Fuck (H)

I remember the thrill of saying it as a kid–the word held a kind of power kids weren’t allowed to have, and saying it felt strong. It wasn’t about rebellion; it was about being a real person, being taken seriously, that whole horrible struggle to be seen and heard.

I bristled at it later used to refer to sex, but then came to like it around the same time I began to pursue (and enjoy) casual sex. It was a way to talk about sex that meant that it was casual, my coolness and flippancy denoting what I felt as power in the form of invulnerability. It was also about not letting a word scare me, using it so I wouldn’t be sensitive to it (and thus risking being hurt).

But this summer I read a passage by John Stoltenberg that keeps arresting me. I think of Audre writing about how learning can be incited, and it is starting to feel like this: ideas enter my mind, grow, compel and disturb me, and cannot be unrooted. It is hard to un-see. I don’t have the Stoltenberg passage–I’ll amend this when I’m back in California–but he points out how troublesome fuck is. That the same word is used to mean sex as is used to mean messed up (fucked up), ruined (it’s totally fucked), beat up (they fucked him/her up), as a usually negative exclamation (fuck!), an expression of giving up/in (aww, fuck it), taken advantage of (fucked over, get fucked by), as an order to go away (fuck off), and as one of our culture’s ultimate verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect (fuck you). If you’re tempted to call it a fluke, he reminds the reader of the similar ways screw is used.

HELLO. You can’t really get more rape culture than equating sex with violence and/or domination.

This post on tumblr brought the issue to mind again this morning:

How often do you use “fuck you” or hear someone else say “fuck you”? I’m guilty of it, I do it quite often. I’m always spewing out “fuck that!” or “fuck hate!” or “fuck (insert unpleasant concept/thing/person here)” But only lately have I begun to analyze my use of that language. “Fuck” represents the act or acts of having sex, intercourse, oral, WHATEVER. Sex. When we apply that to things like “fuck you,” and especially when we say “fuck you” because we don’t like something/someone, we are implying that through fucking someone we can ruin it/get rid of it. We are implying that we are going to do something that will be unpleasant, undesirable, and harmful to someone else in the hopes that it will make them upset or make them disappear. If my nose is working correctly, I think I smell a pot of rape culture brewing up. This is what rape culture is: perpetuating and implementing violence through sex. We are going to hurt people through sex, whether it being physically, mentally, or emotionally. And you can say, “hey it’s just a word” but it’s not. We must treat this like we’d treat any other racist, sexist, heterosexist, anti-trans, xenophobic, etc slur out there. By saying things like “fuck prop 8” or “fuck racism” we are using a tool that rape culture apologists use; we are negatively sexualizing unpleasant things with the mentality that we are combating inequality, hatred, and overall bad things. But we are simply using violence. We are implying that it is okay to apply violence through sex to get rid of something or someone. It is not okay. Saying “fuck you” is not okay.

This has been incubated in my brain  a few months now, and I keep bringing up this question with Max–is it best to claim the word for one meaning (violence) or the other (sex)? If so, which one? Do we drop it all together? Thoughts?

The G-Spot (I)

This is going to be a blatant case of fishing for information. I don’t have any insight into this, but I was hoping the occasional reader might have anecdotes or links to more articles on the topic. “The topic” being the G-spot.

Basically, a lot of people, some very learned scientists, still think it doesn’t exist. It’s a weird mixture of the limits of observation and persistent sexism holding over from before women’s lib. The penis is fairly easy to study: whatever variance there is in penis size, shape, dimension, stimulation, what have you, it’s right there. You can look at it by virtue of it being external. Vaginas (oddly my spellchecker insists on “vaginae” but I won’t be using that, thanks) are a lot harder to study, exceptionally so to study them while aroused. Scientific study and arousal are strange and rare bedfellows.

On top of that, Freud believed that becoming feminine meant moving from clitoral orgasm to vaginal, because femininity means being passive, and any woman who masturbates or requests clitoral stimulation is a stunted adolescent. This is the thinking that has led many cultures to pervasive use of clitoridectomy. A “move” of this kind would leave many women unable to climax at all, which never seemed to be a concern of Freud’s.

What we do know is that only about 25% of women are able to have an orgasm from sexual intercourse alone, with no added clitoral stimulation. I’ve personally met some that are incredibly skeptical of any women claiming to have had an orgasm from anything but clitoral stimulation.

In Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex, she enumerates the histories of G-spot study (FYI, the G stands for Grafenberg, Ernst Grafenberg specifically, who did the first studies on the G-spot… oddly, the history of sexual science is littered with people named Ernst). There are correlations between penetration-only orgasms and the proximity of the clitoris (specifically the visible bit under the hood, really the tip of the iceberg, called the “neoclitoris”) to the vagina. Marie Bonaparte’s studies implied that vaginal orgasm simply comes from having a close clitoris and getting some pressure on it during sex, and the numbers do correlate. Roy Levin believes that the periurethral glans directly around the urethra are an erogenous zone (it’s analogous to the very tip of the penis), and they this area gets pulled inside the vagina during sex for some women.

These are all ways of explaining how the G-spot doesn’t actually exist, and it’s starting to sound like the scientific community thinks the G-spot is some kind of spook story, a “God of the gaps” that will eventually be summarily disproven.

But these are all older studies than one that Roach mentions taking place in the mid-80′s in Colombia, where two researchers, Heli Alzate and Maria Ladi Londoño, to put it bluntly, finger-banged 16 Colombian prostitutes and 32 Colombian feminists to test for their sweet spots.

When Alzate or Londoño located a subject’s sweet spot – which for most was on the front wall, but for some, the lower back wall – the spot was simultaneously pressed and stroked (a maneuver I have seen elsewhere described as a “come here” motion). More than three-quarters of the prostitutes Alzate “frictioned” in this manner had a vaginal orgasm. (Londoño brought no subjects to climax; the women said that this was because she wasn’t pressing as hard as Alzate.) Only four of the feminists, though aroused, reached orgasm. Perhaps they were feeling uncomfortable with what many feminists might perceive to be an exploitative scenario. Or perhaps they were simply less accustomed to sexual encounters with strangers.

-Mary Roach, Bonk, p.49-50

If I may get anecdotal for a moment: I’ve had four sexual partners. One has never had an orgasm in her life, and the other three have at least once had a vaginal orgasm. Of those three, all of them have had a vaginal orgasm from exactly that “come here” motion of fingers, a motion with bent fingers that pull the hands and fingers away from both the clitoris and the periurethral glans.

If there’s no such thing as a G-spot than I have known three exquisite fakers, and I need to reassess my value as a sexual partner.

So what do we think? I’m fully convinced that the G-spot exists, but I can’t tell you what it is or how it works, or why it’s so variable from one woman to the next. Dan Savage stresses that the clitoris is more than just the neoclitoris, that the analogous “shaft” of the clitoris is inside a woman’s body, and that the G-spot is simply what occurs in the women who are lucky enough to have this shaft extend low enough into their bodies to be touchable from inside the vagina. But I’m not sure where that study is, and it doesn’t explain the “lower wall” orgasms that Alzate achieved with (and within) some of his prostitutes.

Now, while I’ve been graciously granted some free access to vaginas at different points in my life, I haven’t got one of my own. I sure would love it if some people with more firsthand (or both-hands) experience(s) or someone with a link to some more articles on the subject would pass them along.

Anyway, here’s Dan in his own, inimitable words:

Throw me links and/or stories in the comments, or shoot me a line privately at mejicaboom (at) gmail (dot) com.

NL (H)

A friend sent me this quotation from Camus 5 years ago. Looking for something else, I came across it again today:

What astonished him about lovemaking was – the first time, at least – the terrible intimacy the woman accepted and the fact that she could receive a part of a stranger’s body inside her own. In such intoxication and abandonment, in such surrender he recognized the exalting and sordid power of love.

Transforming Desire (H)

Yeah, I’m a little behind the times, but I finally got my hands on some music by Lily Allen. This song is catchy, and I admit I’m a sucker for her accent. But it’s got the same old themes: nice guys finish last, nice guys are no good in bed, the total cultural sexualization of domination and oppression that makes some women think that only guys who treat them like shit can be good lovers…

bell hooks writes about the need to decolonize our minds–to get out of this attraction dynamic that she admits to being stuck in for a long time. In “Seduced by Violence No More” she writes:

…the courageous brothers who do, who rethink masculinity, who reject patriarchy and rape culture, often find that they cannot get any play–that the very same women who may critique macho male nonsense contradict themselves by making it clear that they find the “unconscious brothers” more appealing… Their black female peers confirm that they do indeed hold contradictory desires. They desire men not to be sexist, even as they say, “But I want him to be masculine.” When pushed to define “masculine,” they fall back on sexist representations. I was surprised by the number of young black women who repudiated the notion of male domination, but who would then go on to insist that they could not desire a brother who could not take charge, take care of business, be in control.

Their responses suggest that a major obstacle preventing us from transforming rape culture is that heterosexual women have not unlearned a heterosexist-based “eroticism” that constructs desire in such a way that many of us can only respond erotically to male behavior that has already been coded as masculine within the sexist framework…

Years passed before I found a man who respected those rights [to say no] in a feminist manner…While I liked his alternative behavior, I felt a loss of control–the kind we experience when we are no longer acting  within the socialized framework of both acceptable and familiar heterosexual behavior. I worried the he did not really find me desirable. Then I asked myself whether that aggressive emphasis on his desire, on his need for “the pussy” would have reassured me. It seemed to me, then, that I needed to rethink the nature of black female heterosexual eroticism, particularly in relation to black culture.

Critically interrogating my responses, I confronted the reality that despite all my years of opposing patriarchy, I had not fully questioned or transformed the structure of my desire. By allowing my erotic desire to still be determined to any extent by sexist constructions, I was acting in complicity with patriarchal thinking. Resisting patriarchal culture meant that I had to reconstruct myself as a heterosexual, desiring subject in manner that would make it possible for me to be fully aroused by male behavior that was not phallocentric. In basic terms, I had to learn how to be sexual with a man in a context where his pleasure and his hard-on is decentered and mutual pleasure is centered instead…

Concurrently, when heterosexual women are no longer attracted to macho men, the message sent to men would at least be consistent and clear. That would be a major intervention in the overall effort to transform rape culture.

In other words: talking feminism and anti-oppression is good and well, but if you’re still dating/ fucking guys who act out the myths of seduction through coercion and domination (does our entire culture have Stockholm syndrome?), you’re contradicting and undermining the message.

And I know that desire can change because I’ve seen mine change, expand from attraction solely to caucasians to people of varied ethnic/racial backgrounds. And a friend of mine, after becoming a feminist, noticed that the sorts of female bodies he was attracted to changed and broadened after the conceptual shift. I know sexuality is plastic, but how plastic? And how does one go about changing one’s desires and responses? Can knowledge alone accomplish the shift?

bell also writes about BDSM (which, despite superficial resemblances, is distinct from the mating’n'dating rituals referred to above) as inherently problematic, as does Audre Lorde. The orientation towards certain dynamics or psychological themes can be an axis of desire as central, important, and as gender orientation. But is it even mutable? Or is Dan Savage right that our kinks are here to stay?

Addendum: Kink (H)

Sometimes sex is simply a context for the strange intimacies and radical psychic openings of “kink”. It is a way to go “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond/ any experience“. Sometimes it feels like a pretext, even, the price of admission for getting to where the interesting stuff is. But perhaps I don’t give it enough credit. Idea: sex establishes a minimum of intimacy which serves as a launch pad for the intensely intimate psychological exploration of serious BDSM. At least as important is its role in establishing intimacy as something embodied, rather than as the simply psychological or emotional, body-ignorant intimacy we settle for in most of our non-sexual relationships. Objectification, after all, is not the awareness of a being as physical, but an ignorance of a being as that which is inherently, unrelentingly, and simultaneously physical, psychic, spiritual.

Kink & Alchemy (H)

A dear friend wrote to me about feeling that vanilla sex was inadequate and though he’s not particularly oriented towards BDSM, he’s decided to start exploring it to expand his sexual repetoire. He writes:

I’m under the impression (perhaps misguided) that BDSM has a lot to do with power imbalances, anger, humiliation.  I appreciate that it’s probably more complicated than that, but those drives aren’t really my deal… I’m also recently aware (via facebook) that some psychologists are considing recognizing five human experiences (interest, gratitude, confusion, elevation, pride) as emotional responses on par with the regular ones. So it seems that I could start looking into some kind of “topping” practice with a focus on aesthetic / emotional responses that are different from the ones I think of as being specific to BDSM.

I replied:

From my limited experience:

Pain is different from harm. Whether the two coincide often has to do with intention or context–the pain felt during childbirth is processed and experienced differently (and usually not as psychic or emotional harm, even if the body is injured) whereas an equal amount of physical pain felt when being tortured in someone’s basement or in a POW camp I would guess is much more likely to be harmful.

In less dramatic senses, I think there is more risk of harm when we are acting out of any sort of malice, retributive anger, hatred, resentment, defensiveness, aggression–anything that Yoda would put on the dark side of the force.

This purtains to kink in that, when it is done in a “safe, sane, consensual” manner, one of the intentions may be to cause pain–physical or emotional–but not to harm. Anyone who wants to do you lasting damage isn’t someone that it would be healthy for most people to get kinky with. A good top, when you are not “playing” with power or other kink stuff but doing something more serious, is more like a spiritual guide, knowing when to push and when to slow down, open to feedback, offering support and encouragement when necessary, with steady love beneath whatever else is going on or whatever the expression of it is (you know I don’t necessarily mean romantic love). And in this context, the sub has the opportunity to experience and confront some of the things we struggle most with as humans– perhaps, physical pain, which she will learn is easiest when one surrendors to it or accepts it wholely; mentally, humiliation–which can be an joyful release from selfhood, an entry into intense trance states, a way of taking the ego and breaking it against a rock, failure or guilt–which, in going into fully in the safety of the setting she will learn to fear less in daily life, and to meet fully when it arises, her psychic and physical limitiations–which may help release her from some of the perfectionism conditioned into us by our culture, fear–which she will become intimate with and learn to and enjoy, create for herself the tool of imbuing the terrible with the erotic thus helping her to face it, to make it bearable.

It is a grounds, perhaps most of all, for giving and recieving unconditional love. There is incredible risk on both sides to exposing “shadow” sides, in asking for obedience or giving it, in giving a command or following it. The scene can exist only when both parties conspire together, are in it together. And it is amazing, to humiliate oneself completely in front of someone, to for a period of time exist in a state of utter trust and let someone cause you pain without trying to escape, and instead of leaving, the person stays, appreciates, loves you all the more. And the top, I would guess, has a reciprocal experience–to demand, inflict, command, humiliate, and still be loved. It’s breath-taking, isn’t it?

The difference between this and actual abuse has much to do with explicit consent and intention. Abuse often comes from intentions to harm, defend, protect, intimidate. Kink, in good situations, comes from intentions to expand and open emotionally and experientially, to achieve intimacy, to give and recieve love, and often includes inflicting pain in the service of these things.

Of course some people use kink to channel hatred of various sorts, or to put themselves in harm’s (rather than pain’s) way, and in those scenarios, there is great potential to damage all involved. But in the best cases, sex can become a pretext, a means, a background, or simply a component of a deeply intimate, alchemical process.

Depravity (I)

In our puritanical America (and we were colonized by puritans, after all), we seem to be afraid that everything is a gateway to sin. Graphed on a chart, this thinking would probably increase as religious fervor increases, but it seems to be a pretty prevalent mechanism in the US. Overall, our attitudes about sex are much more ascetic than, say, France’s, our attitudes about drugs more prohibitive than The Netherlands (obviously). Our age of consent laws and our legal drinking ages are higher than most of Europe. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, and I don’t know if what I’m going to talk about is a reason or just a symptom, but Americans, I think, fear depravity.

We seem to think much of the world is sinful, or if we don’t buy the notion of sin, at least unethical or dangerous or just overly-complicated. It’s not a matter of qualitative difference sometimes: monogamy is simpler than polyamory, abstinence is simpler than promiscuity, asceticism is simpler than finding a dealer and getting high. But not even just simpler; safer.

But safe from what?

I remember from my D.A.R.E. training in elementary school this notion that smoking pot for the first time is the gateway to becoming a heroin addict (and I think my parents figured swearing of any kind would turn me into a Tarantino movie). Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; certainly many heroin users started with marijuana, so is it not safer to just avoid the whole thing? This is the thinking they teach us to keep us clean.

I suppose I can re-quote Martin Amis:

If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer – or an undertaker.

-”A Rough Trade”

I’m behind the idea of harboring a perversity, but I don’t think that’s what’s being taught, or rather, it’s more common to put the cart before the horse. People are more afraid that watching pornography will make you want sex, that taking drugs will make you want drugs, that getting kinky will make you violent, that reading Marx will make you a Communist.

With my recent first forays into kinky behavior, the only thing I’ve come away knowing is that I am not a violent person. There is a thrill I get from the permission to bite, choke, scratch, spank, and paddle a person, and that thrill comes entirely from knowing that I am not aggressive in any other part of my life. From what I know from other kinksters (and it is rather fun now to say “other kinksters” instead of just “kinksters”), kink can be very psychological, with all kinds of darkness and degradation, fear and intimidation. It can be a place where very real and possibly dangerous desires get exposed. But for a person who is dark and possibly violent, the darkness always preceeds the sex and exists beyond it. Kink will not make you violent.

And I think it holds: drugs will not make you want drugs; gagging someone and stringing them upside-down is not going to get you into bondage (odds are: you’re already into it). When it comes to harboring perversity, I come down on the side of nature over nurture. It’s true that exploring a wide variety of experiences might increase your tolerance for many things: you may smoke socially because others are, you may be willing to tie up your partner, but doing it is not going to affect your preferences. I know from a long relationship with a mostly asexual partner that all the sex we could have was not going to make her want it more.

The funny thing is this: as our culture espouses this idea that trying it will make you want it, I think we push more people towards real depravity. When someone is told all their lives “smoking weed will make you a pothead,” they feel almost obligated to become a pothead after trying it once. We don’t leave it up to our society to ask “do you want this?” We say only “if you try it, you want it, and are depraved.”

Myself, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t use drugs of any kind, and I completely avoid caffeine. For a long time I lived that way out of judgment of the lifestyle; but at some point I asked myself the question, “do any of these things interest me?” At which point I never bothered with the idea again.

Poverty (I)

Orwell, on living for 6 francs a day in Paris:

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty – it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

[...]

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Elsewhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyére cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire’s poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

-Down And Out In Paris And London, p.16-17, 18-19

Then, on having no food at all:

This was an ugly experience. There are people who do fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they say that fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems different when one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at the start.

The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a rod and went fishing in the Seine, baiting with blue-bottles. I hoped to catch enough for a meal, but of course I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they grew cunning during the siege of Paris, and none of them has been caught since, except in nets. On the scond day I thought of pawning my overcoat, but it seemed too far to walk to the pawnshop, and I spent the day in bed, reading the Memoirs orf Sherlock Holmes. It was all I felt equal to, without food. Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition more like the after-effects of influenza that anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish or as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and a luke-warm water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and being obligated to spit very frequently, and the spittle being curiously white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I do not know the reason for this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has noticed it.

-Ibid., p. 37-38

I know from this past year what Orwell calls the suburbs of poverty. I lived on dry grains and canned beans, did freelance animating 70 hours a week, slept nocturnally, dropped 5 pounds (at 5’9″ and 120 lbs, dropping to 115 is visibly gaunt). I know what it’s like to abandon all luxuries; there is rent and there is food and there is nothing else. And I understand how it’s so much less terrifying to be there than it is to be just a few rungs above it. It makes sense to me why all those studies show that the poorest families in third-world nations seem so much happier than middle-class Americans; being very nearly broke is like being suspended over a 3 foot drop. There’s just not that far to fall. There’s nothing terrible about the ground at the bottom of a cliff; what’s menacing is when you’re high above it looking down.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the feeling of being impoverished in another way. I want to talk about being starved of intimacy.

Reread these passages and replace “look into the shop windows” with “walk around College Hill in the spring.” Replace “fasting cures” with “vows of celibacy.” Fishing for dace is going to a bar when you don’t have a friend to come with you and you don’t even drink. You starve for contact, and your stomach shrinks for want of it. You’re almost afraid of finding it again, because the hunger is so much sharper after you’ve been recently fed, and maybe it’s best not to incite your appetite because it will be so fierce if you let it. A broken heart with a few accessory organs.

It’s something that many people, I think, don’t comprehend. The people who talk of low months without sex, can they fathom a year without? Can they understand that a year between partners is normal for others? Especially the polyamorous, who go through the same pains and heartbreaks as anyone but can at least have the comfort of overlap. The naturally charismatic men who have always known they can get sex whenever they look for it, who have insomnia whenever they sleep alone which is a rare case; the beautiful women who have to spend so much of their energy turning down unwanted desires, who always have a string of suitors as soon as a relationship ends, where every day they spend single is a choice – do they have any idea how it feels?

The questions that come flooding in, the anxieties, asking “will I ever be desired again?” Not “will someone on the street think I’m pretty?” Not “will someone I don’t really like have a crush on me?” But having one’s back clawed, flesh bitten, sustained eye-contact, gasps. “Will I be in the presence of mutual desire ever again?” Months go by, years go by. You can’t help but ask. Nothing feels more important, and no lack makes you feel weaker. You cope with how long it’s been by forgetting the way a first kiss makes your face tingle. Forgetting what sex feels like.

“There are only so many ways to fuck myself.”

I want to stress: everyone has their suffering. Everyone woman getting cat-called, every man prowling the singles bar, they all have awful pains. No one has it easy. Navigating romance is painful just as navigating solitude is.  And this isn’t a rational state for the mind that asks these questions, it’s a starved state. And you’d like to think this is the world of weak-willed men and homely women, but it can happen to almost anyone.

Chip, who was used to several casual encounters a day, a well-fed man indeed, speaks of the appetite for love, sex, and desire. He’s a lucky one, who’s had many stretches of his life where it has been very easy to satisfy. He thinks of the need for regular sex being the same as the need for regular oxygen.

I can’t imagine what it must feel like to know you can find intimacy. It’s terribly hard when you’re looking for it, but to not look means there is a certain security that it’s there, a fullness of the belly. So exhausting to look on an empty stomach. And how hard to not devour whole the first person that offers you some closeness.

And the absolute stupidest thing is the way your hunger melts away completely after one good meal and knowledge of where the next one will come. It’s instantly familiar and calm.

The Talk (I)

Pornology (I)

Here’s how female porn stars are paid, by the deed:

solo: $500
girl-girl: $700 (extra $100 for anal toy)
boy-girl: $900
anal: $1100
double penetration: $1500

Chip talks about the first porno theaters that opened in the 70′s in Times Square. He says that the films, which he saw dozens of times each as he spent entire afternoons, day after day, having casual sex in the balcony seats, always followed a standard pattern of sex: fellatio, cunnilingus, woman-on-top, and a male-on-top finish. And it always ended with a “gentle, lingering kiss.” He goes on:

Generally, I suspect, pornography improved our vision of sex all over the country, making it friendlier, more relaxed, and more playful – qualities of sex that, till then, had been often reserved to a distressingly limited section of the better-read and more imaginative members of the mercantile middle class.

For the first year or two the theaters operated, the entire working-class audience would break out laughing at everything save male-superior fucking. (I mean, that’s what sex is, isn’t it?) At the fellatio, at the cunnilingus even more, and at the final kiss, among the groans and chuckles you’d always hear a couple of “Yuccchs” and “Uhggggs.” By the seventies’ end, though, only a few chuckles sounded out now – at the cunnilingus passages. And in the first year or two of the eighties, even those had stopped. (No, that’s what sex is: a four-part act, oral and genital, where everybody gets a chance to be on top. Anything else was what was weird.) Indeed, I think, under pressure of those films, many guys simply found themselves changing what turned them on. And if one part or another didn’t happen to be your thing, you still saw it enough times to realize that maybe you were the strange one, and it behooved you to sit it out politely and put up with it, unless you wanted people to think you were strange.

-Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, p.78

Porn is the reason video killed film, the reason VHS killed Betamax, the reason Blue Ray killed HD; it’s commonly argued that the Darwinism that decides what technology will succeed is a pornographic Darwinism, buoying the success of the internet, previously the film industry, previously the camera, and previously the printing press. I think it’s fair to assume it does much to shape our understandings of sex in the way Chip describes, especially today with the porn-abundance the internet provides. All but the most fortunate Casanovas and the biggest prudes have watched more sex than they’ve experienced.

But if it’s true that porn normalizes certain acts and attitudes (which is pretty indisputable to me), there are a lot of things modern porn normalizes as well. Most young people start learning about sex from porn before they learn about it firsthand, and here’s what I’d assume they are learning:

Sex is not playful, not anymore. Sex is never slow. Sex is humorless. Sex does not involve kissing with lips, only tongues. Sex is not about eye contact. Women don’t come (they either don’t need to or don’t want to or can’t); unless we’re to believe a woman spends the entire hour or so in constant climax, there is never a climactic moment for the woman except (dubiously) in lesbian scenes.

Sex is almost always mildly degrading for both sexes, though more for the women (see the preponderance of spitting in clitorides [yes that's the proper plural, isn't it hideous?], the long strings of spit on penises, and holy shit, the facials). Women are usually the seducers, which is curious to me since the scene always ends when the man comes (what, only once?). Sex is gutteral; Martin Amis (in “A Rough Trade” quotes a porn director who’s answer to “why so much anal?” is “pussies are bullshit”, referring to the more animalistic noises a woman makes during anal sex). Sex is aggressive. Sex is intense. Sex is about more: more toys, more people, more orifaces, more at once, more positions than we’ve tried.

I don’t want to sound like a person who thinks pornography is bad for society; I think you can judge a lot about a society’s health by the health of it’s porn. And I think our porn is getting sickly. I think we need to admit that young people are going to watch porn, and it’s important to ask “what are we teaching them?”

And I want to come out and say that a scene with a lot of kissing, a slow build up, a little bit of laughter and whispering, and a convincing female orgasm, that doesn’t end at the moment the man comes, would do more to get me off than most porn I’ve seen. But pornographers are too lazy for that, and I think they try to make up for it by giving us more taboos to cross. I figure anyone who is turned on by aggression and degradation is going to find most of this shit laughably tame.

Amis says:

Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I’d like it. Porno services the “polymorphous perverse”: the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer – or an undertaker.

Porn is inherently desensitizing; that’s kind of a good thing, as it can loosen our anxieties about sex. But I can already see what’s it’s done for me: when a PG-13 scene in a movie was the most I had access to, it was enough. Then access to the internet meant longer nude scenes, artful photographs. When that wasn’t enough, softcore films, then solo hardcore, and up and up. I think this is a common trajectory. I have trouble now with just using my imagination. It seems like much of the industry is concerned about what the next rung on the ladder is, what thing can people are still sensitive to. It’s a lot easier to arouse by shock than to arouse by sincerity.

But I think of the movie 9 Songs, which made a stir a few years before Shortbus for being a narrative with explicit sex scenes. It was a movie of flashbacks as a man muses on his former lover. In their relationship they went to concerts, had a lot of sex and conversations, and broke up easily when the girl moved back to America. Director Michael Winterbottom insisted it be viewed as a serious film and not pornography. As a film, the acting was lukewarm, the improvised dialogue was weak, the editing was choppy, the drama (and BDSM) was laughably tame, and the cinematography was indifferent.

As pornography, though, it was immensely satisfying.