Porn And The Real World

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Sex is an interesting thing on the academic level.

Ok, it’s pretty goddamn interesting on the practical level too, but stick with me here.

Culturally (western culture in particular), we’re brought up to think of it as something that’s supposed to be private and intimate, strictly between two people – preferably with a strong emotional connection.

In practice… well, not so much. In fact, humans as a whole aren’t just interested in keeping sex to private sessions; we’re also – as a species – interested checking out other people’s sexin. If there’s anything that has remained constant over the millennia of human evolution it’s this: we may love having sex, but we’re also always up for watching other people bone too. It seems to actually be hard-coded into our systems; there’s evidence that female copulatory vocalizations – which is fancy talk for “women’s screaming orgasms” – are specifically for arousing other people, especially men.  Not just the man currently having sex… other men. Like, anyone else in ear-shot. Getting other men hot and bothered by advertising that sex is going on rightthefucknow has a number of benefits including possibly inviting other partners to have sex (with her) and induce an element of sperm competition into the mix.

Porn – watching other people have sex in various forms and mediums – has been with us from the beginning of human existence. As soon as we figured out that abstract symbols could represent external concepts, somebody scrawled boobs on the cave wall.

When we realized that stone could be carved into representative shapes, they started carving marble wangs and basalt naked chicks. All those nude paintings hanging in museums weren’t just celebrations of the human form expressed in a visual medium – they were also created with an eye towards the erotic; having nude paintings in your collection was considered to be scandalously naughty.

Fast forward 50,000 years and we get to the age when watching other people fuck is as simple as typing “fucking” into Google.

Go on. Try it. I’ll wait.

It’s interesting – since the advent of mass-market pornography, we’ve found ourselves at odds with our own desires. We’re told that porn is horrible, damaging and degrading for everybody involved by one group, while another points out that not only are there no reliable studies on the effects of porn that show all these horrible results, the question is based off a profoundly biased view of human sexuality. Then there’s the fact of porn’s enduring popularity despite all attempts to kill it, the way it’s influenced modern culture in more ways than just teaching people that maybe they wanted to try positions other than missionary or that they might like to try a finger up the jacksie… needless to say, porn is an indelible part of both culture and the human psyche.

Now to be fair up front: I’m unabashedly pro porn. I’ll freely admit there are troublesome aspects – it’s rife with sexism, misogyny and racism… just like mainstream entertainment, really –  but I’m not here to argue the pros and cons or  play “my study that validates my point of view is more scientifically rigorous1 and accurate than YOUR study”. I’ll also be riding hard2 on the comments section; if things get too heated, I’ll start deleting comments. If people start picking fights, I’ll drop the hammer3, so let’s keep it civil there.

Now… let’s talk a little about porn, shall we?

The First Rule of Porn Club is…

Right off the bat, we must acknowledge a simple truth. There are two kinds of men in this world: Men who look at porn and liars.

This isn’t my being glib, by the way. Three years ago, researchers at the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women were working on a study that examined the impact of porn on male concepts of sexuality, masculinity and their views on women.

Now in order to conduct the study properly, they needed a control group – that is, men in their 20s who have never consumed porn.

They didn’t find any.

The fact is, every time technology has advanced in a way that allowed us to jerk off to porn in greater privacy and convenience – transitioning from having to go to the infamous XXX theaters of the bad-old-days in New York’s Times Square to VCRs to Pay-Per-View – the consumption of porn by the general public has grown exponentially.

Now, as tempting as it is to roll one’s eyes, sigh and say “men”, it ain’t just guys who’re digging having easier access to porn. Women are consuming porn in rapidly increasing numbers. In fact, when you want to tally up other mediums besides video, then suddenly women are consuming porn – even producing –  at an equal or greater level than guys.

Surprise!

Women Dig It Too.

Now, nobody’s questioning that men make up the vast majority of the audience of RedTube, YouPorn and all the other streaming video sites – not to mention members of porn website networks like Brazzers and Naughty America… although we’ll come back to that. But while men are profoundly visually oriented, women consume their porn in a wider variety of mediums than men. Y’see, once you break away from defining porn strictly as video and into areas like text and comics, you start getting into some interesting areas.

For example, take fan-fiction4. The predominant genre of fanfic is, not surprisingly, porn. What is surprising is that the majority of erotic fan-fiction is written by and for women – even in fandoms, like Star Trek or shonen anime – that are overwhelmingly male.  Even back in the 1970s, when trading fanfic meant shelling out for envelopes and postage, 90% of fanfic writers were women… and they wanted to see Kirk and Spock fuck.

This trend hasn’t changed, by the way. Just going to fanfic.net and doing a search on yaoi – a Japanese portmanteu of a phrase that alternately means “no climax, no point, no meaning” and “stop it, my ass hurts!” and generally refers to a genre of homoerotic male sex written by and for women – brings up over 82,000 stories tagged “yaoi”. Even when you filter out yaoi, the number of explicit sex stories is rather staggering. Take, for example, Harry Potter. There more than 100,000 tales of the students of Hogwarts merrily shagging one another, including some rather disturbing alternate uses for the petrificus curse (helpfully, Hermione traded in her vinewood wand with the dragon hearstring core for a Hitachi…) and creative interpretations of what can be used as lube.

There are over 130,000 Twilight fanfics in the archives. Of those, more than half are all about fucking.

It doesn’t stop with fan-written pastiches of their favorite couples, official and otherwise. If you head over to your local bookstore’s erotica section, you’ll quickly see that women authors dominate the shelves.

The top selling book in America right now? 50 Shades of Grey, 520+ pages of BDSM sex. Written by a woman. For a female audience.

And it started life as a Twilight fanfic.

However, as much as it’s an accepted truism that men prefer to consume their porn visually and women prefer text, studies have shown that women and men respond to porn vids with equal levels of arousal. Women are also an increasing customer base for porn videos and websites as well… and not just the soft-focus “erotic” videos marketed to them by the studios. It’s actually possible to track the growing influence of the female audience base by the evolution of porn stars from “any freak with a giant cock” to “dude-bro” to “sensitive, kinda geeky guy you met at Hebrew school”.

In fact, all those new female viewers have turned porn star James Deen (lower right) into a smut film anomaly. It used to be that the male stars were nothing but an interchangeable cock – someone to be the insertion point5 for the viewer while nailing the women that they’re really there to see. You could switch out Dale DaBone for Charles Dera, then again for Evan Stone without missing a beat. Nobody cared… until James Deen. He has an incredibly large… fanbase. He’s one of the few men in porn that is actually is a draw. If you do a Google search, you end up with a network of Tumblrs devoted to the man – almost entirely run by teenaged girls – that look like Tiger Beat tried to crossbreed with Brazzers and then promptly exploded into a sea of glitter and animated gifs.

Much like with comics or video games, the impeccably waxed, tanned and toned Brosephs represent a male stand-in fantasy. It’s the kinda skinny, scruffy dude with the dreamy eyes that the ladies are fantasizing about.

1. That’s what she said, ho ho ho… [↩]
2. That’s what she… oh never mind [↩]
3. The hammer is my… oh, come on, you’re not even trying anymore… [↩]
4. Please! <rimshot.mp3> [↩]
5. HEYOO! [↩]

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