What a tangent that was. Glad I missed it…
The funny thing is, porn is a product and the people who make it know this well. What sells products? Being the hottest, dirtiest, most taboo etc etc, just like the nicest paint job and best engineering sells sports cars.
People have been doing weird shit to each other in the bedroom since lonnng before internet porn came along, sometimes it really is degrading Im sure, sometimes not…Depends on the relationship totally. People get turned on by things that might seem degrading to others, theres much more to a healthy sex life than physical stimulation, a lot of mental capacity there too, And that goes for both men and women. Not everyone understands or enjoys this and thats cool. Mainstream porn is kinda drifting in that direction since the 50’s and I propose that its a market effect as I described above, and some measure now of Internet and its attendant competition stresses. Being that people are largely products of their environment ISTR that its going to have an effect of some sort, as Troppus alluded to.
Missed it? You’re continuing it!
On the flip-side, issues such as premature ejaculation and early onset ED has been linked to “overstimulation”, or watching too much porn. So you see the world is not without some justice.
I was referring to the tangent that got moderated.
Yeah, I don’t think anybody is confused about what you meant.
**Voltaire **seems to have been confused. See post 142. I dont think I made any personal attacks or snarky comments, which is what I would have to do to continue the tangent I was referring to. I was simply stating my thoughts on how porn ended up being what it is today.
Which is the tangent I was referring to, since it’s a complete and utter hijack of the OP. But whatever, lost cause.
Kind of, but you miss the point.
To continue your analogy, Ford might issue some new muscle car and it will be widely advertised and talked about. And they’ll sell about 50. That gets the Ford name out there. But meanwhile, what Ford makes money out of is churning out (and selling) hundreds of thousands of ordinary plain, dull, workaday cars and trucks.
Most of what I know about the business of porn comes from reading a Slate (I think) article a long time ago which I now can’t find, and this thread in which an actual porn producer Mike South talks very openly about the biz.
Mike South explains that he is a niche porn producer, but comments that his two most popular sites are one that features bukkake and another which is just vanilla amateur porn. (see post #5). Now bukkake is pretty out there and I guess if I was going to call any mutually voluntary sex acts degrading bukkake would be amongst them (but it’s interesting to hear Mike South’s view, see his post #20). And the fact that his bukkake site is his most popular site probably has more to do with the fact that it is his particular niche than it’s overall popularly in general.
But what is interesting is that his second most popular site is “plain vanilla amateur”. Not dirtiest or most taboo at all.
What was interesting about the Slate (or whatever it was) article was a discussion about how much data mining the big web porn providers could do. It’s child’s play for them to see exactly what sort of picture gets the most clicks and observe exactly which videos get voted up and favourited. And so on. And IIRC what they said was that what is ultimately the most popular thing is well shot stills or video of attractive people [appearing to be] excited by being into having relatively plain vanilla sex.
Sounds like the plain old lowest common denominator effect to me. Attractive people + sex, about as basic as you can get for porn; something for (almost) everyone.
You’re right, troppus, sex is wrong. I’m joining a monastery.
What I find that gets overlooked in this thread also is the expansion of amateur porn. The internet allowed people to be their own pornstars, and I would say a lot of the free porn out there is regular folks, flabby, stretchmarked, having “normal” people sex with each other. There’s this misconception that the only naked bodies young men are going to see are these airbrushed silicon haemonculi but the sheer quantity of amateur stuff (not to mention sexting and webcams and whatnot) means there’s just as much chance young men are watching people of various age ranges/body types doing all sorts of mutually pleasurable stuff to each other.
Don’t underestimate the power of young people using shock value, Troppus. Its totally possible young guys were simply trying to gross you out/offend you/get a reaction. I used to say obscene things to people when I was young, not because I wanted to do those things/meant it, but because I found the other person’s reaction hysterical. For these young men, it might be less taking all this gonzo porn stuff seriously, but more just trolling in real life.
That definitely happened a few times, Incubus. Every young generation goes through a stage where they think they invented sex and have something to teach the older generation. A handful of those guys were persistent and definitely misguided though, truly seemed to need to conjure a whore in order to maintain interest. Pretty hard to shock me, through, I just laughed them off while feeling sorry for the girls they dated.
I kind of thought this whole internet sex thing would go the other way. I figured that widely available and easily sharable porn would erase the misconception that only dirty girls like sex, erase the crazy posturing and ceremony both sexes have to go through in order to hook up. Still can’t figure it out; for twenty years the web has been flooded with boobs, butts, and every possible degree of exhibitionism. When will guys figure out that women
like sex, too? The proof is in the oversharing and the exhibition.
The reason I’m so put off by the humiliation/subservience porn is because it echoes the Madonna/whore complex for me. It seems that because some boys feel embarrassed or have been made to feel ashamed of their erections and their subsequent emissions, that they need absolute reassurance that women aren’t as disgusted or disturbed as they are with themselves. Maybe some just want reassurance that women are just as horny and eager as they are. And some, I fear this group: must objectify women entirely, make them contemptible whores. Unless the scenes listed include reciprocal acts, I feel like I’m witnessing someone’s hang-ups, misconceptions, or deep seated psychological issues and self-hatred.
It’s not that any of the acts seem forced on the girl, it’s that the humiliation angle just reveals too much about his sexual hangups. Like “Is * that* what I have to do in order to convince you that I’m not disgusted by your erection and demonstrate that I’m excited about having sex with you? Well, okay, I’ll do it, but I’d sure rather demonstrate my enthusiasm by working towards my orgasm, too”
I see it sort of like Pro Wrestling. Obviously pro wrestling is staged, but people still get obsessed with it/convince themselves it is real. Over time, pro wrestling got more zany/violent/over the top. Then something new came along: Mixed Martial Arts. If you want to see 2 atheletes scrap and pummel each other for real, you can. You can even learn how to do it! The hobby grows in popularity over time.
By the same logic you’d think nobody would care about pro wrestling anymore. But it still has plenty of popularity as well. For various reasons, there continues to be a demand in spite of a more “realistic” alternative.
The fact is, its simply not a zero sum game. The “humiliation” genre of porn is still popular, in part, because of people’s assumptions of what porn is supposed to be. When presented with different examples, people refuse to accept it. This article gives some interesting trends in porn search habits, among which include more searches for 50yo women than 19yo women, 3x as many searches for fat women vs skinny women, and more searches with the word “mom” in the title.
I also think porn tastes vary greatly on what a man likes and what he’s willing to admit he likes. We all complain about how this degrading “conventional” porn is so ubiquitous, but I think its because many young guys are uncomfortable admitting to liking something “different”. So while some perv classmate of yours might say “lets have a milf bukkake party” maybe he might feel self-conscious if he said “how would you feel about stomping on balloons while smoking a cigarette while making godzilla noises…i like to watch!” 
Both good points, Incubus, about the theatrics and the unwillingness to admit deviation from the status quo. I’m equally embarrassed for and incredulous of the belief that WWF is real and that women reach screaming orgasms by being gagged and having their eyes, nose, and hair hosed.
When those acts I listed as humiliation and revenge porn are shown as singular acts without context, the takeaway is that men dont know or care about sharing ecstasy with a partner and that the have a deep and unapologetic contempt for women. The porn women offer (flashing, nudes, solo) as described by the OP seems so playful and generous by contrast.
Ya got a cite for that?
I’ve underlined parts I found interesting. It never occurred to me that any man feels embarrassed about his erection or ejaculation. I haven’t come up with my own theory to counter yours, but what is the basis for your conclusion that some men have this particular hang up or "deep seated psychological issue? From what I’ve read, most men are quite happy and proud of their erections and could never believe than anyone would be disgusted by it.
I don’t think all men suffer from it. I think that cum guzzling porn stars reassure those guilty, ashamed types that some of us approve and want their attention.
No studies or cites to offer here. Little bit of college psych, little bit of experience raising teenaged boys/social work, little bit of talking with girlfriends, little bit of personal experience, whole lot of conversation with my mostly guy friends. More than one factor at play here, none worth its own bullet point: Guys are pretty convinced they want sex far more than women. A meme exists that masturbating teenaged boys live in fear of grossing out their mothers. Some women can’t or won’t perform oral; lots won’t swallow. A meme exists that women want a towel or a shower right after sex. Threads here that challenge the idea that women want sex as often as men usually deteriorate into ugly disagreements. The meme that women are the angels of the house, naive young ladies; the pure virgin moms. And boys are dirty, dirty dogs. The origins of purity versus corrupted began before the virgin birth and has tenaciously carried through to the apple pie fuckers of today. Boys are shamed for being horny little devils, suspected of ill intent towards our daughters; not even the pastry is safe.
And brides still wear white, still a stigma on unwed mothers, purity rings, slut shaming, etc. These are the prevailing roles throughout history. Finding a woman who begs to be defiled and revels in every drop is a sure fire way to reassure a man that his needs, urges, and body are acceptable and desirable.
Thanks, after approximately 130 or so completely off topic posts, someone finally got back to original topic!
There’s a recent paper in Pediatrics* that measured some of the developmental pathways for teens in the Netherlands (ages 12-18y) who participated in high risk sexual behavior. Sending a photo in which the adolescent was partially naked was considered as one of the online sexual risk behaviors. Other ones were “searching for someone on the Internet with whom to talk about sex”, and “searching for someone on the Internet with whom to have sex”.
The factors came from different psych scales, and where possible, the scales seemed to be validated. For example, they used the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale and the FACES for family cohesion. It’s not my area but the interpretation of the scales seemed straightforward (usually low to high mapped between 1 to 5 or 1 to 10).
I didn’t see a gender stratification of the results, so the conclusions are a little limited for this thread. The rates for the high risk group were 62% boys and 38% girls. The rate for girls at high risk was ~5% out of all girls surveyed.
That said, the factors that they found from the study most correlated with high risk online behavior were: Sensation Seeking (high), Life Satisfaction (low), Family Cohesion (low), Online Communication usage (high). The stuff in parens are means relative to the low risk online sexual behavior group.
There was overlap between online behavior and offline behavior, as one might expect. Some of the factors that were in common were sensation seeking and lower education levels.
*Baumgartner et al, “Identifying teens at risk: developmental pathways of online and offline sexual risk behavior.” Pediatrics. 2012 Dec;130(6):e1489-96. doi: 10.1542/peds.2012-0842.