Um, warning. Not PG13 today. Proceed at your own risk, campers.
In another fabulous example of everyone in the world wanting to discuss what I do (okay, not really), I read a discussion yesterday that was spurred by an article about how the pornification of America is leading us to hell in a handbasket. Now, the original article was from Adbusters, which I'm not familiar with, but from some of the comments I read, their editorial policy is more or less that everything is a harbinger of the fall of Western civilization and, oh yeah, the sky is falling. Be that as it may, you know that I personally am always going on about this pornification and its ridiculous influence.
My usual rant is directed at its effect on shaping the culture's idea of what a woman's body is supposed to look like: my fear that young men my kid's age, warped from all the easily available internet porn in their formative years, think that a skinny woman with artificially big and preternaturally perky breasts, devoid of all pubic hair, with featureless genitals--basically Barbie--is what a real woman actually looks like, and that any deviation from that pattern is less than perfectly sexually arousing, with the resulting pressure on women to try to look like that, with procedures ranging from the (relatively benign) Brazilian to (it goes without saying) implants to (the ridiculous extremes of) anal bleaching or labiaplasty. But you've heard me bitch about that before, I'm sure.
No, what I found new and interesting in the discussion I was reading was all the young women coming forth and complaining about guys who have picked up their "sexual technique" such as it were from watching porn. That is to say, they watch things that are faked, the women in the porn are moaning with "pleasure" over these faked things, and then the morons try these things in real life--things that are actually uncomfortable, possibly injurious, annoying, and/or downright painful to their partners--because they don't realize porn isn't real and real people's bodies don't work like that. (OMG, shades of The Lawyer! ::spit:: I had no idea this was an actual syndrome.) In other words, porn is making a whole subset of young men into crappy, crappy lovers. Hopefully, with more experience and/or a woman or two willing to work on setting them straight, they'll outgrow it, but then again, The Lawyer was in his 40s when I dated him and he sucked big time. Um, no pun intended.
The other interesting thing I heard from the young women in this discussion is that porn is leading to their feeling pressured to do every kinky or semi-kinky thing on the sexual menu, and to do it all immediately, because these dudes who have watched too much porn aren't satisfied with, y'know, just PIV. And while most or all of the women complaining about this were quick to say they aren't averse to less standard acts or to experimentation, they don't necessarily need or want to do that stuff the first time they sleep with someone or with every casual partner they have.
This ties in with something I've long wondered about. Some of my friends and I have discussed that in Our Day (when dinosaurs walked the earth, yo) oral sex was considered a much more intimate act than fucking and that you didn't engage in it with someone until after you were already doing PIV on a regular basis. We've been kind of astounded that that has apparently flipped, and Kids These Days don't see it that way. Well, in that discussion I was reading, it became clear to me that many of these young women did in fact feel that same way, but felt pressured by their peer group, the culture, and/or the guys they were hooking up with not to. There's all these young women saying that you hook up with a guy for the first time and he thinks you're going straight to facials and anal sex, activities they are fine with but, y'know, don't want to do willy-nilly with every casual partner or in a very new relationship. But these guys are so jaded from watching porn, they think every sexual encounter has to involve every possible orifice being penetrated and ejaculate flying everywhere, or it's boring. So, again, yeah, pornification leads to bad sex.
That's ironic, right?
xoxo
12 comments:
Is PIV the new black?
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(I had to think for awhile before I figured out what PIV was. Does that mean I'm watching too much porn, or not enough?)
I think it means that *I* spend too much time on the magical magical interwebs, because there's nothing I don't know a ridiculous internet abbreviation for. Apparently. :-)
If I hung out in the right bars could I ask women if they wanted to PIV?
You might ask them if they want PIV, but that might be a little close to PID for comfort. hahahaha
So the truth is finally leaking out... Andrea Dworkin's first name is actually "Malevolent". ;-)
On a more serious note, I've also been continuously amazed at how far things have gone since I was a horny teenager. Since we also had plenty of pictures of naked chicks back then, (also all very air-brushed and idealized on the pages of Playboy Magazine and elsewhere), and, as well, a goodly amount of full motion video to go with it, (RIP Marilyn Chambers), I wonder if the differences may have more to do with the interwebs and cell phone cameras, and the ease and ubiquity of self-published (and possibly photoshopped) porn, rather than just porn in general.
I also think, ironically enough given your recent rant on slut shaming, that a lot of it is also down to issues of peer pressure, self-esteem, and the evolution of the slut-as-pariah to the slut-as-role model. I don't mean to disagree with your point about the culpability of the assholes in the worst of it, but I do think it's worth pointing out that the slut with the shaved hoo-hah and bleached pooper doing all the ooh-ing and ahh-ing on the viral video has somehow been elevated from a gutter of societal derision to a strange sort of pedestal of societal idealization, (in a bedroom context), and that's just plain f'd up.
Of course, we could put it all back on guys and our f'd up madonna/whore issues, but I think another part of this has to go back to our generational failure as parents to arm our children with the character necessary to recognize when behavior is coercive and unhealthy, not to mention just plain wrong.
The reason that this post follows from the slut-shaming one (and I should have actually written this in this post) is from Mr Indemnity's comment that real-life sexuality has been wiped from the media (paraphrasing!). So, yeah, you have this pornification culture that elevates this iconic figure of a slut as what a hot woman should be, tells men and women that of course women should aspire to being "hot", and on the other hand sneers at or completely objectifies that slut figure. It must be really confusing for teenaged girls and very young women to be bombarded with that: that you need to look and act this certain way or else guys won't like you or want you, but if you look and act that way you'll be reviled. Am I making any sense here? I know what I'm trying to say but I don't know if I'm getting it across.
I think you're getting it across to me, but that's cause I feel the same way--and sent you a couple of related articles on the subject.
My guess is that once one gets out of the teenage/college years the sneering at girls as sluts for the being the sexual beings the similarly aged boys are actually dying for tends to dissipate. But teenagers are trying so hard to fit in, while getting these two simultaneous, and simultaneously opposing messages from our society and culture, that their responses are equally conflicted.
Especially when the middle option, neither virgin nor whore but real people having real sex that they both enjoy with each other has all but disappeared from American mass media.
Just to add something on the side of the assholes...
This whole thread has me thinking about how the sexual balance of power has shifted in the last 50 years. Whereas once a guy had to wheedle and cajole (and ply with prodigious amounts of alcohol) the object of his affection into sharing any, (or at least that was what he was led to believe), nowadays we have girls who will wear and do just about anything to get any sort of sexual attention. (Oversimplifying, but work with me here).
The possible conclusion is, as f'd up and asshole-ish that guys can be while under the influence of too many teenage hormones, there's a fair body of evidence suggesting that the insanity of women denied their desires is at least a match.
So, are you chicks ready to admit that you were mean to us back in the day? We'll be willing to forgive you if you wear that thing you know we like, and, uh, do that thing you know we like... And we swear we won't share the pix with our buddies... Honest!
Oh, I just lost a long comment. *$*%(@#$*#@!!!!!
Let me try again.
I think that what you're saying is part of what I'm lamenting when I say things have gone backwards: that these young women today have absolutely no sense of their own sexual power or agency. :-) Now, you're implying that the power was all on the girl's side in, say, 1978. I'm disagreeing. I think it was much more equal and balanced.
But I'm only going from my own experience, because *as you all know*, I am neither very mean (most of the time) nor lacking in, um, sexual appetite. I mean, the "meanest" or most unethical I ever was in the sexual arena was the guy freshman year of college that I went on a number of dates with, made out with (without really feeling much, or any, sexual charge or chemistry with, though I liked him as a person), and finally decided to have sex with, just to see how it would be different with soneone other than S (who was the only actual prtner I'd had up until then.) So we had sex once, it sucked, and I stopped seeing him, which really *really* upset him.
I still feel guilty about that, because I should never have fucked someone who I knew really liked me only out of curiousity. But at least he got laid. And it wasn't done maliciously. And I didn't tell him the reason I wasn't going to see him any more because sex with him was fairly nauseating. Plus, I was 18, so yeah, I was an asshole :-)
Re: "pornification leads to bad sex", I see it as quite analogous to how consumerization of produce leads to giant, red, flavorless strawberries.
Re: "good slut / bad slut" (paraphrasing), yes there is a huge double standard. I've certainly seen it have negatives effect on many people I've known, even if in subtle ways, so don't hear me as defending it... But I would suggest that it has been partly the unavoidable result of inhomogeneous attitudes in society. There are still plenty of people (grandparents, parents) that are strongly sexually conservative. There are the pornificators, and who knows what other influences, towards the opposite end of the spectrum. In my experience, both exercise plenty of cultural influence, at odds with one another.
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