Conservative, Brutal, and Anonymous ... Often Monotonous
September 20, 2016 2:30 AM   Subscribe

Today, our flesh comes to us from the Internet, and not only what we consume but how we consume has changed since the porn wars. Porn is abundantly more, in every way: there are more people, more acts, more clips, more categories. It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar. Making Sense of Modern Pornography by Katrina Forrester in The New Yorker
posted by chavenet (69 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Well, that sounds just as depressing as (or even more depressing than) the rest of the economy: the same all-but inescapable pressure to do more for less. Little wonder that much of the end product - such as I've seen - seems so joyless, with the performers too often having the same harrassed air as office drones trying to get their quarterly reports done by the end of business. Given what sound like increasingly difficult working conditions, I can hardly blame them for that.
posted by zmacw49 at 3:39 AM on September 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


From the first paragraph, I'm still reading:

according to a recent CNBC report, seventy per cent of American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to-five workday.

Yeah. Ok. I'm going to carry my own mouse around in case I need to use someone's computer in the office.
posted by adept256 at 3:56 AM on September 20, 2016 [18 favorites]


I suspect most of that is smartphone viewing, so the mice are probably no more disgusting than anything else humans are touching.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:09 AM on September 20, 2016


Anything else?
posted by The Bellman at 4:13 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


according to a recent CNBC report, seventy per cent of American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to-five workday.

Why do they do that? So they won't get busted at home? Every few years a story turns up at my work about someone caught with porn just exploding from their work computer! Seems like a poor plan....they MIGHT fire you for being on Facebook all day, but there's no doubt & maybe also charges with the porn (State-owned PCs).
posted by thelonius at 4:18 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I note that the article states that porn use happens during work hours,, but it isn't clear about whether it is on work computers. I wonder how much the unemployment rate can account fo tha.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:38 AM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


according to a recent CNBC report, seventy per cent of American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to-five workday.

If I may be frank, I am much more inclined to look at such things if I have a day off. After a full day of work I am either too motivated or too tired to bother with downtime activities.

I expect the unemployed, semi-employed, and student population also skew the figure significantly.
posted by solarion at 4:41 AM on September 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


Not well researched enough really: Jenna Jameson is now officially broke and Sasha Grey now has a legal restraining order enforced against the guy she says got her into porn: Grey claims in new court docs Ian Cinnamon subjected Grey to years of abuse and sexual assaults -- starting in 2005 when she was 16 and he was 29. Grey claims it was Cinnamon who convinced her to become a porn star.
posted by Coda Tronca at 4:41 AM on September 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


This is why people shouldn't have multiple monitors at work.
posted by oceanjesse at 4:43 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Not an easy read, I have to say. As an AMAB person attracted to women, I'm pretty clearly the intended consumer of a lot of porn, and as much as I enjoy the idea in the abstract, so much of the politics of how it plays out in practice really upsets me. I really like the idea of pushing for a more inclusive approach to making porn, one that pays a decent wage to performers, acknowledges the importance of treating everyone with decency (kink being of course entirely consistent with these ideals), and reflects the diversity of people in the word, but like the article says...

Few people want ethics with their porn.

... yeah, that. Despite notionally being in favour of porn "as it would work in my ideal world", I'm pretty uncomfortable with porn as it currently exists in this one.
posted by langtonsant at 4:46 AM on September 20, 2016 [10 favorites]


One regrettable artifact of the tube porn era seems to be an increase in misogynistic porn titling. While porn creators and publishers are not and have never been strangers to calling their female performers sluts and other demeaning things, the massive amounts of copyright-infringing and/or non-consensually published porn (unauthorized camshow recordings, some of the home sex stuff, pirated clips from commercially released titles etc.) uploaded on tube sites by its users seem to have brought with them a significant increase in extra horrible video titling. It's like a safe space for unchecked population-level misogyny.

If my gut feeling about this is correct, it seems like a given that an increase in exposure to misogynistic language further normalizes and reinforces misogynistic views of female porn performers and likely women in general.

It's not like the actual content of a large portion of the videos isn't already hugely problematic and demeaning and with its own negative effects, but I feel that the metadata (titling, categorisation) side may be getting overlooked in the discourse.
posted by jklaiho at 4:48 AM on September 20, 2016 [21 favorites]


Pro porn has been a repulsive, brutal, misogynistic, and racist swamp for a long, long time. Inexplicably, amateurs (and what is known as "pro-am") have taken advantage of our internet age and filled the void for what would more-or-less be "acceptable" porn. What's especially interesting about amateur porn is the overall body-positive stance, which runs counter to pro porn.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:10 AM on September 20, 2016 [15 favorites]


It's not like the actual content of a large portion of the videos isn't already hugely problematic and demeaning and with its own negative effects, but I feel that the metadata (titling, categorisation) side may be getting overlooked in the discourse.

I'm not a major porn consumer, but I've seen enough to agree with this. There is something weird and off-putting about the categorizations and titling, where clearly many people not only want to know each and every subcategory of act and ethnicity before watching, but also prefer degrading or just plain gross titles, rather than descriptive ones.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:17 AM on September 20, 2016 [6 favorites]


according to a recent CNBC report, seventy per cent of American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to-five workday.

Well that sets off my Snopes Alarm, and not just because I work in an office that doesn't even have cubicle walls. Let's follow the trail!

a recent CNBC report

Perhaps this seven-year-old sensationalist bit of reporting?

Ooh, a citation! Off we go!

according to a MessageLabs monthly report from March 2004

Now we're down the rabbit hole. MessageLabs was a web security SaaS vendor that Symantec bought eight years ago. All their archives have been scrubbed from the internet. But wait! The Wayback Machine has us covered! Here's the "March 2004 report" from MessageLabs. In which is discussed, briefly, the newly-emerging technology of sender authentication to combat spam. Notably not present: discussion of pornography, its viewing at work, or anything even vaguely related, because MessageLabs dealt with email security, not employee browsing behavior.

OK, we can go back to talking about how porn is shitty for/to people, and women in general, but maybe we can stop framing it in terms of "everyone watches it at work on their second monitor, LOL."
posted by Mayor West at 5:38 AM on September 20, 2016 [66 favorites]


Regarding titles: I don't believe it's new. I believe tube-sites and pic-dumps amplify it due to volume. An impressive degree of iteration. Not creative, but a permutational exercise. I believe American culture's Puritanical sanction of public spaces is profound and body-shaming is generally pervasive and from the get-go. Fantasy frequently involves control and power and the titles utilize every taboo a society has prepared itself. I can't decide if the article's final line is one of my favorite framings, or a platitude, but I'm leaning toward the former.

Does a volume normalize? I think so. I enjoyed the article's exploration of practicalities and there are many points of reference from which to jump and follow. A taxonomy of depiction intrigues me. How it is I see an abundance of clips where women emote helplessness and fear and a man subdues by slaps, grips, and chokes...I can't watch it for even seconds, but a sizable audience does and I think, "Well, that's not good." So what is achieved for those men? And there's no one answer of course. My porn choices, of course, are healthy...right? I want to see a woman, or women, smiling and laughing at commanding a situation in which I'm gratified. And what does that say about me?

I don't have a single answer.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 5:53 AM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


MetaFilter: everyone watches it at work on their second monitor, LOL.
posted by briank at 6:13 AM on September 20, 2016 [11 favorites]


In the office building I once worked at, I would enter the building through the atrium where some of the first-floor businesses had windows into their offices. I recall one corner cubicle especially. The occupant in the cubicle must have bee in the IT department...He had a three-monitor setup. One monitor had what appeared to be realtime plots of server and network loads, the second monitor had stock marker plots (this was back in the day when every tech and dev was a day trader) and the third monitor was full of porn.

I don't think he ever figured-out how to work the window blinds.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:13 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


our flesh comes to us from the Internet

Ah hmm, hold on a moment. *begins furiously writing draft of next Hellraiser script*

My daughter was in the tub the other day and suddenly said "I'm drinking my flesh!" which is definitely the most Pinhead thing she's ever said.
posted by selfnoise at 6:20 AM on September 20, 2016 [20 favorites]


Regarding titles: I don't believe it's new. I believe tube-sites and pic-dumps amplify it due to volume.

It's definitely not new. A friend and I went into an old-school porn place as teenagers (expecting to get kicked out, but no one cared) in the mid/late 1980s, back in the days of coin-operated booths and magazines in shrinkwrap. What I recall most of all was the subcategory upon subcategory of specialist magazines, each targeting a very particular set of buyers, many imported from Europe. But the overt degradation in the language was (at least in my memory) a lot more toned down than the titles you see now on the tube sites.

So there is more volume now, but there's also even more directness and lack of filtering, since anyone can upload a pirated clip and give it the title they think it deserves, and there are fewer barriers since you don't have to drive to the one sketchy place on the outskirts of town and risk being seen there.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:23 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think the titling is subject to the same Greshamization process as the content, no? It's optimized for quick-twitch appeal in the same brutally reductive way web content is tuned for SEO — a race to the bottom, so to speak.
posted by adamgreenfield at 6:34 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


a race to the bottom, so to speak.

That's its own niche genre.
posted by Mayor West at 6:36 AM on September 20, 2016 [14 favorites]


Ah-ha! I knew there had to be more to the story than a columnist just making up a citation for a news story. The missing link was "Porn @ Work: Exposing the Office's #1 Addiction," a 176-page tome in which Michael Leahy describes the epidemic of pornography plaguing the modern business world. He published it several years before admitting to his own pornography addiction. He's now a regular contributor to The 700 Club.

Excerpted from the book's Appendix A, Statistics On Pornography, from which the 70% number was taken:
Unless otherwise noted, the statistics below are found in Jerry Ropelato, "Internet Pornography Statistics" (www.toptenreviews.com), and are drawn from credible news and business sources.
posted by Mayor West at 6:46 AM on September 20, 2016 [13 favorites]


I saw a comment once on Reddit from someone who claimed to have run a very successful gay porn site. He said an overwhelming majority of customers were older, possibly married men in the Midwest.

I believe him.
posted by ostranenie at 6:59 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I believe him too. I think comparing and contrasting heterosexual, gay, and women-produced porn is essential to any comprehension.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 7:02 AM on September 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Pornhub's data reports are an alternate source for evaluating the "seventy per cent of American online-porn access occurs during the nine-to-five workday" claim. Pornhub’s Fappyhour specifically looks at American porn usage by hour. Eyeballing the graphs, the 8 hours of 9-5 account for roughly 33% of total porn viewing per day. And same hourly pattern on weekdays or weekends, there's nothing special about being at work.
posted by Nelson at 7:14 AM on September 20, 2016 [9 favorites]


Here's a fascinating look at fact checking at The New Yorker over the years.
posted by notyou at 7:45 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm still weirded out that we human monkeys get off on other human monkeys copulating in full video form. Am I the only one that still jerks off to tasteful pics of bikini babes + my imagination?

Not a Christian, just have a really vivid imagination.
posted by ELF Radio at 8:04 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Some people have to put their sex partner down in order to perform. This at least seems most common amongst outwardly heterosexual males. And like the song says, some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused. Those with a need to be mean are the ones that makes hooker's lives so dangerous.
posted by Goofyy at 8:11 AM on September 20, 2016


It would definitely be nice if "ethical porn" were more of a thing, but then, I don't think porn viewing necessarily maps neatly to real world sexual behaviors/appetites.

I don't know. Porn can be a helpful tool for managing excess sexual desire, but it can easily get away from that and become something that feeds excess/unhealthy sexual appetites in real life, too, I suspect.

I'm with Jocelyn Elders on masturbation as an underutilized tool for managing male aggression and potentially unhealthy sexual frustration, but the cultural messages around mainstream porn can definitely seem problematic.

In the case of kink, especially, the meaning of certain degrading fantasy behaviors might not read the same way to the performers and the audience--a man or woman volunteering for fantasy play involving degrading treatment as a release from shame and as a way of confronting and owning their own emotional baggage related to sexual stigma, for example, might be liberating/cathartic/personally satisfying for the performer while at the same time feeding into the same unhealthy cultural attitudes that stigmatized them in the first place among the audience for that performance...

It kills me, though, that PornHub is considered mainstream porn and there's so much of that ugliness in it. But then I've also been accused of being a killjoy for sweating stuff like that, and for some people, the "nastiness" of that kind of sexual expression seems to be a necessary condition for arousal.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:24 AM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


Relevant: Andrea Dworkin's Pornography is a Civil Rights Issue

I feel like she's more relevant now than ever. (hugs memory of Andrea Dworkin, wipes tear)
posted by Dressed to Kill at 8:28 AM on September 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: probably no more disgusting than anything else humans are touching.
posted by mhoye at 8:31 AM on September 20, 2016 [10 favorites]


Why would I put MetaFilter (or RedTube either) on my second monitor?
My second monitor is for the dumb stuff, like work.
posted by MtDewd at 8:50 AM on September 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


I've got a desktop and a laptop going at the same time here in my home office. Hmm, never thought of running porn on one while working. I'm easily distracted (see, I'm posting of MeFi instead of fucking getting to work) so I can't imagine my level of concentration if I have people engaging in the sweaty on the next screen. Best I can do is sometimes I'll have a nude for a desktop wallpaper. Which usually results in my wife coming in, tsking, and saying "butts, why is it always butts".

As a CIS boomer male I have seen my fair share of porn in my life and I find these days it's rare to see something that's not stale, demeaning, or just soulless. Maybe I need to see what Stoya is up to.
posted by Ber at 9:04 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Some porn sites get more traffic than news sites like CNN...

As well as being much more professional.
posted by Splunge at 9:07 AM on September 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


look, I'm not afraid to admit it...

I watch videos on CNN.com sometimes. I've even done it at work.

what can I say, I'm a red blooded cis male and sometimes I like watching good journalism get boned

OH WHAAAAT
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:16 AM on September 20, 2016 [6 favorites]


I don't know. Porn can be a helpful tool for managing excess sexual desire, but it can easily get away from that and become something that feeds excess/unhealthy sexual appetites in real life, too, I suspect.

What is excess sexual desire?
posted by layceepee at 9:28 AM on September 20, 2016


Like, being horny, but not having a partner. It won't kill you to be completely abstinent, but there can be unhealthy physical/psychological effects. Sexual desire is a basic human instinctual drive for most people. That doesn't mean anyone has a right to expect to find a partner, but there's good evidence most people need some kind of sexual release now and then--as Jocelyn Elders acknowledged (for one example of a medical expert who publicly advanced that view of the health consensus).
posted by saulgoodman at 9:38 AM on September 20, 2016


The internet in general is serving as humanity's Id, so it's no surprise that the porny quarters of it are also the Iddiest.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:49 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I saw a comment once on Reddit from someone who claimed to have run a very successful gay porn site. He said an overwhelming majority of customers were older, possibly married men in the Midwest.

I was gonna be all, "hey, I live in a libidinous coastal city and know a lot of out gay men who consume a whole buncha man-porn" ...but then I suppose demographically, if even a small proportion of straight-identified guys were looking at it, the numbers would easily tilt that way.

Still, I'm curious just what kind of user metadata someone in that position could reasonably collect.
posted by psoas at 9:50 AM on September 20, 2016


Like, being horny, but not having a partner. It won't kill you to be completely abstinent, but there can be unhealthy physical/psychological effects.

That suggests a model where masturbation is nothing but a not-quite-as-good substitute for sex with a partner. I guess I regard masturbation as being something similar to, but different from, sex with a partner. (In fact, there have been times during sex with a partner, I've had the thought, "It's going to be great to remember this moment next time I'm jerking off.")
posted by layceepee at 10:11 AM on September 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


(In fact, there have been times during sex with a partner, I've had the thought, "It's going to be great to remember this moment next time I'm jerking off.")

AKA: "Re-stocking the Spank Bank."
posted by Coda Tronca at 10:18 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


No reason it couldn't be both is there, layceepee? I think I get what you're saying though.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:30 AM on September 20, 2016


Clips4sale. Certain kinds of streaming. Genuine amateur/exhibitionist stuff. None of that comes with a promise that nothing shady is going on behind the scenes -sometimes there is - but if you're looking for "ethical porn" it seems worth getting a little deeper (...) into the way technological change has made truly DIY pornography a thing. (Probably works better for niches and fetishes though?)
posted by atoxyl at 12:20 PM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I guess I regard masturbation as being something similar to, but different from, sex with a partner.

Happiness is just an arm's length away ;)
I read layceepee's first post as a sincere joke, coy framing, or sarcasm, but everyone can see the potential for confusion, no? And an important point (what assumptions are made/given/accepted by "excess" any human desire/need/behavior).
posted by lazycomputerkids at 12:21 PM on September 20, 2016


"Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn," by Schmuley Boteach and Pamela Anderson.
posted by No Robots at 12:39 PM on September 20, 2016


Is that wsj rant worth reading? In the first paragraph it conflated infidelity with porn watching, so I can't imagine it's going to get better.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:01 PM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


sebastienbailard: In the first paragraph it conflated infidelity with porn watching

Well, as a great man once said, "[W]hosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart."
posted by No Robots at 1:16 PM on September 20, 2016


excess" any human desire/need/behavior).

Enough it causes other life problems for you or other people. That's my definition of excess. Same definition as for any other behavior.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:08 PM on September 20, 2016


That's my definition of excess. Same definition as for any other behavior.

I think that's an excellent definition, somewhat. I think your first post to the thread was along lines I had meant by 'taxonomy' of depiction, or maybe not. I think layceepee's joke (misread as literal) was along the lines of You Can Never Have Too Much of a Good Thing and, at the same time, seriously addressing how culture/religion/each other tend to limit desire/behavior.

What's a problem for you versus others? I believe that's quickly sticky ;) and I'll now show myself the door.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 4:04 PM on September 20, 2016


I expect the unemployed, semi-employed, and student population also skew the figure significantly.

Damn straight we do. What's the alternative? The American (wet) Dream?
posted by kidkilowatt at 6:43 PM on September 20, 2016


I'm with Jocelyn Elders on masturbation as an underutilized tool

Oh come on now
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:38 PM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


In 1994, she was invited to speak at a United Nations conference on AIDS. She was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a means of preventing young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity, and she replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." --Wikipedia

Chief of Staff Leon Panetta distanced the White House and Clinton would fire her. Wild times, eh?

Elders had previously made a number of other statements that put her in the public spotlight, like her quote in January 1994 in the context of abortion: "We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children."-- Wikipedia

I frickin' loved this woman and believed real change was attainable. I was very, very wrong.

So, is "come on now" a pun echoing an ambiguity? A baseless dismissal? Or both?
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:46 PM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


It won't kill you to be completely abstinent.

It actually would kill a (relatively small, sure) subset of men given that lack of frequent ejaculation increases the rate of prostate cancers.
posted by Justinian at 1:43 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Well, as a great man once said, "[W]hosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart."

That explains the Ashley Madison ads that are scattered around porn sites, I guess. [real]
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:24 AM on September 21, 2016


Okay, deep bref:

This might be an unsexy opinion, but my views on porn have changed AH-LHAT since I've gotten older. Here are a few of my thoughts - take them for what they're worth:

1. I have, and many women I know, have over the course of their sex lives endured physical pain, impossible body contortions, penises that have caused gagging and eyes watering, and general degradation and humiliation in the attempt to satisfy the male gaze... in the illusion of achieving some kind of status as a lover defined solely in terms of male visual and physical pleasure. Pornography encourages these fantasies at the expense of women.

2. Sex is not cheap. Not all pornography is cheap or sells cheap sex, but the majority is. When satisfaction comes cheap, it tends to mean that someone, somewhere is being exploited to make up the difference. See: WalMart clothes made in Bangledesh, Sea World, Zoos, Apple phones, Mass-produced chicken, beef and pork, etc. You can still enjoy all of these things, but jesus, don't tell me that there's no exploitation behind cheap, prevalent sex. It's insulting.

3. Stop trying to silence people critical of pornography. It's not filmed sex that is the problem: it's the civil rights of the women who are ground up like meat for consumption. We need to talk about them. We need to talk about blow jobs and anal sex and all of the things that men want to do, but don't want to learn about how to do thoughtfully and to provide--rather than take at the expense of another--pleasure.

4. I wish I could take back 90% of my sexual experiences that confused me into believing that what I was doing was 1) not exchangeable with any other available pussy 2) not being asked to both be desirable but unavailable (but secretly available--but NEVER TALK ABOUT IT). All of the contradictions involved in sex that came from fucking guys raised on porn fucked me up. I'm paying the price for that now.

5. If porn is so great and so cool, why aren't we celebrating the women and daughters and sisters and mothers that star in it and have to do most of the work? Shaming porn keeps it cheap and exploitative. As soon as women empower themselves and say that their pussy is worth something, men lose easy access, the dominance of their ever-present gaze (that is then internalized by the women that have to live within it), lose the privilege of dictating the market that peddles cheap pussy. God forbid you have a pussy pic online somewhere... you'll never be taken seriously because you've allowed yourself to be reduced to an object. When women can't have both a career in sex and self-determined worth, there is a double standard that needs to be blown the fuck apart.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 3:24 AM on September 21, 2016 [9 favorites]


ugh okay a couple more thoughts before I get ready for work...these are from my own experience and are therefore very heteronormative, so take it fwiw.

1. I love sex and criticizing porn doesn't have to be considered sex negative. I'm so tired of having to explain this. From a very young age (seeing women in my dad's magazines) I was obsessed with sex, and tried to read and learn as much as I could about it. I listened avidly to the Sunday night sex show. I read books about how animals had sex. (this was the early 90s so common) I read Shere Hite's Hite Report (mind blowing). I listened to Madonna and saw her touch herself on stage in Toronto in 1990 and almost get arrested (I was 10!).

But most of my lovers did not learn about sex that way. They learned it from porn. That wasn't a good thing in terms of my pleasure as a cis het woman.

2. Is it a bizarre question to ask if we need the ubiquitousness and availability of porn that we have? Does it not contribute to the narrative that men are entitled to see and have and objectify whatever their eyes graze, whenever they want? .... and what does that mean if it leaves the Great Wall of China's worth of ground up object-women-meat-bodies in its wake?
posted by Dressed to Kill at 3:39 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


To the second question the trivial answer is no, of course we don't need this level of availability or ubiquitousness; after all is it only in the last 20 years that it has become so. But that's kind of the wrong question. We don't need five thousand channels and twenty different TV-replacement streaming options either, and the easy accessibility of such things does lead to problems. Watching passive media on your ass 16 hours a day is not good for you.

The question is what, if anything, can or should be done about it? That's a much more difficult question. Do we "need" it is easy by comparison.
posted by Justinian at 4:02 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't know, Justinian. I think, in my limited purview, that men should ask themselves if they "need" it and act accordingly. They're driving the production of porn that leaves ground up women in its wake.

"What should be done about it" is an easy answer to me: "stop consuming quasi-ethical porn just because you can" - but that follows from asking "Do I need access to it all the time whenever I want?"

I can't stop men from dehumanizing women. Men need to stop doing it.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:40 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think that it can be good to keep in mind that SWERFs are a thing and that attacking porn as an industry can all too easily turn into dehumanising and even attacking those porn performers who don't fit into a neat victim model. Not saying this is what you're doing, Dressed to Kill, and in fact I have no doubt that you're participating in good faith here, but it's an important piece of context to the debate that needs to be acknowledged.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:47 AM on September 21, 2016


Yeah, that's actually not what I'm doing at all.

Nor am I dehumanizing or attacking porn performers in any way.

But that's a common net that get's thrown on me when I'm critical of pornography and I will call it out as such.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 8:03 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


DtK: At the risk of being all #NotAllPornography, I think you're ignoring a lot of porn that is feminist and/or not cis het (and the trope that porn features women who are watched by men is very much weirdly exclusionary).

I will merely ask you one thing. What would a porn industry that you found acceptable look like?
posted by jaduncan at 8:36 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


That's even ignoring the fact that things like hentai don't feature live performers other than the voiceover artists, but are still sold as porn. It's quite possible that CGI will get cheap enough that porn is possible without paid talent - is that still unethical? I'm unsure what your stance would be as you're conflating the effects on performers and the desirability of consumer access to porn. You seem like you're burying a few controversial premises, and I'd be curious to hear you make your reasoning more explicit.
posted by jaduncan at 8:43 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm not ignoring it, I'm just telling you *what I've experienced personally*, as a (as I've stated above) cis het woman.

It was hetero-normative cis-het porn that I saw when I was 8.
It was women I saw with ball gags in their mouths, DPs and their pussies pulled open.
It was my family telling me that it was something my dad enjoyed in private (but no one explained the ball gag or why it was ok for him to see but not me).
It was numerous bungled sexual experiences that left me unsatisfied.
It was one day having a 3 some with two "friends", and the shortly thereafter hearing another "friend" refer to a woman he had a 3 some with as a "pig on a spit."
I could go on.

I don't know what an ethical porn industry would look like. But that's not really my job to come up with.

I love sex. I love masturbating. I love my husband. I love the history of art and erotica. I can love all of these things very deeply and still be extremely critical based on my own experience (which isn't even "traumatic").

All I want is for cis het men (and again, I'm not speaking to gay porn, feminist porn or any other type of porn that DOESN'T make up the MAJORITY of pornography--maybe it's weirdly exclusionary, but it isn't like a small fraction) to think about the effect of incessant objectification of women and their bodies coupled with patriarchy-endorsed entitlement on themselves, the women they want to watch, and the daughters they raise.

(shrugs)
posted by Dressed to Kill at 9:04 AM on September 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


"If the questions make the holy penis unhappy, who could survive what the answers might do?" - Andrea Dworkin "Occupation/Collaboration"
posted by Dressed to Kill at 9:10 AM on September 21, 2016


I think you're ignoring a lot of porn that is feminist and/or not cis het

Jesus, perhaps if DtK put "cis het" in front of every mention of "porn" you find her posts less objectionable. It was very clear what she was talking about.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 12:04 PM on September 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


All I want is for cis het men (and again, I'm not speaking to gay porn, feminist porn or any other type of porn that DOESN'T make up the MAJORITY of pornography--maybe it's weirdly exclusionary, but it isn't like a small fraction) to think about the effect of incessant objectification of women and their bodies coupled with patriarchy-endorsed entitlement on themselves, the women they want to watch, and the daughters they raise.

I would hope that feminist criticism is possible and welcome (a Feminist Frequency regarding pornography would be interesting), but you're also making the argument that it is inherently harmful to performers. The distinction I'm wondering about is if you view it as inherently objectifying if the art form is different and the performers/voiceover artists, especially since you presented a text from Dworkin that argued the first amendment should be ignored on the basis of harm to performers and women in general.

"I live in a country where if you film any act of humiliation or torture, and if the victim is a woman, the film is both entertainment and it is protected speech. Now that tells me something about what it means to be a woman citizen in this country, and the meaning of being second class."

Do you have the same issue with, for example, hentai or literature? It's likely to become an important distinction as CGI gets better, and or VR porn uses 3d CGI models so that the consumer can use head tracking (hard with traditional cameras and 3d models can be interactive). You're interested in the effects of porn, so I'm curious about how technological change affects your view. On the one hand, the objectification of the subject exists, on the other hand the subject actually isn't human (or necessarily a woman - Second Life was certainly full of CGI furries).

I'm also curious about the difference between narrative, which Dworkin tackled there though things like the claim that people act out pornographic scenes and the form in which that narrative is presented. Under the same logic, should the Marquis de Sade be banned? They certainly feature more extreme narrative events. Should Venus in Furs? Does it have an impact when characters are more or less developed in the media presented? You say you love the history of art and erotica, so you're apparently drawing a distinction between art, erotica and pornography. I don't think you've clearly defined the difference. Dworkin said that she'd follow Steinem and define it as "erotica is sexually explicit material that shows mutuality and reciprocity and equality. I am prepared to accept that definition as something that is not pornography." I think that becomes more nuanced where no actual sex act occurs, and so I'm interested in how you view that.
posted by jaduncan at 5:06 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


First: I haven't said that porn is inherently harmful to performers. Please read what I've written before re-casting what I've said. You're being #NOTALLPORN here, and that's not the discussion I'm having, okay?

Second: I haven't clearly defined the difference and get this: I don't have to. (waits for your mind to be blown). You can draw whatever "distinctions" or "definitions" you like from what I've written, but you've got a knack for trying to wring it into something it's not.

I've read and written about Sade in my thesis. I've read Venus in furs numerous times. I'm a long-time consumer of all things sexual. I've produced sexual things.

I don't draw a line between those books specifically and the way my past lovers have treated me or expected me to behave in the bedroom, because they WEREN'T studying that shit (which god, if you conflate Sade with erotica ... you haven't read Sade. Belching and vomiting in one another's mouths is not "modern" pornography, and I don't think Sade even intended it to function as such... but I digress). They were watching cis het (I believe) porn. My life intersects with cis het porn from age 8, onward, and that's what I know.

Has it had a profoundly negative effect on my life? I don't even know the answer to that question. I'm confident in saying that it hasn't had a positive effect in any way.

Would I want a girl to learn about sex the way I did? Absolutely, absolutely not.

But look: try to see this from my perspective. I don't watch hentai. I don't know what it does to the dudes that consume or produce it. I don't care about Virtual porn, but on first blush, I think it's sad that the new technology caused a riot at a recent Tokyo Adult VR Fest.

But I have almost barfed while a guy pushed my head on his dick. Have you?

He didn't think anything was wrong with that. Would you?

Stop trying to get me to qualify my experience of pornography. I'm saying I'm well versed, I like sex, and I DON'T HAVE THE ANSWERS ABOUT ALL THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF PORN FOR YOU. I only have my own experience.

If you really want to know what porn does to women, get brave enough to ask the women you care about, how it REALLY has intersected with their lives.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:32 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


Also, instead of asking me to qualify everything, why don't you offer an alternative viewpoint?
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:35 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


But I have almost barfed while a guy pushed my head on his dick. Have you?

He didn't think anything was wrong with that. Would you?

Yes (and, indeed, have also done so), and without consent yes. I'll write you something later today, but I just wanted you to know that it isn't that this is something I haven't thought about.
posted by jaduncan at 9:51 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


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