Porn

My post below and this post by Hugo on misogyny got me to thinking about the subject of porn. And since I want to avoid polluting up his blog with a meandering discussion on the talents of porn actors or anything like that, I thought I'd drag it to Mouse Words, where we say "fuck" and don't give a fuck who reads it.

Anyway, I had all these long, meandering thoughts on the subject that I'm sure were really deep when I was thinking them, but I am stuck on one thing I touched on lightly over at Hugo's blog when I called porn a "masturbation product". Why is there this sudden and tedious fascination with porn in our culture now? I know I'm not the first person to ask this question, but I am honestly flummoxed. We're like a bunch of 12 years old snickering at a magazine we found in the trash can. I realize that it's titillating to think about people who have sex with thousands of people for money, but god knows it's certainly not a new thing to do.

I mean, at its core, porn is a masturbation aid. It's only other purpose, as far as I can tell, is to be emailed to your friends so they can snicker at it. Sure, a lot of it has appallingly sexist portrayals of women, but then again, so does the majority of television shows. Some is violent, but I see a lot more eroticized violence in regular movies. Mostly, it's tedious and that's how it's supposed to be, since it's not really meant for watching for much longer than 10 minutes or so.

I get embarrassed for men who are really proud of their porn-viewing habits. It's as if I had a bunch of vibrators and dildos in a glass case or something. I'm not embarrassed about masturbation or anything, but it's hardly something to take a lot of pride in. It just is what it is. I'm not putting people down who make or sell sex aids for a living--we need you, of course. But that's their job. The rest of us need to chill.

And of course, the people that obsess over porn know on a certain level that dedicating that much attention to is adolescent and silly. So they puff it up to be something that it's not like some writers at a certain online magazine that I read every day and link to with some regularity but am not going to call by name, except to say that it starts with "S" and ends with "n". Watching Jenna Jameson have sex might make you horny, but I don't think that it's really a deep experience. Not that sexuality can't be a deep experience--even masturbation can teach you more about yourself--but it's just a tool. Like a dildo. Which doesn't get laudatory write-ups in liberal magazines on a regular basis.

Does porn give men unrealistic ideas about women? Probably, but to me that indicates that we have much bigger fish to fry in the sexual realm, beginning with how it is that men and women are placed in so much opposition to each other that some of us are getting more ideas about each other from movies and magazines than we are by relating to one another. Call me an idealist, but if men and women were more open and really listened to each other, you'd have a lot less men thinking that X should work for his girlfriend because it works in the porn movies.

Do porn consumers hide from their relationships with porn? A few, I'm sure, but I see no evidence that there's a widespread problem out there of men refusing the warm bodies of the women in their lives in favor of a cold computer or television screen. Those who do hide would probably be hiding no matter what the excuse is.