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?

Just wanted to say thanks to dittany for that link to Robert Jensen's piece on porn, sex and cruelty uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/pornography&cruelty.htm which was very thought provoking.

Yes I think that's closer to the mark BitofFun.
The 'acting out the hatred towards the mother' argument is a sneaky way of saying misogyny is women's fault.

Sakura: but I think that treating sexual expression and sexually explicit media - indeed, 'wank material' as something irrelevant, unimportant and nasty is not a good idea because it allows the myth that sex is something irrelevant and nasty that women dislike and need to be protected from, to flourish.

Does it allow that myth to develop? Some of the most mind-blowing sexual experiences I've ever had was when I was young with boys of my own age, and I think it's because they hadn't been exposed to that much porn.
Do you think it's possible that the more porn a bloke watches the worse he'll be in bed?

I think that it is certainly true that inexperienced men who have been exposed to a lot of porn might be shit in bed.

Remember too that girls are being exposed to this version of sexuality now too, so sadly you might have a situation where inexperienced people are trying to replicate porn sex as that is the idea of what sex is that they have been given, and thus are denied the experience of experimenting for themselves and finding out what makes them tick, also in porn the point is usually missed that it's supposed to be fun/enjoyable etc.

I've often wondered this - why a 'straight' man would want to watch some guy waggling his huge penis around, watching it be sucked etc ... I assume they are getting off alot on the visual of the penis.

I can't even answer the argument the other way (do women get off on seeing the vaginas in porn) because I do!

I know what you mean about 'acting' and about women accepting male sexuality as their own. I think Sam in sex and the city is a perfect example.
Remember that 'more' magazine for young teenagers that had the 'position of the fortnight'. I remember looking at them and thinking 'well, yes, it looks okay, but I don't see how it could beat what Kev did for me last Saturday'
Male and female sexuality is so different, I think.

Again I feel I have to say that some women do have a sexuality that is more usually found in men, and that there is nothing wrong with them for that.

it gets back to this averages thing - one average it may be that women and men have different sexualities, but for specific individuals many people have the sexuality more commonly found in the other sex, and that is fine.

If we're thinking predatory/bedpost notching type behaviour vs needing an emotional connection type stuff.

the problem with both mainstream porn and say what we were talking about the other day with the suggestion of "normal loving sex" for children in schools is that both of these direct ererging sexualities and potentially stifle them.

Agree with Dittany. The male viewer puts himself in the place of the man, the female viewer puts herself in the place of the woman.

Which is why men being exposed to mainstream porn is categorically a bad thing. It forces men into "being" the person who is doing these things, and as we have seen some of the things that they are then repeatedly being asked to "do" will amost certainly warp their view of what is right/acceptable/how women react etc etc and all teh rest of it.

yes, there is no one sexuality for women, of course. I identify with some aspects of Sam, but that type of sexuality is the only one you really get to see usually in the media. And I definitely agree that porn and the media direct people's behaviour, which is stifling. Just as they direct men's expectations of what a woman should look like.

Does this tie in with the rape conversations with the following thought

On teh rape threads it has been repeatedly been said that men are not incapable of reading facial expressions and body language, and that a man who says "how was I to know she didn't want it" when it should have been pretty bleeding obvious must be lying.

But if men have been raised from boyhood on films of sex where the women involved do not look like they are enjoying it, then maybe they do believe that this is what women look like when they have sex.

I know that sounds like I am giving an "out" which as you can imagine is not very comfortable for me, but may there be something in that?

And it ties in with a very old fashioned idea that women don't enjoy sex, they "lie back and think of england" and it's something that they put up with. If it's something that women put up with, rather than enjoy, then that means that you can do more or less whatever you like, as they won't enjoy any of it anyway.

Disclaimer: Most men are fine IME. Even the ones that have watched porn understand that it is not real life. And most men I know would walk out if shown a film that was explicitly abusive. (Unfortunately a lot of it is impicitly abusive and most people seem able to ignore that).

Good question Dittany, and one I will have to think about.

Another question - what came first, the misogyny or the porn?

If mainstream porn is an expression of hatred for women, then it is being made to sell to an audience of misogynists. We know that many many men really do hate women, and do rape them, and so on. So the fact that they have films which cater to their tastes is no surprise.

However many men don't hate women, but they see these films as it is what is available. So teh question is, do they affect these men, the normal ones?

In the way that porn is seeping into society at large, harder and nastier porn is seeping into a world where previously it was not consumed. Is this having an effect on men?

And this isn't a "what about the men", but to try and understand whether this type of porn is a problem for people who are being abused inside the industry, for women in the wider world, or for everyone.

Perhaps it's because we see so much blood and gore and violence in the media, that they just think it's another form of acting. Even women are desensitized to the way women are treated on TV and films. I remember being very shocked as a little girl. And then as a young teenager I remember wondering why the murder victim always had to be a woman. Now I don't question it. I just 'know' that murder victims on TV are women, with the odd exception. CSI: let's find the most sadistic way a woman can possibly be murdered and up the antse each week
And let's be honest, some men haven't got the first clue about women and probably believe they're enjoying it.

To answer your question, Dittany, I think it's hard to accept because statistically we know that the men in our lives watch porn.
It's difficult to accept that the man you go to bed with, in your vulnerable state, gets off on degradation. Rather he only watches happy people having happy sex.

And of course women watch it as well.

Could this be doing something to women in the wider world as well?

Sakura yes we had that CSI conversation recently, there is something really disturbing about all these (usually) american detective shows and the whole representation of women in them.

I watched something the other day which is a bit crap, it was the last episode, and the storyline was just really openly and lovingly rendering various rape fantasies. It's just unbelievable and bizarre and a real concern I think.

Wukter's point is correct - all of the men we know will have seen porn, almost certainly more than once.

"There isn't a class of women who it is OK to treat like this"

That's true, I'm desensitized to that too I suppose. I do sort of think soft porn is okay at least, but when I get my head around the fact here's a camera crew, and a tea lady, and a director and a bunch of other people right there in the background giving directions while she's lying there spreadeagled... and then, when I think about my own sexual experiences, I have to start admitting there's something not quite right.
Then when you factor in the economic side and wonder why it is that it's usually men behind the camera you begin to see this as a definite 'woman problem'.

I'd agree with your last point Dittany - I think watching it screws up notions of "normal" sexual behaviour for both sexes.
Ariel Levy made the point in Female Chauvinist Pigs that young girls feel sex is something they perform for the benefit of boys, rather something they experience as an exxpression of their own sexuality.

Yes that was what I was getting at - girls and women didn't used to watch porn, what is the effect of themn watching it now, and nastier stuff, and increasingly young ages. I am not surprised by the result of that research about girls who watch porn and sexual experiences.

Isn't showing porn a grooming thing? As was mentioned on the coke/scat porn thread? the problem is that girls and women are not just being groomed by individual abusive men, but from all sorts of quarters.

On the "But porn isn't a necessity. It's not a necessity to watch women being prostituted on film. If people wouldn't be happy for their husbands/partners to pop down to the local brothel to watch the action, why should porn be acceptable? "

I suppose that I am coming from it from teh perspective that most men first encounter porn with their friends at school. In that situation, where they are immature and there is peer pressure, combined with the fact that most teens have not got fully developed empathy/altruism type things going on, and you have a situation where most boys will go along with it and watch it. So by the time they are men, they are in a situation where porn is completely normal, and has been their companion through their years growing up etc. So it's just like a normal background thing. That if they saw for the first time ever aged 40 with wives and female children etc, they might well be horrified.

So when wives etc express disgust at them viewing porn, they are as the fact that it's degrading etc has never even crossed their minds. Becuase they started using it when they were very immature.

For me, with this, what I think is the problem is the portrayal of women across all types of media, which is reflected in porn. So the fact that more and more extreme things are becoming mainstream. Plus the huge powerful expoitative nature of teh mainstream porn industry. Plus the fact that porn is seeping into society, that children are exposed to it younger and younger, that it is so freely available. And not just films - images of women that reference the porn industry are everywhere, for children to see from when they are tiny.

The idea that some people would want to watch some other people having sex, is not for me, a problem in itself. it is how that desire is being met that is the problem.

that's true ISNT. If it was, say, (unpaid) people in your living room, aquaintances, people you'd met at a party (grasping at straws here!) it'd be less of a problem, perhaps? It's the industry that's the problem. Although I think even the first scenario might be open to abuse too.