Heh heh heh.
If it were possible to distinguish between the reluctant/forced participants, and the ones who see it as a reasonably easy way to make a living, would that remove your objection?
See, this is the thing I just don’t get about guy-porn. How is romance bad in porn? And how the hell is having a good story intrusive?
Look, if you’ve got a good piece of fiction which involves a relationship, if you empathize with the characters, if you feel their connection, if you have the buildup and the circumstances, isn’t that a perfect place to slam in some really steamy sex? And if story + sex is good, why not sex + story?
I dunno. I’m a chick and I find that stuff distracting as shit in porn. I mean, I’ve watched Pirates and it is hilarious, but it isn’t sexy.
Same reason too many long cut scenes ruins a good video game. There’s a purpose in watching besides just watching.
Low-budget movies are usually bad. Poorly-written, look like crap, etc. Occasionally you get the rare gem that has a super script, and the production values either somehow add to or at least don’t detract from it. But those are rare.
People watch porn by and large to have a wank. Which means (at least for most guys), it’s highly dependent on the visuals. Shoddy camera work, poor lighting, bad makeup, can all detract heavily from the primary purpose of the shoot (wanking). So rather than spend the tight budget on getting a good writer in, the money has to go to quality production. No one wants to sift through tons of bad story lines to get to the rare gem that just happened to work and make us care about the characters-- we’d just rather get to the sex. I’d even go so far as to say that most people (or at least most men) don’t want to care about the characters.
So in essence, lack of money and good actors make a well-written, engaging porn near-impossible in a practical sense, and the fact that watching a good story and wanting a wank are separate things make it unrealistic in a philosophical context.
Speaking of writing quality in porn, I love the Who’s Nailin’ Paylin’ video. A pair of Russian soldiers have a tank that breaks down in Alaska and they go to Paylin’s house to make a phone call. She winds up on her knees between them and says, “Huh. You look German.”
Someone missed their calling.
I would like to add that there is no reason to keep porn on your computer in this day and age. You can go to any number of streaming sites and chose from thousands of videos (assuming you have broadband).
tube8 [dot] com for instance.
Also, Bricker, you aren’t watching the right porn. 
I’m telling you, men and women are coming from totally different directions here. I believe that for most men, a porn movie with an amazing, romantic story featuring a woman whose appearance is a 7/10 can’t compete with the most hackneyed pizza delivery guy story featuring a woman whose looks are a 10/10. I don’t think a large percentage of women would vote the same way. Guys prioritize visuals in their masturbatory aids far more than women do.
Well, I’m a woman and if I want to watch an amazing romantic story I’ll watch an ordinary film. When I want to watch porn, I’m just watching for the sex.
I agree. I’m a woman and I enjoy visual porn. I prefer it to text, and also like good visuals when doing the deed in real life. If there is a story beyond the most bare-bones set up, I’m going to just fast forward through it looking for the good parts so that I can get off and go on with my day.
Now a good movie with a lot of erotic subtexts can get me hot and be a lot of fun, but that’s different than porn and I’d never use it in the same way.
I’ve been thinking about this some more and I think perhaps it’s a difference in what men and women find visually appealing, rather than women being less drawn to the visual aspect per se. An awful lot of male-oriented porn revolves around close-ups of body parts, which do nothing for me (whether they’re male or female body parts). I’d usually get a lot more out of it if they’d just pull the camera back a few feet.
I know a lot of women are positively revolted by these close-ups and I think maybe that’s why a lot of them are turned off by porn altogether. It isn’t romantic storylines they need, just different camera angles.
Of course some won’t ever like it, for other reasons.
I am the same way. The major problem is he wants to watch it occasionally with me, but I loathe it. I really do. It turns my stomach. I don’t think it’s my insecurities and I’ve often laughed at how I’m considered a prude around here because I don’t like it. I’m not a prude; I just don’t get into porn.
Anyway, I have suffered through it a few times over the years with my Mig, just for his pleasure but if I had my way I’d never have to look at it again. What irks me though is when he tries to console me by telling me I don’t have to be jealous. JEALOUS HELL. I’m not jealous of those people at all! I think we still have a few years of work before we’ll ever respect each others opinions when it comes to this so we just really rarely bring it up. I don’t feel resentful knowing he enjoys it but I’m afraid he may be harboring resentment and that plain pisses me off!
Oh sorry to make this on-topic, we’ve managed to make it almost seven years with this issue (in addition to many, many more) so if you think it’s worth it, and this is the worst of your problems of course you can work through it! It’s just one aspect of your relationship. Let it be one aspect; don’t magnify it. Don’t let it define your relationship and you’ll work through it. It does sound like she has an insecurity if she expects you not to watch it just because she doesn’t like it. If she’s worth dealing with this insecurity then it’s a no-brainer. She’s worth it. I don’t know if you’re worth it to her if it keeps her up at night though. Maybe she needs to find someone who feels the same way she does. You may not be the best match for her.
That’s certainly part of it, for me. The other day we were watching (commercial, not amateur) porn which featured a male/female couple doing anal, and he kept pulling out and spreading her cheeks so the camera could see her “stretch”. Ugh. Rectums are not sexy. If the camera had stayed a few feet away, I might have liked it, but that just turned my stomach.
I think so. That’s not to say I’d become a porn fan, because I find it more embarrassing than arousing to watch other people go at it. I’m sure that to other observers, Mrs. Bricker and I wouldn’t be exactly Swan Lake, either, but that’s fine with me. But if I could know that the element of quasi-coercion (or outright coercion) was gone from the process, the distaste would go away too.
Maybe, but I think it’s a more endemic situation than you’re picturing.
Linda Lovelace was, by all accounts, an enthusiastic participant in her various porn films, to include the classic Deep Throat. A watcher of that film would see a woman who apparently enjoyed the eponymous act, and argue that there was nothing wrong with the film.
It was only later that we learn she was the victim of physical and mental abuse, and that her then-husband and manager desensitized her by, among other tactics, a gang rape.
It’s hard to reconcile the image of the enthusiastic performer with those methods of persuasion, but it happened. And it makes me constantly wonder what stories some of these other performers might tell.
You think she was enthused about that movie when she fucked the dog?
I fail to see why that is supposed to make any difference – if you know perfectly well that (for example) your coffee came from beans picked by someone working for pennies a day who would be shot by a death squad if he tried to go on strike for better wages and conditions, what possible difference does it make that you are enjoying the taste of the beverage rather than the sight of the production? If anything, putting the objectionable aspects of the matter further out of sight and mind makes it more, not less, morally suspect.
Yeah, that was my question, too. It seems to be a deliberate “out of sight, out of mind” attitude.
While i appreciate that we all do this, to an extent, when we use products that are of dubious origin, it seems pretty odd to adopt it as an explicit philosophical position in order to argue that some exploitation is worse than others simply because you actually get to see the workers.
I have a somewhat-related question for men who believe that women should accept that men are visual creatures just doing what hundreds of thousands of years of biology have hard-wired them for.
If men are hard-wired to be visual creatures, then it would make sense that women would be hard-wired to enjoy being looked at, right? So men, would you accept your girlfriends/wives putting up amateur videos of themselves engaging in titillating behaviors (i.e. having a wank or dancing or whatever floats their boat but doesn’t involve physically cheating with another person) for public consumption?
If your answer is “That’s different!”, please explain why.