (who make up two-thirds of all porn viewers)—want to see or do.

“Pornography, with its garish view of male sexual desire, bares an uncomfortable truth that the women’s-liberation movement has successfully suppressed: men and women have conflicting sexual agendas.”

Reasonably enough, she suggests that men are by nature aggressive about sex and that any effort to make them soft and vulnerable, to be in touch with their feminine side, does not work. Only in a world where the discourse on sexuality has been contaminated by feminism would anyone need to assert this point. Since our world has suffered that fate, we should be grateful to Vargas-Cooper for pointing it out.

Of course, you don’t even have to watch a bunch of scenes of triple oral to grasp the point. Take the name of the most popular erectile dysfunction medicine: Viagra. Haven’t you noticed that the two syllables in the brand are the first syllables in the words: violence and aggression?

I hope you didn’t think that the word Viagra was an amalgam of the first syllables of violet and agree.

Men want to see themselves as tigers; they want their women to see them as tigers. If they start feeling like delicate flowers or like a woman’s prey,  they become, as Vargas-Cooper poignantly shows, less able to perform.

What is the reality that feminism has sought to ignore? She writes: “While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality. They may be unattractive and even, if taken to extremes, dangerous, but they’re not, perhaps alas, deviant. Leaving aside for the moment the argument that some things that might be sordid and even ugly can also be arousing and satisfying, the main problem with the new anti-porn critics is their naive assumption that if only we could blot out Internet porn, then the utopia of sexual equality would be achieved. But equality in sex can’t be achieved. Internet porn exposes that reality; it may even intensify that reality; it doesn’t create it.”

As it happens Vargas-Cooper is not the first or the only person to have attempted to isolate the essence of male sexual behavior. Nor is she alone is questioning how much of it is intrinsic to the male of the species and how much of it results from either social constraints or the leavening influence of women.

Donald Symons, for one, studied how men behave sexually when there is no woman around and how women behave sexually when there is no man around. See his book: The Evolution of Human Sexuality.

It’s almost intuitively obvious, but Symons was able to demonstrate that male homosexuals were far more likely to engage in anonymous casual hookups than are men who have sex with women.

And he also noted that lesbians are strongly prone to combine intimacy with emotional connection and long-term relationships.

But, what exactly does Vargas-Cooper mean when she says that aggression is the animating force behind male sexual arousal?

I would agree that that men have a reptilian side, that they are easily stimulated by visual images, and that they are capable of lusting after the most repulsive pornography. I would also agree that if there is no woman involved a man is less likely to think about a long term, committed relationship.

That is not the salient point. Perhaps it has begun to eat at you, just a little bit, but why do we accept so easily that the best way to study male sexuality is to examine how men function sexually when there are no women present?

If we really wanted to know the true nature of male sexuality, wouldn’t it be a good idea to examine how men behave sexually when they are involved with human females rather than with she-goats?

Doesn’t Internet porn tell us more about the lengths to which men will go to achieve sexual release when women are not around? Don’t its most aberrant fetishes really concern how to get aroused when the touch and presence of a real woman no longer work for you?

We need to distinguish between what people are capable of doing and what they would do naturally. We can agree that all, or nearly all, human beings, under the most dire circumstances, would be capable of eating human flesh.

Does that tell us the truth about the human alimentary appetite, or does it tell us the most extreme possibility, the kind you resort to when other more appetizing possibilities are absent?

Whether we are talking about man-on-man sex or about man-watching-porn sex, the one thing they have in common is the absence of a real woman.

While real women are certainly more difficult to deal with than images on your computer screen, they do offer reproductive possibilities that are radically precluded from the instances that are supposed to show us the truth about male desire.

It’s one thing to say that men get aroused by images of bukkake; quite another to say that they get aroused when their female sexual partner is exhibiting biochemical signs of fertility or behavioral signs of desire.

We can accept that men are capable of responding to every manner of fetish, but why should we diminish the fact that men are aroused by sexual hormones and their lovers’ desire? And that these forms of arousal are more normal, and more natural than watching an endless series of movies about spanking porn.

When a man wants to ravish a woman, there is surely an aggressive component. But doesn't their lovemaking make that aggressiveness part of the game? Wouldn't it be reasonable to say that the impulse is tempered in the interest of obtaining a consent and responsiveness that is exciting, and not to say that he has been forced to repress his truest sexual nature?

If he really, really wants to copulate with her, would you say that he is repressing his fetishistic tendencies?

True enough, sex between a man and a woman involves mutually compromise. As we all know, in a marriage a man is going to get less sex than he wants and a woman is going to get more sex than he wants.

Why would we not imagine that their sexual relations are improved by the fact that they have each given their full consent to a compromise arrangement that would be most likely to be mutually satisfying? Rather than consider it to be a restraint on their animal spirits, why not consider it a trade-off, an exchange of one kind of sexual function for a more gratifying one.

While I applaud Vargas-Cooper‘s efforts to explain some of the truths about male sexuality to feminists, I would place the emphasis differently.

Why not say that pornography shows us what the way male sexuality functions when women are absent, but that the truth of male sexual behavior lies in what happens when real women are present.

13 comments:

Chuck Pelto said...

TO: Dr. Schneiderman
RE: Well....

As we all know, in a marriage a man is going to get less sex than he wants and a woman is going to get more sex than [s]he wants. -- Stuart Schneiderman

....I-I-I-I-I wouldn't be too sure about thaaaat.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Instant sex will never be better than the kind you have to peel and cook.]

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Don't the exceptions prove the rule...

Dennis said...

Had a married man tell me before I got married some almost 50 years ago to get a big glass bottle. Every time I had sex I was to put a bean in it. Say if one had sex five times in a day one would put five beans in the jar for that day. The only time you would remove a bean is if you did not have sex on a given day.
He stated that in the not too distant future that the jar would become empty and stay that way. I thought he was crazy, but alas he was not. Life is full of challenges that put both partners in a marriage under considerable stress. It has little to do with loving each other.
If one is to look at any studies on this Stuart is right.

Robert Mitchell Jr. said...

I think women actually buy more porn then men. Look at the sales and resales of "Romance Novels". Sure are a lot of "none consensual moments" in them. What does that tell us about female sexuality?

Chuck Pelto said...

TO: Dr. Schneiderman
RE: In That Case....

Don't the exceptions prove the rule... -- Stuart Schneiderman

....I thank God for all the blessings He bestowed on me since I became a REAL christian.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[My cup runneth over....]

P.S. Mind the spillage.....

Chuck Pelto said...

TO: Dennis
RE: You....

He stated that in the not too distant future that the jar would become empty and stay that way. I thought he was crazy, but alas he was not. -- Dennis

....have my sympathy. And, at the current rate, I guess I'll live to be around 200 before I see the beans 'disappear', entirely.

Maybe the good doctor can provide a thread where we can discuss this sort of happenstance in more detail. [Note: Personally speaking, I suspect that an abiding 'Faith' has EVERYTHING to do with it.]

This thread is more interested in 'porn'. That's something we don't have around here. We don't 'need' it.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[Who can find a virtuous wife. Her worth is greater than rubies. -- Proverbs 31]

P.S. As I was saying about 'cups'.....

P.S. Doc....

....I'm again reminded of how I've been 'blessed'.....

Chuck Pelto said...

TO: Robert Mitchell, Jr.
RE: Bodice Rippers

I think women actually buy more porn then men. Look at the sales and resales of "Romance Novels". -- Bob

Good point. And it supports the idea that women are more 'mental' about it as men are. Whereas men are more likely to be 'visual' about it.

What was it someone said....

You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life and women are sexually manipulative. -- Andrea Dworkin

This correlates well with that understanding.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[ When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love. -- Andrea Dworkin

Chuck Pelto said...

TO: Dr. Schneiderman
RE: Studies in 'Porn'....

Why not say that pornography shows us what the way male sexuality functions when women are absent, but that the truth of male sexual behavior lies in what happens when real women are present. -- Stuart Schneiderman

About 20 years ago—MY GOD!!!!....how time flies—our rich Uncle Sam funded research into American Male Sexuality. A couple of million went into what was touted as the most extensive such study in national history.

The 'results'—abridged, as far as I can discern—were published in Family Planning Perspectives. It's from the people who operate abortion mills. Check out their Volume 25, Number 2, March/April 1993, to see the initial article.

They have all KINDS of data on heterosexual male activity. But hardly anything as detailed relating to homosexual male activity.

I called them up about that. They refused to provide any information short of a federal Freedom of Information Act suit. But their 'reluctance' was more than enough of an 'indicator' to me.

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out....]

Chuck Pelto said...

P.S. Maybe....

....it's time for such an extensive study of American Female Sexuality. However, I doubt if the abortion industry would appreciate the results being published.

Chuck Pelto said...

TO: All
RE: Speaking about....

....'sex' without 'women'....

NOW we have THIS!

How...uh....'creative' can you get?

Regards,

Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out....not that 'progressives' will like it.]

P.S. Maybe we need to file a FOIA with the people who did that study nearly 20 years ago. Might provide some insight into 'male' sexuality.....

Stuart Schneiderman said...

I too am intrigued by Robert Mitchell's suggestion that, in fact, if you count romance novels as erotic stimulation, then one might say that women buy an awful lot of it.

And as Chuck notes, women are more mental and men more visual. But women are also more aural-- they are more interested in voices, too.

Now, the irony in the current situation is that the men who use online porn are mostly not paying for it... I assume... while women who buy romance novels do pay for them.

In the ancient Greek, the word "porne" meant prostitute, while "graphos" meant writing.

While women will pay a lot for mental intimacy... perhaps because they are not getting it from men... it is relatively rare for a woman to pay for sex. I'm not, of course, saying that it doesn't happen, but it happens far less often than does its opposite... men paying for sex.

Rogue Male said...

One dimension I'd like to see explored by Dr. Schneiderman is why women perform in porn, and increasingly, amateur porn. My take is that these women are validated by being sex objects. It is a thrill for them, and likely linked in some fashion to the goupie phenomenon. But in my own experience, there are a surprising number of smart, attractive women with validation issues, and sexuality/porn is one outlet (not the only one) whereby they seek a validation that is apparently missing in their lives.

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