Asians tend toward being prudes. Far from all of us are. In general, I've found, Westernization has a strong inverse correlation with prudishness.
I don't know if where you live really has that much to do with it, however. I spent most of the past few years living in Northern California, which is noted for its free-spiritedness (by American standards), and Asians there are no less restrained than they are elsewhere.
Note that all of this is with regards to Asian-Americans, since that's what I know. Japanese porn is...weird.
There's still some strong Victorian sensibilities. If you go to the nude beaches in Europe, you can tell who the American women are because they're one with tops on. It's also fairly odd with our obsession on looks and sex, yet Americans still can't take nudity in any form.
Then again we're also a country that turns 16 year old women into pedophiles for emailing nude pictures of themselves to other people their age with long term repercussions on employment. Brilliant justice system that could be solved with community service... Either way, I'm still trying to figure out how the hell we're so anti-teen sex to an absurd degree, yet everyone and their mother fornicates. Old people STD's are up by a considerable degree in the States, and then there's the rise of new classifications of STD's thanks to oral sex.
I think it's a thing where in public "sexuality=bad" is still taboo, while "in private" if you aren't "of a certain age" you can fornicate to your heart's content.
American capitalism+porn+little people=?. Bridget the Midget Gang Bang being one of her titles, so we still put forth enough odd domestic product. I wonder what Tom Thumb would think.
Watching guys get off never had much appeal to me, and my first reaction was indeed "This is totally gay." But honestly, I think there are more possible explanations for its popularity than just latent homosexual tendencies. The guy in the porn is supposed to be an audience surrogate; just because it's shot from a third-person perspective doesn't mean the viewer isn't identifying with him. As the viewer sees the performer have the experience that he wishes to have as well, he feels those sensations sympathetically, rather than erotically.
Think about a woman watching a chick flick. When she sees the heroine of the movie get flirty and puppy-lovey, and this appeals to her, she's not feeling a lesbian attraction to the heroine. Rather, she's sympathizing with the heroine's straight attraction to the male lead.
It's the old "want to be"/"want to be with" distinction.
Yes, I am, but that doesn't mean everything about me is by necessity outside the norm. I'm not that much of a contrarian.
Can you at least agree with me that the audience that attends chick flicks is (a) predominantly chicks and (b) predominantly straight? I don't think this is exactly controversial.
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Oh, I'll agree with you there, but that doesn't mean you necessarily assume I wouldn't watch them for no reason. I mean, I wouldn't assume you would or wouldn't be a fan of them.
Oh, I'll agree with you there, but that doesn't mean you necessarily assume I wouldn't watch them for no reason. I mean, I wouldn't assume you would or wouldn't be a fan of them.
Too many negatives in there; not even going to bother. Anyway, just replace "chicks" with "dudes" and "chick flicks" with "hardcore porn" and you have my point. Nothing to do with Teia at all.
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Watching guys get off never had much appeal to me, and my first reaction was indeed "This is totally gay."
I think your first reaction was, in many ways, the accurate one one.
But honestly, I think there are more possible explanations for its popularity than just latent homosexual tendencies. The guy in the porn is supposed to be an audience surrogate; just because it's shot from a third-person perspective doesn't mean the viewer isn't identifying with him. As the viewer sees the performer have the experience that he wishes to have as well, he feels those sensations sympathetically, rather than erotically.
Well, as he's pleasuring himself and watching porno, he is in fact feeling those sensations sympathetically AND erotically.
In fact, if he's getting off at the same time that the male character is doing his O-face and making the money shot, he's also conditioning himself with very powerful positive stimulus, to sympathetically get aroused and getting off on viewing another male having orgasms (while empathizing).
Furthermore (something I didn't think of the first time around) in most straight hard core porn, the dude pulls out and finishes off. Which means if a guy is pleasuring himself in timing with the porn, he's pleasuring himself to a guy pleasuring himself.
Think about a woman watching a chick flick. When she sees the heroine of the movie get flirty and puppy-lovey, and this appeals to her, she's not feeling a lesbian attraction to the heroine. Rather, she's sympathizing with the heroine's straight attraction to the male lead. It's the old "want to be"/"want to be with" distinction.
Oh I totally understand that... in fact that was the first explanation/rationalization I thought of when this thesis came into my head.
But looking at it a little deeper, empathy for characters on screen (or other people we do a shared experience with) is how we experience additional pleasure from our own direct pleasure... whether it's sports, or whether it's eating great food, or watching a friend or a movie character "get the girl".
But isn't sexuality (at least as defined) different?
Often with others of the same gender, we share a lot of pleasurable things. But in our modern demarcation of what constitutes of homosexuality, we are allowed to hug, we sweat together, we even wrestle... and it's all bromance/buddies, and it's still hetero. Two guys can live together, watch movies together, eat every meal together, ride horses together, be absolute best friends, and never ever speak to a girl whose opinion you value as much as that other guy... and you're still hetero as long as you pleasure yourself privately and not with each other.
As much as I love to win together at starcraft with my best friends, or play tennis together with them... or even see him "win the girl of his dreams", or watch him succeed...
...I think it's fair to say that if I were to pleasure myself while looking at his O-face and his money shot, there's something that's no longer hetero there. Same goes for watching a stranger while doing the same to myself.
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I don't know if this says that this sort of porn appeals to an ambivalent or latent homosexuality... OR if it points out that the demarcation we have between empathizing with another person's pleasures, and empathizing with their orgasms, is highly artificial.
My personal opinion is that its probably more of the latter than the former, and points out the sheer illogic of hating somebody for being gay. Considering how many straight men love another man more than they love any woman, it's illogical how hostile society can be towards people who want to share one particular kind of pleasure with somebody who "feels what they feel" (a line I remember a lesbian saying in a TV show once, but I can see the logic of). Especially in an era where sex is virutally "sport" for many people, hopping back and forth between different partners, mostly to pleasure themselves.
I hate to say it but you folks really make quite the big deal outta something like porn. People use/watch it everyday. It's kinda like the news. Regardless if people like or don't like what's happening, they'll watch it.
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In fact, if he's getting off at the same time that the male character is doing his O-face and making the money shot, he's also conditioning himself with very powerful positive stimulus, to sympathetically get aroused and getting off on viewing another male having orgasms (while empathizing).
I'm pretty sure the psychological consensus is that a person can't be conditioned into a sexual orientation they're not.
As much as I love to win together at starcraft with my best friends, or play tennis together with them... or even see him "win the girl of his dreams", or watch him succeed...
...I think it's fair to say that if I were to pleasure myself while looking at his O-face and his money shot, there's something that's no longer hetero there.
Your best friend is not an audience surrogate character in a porno.
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*SNIP*... Furthermore (something I didn't think of the first time around) in most straight hard core porn, the dude pulls out and finishes off. Which means if a guy is pleasuring himself in timing with the porn, he's pleasuring himself to a guy pleasuring himself. ...*SNIP*
Youre misinterpreting what that act is supposed to achieve. Its not the guy getting off that makes someone sympathize. Its the act of orgasming on a womans face/breasts/butt/etc that is what makes that popular. Its the female debasement that is what people like. Its a power thing, not an "im gonna watch this guy orgasm" thing.
Disclaimers: Im not homophobic; I watch porn with penises in them almost exclusively; im not a fan of the "money shot."
I'm just gonna put an "Explicit" warning on the title of the thread for now. I know this conversation demands a certain frankness by its nature, but keep in mind we want to stay at least vaguely work-safe.
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So what is a straight guy doing pyschologically (in terms of identification) when he's watching (from 3rd person POV) some muscled dude with a giant organ making an O-face, and then spraying a "money shot" on a girl? If a guy is watching that, and pleasuring himself, and being turned on because you're seeing another male getting his "O" (and watching his shot), it seems extremely NOT hetero.
This is just a crackpot theory, but I think the widespread introduction of hardcore "vanilla" hetero video pornography in the last 30 years, might be the mechanism by which many males may have discovered their homosexuality (or many "mostly straight" males have channeled some aspect of their sexuality which is not 100% straight).
Sexuality and intimacy involve heavy identification, and enjoying watching another get pleasure as well as yourself... Rubbing one out to porn involves pretending this is occurring... What does it mean when millions of teens and 20-30 something men are "rubbing one out" while watching Peter North make an O-face, intersperced with shots of his organ spraying everywhere? If you were a voyeur and watching this, the fixation of what the camera is choosing to look at would imply more of a gay perspective than a straight one.
Maybe I'm completely off base, but this is yet another demonstration that sexuality is a lot more complex than just straight or gay,
Care to refute what I said rather than "oh, he just gave a knee jerk reaction, ignore him"?
I have no problem with sex education to children, so I'm not sure where this sentiment came from. Pornography can be education, but that's not its purpose, and is more often a source of _miseducation_.
When first saw porn at the age of 12 I understood that it was not a realistic portrayal of sexuality. Just like I understood that robo-cop, and other such television shows/movies were unrealistic. If your child is too dumb to understand the difference between reality and fantasy, then the problem isn't with the porn or television.
Youre misinterpreting what that act is supposed to achieve. Its not the guy getting off that makes someone sympathize. Its the act of orgasming on a womans face/breasts/butt/etc that is what makes that popular. Its the female debasement that is what people like. Its a power thing, not an "im gonna watch this guy orgasm" thing.
Thats you projecting your own strange interpretation onto it. How do you know that for some people they don't get off on it for power reasons? Are you in thier heads?
Exactly, the blanket statement that "porn isn't degrading" is pretty absurd when so much of it is.
And the blanket statement "porn is degrading" is absurd when there is so much porn that isn't degrading. So then is porn really the problem here? I mean, you can expereince degredation in other fields of work. So instead of blaming porn, why can't we just agree that degeredation in general is the real problem here?
I hate to say it but you folks really make quite the big deal outta something like porn. People use/watch it everyday. It's kinda like the news. Regardless if people like or don't like what's happening, they'll watch it.
Asians tend toward being prudes. Far from all of us are.
Thanks!
Not only has Teia perhaps interpreted Asians "tending toward being" as "are" but it'd hardly be reliable to make observations and generalise on the basis of a small population of a select set.
It's awful that Asians of all varieties have been normalised.
In general, I've found, Westernization has a strong inverse correlation with prudishness.
Ironically, cultures have adopted religions with the occidentalisation as well. I have similarly observed that American occidentalisation, specifically the lifestyle, values, and mores, is associated with increased sexual liberation.
From living with the 'natives', western Europe is, in comparison to the United States, more conservative; but, in comparison to eastern Europe, it is more liberal. Formerly, laws were enacted in many of the European nations, some of which have since been repealed, assuredly a factor in the stance on pornography in those countries.
Peculiarly, Europe, generally speaking, can be vastly different from what would be expected of it (e.g., permissiveness apropos deshabille, certain physics)
I don't know if where you live really has that much to do with it, however.
I'd argue that the environment can shape you via various means as you can shape it.
I spent most of the past few years living in Northern California, which is noted for its free-spiritedness (by American standards), and Asians there are no less restrained than they are elsewhere.
Note that all of this is with regards to Asian-Americans, since that's what I know.
From what I know, the 'typical' Chinese-American is inclined to be less sexually liberal than the 'typical' American but considerably more sexually liberal than the 'typical' Chinese person in the P.R.C./R.o.C., and that the 'typical' Japanese-American and the 'typical' Japanese person are similarly oriented. This difference can be attributed to the laws regarding pornography in the countries involved and, no doubt, the culture of the milieu.
Japanese porn is...weird.
Can I get an 'amen'?
It can be rather deviant in basic terms, its ABCs if you will -- acts, behaviours, and censorship.
What is the history of the consideration of pornography as being bad?
Like the other person said, this is shameless projection, nothing more.
A.) you didnt read my disclaimer i see...
B.) In the article "My Son's *****" from Masthead magazine, Richard Jeffrey Newman, who cites Susan Faludi, writes: "the male performer's [in porn] primary function is to make her [the female actress'] performance possible. He is her straight man, her foil, or as Susan Faludi puts it in her essay 'The Money Shot' her 'appendage, the object of the object.'" The article states that the woman in such a scene may appear like a "machine". It also states that with "the *** shot, the pleasure of which is expressed not in what the man on the screen felt in his own body up to and including the point of his ejaculation, but rather in what it means for him to ejaculate onto the body of a woman." She argues that the way *** shots are depicted in pornography is a "more or less absolute yoking in heterosexual pornography of male sexual pleasure to a woman's presence.", and that focus on having the man ejaculate onto a woman "... has a moral fervor, an intellectual certainty" that is usually associated with "religious or scientific pronouncements." Source
I'm more of a Camille Paglia guy, not really that big on Susan Faludi... and I'm not sure I buy anything Faludi says in her essay.
Her essay might apply to some men and some porn, but in reading Faludi, I've never gotten the impression that she remotely understands the male perspective. If men are from Mars, Faludi is from the Crab Nebula. At least from my male perspective, I can't relate to anything she ever writes.
At any rate, there's a lot of different sexualities, and lots of different kinds of porn, and any inferences I've been drawing about certain specific porn, is probably just as narrow as anybody else's interpretations.
Quote from TSpice »
Youre misinterpreting what that act is supposed to achieve. Its not the guy getting off that makes someone sympathize. Its the act of orgasming on a womans face/breasts/butt/etc that is what makes that popular. Its the female debasement that is what people like. Its a power thing, not an "im gonna watch this guy orgasm" thing.
I completely disagree. I don't think that "female debasement" is the primary thing that most men like. "Female debasement" is not even remotely on my radar, emotionally, and was never on my radar, even as a lonely teen or 20 something with no girlfriend.
If anything, I'd say a large percentage of men and women out there prefer to be submissive to being dominant, sexually. Same for their porn.
I think looking for deeper symbolism or metaphor in the concept of the money shot is an entirely separate issue (that we each could use to argue our specific agenda) from the one I was discussing.
The fact is that pleasuring yourself while some dude pleasures himself on screen while straddling some woman, is just NOT traditional heterosexuality. I guess they could be considered complex extensions of autoeroticism.
Autoeroticism in general might need to be considered something entirely separate from traditional sexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bestiality. When it comes to autoeroticism, many people just get off on "strange", whatever it is, as long as its forbidden, it's a turn on, especially for those who have been sexually repressed.
As a teenager and a very undersexed, repressed guy in my 20s, I found almost ANY porn with a naked woman in it to be titillating and fascinating and a turn on... from straight porn to bukkake, whatever... bondage porn (with the girl being the dominatrix, not the other way around)... even bestiality, seeing donkey show videos or whatever with a hot naked girl (though notably, not golden showers or coprophilia, which somehow ticked off the nausea meter). But once I started actually having girlfriends and sex on a regular basis in real life, most of that just became uninteresting, maybe a bit amusing (though some of the fetishism of old school porn might still push some buttons). I have no actual interest in actually acting out any of those genres of porn that I found titillating to watch. I can't even imagine who would enjoy participating in bukkake, utterly gross. I just feel sorry for the donkey and the woman in a donkey show mpg and any bestiality is really, really sad. I can't imagine the people who get off on it in real life... the bondage porn with the rubber and leather suits just look uncomfortable and vaguely desperate, and even stuff like girl on girl porn looks mostly intimidating, mechanical, and leaves me cold.
It's like my porn phase (just like my exotic dance club phase, and my serious debauchery phase) were about self-exploration, all in my head, not really about actual shared experience.
I don't know about you, but I now perceive almost all porn as a hobby for the lonely. And frankly, all the people I ever knew that were more heavily into porn (people who viewed it daily and owned large collections) were serious losers at the time, and were very lonely and pathetic (though many of them eventually snapped out of that phase).
B.) In the article "My Son's *****" from Masthead magazine, Richard Jeffrey Newman, who cites Susan Faludi, writes: "the male performer's [in porn] primary function is to make her [the female actress'] performance possible. He is her straight man, her foil, or as Susan Faludi puts it in her essay 'The Money Shot' her 'appendage, the object of the object.'" The article states that the woman in such a scene may appear like a "machine". It also states that with "the *** shot, the pleasure of which is expressed not in what the man on the screen felt in his own body up to and including the point of his ejaculation, but rather in what it means for him to ejaculate onto the body of a woman." She argues that the way *** shots are depicted in pornography is a "more or less absolute yoking in heterosexual pornography of male sexual pleasure to a woman's presence.", and that focus on having the man ejaculate onto a woman "... has a moral fervor, an intellectual certainty" that is usually associated with "religious or scientific pronouncements." Source
Not to pun, but this reads like exactly the sort of ungrounded, speculative pseudo-intellectualism that is often described as "masturbatory".
As a teenager and a very undersexed, repressed guy in my 20s, I found almost ANY porn with a naked woman in it to be titillating and fascinating and a turn on... from straight porn to bukkake, whatever... bondage porn (with the girl being the dominatrix, not the other way around)... even bestiality, seeing donkey show videos or whatever with a hot naked girl (though notably, not golden showers or coprophilia, which somehow ticked off the nausea meter). But once I started actually having girlfriends and sex on a regular basis in real life, most of that just became uninteresting, maybe a bit amusing (though some of the fetishism of old school porn might still push some buttons). I have no actual interest in actually acting out any of those genres of porn that I found titillating to watch. I can't even imagine who would enjoy participating in bukkake, utterly gross. I just feel sorry for the donkey and the woman in a donkey show mpg and any bestiality is really, really sad. I can't imagine the people who get off on it in real life... the bondage porn with the rubber and leather suits just look uncomfortable and vaguely desperate, and even stuff like girl on girl porn looks mostly intimidating, mechanical, and leaves me cold.
It's like my porn phase (just like my exotic dance club phase, and my serious debauchery phase) were about self-exploration, all in my head, not really about actual shared experience.
I don't know about you, but I now perceive almost all porn as a hobby for the lonely. And frankly, all the people I ever knew that were more heavily into porn (people who viewed it daily and owned large collections) were serious losers at the time, and were very lonely and pathetic (though many of them eventually snapped out of that phase).
Thanks for sharing, I guess, but I have to ask what your personal preferences have to do with the topic. Or why you felt the need towards the end to adopt a judgmental tone that might quite understandably be taken by the porn fans on this thread as insulting.
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I have? I thought I said the Asians I know don't fit the stereotype.
'Perhaps' was the word.
You cherry picked; that there are some 'Asians' that you know who don't fit the stereotype neither by and large proves the prudishness or permissiveness of 'Asians'. It does, however, suppose that there are exceptions to a rule if the rule ever were 'Asians' are prudes. This is now beyond the pornography is bad or not case.
Quote from Tspice »
In the article "My Son's *****" from Masthead magazine, Richard Jeffrey Newman, who cites Susan Faludi, writes
Oy vey.
Eh, I can neither identify with Newman or Faludi. In those days, Faludi was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose works were something insightful to peruse; these days, I find her version of feminism uncompromising, unrestrained, and unrefreshing. If you've read her works (e.g., Backlash, Stiffed) and you're of either natural-born gender, you'd be hard-pressed to be unaffected and uninsulted, particularly regarding her candour and crack at a one-sided, reductionistic construal of male (and female) psychology. In her works, she presents the human population as being upper-class white females and plebeian white males and, while indeed spouting her brand of feminism, she expresses her perceived injuries and insults in society. Of the Wikipedia'd passage, yeah... no; to wit, and if I must expound -- and perhaps I am misapprehending -- but that the male performer is the object [and the female perform is the object of the object] is not only an extraordinary PoV but it's unsubstantiated.
Of course, that itself was unrestrained and unrefreshing; and, if review were ever asked for, it would have been asked for. :\
If you are of the opinion that the censorship of pornography from a feminist/androgist/genderist line of argument, consider poring over Catharine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin, if but for breadth and wider reading.
If the entire thread's argument for why pornography is bad is that it's degrading or whatnot, even using examples of pronounced writers, there's very little to suggest that pornography, intrinsically and extrinsically, misshapes society.
Thanks for sharing, I guess, but I have to ask what your personal preferences have to do with the topic. Or why you felt the need towards the end to adopt a judgmental tone that might quite understandably be taken by the porn fans on this thread as insulting.
the point wasnt so much to go into personal detail, so much as it was to express the sheer range of genres of porn that a person could potentially enjoy (especially as a teenager, anything that will show up in the screen with boobs, even static-y barely visible crap on the porn channels that were scrambled).
As for any porn fans on this thread potentially finding my end-comments "insulting"... I don't think I was really looking down on any "protected class" of people, and I was just reflecting on personal experience with the people I knew who were daily porn viewers. If somebody takes offense at that, I'm sorry. For example, thinking of one guy who lived in my dorm, let's call him Tim, whom I actually used to get my porn from... Tim had the biggest collection of porn I've ever seen. Gigs and gigs worth, every kind. And he just knew it all, all the names of the stars, etc. He was a lonely dude... And a self-proclaimed loser who had trouble relating to girls (And I was basically in a similar boat of romantic non-entity).
But I don't think there's anything wrong with porn, anymore than there is anything wrong with world of Warcraft. But every person I've personally known who plays WOW, every day, 30+ hours per week, has been in a lonely place in life.
But in the case of a person pleasuring yourself DAILY to porn, that's directly displacing intimate relationships that you could be having. That doesnt categorically make a person a lonely loser, but all the people I personally knew who were in that stage were not "healthy" people. It would not shock me if any of them had a collection of realdolls, each individually named, at home. It's all just elaborate masturbation props of higher sophistication.
If there are socially & mentally healthy people in this thread who are rubbing it out daily to porn, I apologize for any perceived insult, and would love to hear from them. At least for me, the role porn played for me was an outlet valve, an education, and helped kill time and a void in my undersocialized life. I have nothing against porn per se today.
Not to pun, but this reads like exactly the sort of ungrounded, speculative pseudo-intellectualism that is often described as "masturbatory".
It also comes off like radfem literature. The kind of "feminism" that has no problem objectifying men but flies into a rage at the slightest whiff of doing the same to women.
If there are socially & mentally healthy people in this thread who are rubbing it out daily to porn, I apologize for any perceived insult, and would love to hear from them. At least for me, the role porn played for me was an outlet valve, an education, and helped kill time and a void in my undersocialized life. I have nothing against porn per se today.
Contrary to what some people may have expected me to say, I actually agree with the spirit of about 90% of what you're saying. Porn is very exploratory if you take the time to sample different things, for example, and the masturbation it facilitates serves as a great emotional release valve. I'll also grant that I was a lot more into porn in the years my depression was utterly crippling. Unlike you, though, I took from it a much more positive, some would say desensitized view of porn. I see it for what it is: expression of sexuality, which is something extremely basic to human nature. Damn near everyone wants sex, so why try suppressing it? If you can't get any, masturbation is a fine option, and porn stimulates the imagination.
I don't subscribe to the mainstream American porn industry as being synonymous with porn, and I think that causes a major difference in opinion between myself and the people who are more staunchly opposed to porn. I actually tend to stay away from anything with any real production values—mostly I just stick to amateur, or pro amateur at most. European tends to be better than American. But I digress.
If there are socially & mentally healthy people in this thread who are rubbing it out daily to porn, I apologize for any perceived insult, and would love to hear from them.
For the record, I count myself as being much healthier than I used to be, and to summarize most of what I've been saying I consider porn just another kind of entertainment. Masturbation doesn't even have to be involved.
B.) In the article "My Son's *****" from Masthead magazine, Richard Jeffrey Newman, who cites Susan Faludi, writes: "the male performer's [in porn] primary function is to make her [the female actress'] performance possible. He is her straight man, her foil, or as Susan Faludi puts it in her essay 'The Money Shot' her 'appendage, the object of the object.'" The article states that the woman in such a scene may appear like a "machine". It also states that with "the *** shot, the pleasure of which is expressed not in what the man on the screen felt in his own body up to and including the point of his ejaculation, but rather in what it means for him to ejaculate onto the body of a woman." She argues that the way *** shots are depicted in pornography is a "more or less absolute yoking in heterosexual pornography of male sexual pleasure to a woman's presence.", and that focus on having the man ejaculate onto a woman "... has a moral fervor, an intellectual certainty" that is usually associated with "religious or scientific pronouncements." Source
And feminists wonder why they are no longer taken seriosly...
The sheer amount of baseless speculation, insulting psuedo-psychology, lack of statistics, lack of rigour, ect... is astounding in feminist literature. From Dwarkin to this...
Can you actually argue against what she wrote, though? There is an obsession with ejaculating onto the woman and one can certainly wonder why that is and how the whole affair is generally portrayed.
There have been countless explanations of that, most of which are far more convincing than Faludi's. Even my own tangent makes far more sense than Faludi's agenda-driven take on it.
You can't SEE a money shot happening unless they pull out. That is 90% of the reason right there. It's the difference between fake and the real thing.
Since they're clearly not using condoms, there's the contraceptive reason to consider as well.
And even if these obvious alternate explanations weren't ready at hand, it wouldn't follow that we should buy into this nebulous theorizing about male and female "power".
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There's still some strong Victorian sensibilities. If you go to the nude beaches in Europe, you can tell who the American women are because they're one with tops on. It's also fairly odd with our obsession on looks and sex, yet Americans still can't take nudity in any form.
Then again we're also a country that turns 16 year old women into pedophiles for emailing nude pictures of themselves to other people their age with long term repercussions on employment. Brilliant justice system that could be solved with community service... Either way, I'm still trying to figure out how the hell we're so anti-teen sex to an absurd degree, yet everyone and their mother fornicates. Old people STD's are up by a considerable degree in the States, and then there's the rise of new classifications of STD's thanks to oral sex.
I think it's a thing where in public "sexuality=bad" is still taboo, while "in private" if you aren't "of a certain age" you can fornicate to your heart's content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Powers
American capitalism+porn+little people=?. Bridget the Midget Gang Bang being one of her titles, so we still put forth enough odd domestic product. I wonder what Tom Thumb would think.
Even one standard deviation to the left is still deviating.
Unless if you're Meg Ryan.
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Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Can you at least agree with me that the audience that attends chick flicks is (a) predominantly chicks and (b) predominantly straight? I don't think this is exactly controversial.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Too many negatives in there; not even going to bother. Anyway, just replace "chicks" with "dudes" and "chick flicks" with "hardcore porn" and you have my point. Nothing to do with Teia at all.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
My point was mostly the deviation in some areas doesn't mean other areas necessarily have to deviate.
His point was you used a quintupple negative which makes it incredibly difficult to understand what the devil you were trying to say...
Well, as he's pleasuring himself and watching porno, he is in fact feeling those sensations sympathetically AND erotically.
In fact, if he's getting off at the same time that the male character is doing his O-face and making the money shot, he's also conditioning himself with very powerful positive stimulus, to sympathetically get aroused and getting off on viewing another male having orgasms (while empathizing).
Furthermore (something I didn't think of the first time around) in most straight hard core porn, the dude pulls out and finishes off. Which means if a guy is pleasuring himself in timing with the porn, he's pleasuring himself to a guy pleasuring himself.
Oh I totally understand that... in fact that was the first explanation/rationalization I thought of when this thesis came into my head.
But looking at it a little deeper, empathy for characters on screen (or other people we do a shared experience with) is how we experience additional pleasure from our own direct pleasure... whether it's sports, or whether it's eating great food, or watching a friend or a movie character "get the girl".
But isn't sexuality (at least as defined) different?
Often with others of the same gender, we share a lot of pleasurable things. But in our modern demarcation of what constitutes of homosexuality, we are allowed to hug, we sweat together, we even wrestle... and it's all bromance/buddies, and it's still hetero. Two guys can live together, watch movies together, eat every meal together, ride horses together, be absolute best friends, and never ever speak to a girl whose opinion you value as much as that other guy... and you're still hetero as long as you pleasure yourself privately and not with each other.
As much as I love to win together at starcraft with my best friends, or play tennis together with them... or even see him "win the girl of his dreams", or watch him succeed...
...I think it's fair to say that if I were to pleasure myself while looking at his O-face and his money shot, there's something that's no longer hetero there. Same goes for watching a stranger while doing the same to myself.
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I don't know if this says that this sort of porn appeals to an ambivalent or latent homosexuality... OR if it points out that the demarcation we have between empathizing with another person's pleasures, and empathizing with their orgasms, is highly artificial.
My personal opinion is that its probably more of the latter than the former, and points out the sheer illogic of hating somebody for being gay. Considering how many straight men love another man more than they love any woman, it's illogical how hostile society can be towards people who want to share one particular kind of pleasure with somebody who "feels what they feel" (a line I remember a lesbian saying in a TV show once, but I can see the logic of). Especially in an era where sex is virutally "sport" for many people, hopping back and forth between different partners, mostly to pleasure themselves.
Current Capt. of Team "Ju"
I play this:
Rotation is coming...
Modern: GGGSTOMPY
ZOO (Goyf-less)
Legacy:
Brewing
EDH:
Too many to name.
I'm pretty sure the psychological consensus is that a person can't be conditioned into a sexual orientation they're not.
Your best friend is not an audience surrogate character in a porno.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Youre misinterpreting what that act is supposed to achieve. Its not the guy getting off that makes someone sympathize. Its the act of orgasming on a womans face/breasts/butt/etc that is what makes that popular. Its the female debasement that is what people like. Its a power thing, not an "im gonna watch this guy orgasm" thing.
Disclaimers: Im not homophobic; I watch porn with penises in them almost exclusively; im not a fan of the "money shot."
10.) No taxing cards.
If i wanted to pay 1 more on my Fresh Volunteers, then id just have played Pearled Unicorn.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
This is pretty accurate to what happened to me...
When first saw porn at the age of 12 I understood that it was not a realistic portrayal of sexuality. Just like I understood that robo-cop, and other such television shows/movies were unrealistic. If your child is too dumb to understand the difference between reality and fantasy, then the problem isn't with the porn or television.
Thats you projecting your own strange interpretation onto it. How do you know that for some people they don't get off on it for power reasons? Are you in thier heads?
And the blanket statement "porn is degrading" is absurd when there is so much porn that isn't degrading. So then is porn really the problem here? I mean, you can expereince degredation in other fields of work. So instead of blaming porn, why can't we just agree that degeredation in general is the real problem here?
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Thanks!
Not only has Teia perhaps interpreted Asians "tending toward being" as "are" but it'd hardly be reliable to make observations and generalise on the basis of a small population of a select set.
It's awful that Asians of all varieties have been normalised.
Ironically, cultures have adopted religions with the occidentalisation as well. I have similarly observed that American occidentalisation, specifically the lifestyle, values, and mores, is associated with increased sexual liberation.
From living with the 'natives', western Europe is, in comparison to the United States, more conservative; but, in comparison to eastern Europe, it is more liberal. Formerly, laws were enacted in many of the European nations, some of which have since been repealed, assuredly a factor in the stance on pornography in those countries.
Peculiarly, Europe, generally speaking, can be vastly different from what would be expected of it (e.g., permissiveness apropos deshabille, certain physics)
I'd argue that the environment can shape you via various means as you can shape it.
From what I know, the 'typical' Chinese-American is inclined to be less sexually liberal than the 'typical' American but considerably more sexually liberal than the 'typical' Chinese person in the P.R.C./R.o.C., and that the 'typical' Japanese-American and the 'typical' Japanese person are similarly oriented. This difference can be attributed to the laws regarding pornography in the countries involved and, no doubt, the culture of the milieu.
Can I get an 'amen'?
It can be rather deviant in basic terms, its ABCs if you will -- acts, behaviours, and censorship.
What is the history of the consideration of pornography as being bad?
I have? I thought I said the Asians I know don't fit the stereotype.
Like the other person said, this is shameless projection, nothing more.
A.) you didnt read my disclaimer i see...
B.) In the article "My Son's *****" from Masthead magazine, Richard Jeffrey Newman, who cites Susan Faludi, writes: "the male performer's [in porn] primary function is to make her [the female actress'] performance possible. He is her straight man, her foil, or as Susan Faludi puts it in her essay 'The Money Shot' her 'appendage, the object of the object.'" The article states that the woman in such a scene may appear like a "machine". It also states that with "the *** shot, the pleasure of which is expressed not in what the man on the screen felt in his own body up to and including the point of his ejaculation, but rather in what it means for him to ejaculate onto the body of a woman." She argues that the way *** shots are depicted in pornography is a "more or less absolute yoking in heterosexual pornography of male sexual pleasure to a woman's presence.", and that focus on having the man ejaculate onto a woman "... has a moral fervor, an intellectual certainty" that is usually associated with "religious or scientific pronouncements." Source
10.) No taxing cards.
If i wanted to pay 1 more on my Fresh Volunteers, then id just have played Pearled Unicorn.
Her essay might apply to some men and some porn, but in reading Faludi, I've never gotten the impression that she remotely understands the male perspective. If men are from Mars, Faludi is from the Crab Nebula. At least from my male perspective, I can't relate to anything she ever writes.
At any rate, there's a lot of different sexualities, and lots of different kinds of porn, and any inferences I've been drawing about certain specific porn, is probably just as narrow as anybody else's interpretations.
I completely disagree. I don't think that "female debasement" is the primary thing that most men like. "Female debasement" is not even remotely on my radar, emotionally, and was never on my radar, even as a lonely teen or 20 something with no girlfriend.
If anything, I'd say a large percentage of men and women out there prefer to be submissive to being dominant, sexually. Same for their porn.
I think looking for deeper symbolism or metaphor in the concept of the money shot is an entirely separate issue (that we each could use to argue our specific agenda) from the one I was discussing.
The fact is that pleasuring yourself while some dude pleasures himself on screen while straddling some woman, is just NOT traditional heterosexuality. I guess they could be considered complex extensions of autoeroticism.
Autoeroticism in general might need to be considered something entirely separate from traditional sexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bestiality. When it comes to autoeroticism, many people just get off on "strange", whatever it is, as long as its forbidden, it's a turn on, especially for those who have been sexually repressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pornographic_sub-genres
As a teenager and a very undersexed, repressed guy in my 20s, I found almost ANY porn with a naked woman in it to be titillating and fascinating and a turn on... from straight porn to bukkake, whatever... bondage porn (with the girl being the dominatrix, not the other way around)... even bestiality, seeing donkey show videos or whatever with a hot naked girl (though notably, not golden showers or coprophilia, which somehow ticked off the nausea meter). But once I started actually having girlfriends and sex on a regular basis in real life, most of that just became uninteresting, maybe a bit amusing (though some of the fetishism of old school porn might still push some buttons). I have no actual interest in actually acting out any of those genres of porn that I found titillating to watch. I can't even imagine who would enjoy participating in bukkake, utterly gross. I just feel sorry for the donkey and the woman in a donkey show mpg and any bestiality is really, really sad. I can't imagine the people who get off on it in real life... the bondage porn with the rubber and leather suits just look uncomfortable and vaguely desperate, and even stuff like girl on girl porn looks mostly intimidating, mechanical, and leaves me cold.
It's like my porn phase (just like my exotic dance club phase, and my serious debauchery phase) were about self-exploration, all in my head, not really about actual shared experience.
I don't know about you, but I now perceive almost all porn as a hobby for the lonely. And frankly, all the people I ever knew that were more heavily into porn (people who viewed it daily and owned large collections) were serious losers at the time, and were very lonely and pathetic (though many of them eventually snapped out of that phase).
Not to pun, but this reads like exactly the sort of ungrounded, speculative pseudo-intellectualism that is often described as "masturbatory".
Thanks for sharing, I guess, but I have to ask what your personal preferences have to do with the topic. Or why you felt the need towards the end to adopt a judgmental tone that might quite understandably be taken by the porn fans on this thread as insulting.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
You cherry picked; that there are some 'Asians' that you know who don't fit the stereotype neither by and large proves the prudishness or permissiveness of 'Asians'. It does, however, suppose that there are exceptions to a rule if the rule ever were 'Asians' are prudes. This is now beyond the pornography is bad or not case.
Oy vey.
Eh, I can neither identify with Newman or Faludi. In those days, Faludi was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose works were something insightful to peruse; these days, I find her version of feminism uncompromising, unrestrained, and unrefreshing. If you've read her works (e.g., Backlash, Stiffed) and you're of either natural-born gender, you'd be hard-pressed to be unaffected and uninsulted, particularly regarding her candour and crack at a one-sided, reductionistic construal of male (and female) psychology. In her works, she presents the human population as being upper-class white females and plebeian white males and, while indeed spouting her brand of feminism, she expresses her perceived injuries and insults in society. Of the Wikipedia'd passage, yeah... no; to wit, and if I must expound -- and perhaps I am misapprehending -- but that the male performer is the object [and the female perform is the object of the object] is not only an extraordinary PoV but it's unsubstantiated.
Of course, that itself was unrestrained and unrefreshing; and, if review were ever asked for, it would have been asked for. :\
If you are of the opinion that the censorship of pornography from a feminist/androgist/genderist line of argument, consider poring over Catharine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin, if but for breadth and wider reading.
If the entire thread's argument for why pornography is bad is that it's degrading or whatnot, even using examples of pronounced writers, there's very little to suggest that pornography, intrinsically and extrinsically, misshapes society.
Really?
Once more with feeling; really?
As for any porn fans on this thread potentially finding my end-comments "insulting"... I don't think I was really looking down on any "protected class" of people, and I was just reflecting on personal experience with the people I knew who were daily porn viewers. If somebody takes offense at that, I'm sorry. For example, thinking of one guy who lived in my dorm, let's call him Tim, whom I actually used to get my porn from... Tim had the biggest collection of porn I've ever seen. Gigs and gigs worth, every kind. And he just knew it all, all the names of the stars, etc. He was a lonely dude... And a self-proclaimed loser who had trouble relating to girls (And I was basically in a similar boat of romantic non-entity).
But I don't think there's anything wrong with porn, anymore than there is anything wrong with world of Warcraft. But every person I've personally known who plays WOW, every day, 30+ hours per week, has been in a lonely place in life.
But in the case of a person pleasuring yourself DAILY to porn, that's directly displacing intimate relationships that you could be having. That doesnt categorically make a person a lonely loser, but all the people I personally knew who were in that stage were not "healthy" people. It would not shock me if any of them had a collection of realdolls, each individually named, at home. It's all just elaborate masturbation props of higher sophistication.
If there are socially & mentally healthy people in this thread who are rubbing it out daily to porn, I apologize for any perceived insult, and would love to hear from them. At least for me, the role porn played for me was an outlet valve, an education, and helped kill time and a void in my undersocialized life. I have nothing against porn per se today.
It also comes off like radfem literature. The kind of "feminism" that has no problem objectifying men but flies into a rage at the slightest whiff of doing the same to women.
Contrary to what some people may have expected me to say, I actually agree with the spirit of about 90% of what you're saying. Porn is very exploratory if you take the time to sample different things, for example, and the masturbation it facilitates serves as a great emotional release valve. I'll also grant that I was a lot more into porn in the years my depression was utterly crippling. Unlike you, though, I took from it a much more positive, some would say desensitized view of porn. I see it for what it is: expression of sexuality, which is something extremely basic to human nature. Damn near everyone wants sex, so why try suppressing it? If you can't get any, masturbation is a fine option, and porn stimulates the imagination.
I don't subscribe to the mainstream American porn industry as being synonymous with porn, and I think that causes a major difference in opinion between myself and the people who are more staunchly opposed to porn. I actually tend to stay away from anything with any real production values—mostly I just stick to amateur, or pro amateur at most. European tends to be better than American. But I digress.
For the record, I count myself as being much healthier than I used to be, and to summarize most of what I've been saying I consider porn just another kind of entertainment. Masturbation doesn't even have to be involved.
The sheer amount of baseless speculation, insulting psuedo-psychology, lack of statistics, lack of rigour, ect... is astounding in feminist literature. From Dwarkin to this...
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You can't SEE a money shot happening unless they pull out. That is 90% of the reason right there. It's the difference between fake and the real thing.
(2) it's not always the face. Often it's just pull out onto stomach or back.
And even if these obvious alternate explanations weren't ready at hand, it wouldn't follow that we should buy into this nebulous theorizing about male and female "power".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.