So, I got some het dude input on my last post on porn, which I found somewhat useful and somewhat not–useful because one of the main foci of the last post was, why is this what your average het dude wants to see..? And not useful because apparently, these two het dudes are themselves not the dudes that want to see the commonest porn scenarios of woman = hurt/humiliated/bored.
BUT anyway, this is what the two aforementioned men (you know, though, now that I mention it, I’m not actually 100% sure what Quin’s precise sexual orientation is–it hasn’t come up as a conversational topic between us to date–if you’re not het, Quin, I apologize for making the assumption!) had to say:
Quin, fellow PAB blogger:
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.
D, ex-spouse of PAB blogger:
I don’t think that it isn’t that men actively prefer to see a woman who is bored or otherwise totally unengaged in sex–an object–it’s just that that is what’s most commonly out there. I know you [Lisa] are saying that porn is a completely consumer-driven market, but I don’t think you’re taking into account that it is by far the easiest and cheapest porn to make–the porn that shows a woman just laying there or kneeling there and doing whatever without really caring. It would take a lot more effort, and probably a lot more money, to find a large number of women who really want to make porn, really get off on doing it on camera, etc.–also think of acting skills–in porn women actors like that are probably in high demand and get the best pay. But anybody can just offer somebody else fifty bucks to just lay there and, like you said, “get pounded.”
Another commenter, whose gender and orientation I can’t even guess at and is therefore appropriately self-named Nobody, said this as well:
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.
So Quin and D are addressing two different facets of the issue–hurt/humiliation porn vs. passive object porn–and Nobody seems to be addressing both issues, to a point. D’s contention makes a lot of sense to me in terms of the latter style of porn, and I find myself a little better pleased with the average het porn-watching man because of it–certainly that would be and no doubt is the easiest type of porn to make and that’s why it is in such massive proliferation everywhere. I suppose it would be nice if het men turned their noses up at it and demanded better fare, but if that behavior was an integral part of human nature, McDonald’s wouldn’t be the multibillion-dollar empire that it is today, eh?
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. All the guys I’ve been intimate with, as an adult, even the one casual one–those guys had a real, vested interest in me thinking well of them. Nearly all of them have been a coworker, and not just a coworker, but a member of the same after-work social clique that I inhabited. And I was well-thought-of, in that clique–I was universally regarded as a good girl–it would not have been possible for any of those men to treat me poorly in an intimate way and have survived the social fallout unscathed. And they all found me quite physically attractive–in other words, they all desired several repeat performances, at the minimum, if they could get them, and the only way to strengthen that likelihood was, obviously, to please me as thoroughly as possible. In short, I was the one in the position of power, psychologically, in those interactions, in the minds of those men–so I didn’t get hurt or humiliated or bored in bed.
But how many men find that massively, even unbearably at times, frustrating, and want to get back their own, especially on a hot woman..? Must I accept that it’s the majority of them..? It seems inescapable that it’s a significant number, though here I am trying to find some comfort in Nobody’s post–perhaps it’s not a majority, simply an obsessed and driven minority that pumps the majority of the cash into that market. That does make sense…but still–Animal Trainer has won multiple industry awards. How to reconcile that with it not being some kind of majority desire amongst the men who watch porn?
Quin had a few suggestions, neither of which are remotely achievable in our current sociopolitical clime: 1) Spread universal human empathy to every person on the planet, and 2) Make sex so socially acceptable that simply stopping people to ask the time regularly leads to a a roll in the hay. (Yes, I’m pretty sure no. 2 is a wee bit snarky, and honestly, I’m quite sure I will never want to have sex with at least 99% of the people who ask me what time it is during the course of a day–but you get the drift in terms of stripping off the insane taboo systems we have built up around the sex act, yeah?) I suppose that really just goes back to me plowing forward determinedly with the sex-positive feminism, which I was doing anyway. Maybe things will be better for my great-grandchildren?
I would presume that a culture gets the porn it deserves, and given how messed up the rest of our culture is, it doesn’t surprise me that the porn of th ehere-and-now is pretty fucked up.
After all, we live in a culture where “fucked up” means something bad.
Think of this: in a society where most people were happy most of the time, I suspect we would hear laughter less often, but when we did hear it, it would sound better.
I can’t help but agree with Quin that the reason the supply of porn is getting meaner is that what sells. At best, it’s what porn producers believe sells. They could be wrong, but you know, they have the best data on it.
Of course, as your other commenter noted, this doesn’t actually mean that’s what men on the whole want to see. The few avid consumers drive the market—I’m sure we’re all aware that the sort of men who watch a TON of porn are almost all misogynists.
Amanda, while I’m sure this assumption is immensely gratifying to anyone doesn’t watch a ton of porn, I’m not sure that it’s actually true. Certainly, speaking as a man who has (unfortunately) had extended periods where I watched a TON of porn, I become naturally defensive. I know you left wiggle room for exceptions by saying “almost all”, but frankly I suspect the majority of men to whom porn is readily available will have gone through one of these periods, if they’re not still in one now.
Dr. Psycho, you make me want to go get fucked up. But in a good way.
Lisa– yeah, I’m het. Always considered myself open to experimentation in other directions, but somehow just never found anyone I wanted to do it with. Athough a guy friend did try to make out with me while I was drunk once. Stubble is weird.
Amanda, I take it back, because I think maybe the majority of men are misogynists, although not necessary of the obviously aggressive, girlfriend-beating variety. Including, quite possibly, me. More later, I need to digest some thoughts.
Amanda –
I don’t know on what basis you assume that any man who watches a lot of porn, or (based on what you’ve said in comments elsewhere) ever goes to a prostitute is a big time misogynist and abuser, but really, I think your projection booth is working overtime.
Its really a sad thing that big-name middle-class feminists like you who show precious little understanding of either sex workers or male sex consumers are driving the driving the current legal and ethical debate around the sex industry.
Just thought I would chip in addressing what Quin said since I’ve actually thought a fair amount about this subject. I found out early on that I am turned on by humiliation and degradation, so I’ve thought quite a bit about what this means about me.
I try my best to be a feminist (or at least feminist-friendly, for those that believe men can’t be feminists), and I’ve tried hard to get rid of any thought processes I have that seem misogynistic, but that doesn’t mean I’m successful, and I’ve always worried that my taste in erotica indicated something about me that I’ve just never been willing to see in myself.
On the other hand, I do know that I am also turned on by porn in which a man is humiliated or degraded by a woman (rare as that is compared to stuff going the other way), which may mean that my arousal in not misogynistic in nature, but just means that I turned on by the idea of power being exercised over an individual. From examining my fantasies, I know I get aroused both by imagining being in control and not being in control. It might be that I am just able to empathize with women so well that I have no problem identifying myself with the woman in the role, which might even be a good thing regarding misogynistic tendencies, at least.
I really can’t say what drives most men to consume porn like that, but I thought I could chip in with my specific viewpoint, at least.
I also wanted to mention something which I think is evidence against D’s argument, unfortunately. Most of his arguments go out the window when you consider hentai. Animating one type of sex is just as easy and cheap as animating another, and what you find there flourishing there, both in Japanese market and the translated American market, are humiliation and degradation beyond anything most mainstream porn would even consider. Of course, you have to consider that most consumers of this porn are probably men with even more sexual and gender issues than the mainstream male consumer, but I still think it’s a blow to D’s idea.
I do find Nothing’s argument convincing, though.
If I were Amanda, I would totally get a t-shirt that said “BIG-NAME MIDDLE-CLASS FEMINIST” on it and I would, like, wear it everywhere. I don’t think I could resist.
Captain, I have to agree that you’re not misogynist; you’re into BDSM. Your focus clearly isn’t the gender of the participants but the activities they’re engaged in. Since I’m not, and to be honest have a deep personal aversion to even the ordinary power games people play with each other on a day-to-day casual basis, I definitely can’t give you any insight into why that would flip your switches, but I feel pretty comfortable saying it clearly isn’t an internalized hatred of one gender or the other (or one race or the other, or one sexual orientation or the other, or–). TBH, I don’t think your leanings are what drives the common, mainstream “trick the bitch” style porn, at all. That is very, very gender specific.
To give D a little credit, the world of animation and the world of live-action are pretty different–most American porn consumers, I’d say, your average Joe, wouldn’t find animation as stimulating as real live people, and also, there are a lot fewer average-Joe guys who watch hentai (or frankly, even know what the hell that is–though I could be massively wrong about that). Also, D was really talking about the unengaged/bored/objectified style porn, not the hurt/humiliation style porn. But also, to pass on something else D said while we were discussing the overall issue–
“It’s hard for me to accept that it’s a majority thing, because I’m not like that and I don’t want to believe that most men are like that and if they are, I can’t understand why.”
So he knows he has some deficiency of understanding already–he and I are just hoping it’s not a gaping chasm.
CaptainBooshi, I agree with Lisa – you’re into BDSM.
I’m a woman who’s into BDSM and gets off on porn that involves power games regardless of the gender of who’s playing. I think the danger with mainstream porn that incorporates BDSM fantasies is that it doesn’t show any of the things that I think makes BDSM inherently feminist: negotiations, talking about really taboo desires in an open and honest way, safewords, and of course, the idea that even if this is rape play/humiliation/etc. it is PLAY, i.e. entirely consensual.
The top selling porn film of all time? Not Animal Trainer. A feature called “Pirates”. With a plot, and people acting and having sex, and huge budget-porn wise- and all feature contract performers who get paid a lot. Top grossing production companies? Adam & Eve and Vivid, not Rocco’s company….
WHich tends to make me think that most people watching porn (who are men) are not watching porn to get off on the humilation and degradation of bored looking women who make 50$ to get pounded.
I know this because I have to bring it up every time I debunk “The Price of Pleasure” at universities.
Oh, and the sales/rental records for “Pirates” backs that up.
I remember there being a look into it a while back and a possible reason for the focus was that while the majority of erotic entertainment consumers were into plot, real bodies, or a variety of loving fetishes, the most fervent consumers of porn and the most loyal customers, the types that would buy out an entire catalogue tended to be in the punish women for not sleeping with me camp. Also, those numbers would get worse as a huge overflow of those types of porn in an industry strongly discourage customers who like the other stuff because it’s hard to find “what you like” in especially mainstream porn. That was the theory on why the industry tended to get dominated by humiliation play, but I don’t know if it was entirely accurate.
It makes sense on the face of it that those with the most time and disposable money will tend to flood the market with a high demand for a low or rather lower demand product. There does seem to be a large market for those looking for anything but though, which does explain the popularity of things like Suicide Girls.
Well, Ren, the top box-office grossing movie of all time is Titanic. I’m not sure that there are any extrapolations we can make from what Titanic is–I don’t know that the top grossing anything is really representative of much. Two of the top ten, for instance, are the Star Wars I and III, which pretty much everyone agrees sucked ass–a disconnect in terms of what people really like, you know? What’s representative tends to be the mean, median and mode of movies, eh? (I only use Animal Trainer as an example here because it’s one of the ten or so porn movies I have personally seen, and the only one of the ten that I know is popular.)
However, I’m the first to say that I don’t know what, say, the top 100 porn-grossing websites are out there–I think that would be extremely informative and illuminating in terms of what the current trend is in porn type, to find out. However, I have no idea how to find that out or if it’s even trended. Anybody have a clue..?
(I should note that I’ve never seen TPoP. I’ve been thinking I should see it, but I admit, I’m reluctant. I suspect it would distress me on multiple levels while simultaneously providing me with zero new information and insights into the porn industry–makes it hard to get motivated.)
I’m a little confused as to how Anybody can call Amanda a “big-name feminist” in one breathe, and then say she’s projecting her own “misogyny and abuser” status in the other. Aren’t those sort of contradictory? Or does he mean “projecting” in some way that I don’t understand?
And yeah, I’m going to assume if you view women as consumable, you’re a pretty big misogynist. And I really don’t know how else to look at it if you’re watching porn after porn, or buying sex. (Not that means I support in any way making either of those illegal in any way, nor meant as any kind of condemnation of sex workers themselves).
Lisa:
“Playboy”. Their site is pretty much the one that gets the most hits a day. Softcore playboy. The porn feature film (ala vivid and adam and eve) is the staple of the porn industry. Are their rough/gonzo films that do well? Yes. Have governement regulations really made these films harder to make and does it have makers of such material worrying about content regulation? Yep. Two of the main companies who produce the type of porn you are speaking of are currently embroiled in law suits, another has pled out and paid up, and yet another fellow known for this stuff (max hardcore) is going to prision. Also, I will add that two sites known for the roughness of their content (kink dot com, a US site, and GGG, a german site) spend a lot of time showing the before and after footage of the performers invovled in those scenes, thus depicting the negotiation and after effects as it were).
However, anyone, and I mean anyone, with a camera and computer can make porn. but I just don’t think that the dude videoing himself and his friends utterly abusing and degrading a woman is, oh, ranking in the type of bank that Wicked Pictures is nor does he half one tenth their viewers.
Not surprised that it’s “Playboy,” but I still think it’d be way more useful to have a top 100 list–does anybody compile one, out there? (It’s not something that’s readily available via Google, I speak from having just made the attempt with various creative search terms.) “Playboy” is a lot like “Titanic” in that I’m not sure how indicative it actually is in terms of what the majority of people want to see–the more data points you have, the better your results, as we like to say in sciencegeekland.
I don’t know how I feel about government regs–I’m a massive fan of free speech, regardless of how I personally feel about the content of that speech. The only place I can see the government legitimately getting involved is making sure that everything portrayed occurs only between and involving consenting adults.
http://goddesscassandra.blogspot.com/2009/05/moving-day-and-porn.html
Psuedo-aside from the discussion, but this is what I came across when it came to porn in my younger years.
Antigone, you should TOTALLY do a blog series on how you traveled from that POV to the one you have now–not just about porn and sex but in general–I mean, whenever you have the time and inclination, but I bet it would be really fascinating.
lisa- far as I know, for net porn, there isn’t a list. Films? Yeah, on AVN. Websites? I know of no such thing.
Anybody, I never said such a man was an “abuser”. Certainly, a man can be a misogynist and hold back on the urge to smack a woman he thinks is out of line. But if you visit prostitutes, then yeah, I have a serious problem with you. You think so little of women’s affections that you’re satisfied with buying them. I realize there’s some marginal men who are undersexed or what have you, but they are a tiny minority of porn addicts/prostitution fans. Most could get laid if they wanted to, and do. But they have a misogynist need to own a woman, if just for a time.
We live in a world with slavery in it, and I’m honestly supposed to believe that the default regarding men who pay for prostitutes is they are Great Guys who just have this weird fetish that has Nothing To Do with their disdain for women. Sure.
See, the danger in pretending otherwise is that some well-meaning women might overlook the red flag that is dating a man who visits prostitutes. If we continue the lie that such a thing is utterly innocuous, then I guarantee said men are using that to guilt trip women who have major (and warranted) reservations. Women are already told routinely that our feelings and opinions are irrational, and that men know better, so men already have an upper hand in these arguments. Feminists, of all people, shouldn’t hesitate to make it clear that your fears about men who go to prostitutes are well-warranted. No, he may not hit you. But it’s probably not going to be great for you.
Dan Savage’s podcast this week had an interesting example of how a woman’s self-interest is so easily broken down with these tricky faux sex positive arguments. Her boyfriend is into BDSM, and she’s not. She wants to be GGG. But he’s exploiting her desire to be a good girlfriend—as well as the pressure people are under to try to make it work instead of just moving on—in horrible ways. He put her picture on the internet to humiliate her. (But he apologized! she said, as if he could possibly mean it.) He insists that he can’t act out these fantasies with anyone else—it has to be her. That is, he has a fixation on hurting her and breaking her down, and he’s using BDSM as a cover to break her will and abuse her. Because he knows that society is going to shame her for being a “prude” if she resists.
Natch, I’m not putting down BDSM. If everyone’s fully and completely consenting, and it’s your thing (as opposed to a cover for abuse), go with the Disco Ball. But we have to ask hard questions about why it’s so easy to use sex to cover massive amounts of misogyny, and how playing that game hurts women.
I’ve got nothing against prostitutes. I don’t have anything against auto workers who are just trying to get paid, even though I have major problems with the auto industry. Just as my focus when it comes to the auto industry is on the bosses, so is my focus on the bosses when it comes to prostitution. And while it’s certainly true that most people look at porn, and most prefer silly, harmless fantasies, it’s also true that women shouldn’t be guilt-tripped into shelving the bad feeling they get when a man visits prostitutes, is deep into rape porn, or watches porn to the point where it’s interfering with having a normal life. Those are red flags, and you should run like hell.
I think Nobody might have been referring to True Porn Clerk Stories:
http://www.improvresourcecenter.com/mb/tpcs.html
Amanda, It is pretty obvious to me you have never been a whore…imagine that? And yeah, I am speaking from a place of privilege, but so are you. ANY man who has seen a prostitute? Well damn, thats a lot of men. I know, because gee, I see them!
“Anybody, I never said such a man was an “abuser”. Certainly, a man can be a misogynist and hold back on the urge to smack a woman he thinks is out of line. But if you visit prostitutes, then yeah, I have a serious problem with you. You think so little of women’s affections that you’re satisfied with buying them. I realize there’s some marginal men who are undersexed or what have you, but they are a tiny minority of porn addicts/prostitution fans. Most could get laid if they wanted to, and do. But they have a misogynist need to own a woman, if just for a time.”
Amanda -
Yep, that’s exactly the “theory” of your’s I’ve read and I think its so much bullshit. So any man can get laid any time he wants? Really? That’s news to me. So ergo, a mans only motivation to go to a prostitute is to have a quasi-slave or commit some horrific act that they could never get in a free sexual encounter.
Actually, men’s reasons for visiting prostitutes are largely pretty straightforward. Maybe free sex isn’t as easy to get as you might think (especially as you get away from youthful urban subcultures). A big motivation is that a man might really want to fuck a woman (or man) who’s “out of his league” – who’s younger or hotter than he is and who he isn’t likely to have a snowballs chance in hell with otherwise. Another might be a desire for essentially anonymous sex, and for straight men, there really isn’t a subculture for this. I could go on, but the point is that there are a lot of reasons for going to a prostitute that don’t involve abuse. (Of course, there are some johns who do go to prostitutes precisely because they want to feel power over or want to get away with something abusive, but I don’t think that’s the default for all johns.)
And while such motivations aren’t exactly noble, they’re not exactly dark and horrible either. I think, Amanda, that you’re boxing sex into a simplistic black-and-white moralism where any sex that isn’t sweetness and light and pure wonderful mutuality is something purely evil. I think the above motivations are, in themselves, ethically neutral. They’re of the nature that, on one hand, evils like forced prostitution, sex trafficking, etc should be wholly condemned as destroying lives to fill a trivial need. However, if a john goes to a prostitute who’s doing it of her own free will, well, no harm, no foul.
And as for “warning bells”, I suppose I could think of a few of my own regarding women, and high on my list would be women who feel the need to micro-manage a guy’s entire sexual history or fantasy life. To men involved with such women, I say don’t walk, but run.
Antigone writes:
“And yeah, I’m going to assume if you view women as consumable, you’re a pretty big misogynist. And I really don’t know how else to look at it if you’re watching porn after porn, or buying sex.”
No, actually, that tends to indicate that one views sex and/or images of sex as a “consumable”. (Using the same logic, I guess a man who watches a lot of gay porn or has a taste for male “trade” hates men.) That may or may not go against your particular notions of sexual morality, but in any event, I really don’t think buying sex or watching porn is a grand indictment of how a man views women in general at all times in all situations.