No doubt in a disjointed fashion–frankly, porn is not a big part of my life. If I look at porn four times in a month, that’s unusual. Now, that isn’t because I don’t like sex–I like sex, lots. Nor is that because I don’t have a high sex drive–I do have a high sex drive, one that has not infrequently exceeded that of my partners in the past few decades. Mostly, I don’t use much porn because it’s just more trouble than it’s worth as a sexual aid.
I have watched probably about ten actual porn movies from beginning to end. Most of them did have a plot, but the plots (and the acting, and the dialogue) were pretty bad (ranging from inadvertently-funny bad to simply stupid-boring bad). This raised the question in my mind of, Why do they even bother with plots, acting and dialogue? Either someone out there, presumably many someones, must find some depth in this that I’m simply missing (hard to imagine though) or the makers themselves and/or actors and/or producers aren’t comfortable with fucking without (even very poor) window-dressing to soften the edges a bit.
Whatever the reasons, I decided that clearly, actual porn movies were not for me, so I switched my attention to just looking for video clips on the Internet. I also quickly learned to do this with the sound off, because with the sound on, it’s usually impossible to pretend that the woman or women in the scene are actually enjoying themselves. Actually, it’s also often impossible to pretend that they’re enjoying themselves if their facial expressions are shown for more than a split second, so most commonly, what I end up with is a collection of video closeups of various ongoing acts of penetration in various orifices.
That’s nice, when I’m in the mood for it–seeing something makes it a lot easier to imagine it going on with yourself, you know? But having to weed through all the other stuff gets old quickly, and the knowledge that I’m avoiding the vast majority of it because it shows women being hurt, humiliated, or simply pounded away at without any real engagement on their part is something of a mood-killer.
I’m not deeply engaged in the concept of the exploitation of women in pornography. I have no doubt that there is porn being made out there, right now, that is deeply exploitative–I have no doubt that there are women who are abused into making it, deceived into making it, and hurt while making it, and I hate that (back to the previous comments I made, where one of the more positive portrayals of a woman’s mood is “bored”). Whatever I can do to help prevent that, I’m totally on board with that. But I admit, it doesn’t keep me up at night. (The concept of underage pornography does actually keep me up at night, but that’s really a whole different discussion–I’m talking about legal adult pornography at the moment.)
What does deeply engage me is the inescapable knowledge that the porn portrayed is, overwhelmingly, what turns heterosexual men on. It really troubles me that, to find most of this stuff arousing, you really cannot care if the woman participant is enjoying it or not. Must I accept that indeed, most men don’t really care..? That their most arousing, common fantasy is a thin, pale, eighteen-year-old girl who either is getting actively hurt and/or humiliated or is passively accepting penetration wherever they care to stick it with dutiful grunts and moans in the appropriate rhythm? It kind of makes me ill.
I’ve been pretty fortunate in my personal sexual encounters–every man I’ve ever been with, even casually, has always been deeply interested in my participation and enjoyment–has always put in the extra mile to do his very best to make sure it’s as fun an experience for me as it is for him. They’ve also without exception expressed nothing but praise and compliments for my person, my own sexual efforts on their behalf, etc. You know–if I’d never seen any porn at all, that’s what I’d think het men were, sexually-speaking. …so now I have to wish I had never seen any porn..?
Happily, the current ex-spouse has a real fondness for porn where the women involved are clearly enjoying themselves–it’s not the easiest to find (which is why I could never find it myself) but he knew where to look, and found some for me. It’s all amateur stuff, though–usually made by one couple or another with nothing more than a webcam and an internet connection, so the video quality’s rarely superb. The people are often not all that hot to look at either, but they are really enjoying it–both of them (or in some cases, the three or more of them).
But as far as the commonest porn goes–how do I reconcile that that’s what so many men, quite likely the majority of men, want to see? How do I not react negatively to that? And is there any way at all to change it? Thus far, the only idea I’ve had in terms of the latter is to keep up with the determined feminism in the hopes that someday, it will no longer be psychologically possible for men to enjoy watching sex involving a hurt or bored woman. However, since that day is, if even achievable, a very long way away…anybody else got any better ideas?
I find the solution sometimes with gay porn, particularly the stuff over at MenAtPlay.com. It makes my feminism ridiculously happy to see really built, stubbly men kissing and smiling and enjoying themselves together–not using sex as a weapon of humiliation, which happens in gay porn just as much as straight, and is usually a feminism problem because one guy is made to be the bitch, the woman, etc.
But yeah: I have days when I can’t get past the appearance of people being sexually used, or that consent and mutual pleasure are so absent in many storylines. I just try to avoid the stuff I find distasteful. Progressive, fun porn is out there and I certainly enjoy looking for it, so that’s what I do.
The fastest way to lose my ardor is to seek out porn on the internet. I really don’t like humilitation porn.
My wife actually recently started working for a girl/girl porn company, Sweetheart Video, that tries to get performers who actually like what they are doing and are into each other. They are all about real sex. I haven’t seen a *ton* of their stuff, but with a couple of exceptions the actors don’t seem to be faking it and they have decent plots. They suffer from a lot of the same bad acting/poor production values problems that a lot of other companies do (and they do everything in one take), but they are getting a lot better, hiring new and more experienced crew that actually TRY instead of saying “well it’s just porn” and phoning it in. Their boy/girl line is called Sweet Sinner; I haven’t seen any of it.
My wife is going to be heading up a new “dyke” line for them if all goes well, with much higher production values, great stories (she’s a fantastic writer, film school grad), hot girls, zero fake tits, more butch women, and basically more appeal to a queer audience instead of to a straight-identified audience.
Also gay male porn generally = win.
I’m with Lauren and artdyke on this one. Gay porn is where it’s at! Margaret Cho was right when she said gay porn was better than straight porn because most of the men in straight porn are ugly. I’m straight, but I can’t watch straight porn. It doesn’t do a thing for me. But gay porn – if seeing one hot looking naked guy is great, then seeing two hot looking naked guys getting it on is even better. It makes my gay boy loving little heart happy!
The het dudes are not the only ones who get off on that shit, just for the record…
Plot. Generally not a fan of plot in porn…or acting. However, what with the dismay people seem to have with lack of plot and acting, the next thing I am doing (as in, writing, making, all that stuff) has plot, and well, the people I am putting in it? Some of ‘em can actually act.
Alas, however, because it is me, there will be rough sex, foul degrading language, and fake tits. No 18 year olds thou…and only blonde dudes.
I am now tempted to check out the gay male porn solely on the basis of the hotness factor.
BUT unfortunately, the way I relate to porn personally, I get my enjoyment from identity transference–which may work somewhat if the person I’m ID’ing with is male, why not give it a try? But my preference is definitely to ID female, so gay male porn may not satisfy me on that level. The same, though on a lesser scale, would go for female porn–I could ID perfectly with one of the two female characters, but as my sexual preferences in terms of who is the partner are very strongly male, there’d again be a level of dissatisfaction. (But artdyke’s wife’s proposed stuff sounds fascinating–keep us here posted on that situation!
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Ren, this post was all about me, my preferences and my issues–I don’t relate sexually as a potential partner to much more than het dudes, so that’s what I focused on. It wasn’t meant to be an exclusive statement, just a description of my thought processes. And I don’t think it can be denied that het dudes are the largest audience, and the primarily targeted audience, for the commonest types of porn.
I know of your porn project, of course.
I haven’t expressed a personal interest to date because I was pretty sure from the get-go that the sex would be too rough for my personal tastes and I’m not into degradation, regardless of what combination of genders goes into it. It’s interesting, though–I don’t know what kind of degradation you’re looking at, but I don’t really find degradation in an outright BDSM situation distressing. I don’t find it sexually interesting, either, because I don’t swing that way, but it doesn’t bother me. The type of degradation that does bother me, deeply, is the mainstream type, where the person presented as being on the receiving end is obviously not into BDSM and doesn’t want to be degraded and is clearly the creator’s idealized revenge against all the hot bitches in real life who have refused to give him the time of day he feels he has been owed all these years. (He’ll show THEM! bleh.)
Lisa:
You know, I have seen a lot of “degrading” porn in my day…been in a fair amount too…and that’s the thing…john/jane q public? Has no idea what makes the performers tick. At all. I mean, Kelly Wells does some really over the top crazy porn…and when asked, she said “thats what she does in her bedroom”…does she always look thrilled? Nah, but it seems to be her thing. Shrug. Not for everyone by any stretch of the imagination…
but you know, I think more folk need to watch themselves having sex…humans make some weird ass facial expressions while fornicating, and some of them? Even if the person is actually having fun, it looks more like they have gas or are about to have their spines ripped out of their body or something. Strange that!
And yes, considering what I’ve read and all, the sex in my flick? Um yeah, not for the faint of heart or stomach. Then again, I am making a movie that turns me on, so you know it will be nuts.
1. I’ve heard the gay male porn recommendation before—from dykes, in fact! And for whatever reason, I can’t really get into it. Too many guys, I guess. :-p
2. The stuff that really twigs me as gross is less German shiza porn and more explicitly exploitative shit that’s marketed as hot because of it—stuff in the Girls Gone Wild vein. Yeah, some of it’s probably filmed ethically, but so are plenty of mainstream films which are also problematic.
3. I think the plots are around because narrative—even paper-thin porn narrative—is engaging and can elp sell a situation as arousing.
What does deeply engage me is the inescapable knowledge that the porn portrayed is, overwhelmingly, what turns heterosexual men on. It really troubles me that, to find most of this stuff arousing, you really cannot care if the woman participant is enjoying it or not. Must I accept that indeed, most men don’t really care..?
I think you may be being a bit overly charitable to men right now. In that this ever-deepening spiral towards “harder” porn is not a result of men not caring about the women’s enjoyment. Seems more likely to me that it’s a result of men desiring to see humiliation in women. It’s fucked up, but popular concepts of masculinity are knotted up in a thorny tangle with sex, dominance, and violence. The desire of passive viewers to always want to cross the next boundary of acceptable taste via the safety of porn– sexual transgression without consequence– seems to me a natural consequence.
I don’t know whether this is good or bad in and of itself– my gut says bad, but I’d have to think about it further to figure out why– but it definitely ain’t so good if real women are continually being coerced into performing said porn to feed the monster.
But as far as the commonest porn goes–how do I reconcile that that’s what so many men, quite likely the majority of men, want to see? How do I not react negatively to that?
Well, if you choose to take the philosophy that it’s simply in human nature for a statistical majority of men to get off on female degradation, then you just accept it because that’s just the way it is. This is, of course, not a given, but just saying, if it were, the best thing would be to not let it bother you and move on to finding ways to ameliorate the bad parts as best as possible.
And is there any way at all to change it?
1. Spread universal human empathy to every person on the planet. May require mad anarchist chemists to infect the human race with a self-replicating nanotech love virus.
2. Make porn really difficult to come by again, and the “hardness” level goes down as various local porn regulations start to mean something again, mucking up distribution and marketability of the hardest stuff. May require mad anarchist hackers to shut down the internet.
3. Put estrogen in the world food/water supply, so that men desire less aggressive things. According to some sources, this is already happening, but only in blue states.
4. Make sex so socially acceptable that simply stopping people to ask the time regularly leads to a a roll in the hay. If everybody gets laid easily, nobody needs porn, degrading or otherwise. Probably requires radical changes to conceptions of fidelity and sexual polarity as well, though. Another one of those self-replicating nanotech love viruses would probably do the trick.
In short, Lisa, what I’m saying is: if you want to make a difference, change career paths and get into nanotech.
“. Make porn really difficult to come by again, and the “hardness” level goes down as various local porn regulations start to mean something again, mucking up distribution and marketability of the hardest stuff. May require mad anarchist hackers to shut down the internet.”
Actually, the governement is already on that one for ya.
Oh good, nothing to worry about then!
1. Spread universal human empathy to every person on the planet. May require mad anarchist chemists to infect the human race with a self-replicating nanotech love virus.
Another method: raise children in an environment free (as possible) from shame, guilt, humiliation, degradation and violence. This probably requires empathetic parents . . . damn, I guess we’ll still need the nano-love bots.
I would say that roughly 85% of the time, nano-love bots are definitely the answer. Then again, the other 15% of the time there’s a programming glitch and the whole planet gets engulfed in a big grey goo soup of self-replicating nano-bots. But you know, no guts, no glory.
“But as far as the commonest porn goes–how do I reconcile that that’s what so many men, quite likely the majority of men, want to see?”
Is this really correct? I recall reading an interview a while back with a person who worked the register in a porn shop (I believe this was back before the www was ubiquitous). She said that there were a lot of costumers who might come in once or twice a year, and a few who were in and spending money every week; they provided the bulk of the shop’s income.
If that’s the case then “mainstream” porn isn’t what the majority of random folks on the street want to see, but what the relatively small group that spends significant $$$ on porn wants to see.
It’s just a hypothesis, but I don’t think it’s an outrageous one. Most industries are driven by the people who actually spend the majority of the money.
RE writes:
“The het dudes are not the only ones who get off on that shit, just for the record…”
As a matter of fact, the Rocco: Animal Trainer series which LK goes off on over on a followup thread to this is something I first heard about over on Susie Bright’s podcast in an interview with a woman who was decidedly a fan of these videos, right down to the part where women get their heads shoved in a toilet. Just sayin….
I am a fan of Rocco’s work
Given that I’ve only ever seen one Animal Trainer movie and that’s it, I can’t pronounce an overall judgement on his stuff. I can say that the Animal Trainer movie I saw was quite pointedly gender-biased in terms of who was doing the getting and who was being got. If it’s representative of his work, I can’t imagine I’d be a fan of any of the rest of it any more than I’d be a fan of the same work that replaced all the men with white people and all the women with black people, or all the men with het people and all the women with queer people, etc. But that’s just getting back to my original issue, isn’t it?
Rocco mixes it up a bit, in the AT series there are men on the recieving end. Not as often, but their are.
I don’t think the women in his films, however, look like bored exploited girls who are making no money.
I think it’s pretty clear from the blog post that Animal Trainer is not being presented as an example of the bored/unengaged/woman-as-object style of porn.
Is it? I did not get that impression.
From the blog post:
“So Quin and D are addressing two different facets of the issue–hurt/humiliation porn vs. passive object porn”
“Quin’s contention is a thornier one, for me. Not because I don’t agree with it, but because I would prefer not to agree with it but don’t see how to avoid doing so. I am quite aware of the sexual power dynamics between the genders, and I can’t say that the precise dynamics that make porn like Animal Trainer so popular with het dudes aren’t exactly the same dynamics that have resulted in me having such positive sexual experiences overall as an adult with het dudes.”
Hope that helps.
Well Lisa, I feel like a goddamn juggernaut every day! And I make “that porn”. I wish people would listen more to the performers! I mean, that film I am making….probably “EWW” worthy in your eyes (from what I have seen, though the distress plus EVIIIIL female grin and knowledge that my female players dig it might work for ya)….but see..
so many people write us off as that girl? I may be A LOT of things, but lack of assertivenes? Not it. Same goes for SO MANY sexworkers I know.
Actually, Ren, if you notice, in terms of hurt/humiliation porn, I have consistently not speculated as to the actual feelings of the actresses involved in making it. I have only speculated as the actual feelings of the actresses involved in making bored/unengaged porn, and while I could be wrong that they are in fact as bored and/or unengaged as they look, it’s hard to imagine why they’d be putting so much effort into giving that particular impression if what they really felt was something more positive, eh? The reason I am unable to speculate reliably about the feelings of any specific actress in the former style of porn because I have read the writings of a sampling of female participants and ex-participants (including yours) and as it turns out, their self-reported feelings while making that kind of porn span the entire spectrum from genuine enjoyment, to businesslike efficiency, to miserable hurt and humiliation.
All I’ve been speaking to, in terms of hurt/humiliation porn, is the motivations of the het men who seek it out.
I wrote about that….why men might dig it. It’s an odd mix of things I think. Some dudes are just assholes, no doubt….but a lot of them seem to like it more when they know the woman is getting off on it as well.
Exactly.
This is also the same message I got when my ex tried to convince me to have sex with him — when I didn’t particularly want to on occasion — anyway. Given that he had no trouble at all getting off when I did this & wasn’t enjoying it, that became one of the factors that destroyed our marriage.
“I wrote about that….why men might dig it. It’s an odd mix of things I think. Some dudes are just assholes, no doubt….but a lot of them seem to like it more when they know the woman is getting off on it as well.”
Actually, from what I’ve seen on porn review sites (most reviewers there being male), scenes where the performer really seems to be getting into it are consistently more highly rated. Scenes where the model is noticably bored or detached not so. And, generally speaking, the same is true with porn performers who really seem to show a lot of enthusiasm in their sex scenes.
Well, there’s a huge amount to unpack here that’s already been commented on here and in the subsequent porn post, but I just want to note for a second that just because the actress/model is patently faking it doesn’t mean that the men watching it are totally detached from the pleasure of the actress. I mean, if that were true, then the women wouldn’t bother faking it with oohs and moans and screams and what-not, they could just sit there and indeed, “get pounded”, no?
As has been said, it’s somewhat hard to find women who seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves, and even then — it’s hard to tell between really superb actresses (or superb at least in this particular arena) and those genuinely getting off. And indeed, some of the highly-fakey acting is probably a response to how women in real life genuinely get-off — as often as not, quietly or with subtler cues such as shuddering or perhaps a slightly longer or different kind of “ooh.” You can tell once you get to know a partner, perhaps, but with someone you don’t have a number of experiences with, it’s often not easy to tell if a woman’s had an orgasm (which is distinct from whether or not she’s simply enjoying the sex itself, true).
All that’s to say, I think the fakey-acting is to fulfill the male fantasy of really, really being an excellent lover with no effort. The idea that mere insertion sends women into paroxysms. Now, of course, that’s not true, but porn is about fantasy as much as anything else. So I’m just saying, in my amateur research, the women who fake poorly are much more common than those who look outright bored, and I think many men are willing to engage the fantasy of poor fakery, or perhaps don’t even know better (all the worse for their real-life lovers who likely/possibly aren’t going to moan, scream, and thrash with such brio). They are not indifferent to the woman’s pleasure, so much as willing to sacrifice some reality in its portrayal or don’t know much about the reality of it. In a weird sense, it’s like big action movies — the point isn’t really that the action hero is believable, but that he’s causing action and acts heroic.