Pornography Is Super Fantastic

[ericluxury]

Not sure if this is 100% on topic, but having dated a woman who was actively interested in pornography was surpisingly not appealing. Personally it made me uncomfortable when it was pornography that I would normally be interested in (and my tastes aren't bizarre). I am sure that I have some stupid madonna/whore stuff going on in my head, but I think that in a lot of ways there is a personal sexuality and a social sexuality in the same ways that all parts of personality get divided up.
This isn't uncommon, according to Dan Savage, who is my source for almost all information I have about sex statistics and how common things are.

[Hammy Pink]

I haven't had experience with an intimate relationship of that sort, but I have usually found a certain degree of that attractive and a turn-on, given that my uber-politically-correct anti-porn anti-white-male collegiate years primed me to think of women as anti-porn and anti raunchiness in general.  Therefore when I encounter a woman who doesn't come across as a puritan, I like it.  There are limits, tho-- not really into the girls who love to joke about farts thing.

[blied]

Not sure if this is 100% on topic, but having dated a woman who was actively interested in pornography was surpisingly not appealing.

I haven't had this experience, but it does not surprise me.

Did her interest in pornography seem genuine?

[hickenloop]

I'll go ahead and be the one naysayer here
I'm not against anyone doing what they want, I'm all for it.  I'm not a crazy churchie or right winger.  I just think that the old argument comes up: just because we can do it does it mean it has any value to us?  Come on, really, what is porn for other than to 'get off'? I think what was stated earlier about the cum/ownership thing is relevant to getting off - to see things as merely useful or not for our own means.  So, this chick is good looking, this one ugly. I really want to possess this one!  The whole process gets rationed down to the 'ideal' something to possess, to cast off, and then to look for the next 'thing.'  The intimacy quotient runs all the way down to zero. 

Does anyone think that poring over porn pics (I've done it many a time) looking for 'the right one' or for 'something beyond the awful' is really a worthy quest?  What about real intimate relationships with real people?  Porn seems nothing more than a convenient escape from intimacy and I can't see how looking at tons of images cannot sexualize the mind and the world around one further, until everything just becomes a self-indulgent fantasy, not to mention a continual propagation of the idea of people as product.   I'm no innocent in any of this, but sometimes I believe our cultural nonchalance about subjects like this isn't very forward thinking.  Everything is great while we're taking it in - not so much when we have to clean up the mess later. 

Imagine if just one pic you happened to like was of a woman or man forced to pose for you.  Would it change your perspective?  Would you jack off if he/she was being forced to in front of you? This isn't saying that there aren't millions of people having fun and cashing in on the industry, but if your actions resulted in pain for someone you loved you'd reconsider your actions, why not consider the possibility for another?  How do you know what's genuine? It's all just product, and we know how great a toll our need for  'products' are already having on the world around us.   Just some thoughts... 

"No matter how many widgets, and digits, and stuff
You gather, you forsake, it can never be enough
That hollow, howlin' wind blows plaintive across your plain
Honey, I'm moved to say it again

Darlin', won't you please fill my hole
It's located at the bottom of my soul
And it's a felon to be tellin', I know"

[Hammy Pink]

The argument that masturbation to pornography is immoral seems connected to the idea that the only purpose of sex is reproduction.  Human life is full of ways that humankind have found to circumvent biology in order to make life more bearable.  Life is not a utopian buffet where everyone who wants the intimacy and love you place primacy on gets to have it.  Life is absurd and cruel when it comes to the desires of biological entities; we are programmed to want things we often cannot get due to Darwinian competition and the limits placed upon us by our fragile and ever-decaying physical frames.  If someone wants sexual contact but cannot have it, you seem to be suggesting that they should quietly endure celibacy without the comfort of physical release, and await the next time that physical intimacy with another human being is possible.  Seems kind of extreme, don't you think?

[hickenloop]

You make a lot of good points Hammy.  One of which is my tendency to be a tad alarmist, if not completely dough headed in what I'm trying to say.  I agree with you on the idea of sexual contact for people who cannot find other means, or for whom intimacy may be a rough road to engage in by whatever means.  A point well made and taken. 

I didn't think I was presenting the idea that either porn or masturbation were immoral, because I don't believe they are.  I was trying to articulate the point that the effects of our excesses at times are seen from a narrow point of view.  We hold fast to what is available and which we may feel should not be limited in any regard. Damn the consequences!  Often people bring up an either/or situation without looking at issues that are tied to such things.  It goes far beyond is porn good or bad, moral or immoral.  There is an effect on people, on communities, culture, on the world at large. The effects may be beneficial or they may not be, but there will always be consequences. A somewhat faulty analogy may be that we’re up to our asses in waste and pollution in the world because we rode the winds of our desires to have what we want when we wanted it.  A great convenience with many consequences. 

I work with people sometimes who have sexual addictions, and for whom intimacy with others, not to mention an unsexualized view of the world would be a refreshing change.  I could write them off as simply the ‘addicted’ type, or that this is what they need because something limits them from the ability to connect, but unfortunately I know these assertions don’t help them when they know it’s a problem that is causing them major conflict in their lives.  You can look up the problem it’s only growing.  My initial post was a tad emotionally reactive.  Thanks for pointing out my extremes.  I appreciate your points.

[Hammy Pink]

Hey, hickenloop.  I want to clarify, the only reason I was aggressive in responding to your original post was because I have long held some of the same concerns, so these arguments are at the top of my mind.  I don't I think of you as a reactionary for thinking this stuff.  It's stuff I've long debated in my own head, so it was as if I was replying to myself in a way.

I have read two noted fiction authors/philosophers -- Norman Mailer and Stephen Vizinczey -- who've made statements to the effect that masturbation is immoral (speaking only in terms of what is good and bad for human health, not in terms of religious definitions of morality).  Both of them seemed to be on the same page (metaphorically speaking), in that they both believe that masturbation is "the easy way out" and that by living by an ethic of zero masturbation, a person is driven by the erotic urge to break through psychological barriers to intimate contact with the opposite sex.  I got the impression in both cases that these men felt that if they had allowed themselves masturbation, the life experience from which they drew in creating their fiction would have been greatly diminished, because they would have taken much fewer risks in terms of opening themselves up to various women.

I have more to say on this, but I'm getting tired and am going back to bed (hands above the covers, I swear)!

[Dragon Management]

To take this already fractured discussion into further realms of Tangent Land, I was talking to a good friend of mine about sex as we get older.  Inevitably, porn came into the discussion, and my friend asked himself (and me, I guess), if he had watched enough porn and gotten off to enough porn that PORN ITSELF had become sex to him, that to be aroused required porn instead of a real human being.

I understood exactly what he was talking about, and to be frank, that thought is scary for many of the reasons hickenloop discussed above.

I'm not against porn itself, but I am against those things that might permanently disable me to be completely open and intimate with my significant other.

[Hammy Pink]

I do believe human beings are permanently affected by porn.  Behavior can be conditioned through reward stimulus, and the orgasm is one of the most rewarding sensations there is.

You want to talk about negative effects of solo sex?  Here's something I read about once in a Dan Savage column:  supposedly men can through masturbation become accustomed to a certain tight grip on the head of the penis during orgasm that cannot be replicated through intercourse, and this can have a negative effect on the ability to achieve orgasm through intercourse.  Sounds kinda scary, and it doesn't even involve porn.

That said, it's impossible to get through life unscathed.  It's probably impossible to go to rock concerts without getting your hearing permanently damaged.  Every time we open ourselves to someone else, we risk being emotionally scarred by them, or by the loss of them should they die or leave us, in ways that will affect us for the rest of our lives.  Life isn't safe...  No one gets out alive.

[Dave]

Ham, nothing is perfect, to be sure. Pornography, like anything else, can become bad if you get too attached to it.  You can get addicted to anything; look at all the people who get hooked on lottery scratch tickets, for example. While it's impossible to get physically addicted to pot or acid, it's very possible to get caught up in the whole 'drug culture' thing if you only hang out with guys who roast a bowl several times a day, and thus you can sort of get addicted to that, too.

And yeah, if you squeeze your dick too hard when you jerk off,  your cock'll get used to intense pressure that just doesn't happen during your standard blowjob. But, just like getting caught up in smoking too much herb, you can wean yourself off of that too, but adopting a more gentle technique and sticking with that until your cock retrains itself to respond to a feather touch rather than a hammer-fist. Or, you can just ask your sexual partner to be patient and blow you whether you cum or not for a while while you refrain from jerking off altogether, until your ciock gets so desperate that it'll start ejaculating in response to a nice hummer once again.

So, I dunno if either of these count as a bona fide problem, at least, not in the sense of a real crisis since they're reversible. Masturbation appears to be a good way to ward off prostrate cancer, too. It's better than being sexually repressed, anyway. Did I ever tell you about this girl I knew once who would burst into uncontrollable laughter if you said the word 'nipple' in front of her? She grew up in an ultra-conservative family like I did, but I guess I rebelled and she just tried to play along with her parents' bizzarre paradigm whereas I realized that everything mine told me was utter bullshit with the coming of adolescence. Now, her crisis ran real deep, and I'm not sure it's reversible. For her, normal sexual function or even the discussion of it is almost impossible, and she has to take careful steps to properly blind herself to the reality of sex in the world around her just to function within it, else a subconscious reaction paralyzes her on the spot. That's a real freaking problem there.

But jerking off to porn? Well, you know, not everyone's got a strong libido, but those of us who have one need an outlet, and I'm kinda past the one-night-stand phase, so when there's nobody special in my life at any given point, a little pornography provides the kinda release that keeps the blue balls away.

[Hammy Pink]

I hear the Hollywood cognocenti these days swear by a mysterious site called "Redtube."