Make love not porn

[Hullygully]

New sex site, founder keen to educate men about "real love making" not porny stuff.

Hurray?

It's true.

Humans have always liked to watch other humans going at it.

That being so, I'd rather consensual erotica than porn.

1. It is graphic images of people having sex.

2. Someone is making money out of it.

Ergo - it is porn. It just isn't hardcore gonzo porn.

I think yer woman who set it up should win the cynic hat. She saw a gap in the market and not only is she profiting from it but she is pretending that she is providing a caring sharing service. She has invented Good Porn For Teenagers.

I bet it will all still be patriarchal sex anyway - just without the bukake, gagging, verbal abuse, etc.

See, that's what I don't get.

While I think suspicion and cynicism is entirely warranted until circs prove otherwise, what, for example, would be necessary to suggest that it might be a genuine attempt at change?

Wanting all graphic images of human intercourse to simply stop in their entirety isn't going to happen: as said above, it's been going on since someone picked up a bit of slate and carved on a wall.

While I am not saying that Cindy is the shining crusader against porn (because I just don't know and am not her defender), what, if anything ever, would suggest a possiblity of change?

Cindy says she likes and watches porn.

Cindy charges people 5 dollars to sign up to her makelovenotpornsite.

Cindy is very cynical sincere about this.

Although I suspect that Cindy will not be laughing all the way to the bank because most porn consumers want to see hardcore.

oh well

I mean. Let us, then, leave cindy aside.

Given that humans like to look at humans engaged in sexual congress and always have and are unlikely to change.

And given that we all hate exploitative porn which is the form it takes now, what would offer hope?

It's very easy to be cynical, I suppose, but I am interested in possible ways forward too.

Hully I see where you are coming from and I see where the other side is coming from (picks out splinters)

I suppose the only 100% way to make safe porn is to make and watch your own. Then going down a notch in safety would be to somehow "know" the participants in another context. Then another notch down would maybe be a swingers' party or similar.

I think as soon as it is anonymised, you just don't know. Sites like this sound a bit lower risk but by no means risk-free.

hully, start your own channel

we will give you tips

hehehe

< is not taking this very seriously at all >

Actually it turns out that it is 5 dollars per video rented not just a 5 dollar sign up fee.

It also costs you 5 dollars to submit your makinglurve video.

MLNP creams off 50% of the rental fee and you get 50% of the fee if you choose to 'share' your videos.

There is nothing mentioned about what happens to your video if you regret submitting it/find out your partner has secretly filmed you/find out your partner has decided to 'share' without your consent/are a prostitute and a john films you.

This is very very dodgy.

They are promising to pay people for submitting films. They say that they will only accept films that fit their criteria. I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of the person who has to watch all the stuff they will get sent in order to check it our for consensual lurveness. I bet they will get send some nasty shite.

And that is the problem with porn. It is about making money. It isn't about makinglurve.

Everything is about making money.

That's capitalism for you.

How will they decide that MrsHully (or whoever) gave her full and true consent ?

I don't know

It seems to me unlikely that there are large numbers of people who are not already making porn videos and uploading them that are going to read about this site and decide this is the time to start filming themselves having sex and posting videos on the internet.

And surely this kind of thing already exists? Not all porn videos follow a trope. I thought it was fairly standard in the creation of soft porn that either a. people make hard core porn will also upload soft core porn or that b. in 'professional' porn the actors will come in and make a soft core and hard core version of the same film, and the soft core version is then sold on to other sites/ adult tv networks etc.

So even if the people appear to be something 'ethical' in the video, there is no reason to believe that they are not part of a wider exploitative situation or were brought into porn by exploitation earlier on.

So I struggle to see how this is different from what already exists. For it to be different, there would have to be actual direct involvement from the people who own the site. They would:

a. have to be interviewing people and making sure of their consent and of the impact it had on their mental health. They would then have to employ them and make sure that the financial elements were reasonable to the person.

b. have to have some kind of proper creative ideas about why they were producing were different from porn, and they would have to actually go away and investigate and research the wide and varied interests that have developed away from the porn trope and have some kind of vision of what they're trying to achieve. And then they would have to make those videos with actors who can act.

But at the moment all I see is them saying, 'people who make porn for the internet, do us a softcore version.'

And there is nothing new about that. They're just going to be competing against other companies that distribute soft core porn, and they're simply trying to put an educational spin on it.

The other dubious element of it (particularly as they want to sell vouchers to under 18s), is the community aspect and interaction that the company is hoping for. Because then to really be part of that community, you would have to put up your own video. So the reality is not that a young man will learn how to have more 'real' sex with his girlfriend because that is 'normal'; it is that he will learn that having real sex with his girlfriend and then posting a video of it is 'normal.'

he will learn that having real sex with his girlfriend and then posting a video of it is 'normal.'

Yes and yuck to this.

Ok

So how shall we teach young men about sex? To contrdict the porny sex they see?

I have yet to see any evidence that we do have to teach young men about the sex itself to contradict porn.

People have sexual fantasies. If visual porn did not exist, they would still have sexual fantasies. A lot of those fantasies would not be very pleasant if brought into real life. A lot of those fantasies would be pleasant in some instances but very unpleasant if another person is pressurised into doing them.

Young men need to be educated in treating sexual partners with respect. That means that they should be starting from the premise that what their partner wants is unknown, may not match up with what they like sexually, and that they have to find out what they both want to do - through some degree of physical and psychological intimacy, even in sex outside of relationships, even in one night stands.

It may be that most of what you both want to do is never going to match up; it may be that it does. But there is no shortcut to intimacy - there is no video that tells you how to have the 'right' kind of sex. The right kind of sex happens as a consequence of finding out from another person how they want to have sex.

Surely if the focus is on teaching young men, it's not going to work? I thought the idea was men and women but when you post about the need to teach young men it assumes young women learn fine on their own. I think this is true, and they often do - when they're taught that it's ok to test out what they enjoy and how to avoid abusive relationships. Isn't this how most of us learned?

I think it is good to teach teenagers about how to have good sex, but I'm not sure that teaching needs to be particularly explicit in the 'what goes where' sense. Given how different we all are, it's better to teach people the general stuff about enjoying sex, and respecting each other, and checking for consent, and so on (and safe sex, obviously).

Yes, I'm really in favour of responsible adults talking to teenagers about sex, and having on a focus that for many people sex is enjoyable and an important part of who they are.

But it would be an impossible task to teach teenagers what makes enjoyable sex, because that is often very specific to each generation, and much of what they like will have nothing obviously to do with sex itself, but come from wider culture. If it didn't, we'd still have sex involving macs (the coat, not the computer) and steam train compartments as one of the most popular sexual fantasies.

Indeed. I think mostly I learned what was enjoyable by being given the confidence to think it was ok to test things out and talk to whoever my partner was. We used to read Cosmo aloud in the common room and get all giggly about it but amongst all the other guff I think the fact it used always to say that you should talk to your partner was spot on.

It amazes me that some women I know will say they slept with someone who wasn't good for them, but they didn't feel able to say anything. I think in a way, if you'd been 'educated' on films of how to have sex, that could actually make things worse, because you'd get young men thinking they knew exactly what to do and not being prepared to mess about and make it up as they went along.

And that then comes back to a culture of consent. A lot of people's argument about consent seems to go along the lines of 'well, if you did agree to feed somebody's cat when they were on holiday, you were clearly consenting to XYZ and it would be really unsexy if they had to ask you.'

But isn't asking somebody else one of the sexiest things? Finding out what is going on in somebody else's head, and educating each other?

Which isn't to say that people can't find out about what other people find appealing on the internet because it isn't useful, because it is useful (and what we're doing now). And looking something up to find that out might be a very different activity to looking up what you already know that you like, but it isn't the same thing as looking at a website moderated by a particular group of real sexperts. In fact teen boys would probably work out more about what's going on in the heads of teen girls by looking at Tumblr.

Absolutely agree, with all of that.

(I do so hate the term 'sexpert', because it always makes me think of that idiot woman who writes for the Guardian and whose advice is always 'oh, yeah, just go with it dear, you'll enjoy it when you do it'. It's like talking to a stoned teenager.)

why do people need to have to actually watch the act of others having sex to "learn" about it ? < clue:they don't >

most of the basic moves are instinctive into what goes where, and the rest is what spaniel says, learning about what is nice and what works with individual partners, whether a long term or short term relationship

an emotionally-aware teenager has a brain and vocal cords to think and to ask and get feedback

how does looking at other people rutting help with all that

It's not that they "have " to, it's that if they are going to watch sex, and the vast majority do, it's surely better they watch something vaguely approaching consensual.

In the real world huge swathes of young men watch porn and the majority ot teenagers DO NOT have lovely cosy intimate talks about their likes and dislikes.