When a 13-year-old girl can sit in math class, hide her Hello Kitty smart phone behind her textbook, and pull up such an extreme video in less time than it would take her to text a vote for her favorite American Idol contestant, we’ve certainly reached some kind of new societal landmark. It’s important, however, to distinguish between what has changed and what hasn’t.
When I first read that paragraph, alarm bells went off in my head. "Oh no," I thought, "Please don't be another diatribe about the need to protect the children! And please don't rant on for four pages!" Fortunately however, this is not the gist of the piece. Rather, it's an examination of what the vast availability of pornography and it's themes says about sexuality, male sexuality in particular.
I find the piece to be rather even handed to be honest and I went into it with the presumption that it would be filled with fire and brimstone and debased and abused women. The crux of the authors argument is probably summed up in this paragraph:
Porn’s new pervasiveness and influence on the culture at large haven’t necessarily introduced anything new into our sexual repertoire: humans, after all, have been having sex—weird, debased, and otherwise—for quite a while. But pervasive hard-core porn has allowed many people to flirt openly with practices that may have always been desired, but had been deeply buried under social restraint. Take anal sex: in a 1992 study that surveyed sexual behaviors, published by the University of Chicago, 20 percent of women ages 25 to 29 reported having anal sex. In a study published in October 2010 by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, the instances of anal sex reported by women in the same age cohort had more than doubled, to 46 percent. The practice has even made its way into the younger female demographic: the Indiana study shows 20 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds have had anal sex at least once.
Though I think it's a bit of a leap to assume that this is purely driven by the availability of porn, I think it's important to note that a judgment isn't being passed here. Whether anal is becoming the new oral is really nobody's business. Frankly, if it's making the people engaging in it happy (and given the numbers, I'm assuming that it does), then I'm all for it. Have at it kids! I would in fact say that if porn actually is responsible for these statistics then it should be congratulated inasmuch as it's presumptively helping people to approach their partners about their sexual desires honestly.
But what shall we make of the role of women in pornography who are frequently presented in positions of degradation, humiliation or servility? What does this say of the (generally but not always) male viewer?
Hard-core porn, which is what Internet porn largely traffics in, is undoubtedly extreme. But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their “serious relationship.” But the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life. The manner in which one physically, and emotionally, contorts oneself for sex simply takes sex outside the realm of ordinary human experiences and places it in the extreme, often beyond our control. “Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,” Susan Sontag wrote in Styles of Radical Will. Yes, it’s a natural, human function, and one from which both partners can derive enormous pleasure, but it is also one largely driven by brute male desire and therefore not at all free of violent, even cruel, urges.
At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.
I don't know that that's necessarily accurate. It's quite possible that I'm arguing against it instinctively simply because I'm a man and I think a fairly decent one, who becomes understandably uncomfortable when adjectives like 'aggressive', 'hostile' and 'humiliating' get thrown around to describe my love life.
That said, I will agree that men have often have higher amounts of aggression than women, sexually and otherwise. I would pose that this is probably hard-wired into us as evolutionarily useful.
However, the author notes that women may consider the sex they have between relationships "where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist; the raw, unpracticed sort.", the best sex of their lives (it's a generalization but at least it's one that someone else is making). The article though, seems to assume that less insight can be attained from what women do rather than from what men watch. Personally, I think that little to no accurate insight on a woman's sexuality can be gleaned from a single sweaty night in a motel room, particularly when placed in the context of not being something they want to do within the bounds of an extended relationship. That said, I would argue that watching a 30 second video clip even repeatedly, generally falls into the same category (obsessive viewing is of course another matter). I would also argue that for the vast majority of men, what they watch is not something that they have any intention of ever actually doing or even proposing, particularly within the bounds of a serious relationship. In this way, though pornography clearly has a sexual role as a masturbatory aid, for most men it's in fact divorced from actual sex in real life.
So what does porn say about male sexuality? I would say that when compared to what people are actually doing, rather than viewing, not all that much.
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