Last week I interviewed a porn performer/director/business owner -
CJ Wright but I won’t link to his site because it is NOT EVEN A LITTLE SAFE FOR WORK
- and together we came to the conclusion that the pornification of our culture is woefully incomplete.
What??
What I mean is that the actual experience and vision underlying porn as an industry and pornification as a cultural force is partial and inadequate.
(I’m embroidering upon CJ’s experience here and making my own tapestry: CJ’s work is a little genre-busting in his niche – fat women – and so he can speak eloquently on why his work gets marginalized or dismissed within the porn industry; but his porn vision is still young, male, dick-centred, PIV sexuality. That’s who he is and so that’s what his porn is.)
(Talk about dowhatchaloveandthemoneywillcome.)
Porn – as pointed out by the delicious Cindy Gallop in her TED talk and at makelovenotporn.com – takes one experience, one gaze, and generalizes that particular experience of sex to mean sex, generally.
In short, what gets a young male heterosexual’s dick hard has now come to mean sexuality.
So yes, our current understandings and representations of sex are just sad and undernourished.
They’re not reverent. Not terribly joyous. Kinda boring. And man, the decor is fucking AWFUL.
I can’t get past that. I could blame my discomfort on lingering, ingrained second-wave anti-porn ideas, but I’d prefer to target the horrific hotel rooms because they are the antithesis of sexy.
So I get Alan Moore’s simultaneous exuberance for the function of porn (“function” – could I have made that less sexy?) and exasperation with the lack of art and intelligence in pornography. I understand the aesthete’s argument. I understand how impoverished porn is to an artistic, thinking guy like Alan Moore.
I just don’t think everything has to be rich and complex and beautiful and challenging.
Not everything has to be art. Not everything has to be substantial. Not everything has to be dinner. Sometimes it is just Cheerios and a dash out the door.
And that is okay.
But imagine if there were other options. Other visions of sexuality and sexual attitudes and joyous, libidinous sexual expression.
There are.
Well, I agree on what you said, but it seems to me you are – somehow – missing the point. The point being “Porn is a profit industry for making money”. Like most profit industries, they try to gain higher with spending lesser. Porn is – mostly – based on male sexual imaginarium: it’s exciting for men, so it sells. Period.
Beware, I’m not judging: I enjoy porn, it’s good to a part of my sexuality, although I acknowledge its limits.
It’s sort of like a screwdriver (pun intended): it doesn’t need to be fancy or artistic, it just “works”.
I understand most women can be annoyed, enraged or just plain bored by mainstream male porn (there are alternative niches, though). Porn wasn’t made for them, it was just made to excite us. It’s very specific and efficient, in that sense (and “efficient” is typical male reasoning, BTW
).
Other options, there are. There is female porn, and there is more “stylish” porn. The reason it’s much less widespread, perhaps, it sells much less. There’s less market to it.
In the end, male and female’s brain and minds often works differently. This has to be acknowledged (to understand and respect such diversity). The nature of porn is just a consequence of that diversity.
The pity (and here I agree with you) is when porn is equated with male sewuality; that’s just narrow-minded and impoverishing.
It would be like saying that Harlequin books (somehow “female pornography”) represent the whole feminine emotional world.
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I remember watching a ‘best of’ video years ago with a lover of mine and noticing the girl had one largish breast and one much smaller one. Now, I know we are not completely symmetrical, but this was quite obvious [to me]. He had seen this video many times [he owned it] yet never noticed. Yes, our minds work quite differently, but it’s not like women don’t get a bit turned on by porn as well, even the ‘male dominated get to it’ genre.
I did thoroughly enjoy Cindy Gallop’s video. It seems many men think this is what women want [not just twenty-somethings either]. If they never learn differently, then they will never perform differently. It can take a woman longer to get there than a man. I’m beginning to think Viagra was made by women for women so men could keep it up long enough to get her there.
And the cheerios and out the door analogy is spot on! It doesn’t always have to be all flowers and champagne; a quick dine and dash works fine, and is sometimes preferred.
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Valter,
You’re right – I didn’t consider or acknowledge the basic economics of why most mainstream porn is the way it is. It is a business. It is not about philanthropy or producing material with grand social objectives.
You wrote:
“The pity (and here I agree with you) is when porn is equated with male sewuality; that’s just narrow-minded and impoverishing.
It would be like saying that Harlequin books (somehow “female pornography”) represent the whole feminine emotional world.”
So we’re in total agreement on this.
The point I was trying to make, beyond that, that I didn’t draw out explicitly (and therefore, didn’t make, ahem) was more in line with Cindy Gallops’: that there are actual consequences to this vision. Pornography does often stand in for people as sex education. Young people grow up in a pornified culture that paradoxically has a dearth of sexual education and so they ‘learn’ about sex from porn.
So they/we learn that what porn presents as sex – male heterosexuality, designed for good camera angles – is sex.
This is a problem. It is a problem, politically (possibly) and it is a problem, personally. (Watch Cindy Gallop’s TED talk. Seriously. She says it way better than me.)
It isn’t a problem will get ‘fixed’ by the porn industry, obviously. But it is something we need to talk about.
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Valter Prahlad
replied:
on January 8th, 2010 at 5:50 am
@Kelly Diels,
KD: “Young people grow up in a pornified culture that paradoxically has a dearth of sexual education and so they ‘learn’ about sex from porn”
Yeah. That’s the problem (as always is ignorance).
And, before widespread porn, there were something else (barber’s calendars? Bigger brothers bragging?…)
The problem isn’t porn; the problem is, our culture lacks healthy sex education. Lacking good education, any alternative gets in the way. Porn isn’ a cause, it’s a consequence.
Untile bigots and morons will stop to bash sexuality, it will be distorted and un-educated. Porn or not.
Our oh-so-advanced culture, lacks almost totally in emotional and sexual education. We are at “barbaric” levels about that. So men and women grows learning lots about literature and calculus, and nothing about the fundamentals of life.
So they get whatever they can from media (porn included). Problem is, media aren’t meant for education, they are meant for entertainment.
Bottom line: we’re a bunch of ignorants, desperately trying to “graduate” in relationships.
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Porn: vicarious emotional connection.
A spectator sport. Sex a la Van Nuys.
But what about chick flicks? And romance novels e.g., “The Spymaster’s Lady.” (Which was very good by the way.) Or anything by Jane Austen.
Think about it: The Myth of the One. Millions and millions of impressionable young women emotionally handicapped by Miss Austen’s romantic fantasies.
Also, I agree with your assessment of make sexuality. It’s both far simpler (“you had me at the mashed potatoes”) and far more complex (ah… er, never mind) than either the pr0n industry or the mainstream media ever even hints at.
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Just to address one tiny little bit of this subject– regarding primarily your first commenter’s statement about women being annoyed or enraged by porn…
Women, I believe, as well as many men, are troubled by porn because it often leads to depersonalization, disconnection, exploitation and sexual violence. At least that’s my pov, and otherwise I’d be totally live-and-let-live.
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I agree with Leah that alot of us have grave concerns about porn as an industry, rather than just the product. Many vulnerable women (and men too) are exploited by the porn industry which often leads to drug use as well.
While I agree with Dave that romance novels are porn for women in a lot of ways. I think he has badly misunderstood Jane Austen if he puts her in the same category – her work is hardly naive aspirational fantasy.
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I really appreciate the acknowledgement around most porn being for the young dudes schlong. There’s just something about the lack of plot, bad music and closeups of areas I’d rather stayed in my imagination only that are so unappealing for me. Some of the sexiest movies for me aren’t even real porn. But I would love it if someone made good porn with a great plot, sexy lingerie and lots of hot sex. Think Secretary + burlesque + The Notebook or something along those lines.
For me, I can’t even get turned on by porn in video format, so I just opt for smutty reading instead.
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Well, I can’t say too much (or else I go on and on without end) here. Nevertheless, this posting and the comments made me think about a link I’d posted to Facebook earlier today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?_r=1
Here’s a partial extracted clump of text: While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto…, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs —
This was one of the top ten articles of 2009 in the New York Times.
Kelly, I found you via your wonderful ‘F It’ post on ProBlogger. So glad that I did.
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@zooey – Guitar Porn: http://www.ricktoone.com/2009/06/guitar-porn.html
Q.E.D.
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