There are a lot of assumptions made in the OP.
If I (being female and heterosexual) view porn, is it “objectifying women”? How?
Women watch pornography too. Does it cause women to view women as sex objects?
Many men think the “enhanced” women in porn look awful. There are a lot of men who do NOT like the fake breasts and fake lips and cheesy acting. (And, my god, the music. Make the music stop!)
Julie
What’s wrong with being viewed as a sex object? I like be be told I’m sexy. My wife likes to be told she is sexy. (She likes to prove it even more–lucky me.)
Now, if someone wants to argue that being viewed solely as a sex object can be a bad thing, well, I might agree. But that’s a more difficult thing to lay at the door of Vivid Video.
Hm. Interesting point, godzilla. I wonder if this experience is shared by other men who are into porn. From my experience it hasn’t been but again, I can only speak for a very small sample of them !
Tuckerfan - very funny ! Why, just this morning I learned a whole lot about oral sex, both on men and on women. It’s a lovely diversion from the war, don’t you think?
Avalonian: you’re right, of course. There are other places for women to explore their sexuality. But the sex trade is still important because (a) historically, those other places haven’t been available and (b) for many women (like me, it would seem) they are still not available, if only because we don’t know about them. I still don’t even know how one goes about getting invited to an orgy ! It would be much easier for me to buy a webcam than join one of those communities at this point. I’ll restate, then: the sex trade is the most available option for many (if not most) women to explore that part of themselves.
So long as we live in a society where young girls are faced with working at minimum wage jobs that don’t pay a living wage, we have no business criticizing the porn industry for paying women well for work in the sex industry.
As for its harm to men, sure, some men may be adversely affected by porn, but I doubt very many. I commend you to the True Porn Clerk Stories blog, a brilliant series of essays by a woman who worked for a couple of years as a clerk in a video store that had a large porn section. (Go ahead, Google it, it’s fascinating and thoughful reading.)
Her conclusions: almost all men watch porn. It was based on her observation that in all the time she worked in the store, only two or three men did NOT go downstairs to the porn section. She found that men who rented porn came in three varieties: men who rented every few months, men who rented a coupla films every month or every week, and a minority who rented three to six porn films EVERY DAY.
The guys who rented no more often than a weekly or less seemed pretty normal to her. The day-in-day-out renters were pretty obviously obsessive cases. Had some disgusting habits, too. And some days when she opened the store in the morning, she’d find them waiting there for the next hit of porn.
Based on her experiences and my own personal experiences with porn (I write erotic stories, though I wouldn’t characterize them as porn since they have plots and characterization and all) I’d say that most guys recognize porn as fantasy, a good way to work off sexual tension when you need to and there’s no one in your life to help out. A small minority watch porn obsessively. I’m not sure how much of a loss that is, though … their obsessiveness would probably manifest itself in other ways than enjoying porn, if the truth be known, and make them bad partners for whoever hooked up with them.
raises hand Sing it sister! Many of the women are porn movies just look ass-nasty. If anything, I’m avoiding objectifying these women because to turn then into sex objects would simply turn me off of sex forever. Yuch.
My wife and I both watch porn, though we fall into the “once every few months” category. It’s fun… sometimes we make fun of the movies, and sometimes we use it to start our own fun. I don’t think either of us take it too seriously. Evil Captor’s point is well-made, I think… porn is like food or alcohol or anything else: in moderation it’s fine, but if one gets obessive or addicted to it it can be dangerous.
cowgirl, I’m more comfortable with your new statement, thanks. I just think it would really suck if women thought their only unihibited sexual outlet was porn. If that were the case, there really would be something seriously wrong.
As to how one gets invited to a sex-positive community, it depends on where you are of course. If you’re really interested, I could probably dig around a little for you and see if there’s anything in your area. I’m guessing you’re in Canada, but if you want to e-mail me with your general area there, I can see what some of the people I know have to say. My e-mail is available in my profile.
And no, that’s not a come-on. 
Cowgirl - and everyone else. Although cowgirl combined my statement with the OP, I wasn’t clear. I meant working on the sex industry is hard on women. All the women discussed in my post are working in the sex industry, but I failed to state that in the first line.
I wasn’t raised not to be slutty, I was raised to keep my private life, sexual and otherwise, private.
You could look at this as the old “those who talk about the most do it the least model.”
Some good points have been raised here.
I don’t particularly like porn, but it’s not evil. It’s all about moderation and understanding that porn is fantasy. Also important is what is being depicted in porn–I’m very uncomfortable with the “teen/barely legal” pornography, and I disapprove of anything that suggests incest (involving a younger person), brutal rape (like snuff films), or bestiality. I think when someone is already into that stuff, viewing it will possibly motivate them to bring their fantasies to life. (Needing more and more to get gratification.)
I do worry about the men who get wrapped up in it and only view women as sex objects. I’ve known porn-addicted men, and men who treat women as sexual objects only (not necessarily because of porn, though). I’ve seen porn-addiction cause huge problems in marriages (and therefore, affecting the children). As someone else pointed out, any addiction can cause problems.
Two other points I want to mention… I notice that most “general” porn features women in the late teens to early thirties (but most of them look to be in their early 20s) so in my opinion it sets men up to think of women in that age range as sexual objects, and the rest of women aren’t considered as sexually desirable. It’s not just porn that relies on young women, though. (Advertising, etc.)
I mean, I’m in my late 20s. I ain’t getting any younger… and neither are the men I date. I accept beer bellies and balding heads as par for the course and not at all a bad thing. It’s reality that people aren’t perfect, and that we age and things go south, or spread east and west, or disappear altogether (like hair).
And I have had two boyfriends that wanted me to look more like a porn star–more makeup, bleached hair, tight clothes… and one of them wanted me to get a boob job. And it did bother me to be compared to women in porn and found to be unsatisfactory. (Kinda like the other thread about small penises… if your partner tells you that you don’t meet their qualifications and spends their leisure time looking at people who do, you don’t feel terribly secure about your desirability.) It makes me wonder how people who are very far away from the “ideal” feel about the beauty industry, the sex industry, etc.
But I had one partner that regularly watched porn, made no derogatory remarks about my looks, and was a great lover. He attributed it to watching porn. I certainly wasn’t complaining, as I reaped the benefits.
Actually, godzillatemple, you missed out one of the biggest arguments against porn I’ve come across from Christians. Namely, that porn caters to lust which is inherently sinful and that it cannot be used in a non-lustful way. I don’t entirely agree with that argument, but it is out there.
I’m afraid I know too little about the subject to be able to contribute anything else.
CJ
I don’t get it. Porn is fantasy. To assume that men can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality is insulting.
Porn is just a tool to help me get off, none of the feelings from the women in the pictures transfers to my daily life. In fact, i am less likely to treat women as sex objects after i get off, since i am less inclined to be thinking about sex. I don’t go for the big breasted blonde thing, either, I usually avoid the hardcore stuff.
As a libertarian, I do not believe banning porn is worth the immense sacrifice of civil liberties. However, some of my observations…
I’m a computer science major and more than one of my fellow male computer geeks quite literally cannot be attracted to anyone but Japanese anime women. One of them even forced himself to date an attractive girl on a steady basis to try to cure himself of the habit, and in the end he still couldn’t be attracted to her. I suspect that my own geeky BF is quite disappointed that I’m not an anime woman or an Asian woman.
My father is a high school psychologist and says he sees many guys who cannot be attracted to anyone except porn women.
My freshman “health” textbook showed some statistics on the “sexiness” expectations of people with respect to the opposite sex. Girls preferred a male body type that was very close to average, whereas guys preferred a body type that was far thinner than average (borderline underweight, if I recall correctly).
What else do you expect with the first generation of adults who spent their teen years with the Internet porn babes and playing Tomb Raider starring Lara Croft (5’10", 108 pounds, with DD-cups)?
Porn is fine in moderation, but the difference is that it’s now free, totally anonymous, and there are plenty of realistic “porn by proxy” video games out there. We all know how good teenage boys are at refraining from looking at DD-cup women. And because of this, IMHO, there is an epidemic of young adults out there who can’t flick a bic at real-world women.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by cjhoworth *
Actually, godzillatemple, you missed out one of the biggest arguments against porn I’ve come across from Christians. Namely, that porn caters to lust which is inherently sinful and that it cannot be used in a non-lustful way. I don’t entirely agree with that argument, but it is out there./QUOTE]
Actually, I didn’t miss out on this argument – I specifically excluded it from my original premise when I stated, “If we ignore the religious prohibitions against pornography…”
I’m not religious, and I really can’t see any validity in an argument that basically boils down to “God told us not to.” As the sig line states, however, your mileage may vary…
dre2xl: Well, it’s nice to know that I’m not the ONLY messed up male on the planet
Regards,
Barry
Shame this hasn’t been addressed. I think “romantic” movies and novels do just as much to reinforce unrealistic expectations of men as porn does to reinforce unrealistic expectations of women.
Guys don’t always dash in and sweep ladies off their feet, they don’t always say the right thing at the right time, and there’s no such thing as “the one”. But you wouldn’t know that from reading any of the romance novels at Wal-Mart, or watching any movie with Julia Roberts or Hugh Grant.
Agreed, and that stuff is shown to children. (Like Cinderella, etc.)
godzillatemple: As someone who has surfed a fair amount of porn sites, I can give you some reasons for what’s wrong with some kinds of porn.
1.) Check out a few sites and you’ll quickly learn of the “upskirt” shots, shots taken up women’s skirts or when they’re bending over. Some of these sites, including one site that boasted shots of women using the bathroom, admitted upfront that the photos were taken without the women’s permission. To me, this constitutes invasion of privacy. If a woman wants to drop her skirt, I’m all for it, but it’s wrong to post photos of private citizens without their permission.
2.) Once I got a disgusting pop-up that claimed to feature photographs taken of a rape. If these were real, once again you have invasion of privacy and possibly obstruction of justice and aiding in a crime. If these were false, you have false advertising. Prosecute the fuckers in either case.
3.) Snuff films may be an urban legend, but I have seen written snuff pornography at one site (if anyone wants to challenge me on this, please e-mail me and I will mail you back the site’s URL). I think fantasies that involve murder are evil.
4.) I have read a few things on the Internet that were written, IMO, not as erotica, but as attempts to degrade, demean, and brutalize women in the most sordid fashion possible. Frankly, if I were a cop investigating certain kinds of sexual murders, these writers would be on my list of supsects.
5.) Some people have a taste for BDSM, and I must admit I have seen a few very sexy BDSM photos. However, most BDSM seems to me to be attempts to control and degrade others, not what I would call fulfilling sexual experiences. YMMV.
Strange, Peyote. I’m a pretty big fan of some of that evil stuff that degrades and brutilizes women. But I don’t think I’m gonna be on the FBI’s sex murder suspect list anytime soon. College age girls don’t show up on those lists that often.
My fantasies are not evil. I have never hurt anyone in my life. I am not even physically equipt to act out half my fantasies! I can’t tell you why I get off on the things I do. But I have felt aroused by the same things since early childhood (and no, I was not abused). It’s just some wierd little quirk wired into me, and one that has no bearing on anything in the world except what kinds of websites I go to when I’m having some alone time. There is a pretty darn thick line between fantasy and reality- one I know very very well. Violent disgusting porn does not neccesarily mean violent disgusting people and certainly doesn’t make for a violent disgusting reality.
**godzillatemple, ** this statement struck me, so I hope you don’t mind me going after it a bit, and getting an opinion from other here. I’ve read the rest of your posts in this thread, though, and I’m happy that you’ve found a fulfilling relationship.
The phrase “has been instilled in me” is what caught me. Now, I understand that advertising is hard to avoid–the way “Madison Avenue” has portrayed women sometimes is pretty weird. However, you were talking about porn, which is so very easily avoidable.
You used the word “instilled,” as if it were something that your parents raised you to believe. Well, pornography is an option. The porn industry didn’t “instill” anything, IMHO. You saw something, you liked it, and went looking for more. That’s not the porn industry “instilling” something in you…that’s you instilling it in yourself.
I’m not anti-porn myself (although there’s some stuff out there that freaks even my really, really open mind). But I do wonder about statements like godzilltemple’s (although, as I said, I’m happy that you’re in a fulfilling relationship, and I’m glad you’ve moved past the issues that you had). Most people I know have watched some porn, and the overwhelming majority are just not warped in any way. So is it really the porn itself, or is the viewer, who may have had an underlying issue or two to start with?
I just thought I’d add a note about the ‘unrealistic images’ that porn can encourage. It is a two-way street, though I haven’t heard anyone mention it.
Yes, porn does focus heavily on certain aspects (big breasts, blonde hair, very slim bodies, etc) but it also focuses a lot on big penises, IMO. I have never seen a penis half the size of those in pornos. Isn’t the horse-sized, thrusting, throbbing penis another ‘unrealistic image’ ?
:::Checks pants::: Nope.
I am a guy.
My suspicion is that mostly men go for pornography, not women. I might be mistaken, though. Tell me.
Why do men go for porn?
My impression again, because of erotic fantasy and curiosity, and satisfaction therefrom, without the inconvenience and mess of actual sex acts with a partner or partners.
But whatever the pleasure of porn, I maintain for my own part that it never beats real sex with a live partner of the opposite sex.
Sex and defecation, they are quite close. There is a lot of sex porn but practically nothing of defecation porn.
Both are embarrassing and most I maintain people would seek total privacy in the process of.
Now, why do I think porn is not such a terrific deal; maybe honestly after you have seen some there does not seem to be anything new; one can just use one’s imagination to picture in one’s mind all the possible permutations and varietions and combination postures or acrobatics and exaggerations of members and parts.
Now, someone observant of human behavior tells us some two thousand years back that “Omne animal triste post coitum”; I for one must confess that I experience sadness “post pornum”.
Maybe I am a self-righteous prick, but indulging in pornograpy is not really as self-enhancing as writing opinions in message boards – for myself; maybe some of you have the same introspection.
Susma Rio Sep