I think it’s bad when they cut to the guy making those “having sex” faces. Stop that!
Bingo. Once you get over the titillation angle, there’s, if anything, a strong disincentive to consume, given the consistently attrocious dramatic quality of standard-issue porn. Zero plot. Incredibly cheezy dialogue. Unskilled, vapid actors. Numbingly repetative.
And you’d think with all the amateur cam-whores out there one might stumble on some outsider art gems, but no such luck. Apparently it’s just a million slight variations on the same tired theme: Show me the money, and I’ll show you my twat. See me eat cum and pretend to like it. Pay me again. Gooooood. It’s depressing. I thought the Internet was supposed to make things seem less commoditized and sterile, but boy was I wrong.
I’m with HypnoToad here. Porn to me gives some guys (I don’t know any females who regulary watch porn) unrealistic expectations about the sex act. It also doesn’t reflect accurately the quirkiness of RL sex and the variety of it. It’s all women love to give and get head, intense thrusting, penis size is the most important thing, and women love semem facials. Yeah, I get that it’s supposed to be a fantasy, but unfortunately, that part can get forgotten. To me (and admittedly, my experience with porn is fairly limited), it can give guys a false sense of what intimacy should be like.
I would be interested in erotica that is not raunchy, that doesn’t make the man King and the woman a pleasure device. Give me some attractive people, a decent but not overly intrusive plot, and oh-how about some actual love/tenderness/regard for partner? then I would watch and enjoy porn.
I’ve had similar feelings about it. My feminist side is quite split, because I was taught that “it’s exploitation of women!” Yet I acknowledge that any woman is free to express her sexuality in any way she wishes.
And even worse, some of the porn that I see is quite hardcore, and sometimes the women don’t always look real happy to be doing it. That bothers me. They look, to me, like junkies, in that they’re physically emaciated, bruised (as if from injecting drugs), and I get a sense of desperation from them. That’s just sad. That porn is no fun.
Several years ago, when I was a working journalist, I interviewed a fairly well-known porn star. She was an intelligent, well-spoken person, and she had retired from the porn business after 15 or 20 years, I think. She wasn’t a stupid bimbo, or a junkie, or a “victim.” She was a clever businesswoman who made a freaking fortune with her fabulous body. Her attitude about her porn career was very pragmatic; she made ends meet, and supported herself (and her children, IIRC) by making porn movies. I knew her for a couple of years, and never saw her pick up so much as a beer or a cigarette. She talked to me about spiritual issues, and she was a reasonably accomplished musician, so we talked a lot about music. She was classy. I’m a little ashamed that I was so surprised to find her such a pleasant person; I guess I expected the stupid bimbo, and I met a thoughtful, caring woman.
I think viewing pornography is definitely immoral. However I don’t necessarily think it is truly harmful except in two instances I can think of:
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Someone who becomes obsessive, to a dangerous level. Obsessing too much over anything is not healthy, and some people become obsessive with pornography.
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Some people who aren’t necessarily very sexually experienced will confuse the outlandish sexual behavior in pornography with what is “normal” or with what most women would find acceptable. Porn does tend to objectify women. Some women and men are into that, and people should be allowed to do as they wish in their own bedrooms (within reason) but I think it’s still mentally injurious for both the woman and man involved. And I think it gives many young males the wrong idea as to what a normal sexual relationship is like. And may also skew a young man’s opinion as to what a normal, healthy, attractive female looks like.
Yeah … it turned me into a newt!
But didn’t you get better?
If it weren’t for porn I’d never see any women naked.
It’s attitudes like this that make most folks :rolleyes: at the legitimate criticisms of porn. A lot of porn is harmfully exploitative, but a lot of it is produced in a perfectly consensual manner by enterprising exhibitionists. There’s nothing “immoral” about consuming something produced by people who themselves have no personal problem with fucking on camera, and recognize how lucrative that can be. Sure, a lot of it is total crap, but having no taste isn’t a crime.
Yeah, It’s supposed to be ‘pron’
I was going to respond to the OP seriously but I couldn’t word it. Something along the lines of porn is normal, and is here to stay.
It’s only bad in the context of production values. If you view too much of it the only likely outcome is that it loses it’s appeal, and you get on with your life.
Of all the objections to pornography, I find the objection that it creates unrealistic expectations to be the most odd.
What is so necessarily bad about ‘unrealistic expectations’? And if it is that bad, why is only pornography demonized for doing so?
There are always a few people who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. They will quickly learn what reality is, or suffer. The problem is not in the expectations, but in the individual.
There are a lot of romantic movies that protray men and women as always being attractive. They give unrealistic expectations of how ‘romantic’ courtships should be. The person with the ‘flaw’ can always be redeemed. The person trying to redeem the ‘flawed’ person, is shown as being heroic. People always make the right choice in the end. If love making takes place, it is always touching yet soul-shakingly passionate. Why is this sort of unrealistic expectation ignored or applauded?
No
But I have read articles that the “hardcore” variety of porn that is available on the internet today is having an effect on young teenagers, especially males. Essentially, children have reasonably easy access to porn at earlier and earlier ages and it’s not the type of stuff from the past like, nekkid ladies, but a garden variety of sexual acts, many depicting unrealistic images of women and sexuality. That, I think, is a bad thing. I’d much rather my future son be eyeing an old-school playboy than be downloading “Hott Slutts Getting [bleeped].” It was interesting, in the article I read on the subject two things stood out a) that every kid in the sample group, male or female had seen porn before the age of 12-ish (???, exact age unknown but it was pretty young) and that b) the males were explicitly able to state what they expected based on the porn and then how they were disappointed when they eventually got girlfriends and how the porn affected their move into being sexually active (unrealistic expectations of what acts young females would perform etc. etc.).
See anu’s post below. The unrealistic expectations is only one reason I dislike porn. And while normally I would agree with you as to underlying principles, it’s not that simple when it comes to porn. What is a girl or woman to do if the guy she is with expects her response to follow a porn star’s? What if her “performance” is unfavorably compared to the films?
Yes, if a girl is expecting Mr. Darcy and ends up with Raymond–she needs to temper her expectations. Most women do–as do most guys when it comes to sex (ooh, bad pun). But since there are very few men waltzing about in breeches and ponytails, the fantasy aspect of such yearnings is much more apparent. When you are looking at Ms. Bambi and her Hot Girls–these are ordinary (?) people who are out walking around etc. The line between fantasy and reality is blurred–also, there is just so damn much of it–like someone else said, a person could come to believe that aberrant acts are really the norm.
But that was not really the point I wanted to make. My point is that porn shows guys a very limited approach to sex–and lovemaking. It does not take into account fatigue (those girls always want it), health issues, new baby, the 'flu, his mother visiting–whatever–all the vagaries of real life and real relations with a real person. If a guy only sees porn and starts to believe that a “normal” woman wants sex all the time and always the way he wants it or has seen it depicted etc–there is a problem.
I am not a porn watcher (although I have seen more than I care to)–to each his own. But I doubt it’s innocuous if it’s a major way of spending time.
Yeah, pretty much. A lot of porn out there is bad-ranging from stupid and laughable to absolutely disgusting and hateful. I don’t think it should be banned, or outlawed, but I find the brutal stuff, the disgusting “let’s beat this chick and rape her and fuck her up the ass with a grill brush and see-she LIKES it!” to be pretty damned scary. It’s not so much that I think it will influence anyone-because, let’s face it, the kind of people who’d go out and DO that probably don’t need something to influence them-in that I wonder where we get this idea that women want to be raped and beaten, or that rape and violence are truly sexy? No, not bondage games or mild rape fantasies (which are nothing like real rape), I mean actually brutalizing, hateful, viscious things. Taking a young virgin (and we can include men in this, in gay porn), and making her do this against her will, punishing her and getting off on someone else’s pain.
Or the fucking bizarre gross out stuff, that goes beyond “forbidden fruit” into the downright vomit inducing. Prolapsed rectums! Scat play! Extremely unhealthy looking body modifications. What the HELL???
If this stuff gets you off, well, hey-that’s your business. But sometimes I wonder what kind of sick mind comes up with some of this stuff, and WHY they find it sexy.
I’m the stereotypical female who prefers written erotica to visuals most of the time. But even then, it’s got to be pretty well written.
Alright, as a member of the ‘internet porn’ generation, I want to bring some of my anecdotal evidence. Just around the time I hit puberty, the internet was coming into it’s own and along with it the wonderful world of internet porn (or pr0n if you prefer). So I pretty my grew up watching women get it hard from behind and then get semen sprayed on their face, among other things. I still don’t get the appeal of the ‘cumshot’. Well anyway, since my discovery of porn I’ve had several real female sexual companions and never did I confuse those with my experiences with porn or expect the girls to perform acts that were common in porn. But I do remember when I first received a blowjob my thoughts were “OMG it’s like i’m in porn!!!” Beyond that I do not have any trouble distinguishing real intimacy and porn. Desperately stroking your member hunched in front of a computer monitor is waaay different from actually seeing, feeling, smelling a woman.
OK, admittedly I do talk dirty in my head during sexual acts and that might be the influence of porn.
Wait a minute, what? How is the line between fantasy and reality more blurred in porn than in other things? Maybe I don’t get what you’re saying because I don’t know who Mr. Darcy is, and I have no idea of the significance of breeches and ponytails.
And that applies to every form of fantasy indulgence in existence. It’s like criticizing Star Trek because they routinely defy the laws of physics.
About a year back, I went a couple rounds with a strident anti-porn feminist in this thread. That was a fun thread, even if it was pretty much the Dope equivalent of slow-pitch softball.
I’ve decided that calculus is one of the things that I should learn in my life, but don’t necessarily want to sign up for a nightschool class. The level of expertise that I’d been to have would be to understand how some basic equations work and have a sense of how changing the variables affects the outcome (which is, I suppose, the point of studying calculus at all).
Nothing terribly complicated, just the ability to quickly some some basic equations and understand new ones without too much fuss.
My question is, would this give me a good enough background to get started with some other self-taught courses?
http://www.teach12.com/ttc/assets/coursedescriptions/177.asp
Wrong turn Chairman Pow?
I wish I could recover the article…I read it within the last two years. It was in Time, Newsweek, the Boston Globe or some such secular source. It’s a pity I can’t find it and all the stuff I’m finding on Google is from “morality” sources that don’t really seem to articulate anything other than hellfire and brimstone.
I’m only 25 so the internet was available when I was a teenager (I remember getting Mosaic/AOL/Netscape in early highschool) and I’m not talking about that generation PopCultureReference. I’m talking about kids that were born in the early 90s so that they’ve grown up with the internet in their lives since they were toddlers. It was part of an ongoing study.