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In this Discussion
- 1234 March 2012
- Clever_girl March 2012
- distant_shoe March 2012
- ed_chigliak March 2012
- flossy_log_lady March 2012
- freddy March 2012
- kdawg March 2012
- Leland March 2012
- Loose_Thread March 2012
- Lucy March 2012
- Marcus March 2012
- MirandaJuly April 2012
- swamp_knobbler_mahan March 2012
- ThickeningAgent March 2012
- YoursTruly March 2012
Porno
It's the biggest thing on the internets. Also dumb, secret, and everywhere. Bad? Maybe. Or not really. But whatcha gonna do about it anyways?
A thread spliced in parallel from the Fancy Lady zone because people of every fancy might have something to say.
A thread spliced in parallel from the Fancy Lady zone because people of every fancy might have something to say.
Comments
Ladies-only stripclubs (lady dancers for lady patrons) were promoted. Sextoy stores for women came out into the daylight. Sex workers organized to protect their own collective health and safety. [WikiP on "Sex-Positive Feminism"]
Of course, this was also the era of the AIDS holocaust and the reality of the equation SILENCE = DEATH.
I guess I'm trying to say that while the 60/70's were a time of sexual openness, discovery and utopian practice (perhaps following from the relatively wide distribution of birth control options for to women, as well as the general liberating ethos swelling during the nation's greatest period of prosperity --- teenagers, with CARS!), the 80's were a time of dystopian sexual militancy.
In 60's porn, the gentile male swinger lifestyle was normalized, suburbanized and given high production values by the likes of Hugh Hefner, resulting in the first x-rated blockbusters. By the 80's, sex and gender activists were claiming public space and attacking social theories that classified broad swaths of joyful human behavior as deviant and anti-social.
[Insert Richard Hell and The Voidoids: New Pleasure]
I'm not going to claim that the young models that populate contemporary internet porn have benefited from any of this legacy (not that I really know one way or the other), but I do believe that in the 1980 and 90's the community of sex workers and porn producers became much more diverse and feminized. There were many female workers (like Seka, etc.) that became producers for a wider range of styles and tastes.
I'm just kind of speculating here, but my impression is that since the mid-90's, as with so many other commodities, the internet, digital production and digital distribution have overwhelmed the dominance and techniques of the previous generation of entrepreneurs.
Now, I guess, we are in the land of instant cheap dominant-id (ie, male) pleasing voyeurism everywhere. There are many liberated, self-actualized sex and porn workers working in ideological bulkheads established during the identity wars of the 80's and 90's, but that does not describe what fills up bazillions of video files that you'll find when you search on a few dirty words in Google.
What does this new world mean for web-native generations? Is it just a virtual Amsterdam, ie no big deal? Or is this an era of unprecedented sexual terror, confusion, and damage?
I just didn't want to unpack all this noise there. Out of respect, you know?
but also agree with a lot of RJ's historical analysis
mostly just makes me tired these days
also I don't want to shave my butthole, what on earth?
(???)
also I am interested in Cindy Gallup's project
http://makelovenotporn.com/
I'm not against porn, I realize that most dudes (and many ladies) indulge in some fashion, but I do have some reservations about its' ubiquity and the porn aesthetic seeping into general culture. Like the current social norm of public hair being "gross", and the rise of labiaplasty (!).
Academically speaking, pornography is really interesting as an adopter/driver of new technologies.
like if you read the hairpin comments, everybody under 30 thinks shaving/bleaching/worrying about the way their labia look (???) is totally normal. and all the old people like me are like "little sisters, WHAT?" In my day you had to go hunt down somebody's weird VHS porno and watch it over and over again. Not so pervasive and ubiquitous. Also WTF is up with the new porn aesthetic? Everybody's so smooth, those things don't even look like hoo-has anymore! AM I A HIPPIE???
And that's fine. I get really bummed though at the thought of ladies snipping things that are TOTALLY NORMAL because they do not match the idealized(also TOTALLY PHOTOSHOPPED if we're talking still images) vulva of porn ladies. Comment sections about pubic hair are also really funny when the young ladies are all "this has NOTHING to do with societal norms, I just think hair is gross/unhygenic" etc etc. If it was 1910 we'd think that NOT douching with Lysol is totally gross.
I like to ask my gyno about what trends she sees in shaving, fear of lady bits, etc. She reports a serious rise in labiaplasty requests, which depresses her. Also asked if some Portland ladies shave their bits but not their legs? YUP!
LOVE U PORTLAND!
(she also says pubic hair is there for a reason, keeps infection down AND better friction-wise for sexing)
To reiterate, though, I am not against porn. But porn is not real life, it is FANTASY.
They know they are feminists so their sub-brains have to find other reasons for crazy body-hating grooming regiments. LOVE the shaving of bits but not of legs!!!! Like a literal physical demonstration of the Two Cultures being drawn from.
My theory is that a lot of cosmetics (including for the stuff down there) is not really in the service of the partner's desire, but in the service of insecurity about the partner's imagined desire.
I can't believe menfolk really care about how stuff is decorated. By the time one is acquainted with those details, one is already well on the way to working with what is available.
Are there people who shut down because haircare doesn't meet their standards? I can't imagine.
Maybe these cosmetic gestures are more like a kind of symbolic courtesy. They don't really mean anything in themselves, they just represent 'caring'. I'm thinking of the gift card industry and gift shops full of teddy bears. Fifteen dollars for a teddy bear in a bucket of flowers doesn't really do anything useful for anybody except to say, "I was thinking about you, so I spent some money to make this moment special."
We say, "Thanks." Not because we desire or have any use for a stupid teddy bear, or pony, or rainbow alligator face, on our desk, but because we appreciate the evidence of our partner's concern for us.
Got to keep those butthole bleaching mills churning!
So yeah, I think this something affecting dudes too, not just ladies.
But yeah, I think pubic hair can be used as a jerk filter. Oh, you're grossed out by my totally natural body? GOODBYE.
We are pointing out new big generational trends in grooming that in my opinion can be 100% tied to the widespread ubiquity of a New Porn aesthetic. And that this new generation DOES think this way (boys liking me = must shave pubic region). And how that's intense.
I'm sure you dudes would never be so flip as to think vast across-the-board beauty myths are solvable by just shrugging and saying "who would care what someone else thought of them? that's stupid." Which is what it seems like you are saying right now.
I was only presenting a counter-example to an earlier-raised-point wherein someone seemed to be saying they didn't think porn had widespread implications for how people viewed one another/behaved/thought things were sexy.
The idea that porn doesn't influence us as individuals is bogus.
If anything, I think easy access has normalized porn to the point where its power is forgotten. It isn't forbidden... I prefer the satisfaction of forbidden things.
Splitting hairs
There's too many kinds of porn and too many kinds of viewers to make generalizations. Except the one generalization I can make, is that visual stuff is incredibly powerful.
Like for example... the point of shaved genitals is not that hair is "gross." It's that you can't see the genitals when hair is covering it. And we have this camera. And it wants to see everything. It's because of the camera.
Bbbut
1 thing is we are talking about an m/f power thing.
And same-sex stuff plays with the power thing as a matter of course.
Ha ha, I really am an elitist.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
This was interesting. Thanks Ed.
>>>also I am interested in Cindy Gallup's project
http://makelovenotporn.com/
It's true there are many contemporary straight-porn cliches ( facial conclusions, eg) that are totally about what the camera wants and what the voyeur can work with and have maybe nothing to do with the pleasures of the participants or the practices of "real" people. And just like with the hair trimming, this is no doubt changing the expectations and practices of "real" people.
And yeah, it is messed up if these industrial conventions get in the way of people creating their own best pleasures.
I believe you when you say it is happening.
I'm going to go think some more.
For the record, I don't think I'm defending porn or my relation to it. Did you think I was LT?
I think you are correct that it is kind of hard to make generalizations. That was part of what motivated me to try to sketch a 50-year overview.
I've read some books and hung out with students of sexuality, but I've never taken a feminisms class. The first wave is like the suffragettes, right? And second wave is Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, anti-objectification, equality, sisterhood and separatism, Womyn, right? And so third wave is about the contradictions of desire, liberation and power, anti-essentialism, the mutable ground of gender and other categories, right? And I think that's the territory of the 'sex-positive' feminists I was talking about. They were like: we can porn the shit out of shit if we want to. This is our time, our game, our pleasure, and if it works for us it works, whatever the f*k it looks like.
------------------
For years my online porn/smut was here. A real catchall going since the earliest days of the internet. Lots of totally messed up stuff. All kinds. All text. No pictures. It's like a massive toxic dump of the collective unconscious. (For the record: Probably 3% suits my vanilla tastes. Just sayin'.)
--------------------
I don't think I'm defending porn. It seems too big to me to even think about whether it should come or go.
I'm thinking the erotic can attach to almost anything. Erotic logic is indivisible from every pleasure in life.
Anything can be porn if you look at it through the lens that way.
So agree with Dworkin needing to be taken a zillion times more seriously. I recently re-read her essay on Nicole Brown Simpson and felt that old-school feeling of my mind just being SLAYED. I just sat there, like, Uuuughhhhhhhhh. Talk about speaking fucking truth to power.
Honestly just go get any book of her essays and prepare to have a big hole blown in your reality
She's caricatured, but it's because there's so much power in her.
Even the second wave porn trials, with MacKinnon and Dworkin and the lady from Deep Throat, they were caricatured....everyone talks about how you know the feminists were on the "wrong side" of that issue because the religious right was also on that side. But you can support the right causes for the wrong reasons, I think we would all agree. The feminists' fundamental statement in that trial was "if porn is free speech, WHOSE SPEECH IS IT?" and that question was never answered and has still not been answered. To read Linda Lovelace's supreme court testimony, about being forced at gunpoint to let a Great Dane fuck her so that generations of frat boys could enjoy watching it, and then to know that it made no difference, and to know that legions of male legislators, thinkers, and people, just disregard it as not even being allowed to be part of the discussion--like oh, that was just ONE WOMAN'S experience, and oh, but most porn isn't made at gunpoint, and oh etc. etc. Totally unable to engage with the idea that countless theaters full of men, watching a woman get raped by a dog and GETTING PLEASURE OUT OF THAT VIEWING, says something fucking EPIC about our culture.
Like yeah, I don't know about legislating pornography, obviously the implications of that are dark, etc. etc. first amendment censorship etc. But this to me also seems like somewhat of a canard--like by just saying "it's free speech" we can wash our hands of having to engage in the much grittier discussion of what such things say about us, our society, the power dynamics we all exist completely within, and how we relate to one another as human beings. That conversation is too difficult, so we just comfort ourselves with platitudes about choice and free speech and "whatever floats your boat" and "well there's nothing to be done about it, boys will be boys" or whatever.
I prefer erotic fiction.
Erotic fiction almost seems worse because people write shit with minors involved (Harry Potter &c).
Where are the big, modern female-friendly porn purveyors? Everyone always brings up Candide Royalle but her production company wasn't able to stay afloat even through the video craze of the 90s.
Why have so few companies made a biiiillion dollars making mainstream porn for women's enjoyment?
erotic fiction is awesome, you have to use your IMAGINATION
also, the internet makes all media free.