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June 06, 2007
Amateur Porn!
Julian, commenting on the rise of amateur porn, writes:
there are plenty of people who consume porn as a second-best substitute for the sex they're not having, which means they want something that approximates at closely as possible an erotic experience they could imagine themselves having. In other words: Couples (or whatever) who are slightly-more-attractive versions of recognizably ordinary sorts of people, having sex because they actually want to, genuinely enjoying it, and displaying the kind of affection it would be difficult to convincingly feign for someone you'd just met even if you had trained with Lee Strasberg for a decade.
That's always been my sense of it, though I don't follow the industry's sale numbers terribly closely. This also has problematic implication for the Laura Sessions Stepp thesis that porn is leaving young men uninterested in young women. Or something. If what folks seem to be looking for in porn is realism, something as close to the women they know as possible, then the causality may well be going in the other direction. As Julian puts it, it's a "second-best substitute for the sex they're not having," not an obstruction to their actual pursuit of sex. Although to really confuse matters, I could also see an argument that porn that's closer to real life, but still populated by uncommonly attractive individuals, would raise expectations higher than porn where the women don't look like human beings. Making the rare look achievable may do more to change behavior than the outlandish. All that said, though, I highly doubt porn is a serious culprit here. If it's unrealizable beauty standards in romance, it's romantic comedies you want to yell at.
June 6, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
You're just trolling for more google searches, aren't you.
Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | Jun 6, 2007 9:53:41 AM
Hey, it goes both ways.
Porn, amateur or otherwise, may raise male expectations of female attractiveness.
But romance novels & films raise female expectations of male behavior.
I mean, really, how many charming bad boy nice guys are there out there? I think there's just George Clooney, really.
Posted by: Adam | Jun 6, 2007 10:20:35 AM
It could also be that the message about "porn demeans women" is starting to sink in on a broad level.
Posted by: rslux | Jun 6, 2007 10:52:10 AM
As someone who's slightly more connected to the world of adult film than I suspect most political bloggers & readers, from my vantage point I'm not seeing this "amatuer porn revolution" Mr. Sanchez is talking about.
Posted by: DRR | Jun 6, 2007 11:00:05 AM
First, it was that porn caused men to be rapacious beasts. Now, Porn causes men to not want to have sex with normal women. At some point, feminists should just be honest and say that they don't like porn. That's not an argument they can win, and they know it. So they make up, or dupe themselves into believing, this other bullshit. I look at porn, both professional and amateur, yet I still find the ability to have sex with everyday women to be perfectly possible. I'm considered attractive by members of the opposite sex, for the most part. Still, despite this, I still have sex with girls less attractive than me because A.) someone only has to look good enough to you. and B.) sex is a lot of fun regardless of the inherent attractiveness of your partner.
So while I won't sleep with people far outside my level of attractiveness. I don't know many women who will either. Could that just be that some of these women are upset that they can't get a male who is as attractive as they would like, so they make up this load of bullshit to tell themselves they are prettier than they are? Men do it all the time, with lines like 'she must be gay' of 'she's just stuck up'. Women often claim that men who say that women don't like nice guys, are doing this. (generally, they aren't. I'm a complete dick most of the time and it's never hurt me once. I've known many guys who go that extra mile only to be shot down.)
I'd wager one of these two scenarios is far more likely than the idea that men would rather jerk off than have sex, just because they aren't going to sleep with a porno-goddess.
Posted by: soullite | Jun 6, 2007 11:03:31 AM
DRR, you're connected to professional porn. I don't think he's talking about BangBros and NaughtyAmerica. I'm not even sure he's talking about the slightly more amateurish 'exploited teens'. I'd imagine he means the so-called 'dorm room sex' sites where people are clearly filming themselves, the videos are being leaked onto the internet, and they get collected by sites like 'home spy video' and then get sold on the internet, often combined with orphaned or licensed adult video's that look amateurish.
Posted by: soullite | Jun 6, 2007 11:10:23 AM
This also has problematic implication for the Laura Sessions Stepp thesis that porn is leaving young men uninterested in young women.
Outside of a bar, Julian's bullshitting and your agreement does not have a problematic implication on Stepp's bullshitting.
Data please?
Posted by: jerry | Jun 6, 2007 11:35:52 AM
DDR: I'm not seeing this "amatuer porn revolution" Mr. Sanchez is talking about.
Folks may be missing the several X-rated take-offs on YouTube. Try www.xtube.com (free, only an email addy to register). Then tell me there's no amateur porn. LOL. xtube stuff comes in any flavor you want.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Jun 6, 2007 11:36:20 AM
In Kevin Drum's words:
"Seth Rogen is almost completely charmless. . . . We are expected to believe that Katherine Heigl has trouble getting a date."
Yeah - I think this creates most unrealistic expectations.
Posted by: MDtoMN | Jun 6, 2007 11:39:07 AM
I'm sorry, has someone actually SAID:
that porn is leaving young men uninterested in young women.
Has this person MET a young man? Or, an old one?
Posted by: Robert P. | Jun 6, 2007 12:28:17 PM
Amateur porn always makes me think of the song Found a Job:
They might be better off ... I think ... the way it seems to me.
Making up their own shows, which might be better than T.V.Judy's in the bedroom, inventing situations.
Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations.
They've enlisted all their family.
They've enlisted all their friends.
It helped saved their relationship,
And made it work again ...Their show gets real high ratings, they think they have a hit.
There might even be a spinoff, but they're not sure 'bout that.
If they ever watch T.V. again, it'd be too soon for them.
Bob never yells about the picture now, he's having
too much fun....So think about this little scene; apply it to you life.
If your work isn't what you love, then something isn't right.
Just look at Bob and Judy; they're happy as can be,
Inventing situations, putting them on T.V.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Jun 6, 2007 1:21:27 PM
Porn, amateur or otherwise, may raise male expectations of female attractiveness.But romance novels & films raise female expectations of male behavior.
Exactly. Catherine Moreland had completely skewed expectations based on the novels she read; that was 200 years ago.
Discussion of 'porn' is nearly always both too general and too specific. It's too general because while 'porn' is discussed as if it were a single thing, in reality there are as many different kinds of pornography as there are people with sex fantasies. It's too specific because discussing 'porn' in isolation separates it arbitrarily from the broader realm of wish-fulfillment fantasies.
The latter is important because when one says 'porn distorts male expectations' etcetera, it makes it sound terribly sinister; but when you say 'wish fulfillment fiction distorts expectations regarding a given subject' (whether it be real estate porn or money porn or whatever), it makes it clearer that the problem isn't just 'porn'.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Jun 6, 2007 1:30:09 PM
For those who were casting doubt on the premise that there's a burgeoning amateur sector: The original post has a link to a New York Times article reporting on a supposedly dramatic dropoff in porn sales, attributed partly to the large amount of professionally-produced material that can be downloaded free, but also in significant measure to the availability of free amateur product.
Posted by: Julian Sanchez | Jun 6, 2007 3:37:04 PM
Robert P.
Naomi Wolf made this rather strange claim in an article in New York Magazine (I believe back in 2003) but which recently was the subject of commentary on a few sites. Her thesis was that college aged men were no longer interested in sex with real women because they were engaged in an onanistic orgy brought on by the consumption of porn.
My intial reaction -- and my reaction upon reflection -was this is bullshit. Pure, unempirical, let's make crap up, bullshit.
I haven't seen anything by Lara Sessions Stepp in this regard, but if she wrote something I an willing to state, a priori, that it too is bullshit because that's all she ever writes.
Posted by: Klein's Tiny Left Nut | Jun 6, 2007 3:39:28 PM
I've got this thesis that porn is about the hot bitches.
But I can't say that cleverly enough to slightly obscure what I mean, so maybe I'll just go with this:
Porn is about the hot bitches.
This, my friends, is insight.
Posted by: ethan | Jun 6, 2007 3:47:19 PM
The problem is making sweeping generalizations about how men feel about porn. From all sides. To state that men are using it as a second-best thing is to insult the very real experiences some men have of using porn in lieu of actual sexual encounters, something that does create a lot of real world problems for real world women. I know that soullite would dismiss me as a jealous, whining feminist (having already established the strawman that states that feminists are against porn, which is hardly true across the board or close), but I do think that women, being human, are entitled as men are to have misgivings about relationships that are failing. And if your husband or boyfriend is too busy jerking off in front of the computer to ever have sex with you, that's a very real problem a lot of women have.
Still, most guys seem to use porn as a supplemental, as Julian states. Some men are even thoughtful porn consumers and seek out products that are more realistic, not just because they think it's hot but because they want to keep thinking real sex is hotter than the fake-looking stuff. Which is great; I'd like to encourage men to be pickier about blatant misogyny in porn and avoid giving their money to pornographers who think it's not hot unless some woman ends up being called names, spat upon, smacked around or ends up with a faceful of semen.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Jun 6, 2007 4:43:38 PM
I'd add that this isn't a man vs. woman thing, either. If you are a man who'd rather jerk off to porn than ever have sex with your wife, you have a problem that is not good for you or for her.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Jun 6, 2007 4:46:41 PM
No, Amanda, I would dismiss you as a jealous, whining feminist because we've actually read some of your writing, and, quite frankly, I can't imagine anyone emasculated enough to actually sleep with you on an ongoing basis.
Soullite can agree or disagree with me as he pleases.
Posted by: Eric | Jun 6, 2007 6:31:17 PM
Her thesis was that college aged men were no longer interested in sex with real women because they were engaged in an onanistic orgy brought on by the consumption of porn.
My intial reaction -- and my reaction upon reflection -was this is bullshit.
I read the article, and if I remember correctly (which, there's a real possibility I don't), the author's approach was concededly speculative. Her thesis isn't totally implausible. Some men may find it, on the whole, easier to just look at porn and jerk off then to have to actually worry about pleasing another human being besides themselves. Your wife or girlfriend, unlike the girls in the porn videos, is not likely to be content with being your sperm receptacle.
Posted by: Jason | Jun 6, 2007 7:00:32 PM
Jason,
As I recall it wasn't written in the "some men do x" terms, which would probably be indisputable. You can always find an outlier or a group of outliers when it comes to matters sexual (and I don't mean that to sound so judgmental). But it was a typically overblown claim that seemed to suggest a crisis facing young college women because the mens had fallen in love with their computer screens. Now granted I have not lived on a college campus in longer than I care to count, but I have a hard time believing that human nature has changed that much in a quarter century.
I just find Wolf to be a lazy thinker, struck by more than a little bit of middle aged prudery and always attracted to notions of victimhood. She seems very uncomfortable with all of teh sex that is going on without her approval.
Posted by: Klein's tiny left nut | Jun 6, 2007 7:50:47 PM
I'd say this is not one of Ezra's best... or most insightful. The "amateur revolution" is already quite old... though I do get the sense the industry, generally, was flummoxed by it; it's turned the understandable economics of the nineties upside down, from what I can tell. It's allowed a number of enterprising people with webcams and a dream to make waves. But, and its been said before, this "revolution" has happened, and big porn houses seem to have adjusted (as other big companies have) by amping up their web presence (the big houses still have the vast share of total business); as much as smart "amateurs" (many of whom now make livings from it) have presence, customers seem more comfortable with the brands they know, given a choice. And in amateur, you can wind up paying good money for crap - get burned enough, and there's bound to be a flight to quality and trusted names. The rest of this post, and the suppositions about who uses porn and why, seem wildly speculative and off the mark. On the one hand, why porn sells is not nearly so complicated; on the other, what it replaces for whom, given our general discomfort talking about sex, I don't think can be well nailed down. I'd welcome a frank discussion ( a blog, anyone?) of sex and sexuality. But generally, we're not having that conversation, and few people, really, are willing to open up about what turns them on, why, and what role porn plays in the whole sex spectrum.
Posted by: weboy | Jun 6, 2007 8:10:15 PM
The biggest way my porn consumption has distorted my sexuality and the way I experience it is that it's made me unable to fantasize in the first person anymore. It's all third person now. Very frustrating.
Posted by: Greg | Jun 6, 2007 9:58:21 PM
Please tell me that was just Ms. Marcotte's opening gambit to take the net-based marriage counseling business by storm.
Posted by: 29 year old virgin | Jun 7, 2007 5:09:41 AM
Mater artium necessitas.
is the mother of invention].
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