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?

"Are a lot of people finding it difficult to believe that men watching porn might really mean it? That they enjoy watching women hurt and degraded and prostituted and turned into sexual objects for their use?"

Yes, I find this hard to accept. It may be true for compulsive porn consumers, but I do not believe that is true of every man who has seen some porn. I don't believe that most men fundamentally hate women.

No, but there is a general culture of misogyny. The entire concept of plastic surgey is based on misogyny, for example. So individual men don't "hate" women per se, but the culture is woman-hating.

Yes exactly.

And as a group, and often without even realising/thinking about it (which is an effect of a sexist culture in itself), men are consuming a product with is implicitly and often explicitly degrading to women and abusive etc. So as a group, and with this product, we have a problem.

In an ideal world we could all have access to ethical happy porn, but that's not where we are now. I agree with whoever upthread said that in the situation we have now, then the only option is to not use any, on the basis that it's all the same industry.

A really crap analogy might be to, um, eating eggs. So you have the desire to eat eggs. Big business resonds to that with caged birds to maximise profit. In eating the eggs you are complicit to the torture of these animals. So then you have free range eggs. the difference here is that if it were paralleled with porn, there would be no independent bodies checking that the eggs really were free range, and people could sell caged eggs as free range wihtout any recourse. in that case, i guess all you can do is avoid eggs altogether. Or keep your own chickens?

Does this help with your analogy?

Yes. yes it does

Not all men have seen porn it's presumptuous to accuse any group of people of all doing something. But most men have seen pornography in fact most people (both men and women) have seen pornography especially children/teens.

The average child sees their first porn by the age of just 11. Between 60 and 90 per cent of under-16s have viewed hardcore online pornography, and the single largest group of internet porn consumers is reported to be children aged 12 to 17.

www.psychologies.co.uk/articles/are-teenagers-hooked-on-porn/

Also most men don't hate women even those that watch pornography (also there are different types out there not all are of the same material.) i think their simple don't empathise at all they see it as just acting and that most of the women in pornography are not forced to be there so they just think that if they hated it then they shouldn't do it.

People uses reasons not to feel guilty about things all the time, when people buy chocolate they are not thinking of the exploited cocoa farmers or when they buy clothes (cheap/brand names) they know that for some of them children are being made to make them but that is not in their thoughts when they are picking up the product.

Excuse the first comment i made i read the quote wrong thought it said all men.

Max Hardcore is not the norm of porn at all he is branch of it and i think he is in jail now and from what i have heard of American prisons he is probably getting as good as he gave.

I am not defending people who watched Max or anything just saying that what he did was disgusting and the people who watched his stuff are no better than he is but his stuff is extreme and most pornography is not like that, so most people who watch pornography were most likely not watching his stuff.

I am talking about the 'normal' (i say normal as in normal for the industry) stuff the ones they churn out the most which people will have watched the most.

I assure you i am not admonishing anyone

Sammyuni wrote - "the single largest group of internet porn consumers is reported to be children aged 12 to 17".

How depressing. For them, porn seems to have become equated with learning about sex. The mind boggles at the implied creation of all those 12-year-old misogynists?

I wonder if these teenage users of porn ever stop to think "is watching porn online necessary to a good sex life?". Do they just passively consume porn, with brains in neutral, assuming, through ignorance, peer pressure and marketing that they must look at all this porn.

Millions of people had good sex lives before all that porn arrived on the Internet, didn't they?

It was me who said that all men had seen porn at least once. I can't find wheer I said it now though

I do think you would be extremely hard pressed to find a man (or woman) who has never ever seen even a clip or image of something pornograhpic ever.

Even if you reduce it to just pornogrpahic films, I think you'd struggle to find many men who have not had unsusually isolated upbringings who have never ever seen any. And espeically if you narrow it to people under 40, say.

I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that no-one in our society escapes exposure to this stuff. Look at the fact that coke was posting references to scat porn on childrens facebooks, that certain magazines and newspapers are put at childresn eye level, that hugh heffner is a household name etc. It's everywhere.

vesuvia I think that an interest in sex and bodies and stuff is quite natural for a teenager, whether a boy or a girl. I remember cutting pictures of people in their underwear out of magazines when I was a girl

the problem is that now this natural curiosity results in easy access to a wealth of hardcore images.

ISNT, I agree absolutely.

Er, I didn't say that most men use porn. Although I think the vast majority have probably seen some.

But I agree with your basic argument that porn involves viewing the actual abuse of women, although it may not occur to some viewers.

I still thnk it's a mistake to treat porn as something separate to any other kind of media. Porn didn't start the culture of abuse, degradation and humiliation that is currently so popular in mainstream media, nor did the porn industry originate the idea that sex is dirty and harmful to women, and that women who claim to enjoy it are 'sluts' and not worthy of good treatment.
People don't 'need' porn in the way they need food, or air, or sleep, but a substantial percentage of people 'need' art, media, entertainment which covers those areas of life that particularly interest them, which is why my argument has always been that the answer to 'bad' (misogynistic etc) media is to produce 'better' media with socially positive values and high standards of welfare and safety - and pay - for those involved.

SGB agree absolutely.

think that the perpetuation of the myth that men are porn watching monsters and women are just not that interested in sex for sex's sake are unhelpful and plain wrong.