Internet porn and the real life: Just like in the movies... - by Kolya
demagogue on 4/2/2011 at 23:11
I understand you wanted to talk about consensual pornography. Obviously I was talking about coercive porn from the beginning and am not saying all porn is coercive and harmful (though for some countries without the ability to enforce regulations it's not a bad bet). We're not disagreeing on anything. Remember I said I'm libertarian on it if it's safe and consensual. Don't restrict it.
But to me, saying you want to talk about concerns with internet porn but exclude exploitation is like wanting to talk about concerns with torrents but exclude illegal and copyright violating torrents. Ok, but just seems trivial in comparison. Or as a professor of mine used to put it: why dig so deep for the gold dust when there are these huge nuggets here on the surface? ("Nuggets" in terms of seriousness of concern; I don't know the statistics of what % of porn is consensual and what exploitative. I'm sure it varies a lot by country and not a big problem in the US but very serious in other countries.) But it's your topic, of course, so you can focus on any aspect you want to. I just took the topic as what worries us about internet porn, and for me it's the risk of exploitation. I can worry about that without claiming that every woman is coerced into porn or that the mainstream San Fernando Valley industry is anything to worry about.
Edit: BTW, there are more than a few articles about the concern with importing sex slaves into Dallas for the Superbowl. This is Dallas, 2011, not some back alley in Thailand. And I think it's a good bet that many of these women can be found on American porn sites. And things like sex tourism in Japan are of course mainstream and very exploitative; the really bad exploitation goes where the money is. So just flashing the word "mainstream" doesn't erase all the worries. (But it's good that the US has some credible regulation and oversight; Japan needs more; SE Asia is at crisis levels.) But if some college girl wants to make a little extra money to pay for classes with a porn site, I won't be the one complaining.
................
edit2: Ok, as for that part of what's causing what, we should try to get the situation clear. I'm not a sociologist and it'd be nice to have some statistics, and feel free to correct anything that sounds wrong. But my thinking on that one point was... Obviously not all porn is exploitative. Much of it is fine; the women choose it and are fine doing it, and I'm not worried about any of that. Some is exploitative, particularly concentrated in certain countries. Prostitution (consensual & non-consensual) & sex slavery operations I think largely contribute to porn sites, at least from what I've read before. (I think you were reversing my concern. I was thinking "Almost all exploitation is associated with porn that contributes to it" Rather than "all porn contributes to exploitation", which I don't think.) Exploitative porn isn't necessarily identifiable in a photo or site; it's still vanilla sex. The internet itself doesn't discriminate exploitative & fine porn. Legit sites of course have an incentive to distinguish themselves as legit, though exploitative sites have that incentive too. A casual browser can sift through porn of all stripes, from fine to exploitative, possibly without realizing, or maybe they just like women of a certain country where exploitation is rife, so if you want porn of it you hardly have a choice. You'd probably want to distinguish browsers that just subscribe to a big established American site, which probably restrict themselves to legit sites, and people that browse indiscriminately, where there's more chance they follow some exploitative sites just as a matter of probability. Going to sites that are fine doesn't contribute to the problem. Going to sites that are exploitative can contribute to the exploitation. I don't know the statistics what % of browsing that is. If I think it's a "bigger" problem, it's from the seriousness, not quantitatively. I think the mainstreaming of "internet porn" increases browsing and support across the board to all types of sites, legit and exploitative, again possibly without browsers realizing if we're talking indiscriminate browsers... So that's where I was coming from with a sentence like the part of the "internet porn phenomenon" I don't like is the part contributing to exploitation. It's just one slice of the whole pie, or as the whole pie gets bigger, so does that bad slice and sometimes it's not clear where that slice ends; but it's still just a part. I wasn't trying to say the whole pie was spoiled or going in the direction you were taking it.
Does that help explaining where I was coming from?
Jason Moyer on 5/2/2011 at 00:49
I'm not sure I agree with the assumption that disinterest in women is a bad thing.
I'm also not sure I buy the scientific validity of the bit saying that anything that happens post-coetus is related to people being emotionally attracted to each other and, in fact, I'd question if the person who ran that particular study has ever had sex with anyone.
Renzatic on 5/2/2011 at 01:04
I always thought the moments immediately following coitus were reserved for snacks and naps.
Kolya on 5/2/2011 at 01:04
I'm glad you made something out of this topic although I regard this as a deflection and a substitute discussion, I gotta say.
The sociological impact of internet porn is of course not trivialised by coerced women in porn. That's also an important issue, but it applies to a relatively small number of people, none of which are here. Whereas the people who regularly consume porn are here. Agreeing that sex slavery is bad, is just and fair but it's not what these articles or this topic are about. And it's a bit too easy.
I understand that no one would want to admit to some kind of problem here, but it seems that no one even sees that there could be a problem, and that is completely contrary to the articles and why I started the thread.
I like porn. And I don't find it that hard to see how it has shaped my sex life, probably from the first moment I could get my greedy hands on some smutty magazine. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It used to be somewhat educational, sometimes it's inspirational, rarely it's really sexy, much less funny. (Why is it never funny?)
With the internet most of the time it's just some people I wouldn't even describe as very attractive going at it like rabbits. And despite the fact I'm trying to identify, these people are not really humans to me, just flesh. And I forget all about it til the end of the day.
Now real sex can be a bit like that, short, raw, without care or affection, just a zipless fuck, as Erica Jong called it. You usually don't forget about these. Because in real life this kind of sex is quite rare. But with porn it's the usual thing. That is one thing.
The other is the endless selection of willing young hot things at your disposal. They never talk back, never have their period, never have any problems and when you're done with them you turn them off. Heck, I know I've caught myself wishing I could zone out of real life conversations like chats. Just do something else if whatever is being said doesn't interest me. No explanation needed.
Porn girls are also cheap, they don't leave you, although they do cheat a lot, but they always come back. And they do anything. They CANNOT WAIT to suck your cock and they LOVE ANAL and doggy style and scream and twitch and talk dirty like spazzing robots under your rule.
Of course this isn't real and the real world lies somewhere else, but if you tell me that none of this had ever shaped your idea of what awesome sex should be like, I think you're lying, mostly to yourself. And this is what this thread was actually about. I'm sure you could have come up with more differences between porn stars and real women, I know. But mainly it's just to realise for a moment that no matter how independent and cool we think we are, regular porn consumption has an influence on us just like any other media would have, that we use that often. And ignoring or denying it is probably the worst way to deal with it.
DDL on 5/2/2011 at 02:09
By porn, are we strictly talking video? Or do slutty girl photos etc count?
Coz porn videos are usually pretty nasty (plus for actual sucking and fucking you generally need a dude on camera too, and that's kinda....ew) but slutty photos can be hawt.
Still, the guys in that first article really didn't strike me as the "settling down" type in the first place: if you're so damn keen on getting as much sex and/or wanking in as possible, to the exclusion of all else, then long-lasting relationships based on mutual respect, tenderness, understanding and hugs on the sofa are probably not your forte. Sure, given total carte blanche I'd probably be nailing as many women as I could, but even then I'd ultimately still really want just the one woman to share my life with and cuddle up to at the end of the day.
Kolya on 5/2/2011 at 02:16
Wormrat: Because even to find out what your kinks are you need to be able to differentiate between what the internet is putting in your head as normal sex (hetero male view sex), and what you really like. The internet porn that everyone has easy access to is not nearly as diverse as you make it sound.
DDL: I guess that photos leave more space to fantasize, that is space for you to fill out, and are hence less likely to have a direct influence although the sort of depiction may play some role.
PigLick on 5/2/2011 at 02:40
I think internet porn, or regular consumption of, can certainly desensitise the user. An example would be me, back in the days of magazines and vhs, things like cumshots would kinda disgust and turn me off. After years of internet porn exposure, its just normal, doesnt effect me in any adverse way.
And so the bar is raised by this, extreme forms of porn become more mainstream, less shocking.(I'm not suggesting cumshots are extreme porn, was just an example)
Ok, so my daughter is approaching the age of 13, and it gets me wondering about boys her age, what sort of porn have/are they consuming(if any). When they look at my daughter, what are they seeing?
Personally I find it somewhat disturbing, especially when I see some of my (married) friends porn collections, I mean do you really need all that? I'm not against porn, I enjoy using it like any other male, I think it is impossible not to have some form of pornography in any human culture.
Interesting topic for sure.
Xorak on 5/2/2011 at 03:04
Like Aerothorn mentioned, it's pretty clear that some people become so addicted to porn that the real thing actually becomes meaningless.
But I think it's dishonest to blame the ubiquity of porn on the actions of girls on their cellphones. With or without porn, these girls would be doing the exact same thing. Only if there was no porn to compete against, they’d just be more satisfied in their mindless attempts at raising their own self-esteem. In my opinion, for a lot of these girls and women, equailty has given them a free reign to be whores, and it has nothing to do with porn. They just like to use that as an excuse to cover themselves, because it's a lot easier than looking in a mirror and changing themselves.
Quote Posted by demagogue
And any industry gets an astronomical boost when it gets mainstreamed and normal, suburban middle-class folk are the ones throwing gobs of cash at it. Compared to that kind of thing going on, worries about the user side of the equation just seem to pale in comparison.
I'm no expert on this, but the porn industry doesn't have gobs of money being thrown at it anymore. It is making far less now than it used to, and it isn't even viable anymore to shoot scenes featuring too many performers because the companies will never make back enough money on it. The porn companies were way too slow responding to pirating (heck, some of the companies even engage in the pirating (i.e. it's people in the business who run the free porntube sites)), and now they are too in deep to ever combat piracy effectively. The pornstars are all hookers now, where back in the day the pornstar-hookers were laughed at. It's actually in hooking that the pornstars make most of their money now. The internet killed the profits of the industry.
Martin Karne on 5/2/2011 at 03:37
I personally don't know how someone can feel something erotic for "2 girls 1 cup" kind of staff.
I don't recommend that you do a Google on that subject, you were warned.
