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.

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