Women don’t barter sex. Women barter men’s emotional fulfillment.
Am I late to the party for a rant? To clear up confusion upfront, I am here to defend porn.
In case you haven’t read Emma Lindsay’s piece on how porn makes men terrible in bed, you should. It is a valid point, which she later explained even better.
Porn is and has always been everywhere. From your modern browser’s history to your porcelain tea cups shamelessly depicting the small percent of spicy parts in the Kama Sutra. Did you know there is a pretty big part in the Kama Sutra about “relaxing” the woman before getting down and dirty? How about the part about the virtues of marriage? Anyway.
When I say everywhere, I say that fantasy itself is pornographic. You know, that part of thinking concerned with projecting your desirable sexual future.
Want less porn consumption? Stop teaching kids about bees and flowers and storks. Want even less porn consumption? Let’s open up sexuality, like we did with orientation. When will the day come when we can be again openly aroused? Want less porn overall? Why?
Instead of criticizing, or worrying about, what the watching of people doing the sexy time on camera does to kids and teens, why don’t we make sex normal again? We don’t, because we’re set deep inside to fear sex, because we’re set deep inside to fear ourselves.
I find a super tight resemblance between porn and soap opera. Not an easy thing to swallow, and it is a subject for another context, but I want to say this:
Women and men don’t look for sexual satisfaction in porn, they look for emotional fulfillment.
Alain de Botton has a cool talk on this, basically that sex is more about the soul than the body. However, it is true only while your perspective is from inside to outside, while when you look the other way around, it is just sex. What I mean by that is: when you hear some one describing their sexuality, don’t turn into an instant psychoanalyst and draw conclusions on personality because of fetish. You will be wrong if you do it.
But in Emma’s piece the problem is not the fact people watch porn. It is the fact that the content of porn is demeaning for women and bad for men. However, the content of pornography will change when it will be a different industry producing it. Porn today is made by an industry made of ignorant people, who are held ignorant by continuously being kept at the edge of outcast. If you want to do porn you better want it for the rest of your life.
There is no real input of creativity and art into pornography because the world still clings to chastity as virtue. When chastity will be just another option, perhaps gonzo will shrink and meaningful porn will rise up: in numbers, then in popularity.
Porn is popular with teens because it is still something to hide and it still indicates a rebel status. Just like fifty shades of grey. It is the “oooh, I shouldn’t be doing this”. But, at the same time, it is more, much more: with all the progress about being open about your sexual orientation, we’re still a closeted world in regard to sexuality.
In “You’re the worst”, a TV show, there is a dialogue like: “don’t tell me you’re one of those creeps with a foot fetish”. As long as a fetish springs up a label, porn will always be an emotional band aid. And it is so for both men, the horde of wanking dudes, and the, by comparison, select few women who venture into this bottomless pit of lust.
Women don’t barter sex. Women barter men’s emotional fulfillment. And so do men.
This is key to grasp porn properly. I am not talking about abused women or abusive men. They are not the bulk of the society. Feminism explains patriarchy very wel,l but we should not conflate the privilege of being born a male, with the intent driven abuse of women by men. They are different things.
It is a common misconception that in relationships, and in society in general, women barter sex for things. That is wrong. The greater aspect of a sexual relation is about the fulfillment of desire. In the emotionally stunted group of men raised so by our civilization, desire is the root of a general schizophrenia.
Most men live in a state of inner conflict between what they are and what they’re suppose to be, just like women. They suffer less than women, because, like racism, the system is gamed so that they are pampered with privilege to ease the pain of the their schizophrenic mind, lacking emotional expression, outward motivation and any sort of connection to their inside self. Be a man! No shit.
I don’t glide easily on the idea that men learn from porn how to behave in bed. It is true! And it hurts like hell. But this is how male sexual education works because we’re making it so for thousands of years.
Do mothers or schools open up the subject properly and then their kids get slammed with porn at random? No, porn is a seek for what is unknown. For example, in medieval times men of means went to courtesans, sex workers, where the “secrets” of sex were “taught”. In Chinese and Indian sexual tradition always special women, mistresses, priestesses, these knew the secrets, never the wife, the mother or the common girlfriend. Why?
When I was very young there was no internet. Yet we still “learned” about sex from sex stories, magazines, tapes and whatever, including pornographic depictions of sex from older boys do were doing it. What those boys talked about isn’t even on the entire PornHub.
Porn is free because we still can’t pay for sex.
Sex work is, in most parts of the world, hugely problematic. It is a way to work which has been constantly persecuted by society as a whole, and now it is infested with the vermin that grow in the rot of anything deemed illegal or over regulated.
When sex work will be as normal as being a bank teller, and as easy, and as safe, sex will become accessible. Right now it is not, and porn fills this void avidly. Sex is, in the US, in the EU, for the most part still inaccessible.
There isn’t even a serious market for female buyers of sex which is not because women don’t want that, but because of the bad idea that women “get it” whenever they want. Which makes them vulnerable. The hypocrisy is huge.
Pornography works because sex sucks.
Humans are thread full. We have this illusion of cohesiveness, like we’re the same in all dimensions. But, c’mon, we’re so not. We change, we shift, we switch, every single minute of our existence, constantly pulling on threads that unravel some behavior.
The brain tries everything and picks the best guess. And we don’t accommodate this very well, especially in our sex lives. How many people are full frontal about what they want in bed, without metaphor, without fear of rejection, and even more, how many people are by default willing to try?
By default? Edging towards zero, because as we grew up our sexuality was non existent to our social circles.
This guess work done by the brain, which I strongly believe to happen, is even more relevant about sexuality. Men and women get turned on by how a voice sounds or by eye contact. What do we do about it? We ask people to not get distracted by open sexual stimuli. How sane is that?
When will we be able to be openly aroused?
Openly aroused, yes. Making horny normal and as mundane as a headache or hunger. We take lunch breaks, do we take sex breaks? This sounds outrageous, and it should, because we’ve conditioned ourselves for it, but it isn’t.
Did it ever occur to us that we like watching others have sex because we used to see others having sex all the time? People were doing it in front of other people since forever and the hair thin slice of history taken over by religious based civilization will never make up for the large chunk of history made by natural human sexuality.
Why was I prompted to write this?
Because sex and sexuality has always been the liberator of mankind. It will always be so.
Because this new trend is getting louder, this idea that men suck as sexual partners because all they do as teenagers is watch porn and then they grow into cavemen exploiting women. This idea that men are bad in bed and abusive towards women because they look at moving pictures of depicted sexual fantasy is gaining support. And it is wrong.
Because I believe it is another ugly head of the utter mind control we’re subdued into as children by a society that builds cohesion by fighting nature.
Because, we accuse without understanding first, and then we feel entitled to say: qui s’excuse s’accuse, which almost all the time is a fallacy because we believe to be doing righteous accusations in the first place.
Whenever sexuality is talked about in the open, just like the last century’s classification of orientation as disease, society draws conclusions way outside the scope of the subject which is sex, not social standing nor good humanity.
It is not movies and websites that make men treat women bad, just as it is not the gore and blood in TV flicks that make people kill each other. Now that we’re at it, there is a horrendous amount of emotional pornography at children viewing hours broadcast daily an no one bats an eye.
The fencing of sexuality will not ever in a million years make men better, and, yes, pornographic consumption (in metaphor too) is an expression of sexuality.