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to the multitude of positions in which a couple can perform coitus, the Internet porn has largely surpassed and superseded such plain vanilla sexual advice.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