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TRIGGER WARNING:
SEXUAL ASSAULT
PORNOGRAPHY
SELF-INJURY
The short version is a response to a post on Alternet about the summer's most popular porn.
Reading this turned me off rather than on.
Porn is utterly unrealistic, and yet it's what people have come to expect sex is like. It harms rather than helps relationships. Yet we as a society glorify it.
A lot of people think of porn as just people being filmed having sex. You've got your guy-girl porn, your girl-girl porn, your guy-guy porn, and your group sex. If it's consenting adults, no big deal, right?
If it were just consenting adults having sex, it would be no big deal and would, in fact, be kind of boring. If you're not the one having sex, sex looks kind of silly.
Once on the Howard Stern show, Howard asked one of my favorite people, Angus Young, how much porn he watched. Angus replied: "I don't get off on watching butts bouncing up and down, especially not hairy man butts."
Angus may not be aware of just how much more disturbing than butts bouncing up and down porn can be. Hopefully he never finds out. I use his statement to illustrate that for the uninitiated, "butts bouncing up and down" tends to be what they think porn is. Thus, they can't understand the argument that porn is harmful, and view those making said argument as pearl-clutching fuddy-duddies.
For many years I had myself convinced that porn was okay and that I was being closed-minded in my knee-jerk reaction that it really wasn't okay and was exploitative of women.
I also had a complicated relationship with porn, because my own past abuses led me to be simultaneously aroused and disgusted by humiliating fantasies. Part of me believed that I deserved to be hurt and humiliated. While I would never have sought it out in real life, I would spend entire days sometimes watching scenarios in which one person was the target of sexualized demeaning acts.
Back in 1997, I was involved with a very bad guy. He was looking for a victim, and he found a perfect one in the thirty-two year old me, with her untreated mental illness and terrible self esteem.
I had a history of two full-on sexual assaults, and most of my sexual experiences had been coercive. I was molested when I was very young. I was everything a guy like this abusive misogynist could want.
It started out with regular porn, and then he started bringing in worse stuff. At first it was scat, then it moved to bestiality. When I got upset, he laughed at me and threatened to withdraw his "love" from me if I left.
If you're saying that anyone with any sense would have left, you're partly right. My sense was telling me that I needed to get away from him. My butchered self-esteem told me that I was throwing away "love." I was so desperate to have someone care for me that I put up with this abuse.
My boyfriend started flaunting his other conquests in front of me, and when I got upset he told me that men were incapable of being monogamous, and I needed to understand that. He made me kiss his feet.
At one point I showed up at his house at two in the morning with my wrists slashed, after having wandered about the neighborhood cutting myself repeatedly.
I finally mustered the courage to leave him for my son's sake rather than my own. I didn't care about myself. I thought I was garbage. I was still obsessed with him. It took months for me to fully realize what an absolute piece of crap he was and that nobody deserved to be subjected to his monstrous behavior.
It would be another seventeen years before I could break free of the cycle of psychologically abusing myself by watching demeaning pornography.
I'm going to keep this post in the material realm. One of these days I'll talk about how Gem helped me break free of my porn obsession.
Follow-up:
I should not be surprised that I had someone Mansplain to me that my argument was "completely invalid" because his experience with porn had been the opposite of what I described. Porn is totes realistic, you guys.
As we know, nothing will change a woman's mind quicker than Mansplaining. The poor dumb bitches don't know their own minds, after all.
Well, you've convinced me. Porn is wonderful and makes the world a beautiful place. It does not create unrealistic expectations about what sex is like, and it is never violent, demeaning or ugly. I will now return to my invalid existence, gleeful in the knowledge that at least I can always have porn.
6 comments:
The vast majority of porn is made for men to jerk-off too. It simply isn't erotic just timed to have maximum arousal for about five minutes which is, incidentally, roughly how long it takes for a man to pump himself flaccid. The only porn I have seen was when one woman massaged another. It had none of the ludicrous dialogue, none of that 'yum, that tastes good. I love your cum.' (If a woman said that to me I'd buy her some tin rice pudding and skedaddle out of there). It was slow, sensuous and highly charged. Porn is most certainly sexist as the audience it is aimed for are one specific gender - then with the brains in the erections.
How is sexually visual stimulation any different than romance novels written for a female audience? Romance novels are as unrealistic and stupid as pornography. Women are stimulated in a different way than men but the end results is exactly the same in stimulation and lack of reality. No man can trully be what a romance novel hero is just as no woman can be the depraved whore in a porn clip. With porn, it does take all of five minutes for a man to see, jerk off, and forget. Big deal. Making it a naughty forbidden thing for my man will only strengthen the hold it may have. I prefer to let him make his own porn while I do my thing for him. Men need a secure and confidently sexual woman. Of a woman cannot be that because the man has issues them it's time to find a new partners for both.
Russell: Exactly.
Brandi:
The difference is that romance novels aren't in your face visually speaking. Yes, they're unrealistic and stupid, but they aren't portraying the act visually. As well, the hero being pursued by the woman is portrayed in a positive light. This isn't the case for women in pornography.
Porn doesn't just portray women as unrealistically sexy. It portrays women as objects. It is often degrading to those objects, calling them bitches and whores. Women are often treated roughly and then tossed aside. That is far different from the objectified romance novel hero.
I'm glad that you are sexually confident. However, that isn't really the issue here. Also, there is nothing wrong with lacking confidence. Some people have been badly hurt. That does a great deal to erode a person's confidence.
As well, I find myself wondering if you're saying that there's nothing wrong with what Cie's boyfriend did to her, because if that's what you think, than I feel you really need to reconsider your beliefs regarding how men treat women.
Brandi, I understand what you are saying. I used to have the same opinion about it. In fact, I used to be an affiliate for several adult websites.
What I'm discussing here isn't the run of the mill rumpy-pumpy guy gets blow job then gets laid type porn. I could discuss the sexism in that type of porn, but that really wasn't my focus. I should have been clear that what I'm discussing is the more violent and degrading types of porn, such as rape fantasies, rough deep throating, rough anal. It is shockingly easy to find such porn, and people are very cavalier about it. I think you can see that this is a far cry from a dumb romance novel fantasy or even a stupid guy-oriented fuck fantasy.
I would suggest visiting feministcurrent.com I was writing from a personal point of view. Their writers do a much better job than I can of explaining the sociological implications regarding our society's cavalier attitude towards the violent objectification of women.
Here is an excellent article on the subject:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/09/action-against-sexual-harassment-schools-more-about-protecting-male-orgasm
A paragraph from the article:
"One obvious conclusion to draw might be that boys do not like girls very much. They see them as objects to sneer at, flesh to grab at, holes to penetrate. They don’t see them as people, at least not in the way that they see themselves."
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