Pornographic Musings
Last night I started reading a very interesting book: Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen. It's a critique of mainstream pornography in the context of North American concepts surrounding masculinity.
As I read Jensen's specific critiques I agree with most of them and yet...I find I'm also feeling very defensive. I tend to think of myself as generally pro-pornography. I watch porn myself and even though I personally try to avoid the more mainstream productions, I'm not comfortable criticizing people who do. It's fantasy, it's harmless, etc....
Jensen claims that (generally speaking), mainstream porn is built around the infantilization and degredation of women. I've heard the argument before, to which my response has always been "Sex isn't degrading". But it's not the sex that Jensen refers to as degrading. In a lot of pornography, women are portrayed as willing, yet passive recipients of sexual acts initiated by men. As I understand it, the target audiences of most mainstream porn are heterosexual males. The producers of porn seek to create a visual experience which allow men to become aroused as quickly as possible, jerk off and walk away.
Before I began work at VE and had access to free pornography, DK and I used to rent movies from a nearby adult video store. I often had difficulty navigating the shelves and shelves of titles. I wanted to watch something that would arouse and amuse and yet so many of the DVD case had content that repelled me. I couldn't bring myself to choose any movie which contained words like "slut" or "whore" in it's title or tagline. Images of a woman's hair being pulled while giving a blow job, distubed me as well. I remember vividly one film with the title "Pull My Hair and Call Me Bitch". It made me feel awful. So awful that we left the store empty-handed more than once, because I was so sad I knew I couldn't enjoy sex that day.
Even now, when I see those titles I think of the people who might rent them. Porn is in the mainstream. Regular, respectable people rent films like "Pull My Hair" all the time. And it makes me ask myself, "Do they think it's okay to feel this way about women or at least women who want sex?" I'm a woman. I enjoy and desire sex. But I don't enjoy being called names, intended to degrade me. I'm not content to simply lie back and be fucked. If some guy pulled my hair, the last thing I want to is blow him.
And the flip side of that is that most of the men I know, don't want that either. They're not looking for little-girl like vessels, which they can subjugate and penetrate. Yet mainstream porn persists in presenting that scenario as the hetero-male sexual ideal. And I don't understand why.
In the book, Jensen recounts an episode from his childhood:
My first recollection of viewing sexual material is from early grade school. when one of the boys got his hands on a biker magazine that had pictures of women with exposed breasts....As I was consciously becoming aware of sexuality, my first recognizable cultural lesson on the subject came in a male-bonding ritual around men's use of an objectified woman.
It made me think of my first lesson on the sexuality: Paperback novels. I was maybe 8 or 9 when a friend read us steamy passages from a novel, she'd swiped from her mom's dresser. It described sex in terms more explicit than I'd ever heard before. I found it incredibly arousing. When I was older...but not much, I began reading V.C. Andrew's novels. When I first picked up Flowers In The Attic I was unaware that the characters had sex. Once I learned that it did, I read more and more and more. Andrew's preferred sexual scenario was rape. Generally in a situation wherein the female protagonist is forced into sex by a family member who has long-desired her and can no longer control themselves. She is subsequently rescued and made "whole" again by another man with whom she shares tender and loving sex. There was also usually a villainous secondary female character, who had sex liberally.
It wasn't until I was well into adulthood, that I realized I seriously internalized those early, pulp-fiction ideas around sex. Somewhere in the back of my head, I still believed that sexual desire was a dangerous impulse that could barely be controlled. As a woman, wanting sex or at least acting on the desire was base and made one a bad person. And yet I had sexual desire. I had sexual impulses that had nothing to do with being tender and loving. So even while I was experiencing the excitement of sexual arousal, I was ashamed and hesitated to act on it, aside from masturbating.
Every time I work at VE, I help at least one customer who is confused and/or ashamed by some element of their sexuality. I don't think porn is soley responsible...but perhaps it's an exaggerated reflection of specific cultural ideas we have about sex, gender roles and morality and I think at least some of those ideas are ugly and untrue. I'm not ready to launch a personal anti-(mainstream)porn campaign. I'm already fairly selective about the kind of pornographic material I consume. Perhaps after finishing this book I'll be more, or at least differently selective.
Wow! Well if you made it through all the cut text, I welcome your thoughts.
As I read Jensen's specific critiques I agree with most of them and yet...I find I'm also feeling very defensive. I tend to think of myself as generally pro-pornography. I watch porn myself and even though I personally try to avoid the more mainstream productions, I'm not comfortable criticizing people who do. It's fantasy, it's harmless, etc....
Jensen claims that (generally speaking), mainstream porn is built around the infantilization and degredation of women. I've heard the argument before, to which my response has always been "Sex isn't degrading". But it's not the sex that Jensen refers to as degrading. In a lot of pornography, women are portrayed as willing, yet passive recipients of sexual acts initiated by men. As I understand it, the target audiences of most mainstream porn are heterosexual males. The producers of porn seek to create a visual experience which allow men to become aroused as quickly as possible, jerk off and walk away.
Before I began work at VE and had access to free pornography, DK and I used to rent movies from a nearby adult video store. I often had difficulty navigating the shelves and shelves of titles. I wanted to watch something that would arouse and amuse and yet so many of the DVD case had content that repelled me. I couldn't bring myself to choose any movie which contained words like "slut" or "whore" in it's title or tagline. Images of a woman's hair being pulled while giving a blow job, distubed me as well. I remember vividly one film with the title "Pull My Hair and Call Me Bitch". It made me feel awful. So awful that we left the store empty-handed more than once, because I was so sad I knew I couldn't enjoy sex that day.
Even now, when I see those titles I think of the people who might rent them. Porn is in the mainstream. Regular, respectable people rent films like "Pull My Hair" all the time. And it makes me ask myself, "Do they think it's okay to feel this way about women or at least women who want sex?" I'm a woman. I enjoy and desire sex. But I don't enjoy being called names, intended to degrade me. I'm not content to simply lie back and be fucked. If some guy pulled my hair, the last thing I want to is blow him.
And the flip side of that is that most of the men I know, don't want that either. They're not looking for little-girl like vessels, which they can subjugate and penetrate. Yet mainstream porn persists in presenting that scenario as the hetero-male sexual ideal. And I don't understand why.
In the book, Jensen recounts an episode from his childhood:
My first recollection of viewing sexual material is from early grade school. when one of the boys got his hands on a biker magazine that had pictures of women with exposed breasts....As I was consciously becoming aware of sexuality, my first recognizable cultural lesson on the subject came in a male-bonding ritual around men's use of an objectified woman.
It made me think of my first lesson on the sexuality: Paperback novels. I was maybe 8 or 9 when a friend read us steamy passages from a novel, she'd swiped from her mom's dresser. It described sex in terms more explicit than I'd ever heard before. I found it incredibly arousing. When I was older...but not much, I began reading V.C. Andrew's novels. When I first picked up Flowers In The Attic I was unaware that the characters had sex. Once I learned that it did, I read more and more and more. Andrew's preferred sexual scenario was rape. Generally in a situation wherein the female protagonist is forced into sex by a family member who has long-desired her and can no longer control themselves. She is subsequently rescued and made "whole" again by another man with whom she shares tender and loving sex. There was also usually a villainous secondary female character, who had sex liberally.
It wasn't until I was well into adulthood, that I realized I seriously internalized those early, pulp-fiction ideas around sex. Somewhere in the back of my head, I still believed that sexual desire was a dangerous impulse that could barely be controlled. As a woman, wanting sex or at least acting on the desire was base and made one a bad person. And yet I had sexual desire. I had sexual impulses that had nothing to do with being tender and loving. So even while I was experiencing the excitement of sexual arousal, I was ashamed and hesitated to act on it, aside from masturbating.
Every time I work at VE, I help at least one customer who is confused and/or ashamed by some element of their sexuality. I don't think porn is soley responsible...but perhaps it's an exaggerated reflection of specific cultural ideas we have about sex, gender roles and morality and I think at least some of those ideas are ugly and untrue. I'm not ready to launch a personal anti-(mainstream)porn campaign. I'm already fairly selective about the kind of pornographic material I consume. Perhaps after finishing this book I'll be more, or at least differently selective.
Wow! Well if you made it through all the cut text, I welcome your thoughts.