Naomi Wolf claims:
"Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?"
Feministing has a different view:
"She [Wolf] claims that all porn this day and age does is demolish straight women’s sex lives because they can’t live up to porn’s image of the “perfect body” and satisfy their more-or-less bored partners. In fact, the entire piece discusses the issue from the perspective of men, seeming to say that a satisfying sex life is defined based on what a man wants."
Both are, of course, correct. As a porn, er, skimmer? I think there is a definite fantasy-reality that's created by porn as it becomes more ingrained in our society. Teens really do believe that porn sex isn't just "good sex" but "real sex" and that big jugs and Friday afternoon cheesecake is "normal". But is the answer rebelling against that paradigm? Or better yet, is a rebellion really possible outside of radical Islam? I was thinking that talking about this is like discussing what political debate should be vs. what political debate is. Fox News, and really the whole M$M is political porn in which the most extreme cases are presented as mainstream. When torture is presented as a military option and suspension of Habeus Corpus is a considered a "useful tool" in fighting terrorism, isn't that the same thing as accepting the pornographic sex dynamic as "real sex"?
What really needs to be discussed is why is radicalism, in all its forms, is so tempting to the general population. My idea? It's seductive because the narrative is so exciting. Just as porn makes the jump from Romeo and Juliet to Debbie Does Dallas, our radical political dialogue jumps from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to 24. Personally, the whole thing probably has to do with our evolution from a written society to the audio-visual. And Michael Bay is directing the whole production.
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I suggest that porn appeals to many people (mostly men, but some women), because it stimulates them and boosts their self-esteem to see someone else dominated and abused. Here is some of the evidence:
I Was a 'Self-Esteem Vampire': A Woman's Journey Out of Watching Porn (explicit language)
I was getting a sense of power from watching the humiliation and degradation of the women on the screen.
I was claiming power, the all-elusive power that women strive for their entire lives, from degrading and enjoying the degradation of other women. I had absorbed a lesson from the patriarchy: women are easy to degrade, weaker, and more vulnerable, so much so that even another woman can take their power. Watching women being slapped and hurt was filling that void within me that was taken so many years before by men. It allowed me to feel powerful and in control...
The Psychology of Porn for Men
Bill Margold, one of the industry's longest-serving film performers, was interviewed in 1991 by psychoanalyst Robert Stoller for his book Porn: Myths For The Twentieth Century. Margold made no attempt to gloss over the realities. "My whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don't care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn't have when they were growing up. So we come on a woman's face or brutalise her sexually: we're getting even for lost dreams..."
Oppressing other people for profit and entertainment is more reactionary than radical, but porn merchants like Larry Flynt have done a good job convincing people that porn is radical.
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