Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (1/10)

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

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Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus:


Introduction:

"In a much-quoted 1974 essay, Robin Morgan launched one of the most famous salvos against pornography when she declared: 'Pornography is the theory, rape the practice.' Within seven years, Laura Lederer's Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and Susan Griffin's Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revolt Against Nature had all been published...

There was something un-feminist about all this. The women's movement had correctly championed the notion that the individual has the right to define reality for herself. It sought to correct millennia of men defining women's reality. But some women turned around and committed the same offense against men. Their books were filled with peremptory assertions about what happened to men who look at porn, and none of it was good. 'Pornography is often more sexually compelling than the realities it presents, more sexually real than reality,' wrote MacKinnon. Sooner or later, all men want to live out the fantasies depicted in pornography, she asserted. But how could she know this? Where was her evidence?...

Within the last decade, the public debate has shifted. Feminist scholars such as Lynne Segal, Linda Williams, Lynn Hunt, Alison Assiter, Avedon Carol, and Laura Kipnis have supported pornography and explored its history. National ACLU president Nadine Strossen published Defending Pornography, and Canadian activist Wendy McElroy authored XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. Feminist performance artists and writers such as Susie Bright, Pat Califia, Candida Royalle, and Annie Sprinkle produced their own porn as well as declared their support for it and championed the practice of sadomasochistic sex...

What's wrong with this picture?
There are still no men in it...

I decided to find out by doing something no one had ever done: ask the men themselves. I talked to nearly 150 men, some in person, some on the Internet. Their answers might surprise you. Among other things, they said:

1. They would like to see more plot and romance in pornography.
2. They do not particularly enjoy closeups of genitals.
3. They not only do not find violence against women or domination of women sexy, they are specifically turned off by such behavior... and most haven't even seen any.
4. Though they enjoy looking at women having sex with women, they don't believe the women pictured are actually lesbians.
5. They have not sought ever more vivid, kinky, and violent pornography...
6. They don't like the way men are portrayed in pornography."


Unveilings: Men's First Exposures to Pornography:

"'I think I first masturbated to images of 'ethnic' women in National Geographic. This magazine is more pornographic than many would like to admit.'...

For the most part, the sharing of erotic magazines and pornographic materials was a remarkably free and egalitarian experience. Men rarely reported a boy charging others for a look, for instance. When one boy found something, he either kept it to himself or shared freely...

Of course when porn was brought to school, there was a dynamic of asserting power over other boys - 'I'm better than you because I have this stuff' - but this material was still freely circulated as part of gaining social cachet. The everyday competitiveness and aggression of boys and young men was seemingly put on hold in the face of the mystery of girls and what they looked like under their clothes...

'I didn't know what masturbation was. I looked the word up in the dictionary that came with our '60s Encyclopedia Britannica and it said 'to gratify oneself.' I imagined someone staring into a mirror and saying, 'I'm so great, I'm so great.''...

A few boys were introduced to pornography by girls. This should not be surprising in view of the fact that there was so much of it available for discovery in parents' bedrooms and closets and on the street. Before the great divide of puberty, boys and girls can be similarly inquisitive and nonjudgmental about matters of sex and nudity...

Many men remarked that their interest was captured by the female form and its beauty... Not a single man reported that he felt a sense of dominance over women, or enjoyed seeing them in humilitating positions...

If, as antiporn theorists contend, the attraction of pornography lies in experiencing power over an exposed, vulnerable, degraded woman (as opposed to, say, sexual arousal, delight in the positive attitude of the models, and appreciation of feminine beauty), then one might suppose that even closeted gays would derive pleasure from heterosexual pornography. After all, gay or not, they are still men in a patriarchal society, and women are 'only women.' But even though some gay males wished they could be turned on by heterosexual pornography, most simply were not...

Just as shared consumption of pornography could foster male bonding, so traditional male bonding situations had a tendency to encourage porn consumption. Several men had their first exposure to pornography among Boy Scouts on a campout of paper recyling drive...

What's essential about men's first exposures to pornography is that whatever the context, it never had primarily to do with objectifying or degrading women."


Growing Up: The Social Context:

"Several survey participants accused their parents of hypocrisy. Although his mother frowned on 'pornography and related things,' an audio engineer said she 'reads Harlequin romances which have very steamy sex scenes in them.' Another man recalled that the official parental line was 'we don't want that stuff in our house,' and his mother made it apparent that she considered it 'filth'; but when the boy got his hands on some magazines and a video in eighth grade, they confiscated them... but did not dispose of them...

One of the dangers of vehement opposition from the church, parents, or society was that if a boy concluded they were lying or wrong about pornography, he was more likely to question everything they told him... 'I slowly began to realize that sex was a natural part of human existence, though, which shook my faith in my religion. After all, why would God build such desires within us if they were bad?'"