Some outfit is going around colleges showing a movie called The Price of Pleasure - which they claim shows how bad porn is because of its depictation of violence against women. (cite) All I can say is “WTF?”
I’ve seen a lot of porn. Probably more than I should admit to. Violence? Porn’s probably the least violent entertainment genre on Earth. Forget about the body counts in popular genres like action films or horror. Porn’s less violent than sit-coms or soap operas. You could watch thousands of hours of porn and never even see somebody get punched.
Porn’s a big genre. I’m sure somewhere out there, there’s violent porn. But it’s way out of the porn mainstream.
I’m not saying porn is perfect. If you want to argue that porn is foolishly unrealistic and objectifies women, then I’ll agree you may have a case to make. But violent? That’s not just ridiculous - that’s somebody selling an intentional lie.
Do they mean literal violence against woman? Or is it some metaphorical thing I’m just not getting. I wish they would have provided examples in the article (unless I missed it).
If they took a random sample of 50 ordinary popular movies, and counted the “violence” by that definition, I suspect that there would be more violence than in porn.
I was only counting physical violence. If they count “verbal abuse” as violence then my point about sitcoms being more violent than porn is truer than I realized.
I use and enjoy porn, and I have to agree…there is too much violence in current porn. And I hate it. I have to search to find titles that don’t have gagging and slapping. Some folks are into it, and that’s fine. But this stuff is now mainstream, on the theory that it is more “intense”. It’s as if all the producers looked at the most radical elements, like Rob Black, and decided that it is now mainstream. Sorry, but a woman choking and sounding like a strangled duck while attempting deep throat is not erotic for me in any way (but seeing a woman who can do so without choking, or any discomfort, is a major turn-on). Tears are not an aphrodisiac for me, and I suspect for a majority of non-sadists. Again, I have no problem with it for people who are looking for it, but as a mainstream porn consumer I have to specifically look to avoid it.
As it is, I have to confine myself to “Classics” from the 70s, 80s and early 90s. After that, it just starts getting misogynistic. Call me old fashioned, but I’ve never called a woman I’m having sex with a “slut” and don’t get the appeal. And when I watch a porn, the male performer is a stand-in for me, and if he is doing something I would never do, it pulls me right out of it. That’s one of the reasons I’m a big fan of the UK porn series “Ben Dover”. I’d call it “friendly gonzo”. The women are usually smiling, laughing and having a great time.
Yeah, this is something I wanted to ask about. I was once told that “they can’t show violence and penetration in the same scene.” But who’s “they,” and why “can’t”? Who would enforce this? Is there a porn equivalent of the MPAA?
In my experience this is not true at all. Perhaps the particular sources through which you seek your porn don’t have much violent porn, but there is an awful lot of it. Obviously the stuff like Max Hardcore’s is more of a fringe, but there are a lot of very, very popular sites with porn a little too violent for me to stomach.
Not as such. But Paul Cambria, a first amendment lawyer who works for several of the porn companies came up with a list of acts that his clients should avoid showing to avoid being sued by the Bush administration. It was published in Adult Video News in January 2001.
A lot of stuff that had been acceptable in films of the 70s has been edited out of current copies.* A large percentage of the list is routinely violated these days. I suspect 9/11 changed the priorities of the Justice Department.
The fisting of Marilyn Chambers in “Insatiable” and the enema scene in “The Erotic Adventures of Candy”
I’ve got a rather substantial collection of porn on DVDs, and there is no violence in any of them other than a slap on the ass. None. Any PG movie has more violence in it. Sex, yeah, there’s a lot of sex in these movies. I think that is what these stick up the ass people are complaining about. They don’t like people enjoying sex.
Agreed. I’ve seen “normal”, mainstream porn where the guy spits in the girl’s mouth, or shoves his whole hand into her mouth, or grabs her neck, and it squicks me out. I don’t find it erotic.
I kinda like it when the girl chokes on the dick, though. I am so going to hell.
And too much man-ass. What IS it with all the man-ass? I have this theory that an important segment of the pr0n market is made up of guys who really don’t like women’s bodies all that much except as the playing field for man sex. Thus you get a lot of super-close-ups of dry, shaven hooha and bobbing man-ass. What do you think?
My tastes in pron are pretty broad, but that whole choking on a cock thing is a total turn off. The sound of someone gagging is so unerotic it’s not funny.
Not that I watch a lot of vanilla pron. But everyone is doing it nowadays.
I wonder why porn has chenged so much. There are two things I rarely see any more, though I can’t say I particularly miss them.
One is heterosexual anal sex. I’m sure there is a niche market for it, but I don’t see it at all anymore in the the ‘mainstream’ stuff I see over the cable. I even watched a couple of movies with ‘anal’ in the title, both of which turned out to focus on doggie-style conventional sex. No actualanal sex ineither of them.
Also, in threesomes with two men and one women, it used to be pretty common for a woman to be anally and vaginally penetrated at the same time by the two guys. That’s another thing I don’t see now. I’ve often wondered if there was some danger there, possibly tearing of tissue if the guys got too, er, pushy and active.
Are these market decisions? Am I imagining these changes?