And, in fact, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women.
I wouldn't have guessed it was so high. What are the "major" sites, I wonder, and what % of total porn traffic do they get? Is there a wimilar ratio for niche sites?
I'm sure most of those female visitors are going to the browser history to see what gross things are in vogue these days. The % is unbelievably high - but the source is generally unbelievable as well.
At the intersection of porn and home decorating.
I only made it as far as the first page before getting distracted by the real world, but what I read sounded like a pretty standard rendition of the conventional wisdom ("Men like to see naked people! Women like plots and romance!"). Does the article say anything non-trite?
Yes, I'm really that lazy, why do you ask?
Nothing like the restorative power of porn to recover from contentious rape discussions.
1
Well it also says
Women account for only one out of 50 purchases of porn-site subscriptions, ...
which is not very consistent.
1, 7: There's an ambiguity between unique visitors and number of visits. The percentage given sounds high for number of visits, but not that implausible for ever having visited.
Wait, this isn't a third sex post. This is an alternate version of the last sex post, with a link to the WSJ article rather than the takedown of the WSJ article and the book it is drawn from.
Well that topic has been covered. Now, how should I pain my house?
I love the ethnographic/ethological style of the first caption. If every single neuroscientist ever is anything to go by, it must be unpleasant being a female cognitive science grad student.
Now, how should I pain my house?
There are specialist porn sites for that if you google.
8
There's an ambiguity between unique visitors and number of visits. The percentage given sounds high for number of visits, but not that implausible for ever having visited.
The second stat was offered as evidence that a large minority of women like explict porn and is seriously misleading if it mostly consists of brief visits made by mistake or out of curiosity.
Yes, home decorating, please! Our offer on the six-bedroom house was just accepted and there's a lot of room to fill, so I'll just let that fruit hang there.
"Men like to see naked people!"
This is a false generalization, or two.
Woohoo! New old house. I say keep at least one room empty, with no rugs, for Mara to learn to rollerskate.
Six bedrooms is good. My first thought was "a study each and a playroom", but presumably you're thinking guest rooms here?
re: 18
You need a room for the drum-kit, big enough to fit both the bass-drums.
You need a room for the drum-kit
They've got a three-year-old. The mind boggles.
re: 20
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo5Cu84GVio&feature=fvst
Although I was just kidding re: the noisiest possible use for the room.
18: Three bedrooms per upper floor, so second floor will be master bedroom (and dressing room, WTF?!?), playroom with foldout couch for guests or something, small Mara bedroom. The third floor is my room for yarn and books, a middle room we'll expect to be Rowan's at some point, back room for Lee's tv and beer and dog. And we asked for the upright piano that was in the living room as part of the offer and they agreed, so we have a start on a music room!
Is the dog allowed out of Lee's room?
Interesting that Mr. Ogi Ogas was forced to publish under his porn star name. Now what does that say about academic freedom these days? First they came for the fuck saws...
The female cortex contains a highly developed system for finding and scrutinizing a prospective partner--a system that might be dubbed the Miss Marple Detective Agency.
Barf.
re 25: As bad as "evolutionary" theorizing was for academic psychology, it's much worse for journalism.
23: Yes, definitely. But it's where she'll be enclosed during the day to minimize the amount of furniture she can eat and give her a nice view of the back yard.
I'll be over being giddy soon when I have to think about all the details and about getting through the inspection and whatnot, but for now I feel a little bit vindicated that not living somewhere more interesting and fun is allowing us to buy a solid 110-year-old house in the neighborhood we've always wanted for under 1000/month. Something like that was always going to be the theoretical tradeoff, but I'm glad it seems to be working out.
The post title is much better if you mentally skip the word "post."
back room for Lee's tv and beer and dog
If Lee has WiFi, I want that deal.
Congratulations, Thorn! That sounds great!
I am assuming, naturally, that some sort of grotto is already included.
Does the list of "porn" sites include sites that sell sex toys?
The post title is much better if you mentally skip the word "post."
I keep on reading it that way, accidentally.
7: Maybe women are smart enough to figure out how to find porn on the internet without paying for it.
Less flippantly, I would guess we still live in a world where many more husbands are in the habit of reviewing their wives' credit card purchases than vice versa, which could influence porn-site-subscribing behavior.
Jane Austen should totally sue for being classed with Nora Roberts and Stephenie Meyer.
36: People pay for NPR and PBS. Maybe it is for the same reason.
Just because these researchers have access to big batches of visitor tracking and analysis data doesn't mean they've used it correctly; given the stuff linked in the last post about them, I think the presumption should be that they haven't.
36: I dunno, maybe people believe that the pay stuff is better, by whatever standard of better they're using? Maybe it is better, by whatever standard of better?
So, has the .xxx domain gotten going yet? I wonder if the porn will clear out of other domains. It's not clear to me why it would, but it's also not clear to me what the point was of a new porn domain if it wasn't going to localize most of the porn there.
40:
Maybe so. I certainly prefer the paid version of Unfogged. Higher res Heebie butt pics. Better trolls. Better spelling.
The look of absolute horror on the face of the divan in 3 is actually better than the war owl.
Thorn, not to be a downer, but how the hell are you going to keep a 6 bedroom house clean? If I had a house that big, I'm pretty sure my laziness would overtake any pretense at civilization and I'd just start putting junk in random rooms rather than throw it out. I'd be on Hoarders within a year.
By OGI OGAS
Does anyone else think it was unwise of ogged to pick a pseud so close to his real name?
The sites I've seen where a significant number of people pay are amateur porn posting sites where there seems to be both a large degree of community interaction and premium features available to paying members e.g. more communication options or unlimited posting.
46: And did they put a discreet name on your credit card bill?
dona, Lee is a tidiness freak, though she doesn't do a whole lot in the way of actual cleaning. I think we can keep it livably messy. We hired a biweekly cleaner when I initially freaked out about learning Mara was asthmatic after she'd already been living with us for a while, but I don't know whether or not we'll keep that up. It's only two bathrooms and if we break it down into smaller jobs, it should be doable. Plus there's lots of room for storing things out of sight where we don't have to care about them.
48: Roomba? I don't have one, but I like the idea of one.
I would be really tempted to declare one room a closet and throw anything I didn't want to deal with in there unsorted.
did they put a discreet name on your credit card bill
Dikembe Mutombo, of course.
46 I've never actually bought a membership on one of those but they do seem to emphasize discreet billing. Not sure how that works.
The obvious solution is to adopt 4 or 5 more children and get them to help. Once they're trained up you can hire them out as an adorable cleaning service, until they're old enough to become a jazz band, cf. the grandchildren of Mrs Beetle.
and dressing room, WTF?!?
YES!! Do this! It is way more important than you think. Clothes do not belong in bedrooms. Bedrooms would be naturally neat and self-tidying (make bed => room is neat) if there weren't clothes in them.
My housemate just moved out last night and my clothes will be in that bedroom by this evening. You will love this set-up as soon as you try it.
52: Back in the VHS days, a guy in my dorm got a box labeled "Grandma's Cookies" that was too small to hold many cookies. It was about as discreet as writing "This sure isn't porn" on the box.
How much VHS porn could it hold, then?
Okay, not done talking about my house! Megan, the dressing room is a little side room (well, almost big enough to be a bedroom itself) built beside the bedroom with a door connecting the two and its own little window. It would be plenty big enough for a crib if we ever needed that, but I'm not sure that would fly with the foster licensing people anyway. Maybe a small couch for a reading area? Many options!
I had not made any particular previous connection to Cold Comfort Farm but am making my dear non-reader Lee watch I Capture the Castle. Our situation is nowhere near as dire. There will be a new roof in our future and plenty of painting, then a kitchen and bathroom remodel in a year or so. But it's livable now, very livable.
56: I think Moby's confused. Cookies are euphemism for something else (w--d).
Paying for porn has its merits. The free stuff (last I used it, which was years ago) is scattered, low-quality, ad-infested. You can exercise a lot more choice with pay sites; narrow it down to the more active-consenty stuff; where I go, benefit from reviews and Netflix-like automatic recommendations; and in some other cases, patronize creators directly.
Wait, you sound like you're watering down the potential of the dressing room. Are you going to go with the concept of a separate room for clothes? If you have the room, it is such an amazing luxury. It will improve your quality of life appreciably.
I had not made any particular previous connection to Cold Comfort Farm
Well, presumably you haven't checked the woodshed yet.
I've only seen the movie version of Cold Comfort Farm, but it was magical. I have an enduring affection for Kate Beckinsale as a result, stupid werewolf movies and vaguely pervy husbands be damned.
patronize creators directly
Oh God, dare I ask what this involves?
Still, anything to get away from the gnashing envy I feel about Thorn's spacious house. Please tell me you guys live in North Dakota on a moose farm or something?
re: 63
Also, Shooting Fish which isn't a great movie but it's when Beckinsale still looked English. Or, a better movie, Last Days of Disco.
Just to keep the pron conversation going, how are these for working generalizations (n.b., these, except for 4, are close to the conventional wisdom which is reflected in the article, but I think right).
1. The overwhelming majority of men are turned on by pictures or video of attractive people naked or fucking and will seek these out barring social constraints (i.e., don't want them to be discovered by a partner).
2. A majority of women is not turned on by these kinds of visuals, and finds them somewhat gross, but can be turned on by more narrative and less visual erotic fantasy.
3. A minority of women are in fact turned on by images referred to in 1, but only a minority.
4. Most porn, whether of the visual or narrative kind is pretty misogynistic, but this isn't necessarily the case and it's possible to find non-misogynistic versions, which may be leading to the increase of women in category (3).
4. Porn of both the male and female kind has been spreading like kudzu in recent years and, while we're still trying to figure out what the effects of that are on people's actual human relationships, the effects don't seem to be either (a) in the aggregate, that significant or (b) in the aggregate, that negative.
Any dissent from the points above?
65: IIRC, they're surrounded by bluegrass, mint juleps, and racehorses. Not North Dakota, but not the Bay Area.
2 and 3, I'd not actually disagree with, but flag. I'd say it's unquestionable that men in our society are much more likely to seek out (pay for, consume, whatever) visuals of the kind you describe. What that says about whether there are women who are turned on by them but don't seek them out is more complicated, and I don't know what the answers are.
65: Just sites maintained by individuals or small groups creating their own content.
FWIW the type of sites I was referring to seem to have no shortage of women who pay for membership. Or for that matter women who don't. However, my general impression is that while women seem to be the main consumers of commercial written porn (sorry, 'urban fiction, hot romance, erotica, etc.'), the reverse is true of commercial visual porn.
61: I am, Megan, because I can't quite give myself over to feeling of decadence an actual dressing room brings on, but I'm sure I'll get there. A place to get dressed without an inquisitive three-year-old staring at me while she jumps on my bed! How novel!
65: As LB says, it's not quite that bad but not great as far as politics are concerned. We're in easy walking distance (across a pedestrian bridge) to a very conservative but large city. We're moving one town over from where we are now, to the historic district of a bigger town with much more economic and racial diversity. We'll be blocks from our library and from some of our closest friends. I'm excited.
they're surrounded by bluegrass, mint juleps, and racehorses
I don't know how they got into my patio, but they'd better replace any juleps they have used and be nice to the horses.
67: Citing Bonk again: Studies show that the overwhelming majority of women exhibit physical signs of arousal when viewing *any* kind of sexual activity - gay, straight, giant pile of furries, whatever. Men only do so for sexual activity of their preferred orientation. The mental states associated with arousal for men closely track their cocks. For women the mental states track their preferred orientation for the most part, but there is a significant minority who are turned on by depictions of activity they have no interest in actually doing (or can't because they aren't gay men).
Though "women are like this, men are like that" narratives are usually bollocks, the science on this one is actually sound. Or at least as sound as you can get by showing people porn while their genitals are hooked up to measuring instruments. There's obviously a bias due to the fact that the experimental subjects are all the kind of people who would consent to that sort of thing. If only there was a system like jury duty for human subject experiments we could get much better data.
Though "women are like this, men are like that" narratives are usually bollocks, the science on this one is actually sound to the extent that human sexuality and sexual responses are highly socialized, sure. Good luck determining that particular unknown, though.
75 is interesting, and raises the question of why there isn't a bigger market for female purchasers of porn,or, as LB says, why women aren't seeking things out that turn them on. It's not like there's a porn shortage.
Men only do so for sexual activity of their preferred orientation... For women the mental states track their preferred orientation for the most part, but there is a significant minority who are turned on by depictions of activity they have no interest in actually doing(or can't because they aren't gay men).
This seems to be inconsistent in how it describes straight women watching gay male porn and straight men watching lesbian porn.
Though "women are like this, men are like that" narratives are usually bollocks, the science on this one is actually sound.
I'd say that the science seems to be fairly sound, but that measuring what's going on someone's brain doesn't show that it's not affected by their culture and upbringing. (Not that you said anything to the contrary, I'm just bringing it up.)
For example, there seems to be good evidence that men, now, in the US, are much likelier to be fixed in their sexual orientation than women are -- they're gay or they're straight, and nothing affects that fundamental organization. On the other hand, Plato and a whole bunch of his dinner companions would like to point out that when you've got a culture that takes male homosexuality as a norm, you get much more of it.
When I read about studies like this, I fear that, in time, every man person in America will be Charlie Sheen.
The Guardian had an article of female porn use a few weeks back. Apparently there's more of it than conventional wisdom would have you believe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/07/women-addicted-internet-pornography?INTCMP=SRCH
Not endorsing the contents of said article, of course.
there seems to be good evidence that men, now, in the US, are much likelier to be fixed in their sexual orientation than women are -- they're gay or they're straight, and nothing affects that fundamental organization
Wasnt there a lengthy NYTimes mag article about this topic that suggested (bc so little is really known) this point? ie: women's sexual orientation is fluid whereas men's is fairly rigid.
80:
Isnt that the article that says "more women are addicted" without any statistical support? Zero.
It seemed like a "Kids are so much worse now than back when I was a kid" article.
re: 83
Yes, and I generally find the Guardian particularly poor on that sort of topic.
Oh my God, people. You can't separate this stuff from social norms.
Women are into porn, they just can't call it "porn" without feeling terrible about it, so instead it's put in a book (respectable! sort of!) and called a romance novel. Men would fuck a lot of other men if it didn't mean feminizing them in unacceptable way. I feel like these points have been made several times before. Sexuality is really socialized. I almost feel like we can probably learn more about implicit cultural norms through studying sexual response and reported sexual activity than we can learn about actual sexuality from the same.
82: Yeah, I was thinking of that article, and Dan Savage says similar things a fair amount citing to some kind of evidence, and anecdotally it seems truer than not that men are more likely to be more fixed in their sexual orientation than women. But truer than not in a here, now, in this society kind of way -- given the existence of counterexamples where societal factors clearly have a huge effect on the incidence of male homosexuality, it's patently not a fundamental, cross-cultural truth of human nature.
85: I am sympathetic, particularly when I wonder whether we all agree what "fixed" and "fluid" mean w/r/t sexuality, but culture isn't the only thing that exists or the only reason for other things to be as they are.
I find the general question of whether sexuality is influenced by social norms (answer: of course it is) pretty uninteresting, but the specific question of just how those norms are operating right now extremely interesting. Again, it's remarkable that the two sexes (apparently) consume porn so diffferently, and that there's been such an explosion of porn in the past 40 years with so little in obvious (and, particularly, negative) social consequence.
85: I think you have to take the social component of sexuality for granted simply because there isn't some kind of neutral sexual orientation an individual would have absent social influences. We're a social species and sex is inherently a social act. Except wanking I suppose, but even then there's usually fantasies involving another person.
||
An acquaintance just shared with me a "Why grammar matters!" of the following form:
David helped his Uncle Jack, off a horse.
Um.
|>
88: Well, I do think it's interesting and important to keep the questions of "How things are" and "How things are always going to be" separate. You get a lot of answers to the second question based on data that really only goes to the first, when people are talking casually.
I mean, if you'd hypothetically asked me in 1950 the question "do you think it would be a majorly bad and significant thing if every eleven year old boy in the Western world had daily, free access to sex images that would make the most peverted, hardened longshoreman blush" I would have said "yes.". In reality, now that we're living in that world, the answer to that question seems to be "no big deal."
I can't quite give myself over to feeling of decadence an actual dressing room brings on, but I'm sure I'll get there. A place to get dressed without an inquisitive three-year-old staring at me while she jumps on my bed! How novel!
Seems to me that buying a six bedroom house should be a good first step towards overcoming resistance to decadence; I am wholeheartedly in favor of overcoming that resistance. But truly, if you had much less space, I would still advocate for putting clothes in a separate room. The payoff will be much higher than you expect.
92: Which, as the mother of a laxly supervised eleven-year-old and nine-year-old, I do dearly hope you're right about.
90: Hit him over the head with The Chicago Manual of Style.
95: And then he will be enlightened.
91: In my ideal world a major goal of research into human sexuality would be focused on the question of how to create social norms that enabled people to comfortably engage in the broadest range of consensual sexual expression. This would all be funded through the nookie equivalent of the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Perhaps the internet is already serving this function in some roundabout way by exposing people to all manner of freaky weirdness.
[T]here isn't some kind of neutral sexual orientation an individual would have absent social influences.
Challenge accepted. Beige-o-sexuals, aroused!
97: I like that ideal world. The DARPA of fucking!
92:I would not say "no big deal", but that "I don't know."
The porn is mixed with so many other changes in society and culture that it can be hard to separate out.
For instance, many men looking at naked women on the Internet do have the slight feeling that the act is somewhat misogynist. Is this different from the kid in 1960 thinking it is "disrespectful?"
For the record, from my old fart's perspective, I do think the general culture has become a little less coarse and hard than it was ten years ago.
I don't watch popcult closely enough to know if it has gotten worse in other ways.
It feels dumber.
100 + 1:Dumber is unfair and wrong. It feels different.
These kids who don't know who Osama bin Laden is do know many valuable things I don't know, like how to twit.
I mean, if you'd hypothetically asked me in 1950 the question "do you think it would be a majorly bad and significant thing if every eleven year old boy in the Western world had daily, free access to sex images that would make the most peverted, hardened longshoreman blush" I would have said "yes.". In reality, now that we're living in that world, the answer to that question seems to be "no big deal."
One thing to remember about most sexual norms is that even when they are expressed in terms of consequences ("if there is porn everywhere, society will collapse") in practice people treat them more deontologically. (If there is porn everywhere, it would be as morally bad as the collapse of all civilization.)
This explains why "they do it in Amsterdam" arguments are so rarely effective. Some people want to say "they have legalized prostitution in Amserdam and the world hasn't ended." For others, if an American city became like Amsterdam, it would be the end of the world.
I'm a bit a bewildered by the disbelief at the beginning of the thread that 25-30% of the visitor to porn sites could be women, followed by Halford's
raises the question of why there isn't a bigger market for female purchasers of porn,or, as LB says, why women aren't seeking things out that turn them on. It's not like there's a porn shortage.
Have you not brought these two thoughts together, or are you just stuck on "How can women be so cheap"?
further 103: Professional moralist Leon Kass is actually quite explicit about this. One of his biggest fears is that society would suffer complete and total moral collapse, and no one would notice, because every part of society besides the one norm that we are violating continues as normal. For instance, one day we might all live in families of clones that all have sex with each other, and no one will care because we all still go to football games and have jobs and stuff.
To 67, I'd like to ammend 2 & 3: To 2 I'd like to add "as they are currently produced and distributed" one or two places in that sentence. In 3 I'd want to remove the phrase "but only a minority." Either you mean, only a small minority, which I'd only buy if applied to, say, women over 50, or it adds no meaning. That's not separating men's or women's current behavior from some imagined essential or possible nature. I'm saying it's not enough to talk about visuals vs. text without talking about the particular visuals and texts in circulation.
These kids who don't know who Osama bin Laden is do know many valuable things I don't know, like how to twit.
2001 was ten years ago. A 17 year old would have been 7. I can't get worked up by this.
105, 106 -- so are you saying that there's a huge untapped market for visual porn for women that's not being met for some reason (if so, what do you think that reason is)? Or that visual porn is being consumed by a majority of women already? (Not a snark question -- I can't tell).
92: There have been some teen-on-teen gang rapes in the news recently - do you think that was happening at a similar rate in 1950, but underreported?
105: Or we might live in a society that tolerates torture because football and jobs etc.,
Kass is a prick, but is he really enough of a prick that he could make this argument without offering government-sponsored torture as his key example?
They don't teach grade students about Osama bin Laden either.
Teacher: Here is a picture of 9/11
Students: WTF. Who did this?
Teacher:Osama Bin Laden
Students: What happened to him?
Teacher: He is hiding in Pakistan
Students:Why don't we capture him?
Teacher:I don't know.
s/b to Pongo in 104 and 106.
To 105, Leon Kass seems like a moron, but just saying that probably wouldn't get me a passing grade in an undergraduate ethics class.
Kass is a prick, but is he really enough of a prick that he could make this argument without offering government-sponsored torture as his key example?
Who cares about torture when there are shocking moral abominations happening every day in every city, like people eating ice cream in public?
I mean, if you'd hypothetically asked me in 1950 the question "do you think it would be a majorly bad and significant thing if every eleven year old boy in the Western world had daily, free access to sex images that would make the most peverted, hardened longshoreman blush" I would have said "yes.".
Longshoremen were much daintier in those days.
The coarsening of our longshormen can no doubt be attributed to easily available porn.
They call them "longshoremen", but they're actually just regular guys.
If a hardened longshoreman is blushing, I worry that some part of him is critically lacking in blood supply.
115: Or to their diminished job security.
108: I think it's very likely that there's large untapped markets for porn. There aren't many ways to find the particular porn that you want which don't involve wading through a lot of gross things. You can't advertise porn through normal channels.
I mean, if you'd hypothetically asked me in 1950
Halford looks amazing for his age, I guess. Caveman diet for the win!
For example, there seems to be good evidence that men, now, in the US, are much likelier to be fixed in their sexual orientation than women are -- they're gay or they're straight, and nothing affects that fundamental organization. On the other hand, Plato and a whole bunch of his dinner companions would like to point out that when you've got a culture that takes male homosexuality as a norm, you get much more of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Greece
Ancient Greek homosexuality is just wrong. Contemporary homosexuality has removed the coercion, lack of mutuality, and pedophilia from homosexuality. When you do that, it turns out that men's sexual orientations become more fixed.
AARGH!! Reading that article made me want to scream. I hate this evolutionary made-up crap. But what I hate more are vague generalities about "porn." I would not classify most romance novels as porn, even though they may be sexually graphic or titillating because I don't think mere titillation = porn. Porn can be verbal and not visual, thank you Marquis de Sade, but most sex scenes in romance novels are gratuitous, like boobs in an R-rated movie, not central to the text. You can remove them and the text and narrative still make perfect sense and work as they are designed to. I also don't think most romance novel buyers are masturbating to these texts although I could just be hopelessly naive.
You can remove them and the text and narrative still make perfect sense and work as they are designed to.
It's almost as if you don't think men would be watching movies about pizza delivery and pool cleaning absent the sex scenes.
All, please do read the ObWi takedown of this article in the next post down. It's a good balance.
Not caught up on the thread, and I may be in the minority, but I seriously doubt 67.2 and 3. I have a pretty automatic physiological response to seeing images of attractive people having sex.
But it's not something I would seek out. Nor would I seek about more "feminine" porn either. I'm trying to think of why, and all I can say is that I have never felt a need for it. It's pleasant on the rare occasion I come across it, but I think I would quickly get bored with it. It's sort of that it appeals to a subconcious part of my brain, and if I tried to approach it consciously, the effect would be lost.
What's stupid about the article is that the majority of fan fiction is by women, and the majority of that is about fucking, particularly men fucking men. Perverse pairings, too, like a young Harry Potter and an adult Snape. The authors of the study manage to avoid this fact by picking the one fan fiction site that bans describing fucking. If you look at the actual universe of fan fiction written by women, it's a lot of physical descriptions of Spock's throbbing green member. You can't come to the conclusions of the article except by deliberately ignoring the actual evidence.
I would not classify most romance novels as porn, even though they may be sexually graphic or titillating because I don't think mere titillation = porn.
Right. The classification of romance as "porn for women" arises from similar impulses, I think, as the disproportionate time spent slamming the Twilight novels - stuff associated with women is fair game for mockery.
You seem to know whereof you speak, Walt.
126 is interesting. Hard to see why one wouldn't seek out something that produces that response, but that's what a lot of people seem to be saying about women.
126 describes me pretty well, too.
You should read my Unfogged fan fiction, Halford. It's hot. You'd be pleased by your own performance.
126, 130: Put me roughly on this bench, with a helping of the issue mentioned in 119. Of the porn I've seen, some has been pleasantly arousing, but not really filling a need, and some has been some version of really depressing/unpleasant/disturbing. I end up not wanting to look at porn I might like badly enough to sort through porn I wouldn't for it. And throw in a helping of social inhibition/embarrassment on top of that.
Further to 132: That applies to visual porn. Written porn/erotica I've consumed more of, largely (I think) because I'm less inhibited about it, but the issues are similar -- there's an awful lot of terrible writing out there, as well as stuff about things I find either unerotic or unpleasant, and sorting through for something appealing seems not worth the trouble.
Spock's throbbing member is green? Huh.
I think a lot of women feel about porn the way I do about sex toys. I am glad they're out there, and from what I have experienced, they work, but I don't feel the need to buy or own them.
The other problem with porn is that there is a lot of it that's just not for you, especially if you're a woman, and you won't necessarily be into what some other woman is into. So if you have a partner or are not undatable like I am, it might be worth the effort to find something you like. (This thing where women with partners complain about how they are constantly being begged for sex? It's like whining about just having so very much food to eat in front of starving people. Some of us have to find photos of attractive-looking food (metaphorically speaking), people!)
And yeah, written erotica is mostly so badly written that I cannot find it sexy. I have tried.
I'm off to teach my last class of the semester! WAY better feeling than watching porn.
134: Vulcan green blood, you see.
108: Sorry, I went to lunch. More the first one, though, again, people can view/consume porn without money changing hands. Many women I know enjoy porn when they watch it, but as folks have said, and I believe AWB speculated before, find the experience of shopping for it or sifting through the dreck on line wearing.
137: The proverbial tragedy of the English major.
Most caucasoid-like Vulcans (a majority of those shown throughout the series' runs) typically appear with a subtle greenish hue to their skin, due to Vulcans' copper-based blood, which is green in color.and
Approximately every seven years, Vulcan males and females who are bonded to each other experience an overpowering mating drive known as pon farr. Once triggered, Vulcans must have sexual contact with someone, preferably their mate, or else face insanity and death.I can see where the slash fiction silliness might come in.
82: Your mom's sexuality is fairly fluid while mine is rigid!
Why is Vulcan copper based blood green when real life horseshoe crabs' copper based blood is blue?
147: Because, you see, the salts that predominated in the oceanic evolutionary cradle of Vulcan were very different from our own (thus saving Spock from the salt-sucking monster). Also, the waving of hands.
147: Copper turns both colors, depending on how it's oxidized.
I should have said, copper turns either color.
147: Because TV science fiction writers are not biologists.
So, apropos of easily obtainable porn on the internet, I was searching for pictures of horseshoe crab blood so I could get a sense of what shade of blue it was, and this (NSFW) turned up.
Double for Star Trek - isn't that where the writers go "Ensign, [tech] the [tech] in the [tech]" - "But Captain, the [tech] is [tech]!" and someone else fills in the blanks?
Thank god they got everything else right. We wouldn't have wanted a realistic story of people zipping around the galaxy faster than light in a world that operates with no apparent economic system to be too marred by biological inaccuracies.
154: That's not Star Trek, that's a later TV series of the same name.
75: Or at least as sound as you can get by showing people porn while their genitals are hooked up to measuring instruments.
126: I have a pretty automatic physiological response to seeing images of attractive people having sex.
129: 126 is interesting. Hard to see why one wouldn't seek out something that produces that response, but that's what a lot of people seem to be saying about women.
...
Halford, think of, say, waking up with a hard-on, while not actually being horny in an all-things-considered sense. Blood-flow-to-the-genitals, which is all that's being measured by the studies in 75, doesn't fully track "turned on"--even for guys.
157: Sure, but that's not quite what Hilary Clinton et al. were talking about, I thought -- I thought the point was more like porn is something that women enjoy and find stimulating, but don't have any affirmative desire to seek out. That's what seems (weird is too strong, but unusual) to me -- if it's pleasurable, why not seek it out?
I'm pretty unpersuaded that the problem is that women have to sift through a lot of unsavory stuff to find the porn they would like; the same is true for guys, and would seem to be easily resolved with just a little bit of effort.
It took this to be the operative part of Hilary's comment:
It's sort of that it appeals to a subconcious part of my brain, and if I tried to approach it consciously, the effect would be lost.
It is difficult to pin down why one doesn't -- I don't -- feel any need to seek out porn, but it's something like that. Watching porn is like self-stim: not quite like masturbation, but close. I don't really need the visual stimulation to get turned on, and there's way too much room for the possibility that I'll wind up feeling, "Jeez, let's shut it off, this is silly."
Does any of this have to do with voyeurism?
Effort costs are different and the visceral weight of the unsavoryness is different. For women generally, it's their class of people and by extension them personally that's being targeted and judged to be deserving of such treatment in misogynist porn. Not to say that you or I or some other men aren't squicked out, but how that material involves and implicates us is different.
160 -- I do get that argument and it makes some sense, but I just don't find it that persuasive. If it was really just the unsavoryness of the effort of searching out porn through misogynist dreck that was the problem, we'd expect to find successful blogs oriented towards picking and choosing porn for women, porn marketed directly for and at women, gatekeeper labels for porn, etc. AFAIK there's very little of that and what there is hasn't been particularly successful. And even without gatekeepers its not like the effort is that hard.
I agree that this:
It's sort of that it appeals to a subconcious part of my brain, and if I tried to approach it consciously, the effect would be lost.
is the operative part of Hillary's comment, and also the most interesting.
162.last: I've said this here once before, but I have no idea if it resonates for other women (or men). A significant part of what turns a person (me) on has to do with novelty, frisson. I don't mean something especially kinky or unusual, or perpetually changing partners: just the ongoing development and change that's involved in any relationship with a real live person.
We all know that getting into a rut sexually, doing the same thing in the same way again and again, can render sex just plain not interesting. You become inured to what was at one time exciting.
I tend to be uninterested in seeking out porn for something like that reason: I know that I will come to find that once-stimulating thing boring, will probably feel like ratcheting things up a notch is the only way to become stimulated again, and that means I lose excitement over what was once stimulating.
I take this to be a version of what Hilary was saying: that making porn-watching part of a regular routine will make it lose its effect, and deaden me in various ways to what was formerly arousing. I'll have worn a groove. I'd rather keep my real-life sexual encounters fresh.
162: There are all of those things that you're expecting, but don't think exist. This is one such gatekeeper. You're right that they aren't a huge commercial segment or earth shaking business model, but they aren't nothing either. Also, things are changing. Ten years ago, very few people had heard of Good Vibrations outside of the Bay Area, now, in part because of the cultural work of Sex and the City and others, dildos and vibrators are, if not ubiquitous, part of the accepted cultural landscape. Things can change for porn as well, even if we agree they haven't really yet.
Again I'm serially commenting (and will cut it out soon), but is there some idea that it's unfortunate if women don't tend to watch porn? Jimmy's mention of the increasing ubiquity of dildos makes it sound as though there's some idea that the real-life sexual world is inhibited.
129
126 is interesting. Hard to see why one wouldn't seek out something that produces that response, but that's what a lot of people seem to be saying about women.
It is my understanding that the response in question (lubrication) evolved as a protective measure against the possibility that the woman was about to be raped. Which would explain why it is unconnected with conscious desire and why women don't seek it out.
Back before the veldt, women had sex dry.
Finding non-misogynistic porn is very easy since there's tons of it out there, completely avoiding exposure to the ugly stuff is impossible for video porn. This is especially true for commercial porn which has a much, much higher quotient of deeply disturbing material than amateur porn. That is, there is no shortage of people playing out d/s fantasies in amateur videos, but that's just a fetish I find unappealing, not morally disturbing the way the non fetishy degradation of women in much of commercial porn is. And I do imagine the fact that I'm a guy makes that less of a problem. If I were a women I suspect that the inevitability of seeing the ugly stuff, if only briefly before clicking away, might make it impossible to surf porn enjoyably.
is there some idea that it's unfortunate if women don't tend to watch porn?
It seems like there are two competing narratives: (a) that visual porn, while somewhat enjoyable, isn't sought out by women for some kind of emotional response reason, perhaps having to do with "conscious effort" or repetition or something like that and (b) that visual porn, while somewhat enjoyable, isn't being sought out due to a failure of effective marketing and distribution for women.
Both of these narratives could be true at the same time, of course.
is there some idea that it's unfortunate if women don't tend to watch porn?
No. I'm sure you could find someone willing to make that argument, but no, I'm saying that it's unfortunate if women who want to watch porn don't because they find the sexism in most porn too daunting, and/or if our cuture's shametastic ideas about women's sexuality kept them from enjoying sex and representations of sex in general.
Jimmy's mention of the increasing ubiquity of dildos makes it sound as though there's some idea that the real-life sexual world is inhibited.
I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying here. That many people aren't sexually inhibited and that sex toys have long been considered normal? That dildos don't represent what you think I think they do? That dildos aren't necessary to sex and therefor don't enter into questions of inhibition or disinhibition? I don't get it.
but is there some idea that it's unfortunate if women don't tend to watch porn?
Depends why they aren't. If it's because they're not that into it, no. However, if they want to but don't because social norms make them feel guilty about enjoying it then it is a problem.
170.last: No, no, I'm just saying that a woman who doesn't watch porn (or use sex toys) isn't by definition inhibited, and I wouldn't have thought anyone believed that. But some of the discussion late in this thread made it sound as though we really, really want to encourage women to engage with more porn/sex toys, because that would be good.
But the rest of your 170, and 171, clarify.
teraz says what I've been trying to say better.
My impression from stories about the industry is that commercial porn is very much financially and creatively oriented towards a core group of dedicated buyers, and that it tends to very constrained in the forms it pursues because of what it believes porn must have in order to satisfy these consumers, hence the enduring place of external ejaculation. There are titles and directors that try new things, but they are going after a niche market, and someone has to finance these things. So if we're not describing current practices, but trying to understand why they exist, it's important to distinguish between filmic representations of sex and porn as it's currently constituted.
That dildos don't represent what you think I think they do?
They are supposed to represent miniature penises, right?
Did somebody say penis? Hee hee!
174: Penises, yes. Sometimes also dolphins.
The external ejaculation thing is boring, I must say. Upthread there was a suggestion that pron-watching hasn't had any negative effects, but you know: I think more men like to engage in external ejaculation now, which practice I've taken to be a sort of emulation of what turned them on in watching porn. Ogged put up a post about this once.
someone has to finance these things.
My understanding is that even commercial porn can be made for an incredibly small amount of money, and distribution is also extremely cheap (even when not over the internet). I'd think that a niche market for women which might (inter alia) encourage people to actually pay premium prices for DVDs would clean up.
167
Back before the veldt, women had sex dry.
It's turtles all the way down and veldt all the way back.
Robert, go for it. The pron business is probably like the booze business: withstands any recession.
The external ejaculation thing, particularly on the face, illustrates the difference between misogynistic and non misogynistic porn. In commercial porn much of the time, most of the time even, it is played out as a degrading, humiliating thing. In amateur porn it is both less common (though far from uncommon) and it tends to be a 'yay orgasm/come' thing with the woman very into it. Same exact act, but so different.
I'd think that a niche market for women which might (inter alia) encourage people to actually pay premium prices for DVDs would clean up.
There's only one way to find out, Halford. I have a business proposition for you...
I kid. Seriously, as at least one person above has pointed out with a link, these things do exist. But I think you really underestimate how culturally embedded this stuff is--not the enjoyment individuals take in watching/reading particular pieces of erotica, but how young people grow up and come to see X as someone one does as a regular thing.
Another analogy: team sports. Whether or not you're somebody who regularly plays team sports, I submit, has a lot more to do with historically contingent aspects of your past than with how much you fundamentally love the experience of playing, in some stable-utility-function sense. (Obviously, if you dislike playing, you won't; the point is merely that of the set of those-who-would-like-it, whether you play or not isn't even mostly about how much you like it.) My vague sense of things is that adult women playing recreational sports is something that largely dates from the post-Title IX generation--that is, it really took the institutionalization of the activity to translate into later leisure behavior.
So: I think these days, most young women are exposed to porn, but it's perhaps not in all that different a sense from being "exposed to naked men" by a flasher on the subway platform--it's the same old stuff targetted towards the old markets, the compulsive porn-consumers who in days past would have been providing the Times Square theater jizz-moppers their livelihoods. The opportunities Halford is talking about surely exist, but I think leisure consumption patterns of this type change more slowly than, say, kids' taste in music.
Other banned potential analogies--different national per-capita book consumption, genres thereof, etc.
181: The amateur porn version can make sense; I do wonder whether it would particularly occur to many people if they hadn't seen it performed via video porn. That it's part of the potential repertoire now doesn't make it bad, obviously, but it reflects what I think of as a shifting of the erotic vocabulary. That in itself is not bad or wrong either, except that some men (and women) have trouble telling the difference between the misogynistic and the non-misogynistic versions. If the culture's erotic vocabulary is shifting toward inclusion of acts that began in misogynistic fashion, we do have to be aware of that.
183 last Given that commercial porn can present absolutely every aspect of sex, including the woman's enjoyment and orgasm, in a degrading, misogynistic manner I'm not sure how much it matters regarding any specific act.
Mm, you've kind of lost me, or I'm getting tired. I think it does matter; people take lessons about sex, whether they think they are or not, from watching porn. I suppose I think that the depictions of some acts are more misogynistic than others, but I don't feel the need to strenuously defend that. If commercial porn has a tendency to be degrading to women, that's enough to keep one away.
Ogged put up a post about this once.
Yes.
There was also this discussion.
If somebody wants to start a make a new, more equitable type of pron, I have a great title for the first show.
"Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"
Opportunity for a new porn kink. Or several.
Back before the veldt, women had sex dry.
To a distressing extent in a number of south-of-the-Saharan African countries, they still do. Cornstarch is a sex aid in South Africa.
For different reasons, also in Iowa.
188: Something I could imagine Alex and his droogs using. Very horrorshow.
187: "Thick description" does sound dirty hot.
And on the external ejaculation thing, as discussed here several times in the past as I recall, there is some research on male sexual response when looking at images indicating "sperm competition" (I can find "Image content influences men's semen quality" but it seems like a crappy study ... they also postulate a cell-phone link). Research aside, I think that there is a general belief that for heterosexual porn men come harder when they see other men come. Not an argument against it being misogynistic of course.
188: I have, while wearing gloves (and not the special iPhone kind), used my nose to answer calls.
189: If you got the mixtures right you could conceivably create a non-Newtonian fluid which would serve the purpose of slowing down an overly enthusiastic fucker.
How odd.
Apparently Ogas and Gaddam are having a Q & A at the freakonomics blog.
Taking place approximately now.
I don't have time to participate, but at least somebody should see if it's interesting and if they respond to questions meaningfully.
I certainly enjoy porn more when it shows a woman having an orgasm. I think it doesn't have to be about sperm-competition to be true that seeing someone of your own gender enjoy themselves is especially enjoyable.
I wonder if a lot of this "men's brains react to sperm" stuff isn't a way to explain the same-sex aspect of pornographic enjoyment without implying men are gay or something.
198: Yes, I've had that thought as well, although the two could actually be intertwined in some ways. BU that's a bit veldt-y for my taste.
Cornstarch is a sex aid in South Africa.
Not just South Africa! Though google indicates that AbsorbShun proved to be an unsuccessful business venture stateside after all. I guess it was hard to turn a profit once people realized they could just roll their own.
I always assume that when women act like they enjoy the proceedings in porn or prostitution they're indeed acting, and that unless they're obviously self-lubricating they're at best just waiting for it to end. (Is anybody over 13 really stupid enough to think women become prostitutes because they really enjoy random sex with ugly old smelly fat strangers?) The same with most of the women who moan and so on in non-professional encounters: it not only sounds fake, it's distracting and demoralizing. But then I gave up caring about what a stud I was (or not) in my early 20s, around he time I started caring more whether a woman could, say, carry on a decent two-way conversation. (When I want to hang out with a lesbian it's not because I'm aching to fuck her, it's because I enjoy her company; people sometimes insist on flattering themselves in the wrong direction.)
And dryness always rubbed me raw. Yuck. How can anybody enjoy all that friction? Why not just jerk off with sandpaper?
Oh and 2: porn is getting grosser all the time. Are men really that bored with sex?
People are weird. (And this one's only 202.)
By the way, what does any of this have to do with the third sex?
By the way, what does any of this have to do with the third sex?
Huh. My favorite porn star is participating in some kind of event tomorrow where you bring art supplies and draw porn stars. I guess I will miss NYC.
I always assume that when women act like they enjoy the proceedings in porn or prostitution they're indeed acting, and that unless they're obviously self-lubricating they're at best just waiting for it to end.
There's something oddly puritanical about the notion that women engaged in scandalous forms of sex can't possibly be getting off.
Also, porn and prostitution are different in some crucial ways. Beloved Stoya explains her perspective on the difference (which she is careful not to dilate) here. I would also clarify that in prostitution, usually one partner is paid and the other does the paying, while in porn all sexual partners are paid by those selling the images or recordings.
Stoya's near-constant wide open-mouthed smile, as if she views the proceedings as the most amusing thing, is kind of strange, I think.
Defunkt's comment sort of implies that there's having sex with women who pretend to like it or having non-sexual relationships with women.
If there's one thing I've learned from having sex with women, it's that, unlike men, they can't assume that female sexual pleasure is fake, roll over, and go to sleep.
208: Why so presidential?
I think it's cute, anyway. I like to see people enjoy themselves.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out what it is that makes Stoya so compelling. She's cute but so are lots of people, and I like that she's not siliconized, but that's just not a point against. I think it's something about her eyes. It's not that she's naturalistic: her performances (those I've seen) are performances and her expresssions are stylized if not (comically) exaggerated. I think it's that her eyes seem engaged in a way that most performers don't. She seems to be, or to be giving a good performance of being, present.
I find her funny during sex, which is very attractive to me. I don't particularly like porn in which the women look like something really emotionally important is happening to them.
And on the external ejaculation thing, as discussed here several times in the past as I recall
I thought this was relatively commonly used a form of birth control. ie: that even though the girl is on the pill, they dont want internal ejaculation. I thought I read that here.
what it is that makes Stoya so compelling
She's from North Carolina.
217: That would do it.
215: I like my women like a like my retinas: comically detached.
She certainly doesn't have her Virginiaty.
Virginia is for lovers. North Carolina is for porn stars.
