The boys used to have smutty magazines hidden away, now they have their hidden explorer folder. Same thing - different times. The relentless moralizing about sexuality and pornography disgusts me more than any sexual practice I've ever heard of or seen.
The porn industry does have some specific practical issues. Probably the most is the reliance on very young actresses. Most start while under 20 these days. People that age are too trusting. They get put in bad contracts and don't know their legal rights.
For example, I had one girl come to me an say that a studio was claiming to "own" her real name, forbidding her from working under that name with anyone else. They had also not paid her. It boiled down to producers knowing they can bully these kids. The secrecy in which most of these girls wrap their work doesn't help. They are very hesitant to complain or reach out to lawyers.
> The porn industry does have some specific practical issues. Probably the most is the reliance on very young actresses. Most start while under 20 these days. People that age are too trusting. They get put in bad contracts and don't know their legal rights.
I would argue this is not specific to the porn industry. For instance colleges rely on students being too young and naive to really understand the student loan that they are given. 10 years later many feel betrayed or scammed because they have a degree that isn't always the best in the current economy and still in thousands of debt.
Ditto the music industry with teen pop stars, the professional sports industry with dreams of the major leagues, the tech startup industry where only a small fraction of startups will succeed, all of academia where you have dozens of Ph.Ds competing for each tenured professor job, the legal industry where thousands of deeply-indebted fresh-faced associates seek to make partner, and every corporate hierarchy.
As they say, "When a less-experienced businessman meets a more-experienced businessman, the less-experienced businessman gets some experience."
Not sure if there's any way around this, though. The people who avoid getting taken advantage of when they're young tend to get taken advantage of their whole life.
Interesting. I don't know the specific wording, but how much of a contract holds up if one side doesn't hold up their end (not paying the other party). I know it's all down to what's in the specific text, but.. certainly morally, when you quit fulfilling your end of the bargain, I don't feel much of a need to uphold mine. Yes, I'm older now, but I know I felt that way even as a kid.
That particular story just bugs me. Somehow they'd rather pay attorney fees against her for doing something she should be allowed to do, vs just using that money to ... pay her for services rendered in the first place. Touches a nerve, cause I had someone not pay me. But they had money to respond to my lawsuit, and in extremely great detail (20+ pages to detail all the ways they do not owe me anything for the several weeks I built their project and delivered it to their client).
The game is to promise the girl whatever gets her to the set, make the film, then look for whatever reason you can come up with not to pay her. Often there is no enforceable contract. In this particular case, the signed contract was with a fictitious company that had nothing to do with the filming or distribution (a sham 'talent' agency). All it took was a phonecall from someone familiar with the many rules regarding adult films. They paid as soon as they knew she was willing to seek help.
In these situations they wrongdoer doesn't face attorney fees. They pay instantly, but they win in the long run because so many wronged actresses just disappear from the industry rather than put up a fight.
It is very easy to find sexual release with internet porn. More difficult with a real life woman. And therein lies the collapse of western civilization.
When (eventually...they all do) western civilization collapses I highly doubt porn will be the leading cause. I lean more towards it being bankers, lawyers and politicians.
It's even more severe in Germany. However, Germany as a country won't go away, it will just look very different, since there are many immigrants who are making up for it.
> It is very easy to find sexual release with internet porn. More difficult with a real life woman.
Very true... but I don't really see the problem.
>And therein lies the collapse of western civilization.
I suspect you are joking, but behind the joke, there's a very real, very disturbing attitude.
It's a double-standard, really; in modern times, masturbation is largely seen as a positive thing, an empowering thing for women. But not so for men; the same act is somehow shameful for men. It's like there's this attitude that a man's sexuality, to be honorable, must impose it's will on others. It's an attitude that I think is both destructive to the men in question and to those we interact with. It's an attitude that should have gone away with the idea of ownership of other human beings.
I suspect that the word "masturbati_n" triggers an auto-kill filter on Hacker News. There are 3 comments on this article that are all dead, all 3 include that word. Probably too many threads that got derailed by complaints of "intellectual masturbati_n".
Interesting theory actually. And so simple (and as academics say "elegant"). You have to wonder why the US isn't raining down "propaganda porn viewing devices" instead of leaflets. (I'm serious a self contained unit with an LCD and enough memory and power to play some porn..perhaps with solar charging to boot.)
Of course the reason they would never do this has something to do with how porn is viewed by mainstream folks and how an aghast media would present this even if it was an actual practical solution to a problem. Would seem to be worth a try.
It might as well be the other way around. Perhaps these men already have easy access, and are now frustrated that they cannot find women who can live up to their expectations (the real women are often covered by a burqa, after all).
Also, porn is known to be capable of messing up marriages, so I guess it will certainly not solve any problems related to normal family life (which is what we want these men to pursue), and the morals that come with it.
Another counterargument to your claim is that porn can provide an alternative to infidelity, which tends to mess up marriages to a greater extent.
Further, some of those societies already have many of these problems, such as objectifying women (which they do to a greater extent such as requiring them to cover their entire bodies), as a direct result of the culture being so closed in terms of sex.
What is meant is that these men committing war-crimes is immoral.
Also, regardless of the "marriage" argument I made, if these men had normal relationships with women, I think the problems would be much less severe. Porn is working against that, not helping it.
They already do. I used to work for a company where we would see Internet traffic routing all over the world and the middle east was no different in having several porn sites in their top ten most visited.
There may be something to that, given porn in Japan has been prevalent for longer, albeit, pixelated and they are going through population contraction due to many people of reproductive age being kind of indifferent to real sex.
You know people masturbated well before porn of any kind existed right? And that people frequently do more difficult but higher reward thing? And that there are other motivators for meaningful relationships than just sex?
Maybe this was just a joke that I didn't find very funny?
So kids are forgoing realworld sex. When did that become a bad thing?
My whole school life I was 'encouraged' to avoid sex, alcohol and every other vice at all costs. Going to a party on a friday night was a bad thing. Sex, whether through disease or pregnancy, would destroy your life. This is still the mantra, although nobody then told me that sex would send me to hell. That part is new. So why are we not surprised that kids today have found something else? Society tells them to avoid sex at all costs. Society is just now winning that conversation.
Indeed. Wasn't there a US surgeon general who said schools should teach masturbation to young people as way to avoid sex related problems? Think I remember a flap about that and her eventually getting fired... because... Western Civilization and morals or something...
Careful. Sex is an agreement, not a choice. There are lots of people in this world who would like to have sex but for whatever reasons cannot or do not. Abstinence is also a focus of countless religious traditions. I would hesitate to tell any of those people they lacked in personal development.
Personally, I think it is crucial in personal development because, as you put it, it is an agreement, not a choice. There are some lessons to be learned from getting somebody to agree with you on something.
Certainly. However, there are many things where people are expected to reach agreement. It's not clear that this has to be the matter on which they learn it.
Indeed, considering the harm that can result, it's probably better if they learn to reach agreement on some other matter first.
Faults in agreement include parties generating agreement that doesn't reflect their values and/or desires, and the illusion of agreement by one or both parties.
While there is potential risk of harm in many other areas of development - including other areas of agreement - the stakes are not usually so high. Getting an illusion of agreement for what movie to see, what restaurant to eat at, or (at a younger age) what toy to play with, will tend to have less severe consequences than an illusion of agreement over whether to sleep with someone.
It is not clear that someone gains the most from risking the most. Why is an agreement over sex the defining developmental step of the skill? Especially since there are so many easy ways to reach such an agreement if you're not particularly picky. (I believe the classical example is, 'You give me money and I sleep with you.')
Agreement are choices. When people have sex, they choose to agree to do so, hence the importance of consent.
I disagree that it is invalid to suggest that those who abstain from having sex due to reasons such as religious traditions lack certain aspects of personal development. For example, there are studies that show a clear correlation between abstinence education and _higher_ rates of teen pregnancy [1] and STI transmission rates [2].
I doubt too many people will become permanently celibate due to porn. But they might forego a random risky encounter with a stranger in favour of ten minutes with tube-something. That seems like a win.
This type of social criticism is fan service to people who want to believe they are better than the upcoming generation. If we were having too much sex, there'd be an article saying that too, eliciting the same response from the same people.
This is exactly why I'm not so worried about overpopulation or even immortality. In fact, it's going to get a lot "worse" when you know you're immortal. Why would you have kids by 30 or 40 then? Heck, why have kids by your 1,000th anniversary?
There are most likely some people who would want to have kids under those circumstances. To the extent that the traits that lead them to act that way under those circumstances are heritable, either genetically or through parents-raising-kids (some religions are obvious candidates here), these traits would be selected for in subsequent generations. If a supermajority of people lack these traits, the problem may be put off for some generations, but eventually it will make itself felt. That said, I think there are a few possible solutions, and I certainly am in favor of developing immortality.
What you're talking about is puritanism or something like it. That's different from saying that the sexual needs of people should be emulated with porn. Even if the consequences are similar – less real sex with people and thus functional abstinence – I think puritans were more concerned with the timing and focus of sexual thoughts, i.e. control, over just indulging the whim without sophistication.
A bit handwavy but I'm mainly trying to say that different things are different.
The danger is not that teenagers are avoiding real world sex, but that they have unrealistic ideas about sex. Kids see graphic sex and think that is how it's done. Consequently girls are subjected to unrealistic expectations and learn to hate sex. Source: My wife has spoken to many young girls who are the victims of "porn-style" sex.
From my point of view online porn looks boring because it objectifies women too much. It’s just so mechanical nowadays. Whenever I happen to view porn from the eighties it looked much more natural. But then again I guess back then porn actors where only a few dozen and they knew each other quite well so this allowed some kind of intimacy to grow between them. Now porn has become a commodity, there are thousands of actors, a gazillion of different styles and the production is too big for anyone to bother bringing some quality to the mixture. I feel that this would be a threat to youngsters if they were to believe that sex doesn't require any kind of sentimental bonding.
Really like that quote. I was thinking, G. K. Chesterton, or maybe C. S. Lewis on a good day, but it actually seems to be from Pope John Paul II!
“There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.” --Pope John Paul II
I don't buy this. I agree that the quality of modern porn is low, but we need only look to the modern tv/movie market to know that it is possible to produce high quality works in a large industry with large productions.
Indeed, intimacy and passion for each other is beautiful, but it is hard for two complete strangers to fake it. Sex is great, but it is an order of magnitude better when it is an expression of love.
It is like eating a hamburger vs a fancy French meal. In both cases you satisfy your hunger. But the experience of getting there makes all the difference.
It is called acting, and the television/movie industry seems to have figured it out. Of course, you do not want strangers, but rather long-standing co-workers, but this is as true for porn as it is for acting and coding.
Even if, for some reason, intimacy and passion could not be faked, you could just hire couples.
Couples have been hiring themselves for a while now :-)
A lot of couples don't mind publishing their intimate scenes for the world to see. I'd rather young people watch other people in action than professional videos which seem to have gone so plastic/mechanical/unrealistic.
Perhaps you can explain to me what "objectification of women" means? Does it mean being attracted to their bodies? So what would be an OK thing to be attracted to - their ability to recite the digits of PI perhaps?
To me it seems that the "anti-objectification" campaign only seeks to replace one attractor with another. So maybe less pretty women would prefer to be measured by their IQ? Why is one better than the other? Or is it generally not OK to be attracted to somebody - or only once you are married and officially in love?
I'm not saying that I like everything that is done in porn, just that I don't understand what "objectification" is supposed to mean? And it seems ridiculous to me to presume men should not be attracted to the female body. So we should just as likely want to have sex with a horse or a hedgehog as with a woman? "American Pie" was just fiction - at least I personally was never tempted by an apple pie, because the looks of "the object" matter.
I'll start by acknowledging that "objectification of women" has become a buzzphrase, and it means whatever the speaker/writer wants it to mean, and the following discursion is (mostly) not intended as a prescriptivist scold. As such, the following is (mostly) a tangent from your comment, and entirely a tangent from GP's comment, since clearly GP was not using "objectifies" in this way. But anyway, here goes.
My understanding is that originally, in feminist studies of pornography, "objectification" meant to be made into an object, in the syntactic sense, as contrasted with the syntactic subject. In this sense, to objectify something is to have it be the recipient of verbs. In the context of feminist critique, the verb in particular is "desire", and the complaint is that pornography is (allegedly) interested in women as objects of desire, not as subjects. That is, the wishes and desires of the women are, allegedly, less valued than the wishes and desires of the men.
I personally suspect that this critique is overwrought and largely missing the point, although not without any truth at all. Perhaps irrelevant to the feminist point, speaking as a male, I'm pretty fond of being an object, although I wouldn't like to be only an object.
It means having sex for a half hour without one kissing the other even once. It also means that women must have at least a dozen plastic surgeries to be considered acceptable by the industry.
The plastic surgery part certainly isn't true. The porn industry caters to all sorts of tastes, including imperfect bodies. A single visit to a popular porn site will demonstrate that.
As for kissing - OK, so that is one understandable definition, thank you for that.
I think sex is simply weird - if you think rationally about sex it is not really appealing. It only works in a state of arousal. That plays into the hands of feminists who frame sex as something disgusting being done to women - it works because people are rarely aroused while reading feminist pamphlets...
I find American porn to be crude and artificial. Russian porn is much better; it just shows attractive people having sex with each other and enjoying it.
Wonder what that says about our respective cultures.
The problem with saying that porn objectifies women is that it's only half-true. Porn objectifies women as well as men. The only difference between the two is that for cultural reasons we consider sex something "men do to women". But if you think all porn portrays women as the passive "recipient" of sexual activities, you haven't been paying attention.
The problem is that even when women play the active part it they're considered victims because a) we see sex as something "done to women" and b) most porn is targeted at men (so porn consumers "use" the women, too).
Of course what this really boils down to is the sexist idea that men can't be raped (without being penetrated) and therefore can't be the "object" of porn to the same extent as women (except in gay porn because we like to pretend gay men are just men acting as if they were women).
In the end, the most common arguments against porn can be summarized as "I don't like it, therefore you shouldn't like it either" (or "I feel guilty, therefore you should feel guilty too").
It's funny to look at this like an electric circuit. There is a nominal tension, built in our very biological existence. If mere resistance (i.e. moralizing, law) is applied, tension will increase or output will decrease...
I have found that quitting pornography and masturbation has had many benefits for my life. My energy levels, motivation are up and my mood is noticeably more stable. My relationship with my girlfriend and love life have also benefited. I think it's good to practice self-discipline in general. It can also become a problematic addiction.
It might be worthwhile to examine this phenomenon in a larger context. For example, I know a girl who is obsessed with watching sticky sweet romantic shows and movies like "twilight" and "the bachelor". The romance portrayed in these shows is extremely unrealistic and I feel it gives her unrealistic expectations of romantic relationships. Certainly there are no shortage of young men smoking too much marijuana and watching too much internet porn and generally not trying in life who wonder why they can't find a female partner, but likewise there are a lot women who are overweight, unclean, disorganized and generally not exciting (or even downright repulsive) watching romantic shows or reading sexy novels and thinking their world should be that way.
The larger phenomenon is, in my opinion, media substitutions for reality. It's like to much sugar and causes certain individuals problems. But it's not a problem isolated to porn and young men.
What makes it difficult for many people to look at this phenomenon in a larger context is that it is much easier to be alarmist at anything sexual. Unfortunately, many parts of societies still view sex as something shameful and thus tend to attempt to avoid anything to do with it rather than having meaningful discussion about it.
I'm a 19 year old male and I'm completly incapable of connecting with others on an emotional level. However, that wasn't always the case,
I clearly remember having "feeling" (what ever that is supposed to mean now) when I was about 12 or 13 but it has slowly withered away. I realized this when
one of my teachers in high school mentioned that I'm a very hard person to excite, that is even given "exciting" news I would just shrug it away as being nice, but inside I felt empty -- even now I feel absolutely nothing, like being drunk.
Now, its not that I'm anti-social, no, I can "talk" to people and intrigue them (a by product of my pseudo-isolation is that it allowed me to get quite good in some areas) but this is something that I learned to fake:
how to behave and what to say when someone is feeling sad, or happy, or whatever -- but in reality I don't care about you or your problems or how you feel, I'll just manipulate the situation and person into a favourable state to benefit me later on and that means that I have to through
certain social rituals (comforting someone, compliments, etc) and manipulating truth (lying) comes naturally (not naturally enough however; I got called out on it once. Once.).
Recently however I realized that no matter what I do, I'll never be able to connect with someone on an intimate level because I always put myself first (and I have a few rationalization of that, e.g. living in a capitalist society etc.) and I know for a fact that when people get "close" to me they see through me (I have a few friends that see me for what I am and cautiously accept that, with an occasional confrontation here and there).
So how am I supposed to achieve a sexual release without pornograpy? Sure, I've gotten black out drunk and had sex, but that is the same thing, if not worse than pornograpy, because no real intimacy happens there either, and getting super drunk is not something I want either (it just makes the fake social interactions even faker as me on alcohol is not me).
Every once in a while we get this kind of articles that tries to create a story from a few studies that have found loose correlations (but never causation) between what people watch on cinema, TV and now computers/mobile phones, and what they do in real life.
The problem is that if the theory of modified norms and behavior has for all the studies never been strongly linked. In theory, we should all be committing much more crime and violence in direct relation to the ease of access to news and movies, but crimes have steady gone down rather than up. Yearly statistics do show however an increased fear of crime in relation to reading news and watching movies, so it seems our perception about others behaviors has had a much larger impact than on our own behavior.
The first myth addressed by makelovenotporn.com (mentioned in the article) regards "facials".
I wonder how much men's desire to do this comes from watching porn.
Any grecian urns with men "dropping loads"?
Does anybody actually want to do this or have it done to them? There are a lot of weird tropes in porn, but this has to be one of the weirdest wide-spread ones. Really, you might as well just squirt super-glue at somebody.
I think the majority of men in my demographic like to do it.
And in my experience, about half of the girls are into it, the other half are indifferent.
I've done it a few times, at the request of my girlfriend at the time. I was indifferent to it, personally. She was very much into dom/sub type relationships, so I expect most of the kink for her came from that.
The negative explanation is that it degrades the recipient (i.e. women), adding to the sadist/misogynist aspect of heterosexual intercourse.
The pragmatic explanation is that it provides a visual cue for the viewer (particularly those who are more visually oriented) indicating the climax of the sexual act. If the orgasm were internal, it'd be hard to miss (though there's an entire niche for that, of course). As to why it's the face in particular: it's the easiest way to directly show the recipient's reaction at the same time, especially on low-resolution or small-scale displays (plus on those devices a close-up tends to be easier to recognize).
The psychological explanation has something to do with there being a long-standing trope of portraying cannibalism as the ultimate infatuation (e.g. the communion of the Holy Spirit in Christianity representing "becoming one with Jesus" by consuming his flesh and blood) and ejaculate representing the "essence" of the male orgasm (biologically speaking the entire "point" of sex is to put one person's sperm in the other person's body).
It may seem odd that there are people who are into the ejaculate itself but it's far more straightforward than a lot of other things some people enjoy (including pretty much everything else that can come out of a person's body, apparently non-sexual body parts and things that aren't even related to persons, or even BDSM which is so much about psychology it can get away without any actual intercourse taking place).
PornHub has a great blog at http://www.pornhub.com/insights where they put out all sorts of interesting statistics on viewership, preference of certain search terms, and demographics data. I'm not much of a porn connoisseur, but I love the data they publish!
I'd be curious to see the ratio of people that will watch something considered "extreme" in porn and want to re-enact it vs. those that will watch it but have no interest in being personally involved.
I definitely fall in the latter - most of what I watch is pretty vanilla, but at times, I'll venture into things that are more risque. I'm not at all personally into bondage, for example, and I'm indifferent to anything more than just light roleplaying, but once or twice a month I might pull up a BDSM video and enjoy it.
I doubt that I'm alone in sometimes wanting to watch something I'd not enjoy personally doing.
107 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadFor example, I had one girl come to me an say that a studio was claiming to "own" her real name, forbidding her from working under that name with anyone else. They had also not paid her. It boiled down to producers knowing they can bully these kids. The secrecy in which most of these girls wrap their work doesn't help. They are very hesitant to complain or reach out to lawyers.
I would argue this is not specific to the porn industry. For instance colleges rely on students being too young and naive to really understand the student loan that they are given. 10 years later many feel betrayed or scammed because they have a degree that isn't always the best in the current economy and still in thousands of debt.
As they say, "When a less-experienced businessman meets a more-experienced businessman, the less-experienced businessman gets some experience."
Not sure if there's any way around this, though. The people who avoid getting taken advantage of when they're young tend to get taken advantage of their whole life.
That particular story just bugs me. Somehow they'd rather pay attorney fees against her for doing something she should be allowed to do, vs just using that money to ... pay her for services rendered in the first place. Touches a nerve, cause I had someone not pay me. But they had money to respond to my lawsuit, and in extremely great detail (20+ pages to detail all the ways they do not owe me anything for the several weeks I built their project and delivered it to their client).
In these situations they wrongdoer doesn't face attorney fees. They pay instantly, but they win in the long run because so many wronged actresses just disappear from the industry rather than put up a fight.
There is no moralizing in this article, just people trying to understand the impact of online pornography.
Why is this disgusting?
(Windows, Chrome, ABP)
Maybe your browser is in Fetish Mode?
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32929962
Very true... but I don't really see the problem.
>And therein lies the collapse of western civilization.
I suspect you are joking, but behind the joke, there's a very real, very disturbing attitude.
It's a double-standard, really; in modern times, masturbation is largely seen as a positive thing, an empowering thing for women. But not so for men; the same act is somehow shameful for men. It's like there's this attitude that a man's sexuality, to be honorable, must impose it's will on others. It's an attitude that I think is both destructive to the men in question and to those we interact with. It's an attitude that should have gone away with the idea of ownership of other human beings.
Of course, it's probably just a technical glitch.
Wonder if synonyms of a homonym are acceptable?
In your profile settings, you can set showdead to "yes" to see comments made by shadowbanned users.
Ref: Full Metal Jacket (link is a nsfw video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12tce-THLUE
Of course the reason they would never do this has something to do with how porn is viewed by mainstream folks and how an aghast media would present this even if it was an actual practical solution to a problem. Would seem to be worth a try.
Also, porn is known to be capable of messing up marriages, so I guess it will certainly not solve any problems related to normal family life (which is what we want these men to pursue), and the morals that come with it.
Another counterargument to your claim is that porn can provide an alternative to infidelity, which tends to mess up marriages to a greater extent.
Further, some of those societies already have many of these problems, such as objectifying women (which they do to a greater extent such as requiring them to cover their entire bodies), as a direct result of the culture being so closed in terms of sex.
Also, regardless of the "marriage" argument I made, if these men had normal relationships with women, I think the problems would be much less severe. Porn is working against that, not helping it.
Sorry, this hasn't seemed to solve it.
Maybe this was just a joke that I didn't find very funny?
My whole school life I was 'encouraged' to avoid sex, alcohol and every other vice at all costs. Going to a party on a friday night was a bad thing. Sex, whether through disease or pregnancy, would destroy your life. This is still the mantra, although nobody then told me that sex would send me to hell. That part is new. So why are we not surprised that kids today have found something else? Society tells them to avoid sex at all costs. Society is just now winning that conversation.
Indeed, considering the harm that can result, it's probably better if they learn to reach agreement on some other matter first.
Faults in agreement include parties generating agreement that doesn't reflect their values and/or desires, and the illusion of agreement by one or both parties.
While there is potential risk of harm in many other areas of development - including other areas of agreement - the stakes are not usually so high. Getting an illusion of agreement for what movie to see, what restaurant to eat at, or (at a younger age) what toy to play with, will tend to have less severe consequences than an illusion of agreement over whether to sleep with someone.
It is not clear that someone gains the most from risking the most. Why is an agreement over sex the defining developmental step of the skill? Especially since there are so many easy ways to reach such an agreement if you're not particularly picky. (I believe the classical example is, 'You give me money and I sleep with you.')
I disagree that it is invalid to suggest that those who abstain from having sex due to reasons such as religious traditions lack certain aspects of personal development. For example, there are studies that show a clear correlation between abstinence education and _higher_ rates of teen pregnancy [1] and STI transmission rates [2].
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20378905
Future sexbots, on the other hand...
Since the sexual revolution.
A bit handwavy but I'm mainly trying to say that different things are different.
“There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.” --Pope John Paul II
It is like eating a hamburger vs a fancy French meal. In both cases you satisfy your hunger. But the experience of getting there makes all the difference.
Even if, for some reason, intimacy and passion could not be faked, you could just hire couples.
A lot of couples don't mind publishing their intimate scenes for the world to see. I'd rather young people watch other people in action than professional videos which seem to have gone so plastic/mechanical/unrealistic.
To me it seems that the "anti-objectification" campaign only seeks to replace one attractor with another. So maybe less pretty women would prefer to be measured by their IQ? Why is one better than the other? Or is it generally not OK to be attracted to somebody - or only once you are married and officially in love?
I'm not saying that I like everything that is done in porn, just that I don't understand what "objectification" is supposed to mean? And it seems ridiculous to me to presume men should not be attracted to the female body. So we should just as likely want to have sex with a horse or a hedgehog as with a woman? "American Pie" was just fiction - at least I personally was never tempted by an apple pie, because the looks of "the object" matter.
My understanding is that originally, in feminist studies of pornography, "objectification" meant to be made into an object, in the syntactic sense, as contrasted with the syntactic subject. In this sense, to objectify something is to have it be the recipient of verbs. In the context of feminist critique, the verb in particular is "desire", and the complaint is that pornography is (allegedly) interested in women as objects of desire, not as subjects. That is, the wishes and desires of the women are, allegedly, less valued than the wishes and desires of the men.
I personally suspect that this critique is overwrought and largely missing the point, although not without any truth at all. Perhaps irrelevant to the feminist point, speaking as a male, I'm pretty fond of being an object, although I wouldn't like to be only an object.
As for kissing - OK, so that is one understandable definition, thank you for that.
I think sex is simply weird - if you think rationally about sex it is not really appealing. It only works in a state of arousal. That plays into the hands of feminists who frame sex as something disgusting being done to women - it works because people are rarely aroused while reading feminist pamphlets...
The problem is that even when women play the active part it they're considered victims because a) we see sex as something "done to women" and b) most porn is targeted at men (so porn consumers "use" the women, too).
Of course what this really boils down to is the sexist idea that men can't be raped (without being penetrated) and therefore can't be the "object" of porn to the same extent as women (except in gay porn because we like to pretend gay men are just men acting as if they were women).
In the end, the most common arguments against porn can be summarized as "I don't like it, therefore you shouldn't like it either" (or "I feel guilty, therefore you should feel guilty too").
The larger phenomenon is, in my opinion, media substitutions for reality. It's like to much sugar and causes certain individuals problems. But it's not a problem isolated to porn and young men.
What makes it difficult for many people to look at this phenomenon in a larger context is that it is much easier to be alarmist at anything sexual. Unfortunately, many parts of societies still view sex as something shameful and thus tend to attempt to avoid anything to do with it rather than having meaningful discussion about it.
I'm a 19 year old male and I'm completly incapable of connecting with others on an emotional level. However, that wasn't always the case, I clearly remember having "feeling" (what ever that is supposed to mean now) when I was about 12 or 13 but it has slowly withered away. I realized this when one of my teachers in high school mentioned that I'm a very hard person to excite, that is even given "exciting" news I would just shrug it away as being nice, but inside I felt empty -- even now I feel absolutely nothing, like being drunk.
Now, its not that I'm anti-social, no, I can "talk" to people and intrigue them (a by product of my pseudo-isolation is that it allowed me to get quite good in some areas) but this is something that I learned to fake: how to behave and what to say when someone is feeling sad, or happy, or whatever -- but in reality I don't care about you or your problems or how you feel, I'll just manipulate the situation and person into a favourable state to benefit me later on and that means that I have to through certain social rituals (comforting someone, compliments, etc) and manipulating truth (lying) comes naturally (not naturally enough however; I got called out on it once. Once.).
Recently however I realized that no matter what I do, I'll never be able to connect with someone on an intimate level because I always put myself first (and I have a few rationalization of that, e.g. living in a capitalist society etc.) and I know for a fact that when people get "close" to me they see through me (I have a few friends that see me for what I am and cautiously accept that, with an occasional confrontation here and there). So how am I supposed to achieve a sexual release without pornograpy? Sure, I've gotten black out drunk and had sex, but that is the same thing, if not worse than pornograpy, because no real intimacy happens there either, and getting super drunk is not something I want either (it just makes the fake social interactions even faker as me on alcohol is not me).
The problem is that if the theory of modified norms and behavior has for all the studies never been strongly linked. In theory, we should all be committing much more crime and violence in direct relation to the ease of access to news and movies, but crimes have steady gone down rather than up. Yearly statistics do show however an increased fear of crime in relation to reading news and watching movies, so it seems our perception about others behaviors has had a much larger impact than on our own behavior.
Seems like it would make a hell of a mess, and it also makes me think of this joke from Good Will Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6il6tocb4ic
The negative explanation is that it degrades the recipient (i.e. women), adding to the sadist/misogynist aspect of heterosexual intercourse.
The pragmatic explanation is that it provides a visual cue for the viewer (particularly those who are more visually oriented) indicating the climax of the sexual act. If the orgasm were internal, it'd be hard to miss (though there's an entire niche for that, of course). As to why it's the face in particular: it's the easiest way to directly show the recipient's reaction at the same time, especially on low-resolution or small-scale displays (plus on those devices a close-up tends to be easier to recognize).
The psychological explanation has something to do with there being a long-standing trope of portraying cannibalism as the ultimate infatuation (e.g. the communion of the Holy Spirit in Christianity representing "becoming one with Jesus" by consuming his flesh and blood) and ejaculate representing the "essence" of the male orgasm (biologically speaking the entire "point" of sex is to put one person's sperm in the other person's body).
It may seem odd that there are people who are into the ejaculate itself but it's far more straightforward than a lot of other things some people enjoy (including pretty much everything else that can come out of a person's body, apparently non-sexual body parts and things that aren't even related to persons, or even BDSM which is so much about psychology it can get away without any actual intercourse taking place).
A recent post specifically talks about the porn consumption habits of Millennials http://www.pornhub.com/insights/millennials-demographics-sta...
I definitely fall in the latter - most of what I watch is pretty vanilla, but at times, I'll venture into things that are more risque. I'm not at all personally into bondage, for example, and I'm indifferent to anything more than just light roleplaying, but once or twice a month I might pull up a BDSM video and enjoy it.
I doubt that I'm alone in sometimes wanting to watch something I'd not enjoy personally doing.