Porn

[Bubbles01]

Am I being unreasonable for getting upset that my husband keeps looking at porn?

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VOTE LIB DEM!

Right. So you didn't bother to read the thread then, as your points do not address the arguments put forward by people on either side of the argument on this thread.

It is really easy to win an argument by defeating the position you would like someone to hold rather than the one they do.

In Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan they have great big pictures of penises on the walls to ward of the evil eye news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4381893.stm
Em... some are paintings of giant ejeculating cocks on the sides of houses.
Its not porn because..?

It is not porn because the definition of porn is that it is a creative portrayal which has as the creator's primary purpose the objective of causing sexual arousal.

Those drawings are simply drawings of genitalia. Their primary purpose is connected to the supernatural, and nobody from that culture, from the little we know from the article, is suggesting that they inspire sexual arousal.

Its a 5 foot ejeculating cock though.

Explicit is not the same thing as pornographic.

Have you ever herd of these, you can find them in old churches in Ireland www.sheelanagig.org/
there not porn then..

So if I had a drawing of a 5 foot Bhutan ejeculating cock on my wall pointing at my sheelanagig carveing is that porn then?

I don't know. I am not an expert on Irish archaeology. I have no knowledge of what those images meant to that culture, who created them or why.

DavidHappydad your a 5 foot ejeculating cock

Im going to bed now and hope to fuck I dont dream of the above.

MillyR: There isn;t actually anything wrong with creating a picture/story song purely for the purpose of sexually arousing someone else. Sexual arousal is not a bad thing.

Again, I didn't say that sexual arousal was a bad thing. You are fighting against an argument that is not being made.

Sheela na Gig article here too. Interesting comment on what the grotesque aspect of these figures may represent to the male psyche.

DavidHappyDad -- Your post was sexist, aggressive, dismissive of over 900 thoughtful posts on this thread, vulgar, misogynistic and offensive.

SGB -- of course the bad stuff in porn comes from the bad stuff in society, mainly the idea that women are not human. It comes from pure and deep-seated male fears, fantasy and misunderstanding of women. It has nothing to do with women having some alleged role of controlling access to sex. It has very little to do with sex apart from the obvious sexual activity, which is the main point many have made on the thread.
This thread has never been about messed up teenagers and their access to lowest common denominator porn vs. the deranged abstinence movement. (The middle ground between those two is not better class porn, btw)
I recommend you take a look at the links that have been posted.

I am very interested in this topic - not in porn, per se, though I would be if there were more female-friendly renditions around. I'm not about to repeat the very cogent arguments put here by better-informed feminists than me.
Just wanted to throw a few extras into the mix

The statement that women's desire is not visually stimulated is a lie. The fact is, we show a physical response (vaginal lubrication, engorgement, etc) to a far broader range of visual stimuli than men. In short, we can be turned on by almost anything!
Could male objectification and 'control' of women's sexuality be rooted in fear and/or envy?

However, women's perception of whether they're turned on seems quite out of kilter with what our bodies are doing. We can be sticky as a caramel factory 'down there', but still say we feel nothing.
Could this be an indication that we've been socialised to ignore own own bodies and responses?

Films like "Nine and a Half Weeks" and "Eyes Wide Shut", which were designed to appeal sexually to women (amongst other motives), are often excluded from discussions about sex in cinema.
Why is this? Which general-release film are you happy to say you did find sexually arousing?

I don't think objections to porn come down to women's reluctance to admit to being aroused by various different kinds of stimuli, or that women have been socialised to repress their responses to porn, for example, and express their sexuality in more acceptable circumstances. There are plenty of men who are opposed to porn, for much the same reasons as women are.

The idea that male objectification and control of women's sexuality could be rooted in fear and/or envy is very pertinent here, imo.

ItsGraceAgain, the topics raised in your post are a probably a thread in themselves. I think that many women have integrated their sexuality with their identity so that sensuality, sexuality, and personality blend into each other. So I agree with you that women find huge numbers of things sexually arousing including many things that are directly about sex and many things that are not about sex at all.

I would speculate that is why it would be hard to make pornography that appeals to women as a group. Pornography's purpose is primarily or solely about sexual arousal, but many women don't compartmentalise their sexual arousal in that way. Sexual arousal is not some separate part of women that can be targeted without many other parts of their imagination, sensuality and so on also being targeted.

It may be true that men can separate what goes on in a lot of porn from how they view women in real life, as if they can somehow place sexual arousal in some box and put it away when convenient. I don't know. I do know that would not be true for me because there is no clear dividing line between the part of me that responds sexually and the part of me that simply responds to life.

In answer to your question about sexually arousing media. TV audiences are overwhelmingly female. So a lot of tv drama is very much aimed at women and attempts to address the kind of thing they want to view; part of that is about things that women find sexually appealing; I would say that a lot of the tv exposure of emotional vulnerability and disclosure of emotional states of attractive men who are also often in sex scenes as well is aimed at the sexuality of many women - it is a kind of 'emotion porn.' Obvious examples of that would be Supernatural and True Blood.

Interesting post, Milly, thank you! You're probably right about it being food for another thread ...

In my personal experience (so not a theory as such!), men's minds are as closely linked to their willies as our orgasms are linked to our feelings. It's an atypical (hetero) man whose opinion of a woman's intelligence, skills and talent is not swayed by his stiffy when he sees her. I find it hard - no, impossible - to believe the gasping, available c*nt in porn films has no effect at all on his perception of women.

It's interesting how often porn users say their media don't 'objectify' women. If that's true, what are they saying? That they're involved with the female character's psyche and development? Rofl. Or that they respect & admire the actresses who subject themselves to multiple rape for a bank clerk's salary? Not sure how much weight I'd give that viewer's intellect, then.

The only way to summarise porn is as a means by which men masturbate to images of women in humiliating situations. I have quite a bit of tolerance for human frailty, and I don't think anything will make it go away. But I do worry about how far boundaries are being pushed, and about widespread acceptance that porn is OK. Iyswim.

Hmm. Talking to myself here, but still!

I was thinking about those Victorian porn photos and tachyscopes, with girls lifting their skirts to show a bit of bum. To modern eyes, they look sweet. But they were shocking in their time - a time in which women's dress was so restrictive as to cause heart attacks, and the word of a man was law (even to Queen Vic.)

Perhaps our boundary-pushing is going to lead to a place where there are no more boundaries? Perhaps we're all - men and women - heading for a future in which we embrace all aspects of our selves, without prejudice? Even if so, would it be a good thing?

For as long as women in the City need to put up with having their knickers ripped off during meetings (yes, it does happen), I remain unconvinced.

But I thought I should try and explore another POV

Or maybe it will lead to a world where filmed child rape (kiddie porn) or bestiality will be as acceptable and available, and even defended from some sort of aesthetic or positive sexual experience pov, as much of mainstream porn is nowadays? It's possible that the boundaries will be pushed so far that a majority will rise up and finally say 'no more', as happened with anti-Semitism, but in the meantime, the flow of dreck continues.

I tend to take the pessimistic view that something that is so intrinsically flawed could ever lead to anything good.

Victorian porn didn't lead to women's suffrage or laws that allowed women an equal say in court or rights to custody of their children after divorce. Modern porn didn't give us any of the rights women won by political action during the 60s. The fact that women can still endure discrimination and even outright sexual assault in the workplace without much hope of redress shows that we still have a long way to go in terms of having ourselves taken seriously and treated as humans. I do not see porn as helpful to women in that regard. It portrays women as good for and interested in one thing and one thing only.

it portrays that women are interested in who quickly the plumber can get there.

Having a blocked toilet just the other night, i feel their pain!

how even maybe!

Thing is, women are objectified in the rest of current culture/thinking/attitudes. Women are labelled as to whether they are mothers or not mothers,'attractive' or not (this is not purely a porn thing, a woman who wears no makeup and doesn't obsess about her weight is condemned), women are expected to do all the unpaid caring work in society because they are somehow 'designed' for it.
While there is a lot of porn that's unpleasant, sexist, offensive, etc, I really don't like this mindset that porn is the source and repository of all sexism, and that just getting rid of sexually explicit entertainment material would somehow get rid of sexism. Religion ought to be the primary target of feminism, followed by patriarchal economic culture. Then we can start worrying about what people wank over.