Pussy Talk - My two cents' worth on porn

From: tonycomstock Date: June 30th, 2005 01:37 pm (UTC) Ms. Kipnis also says... (Link)

Ms. Kipnis also says:

"Pornography grabs us and doesn't let go."

I am not an academic, but I am (rather unhappily) a student of porn. From my vantage point, Ms. Kipnis gives porn too much credit.

-TC

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From: nicebluejournal Date: June 30th, 2005 05:08 pm (UTC) Re: Ms. Kipnis also says... (Link)

Too much credit? I'm interested to hear why you would say this. Kipnis is an academic with a special interest in porn within the culture, so I assume that her emphasis on it simply represents that intense focus.

Her views on porn certainly influenced the way I look not only at visual/moving image porn but written porn as well.

Have you read Sallie Tisdale's "Talking Dirty to Me"? She writes at length about porn as well, from a similar post-feminist viewpoint.

DTG xxoo

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From: tonycomstock Date: July 1st, 2005 08:01 am (UTC) Re: Ms. Kipnis also says... (Link)

"Why?" you ask?

It would seem my thoughtful but verbose answer exceeds the character limit for comments.

The short answer is that the average budget for a Hollywood film is $60 million. The average production for an hour of Canadian dramatic television is about $1 million. The average budget for a porn DVD is about $20K, and most of that goes to paying the talent to fuck.

For the more verbose and self-absorbed version, I'm afraid I'll have to refer you to today's post on my blog. :-)

-TC

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From: nicebluejournal Date: July 1st, 2005 08:38 am (UTC) Re: Ms. Kipnis also says... (Link)

For readers' convenience, I'm putting the link to TC's post here, and adding it to my post as well.

http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/2005/07/porn-monster.html

DTG xxoo

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From: (Anonymous) Date: July 3rd, 2005 02:01 am (UTC) Re: Ms. Kipnis also says... (Link)

i want to fuck u

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From: perfectmarriage Date: June 30th, 2005 01:52 pm (UTC) (Link)

I've haven't seen anything other than free internet porn for a long time either (and by a long time, I mean pre-video).

Porn of course feeds on taboos. The taboo of having sex in public (or at least in a way that other people can watch), the taboo of a woman having sex with more than one man, the taboo of a woman having sex with another woman, the taboo of anal sex and so on. If we didn't have these taboos in the first place there would be no need for porn.

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From: nicebluejournal Date: June 30th, 2005 05:11 pm (UTC) (Link)

This leads to questions like where do taboos come from, what do they represent, why are they so powerful, how do they function, what do its taboos say about a culture and the individuals within it, etc etc.

DTG xxoo

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From: (Anonymous) Date: June 30th, 2005 02:26 pm (UTC) Taboos (Link)

"If we didn't have these taboos in the first place there would be no need for porn."

If we didn't have these taboos, do you think we'd still be interested and take pleasure in seeing sexually explict photos or films? Does making or watching a sexually explicit photo or film always involve breaking a taboo?

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From: perfectmarriage Date: June 30th, 2005 05:49 pm (UTC) (Link)

Where did the taboos come from?
I think Queen Victoria is largely to blame on that score. :)

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From: nicebluejournal Date: June 30th, 2005 06:40 pm (UTC) (Link)

Nah, our dear Vic gets a bad rap for being a prude. Don't forget John Brown, after all! I think we can thank the Puritans for our hangups, especially here in North America.

DTG xxoo

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From: perfectmarriage Date: June 30th, 2005 05:55 pm (UTC) Taboos (Link)

Does making or watching a sexually explicit photo or film always involve breaking a taboo?

Why yes, even seeing someone naked is mostly taboo, never mind seeing them having sex.

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From: tonycomstock Date: June 30th, 2005 07:01 pm (UTC) Re: Taboos (Link)

I disagree.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: July 1st, 2005 09:02 am (UTC) (Link)

Darn it! I know I left a comment yesterday!

Ah well, my take is this - compelling should always make you think, make you examine your reactions. For me, porn does not do that. There are things that are sexually oriented that do that, Secretary for instance turned me on but made me really uncomfortable too (and we can go into why on another day because that's a big old side road).

Most porn just squicks me, bores me or makes me laugh. It doesn't bother me in the sense that many are bothered. It exists *shrug* because we don't express our sexuality enough and in healthy ways as a culture. Porn is the big mac of sex. It's nourishment in a certain sense but it's bad for you - it's an expression of sexuality yes, but it's not the best expression and it's likely to make you feel woozy afterwards and pollute your system.

What I mean isn't pollute in the general sense - but the idea that it takes the unusual (the body types of the women, the positions, the scenarios, etc) and tries to portray it as normal, usual. As such, real sex can never be as satisfying as the sex portrayed in porn.

I like sex in film, I just think that as a group, humans are capable of something far more alluring and intelligent than 99% of what is out there.

Freya

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From: tonycomstock Date: July 1st, 2005 09:19 am (UTC) Never? (Link)

"As such, real sex can never be as satisfying as the sex portrayed in porn"

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I really really think you have this backwards.

-TC

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From: (Anonymous) Date: July 1st, 2005 10:10 am (UTC) Re: Never? (Link)

No, what I meant is that porn sets unrealistic expectations wrt real sex. When you watch a lot of porn, you begin to feel dissatisfied with real sex, which is noisy and sweaty and not nearly as acrobatic.

IMO, real sex is better. But the problem with porn is that it bends perception.


Freya

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From: nicebluejournal Date: July 1st, 2005 10:56 am (UTC) (Link)

Hmmm. I found Secretary a big disappointment, in every way.

I'n afraid I have to disagree with you. I think that in taking a judgemental approach to porn and dismissing it for being what it is (big Mac sex, "bad for you", etc etc), we miss a lot of the depth and nuance of the message for which porn is the medium.

I'm not sure that porn does try to normalise the unusual (body types, extreme sex). If it does, I don't think it's succeeding because no-one I've talked to believes that the sex portrayed in porn is anything like real or "normal" sex, whatever "normal" means in that context. (Admittedly, I don't talk to 13-year-olds about porn.)

In portraying extremes, porn doesn't normalise. It literally "blows up" our desires and even more, our fears around sex. It makes the fantasy real. It forces us to look at collective fantasies, over and over again. There's something important going on there. That accumulation and jack-hammer repetition of cliches conveys some uncomfortable truths about sexuality in our culture.

These discussions are proof that the ideals and extremes expressed in porn "take hold and don't let go," as Kipnis so truly said. Taking the same old moralistic and aesthetic high roads does nothing to explain or elucidate the perennial power of porn.

DTG xxoo

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From: (Anonymous) Date: July 1st, 2005 11:43 am (UTC) (Link)

I don't think porn is deep enough to have nuance. And it can't make the fantasy real. There's nothing real about it, which is its basic flaw.

And I'm not taking a moralistic high road, I don't think porn is immoral, I think it's poorly made, boring and stupid. It doesn't represent a "collective" fantasy at all. It's not important or truthful. It's cheaply made, horribly scripted video fucking by people who don't care about what they're doing and it shows.

I just don't agree with Kipnis on her perspective on porn. I do think though, that it does have power.

As for Secretary, what I hated was that they made Maggie Gylenhall's character so fucked up. She's a cutter and mentally and emotionally unstable - normal women can be and are sexually submissive. It just made me feel like they were saying that all women who crave it are like that (and also, that being dominated can "cure" mental illness). But otherwise, I think James Spader is oh so very sexy and his chemistry with Gylenhall was lovely.

Freya

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From: nicebluejournal Date: July 1st, 2005 11:52 am (UTC) (Link)

We're gonna have to remain at loggerheads on this then chick, because I think porn is hugely nuanced and we dismiss it far too glibly, the way literature people used to dismiss comic books.

Porn is all about fantasy, it's not reality at all. Like all fantasy, it speaks to some big places in the soul which in this case happen to be very dark.

That's where it's power comes from. Where else?

DTG xxoo

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From: licentia_vatum Date: July 1st, 2005 09:18 am (UTC) porn and the opposite sex (Link)

As a self professed and admitted horn-dog, I avoid HDA (horn-dogs anonymous) at every opportunity. Really, I enjoy women and their form and nakedness and lust and whether there were taboos or no, I would still enjoy women, and women in all their glory! All sizes and shapes and colors and smiles.

My wife doesn't understand this so I don't pursue any, because it hurts her but turn my lusty attentions to her fully and completely. She calls me insatiable. Imagine that?

I don't think society or even/especially religion is to 'blame' for the decisions we as individuals make. Society only colors the path we walk, gives it dimension within its framework.

I would think that is a good thing.

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From: talkingfigleaf Date: July 2nd, 2005 01:46 pm (UTC) (Link)

First of all I agree strongly with Tony that taboo breaking isn't the critical element in porn... or at least not for the visually oriented. For instance we're still interested in women in form-fitting clothes, men wearing only shorts, or fully-dressed couples kissing even though it's not at all taboo and (especially important to where I want to see porn go) even though we see those things all the time in movies, magazines, and real life.

Next I agree with Freya that the immorality in porn isn't the sex, or even the (often gratiutous) taboo-breaking. What's immoral about it is that "it's poorly made, boring and stupid. It doesn't represent a 'collective' fantasy at all. It's not important or truthful. It's cheaply made, horribly scripted video fucking by people who don't care about what they're doing and it shows." In other words, industrial pornographers shouldn't be ashamed for depicting sex, they should be ashamed of the shoddy way they go about it.

Finally, I'd like to echo a fallacy Tony keeps trying to point out: Compared to most other forms of media there's no money in porn. He chided VS for assuming a model kept clothing around her waist due to botched liposuction. Tony, with long experience in the business, bets dollars to donuts that a) she nor her producers could afford the expense of liposuction and that b) the clothing was left to hide stretch marks or a c-section scar from a previous pregnancy. The point being that Kipnis may be correct that porn grabs us, but she overlooks that the grabbing is done almost entirely by us. Judging from the content before our very eyes pornographers appear to lack the resources, creativity, and initiative required to manipulate us. In their dreams they might wish they could, but in reality they're no intentionally influential than "professional" wrestlers or soap operas.

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From: nicebluejournal Date: July 2nd, 2005 03:38 pm (UTC) (Link)

I agree entirely with your last two sentences.

Porn-makers DON'T manipulate at all. That's not their purpose. They simply supply a demand, and in doing so, they reflect what the market wants.

What porn-makers provide is a mirror, and the image reflected therein clearly exercises many people, for a whole gamut of moral-to-aesthetic reasons.

Complaining that porn is bad because it's badly-made is like saying that comic books are bad because they're printed on wood pulp and stapled together. That's quite beside the point.

Porn is like the romance novel industry---which I would argue may be seen as the female equivalent of porn---in that it provides a fossilised and cliched product to a vast, hungry market. The question that interests me is, What does that market lack or need or fear, that it keeps demanding porn (or, in the case of millions of women, the romance genre)?

What's IN porn that causes its consumers---not all of whom are 13-year-old morons---to want it enough to fuel an industry, of whatever size that industry may be? In other words, what and whom does porn serve, what huge need does it satisfy?

DTG xxoo

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From: tonycomstock Date: July 2nd, 2005 04:48 pm (UTC) Badly made (Link)

"Complaining that porn is bad because it's badly-made is like saying that comic books are bad because they're printed on wood pulp and stapled together. That's quite beside the point."

Porn production doesn't even begin to approach the basic level of craft found in either romance novel or comic books. Not even close, not by a mile.

There is one simple reason for this, the prospective returns for pornographers have, with the introduction of cheaper and cheaper motion imaging technology, become lower and lower. It's what has been refered to by one insightful friend of mine as "the tragedy of the commons."

Consider:

Porn budgets were at the highest when porn could be and was viewed in theaters. Does anyone really think budgets and production quality of have spiralled down while ROI has gone up? That just not the way the world works. Ask anyone who's ever done a business with "the porn industry"; when you finally get a chance to sit down in the "porn mogel's" it's like the penultimate scene in the Wizard of Oz.

-TC

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From: talkingfigleaf Date: July 2nd, 2005 05:24 pm (UTC) (Link)

"They simply supply a demand, and in doing so, they reflect what the market wants."

Oh there's clearly a demand for something. I question only whether what they're providing is actually what the market wants, or whether they provide a substitute that the market is willing to tolerate in the absence of what they really want. (E.g. for at least fifty years "the market" in America mostly wanted jug wines because that's all they could get, but when alternatives became available we discovered the market actually *strongly* wanted something other than jug wine.)

Even with comic books Spiderman was a nearly overnight sensation because it provided something (angst, a protagonist target demographics could identify with, narrative arcs, irony, humor, real vs. 'comic book' romance) that the publishers of Superman/Batman/etc. hadn't tried once in the preceeding 30 years.

Continuing the comic book theme, when Spiderman's sales skyrocketed Superman's authors tried to respond by introducing ever more bizarro and pointless forms of kryptonite and Batman's authors by introducing ever bigger and more surreal props-as-weapons even as they (very) slowly went broke. The authors who revived the brands in the 1980s did so by adopting the Spiderman style of approachability. The key thing for me is that the revolutionary comics were produced and printed with roughly the same low budgets and all the same low-cost materials as the old stuff. They just had a better idea what readers (who also weren't all 13-year-olds) were really interested in.

Oof, that's enough ranting for one afternoon. :-) I'm getting horribly backlogged in my "grammar of industrial porn series." This is probably going to turn into another one: Porn provides exactly what customers want.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: July 30th, 2005 08:12 am (UTC) Why the demand for porn? (Link)

What's IN porn that causes its consumers---not all of whom are 13-year-old morons---to want it enough to fuel an industry, of whatever size that industry may be? In other words, what and whom does porn serve, what huge need does it satisfy?

I don't have an answer to this question - but I think it's a good one. For me - unmarried, male and a long-time porn watcher - porn can be completely boring, utterly disgusting and/or electrically, shiveringly, tremblingly exciting.

I've got several thoughts in mind.

FIRST THOUGHT: Apparently there are three basic ways for male chimpanzees to get sex. a) Become the dominant male - then have all the females exclusively as they move into estrus (signalled by swellings on the backside over a few days).
b) Watch for the early signs of estrus in a female and entice her away before the dominant male notices. Then, if he's lucky, the enticer will be the only male around when she needs sex. (Clever monkey!)
c) During the occasional periods when there's no dominant male in the group, females in estrus are available to all. The result is an orgy - though, in modern porno terms it would be a gangbang, I suppose, since it's one female/many males.

I draw two conclusions from this. First, assuming our basic psychology has similarities to chimpanzees', males have much more incentive to watch women for signs of arousal than women have for watching men - hence, possibly, the reported asymmetry between male and female responses to visual porn. Second, assuming the males in the gang-bang scenario are aroused throughout, we may have a genetically determined tendency to enjoy group sex, however much it may be discouraged culturally at the moment. - And, in some respects, to watch pornography is to indulge in group sex, even though the involvement is vicarious.

SECOND THOUGHT: I hadn't really seen any filmed pornography until I was in my late twenties - around 1977, I think. Then, in Amsterdam, I went to a porno movie theatre and watched a short film in which a woman gave a man a blow-job.When he orgasmed, he came all over her face. I was disgusted and sexually jolted at the same time. (In fact, I had to look away. I thought I'd be sick. But I still wanted to see more.)

Nowadays, of course, that image has lost most of it's impact, but the combination of disgust and arousal is an important component, for me.

A slightly different modulation: I watched a short masturbation film: one girl/woman sitting next to a fake camp fire with her legs open, playing with herself. At one point she picked up a large torch (i.e. flashlight) and looked straight at the camera. I thought: "She can't possibly be going to push that thing inside - it's too big!" And, as the thought passed through my mind, she nodded and smiled and pushed the end of the torch into herself.

There was shock there, too, but no disgust.The big kick was that the woman seemed to share my idea of what was erotic. She knew my dirty mind.

I think many of us have never been convinced that women have the same kinds of lust as we do. For men, sex is dirty, because when you masturbate you make yourself sticky and it smells. It leaves embarrassing evidence. We don't believe women could possibly lower themselves to similar acts, or could condone our masturbation. Hence the occasional joy of porn when, after hours of boredom, we finally reach an erotic moment when a woman's sexual mind seems to meet our own. At times, there's an enormous generosity in that moment.

I realise there are many different responses to pornography. For me, arousal comes when women seem to do 'dirty' things for their own enjoyment - and not to order. The main negative about pornography is that most of the time I know this isn't true. The women are directed by men and act for money. The obsessive element in porn is, of course, the search for the 'true' moment - the moment of sexual connection amongst all the dreck.

-George

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