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Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Porn debate rears its ugly head

Now the anti-porn argument is that "real" women just don't compare to porn actresses. Naomi Wolf kicked off the opening shot of this argument and alot of people are liking it. But I just don't buy it. I see far, far too many flaws in this argument.
The major point of the argument is that men have been built up by porn to expect physical perfection in women and therefore women are going to be sexually neglected as men turn to porn, where women are better-looking. I think that's women projecting their own physical insecurities onto porn actresses, not men comparing. For one thing, I find it hard to believe that most men really consider super-skinny women with hard, fake breasts, fried and bleached hair and leathery tans to be some kind of physical ideal. Sure, there are a handful of men who really like that, but most men have their own particular tastes, and most men that I know of at least would rather be with a woman who is pretty and natural instead of skanked up and surgically redecorated. Yeah, it's a different version of the Madonna/whore complex, but at least it's much milder. Most guys expect good girls to like sex and good girls are still the ones they want to date.
Wolf brings up the fashion of trimming pubic hair as evidence that women have to compete with porn actresses for male attention, stating that women her age don't really trim or shave whereas women my age do. In this case, she is mistaking fashion for something more serious. It used to be that women didn't shave their legs or armpits either, but both came into fashion without any pressure from the pornography industry. For the entire century, each generation added a little more area to be shaved; pubic hair was just the last frontier on that. For all we know, being hairy might be the fashion half a century from now.
There is no doubt that women are under alot of pressure to be beautiful, but this has always been true and I don't really see how adding just one more series of images to the public imagination can really make a difference. Images of supermodels with their unattainable beauty are far more threatening to me than any porn star could ever be. In fact, you are far more likely to see a slight thickness of thigh, a round tummy, a bit of cellulite or an ass pimple in porn than you are ever on television or in mainstream magazines.
Another concern she brings up is that women just don't have the arsenal of sexual skills to compete with porn stars. Again, I have to wonder how much bearing that has on real life. Maybe there was a time when men were completely satisfied with women who just showed up and took off their clothes, but I doubt that just as I doubt that there was a time when women were completely satisfied with hands off missionary position sex themselves. Raised expectations are a result of the sexual revolution that also increased the acceptability of porn, but raised expectations are also the result of feminism and women's demands that they too want to have pleasure in bed alongside men.
But Wolf argues that expectations have been raised more on women than on men:

The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.

Fair enough. We still live in a male-dominated society and standard male fantasies are going to dominate young people's sexual experimentation. The cure for this isn't sexual repression but continuing to work at making space for girl's sexual fantasies and experiments.
I can't help but think that this is the old argument of "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"--i.e., men will not be happy in ordinary, monogamous relationships and women cannot be happy without them, so sex becomes a bartering tool that women use to "buy" themselves commitment from men. Porn, in this case, is a way for men to "cheat" and devalue what women have to offer and thereby "escape" having to commit to relationships to get any kind of sex. This argument degrades women more than a porn movie can. If women have to use sex to "snag" men, think about what that says about women--that we are desperate for men, that we have nothing to offer outside of sex--all those ugly, mean, and untrue stereotypes.
The cow-milk argument is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's one of the myriad of arguments that can be boiled down to: We have to impede women's freedom for their own good. The cow-milk argument is used against women who choose to have sex without tying themselves down right away to the first guy they sleep with. It's used against abortion and birth control to say that these things are a male plot to escape responsibility towards women. A variation of take-away-freedom-for-your-own-good is used to justify chaperones and curfews. And both the protectionist argument and the cow-milk argument have been used to justify the veil. In fact, Wolf gets taken away by her own logic and become enamored of the veil:

Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.
She must feel, I thought, so hot.


The veil is not there to protect women or to make them feel special. It's there to degrade them, to be a constant reminder of the shamefulness of female sexuality. And, one look at the tight, pinched faces of most of the people making the cow-milk or protectionist arguments against short skirts, porn, birth control, cohabitation, or even unchaperoned dates tells you all you need to know about why they are really against these things--they believe women are nasty and their sexuality is disturbing. John Ashcroft didn't conceal a nude statue and then demand a list of names of women who have had abortions because he is concerned that women are losing their ability to "snag" men.
At the end, Wolf trots out a young man who seems to have lost his ability to be amazed by sex:

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

This doesn't tell me that young men have lost their interest in sex. This tells me that Wolf has forgotten what young men are like. This kind of dumbass blundering and bragging is far from unknown in young men, to say the least. And of course young men who are too immature to properly manage a real relationship are going to avail themselves of plenty of porn. Taking that away from them in order to compel them to date young women isn't a way to help young women, but it's a great way to get young women into relationships with men who haven't learned to respect women and treat them right. Anyway, it's not likely to work. Young men were enthusiastic masturbators before Internet porn and nothing will change that.
That the younger men in her story sound like morons and the older men have a more thoughtful approach to sex and relationships isn't the result of older men's youthful deprivations. It's more likely a product of maturity.
Men grow up and start wanting more than quick arousal. They want love, companionship, family and all sorts of things living breathing women will always fulfill better than any picture could. And yes, they want sex with love and affection, and oh yeah, the sense that a real person is there and responding. Some men are emotional retards, of course, and they may never get past preferring porn to the messiness of real sex with real women. But I don't see the harm in letting them remove themselves from the dating scene so that they don't inflict themselves on other people.

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