straight pornography is male gay in sensibility

[Heathcliffscathy]

This came to me in a wave of inspiration...straight porn is a hypermasculinised view of sex. Hypermasculinity has it's place in the pantheon of what it means to be a gay male (not all, not every, by any means).

straight porn is totally phallocentric: penetrative to the exclusion of all else and the builds up to an inevitable anal sex finale, or blowjob come shot/facial.

the vagina plays second (third?) fiddle to anus and mouth and size is all. breast stimulation gets barely a look in.

bear with this as I know it's treading a dodgy generalisation line, but it does strike me that if you were to argue that male gay sexuality (as a generalisation, i know that there is a vast continuum out there that we are all on male and female) is the zenith of hypermasculanised male sexuality, then mainstream straight porn is pretty gay?

Do you think it's possible that the homoerotic is so repressed in 'straight' man that it has to find it's outlet in porn, which leaves women utterly hard done by porn wise?

i know there is a strong argument to suggest that straight porn is just about degrading women and undoubtedly that's in there a lot of the time but could there be another basis to it?

I read the OP to my DH just now as well and he has agrees, as a matter of fact when we first met he told me he doesnt like straight porn (or much porn at all tbh) because he isnt into looking at other mens dicks (his words not mine).

There are some really interesting points on this thread and i cant really contribute much except to say that porn culture seems to have pervaded many areas of society and i worry for my teen DD's and baby DS, its impossible to shield them from it short of cutting out all media and keeping them really sheltered (different topic sorry!) But that was a really good point OP and an interesting discussion.

MillyR you have articulated what i was struggling to say. I don't think two people having happy sex is what porn is about or what the market wants.

aha! why doesn't the market want it? isn't it what women want but don't get???

Sophable, I think if your clothes came with a video of the child who made your clothes collapsing with exhaustion at the sewing machine and the absolute evidence of exhaustion was right in front of you, you might be less likely to buy the clothes than in just your current state, where you think maybe a child made this.

And if there was such a video, I doubt you would enjoy masturbating to it.

Dittany loads of people are sexual exhibitionists - I have happened across plenty of people having sex over the years, who weren't upset about being "caught", and also live near a dogging spot, have seen people randomly having sex on holiday, all sorts.

milly re the happy sex thing. There are loads of TV progs etc where the leads are attractive and when they get together the audience can become rather flustered. mainstream films contain sex scenes which I'm sure people get aroused watching. Especially if they fancy the actors/characters. it's an extension of that I guess.

i was making a point about the human capacity to ignore what's in front of their noses if there is a get out clause, and in porn is the moaning and groaning and smiles (with dead eyes) and arching etc etc

Leningrad, I'm not sure of your meaning. Are you saying that, for example, if I enjoyed The Road to Wigan Pier and had built up an emotional response to the emotions of people in the book, someone might film a sex scene where they pretended to be in The Road to Wigan Pier?

I could possibly understand that. But I'd still prefer it as a written book of the sex so that I could hear the people's internal thoughts.

Real sex or mr bloody wotsit wandering out of that lake in a wet tshirt?

they are two differnt things lenin...

erotic depictions of consenual mutually enjoyable sex of all kinds should exist in mainstream porn but don't in the main, and i wonder why not and i wonder if they did whether women would be heavier porn consumers.

Lenin, that was to your 22.10 post about literary adaptations.

Night Dittany.

You are completely right about the porn industry. I don't think anyone here thinks otherwise.

The other problem is that women's views of what they want in a sex scene are massively varied, so the extra detail after the white shirt might not be profitable. That is the point of fan fiction, it is huge in number and massively variable, so that stories can appeal to a small audience.

If porn could be sold to women, it would be. The market is everything, but we don't form a solid market - we vary too much.

xposts!

Leningrad, I agree with you. I don't see the point in a piece of writing or film which just depicts sex acts - they simply aren't that interesting in isolation.

But do we not form a market due to societal pressures? All the usual stuff - upbringing, socialisation, access, peer pressure etc etc

I think that there is a market for porn for women. Adult women. But the porn market for males takes them from puberty to grave. So there is loads of it.

If you read threads on here (not the feminist section) a lot of women say they use porn (the usual made by men for men variety). If women knew there was an "ethical" version maybe they would view that instead?

Don't know.

I also want to feel that I can talk about this without being seen as a defender of the mainstream porn industry, which is very far from how I feel.

totally agree with your post and especially last sentence isnt

I need to go to bed now though.

And no, I'm not taking a videocamera with me

night all

But lots of people do want porn that's about happy people enjoying sex. And lots of people want to make porn that's consensual and fun for the performers etc. Unfortunately, based on my own experiences within the industry, what tends to happen is that a lot of the people with actual power (ie distrubutors etc) are not interested - not so much because they hate women and want to see them mistreated, but because they despise their own product and particularly despise their customers, so they are not prepared to take any more notice than 'Oh they'll buy any old crap, fuck off with your arty farty nonsense, this stuff is what the punter wants.'

ANd there is nothing wrong with sex as performance, or watching others have sex, or choosing to have sex for money.

"if, as the psychoanalysts argue, a part of the emergence of a male gay sexuality (the psychosocial part, as opposed to the possible role of genes etc, all of which play a role in all of our sexualities) is difficulty, making the transition to same sex identification which can result from a man-hating mother (dominant mother who for whatever reason unconscious or not trashes the father, who may or may not be absent) then that very lack of identification with the male might well be underpinned by a rage against the female."

I'm not sure that I agree with this because gay men sort of like women so much more than straight men do, and many have great relationships with their mothers.