The Atlantic on: Why porn proves sex is grim and miserable!

This is one of those links that have been peristalsing their way around the blogosphere for a little bit: Hard Core: The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women. Writer Natasha Vargas-Cooper has a bit of a rambling problem and this really didn't need to be a four-page article, but the gist of it is that porn is grim and nasty because male sexuality is grim and nasty. And the gist of my response is "well, sometimes, but it doesn't have to be and it's nicer when it's not."

There, I saved you four pages. Let's get wordy anyway, and pull some quotes.



As recently as 15 years ago, if somebody wanted vivid depictions of, say, two men simultaneously performing anal penetration on the same woman, securing such a delicacy would require substantial effort because the pornographic repertoire was still limited by the costs and imprecision of distribution. Leaving aside matters of taste and propriety, just how big an audience of horny derelicts or hurried businessmen would wriggle into a Pussycat Theater, with its sticky floors, and, in the company of others, watch a double-anal double feature?
VCRs weren't news in 1996. Double anal definitely wasn't news in 1996. But more to her point, double anal isn't a form of torture. It's definitely a challenge, it's not something I'm up for myself, but it's a sex act. It's arousing because it's a whole lot of dick in not a lot of hole, not because it's the worst thing you can possibly do to a woman.

Or, on another, stickier level, it's degrading, but it's supposed to be hot-degrading, not just unhappy. I'm pretty sure the intended mental image is of the woman afterwards going "ooh, those boys just used me, mmm," not of her going "oh God I'm disgusting and I hate myself" and curling into the fetal position.

Finally: the fact that double anal wasn't a big seller back when porn had less selection suggests that it's not a majority interest. If every man secretly wanted double anal, double anal would have been the naughty nurses of its day.

So, perhaps it’s no surprise that, for those who crave the more drastic masturbatory aid, the Internet offers easy access to a Grand Guignol of the outright bizarre (Midget Porn, Clown Porn, Girl-Fight Gang-Bang Porn). What is surprising is what now constitutes widely available, routine stuff in the major porn portals: episodes of men—or groups of men—having sex with women who are seven months pregnant; the ho-hum of husbands filming their scrawny white wives having sex with paunchy black men in budget motels; simulations of father-daughter (or mother-daughter) incest; and of course, a fixture on any well-trafficked site: double anal.
These aren't really "routine"; they exist, but I'm pretty sure that the genre of "conventionally attractive young women shimmy around naked and have vanilla sex" is still King Of The Porns.

Anyway, what's Grand Guignol about diversity? The porn industry certainly doesn't handle the subject with great sensitivity, but it's not intrinsically bizarre or gruesome for a pregnant woman or a little person to have sex, or for people to play around with cuckoldry or roleplay. It seems the writer is confusing "different types of sex" with "darker and nastier sex."

MEN, SO THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom goes, tend to desire more than women are willing to give them sexually. The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men. Yet in each new sexual negotiation a woman has with a man, she not only spends down that capital, she begins at a disadvantage, because the potential losses are always greater for her. A failed or even successful single encounter can be life-altering. Whatever “social construct” you might impose upon the whole matter, nature imposes much more rigorous consequences on women than on men.
I impose the social construct of condoms with backup willingness to use the morning-after pill or abort. Pow. Then I impose the reality that people can't even tell what my sexual history is, let alone perceive how much "capital" I've "lost," whatever that even means. Ka-bam.

And as for my vagina as a "weapon" to be "granted" in the "struggle"... If I did have magical feminine wiles that let me manipulate men, you know what I'd use them for? Getting laid.

But the reactionary political correctness of the 1990s put forth a proposition even more disastrous to women than free love: sexual equality.
Disastrous!

This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril. Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche.
So, male readers, I have a question. Is the desire to subjugate and degrade women something that just naturally sets in around the time the deep voice and body hair get going? Do you have boyhood memories of waking up with unexpectedly sticky sheets and a sudden urge to see a woman devastated for your pleasure?

Because if so, I'm moving to a very small island.

Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.
And what do these dark, aggressive men want? Mostly to see pretty girls enjoying sex. OH THE DARKNESS.

You could be poking around for some no-frills Web clips of amateur couples doing it missionary style, but easily and rapidly you slide into footage of two women simultaneously working their crotches on opposing ends of a double-sided dildo, and then all of a sudden you’re at a teenage-fisting Web site.
Wow, that sounds exactly like that time I smoked a little weed with my friends, and the next day I was a homeless heroin addict with suppurating abscesses and a felony warrant.

Oh, and I see lesbian sex is intrinsically dirtier than straight sex.

But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their “serious relationship.” But the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort.
Sex in relationships? That's laughable! Let's just toss that whole idea out.

At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.
I don't believe this. No snark even. I just flat don't believe that guys in general hate the women they sleep with. That's not a normal dynamic.

Sometimes, man... sometimes I'll be having sex and I'll look up (down, back, in the mirror, behind the robotic octopus) at the guy and he's just smiling. Just grinning like an idiot that he's getting laid. There's no secret hatred. No dark psychodrama. Just "Dude, there's a cute chick on my cock! How awesome is that? Dude!"

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. [...]We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. [...]in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why[...] He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.
I think you could use this same logic to justify poo-eating as everyone's deep dark desire. Hey, you wanna be really uncomfortable?

But the author's on to something here. Sometimes, a certain irreconcilable, truly nasty darkness is a part of sex, and sometimes even though it's not justifiable or even okay, it feels right. Sometimes sex is mean and cruel and wrong, and it's the hottest thing.

Other times, sex is so full of love that you're almost brought to tears, and it's the hottest thing.

Other times, sex is giddy and giggly, a silly experimental game you're playing with each other's bodies, and it's the hottest thing.

Other times, sex is muscular and striving, your bodies soaked with sweat from the sheer effort you're exerting on each other, and it's the hottest thing.

Sex is a lot of things. Don't point at your personal kinks and your general stereotype of what you think porn looks like, and tell me that's all of sex. Oh, and while you're at it, don't tell me about a sexual encounter that you participated in and you clearly got off big-time on and tell me that it was 100% about male sexuality.

Pornography neatly resolves the contradictions—in favor of men. They fuck with impunity. Women never dream of staying. And if, God forbid, the women get pregnant, well, they can be used in pregnant pornos and then in an episode of Exploited Moms. What a marvelous means of delving into the heads of men.
It's pretty sad to imagine that men never want to be in relationships and never want to have families. No, wait, it's very, extremely, super, ridiculously sad. And I wonder what on Earth would make someone think this was the natural order of things. And I really wonder what on Earth would make someone think this is the natural order of things, and keep having sex with men.

For someone who praises stark "sexual honesty," the author is remarkably obtuse about what she gets out of sex with the horrible monsters that are men. If you're a masochist, lady, or if you like the idea of being used and discarded, or if you don't want a loving relationship yourself--own up.

ONE OF THE most punishing realities women face when they reach sexual maturity is that their maturity is (at least to many men) unsexy.
Now we're just in Wackyland. I don't even know what to say here. Dudes, you've just been upgraded from exploitative sadists to exploitative sadist pedophiles.

[Amateur sites like RedTube are] largely a grim parade of what women will do to satisfy men: young wives fingering themselves on the family couch, older wives offering themselves to their hubby’s Army buddies, aging moms in shabby corsets shoving their sagging rear ends into the camera.
If she hadn't grimmified the diction there, it'd be a party. Young women playing with themselves! Swinger ladies fucking hot guys in uniform! Women in corsets showing off their bodies! OH THE DARKITY DARK DARKNESS.




It goes on, but I've played into the ramble-a-thon enough already. At this point I'm just writing a disorganized response to a disorganized argument.

(Also, I have to go to work. And I got distracted from this entry by making a strapon harness--which looks and works great, except I burned myself. I was using a lighter to seal the ends of the nylon straps, and... I'm clumsy. Ow.)

It's a mess of an article, as writing and as thinking, never even mind the sexual politics. But if you do mind the sexual politics, all you get is the following:

1) Porn is always dark and miserable.
2) Therefore, male sexuality is always dark and cruel.
3) Therefore, sex is always grim and destructive.
4) Therefore, please publish me in "The Atlantic."

I didn't find it real insightful.