Why do people watch porn?

xpost

Precisely why I ask. But in this infinitely bizarre world full of infinitely bizarre people, there MUST be some people who do watch porn for reasons beyond aid de onanism.

Kind of, but it's SO unsexy - like The Dreamers, too, which I found to be an incredibly unsexy film.

What's the point of Salo or Romance or Baise Moi beyond shock?

i thought 'the dreamers' was more sexy than those films -- it wasn't about shock/transgression etc, it was more a straight 'let's perve eva green' film, and who could disapprove of that?

Sorry.

What, they want to learn plumbing?

Yeah, the same reason I read Penthouse when I was 9. (I spent about two years trying to find a dictionary definition for "jism.")

The comic relief of watching midget porno or Tommy Lee driving a boat with his penis. That's about the best I can come up with.

rofl

These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone
By singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love
Or so they would have you believe anyway
But these groups seem to go along with what, the belief
That love is deep in everyone’s personality.
I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love,
We just don’t think that what goes on between two people
Should be shrouded with mystery.

hmm... well, there may be millions who wouldn't admit it, but I doubt they'd out-and-out disagree.

Well, yes, of course it is. I don't know whether it's more boring with me than with others -- I've never had sex without being there. Even when I'm getting off and having good sex, my mind is generally bored silly with it all. Half my mind ends up getting awful songs stuck in its head to relieve the boredom, and the other half spends its time trying to get those songs out of my head.

I mean there are a few interesting moments, but there's a low signal-to-noise ratio, interest-wise. I'm not entirely sure how having sex could be interesting. At its best, it transcends the whole issue of being interesting or not.

I mean sex is interesting to think about but not so much to do. Even if you don't find it interesting, you can surely understand why people find it interesting to think about how people should be taxed -- but it is rare to find filling out your tax forms all that interesting. Sure, the first time it's all new and it's interesting, and there's always that little moment when you get a sense of what you've made over the year, but most of filling out the form is a sort of drudgery done out of a sense of duty and a small hope that maybe this year you'll get a refund.

Except most people tend not to come while filling out a tax return. Unless I've been doing it wrong.

"millions"? That's a bit overdoing it. Did people somehow lose the capability to have intimacy when high speed internet came into the picture or something? I'd be willing to bet just as many people found sex boring or were introverted sexually long before the commercialization of porno as we see it today. They just jerked it to different shit or used their imagination.

'fat girl' (not actually called that) isn't porn but it has lots of explicit sex in it and five gets you nine a lot of people bought tickets in order to see it -- euro art movies have always been sold as covert porn, look it up.

How can they 'direct'? They can influence but then so can other individuals and other groups both 'public' and 'private'. Reading about someone else's sex life may be boring or it may be tittilating but it's just another mediated form of experience. By the logic you've espoused there, we should shy from literature, TV, movies, and music too for fear of besmirching our 'pristine' selves. People watch porn 'cause they like to be sexually excited.

Do you find coming interesting, though?

Sometimes, yes, it is art. It's very much like any sort of product: it has to meet certain requirements.

Sure, but they're trading being sexually excited by another present human for being sexually excited by a (corporate) mediated set of images.

I don't think anybody should shy away from anything, ever, only keep in mind the (psychological, physical, etc.) mechanics and associated costs of what they're engaging in (same as for getting high). The unreality of the porn experience, involving no mutual response, no smell, no contact, no mystery seems to me to diminish many peoples capacity to respond to unprogrammed intimate creative sex.

Don't let that dog curb you
Don't let that dog curb you
Curb your doggie like you're spozed to do
Just don't let that dog curb you
-Langston Hughes

porny indie fux

I agree fully with this. If you watch porn and have a pretty realistic idea of why you watch it and for what, its not gonna do any damage. The same advice is across the board for a lot of art (even that which is questionable as such).

NOT internet friends, mkay.

like a raunchy alastair cooke!

xpost

The 'programming' that I think comes from porn is the re-inforcement of the concept that sex is only about performance and not so much response, like the difference between written out classical music and improvised jazz. Well paired lovers don't negotiate as much as they co-create. The downside of porn (at least in my experience) is that it doesn't have much spontaneity in it, it kind of denies the creative aspects. Insofar as porn serves as our primary sex education it serves us badly in this regard.

Not exactly on point, but the final scene in Carnal Knowlege is a really touching example of the upshot of objectification and scriptedness and their impact on impotence.

well, she's just been mentioned a curious amount of times here lately.

'fat girl' (not actually called that)

well, actually, as someone who knows French, it IS rented and sold under that title in English. Of course, I know the French title - I wonder why you feel the need to be so snotty and insist I don't?

isn't porn but it has lots of explicit sex in it

So that makes it 'porn'? And no, I've seen it twice, and it doesn't have 'lots' of 'explicit' sex in it. Only by American standards.

addiction?

Casuistry's big post is incredible, it's like my worst nightmare of what someone would be thinking while we're doin it

So, let me ask, what do you think about while in the middle of things?

Sure, but they're trading being sexually excited by another present human for being sexually excited by a (corporate) mediated set of images.

Thanks to the Internet, more porn than ever before is available to everyone. Also thanks to the Internet, the porn is more likely to be noncorporate, and a lot of it done by an individual.

As for what I'm thinking about, I'm not really thinking thought-thoughts at all really, I guess. Looking at porn, I guess I'm thinking "is that a noise in the other room?" and that gets old really fast so I don't indulge myself in it all that much since I can never quite relax, i always think someone's going to burst in on me.

xpost I mean, porn and McGriddles are like the basis for most things nowadays.

yes, I realize this say something troubling about my view of women(or does it? nabicso - analyze this!) but i cant help it.

not that i watch pornos on a regular basis anyway...

xpost lovelace I think that's kind of common.

:)

Is it weird to, I don't know, think about your partner and the sex you're having during sex?

xpost YES YES IT IS, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THINKING ABOUT YOGI BERRA.

I totally missed this part of Chris's post btw! That makes absolutely no sense. Plenty of people who don't have food addictions like to eat food, making the obesity question somewhat moot! Etc.

If I knew what was addictive about it, I'd understand a lot more about the world than I do but the fact that just about every dude on ILX has admitted on ILX at some point to reading porn because they're bored and not because they're horny says something. Speaking as a cigarette addict!

But if you're asking "why do people watch porn?" you can't just say "because they're addicted". Not everyone who watches porn is addicted, and anyway why did people start watching porn in the first place? The answer to "why do people eat food?" isn't "because they're addicted to food" -- that's just a non-answer, it doesn't say anything interesting.

Anyway, Tracer, yes of course it's bleak, in some sense. And indeed no one has ever accused me of finishing too quickly.

But I will point out that I am just talking about whether sex is "boring" or "interesting", I'm not saying anything about whether it's "fun" or "transcendant" or "good for what ails ye" or anything like that.

Is it weird to, I don't know, think about your partner and the sex you're having during sex?

Can you be more specific?

http://tonova.typepad.com/thesuddencurve/cat_scratched.jpg

I suspect that's what most people did when porn was less of a presence in our culture. In an unmediated/non-comoditized culture it was probably pretty much the whole idea. I don't think it's anything one could be that specific about aside from the people involved engaging one another's complete concentration, whether through physical skill, emotional rapport, simple hedonistic desire. Devoid of these aspects, sex almost has to be boring after the simple novelty wears off.

Because our society is repressive, I suspect a lot of people are at least subconsciously ashamed of their sexualities (from imprinting that takes place before puberty) and when they discover that they like sex they associate it less with the basic human/animal joy of expressing love and desire than with the (empowering) thrill of transgression or rebellion (OO-EE-OO, so naughty!). This makes objectification and comoditization inevitable, basing human interactions on power relations (as they are so often in startified societies). In this case porn is kind of an ultimate power trip, not only because it often tends to play out on the screen or page as that, but because the enjoyer of it is placed in a position of ultimate authority (watch or not watch). I think that this emphasis on product over process (sex without the empathy required by seduction and/or love) deprives people of the opportunity for self-discovery that empathy affords and with that limitation of opportunity it has to get boring (because an experience that has almost nothing to do with ones personal involvement is never going to much fun or very transcendant).

Well this is totally OTM (though of course doesn't negate the potentially bad qualities that "it"--whatever it is--might have. Using the smoking example again cigarettes are still unhealthy, right, but if you smoke 5 when you go out drinking on a Friday you're probably a lot less likely to get lung cancer than, say, Steve McQueen was, but it doesn't change the fact that the cigarettes aren't really great). Moderation is important with just about everything and if you are unable to moderate yourself then, yes, that is your fault, and not the fault of whatever it is you pursue to excess.

Maybe they fanatasize(d) about being with somebody they loved/actually liked/could stand more than about someone with a more exciting set of body parts.

Arranged marriages are mediated and comoditized, doncha think?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822333120/qid=1133591352/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2267931-4300759?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

Found on ILBks. Most underrated ILX board, no doubt.

When since Eden have human beings lived in an unmediated/non-commoditized culture? The forms of mediation and commoditization have evolved -- radically, in some cases -- but the idea that there was some kind of time of pure experience seems like crit-theory flapdoodle to me. (The whole Society of the Spectacle angle bugs me because there's something reactionary about its distrust/dismissal of mediation/representation/etc., when I think mediation and representation are actually really valuable tools in communicating and even generating the kind of empathy that is being found wanting in porn.) We've been mediating and fetishizing human biological drives for as long as we've had culture -- you could argue that mediation of biological drives was the primary force in creating culture -- so to pretend that the last 25 years of escalating porn immersion represents some kind of unprecedented break is pretty narrow. You've seen the Venus of Willendorf, right? Big titties.

But I agree that the problem with porn is that it's mostly dumb. The reason is that there's apparently not much upside, commercially, to it being smart. If making thoughtful, creative porn paid 5 times as much as making rote stroke films, more people would make more good porn. But porn is a strictly functional product, and even people who would really prefer thoughtful, creative porn will settle for the rote stroke stuff because it does what it needs to.

There have been lots of non-trade based (mostly isolated and tribal) cultures that were unmediated and not comoditized, Maybe that's Eden. Maybe those lives are too marginal to be considered real cultures. But they did and do exist and their latencies remain even in the here and now.

Having been in love (among other things) in my life convinces me that there are pure experiences. Not crit-theory, real life.

I think the value of mediations (sort of like the value of porn) relate to what degrees they enable communication or widenening of empathies and what degrees they add impedences to it (It's the workman who fails, not his tools). Mediation only exists as relationship, it has no (good or bad) value on its own. Distrusting the uses of mediation/representation in our westworld of the present isn't nearly as reactionary as it is essential and sane (you'd have to be an idiot not to distrust them), or do you think things like war in Iraq and environmental degradation are positive evolutionary steps of some sort? I, personally, feel an enormous revulsion for a culture that selects a Bush to be it's most powerful person and I can't help but assume such a society has deep structural defects. Capitalism, the meta-culture created by the 'primary force' of mediating biological drives, has proven itself (to me anyway) to be insane and incompetent -a failed experiment in the methodology of living- and I question the positive value of all its products (dismissing some of them).

Mediating and fetishizing (biological drives, works of art, the neccessities of existence, or comodities) are products of a world view based on privations (haves and have nots) oppressions (male dominance, racialisms) and the notion that competition is more essentially human than co-operation. Nothing unprecedented about it, it is the essence of monotheism.

"If making thoughful, creative porn paid . . . "

The monetarist justification is only a (tautological) justification of montarism (the same foolishness wingnuts use to support fossil fuel use vs. renewable energies) -it sells because it sells and the only way we can see to manage the world is by selling things so what sells is what there is. Admittedly, I'm in a minority thinking that's a fallacy, but that doesn't mean it isn't one. The inheritors of eden, ranging from aboriginees to native americans to urban squatters, had/have no concept of property beyond what one could/can carry or use. (There's a certain amount of common sense in the idea that you can't possess something without being there with it.) Control-in-absentia -one of the principal attractions of porn- is the foundation of our current system.

If stupidity is what pays then basing life on what pays is stupid.

Back at the porn ranch. Porn consumers are about 95% male. If it was just business, don't you think they'd be looking for ways to sell something to females (they have money too)? So maybe there's more to it than just the money, maybe the last 25 years of escalating porn immersion is symptomatic of the reactionary response to the disintegrating world view that thrived for millenia on the subjugation of women (and other "inferior" cultures/races).

So I spoze it's about how willing we are to accept being mediated and comoditized and how willing we are to be fed our experiences rather than going out and experiencing them.

Porn is like a McGriddles. It's sweet on the outside, but when you get inside, you realize you're eating something that bears no resemblance to the products it claimed it was supposed to be, and kind of tastes like tire rubber smells. And before you know it, it's gone.

Huh? Sweet on the outside, no resemblance to what it's s'posed to be? I'm hellaconfused here.

If it was just business, don't you think they'd be looking for ways to sell something to females (they have money too)?

No, the majority, including the business, is still conditioned into thinking that women don't enjoy porn because it's degrading. I don't agree with this stance. It's not degrading (how they are portrayed).

Ah hell, Linda Williams to thread. She rules big time.

I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "unmediated" here. Surely their views on love/sex/etc. are mediated through their society?

Having been in love (among other things) in my life convinces me that there are pure experiences. Not crit-theory, real life.

Just what Hallmark wants you to believe.

So I'd guess they'd be minimally mediated rather than unmediated. I think mediation is enabling in some circumastances (allowing us to speak to one another) and intrusive in others (setting behavioral guidelines on the basis of what serves those in power -such as jingo patriotism). As I understand it, (obviously I wasn't there) the basic nature of life for people in those situations was about responding to the immediate (hence unmediated) conditions they encountered rather than attempting to control the conditions. In our world and time very little of what we do involves those kinds of responses. Maybe many of us never experience those kinds of responses at all. Too bad.

As for having been in love, made music, seen the sun rise, made a living from the sea, whatever, that's my life and some of my experiences have been pure to me. Who do you think you are to say they weren't? What do you know about it? I've experienced ecstacy where you experience "a sneeze, relieving". I don't doubt the reality of your experience at all, why should you need to doubt mine?

I guess I just don't see the percentage in cynicism. Negativity, sure, I've got plenty of that, but cynicism just seems self-mediating and not to much of a purpose. Call me a sap if it makes you feel better, I won't be embarassed by it. Sneeze on, y'know?

See Atanarjuat for the complexities and symbolic interactions of Inuit life.

I'm not sure the issue is cynicism or negativity. I'm just a little suspicious of all that Frankfurt School stuff (NB my actual first-hand familiarity with said stuff is limited to a general sense of its principles). Attacks on "capitalism" and commoditization just seem deterministic to me, as if all human interactions can be reduced to theoretical systems. Not that porn isn't a form of commoditization and mediation -- obviously it is. But I think it is both simpler and more complex than that critique lets on, and less sinister.

To some degree, criticizing pornography for its corrupt mediation of a "pure" experience is buying into the systems of moral control against which porn profitably arrays itself to begin with. I mean, James Dobson would probably agree with the critique, unless you happened to mention to him that it was Marxist. But then of course, porn doesn't represent any real break with those moral systems either, it's just exploiting the gap between morality and biology, and living well off it. otoh, because of its strange position in the culture, porn has the potential to pose real challenges to those systems, which is why it's attractive to some feminist and queer studies theorists. (that and the fact that it's probably easier to publish articles with "porn" in the title.)

I'm not doubting yours, so much. But you describe the feelings that concinved you there are pure (unmediated, uncorporate) things in language very similar to that which sells Hallmark cards or pop songs or romantic movies -- that "pure feeling" is the very thing that is most corporate. So I'm just pointing out that while you might have had this sense of a pure unmediated experience, it is one that I've heard described very often in various corporate media, and I'm not sure how you distiguish the unmediated uncorporate pure feeling from the mediated corporate one.

If you see what I mean.

(I don't really care whether your experience was "unmediated" or not -- that's a category you're interested in. It sounds like it was good for you, so that seems good!)

Suggestions:

* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.
* Try fewer keywords.

This is why you start with the cartoon, then the newsreel, then the porn.

I hate this thread; it made me think about why I wanted to watch porn rather than just watching it. But I made peace with it. I watch porn because it leads to sex. It gives me ideas. What I'm thinking while I'm watching = nothing very interesting or complex. Things along the lines of "looks fun" "looks improbable" "she's enjoying that" "we're too fat for that to work" "ooh, he looks happy" "not flexible enough for that bit" then finally "I want to do that RIGHT NOW". Then there's some technical fiddly bits involving zippers, etc. Then the sex thinking goes along the lines of "nice" "mmmmm" "mmmmmMore" "oooo". If actual thinking ("Is the front door open?" "Is that cat barfing?" "Do I have clean underwear for work tomorrow?") begins to intrude, it's best to override it with "mmmmmmm". Post-sex thinking then gradually returns to normal levels of complexity.

To me these are the very best reasons for the existence/consumption of porn.

I have to admit I'm not very familiar with Hallmark. I've never receieved ot given one of their cards. I haven't watched much TV or seen many pop movies in recent years either, so I can't claim any kind of expertise or exhaustive knowledge about them. But, I don't live an isolated life on a mountain top or a desert island either.

"Mediation" seem to be turning out to be too vague a term/idea to have a substantive discussion about, it's impact is about degrees and applications that can be endless parsed and re-parsed to the point where the word itself has no meaning outside of its very specific context.

So, if I were starting all over again, I wouldn't use it (as it's dependent on an arbitrary common interpretation of the context it assumes and that context isn't general enough to be useful). With hindsight, I'd stay with comoditization which is what underlies my interpretation of the negative (impedence generating) way in which mediation effects our realtionships to one another.

Any media can be comoditized. Hallmark and I can both speak of love, fascists and I can both speak of freedom, using the same terms and, to a certain extent the same methods while meaning completely different things. The difference is that Hallmark's ethos is implicitly tied to exchanges of currency, the expressed feelings themselves are inseparable from the articles of trade, the words and even (by implication) the emotions that they purport to represent are comodities. I think their ads said something like "if you really care, send a Hallmark" shifting the act of caring from a presence of direct individual contact to an absence of participating in consumerism. The root message is that the caring doesn't exist until it's made material by the product. I don't think anyone would dispute that we all are continually barraged with these kinds of messages -that "pure feeling" is inextricably tied to objects of exchange (this what I mean when I use "mediation").

The transformation of simple, "pure", experiences into subliminal propaganda for currency/property based exchanges is exactly what I find objectionable. I strongly believe, having experienced them, that the "pure" experiences don't depend on the product exchanges for their existence. Our society has evolved into one whose mechanics have been made to appear (through pervasive mediation) to require external comodified symbols to verify and validate experiences, thus diluting them and, eventually, reducing the experience to the consumption of a product acquired through the exchange of currency (which is finally meaningless in animal/human terms). Whether it's a greeting card, a wedding ring, or a contract it represents an external corellary (implied replacement) to something that really doesn't need, and is diminished by, replacement. So, intimacy is tied so constantly, with such regularity, to a system of trade that it ends up with no intimacy at all.

". . . James Dobson . . "

I'm trying not to moralize, and I despise any idea of systems of moral control (Marxism as much as Xtianity). I'm really just fascinated by the mechanics of our experiences and I like taking them apart and examining them from different perspectives -more scientist than preacher. I don't want to reach any kind of conclusions, more just generate as much inconclusiveness as possible. Earlier I wrote that I don't think anyone should shy away from anything, ever (quite the opposite of Dobson -OTOH, I've never met a single human being with whom I disagreed on everything absolutely, so, if I knew James Dobson, portions of the tips of our personal icebergs might actually coincide to some small degree). To me it seems that systems are only useful when they're creative (anarchism 101) and all of them evolve into mechanisms of repression eventually, mostly they're both at once. I think it behooves us generally to subject whatever systems prevail around us to rigorous examination/criticism. As I live in a capitalist system, I attack that. If I lived in another system, I'd most likely be attacking that instead.

Of the Frankfort School, I like Marcuse (One Dimensional Man), can't get through a page of Heidegger, find Adorno deeply unimaginative, and Benjamin sort of trite. If there are others I haven't read them.

I'm really not trying to propose any "noble savages in paradise corrupted from their perfection by cynical white men" template. I think that's kind of stupid. All I want to get at with that is that there are richnesses of experience that our prevailing mechanisms of society tend to prevent us from having (and that we should object to that). I feel like we've been conditioned as thinkers (since Plato maybe) to view all our choices as dichotomies, viz, "we can't have civilization without pervasive comoditization", etc. and I think that's a fallacy constantly re-inforced by power elites that benefit from coercing us to choose between a very small range of options (such as Repub/Dem), and that we would all be more fulfilled in an all/and type of society than we are in an either/or one.

More like 60-70%.

Also, Rock Hardy wins.

"La la la la la I can't HEAR me la la la la!"

.. he used to write about the difference in sensation of a pornless wank vs a wank with porn. Preference appeared to come down on the side of the pornless wank. After watching myself for a while, I kind of agree with him. A pornless wank takes much more mental effort but is significantly more rewarding in terms of ideas, thoughts, and sensations.

"Porn-guided wanks focus attention onto specific body parts or bodily sensations."

I agree with both of these statements. I'd extend them to couple sex as well. When we are using our creativity, our own imaginations, rather than borrowing them from external sources, we are much more likely to have unique and engaging experiences. Improvising like jazz musicians instead of playing Bach off a score or performing memorized steps and words from a broadway show. The downside of porn is that it tends to marginalize individual sexual creativity and that tends to make the individual engaging in sex feel/act like a performer in a parody instead of a creator. As an intimate, non-public, experience, sex can be the only opportunity for an individual to express him/herself as a creator, which, whether the creation is any good or not, is empowering in terms of self-respect and sense of autonomy.

"I just get antsy when it starts to sound reductive or utopian."

OTM, Me too. I also think Marcuse et al were ripe for bashing after their ideas so dominated discussion in the 60's and 70's. But after the hideous rightward shift of the last decade, I feel like we need to go through the bathwater and see if we find any babies. This is particularly true since the intellectual left, owing to smugness and complacency, has generated very little of substance since then.

". . . porn has the potential to pose real challenges to those systems. . . "

I think it has, and I think that's really valuable. Possibly porn is responsible for most of the creative thinking/analysis from the left -gender/queer/porn theory- since the 60's and 70's. I also think it has made for better skilled, less inhibited lovers (as did pop books like "Joy of Sex" in earlier times).

This is entirely contrary to my experiences with creativity, but whatever.

Actually I wanted to post, just because I thought it might be amusing to those who have been reading this thread and might provide good fodder for making fun of me: I had two sex dreams last night, both involving people I know from online (only one of whom was an ILXor, and not someone I've ever crushed on or even thought of in a naughty way) and in both the dreams the sex consisted of being naked in bed and talking. There was perhaps cuddling but nothing more explicit than that.

It was kinda awesome.

I think this is the advantage of porn---no babies made via interacting with it. On the other hand, Ann Landers claimed that a girl got pregnant via sitting in a tub of still-warm water in which a man had just bathed. He wanked, tenacious tadpoles stayed in the water and somehow got into her utes = bathwater baby. However, the veracity of this story is dubious at best. Ann Landers needed a fact-checker, or at least someone to point out that this story is very gross and confusing to the sexuality of a developing young girl.

I remember that Ann Landers.... I think the tone of the letter was off... probably the girl's mom or an abstinance astroturfer.

I think maybe I'll see if bodice ripper novels don't do the trick instead

I had two sex dreams last night, both involving people I know from online (only one of whom was an ILXor, and not someone I've ever crushed on or even thought of in a naughty way)

Wow, I totally don't remember who that was.

ihttp://scoopsnoodle.com/splosions/mask/QuickTime-PlayerScreenSn-25.jpg

http://members.tripod.com/Luke_Skywalker_3/max_rebo.jpg

http://thenoise.hermosawave.net/randomness/max_rebo.jpg

Asking this because I've just seen the Stuart Leevid of him performing in scotland and him called the crowd 'scotch' and it being a big deal, is it like called an American a 'yank', or an English person a 'limey' (ie its dehumanising and vaguely offensive, but possible to use it in banter between friends) or is it really offensive and not cool, like referring to a German person as a 'Kraut' or worse (don't really want to type quasi racial nationalistic slurs on here, even in the context of meta question about such terms)

Thoughts!

you'll get a variety of answers to this, but i think most of us would agree that a strong case could be made for

Weapons of Ass Destruction 2 (Blu-Ray)

my fucking internet cut out like one minute ago, that post should have been mine