Please do not tell me what turns on 65-year-olds.
My point exactly. Old people who can use the net must be super nasty porn consumers. Be glad granddad can’t figure out how to log on.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a silent film from the late teens or very early twenties that involved two women, a priest, and a dog.
So I would strongly disagree with any thesis that any increase in accessibility or availability has anything whatsoever to do with boredom or increased stimulation of imagination. People be freaky, people been freaky, people always be freaky.
I wasn’t going to participate, but no one seems to be making the point I was going to…basically that you can get all kinds of “normal, mainstream” porn OTC at stores now. And it’s more acceptable, so it’s easier to look the dude in the eye as you purchase it. Women buy porn publically now, something I think is relatively new.
But for the really weird shit, for the longest time you had to try to find clubs or groups of people that catered to you and your tastes. I’m guessing you still wouldn’t want to buy that standing face-to-face with someone…so instead you look it up online, 'cause it’s fast, free, and anonymous, and seeing that that kind of stuff is more popular online, people put more of it on. A case of supply meets demand IMO.
To be honest, I haven’t spent much time shopping in these kinds of stores nor browsing but I’m guessing you don’t find more unusual things easily and they tend towards “Debbie Does Dallas” and the like.
Interesting. This is a complaint I have levied for years about 'net porn (not that porn has been the main focus of my ire, you get the idea).
But I agree, porn on the net is, for the most part, getting significantly nastier. Or, if we don’t want to get into too subjective terminology, it’s getting more “extreme.”
I have always preferred porn that wasn’t “pornographic,” if that makes sense. I prefer erotica of sorts. Nowadays, it’s near impossible to search for porn without finding a whole list of unappealing, disturbing, and IMO gross selections: rape of all sorts, prolapsed anuses, forced oral sex to the point of gagging, women choked and spit on during intercourse, etc.
The Japanese stuff (hentai), is equally disturbing. I have no qualms with fantasy eroticism of the sort, but I have yet to see the medium used for anything besides women being tied up and raped.
What I realize as I type this is that the focus of pornography has shifted. While we must admit that porn has always been demeaning to women in certain respects, the focus of this extreme porn has literally nothing to do with the sexual act or eroticism, but with the humiliation and degradation of the women involved. In the same sense that rape is not a crime about getting sex but about degradation, demeaning and exerting power over the victim, porn has become about men controlling women. Often against their will. The sex is only secondary.
I cannot say whether or not this is the symptom of a society that has no respect for women, or the result of complete desensitizing to “normal” porn, etc.
Prove it.
.
I don’t think it’s clear at all. I don’t think it’s happening.
Back when I was in the sixth grade (almost twenty years ago) a classmate ran a BBS with hardcore porn.
This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Can you provide any proof whatsoever?
It seems to me that all we’re doing is catching up to the Europeans and Japanese in the Nasty Porn race.
Also it doesn’t go on forever. Most people are will be happy with vanilla porn, some people get jaded. But it’s not like the guy who likes anal graduate to double anal then to triple anal then to anal fisting. If there is a kinky side it will come out. If there isn’t one, they will steer clear of it.
Can it be both?
There have been some great replies in this thread (including Far More Than I Ever Wanted To Know About Japanese Tentacle Porn), so I should perhaps elaborate a bit more on what I was getting at.
I’ve had an interest in porn since I was about 15- at first it was the “Hot Naked People Having Sex!” aspect, but more recently- especially now I’m engaged- it’s been an academic interest as well- the history of porn, if you will. It’s a fascinating subject!
Anyway, I’m aware that there’s always been… “extreme” porn out there, be it in mythology, or woodcuts (someone posted a pic not long ago from a handbook on indentifying witches, in which said witch was clearly performing anilingus on a goat), or cartoons (Tijuana Bibles, for example), and, of course, I’m pretty sure that one of the first uses of the Camera was to take Nude Photos- all very artistic, of course, but I’d be very surprised if the photographer wasn’t also mentally imaging a sideline of… less artistic nude photos for the undiscriminating purchaser. 
Yeah, anyway, the trend towards Nasty Porn seems especially prevalent in Thumbnail Gallery Post websites (no, I’m not putting any links here!) on the net.
Look, I admit my tastes aren’t exactly pure vanilla- but I do NOT want to see women being spat on, slapped in the face, choked with a penis or dildo, or forcibly having anything inserted into their various orifices.
Now, we all have different tastes- I mean, there is no way I could find anything sexually enjoyable from Tentacle Porn, for example, but kawaiitentaclebeast is quite the Tentacle Porn aficionado - but the fact remains that way out there, really, really kinky unconventional sex fetishes used to be one of those things that required a fair bit of effort to find. Now, you just log onto a website- the TGP type seem to be full of these- and pretty much anything you care to name, and a disturbing percentage of it is going to be… well, genuinely Nasty. Not “a bit kinky” Nasty, but bordering on “Fucked up”.
Others have posited that Internet Porn isn’t getting nastier, there’s just more of it- and I’d argue that, be that as it may, the fact there’s more of the nasty stuff means porn is getting nastier, regardless of an overall increase in the amount of general porn out there…
Unless I’m wrong, it was a special bull, sent by Poseidon for some reason or other. It’s still bestophilia, of course, but…uh…she had an excuse!
Hell, before that the rich would pay artists to paint some…less than untitillating portraits to hang in their bedchambers.
Anybody who believes this only has to google “long jeanne silver” and click on the 3rd link to be sorely disabused of this notion.
It was not special in a way that made it anything more than a bull. Poseidon sent a white bull, big and a perfect specimen but not special in any other way, to Minos as a sign of divine favor. He expected Minos to kill the bull as a sacrifice to him. Minos decided to keep it. Poseidon made Passiphae lust for the bull. She birthed the minotaur. But, the mixing of species was not seen as magical at the time.
It’s all about degrading the woman. It’s very difficult to locate porn with the woman being an equal partner in the process. I see the examples you gave as an extention of rape fantasy, and I still wonder what causes people to find this arousing?
Is it rooted in a general feeling of powerlessness that many people feel regarding their place in the world, a sort of existential dispair?
Thereis another thread in Great Debates regarding how people will abuse their authority over people when given the chance. I can’t help but think that the two are related. Men here feel completely powerless regarding their jobs, the direction of their lives, maybe even their marraiges, so they fantasize about exercizing such absolute power over women (which is what rape, slapping women in the face and spitting on them, etc. amount to).
I have always thought that humans who feel helpless and “ruled” will react by abusing what little power they have over other people, to compensate and retain a feeling of importance. I’m not well versed in psychology, so if anyone has good information that correlates or contradicts that assumption on my part, feel free to fight my ignorance.
I’ve never had a problem finding it. Even in porn where part of the attraction is a power imbalance (BD/SM) it seems that dominant women are roughly as common as dominant men.
Well then, it would seem that your personal experience differs from my personal experience.
I agree. Well, in speciality films, the female is more often the dominant. In just plain nastier than normal porno, the male is shown as dominant.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be offering personal experience as a universal truth, no?
If I gave the impression that I was, then I apologize.
Perhaps, “I have found it very difficult to locate porn with the woman being an equal partner in the process” would have been a better wording.
I disagree with the premise. I do not think that peoples tastes are getting any nastier than they ever were. I also do not think that porn has gotten an nastier, though the proportions of it have for reasons I will explain.
Here’s my opinion, which of course I believe to be the undeniable truth: Porn tastes hasn’t changed, the distribution of porn however has changed, like any other product in the modern era. Let me begin with a off-topic analogy.
75 years ago there were a moderate number of brewers of beer. Prohibition had ended and technology hadn’t advanced to the point where distribution and inventory tracking allowed for mass marketing. As a result there was a fairly wide range of styles brewed in the US and each region had their own local brand. Each had it’s own style and flavor, many were bold and dark or light and hoppy. Lots of variety on all ends of the beer spectrum.
40 years ago refrigeration, highways and railways, agriculture and business savvy had all matured to the point where it was practical to have a “national” brewery that served a consistent product from coast to coast. It, however, was still somewhat expensive and not ever brewer could afford it. Additionally, to make it profitable you had to shoot for the middle, the lowest common denominator, so that your audience was a wide as possible. You had to have a product that was appealing to the largest number of people in order to justify the expense of going national. As a result, inoffensive, easy to drink, relatively neutral styles became king. Bud, Miller, Coors etc. Your basic plain American Lager became the product brewers pushed to maximize profits and justify the burden of national distribution.
In the last 10 years technology has advanced to the point where national distribution and large volume brewing is cheap and available to everyone. Consumers are interested in expanding their choices and small craft beers can be viable from a business standpoint thanks to modern facilities. Now we’ve entered a point where specialized beers are king, more choice than there ever has been.
The short version is that the business needs and abilities have both matured to a point where specialization is the most profitable course of action. The peoples tastes haven’t really changed. Bold, dark, craft beers have always appealed to people. Both in the early 1900s here and before that in Europe. Industrialization and mass market economies led to a neutral, broad appeal temporarily.
The same situation is applied to porn. The earliest records show that humans have had some pretty twisted tastes, porn in ancient Rome and China was pretty debauched and fiction from the time tended to be extremely vulgar.
As it matured into a for-profit enterprise with the advent of the photograph and movie camera the business needs demanded that it be made to be as widely appealing as possible. It was expensive and difficult to distribute so you had to make sure that if you made something the largest possible audience found it worthwhile. As result in the 50s through the 90s producers were obligated to make porn that was vanilla and offended no one so they could sell enough of one type in order to justify it’s production costs.
With the advent of the internet and the affordability of quality digital video equipment it’s become possible for anyone to make porn and for it to be profitable with a greatly reduced volume. As a result, just like beer, the industry has specialized. There’s much more porn segmented into specific genre’s because they are now able to target specific groups of fans. It’s not that people want kinkier shit now than they did in the 90’s, it’s just that in the 90’s it wasn’t cost effective to produce it.
I really disagree with the argument that porn today is nastier than it was 15 years ago. I would however agree that it’s much more varied. For every extreme anal insertions video there’s a foot fetish video being made. The former is nastier than the generic 90’s mass market porn, the latter is less so. For every new golden showers and facial abuse website there’s a new softcore tease site and a girls kissing site.
There’s definitely a much greater diversity in porn, much of which is nastier than the norm in the 90s (remember early internet porn was just mass market videos and magazines converted to MPEG or JPEG) and much of which is tamer, just more “fetishy” and appealing to a smaller group of people.
People’s tastes haven’t changed much, but the availability has. There’s more specialized porn out there for perfectly sound business reasons. It’s not a morality question, as always it’s a business one.
Back to the beer analogy: Has the American palate changed? Do our tongues pick up flavors differently? No, of course not. Have the ingredients changed (for the analogy the ingredients are the actors) to create these new bolder flavors? Only slightly if at all. It’s just that the industry has changed to provide more options that people like. Same with porn, same brains, same desires and hormones, essentially the same actors with the same flexible morals but the industry has matured to offer more choice.
If you think it’s gotten decidedly nastier, I’m guessing you just cruise websites that carry a product specialized towards the nastier specialties. There’s tons of vidcap galleries that favor vanilla lesbianism, amateur movies, public nudity, softcore teases and tame roleplaying.