PORN.
Man, Cherany is going to murder me for updating without personal information. I'm posting this here because word found out I pirated it and refuses to let me use it. Needed a spellchecker, and I find this an AMAZING topic. The assignment was to write a 2-3 page long critique about an article (scientific or non-scientific) pertaining to sexuality in some way. I was told to have fun with it, and that this assignment was not APA. Though this has been the shittiest week ever and I haven't slept for more than three hours a night since last wednesday, I had fun writing this while hopped up on energy drinks and coffee.
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I have always been able to speak of sexual subject matter with confidence and ease. I am not sure if this is out of a general interest in the way people behave when confronted about sexual topics, or simply a desire to make other people squirm. Regardless, I became interested in Wolf's article while researching a a paper I once wrote on the topic of marital sexuality. David Amsden once aptly described pornography as the "raunchy wallpaper of our respectable lives"; it is ever-present in the background of our society, whether we actively consume it or not. It influences our relationships, and to a point, our own behaviour. In her article "The Porn Myth", Naomi Wolf examines the ways in which pornography has changed sexual interaction and how it has turned men away from the real thing.
The article opens by describing Andrea Dworkin's (a women's rights advocate famous in the eighties for being vehemently opposed to pornography) prediction that widespread availability of explicit content would result in a flood of negative sexual behaviour towards women. Wolf acknowledges that Dworkin was correct to a certain extent, though instead of breeding a generation of rapists as Dworkin predicted, pornography has "deadened the male libido in relation to real women". Wolf goes on to describe that instead of having to fight off increasingly persistent male admirers, young women are reporting feelings of inadequacy and rejection for not being able to meet male ideals that are emphasized and underlined in pornography.
Wolf argues that it is not only women who are now finding inadequacy in being average. She states that rapid exposure to pornography (which often portrays women with unrealistic bodies performing acts tailored to any fantasy) is redefining what men believe is normal and expected of women in the bedroom. She explains that men are led to become less interested in average looking women who are not willing to perform certain sexual acts that are common in the porn industry. As a result, she claims that men are increasingly finding women inferior to their pornographic counterparts. After interviewing both male and female students, Wolf describes that members of both sexes openly report that men who consume porn are less able to connect erotically with real women. The resulting isolation, Wolf states, leads to a sense of loneliness for both men and women who have been directly and second handed-ly influenced by pornography.
Wolf draws a striking parallel between mass consumption of pornography and another issue facing our modern society--the obesity epidemic. To properly illustrate this comparison, she makes a remarkably fitting analogy: "when an appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up." Fast food may not taste better than a home cooked meal or leave a person satisfied for long, but it is still one of the largest industries in western society.
This is not a scientific article, though that is not to say that Wolf does not have impressive credentials. She is a Yale educated American writer who went on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in 1985. Her book, "The Beauty Myth" (an instant bestseller that was first published in 1991) argues that beauty is a socially constructed idea that serves our patriarchal society by keeping women controlled by their own self-consciousness. Wolf writes from a feminist perspective, and has been both criticized and lauded for her works.
The information used in Wolf's article was gathered through personal interviews and secondary research, though it also contains a healthy dose of the author's opinion. If the article had not been written with such clear bias, people unsympathetic to Wolf's cause may have been persuaded by some of her more valid points. However, I feel that it is only natural that Wolf's argument and position would be sensationalized due to the nature of the publication. A lukewarm approach to such a topic would not make waves, not spark controversy and discussion, and certainly not make money.
As a young woman with insecurities and blemishes of my own, I undoubtedly agree with Wolf's claim that many women feel as if they cannot compete with the airbrushed, made-up, surgically-enhanced women of porn. I have my own skewed beliefs as to what men consider attractive and unattractive in a woman, ideas that partially stem from my own interpretations of pornography. When my perceptions are expressed to male friends, I find that I leave many of them stunned to see how jaded I have become, wondering how I could have developed such strong ideas that prevent me from seeing my own positive attributes.
Pornography is such a broad topic; one major issue that makes this topic so interesting and so ambiguous is that there is no clear definition of what pornography truly is. This is largely due to the fact that people have different interpretations of what constitutes explicit material, as well as the fact that anyone is capable of producing it. Sexuality, though it has its fundamental variables, is a rapidly-changing topic in an ever-changing world. If we were to give a concrete definition to pornography, it would undeniably crumble as it is human nature to push sexual boundaries. This does not mean that we should not attempt to explain the concept, if only for the sake of clarity. I found Wolf's lack of effort in this area to be a glaring fallacy; without a clear definition of pornography as an independent variable, I believe that we cannot make broad generalizations of its effects. I chose to use Wolf's non-scientific article for this assignment simply for the fact that sexuality, in essence, is not a scientific topic. There are no true statistics that can ever be able to properly encompass the varying tastes, values and opinions of every human being who engages in sexually related behavior. Regardless, Wolf's article provides an interesting, poignant glance into the experience of men and women in our modern world: a place where pornographic images are so deeply entwined in the very fabric of our society.