I seem to be unable to get anything else done today because of endless ruminating on this issue and how to deal with it. Even a very productive hour-long talk about this with Seska hasn’t exorcised it enough to let me do other work (Seska, with Cheryl, is often my go-to gal when I want to fiddle with theory and approach when it comes to issues about pornography, because she’s one of the few people I know who isn’t really polarized about the issue despite personal investment and very strong personal feelings: it’s very tiresome for me that so many people in general tend to be so unable to put their personal agendas aside when it comes to discussing the matter in a more general way). So, I’m going to leave this open as a sort of running notebook today where I can bring it and toss thoughts on it as they distract me.
Yeah, one full paragraph later, I’ll actually fill you in on what the topic at hand IS.
Apparently, Strunk and White are on vacation today. I hope they’re having a lovely holiday.
The issue is pornography, the culture of pornography, and some of the effects I’ve been seeing both having on some of the generation I work with at Scarleteen, namely, the first batch of folks in the world who have grown up with it as a pervasive, all-access given from day one of their lives onward.
Back when, in the middle of writing the book, I did a big batch of surveys of teens and young adults about sexuality in general and their experiences with it. At that point, we’d had enough discussion about it at Scarleteen that I had a pretty good idea about the different places this generation stood with it, but I found that in the privacy of the surveys, a surprising number of them — guys and girls alike — were more anti-pornography than I’d have expected. Not really a giant surprise. After all, for a lot of them, even the way they were introduced to porn was some degree of having it pushed in their faces rather than having to search under beds and in the backs of closets for it more electively. In other words, for many of them, they didn’t even get the chance to have a curiousity about it: it was sated before — or without — a need to be.
But I think I’d kind of figured that, if anything, that would have resulted in an apathy, more than anything else. And for some of them, that is the case. In fact, based on what I see at Scarleteen, in other young adult venues and the few studies that address this, and what I found in those surveys, I’d say that the range of response to porn, across the board in this age group (let’s say 14 -22) now is generally apathy/blithe acceptance to disdain/opposition. I don’t tend to see a lot of users that are super-excited, fascinated with or blissed out about porn. They’re either “whatever” about it or pretty negative. Of course, that’s a pretty common range of feeling about a lot of things for teenagers, but ….well, whatever, as the kids say.
Anymore, we get a post nearly identical to this one and the other linked within it maybe once every week or two. Even given our volume, when a pretty specific repeat happens that often, I need to start paying attention and really examine it as best I can. I’d say that posts like these, over the past five years or so, have been cropping up more and more regularly, and they have a lot of common threads among them.
(And per one of the posts in there with the young woman who advises just making porn for a partner instead, yes, we get that a whole lot, too, which, as I said there, is obviously pretty disturbing. Even when you set aside the legal climate we live in which makes that SO volatile and dangerous for them, and when you set aside the fact that so many of them have a hard time envisioning their utter lack of privacy in this respect and where this stuff can go long-term, there are still some elements of this that are troubling. But that’s a topic for another day, or a little later here.)
This is sticky for me. See, I can’t just apply whatever my personal opinions about pornography in theory and practice (which, when it comes to my opinion, are two pretty different arenas) are. I had the same conundrum when it came to the part of the book that addresses porn. I have to do what I can to hear what their needs and experiences are, and put those first, and think much more broadly. Certainly, there is room for some of my personal feelings, but I have to work to not make them paramount or be too influenced by them, which is, of course, always a challenge. I’d say that the approach I took in the book, as well as in interactions like this, was slightly more porn-critical than I personally feel, because given what needs they express, and what the pervasive messages they most often get are — in short, either a puritanical approach that’s just tantamount to nudity-and-sex-are-evil, or the opposite tack, oh-relax-you-big-prude-and-kiss-that-other-girl-for-my-personal-entertainment-already — it seemed like the only appropriate road to take to really do my job in serving them.
In part, that’s because my personal opinions and experiences with this are just not that relevant.
These young folks aren’t me. (Would that they were: it’d be so much easier to apply what were my easy fixes in my teen years and just tell them all to go out to a club, jump up and down all night in big stompy boots, drop a dose or smoke a bowl, take a long hike, and have some really fun, mutually-beneficial sex in the cemetary.) Their experiences have been different than mine, their relationships and the context they engage in them in is different than mine is or ever was. Really, the older I get, the more I feel like it seems that the appraaches to porn someone like me takes — who has SO much context and information to process it in, who has such a vast array of relationship, emotional and intellectual experience, who is and always has been so outside the box of mainstreaming in so many ways, including in relationship and gender models and approaches, and also, who grew up reared so clearly to question mandates and the lot — is of limited use to the vast majority of the populace. In all truth, years back when I first started working doing sexuality advice, I think I brought way too much of my own opinion to the table, and was a lot more cavalier with women who’d ask the sort of things these young women are than I should have been, merely because I couldn’t really get that where they were and where I was were two very different places.
But alas, you live, you work, you learn, and hopfully, over time, you get better at it all.
There’s so, so much to touch on with what I’m seeing in these kinds of queries. One of the tough bits for me is that I, personally, can understand (and to a large degree, agree with) objections to pornography in practice (rather than theory) when we’re talking about aspects of the industry, about porn under capitalism, about exploitation, about some of the cultural messages a lot of it sends, about women, specifically, but also about sexuality and sexual partnership in general. I can also understand, in some respect, concerns about porn per barriers it might present and sometimes does to intimacy.
But when the objections aren’t about that, but are about insecurity, body image; about feeling porn is a threat to idealized monogamy or a sort of sexual ownership or control, while I can intellectually wrap my head around it, those sorts of concerns just don’t resonate with me at all. When adults bring that sort of the stuff to the table, it strikes me as somewhat juvenile, as…I don’t know, emotionally infantile to some degree, but even if those impressions are anything but surface (and they may well be: it even sounds patronizing to me to hear those thoughts in my head), they aren’t applicable when the people I’m serving ARE juvenile or very, very new to sexual and intimate relationships. And when we’re talking control issues, this is of special import to a generation of young women who, from everything I can see, are having a notoriously hard time expressing limits and boundaries, having them respected, or feeling they’ve any right to have them in the first place.
To step towards the more remote before I go to the more obvious, one of the things I’m seeing in situations like this is that pornography — and even masturbation and sexual fantasy, though to a lesser or less potent degree — becomes even more of a sticky wicket among young women (not esxclusively, but mostly) whose sexual fantasy IS absolute monogamy, not just in action, but in thought; not by choice, but because “that’s what love is.” As I addressed in that post, it’s just so foreign to me to think of monogamy as anything but an active choice in which we are choosing to only be with one partner, in person, in a romantic and/or sexual context, and to think of it as anything but an option, rather than an ideal or default. I don’t want to say that I don’t believe these young women who tell me that they never-ever-never think of anyone in a sexual contaxt but their partners…but I really kind of don’t. My impression, instead, is that what they’re actually doing is engaging in an extended fantasy themselves in which they have effectively fantastized a reality into being for themselves. Do you know what I mean?
Related to that, I also keep seeing, again and again, a sexual dynamic in couples like this (and they’re always hetero) in which the sex they are having is SO male-directed, so all about service, about getting off (if they do: plenty don’t, like, ever) on delivering their partner’s every immediate whim to them: in other words, sex which is really porny.
So, what I start to think is that maybe it makes quite a bit of sense that they are so personally threatened by porn — again, nearly all of them object based on how it makes them feel, on their insecurity, rather than to exploitation and the like — if, in fact, the only difference between their sex life and porn is that they don’t look like the actors in it; if they behave like them, sexually interact like them, but can’t match their appearance.
Yet again, if these things are so — and I’m inclined to believe they are a lot of the time based on what’s being discussed and reported — then I have a personal disconnect. The idea of a sex life that resembles what’s often represented in mainstream porn is either totally laughable to me or just plain sad, depending on my mood and the type of porn we’re actually talking about. The idea that the people or activity we see in porn is any sort of ideal just confounds my mind: of course, I wasn’t reared with the idea that that was an ideal, and I’m inclined to think that not ever being heterosexual or gendernormative might make a difference, too. (Especially since one of the things I had validated for me in other studies I found in researching the book was that for this generation has much stricter ideas about gender and gender roles than the one previous, believe it or not.) I don’t even think there is a disparity between me and them: I think it’s a generational difference, all around.
It’s such a huge bummer that there really isn’t much study yet on this particular generation’s issues with pornography: I really don’t like flying solo in this respect.
That said, I’m going to stop here for today, with designs on picking it up a couple more times over the next few entries.
I’d be very, very interested in discussion in the comments on this, especially from readers with kids or who work with teens or college-age students (or who ARE college-age students themselves). It’s very easy for me sometimes given the massive volume of Scarleteen users to forget that when we’re not talking about users who just hang out there that I’m often seeing users in some form of crisis, which does color things somewhat per making generalizations. Sure, I read up elsewhere, because I’m well-aware of the risks of myopia, but there’s never a danger of hearing too many perspectives.
(Just be cool and calm about it, eh? I feel silly even asking that, because overall, I’ve almost always seemed to have a readership better able to handle thsemlves in comments than most I see out and about, but no harm in tossing a reminder out there with a provocative topic.)
November 28th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Two things:
I think that, first, Heather’s comment about fucked up notions of idealized monogamy is absolutely on target. I’m barely out of the age group mentioned here, and it was news to me a few years back that it was a) ok, and b) more or less normal to fantasize about and have crushes on other men and women even when I was seriously partnered, and that this would continue for the rest of my life.
Seriously–I think that, as a teenager, I thought that only pathetic-middle-aged-women (a teenage category if there ever was one!) needed to fantasize about movie stars, for example, and that was only because their husbands (sic) were no longer attractive and attentive.
So the idea that monogamy did NOT mean no longer feeling sexually attracted to/by anyone else was news to me, and I think it’s news to these girls as well. Sure, they’re doing all manner of fantasizing, but they either ignore it, or don’t see it as being in the same league as their porn-watching partners (and I use the term “partner” loosely, since I can’t say I had a single sexual relationship as a teenager that remotely approached a partnership).
In other words, these girls are seeing porn-as-betrayal.
This brings me to point two: why is it a betrayal? Why is the idea that monogamy does not equal a blindfold so threatening? I suspect it’s due to a virtually non-existent sense of self. Women in the US are taught, in my experience, to seek security by finding a man, not to actually seek it in themselves. Sometimes I picture girls as ghosts–we’re just floating there in the wind, waiting for a man to come hold our hands and bring us into corporeality. I still have to remind myself daily that I’m a person, dammit–and at 25, halfway through a phd program, a world traveler, a teacher, and a therapy vet, that’s really freaking sad. But this is what we’re doing to girls (and we, as a culture, are doing horrific things to boys, as well, but that’s someone else’s story).
So girls, such as the one who commented at Scarleteen, are in a catch-22. Pornography threatens them, but complaining about it also threatens them by threatening the one thing keeping them secure–their partner/protector. I think a lot of the panic and heat surrounding this issue lies here.
But what about porn itself? Hell if I know. I find the vast majority of it violently offensive–it makes me feel ill, and triggers all of my PTSD symptoms. On the other hand, there’s a tiny portion (by which I mean, this site, and of course the first set of pics that Heather and I took =P) that I do find erotic and that doesn’t trigger any negative effects. I suspect a big part of that is that I trust that Heather loves, values, and respects women. I think that’s essential when putting women into a context that has so frequently been degrading, and at the moment it’s the only way I personally can decide whether otherwise “neutral” pictures (ie, pictures of the softcore Playboy variety) are worrisome to me or not.
So there’s that. Then again, while the visual doesn’t do much for me, I know that it arouses a lot of people. I also know that I myself tend to be aroused by other media that could be considered demeaning to women, most specifically, romance novels.
All in all, I want porn to remain legal, because I don’t trust anyone to legislate it. I want it to be made in safe conditions, and for the making of it to be worthwhile to the participants, financially and psychically. I don’t want porn to encourage men to do dangerous, degrading, or unenjoyable sexual activities with women.
All of that, though, is almost incidental to the first two things I wrote about. I want men and women to have healthy expectations about what it means to love. And I want them to be raised to seek security in themselves first, and to not need a partner to shore up their self worth (or provide it in its entirety). Take care of those two impossible things, and the porn problem practically goes away.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
I find this an interesting topic myself. I went over to Scarleteen to read those posts you linked. Sad to say, it very much seems like these girls issues are, like you said, based in insecurities. I think my objection to porn would be the degrading nature of it in society. Not as it pertained to me or the relationship I was in. I am 25 yrs old and I have a friend who had a similar porn encounter just recently. She is upset for the same reasons these girls say: feeling inadequet herself in the relationship. comparing herself to porn stars. Her man’s reply: well, it’s just something GUYS do, society has programmed us to want to f*** Jessica Simpson. Yikes. All I can say is that I am glad I have more self esteem and a pretty healthy approach to sex (partnered and self) in my relationship. My guy says he doesn’t watch porn and he rarely masterbates — and I believe him because I have never given him cause to want to hide the truth from me. In fact, when he’s aroused and I am running out the door to a prior commitment, I encourage him to “do it himself”. (We also share a computer and I am pretty sure it’s all the art and photography we have saved that is taking up all the space.) I hope my perspective helps.
November 28th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
I’ve actually been struggling with the whole notion of porn for a while now.
As a kid (12ish-18), I would watch Emmanuelle on tv, as well as sneak some of my dad’s porn. I used it like I used books - to enjoy a life outside of my own. Pregnancy and STD’s had me too worried to ever entertain notions outside of my bedroom and fantasy life.
By college and my early 20s, I was considered the “cool” girl because I wouldn’t protest to watching porn amongst friends. Guys’ eyes would bulge when I told them that it didn’t bother me. To me, porn had always been so separate from my physical tastes that I never saw it as anything other than a fantasy or amusement.
But then I got into sexual identity and gender studies, and began to read a lot of theory. As I’ve read so much from so many sources, including yours, Heather, porn has become this strange phenonmenon that my brain can’t completely process.
I watched some old archives that I had, and saw some terribly misogynistic and troublesome movies in my collection. It bothered me that I had ever enjoyed them. Then, one day, I realized why. I didn’t enjoy the way they were doing something, but genuine reactions. If a girl winced, it wasn’t appealing for pain, but for some sort of reality. It was free of the scary, vacant look.
And I am starting to bring all of this together. For me, porn has always been no more than a tool. It is not something that reflects my tastes or attraction. It’s just in-your-face enough to give me an easier imaginative time. If any men out there are like me, and I wonder if the young men of those posts are, then pornography gives them an added sensory experience to remember sex. I don’t look at it thinking I want the male porn star on-screen, but pay attention to the act and reactions in a sort of simulation.
I think what happened to me is indicative of the larger whole. Perhaps these boys are de-sensitized to the specific actions enough that porn is no different than a vibrator or other sexual apparatus. Where it seems like these girls are imagining their boyfriends having sex with the other woman, I wonder if they’re just seeing porn as an instrument where the woman or man isn’t the attraction, but the act they’re partaking in.
And the second problem, for me, lies in what is readily available. It’s easy to find problematic porn, but it’s hard to find real portrayal of sex that show how great it really is, insteading of creating a false reality.
Anyhow, those are my 2 cents for the moment.
November 28th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
These are amazing, interesting narratives, and so exactly what I’m interested in. Thanks so much!
(And Jen, you know, if someone pronounces me as a pronographer, I generally won’t balk — mostly because a) I figure that they are because they interpret my work as such, and I can’t control someone’s interpretation, and b) if they interpreted it that way, obviously it was in the work somewhere. However, since it’s not the primary intent of my work to get anyone off, or to sexually arouse, and both the literal roots and the general understanding of what porn is isn’t in line with my work, I keep thinking I really need a new word that doesn’t exist yet, something more applicable: this is why I pulled together “femmerotica” what now seems like a gazillion years back, but not sure even that really does it. Must go play with greek roots now, on a lark.)
November 28th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
I’m not feeling very articulate today, but have to comment anyway.
For a start, I don’t think I’d have the patience to counsel people as you do. I have my own set of issues, but jealousy/that particular brand of insecurity are not included.
I feel frustrated by the anti-porn stance of many people: that it’s the default for women to see it as bad and dirty and equivilent to cheating somehow. And that it’s somehow a good thing for a young man to say he doesn’t like porn because it disgusts him to see women make sluts out of themselves?? Yeah, that’s not feeding into the same crap porn is associated with at all.
I’m pro-porn, sort of. I like what you say about theory vs reality. I feel like if women felt like it was OK for them to feel attracted to people whilst monogamous (or not!), like it was normal and acceptable to enjoy watching people have sex, then we might actually have a market for porn that is not abusive.
Because I like sex, I like giving blowjobs more than receiving the equivilent, I like experimenting, I like reading stories and articles about sex, reading erotica and even Penthouse Letters-style pornography, looking at erotic photography… And I like the IDEA of porn.
But in practice I always find myself completely turned off. No one’s having fun, the women couldn’t be any less convincing and the men are concentrating with all their might on lasting as long as possible.
I’ve pretty much stopped, but I used to look at internet porn daily. What stopped me is watching a noticable transition toward even more female-negative images. WHY? Your “average” man just wants to see people getting off, so he can get off. Is it good to desensitise that very apathetic (when it comes to avoiding certain porn) man to borderline violent, 100% male-orientated sex? Why would a majority of men want to see a woman have a cock shoved down her throat so hard her eyes tear?
I don’t know if I made my point, but this is the perspective of a 21 year old woman, currently in a 3 year heterosexual monogamous relationship, who has previously only been in open or casual relationships (with men and women), and would be interested in exploring my sexuality more, if my partner was more comfortable with it
November 28th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
P.S. Just realised how ridiculous my age sounds relative to be implied experience. Between 16-18 (nearly 19!) I managed to try out more than my fair share of (positive) sexual experiences and all the emotions associated with such.
With more maturity and life experience I now wish I had more freedom to explore my wants in this direction, but my relationship is what it is and I will work within the constraints of such
November 28th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
Dosn’t sound stupid to this girl, Dana. I was busier during those ages than all but two people I’ve met in the whole of my life, so.
(Y’all are so great: thanks so much for being so candid.)
November 29th, 2006 at 12:37 am
Glad we’re talking about this. Reading those threads tonight was just incredibly sad. When one of the women described herself, including her measurements, I nearly lost it. Porn doesn’t seem like the issue here; instead it’s the powerlessness, lack of self esteem, lack of real communication with romantic partners, and maybe even an inability to be honest with themselves about what they want and need.
Logic’s response about how porn can be used as a shortcut to arousal when one is feeling rushed or lazy summed up my feelings on porn very nicely. I’ve never attached what I see or read to my own self-worth or even to given it much connection to reality. If it weren’t for feminism, I’d probably never think about it at all. That makes it hard for me to relate what these women are saying but even so, it’s obvious that pornography is causing or exposing some profound problems for many of my peers.
In Isanne’s profile she gives her orientation as “Straight (most of the time
).” That stands out for me because she’s 19 and been in a monogamous relationship with a man for a year and a half. All five of her posts have been in threads on porn and relationships. I can’t help but wonder if she is truly attracted to women or if she’s been influenced by porn culture to think of that as sexy and thus desirable? If so, where is the line where you separate yourself from that culture (or any culture for that matter) and decide that it just isn’t you? How do we help someone get to that point, enable them to turn to themselves and attend to her own wants and needs first?
November 29th, 2006 at 11:37 am
What Jill mentioned in her first paragraph is also something that really struck me: It’s like this girl was striving to be, in essence, a real life porn fantasy. That, if she looked and acted like a porn star, then it would be enough for him to just be with her. And if she failed in this, somehow (by not looking ’sexy’ enough or by not performing sexually) then he’d have to turn to porn. And that is just so wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to start. For one, it signals that she has absolutely no self-esteem. For another, it means that she and her partner just don’t communicate about wants and needs and expectations. At all. And that she’s not honest, even to herself, about who she is and what she wants.
Then there is the issue of the fact that watching porn or even something as harmless and normal and healthy as masturbation and fantasies are a Bad Thing. I’ve never been the jealous type and I understand that people feel differently about this issue, but going so far as to classify fantasies that don’t involve one’s partner as a trasgression is just, well, odd. Because really, that’s completely *normal*. Just because you’re monogamous doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly wearing blinders and it doesn’t mean that any thoughts not involving your partner are a bad thing. But I think it stems from the fact that there is such a hard divide between ’slut’ and ’saint’. You’ve got to be one or the other, and if you choose the latter, then you’re also choosing absolute monogamy, in action and in thought.
And those things are absolutely a big deal to those of us who practically grew up with pornography. When we hit puberty, we’d sneak copies of Playboy of the shelves at the store when no one was around and take a look. We used to make calls to sex hotlines from the pay phone, then get all giggly and hang up as soon as the woman started talking. But even though porn was all pervasive and all around us, so was the atmosphere that it was somehow something that you only looked at behind locked doors, that it was something shameful and secret. And moreover, that it was only for guys, particularly creepy old men or horny young guys. (All of these are impressions of growing up in small-town Germany in the 90s. And honestly, while I agree that porn was a Big Deal, I never felt like it was in any way expected of me to be like a woman in a porn. Or that it concerned me in any way. I’ve watched porn, it didn’t do anything for me, but I understand and respect those who watch it. I’ve had partners who watch porn and it never occured to me to feel threatened by that. I still don’t understand why anyone would. I just keep coming back to the conclusion that only insecure people would feel threatened by it. But then why is it such a big issue for our generation? Are we somehow more prone to insecurity? And if yes, why?)
And something else, that I feel somehow relates to it but that I can’t quite place, is the recent phenomenon of Playby bunnies becoming something women want to decorate their bedrooms with. There’s actually a store at the mall here that sells nothing but Playboy stuff. Pillows, purses, binders, t-shirts, EVERYTHING, in fluffy pink and with the bunny on it. WHY?
November 29th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
I quoted you and wrote about this at my blog.
November 29th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Thank you, thank you, thank you for that phrase, “false reality.” It’s a real shame that so many people out there think that “problematic porn” is not just Real, but the Only Version of Real.
November 29th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Just commented there, Veronica. Great thoughts.
Per your last comment and the others in that vein, right there with you. Especially considering it’s outer limits in the first place to presume any sort of reality in material which is literally defined as fantasy.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
This is really timely. I just got out of my “Gender in the USA” class, which is a Comparative Sociology class and required for all Gender Studies students. It brings a really wide variety of students in, and we’ve been doing presentations for the past couple of weeks, on everything from circumcision to gender representations in Disney films. Today, one of the women in the class did a presentation on print-porn (Penthouse and the like). It was an intensely frustrating experience for me because pornography and representations of the erotic (see the nerdy confession to come) have been major research topics of mine for the past few years. Far more interesting than the actual meat of her presentation was, for me, was -how- she approached the topic. In the 15 minutes or so that she had the floor, she made numerous comments that indicated all the men in class should/do like and watch porn - she warned them against stealing her magazines, and used phrases like “but, of course, the gentlemen here already know all of this”. It was interesting (and frustrating as hell) to watch all the unquestioned assumptions that went into that time - that all men like/use porn, that no women do, that all men are heterosexual, that female porn actors simultaniously “are degraded, violated, and demoralized” and “really love their work” (no joke). This went unquestioned by a -Gender Studies- class! Grr, ok. Done with rant.
A few things in the discussions here and over at Scarleteen have really struck a chord with me. It’s REALLY interesting to think that if young women are modeling their sex lives after porn, then the biggest difference they have with the porn actors is apperances. I didn’t see any of the posters being upset at the acts pictured in porn, but rather the physical apperances of the women. They don’t seem to be worried that their partners would want to different things sexually that they themselves are not comfortable with, but that their partners want someone who LOOKS different. Two things that I’m sure we can all see: this plays directly on apperance insecurities, and if they’re not having sex for pleasure, but rather to “service” (ugh, I hate that term) then maybe their sex lives -are- really porny. I hadn’t made that connection before, but it strikes me as really true.
Sparked by what some of what Veronica’s writen: it’s interesting to look at the whole “Girls Gone Wild” and other amature porn as exemplifying the virgin/whore dynamic. A big part of the appeal seems to be that these girls could be -anyone-, that they’re ‘regular’ girls (you never really see the word ‘women’ tossed around, either) that would NEVER do this normally. Thus, they maintain their ‘innocent’ status while dabbling in the ‘whore’ label. They’re unique and desireable because they wouldn’t normally do this, because they’re not ‘that kind of girl’. Women who do porn professionally may emulate the ‘virgin’ stereotype, but socially we “know” they’re really whores. Amature porn balances on that tricky razor between virgin and whore.
Ok, that nerdy fan-girl confession? My freshman year of college I was enrolled in a required course entitled”Arts in a Multicultural Society”. The final paper was to write on “Art as Revolution” (yeah, UC Santa Cruz!). Heather? I wrote my paper on you. I talked about redefining the erotic and resculpting what we think of as “pronographic” to be something with visual, artistic, and intellectual merit as well as erotic. I think I used the words “subverting”, “redefining” and “holistic” a disproportionate number of times.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
I started reading Scarlet Letters my first year of college - that’s 8 years ago now - and it opened my mind to a whole world of intelligent, enlightened writing about sex on the internet which was a *tremendously* formative part of my life, both as seriously useful learning and seriously formative getting off. My discovery of conscious, independently produced online erotica helped catapult me into the category of the Lucky that Heather delineates in her post. However, I also secretly watched low-quality porn and participated in online sex chat in the early days of the internet from about age 14 — as the writer of the Scarleteen post “admits” she did (her need to repudiate this is sad to me) and I found those experiences educational and hot as well, and very helpful material for forming my own critical opinions about the whole thing.
So I am lucky to inhabit a non-polarized position with regard to porn, and I am totally with Heather in her worry that the generation about 10 years younger than I am is relentlessly saturated with it in a heinous way, a way that warps and stunts people’s development as sexual subjects and lovers. In college, I found myself exposed to it sometimes as a “cool” or sexually adventurous girl, as M did, and I found that an effective way to de-mystify what I was watching with male friends was to mercilessly mock everything about it, loudly exclaiming how sub-par I would find any sex that remotely resembled that.
Jen states it beautifully about the different violences done to boys and girls. Thinking about what to write here, I realize (again) that most of the other people I have intimate perspectives on in this area are males — my brothers, 19 and 22, who watch a ton of awful internet porn and about whom I worry so much, that these unsexy and offensive forms were what they thought sex looked like before they were ever with a partner themselves. I try to drop references when I talk to them, to insinuate things about my open relationship, my bisexuality, the alternative sexual subcultures that I am so lucky to know exist and to have access to, even if I don’t do more than dabble in them. I probably tell them more than they want to hear! It’s so depressing that the damage done to kids is, in all but a depressingly small number of cases, not undone by a life spent questioning gender.
Then there’s my partner (newly married actually), a 27 year old male, who was actually self-aware and insightful enough as a young teenager to make a decision to not watch porn, to not make it a major part of his solitary erotic life, because he feared it would make him less capable of being a responsive and engaged lover when he started to have partnered sex! He’s right, of course, and I think I felt sort of the same thing in college when I would try to get across to guys that the standards for good sex should be so much higher than what they saw there. My partner says as a young teen he found porn reductive and unsexy. That way of taking responsibility for his sexual subjectivity is emblematic of why he’s great.
As an adult, however, he does occasionally watch mainstream internet porn and masturbate to it, but this fact is not constitutive of a problem or issue in our relationship. I think he’s sheepish about the mainstream-ness of the porn he watches. My response to him + porn is “Whatever.” I also do plenty of things that are politically, socially, sexually, and ethically questionable. Being a sub is pretty central to my sexuality (though I switch with women), so I have some politically transgressive fantasies as well. The images my partner jacks off to are pretty removed from who we are in our relationship. It might be part of our erotic power dynamic in mutually pleasurable ways, but it’s not part of our relational power dynamic, who gets heard and gets their needs met, etc. (Not to act like my confidence is perfect or anything — in terms of body image, I feel much more comparison with the stunning women walking the streets of New York.)
So, like Heather, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around young women whose lives are genuinely being harmed by this cycle of expectations. For me, the liberatory effects of the early porn I saw were very tied to growing up in a conservative Christian culture that denies unmarried people the right to have a sexuality at all. Even what passes for feminism where I come from is vehemently essentialist and anti-all-sex. There is no room in my mother’s “feminism,” for example, for sexual desire; any depiction of sexuality, even (especially) female desire, is said to “treat women like a piece of meat.” Acknowledging that I liked watching and fantasizing about sex, even (especially) scenarios of exploitation, was important to my breaking out of this.
Despite the contrasts, I think this might be an “in” to what’s going on with these posters — I can actually identify with being told that being sexual = being violated and objectified, so then coping with that by creating a fantasy life where I get off on being violated and objectified. I can totally see how my development as a submissive is tied to that repression in my background. I think Heather’s onto something when she says that these girls’ fantasy is that they are not fantasizing about anyone but their partner during sex. Luckily for me (again), I never thought that fantasy-monogamy should be part of monogamy even when I was in the monogamous period of my life from ages 15 to 24 (monogamy broken up with cheating, that is). I saw fantasies as one of the outlets that made monogamy possible at all. Come to think of it, the boyfriend I’ve had who watched the most porn was the one with the most twisted ideas of exclusivity’s importance — HE was the one who told me that I shouldn’t be thinking about anyone else as long as we were in a relationship, and swore that he never was, either, when we had sex. He was also the most porn-influenced — showily and performatively “skilled” while in reality extremely selfish — lover I’ve had. Even in that incredibly fucked-up relationship, though, I don’t remember anyone’s masturbation fantasies being fair game for proprietary control.
People who grew up where I did, though, are both told that legitimate or permissible sexuality IS monogamy, AND that you can sin by a thought, AND that fantasies are dangerous because they can make you want to do illicit things. So it makes sense that these young women construct this fantasy of mental exclusivity.
I think joey’s totally right that this all stems from the slut/saint dichotomy. And I think a link that’s sometimes overlooked in feminist objections to the porn/playboy/girlsgonewild/objectified culture we live in these days is that it grows directly out of a puritanical anti-sex ideology. Girls are told that their being sexual persons makes them less than good, that their sexual desires harm their moral and spiritual beings and render them always-already sullied and objectified. When that’s what you think your sexual desires DO, it’s easy to see how you could then only access desire through objectification. I think this goes a little distance towards explaining why some girls (”make porn for your boyfriend”) embrace this misogynistic culture and call it “empowerment,” while some girls are terrorized by it and totally unable to put it in any rational perspective. In combatting the misogyny of this whole culture it’s so important that we don’t forget to combat the repression that gives rise to it.
These teenagers are so lucky to have Heather promoting sex-positive and intelligent ways of looking at things on Scarleteen. I can’t wait to read her book (and give a copy away)!
November 29th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
You are all absolutely amazing, and I am really valuing all of these narratives. Not to sound porny myself, but…please, don’t stop!
This is just so, so helpful.
(And Lioness, you just made my day. What an ego-boost! You too, Christine! Making me feel good wasn’t supposed to be part of the discussion, y’all! But it’s really nice, all the same.)
November 30th, 2006 at 1:23 am
This is an interesting discussion, but I have to ask – what do you think people’s “responsibility” is in all of this? I mean, there’s an implication that too many men are letting themselves absorb “harmful” messages from porn, and that men should be more “responsible for their subjectivity”. Frankly, that sounds to start more than a little like Biting Beaver’s “fantasize responsibly” message, which I find pretty pernicious.
I throw this out as an open question – how are we supposed to “take responsibility for our sexual subjectivity” without putting some kind of politically correct sex policeman in our heads?
November 30th, 2006 at 1:50 am
I think that right now, these personal narratives are too valuable to go there at ALL in this particular discussion, or be sidestepped/overlooked by those sorts of questions inserted here just yet. I’m in CS mode, and I think that’d needed. I feel a need for it, anyway.
Sure, at the very least, it’s pretty clear people really need to start being more self-aware and self-evaluative on these matters, all around, especially interpersonally; but if hearing these sorts of narratives is still fresh and enlightening, then I’m likely not at the place yet to go to The Big What To Do for Everyone: this is why I am asking the questions.
But I’d ask that with this discussion/entry, folks really stay focused on the self-telling stuff and the direct observations than going to general or broad assignments based on them, okay?
November 30th, 2006 at 2:09 am
I think that right now, these personal narratives are too valuable to go there at ALL in this particular discussion, or be sidestepped/overlooked by those sorts of questions inserted here just yet.
Makes sense.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:42 am
I teach young women - 18-21, mostly - at a university in Toronto. Though our class isn’t directly related to this topic (though it’s children’s studies, so there’s some overlap), Heather, I’m seeing much of the same thing you are in terms of worldview. This generation has much less fluid ideas about sexuality, about relationships, and especially about gender than mine did (I’m 34 - a teen in the 80s). We talk a lot about the idea of social constructs, and I have a great deal of trouble convincing my students that many of the things they simply accept don’t have any inherent reality to them, but are just conventions that (many-but-not-even-most) people abide by, and are often unreflective of lived experiences. Many of my students have never questioned the idea of gender as a binary system; the idea that monogamy is the only “true” relationship; that children should not be exposed to sexual information of any sort. (It’s always fun to try and tease out what age of “children” they’re talking about, and then unpack the ideas even further.)
November 30th, 2006 at 6:56 am
I, like crunchywitch, also teach young women 18-21 (at an all-girls university). Like her, I have also found that the young women of this age that I have taught have “much less fluid ideas about sexuality,” relationships and gender. (We have not discussed pornography directly, but we have discussed many of the issues being tossed about in this comments section–AND, when something related to pornography was mentioned in passing, I’m pretty sure I remember cringing faces and utters of “ewwwwwwwwwwwww” throughout the classroom.)
Then I go teach community-college men and women two days a week. For several years I taught 18-21 year-old women AND men at a private university in New England.
What I’ve found, curiously enough, is that TWO factors make a difference in perceptions about gender roles, relationships and sexuality: age and economic class. I have wondered how much of this perception is wound up in power differentials.
Young men and women at the mostly-white private university–where many students drove expensive cars and wore expensive clothing purchased for them by parents–were very open to discussing such things, and expressed views that were generally quite open and less traditional than what I had expected.
Community college classes are notoriously composed of perhaps the most varied population of college students of any schools–but the students I have encountered at community colleges, of various ages, gender, class demarcations and backgrounds–have ended up being perhaps the MOST open to pulling apart societal and cultural “norms” and discussing possible alternatives and solutions. In fact, I’ve really had to do the LEAST amount of teaching work with community college populations in terms of giving background to or easing them into controversial topics.
At the private all-girls university, most students do not have expensive cars or clothing, and come from what are normally considered either economically disadvantaged or lower-middle class families. Several of my 18-year olds have children already. With the exception of one or two of them, they have steady boyfriends (or they at least claim to) and write things into their papers about dreams of “white picket fences” that indicate an unquestioning fantasy of what many would call an outdated American dream. Essays I thought they would warm to about topics ranging from personal empowerment and women’s self-realization to the problems with being perceived as “exotic” have fallen rather flat, and I’ve been running into a lot of backlash and resentment against other women. (I’ve also figured out that most of my female students are very insecure and do not feel powerful AT ALL, in the context of social and intimate relationships as well as in a socio-political context.)
November 30th, 2006 at 7:40 am
I just wanted to add quickly to the exchange between Iamcuriousblue and Heather — not to derail the personal narrative sharing-phase going on here — that I make a substantive distinction between 1. the content of fantasies and 2. the effects of one’s behavior on one’s capabilities in relationships and in sex with a partner. As for the former, I think attempts to interdict at all fall into the peril of replicating the repressive apparatus that I warned about in my above post. I think there HAS to be acknowledgement that fantasy is an uncontrolled space and that exploitative fantasies are productive and useful to the people having them. Quite the opposite of BB’s stance, actually. I was describing an instance of the latter when I said my partner “took responsibility for his sexual subjectivity” — he found mainstream porn reductive and stupid, and was worried that it would have a conditioning effect on how he acted when he started to have sex with actual other people and what he expected of actual interpersonal relations. His fantasies are much richer — and darker, edgier, more transgressive in more interesting ways — than what’s depicted there anyway! Just wanted to clarify that what Iamcuriousblue is talking about is SO important to me — encouraging young women’s fantasy lives, no matter what they contain, NOT trying to stop the workings of fantasy, because I think that just leads to a sicker pornography culture.
November 30th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Veronica - No problem! Although I’m cringing over missing “insteading” when I skimmed that part.
I caught up as much as I could on these posts, although I had to do a little skimming, and then went off to run some errands, and something else occured to me.
It’s definitely troublesome that these girls seem to be focusing on the female physicality over anything else, so I started thinking of the male porn fiends I have known over the years. While I am hazarding a guess, I don’t think I’m far off with what I’m about to say about the men I’ve come across:
As I said, I think porn is often used as an instrument rather than an inspirational fantasy, which is why men and women alike don’t site porn as the sexiest media, but a number of films like Mulholland Drive. But I am also seeing connections between porn and the classic boy-vs-girl actions. That is, the whole scenario that boys are fearless and raise their hands in class whether they know the answer or not, and girls are more timid, second-guessing themselves and their knowledge.
The guys I know who watch porn rarely mention a woman as hot or sexy, the exceptions lie in the non-enhanced girls, and a few like Chasey Lain. Their reactions don’t go so much in what the woman looks like, but both the sense of conquest for the male star and upholding their ego as being able to do the same things. It’s more about the action/scenario, than the visualization of their physical desires.
Girls, especially the ones referred to here, are second-guessing themselves and internalizing the conflict as a fault of theirs, and are taking it very seriously. It’s no wonder they link love and sex inextricably when they’re taught that non-marital sex is an indiscretion.
So, where the guy is thinking “I can be that porn star” whether they can or not, the girl immediately doesn’t think she can compares to the women and de-values herself.
Sidenote: It’s funny.. I used to know a group of men who were very sexually active and into the porn community, going to the Vegas conventions and the like. As much as they physically appreciated the porn actresses, they in no way expected that daily, and in now way held them above other women. These men loved any kind of woman - tall, short, round, or slim. I don’t know if they were unique in their community, or what the reason was, but I find it incredibly interesting that the men I know who were most into porn were the least judgemental about a woman’s appearance.
November 30th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Crunchy and b, so glad to have your perpectives added to the conversation.
Per the matter of this generation defining “children,” a couple years ago, there was an extended conversation at Scarleteen, wherein one of the users was expressing shock and dismay at having been at a beach, and seen a six-year-old girl “allowed” to play on the sand and in the water in her underpants.
The number of other users who also weighed in with absolute shock and alarm was INCREDIBLE. There was a lot of commerntary about how a six, seven or eight year old — or her parents — would be somehow inciting predatory or sexual behaviour.
I came into the conversation talking a little bit about how there’s nothing to show that child nudity like this (or period) “invites” or incites sexual predators, about how girls of the age where they are comfortable being that way obviously are not thinking of their bodies as sexual or sexual billboards/objects, and how important it is to ALLOW them that and let THEM decide about how they’re comfortable, the whole nine yards. (I remember Becca and I talking about it, and having similar remembrances of having to get to the point where we told our mothers that we wanted swimsuits and weren’t comfy swimming in undies and undershirts at a certain point: I believe I was about eight or nine.) But they just could NOT hear it, and many of them were the self-same girls who had NO objections about or question of GGW and the like. In other words, these were not Wendy Shalit girls.
Asked about what WAS an okay age to be topless on the beach, if I recall correctly, the average stated was around the age of two. And when asked what the physiological differences were per sexual anatomy, etc. between a two-year-old and a seven-year-old, they were stumped, but simply very, very sure that it was completely different, and very perplexed as to why I didn’t see the big difference.
M:I hear you on what you’re adding, and I think that’s all really astute. Of course, given the way most porn is made for men, in that the male actors are intended to look like average joes and the women discordant with that — realy, that most porn by design is made to elicit that response of being able to put themselves in the picture without feeling conflict or competition, it’s not surprising they respond differently, even if the emphasis/value on their appearance were the same in overarching culture, which, of course, it isn’t.
(Every now and then, I somehow forget that I have some of the coolest readers in the world. Seriously, y’all just rock so hard.)
November 30th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
(And here’s part two.)
November 30th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
The first time I ever discussed pornography with a male was when I was 17. I had no partnered sexual experience at the time, and my only previous exposure to porn has been half an hour of a video that belonged to a friend’s brother. We found that video funny because it all looked so fake. Anyhow, when I was 17 I was talking to a young man (a year or so younger than me) online explaining that I didn’t have any sort of philosophical objection to pornography, and he decided to tell me that I would never be able to understand a “male” approach to sex. He sent me an image of a women bent over a car, and said “this is what men want from sex,” elaborating that what he meant by that was simply having a woman there offerring sex with no further consequences beyond his orgasm. I had trouble with that, suggesting that concerns like STIs and pregnancy would still be an issue, and he was like “No, you have to be able to not think about all this stuff.” At the time, I felt that I must be suffering from some degree of sexual repression because I was unable to desire this sort of sex, and that I should strive to have a more “male” attitude, so that I could enjoy sex “properly.” And I based this on the opinion of one man– a boy really– whose only knowledge of women’s sexuality (hell, men’s sexuality too) came from mainstream pornography. I also felt that there was something wrong with that, I felt like I SHOULD be able to fully enjoy my sexuality without having to objectify myself and any partners, but at the same time, what this fellow said got to me.
When I got to university the next year, and finally had access to my own private computer with internet access I went to search out porn, hoping to find some that I felt represented something that I could enjoy, or something that seemed enjoyable for women in general. All the searches I did for “porn for women” just came up with more of the same– images in which I could not enjoy putting myself in the position of the woman at all.
It was the next year that I finally found Scarlet Letters, oh joy! I’d actually found it via Scarleteen, back when the old “Pink Slip” used to be on scarletletters.com. I forget the search that led me to Scarleteen/Pink Slip, but I remember it was nothing to do with pornography. And at last, I had found what I had been looking for. Looking back on it, I realise that I was looking for something with a very different purpose to the pornography that the young man/boy had told me about when I was 17. I never actually used any of the SL material for masturbation, nor anything from other sites in the femmerotic network. But what I liked about it, the reason that I looked at it every day for a while, was because AT LAST, here were women enjoying sex from their own perspective, without needing that absolute objectification I had been taught was this exaulted “male” way of enjoying sex. It empowered me to think about sexuality from my perspective, and helped me realise (without even realising that I was realising it
) that I didn’t NEED to let other people, particular men, dictate the way that I enjoyed my sexuality.
Of course, there are also additional problems in terms of representing sexuality in a patriarchal system, in that even our own desires can be dictated by a system that implicitly privileges male sexuality, but the fact is that finding SL at the age of 18-19 alterted me to the fact that I could at least START trying to define my sexuality for myself. While I may still struggle with aspects of my sexuality that seem to have been developed in response to this idea that I should be “serving” men, at least I know that it’s okay to NOT want that, and at least I know that not objectifying myself doesn’t equate to sexual repression.
November 30th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Here’s a story, while we’re doing the whole sharing-personal-narrative thing.
As a child of the internet, I’d had some exposure to porn before, but never really cared that much. I don’t remember a huge “eeewww” response or a fascination, merely the classic teenage “whatever” response when presented with images (yay, internet popups!). I do very much empathize with the whole “cool girl who is ok with porn” situation. I always had more male friends than female friends, and remember a few distinct times where I didn’t want them to think of me “as a girl” but just as another person - not necessarily as a guy, but not as a girl. Make sense?
Anyhow, one of my most distinct memories around porn was with the lad I dated in high school. I seriously need to call him up and lavish him with compliments, because he was the BEST introduction to partnersex and relationships I could have asked for.
He and I had talked about porn a few times. I was about 16, he was about 17. I remember him telling me that the first porn he remembered he drew on the computer himself (he’s a crazy-smart computer programmer, so that was extra amusing). After we’d become sexually active (after a year-long slow exploration of each other’s bodies - you can tell why I liked this boy, mmm?) he brought a sheet of paper over to my place one day. On it he’d printed out images, some from porn sites, of positions he’d like to try in our sex life. I was pretty psyched about it. So, in affect, my first situation with pornographic images that I really sat down and LOOKED at were instructional and a positive addition to my sex life. It actually really helped as a dialogue-opener for us on our likes and dislikes.
I think this had a big impact on how I thought of porn after that. Because my boyfriend didn’t have any guilt or shame about the images that he consumed, because he brought porn in as a positive, non-competitive addition to our intimacy, because I’d already grew up “proving” that I was more ok with boy things than girl things (I hated shopping more because of the “girliness” of it than the actual act), I think I had a pretty positive introduction to the idea of porn.
It’s interesting - I consumed porn pretty blithly for years. Finding images that I LIKED was few and far between, but I did my own scouring trying to find them. Often, though, I’d find myself turned on by images that I didn’t find attractive, per se. I still don’t really know what to think about this, though I’ve been mulling over it for a bit. I do know I NEVER enjoyed looking at men in porn. This has a lot to do with my own sexuality, but honestly, men in porn? Not so much. I think what I was hunting for much of the time was dyke porn, not that girl-on-girl stuff. Now as I’m looking at my erotic consumption (and as my feminist worldview is expanding) I’ve become more critical. It looks like I’m going through the reverse of what a lot of these girls are experiencing - I’m going from “porn is totally fine and hot” to “well, I really need to think about this. Some of this isn’t ok” rather than “absolutely not!” to “well, maybe?”. Hell, though, I don’t even know if they’re going that direction.
I fall smack dab in the age range of folks we’re talking about (20), and I’m having an interesting time hearing what they’re saying (and this is my peers sometimes) but not /really/ having a shared experience there. It’s particularly complex because while I hear what they’re saying, I’ve always lived in pretty liberal communities, so it takes some perception shift to get it.
Blah, I’m rambling at this point and need to get myself up to Seattle. I’m really enjoying this dialogue - let’s keep it up!
December 5th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Great post, Heather. Hope I’m not too late to get in on the discussion. Every time I’m confronted with a discussion on pornography, I always think back to when you were talking about how there was some retail porn industry that hired you to come up with a few things that could bring them the women audience that they were lacking - and once you compiled the list of things that they needed to change, they simply decided it wasn’t worth the cost. Which is why, a lot of the time, I just feel like turning my back on the pornography industry, because they turn their back on me by refusing to acknowledging that I’m part of their audience.
When I was little and first learning about sex, porn was always intriguing more than anything else. When I was old enough to be left alone, I would watch the scrambled channels and visit the sites I wasn’t supposed to and then quickly click the ‘erase history’ button. The excitement of ’sex’ outweighed the guilt.
I think that once I started becoming involved with monogamous relationships, my intrigue with sex and pornography started to dissipate. After reading all of your comments, I hate to admit it, but I was that girl that felt threatened when I caught my boyfriend watching pornography. A lot of it *was* the fact that I was just comparing myself to the women in the pictures and therefore thought that maybe he was unsatisfied with the way I looked, and another part of it was that I felt pornography shouldn’t have to play a part in a happy relationship. All the while, I secretly enjoyed looking at porn myself, but just refrained from it, because I felt tremendous guilt when I did - plus, if my parents caught me, I’d be toast.
So looking back, I think a lot of my reaction towards my boyfriend was just jealousy in a different form. Jealousy, because I wasn’t able to enjoy it like he was…because whenever I do watch it, there’s always something that ruins it for me - like the “moneyshot,” or the fact that there’s no way that I could ever relate to the women in porn (sexually, or otherwise), or that it’s just plain socially acceptable and understandable that men have this need to watch porn, but if a woman does it’s “weird,” or “she must really like sex,” or “she must just be gay.” And as far as I know, there isn’t much of a uniform when casting for male parts in pornographies - which makes the male cast more diverse and easier to identify with for men…whereas for women, it’s just a different story.
But when I learned about the fact that there was an entire feminist porn movement - like candida royale, or even nina hartley - people that were genuinely interested in opening the industry up to women, as well as genuinely interested in *sex* to begin with and not just wanting some quick cash - I got excited about watching it again. It became something that I didn’t have to feel guilty about watching because I’m constantly thinking about how bored the girls look, or how male dominated this or that scene is, or sigh and roll my eyes when the final facial comes (no pun intended.)
The fun, now, is being able to find the diamonds in the rough - and it’s hard. My boyfriend and I do notice that earlier porns are much easier to find. It seems like there wasn’t a uniform that the women had to wear - they’re unshaven, their boobs aren’t synthetic and the sex scenes are (usually) centered around *mutual* gratification - and this makes it seem more real. Some of them are even good movies, like the seven seductions of madame lau.
So I think that if pornography were a resource that was available to *everybody,* men and women, there wouldn’t be such a gigantic division of sexuality to begin with - and women might even stop feeling threatened by pornography as well, if they were able to enjoy it in the same manner as their partners. Anyway, I hope this all makes sense, as it was just me citing a couple of my run-ins with porn. Loved reading all of your comments - keep it going!
December 6th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Maybe it is because I work in a retail porn store and have an odd perspective on things but the effect porn has on sex, in my mind, pales in comparison to the effect sit-coms have on relationships in general. I’m not just talking about how Seinfeld treats his “friends” but even deeper. I live with a couple who have just had a baby, she is 32 and he is 28. His behavior towards his wife and supposed helpmate is a Home Improvement Mad About You Everybody Loves Raymond mish mash of treating her sometimes like a mother and sometimes like an overlord. She doesn’t understand why he won’t volunteer more and he doesn’t understand why she won’t tell him what to do. I feel like any minute the camera man will jump out of the closet. How can any sex within a relationship be equal if the relationship is not? How can any relationship work if it is based on an artificial mainstream media concept of this is what couples do? The conditioning starts well before the first under mattress Playboy. Sitcom wives have not changed nearly enough since Ozzie and Harriet.
December 6th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Nice observation.
(Ladies and germs, my college roomie come home to roost.)
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Reading all the comments here, as well as the original posts on Scarlet
Teen, has made me want to add my two cents into the conversation. I became sexually involved with men in a sexual context between 15 and 16. (Notice that I said with men… my first experiences were with girls, starting at a very young age, and indeed, it has occurred to me that my sexual attraction to males may indeed have been conditioned, rather than innate.)
My first experience with explicit material was science fiction (Robert Heinlein), a fact which probably gave me a better grounding than most other things…for one thing, the woman was completely a sovereign being, choosing, or not to have sex as she wanted, while the male was free to do the same.
Never the less, by the time I reached high school (1998-2002) I had swallowed a bunch of cultural conditioning without thought, about the primacy of heterosexual relationships, the Virgin/Whore dichotomy, and a host of other related issues… there was, and I suspect, still is, the double standard that in order to be cool, a girl had to be sexual, but if she was “too” sexual, she was then a slut, and the most reviled (well, after the bi-sexuals) person in the school. At the same time that we were being gathered in the cafeteria to sign virginity pledges, (yes, a school mandated assembly, where one was not explicitly required to sign one, but strongly encouraged to. I declined, mostly out of an early feminist impulse not to have any religious authority dictate what I would or would not do with my sexuality,) girls were exchanging tips on giving blowjobs and boys were talking about having sex every weekend. There was even a formula for how long one should date before having sex (three months) to prove that the guy was not just out to have sex. The idea of a girl wanting to have sex was nonexistent in this conversation.
My close girl friends, on the other hand, explicitly talked about our sex drives, including masturbation advice and tips, and eventually, supplying each other with condoms and rudiments of safer sex info. My fist porn viewing was at a sleepover as a freshman with my girl friends. I recall pretending to be asleep, watching through slitted lids, because while I was embarrassed by the sight of a naked man (the first erect penis ever!) I was intensely interested in the portrayal of sex, and masturbation. But there was such an air of unreality about it! My girlfriends were discussing how one would masturbate with long nails, and deciding that it was overrated, and the one of us who had had sex was critiquing the whole scene. We knew it was fake and thus could not take it seriously.
So porn never bothered me, even though it certainly didn’t get me off…
But when I fell head over heels for a traditional “very bad idea boy whom my mother hated” ™ all of my knowledge went out the window. I was a nervous and completely ignorant virgin. It was the Pygmalion story… he made me into the girl he wanted, but I didn’t care, because I was finally having sex, and enjoying the heck out of it. But I was aware of the very strict list of things that were ok to do, and what was not, and having to try to fit my burgeoning sexuality into this mold. One of these things was desiring other men, which merely meant that I spent a few years going around his back and feeling guilty… and gradually I felt more and more guilty and used by sex, and it still took me 6 months after the night he raped me to leave for good.
While porn did not have much to do any of this, there were elements of the same desires to control each others sexuality into something oriented solely around each other. And while I got over it, he would spend huge amounts of time accusing me of sleeping with other men. The idea that I wanted to buy a vibrator, or spent time masturbating after he would drop my back home after sex was profoundly threatening to him. The emphasis became increasingly focused on his satisfaction, and what he wanted to do. And I was convinced that this was the way it was supposed to work. I was supposed to “satisfy” my (note the possessive use) boyfriend.
This left me with a host of issues surrounding my ability to choose to have sex or say no, a fear of rejection for any “kinky” thoughts, and a supreme distaste for monogamy, all of which I’m still working through to this day.
This conversation has reminded me how vulnerable my younger self was to what the man in her life told her about herself, and how this shaped, and as much as I hate to admit it, continues to shape my world view, and how lucky I was to have friends that eventually pulled me out of the downward spiral that was that relationship.
It also makes me worry more and more about my youngest sister (now 13) and what she is getting out of the culture as she begins to become who she will be.
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:16 pm
So many of you have said such amazing things here in hindsight that I just started a thread at Scarleteen I’m hoping some will be up to participating in.
What you say doesn’t have to be about porn specifically: in fact, it’s more of the general stuff I’m hearing said in here about self-esteem, about figuring out limits, boundaries and expectations that I think could be really valuable to our younger readers.
They get some of this from me, but I’m only one perspective of SUCH a varied array, that I just would love to offer them some of what y’all have been sharing here.
April 14th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Interesting comments..
June 28th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title . Thanks for informative article
October 5th, 2007 at 11:57 am
I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100% regarding , but it’s just my opinion, which could be wrong