Pornography and relationships......

[orchidia.livejournal.com]

Hi, all. I am a 27 year old female who has been married and divorced once, and then, I married again. I have never really taken on any 'titles' to my points of view. I have strong feelings about things, but I have never classified them into a group of other's beliefs. I have never found one system of beliefs that fit everything I think and feel, so I don't bother trying to find one. I don't believe in God or any spiritual entity, but I do have my own ideas about morality.

I am curious how different people in this community might feel about pornography. I am curious if one feels it is okay at a certain point in life when one is not married or in a relationship. I am curious about one's feelings of its use inside a marriage with or without a spouse who consents to it. I am curious how one thinks their spouse should react to it. I am curious if one thinks it affects how he/she looks at him/herself. I am curious if one thinks it affects how he/she looks at others. I am curious how one thinks it changes their expectations in real sexual relationships. I am curious if one thinks it creates intimacy issues inside a relationship.

There are many other curiosities I can come up with, and if you are curious about my own viewpoint, you can read my own personal journal entry on it, which was the last entry I made in my own journal.

I am curious about this, obviously that I am posting it in this community, in a male viewpoint, as pornography is mainly geared towards men, and I believe them to be the main consumers of pornographic material.

Comments

I disagree with a point..or two

[celticacid.livejournal.com]

"Plus, there's a porn for every kink, so couples can experiment with fun new things."
Except for masturbation control which "should not" ever happen, or
the objectification of the woman? Right? I am QUITE enamored of my fiance literally begging to be used as an object and loving it.

Re: I disagree with a point..or two

[mediaprophet.livejournal.com]

Ah, the internet; where anything you write can and will be misinterpreted by the most reactionary minds ever honed to the purpose of anonymous argumentation...

I never said that people shouldn't control their own sexual impulses. I said that people should not control their spouse's desire to explore their own sexuality on their own. Do you want your fiancee to dictate when you can and cannot touch yourself down there? I mean, other than in some D/s relationship, in which I suppose the kink is the domination, in which case it's voluntary submission anyway...

The objectification of women happens completely outside of porn. By objectification, feminists mean that the woman is the object of sexual desire while the man is the subject. As in "subject-verb-object".

In exact terms, that means that a man - according to this culture - has desire for a woman; not the other way around. Women are not supposed to show desire for a man - it's part of the passivity implied by objectification.

Pornography is a symptom of the objectification of women and also a cause; this is because it facilitates the "meme" of the active masciline and the passive feminine. Take the "lucky pizza boy" scenario. The pizza boy arrives. The woman is in a bathrobe. She offers to play with his tip. He succumbs to the desire. The pizza boy is a subject of desire for the object (woman). But it can also be used to portray women as subjects of desire and men as objects (the pizza boy scenario reversed), or a more balanced distribution (everyone is an active, agentic subject).

Such pornography exists, and is often called "fem positive" and other things. Oftentimes you'll find it under [real] amateur [as opposed to just "novice"] porn. It's designed for women or couples, and usually shows women being positive, active agents (and usually men too). Or it's not designed professionally at all, and it's made by women who've got an exhibitionist streak and want to show off their sex lives. Some of their motives are best described as "desire me" but some are honestly similar to the men [obviously with no intention of running for public office] who video tape their one-night stands and post the tapes on the internet (occasionally turning their randy sex life into a profit-seeking venture).

A lot of mainstream porn that portrays women badly also shows women as subjects of desire, but what it actually does is objectify the desire because the men (and women) consuming it actively seek fantasies of a woman's desire for a man.

I like the idea of women being subjects of desire, not objects. A lot of men do - that is, a lot of men are subjects of a desire for women (objects again) to be subjects of desire.

That's possibly one reason why porn is taboo; it often displays situations counter to the culture's norms ("slutty" women).

Sex positive feminists will tell you that the word "slut" could be a compliment, just like "player" is for men, if we didn't have a double standard that expected women not to be subjects of desire.

Sorry if I misinterpreted anything you said. Sarcasm comes across very poorly in text, and it seemed you were being sarcastic in many parts of that comment.

Re: I disagree with a point..or two

[celticacid.livejournal.com]

No, there was no sarcasm intended it was probably just a distaste I have for pomo-feminist dialogues. I find it entirely riddled with the stench of postmodernist non-thought. I seem to be the only male not subscribing to the politically correct truisms of this brand of feminism on this community. Human society is not an infinitely malleable ball that feminist or whoever else can mold around for whatever purpose they want. Meme's despite what Susan Blackmore (who advocates the giving up of identity to the mysteries of ones genes and memes), or Steven Pinker might say, are in my opinion inherently tied to the biological and chemical situations in the human mind (The human brain is a Turing machine, with less than limitless configurations). While your goals of making porn more couple/female friendly is admirable, the current situation probably exist for VERY good reasons(It being sold primarily to men, who are visually oriented sexually is a good start (hence a good reason why it would be in a format that was male-centric)).

Re: I disagree with a point..or two

[mediaprophet.livejournal.com]

I don't subscribe to thoughtless feminism, and I've been in countless flamewars confromting the hypocracy of a lot of idiots who think of themselves as feminist yet have contradictory or unabashedly narrow mindsets. I'm sociologically trained, though; so I have the vocabulary, and I use it.

Very few people actually understand what "objectification of women" actually means - male or female. In their failure to understand what it means, they fail to understand how it hurts men as well.

Your personal beliefs stem from a sort of home-brew functionalism. That is; if X is, look for the factors that cause X. Functionalism tends to conflate reasons with justifications, however. Just because biology plays a large part in men and women's sexual habits does not justify certain kinds of dehumanizing pornography. Granted, the among the first writing ever discovered, over 8000 years old, there was pretty much only pornography and receipts for trade (pretty much what you find littering the streets of Las Vegas, today); that's still an unaccountably short time for evolution to occur in. Our mating impulses explain our porn tastes, in a circuitous manner, but they do not justify it. Otherwise they would justify clubbing women over the head and dragging them back to our condo, too.

Agriculture led to fixed, large societies; which led to the social contract; which led to a society of mammals that deny their biological impulses in order to increase their numbers and capitalize on their ability to store extrasomatic information for use by future generations in social theory discussions on the internet.