To think that women reading erotica, however smutty, is not the same as men watching porn?

[Carla786]

I've seen some posts here and various articles elsewhere speak of women reading smutty books as if it's equivalent to men watching porn.
I can see how if a woman read huge amounts of them they might have unrealistic expectations. How common is this though?

I've had the misfortune to read a few pages of masterpieces like 'Bull Moon Rising' and 'Morning Glory Milking Farm' and I think the 'monster mance' trend is quite grim. I also find the popularity of dark romance including rape & abuse disturbing.

So I agree with some criticisms of romance fiction trends. But isn't equivalent to porn. Porn usually involves real actors, and even if the scene isn't violent, pressure is rife, performers suffer from injuries, men are pressured into using viagra to keep erections going. None of these issues are present in romance fiction.

Romance fiction doesn't lead men to suffer physical harm either. What romance novel has led to men being choked or pressured into anal sex?

I feel that sometimes coverage seems to want to imply that men and women' faults are equivalent. But if one sex is worse at something, men or women, it should be permitted to say that : if that's the reality. And I think porn is clearly worse. This doesn't mean issues with romance fiction shouldn't be discussed, it just means there' no need to equate them

AIBU?

Filmed porn involves real people, and while some is paid actors, a lot is not.

And real people are exploited. We just had the CNN article about men filming their drugged & sleeping partners.

There is no world in which middle-aged Martha writing about a woman shagging a werewolf or something is as bad as middle-aged John plying his wife with sleeping tablets to rape her on camera.

Ok, I said what I said. Enjoy your books.

So what did they do in the before times?

No because the "porn" here is in the imagination

Before porn they hadn't been desensitised by porn, so achieved gratification easier.

It's not a man thing though. It's a porn user thing, and it just happens that more men use porn. I am a forner porn using woman and I did notice a growing dependence. That dependence (on external stimulus to come) isn't there with erotica. I do use it for arousal but don't need it. And even the practical way it's used is different and healthier (will spare the details because it's TMI)

Well what @Wospa said. But given women were considered property in large swathes of the world and at various times in “the before times” as you call it, and the idea of consent was non existent, I’d say a lot of women were just assaulted on a regular basis. If we’re applying today’s standards to then that is.

There is no ‘before times’ when it comes to porn. Paintings with nude figures were commissioned by rich men to hang in their private rooms. Ancient societies made ‘fertility figures’ of lavishly endowed women. The human sexual drive is intense but it can be regulated and choices can be made.

I’d rather live now, even with all the porn problems we have, than in eg the Victorian era when there were thousands of children sold for rape on the streets of London, or in the Roman era when the point of sex was the domination of lesser beings. In all these eras people do still manage to have happy sex lives but I think it was a lot rarer in the past, especially for women.

This is true, and I agree that living now is so much better and safer. Sexuality is more open now than it has been ever before (certainly in modern times), allied with technology allowing an unprecedented number of ways to meet desires.
That creates down sides for sure. The porn industry and porn addiction being obvious ones. But on the flip side the public consciousness of sexual exploitation and abuse is far higher now than ever, so codes of behaviour have changed. Even if actual behaviour is slower to change, the acceptability of certain behaviours has changed.

20 years ago when I was a teenager, I had sexualised remarks made about me in front of me, was spoken of in sexual terms, was occasionally groped and treated as an object of male desire openly. This was before the explosion in porn availability that has come with smart phones.

Nowadays that kind of behaviour is much less likely to happen and would be called out much more readily, often with the police being enthusiastically involved. This despite all those males probably now using porn far more.

When I say “before times” I mean a time before there was multi million dollar industrialised porn using real, often exploited, coerced and trafficked women available free 24 hours a day. As you well know. The “oh it’s just the same as cave paintings”brigade are disingenuous, to put it mildly.

The “oh it’s just the same as cave paintings”brigade are disingenuous, to put it mildly.

People have always depicted others having sex, with whatever technology is available. It's just that it's only been in recent years you don't need a lot of money to make moving images, because the technology is now widely available very cheaply.

If your watching images, you don't have to do much work, just watch. If you're reading, the mental load is more, as you have to do the imagining. If I write, "a man in a black hat walked down the street," everyone reading will imagine different streets, different styles of hat, daytime, nighttime, modern day, different historical eras, men of different ages, heights, builds. On screen, you just get the man in a black trilby walking down a dark unlit street with no other people about, or however they chose to depict it. There are things you don't know, like whether the actor chose to be there, whether they had any input on the direction, whether they are getting paid, and if so, how much. We might know from other sources, and that's how we know many of those in porn films have had little choice in the process.

That can happen in written fiction, too, but the difference is, no real people are harmed. It could inspire people to harm others in real life, but I suspect not quite as easily as seeing it on film would.

I've never read de Sade, but I doubt he was the first person to enjoy sadistic practices; he was just the first to result in an eponym, because of what he wrote. I don't know how influential he was on sexual practices (wouldn't be surprised if someone's done a PhD on it somewhere, though.) He was influential enough to inspire the teams sadistic, sadism. We know writing can be influential. I don't think it's influential in the same way as film - it works on different bits of the brain. They can both be problematic.

And historical context is always important. It usually tells us things aren't new, and if we ban them, they don't go away - they might become far less widespread, though.

Yes, obviously people have created images. The issue we have to consider in the days of industrial pornography is what happens to the people being used and abused in the creation of the images. That’s where the disingenuousness comes in.

Nobody thinks Pornhub is the same as cave paintings, thats a stawman. The point is titillating content is has always existed in different ways.

Not sure what point you think you’re making….but the straw man here is entirely of your construction.

I don’t think you know what the phrase means then. You’re misinterpreting other people’s arguments as if you’ve made some profound gotcha. You haven’t.

Anyone recommend any good reads…

“One of the main problems with the modern porn industry is that it involves real life women who are often coerced, exploited, trafficked or all three”

”People have always created images to masturbate to-look at those cave paintings”

I agree with this.

I would say that I think paintings can fall into the category similar to books, in that they don't require real people to have sex in order to exist the way porn does. I don't think they're necessarily bad
Otoh there is obviously the issue of model exploitation if a model is used. But the stakes are not as dangerous as porn.

I'd also note that before the modern porn era, stag films showing real sex existed as far back as the early 1900s. Grim stuff seems to have been depicted in some like (apparently simulated) rape, urination fetishes. Apparently the prostitutes who were in them sometimes saw it as having better conditions and pay than prostitution - bit that's a long way from saying the women necessarily agreed. We know both Joan Crawford and possibly Marilyn Monroe were rumoured to have done them when short of money.

They were called stag films as men might view them on stag nights,, in US college fraternising etc

The difference is that they fortunately couldn't be marketed in anywhere near the way porn is today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_film

"Erotica" is just middle class pornography. The distinction here is between literary porn and visual porn.

I find it all very sleazy, but I'd imagine that in both cases, human participation will soon be more-or-less obsolete, except as consumers.

Visual porn can be produced much more cheaply and efficiently by AI, which can also churn out smutty stories at breakneck speed.