Category Archives: pornography

How Women Feel About Porn

women-internet-pornograph-007[1]When it comes to women and porn, you’re going to get a lot of different reactions. Sometimes women’s feelings conflict with one another. Sometimes a woman’s feelings conflict within herself.

For some, it’s an acquired taste. A woman named Aaliyah was grossed out the first time she saw an explicit video at a high school homecoming party. Now she looks at porn about once a month, but she likes movies with a story. And she’s disgusted by the brutal stuff. Like Aaliyah, most female fans like a different type than men – less hard-core, more plot.

When it comes to strip clubs many women are tolerant or even enthusiastic. Forty-three percent of Cosmo’s readers and 51% of Elle’s had visited a strip club. And most didn’t mind if their partners indulged (52%). Of course, Cosmo and Elle fans aren’t your typical American woman.

Still, only one out of 50 site subscribers are women. Or apparently women. The main billing agent for these sites flag feminine names because the charges too often result in angry wives or moms refusing to pay.

Then there are women who want to like porn to be “cool” or to be a good girlfriend, but who actually don’t so much. A woman named Ashley says all her female friends act like they are good with porn, but she doesn’t buy it. She thinks they go along because, “Guys think it’s really uncool for women to get pissed off about it.” Another woman named Mia said that at first she wanted to be the cool girlfriend. But after a while it seemed her guy was more turned on by the TV than her.

At the other end, one third of women who are married to cybersex buffs consider it cheating and feel betrayed. As a woman named Ashley explained, “Because you’re getting off to other people, not the person you’re with. How is that supposed to make me feel?”

Or, women resent time not spent with families — and with them, in bed or otherwise. One said she felt thrown away.

Women may also worry that they aren’t enough, or aren’t good enough, or attractive enough. Their body image suffers. And then their sex life wanes.

Those who encountered porn when they were very young may like it more. In a book called “Pornified,” which tells of men’s and women’s experiences with pornography, the women who seemed to like it most had encountered it as young girls, liked it right away, and kept going with it. I’ve found similar instances among my students who say they discovered it young and found it arousing. I should add that girls who stumble upon it are more likely than boys to be upset, by a rate of 35% to 6%. About 40% of boys and girls felt their first encounter was no big deal.

Maybe young girls like it more because they aren’t concerned with how they look compared to other women, they have no boyfriends to feel jealous about, and they are less repressed. Repression can increase over time as women learn that sexually interested women are sluts, as they become distracted by their “imperfect” bodies, or suffer from sexual abuse.

When it comes to porn, women are of many minds.

Source: Pornified

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Twilight vs. Porn

10886003_det[1]Women often worry that porn raises men’s expectations about what their bodies should look like and what they should do in bed. And why does he want to have virtual sex with those other women, anyway? So women can end up feeling like they’re not enough or not good enough.

Men may worry that Twilight raises women’s expectations for a “one true love” that is deep and intense with a man who only has eyes for her. Who can meet to such standards?!

Men craving sex with lots of women and women wanting sex with one true love. Funny how the visions are so often at odds with each other.

In fact, the appeal of Twilight for young girls may be the opposite of porn. Porn is all about getting sex. But as Edward yearns for Bella — yet avoids intimacy for fear of killing her in vampire bloodlust — Twilight is more like abstinence porn.  Sex without sex. As a writer for Psychology Today put it:

Let’s get back to the sex, or lack of it, which is what hooks girls on the first volume: female readers love that Edward sleeps beside Bella and apparently only wants to kiss her neck.

So in Twilight girls can imagine safe crushes on boys who love them, while avoiding all the complex, confusing and scary adult realities of sex.

But it’s not just naïve girls who fall for Twilight. So do their older sisters and moms. But while their male partners are turned on by hard-core porn’s over-the-top fireworks, Twilight is all about the subtlest sex. Here’s how a blogger at Huffington Post described it. Twilight is all about the:

building of sexual tension. So much so that when Edward brushes Bella’s arm, you can almost feel him brushing yours… They get to really know each other, their passion is allowed to build, we revel in the innocence, the time it used to take to truly build a relationship. Do you remember how amazing your first true kiss was?

A Salon blogger continues:

Instead of relying on tight shots of penetration, these books get their sexual spark from extreme emotional close-ups. The ‘money shot’ in these novels typically isn’t a geyser of bodily fluids but rather a declaration of love, or a man on bended knee.

I was struck by the male/female difference when I heard Meryl Streep and director, David Frankel discuss their movie “Hope Springs.” Frankel said the movie’s themes were universal because, “Who thinks they’re having enough sex?” But Meryl Streep suggested the nuances behind the desire:

If my team were here – women – they’d say it’s not necessarily sex, it’s what sex pulls from you… brings you to. It’s connectedness, it’s intimacy, it’s being known, it’s being seen, it’s being felt, it’s being wanted. The whole thing… But yes, you can reduce it to that part.

For many women, a guy can do the exact same moves and it can feel like nothing if you don’t feel emotionally connected to him, and it can be off the charts amazing when you do.

I suspect the female/male difference is due more to nurture than nature, but it’s a pretty strong pattern. Fortunately, not all men and women fit these molds. Some girls do just wanna have the fun of porn sex and some guys do seek consummate love. Or, what’s wanted may change with context.

But too often, like star-crossed lovers whose pairing is “thwarted by a malign star,” it’s an unfortunate trick of nature – or society — that men and women so often sexually connect at cross purposes.

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Porn Fantasy Mistaken for Reality

By Demon Ted

Does porn raise men’s expectations of how women should perform in bed? I believe it depends entirely on the man’s ability to distinguish between real life and fantasy.

True, you could try to recreate porn in real life. But then it’s not real. It’s acting. So you’re back to fantasy.

I think porn is great to enjoy. But men must realize what it is.

Unfortunately, a lot of men (and some women in regards to things like Twilight) get fantasy and reality mixed up. And that can harm relationships.

Take my girlfriend’s ex. He’s a nasty piece of work. Barely finished high school, can’t drive, no job. Literally sits at home all day. But because my girlfriend was young when she met him, he became a lot of “firsts.” And he made her think that things that weren’t healthy were.

She didn’t expect to ever get off on real sex, or that her significant other should even try. Early on she told me that she would be “totally down for a threesome” if I saw another girl I found attractive. She later recanted when I told her to never suggest anything that makes her uncomfortable or unhappy.

As we talked on she began blurting out a long list of things her ex did, sexually, that she asked me not to. The worst part was that after she had listed everything, she thought I was angry with her.

I was angry. Not because she had asked me not to do certain things, but because I realized what she had come to expect. I had thought she’d say something like, “I don’t feel comfortable with the lights on,” not, “Please don’t tell me I’m a dirty slut for enjoying your cock.”

I was upset that she had let someone treat her, for lack of better words, like trash. I had to explain that, even without her asking me not to do those things I would not have done them.

I saw that she had come to believe that she must do things she hated for a relationship to “work.”

Obviously we’ve talked about these things and she realizes that, yes, I do watch porn, but that porn is porn. I do not expect her to act like the girls in it, nor should anyone else.

My girlfriend is beautiful. She’s incredibly attractive just the way she is. And she’s most beautiful when she’s enjoying herself, sexually or otherwise.

This was written by one of my students who gave permission to post it under a pseudonym.

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Men Find Fewer Women “Porn-Worthy”

Feminist, Andrea Dworkin, had feared that easy access to internet porn would turbocharge women’s objectification and turn men into wild, raping beasts. But it looks like internet porn too often has the opposite effect, deadening male libido in relation to real women, with men who over-consume finding fewer women “porn-worthy.”

This is what author, Naomi Wolf, noticed when students talked about their sex lives during her speaking tours of college campuses.

Others have made similar findings.

Pamela Paul interviewed over one hundred people, mostly men, in her research for Pornified, and found that porn-worthiness was a common concern among those who over-indulged.

One young man talked of his change in perspective.

My standards changed. Women who are otherwise good looking but aren’t as overtly sexy as the women in porn don’t appeal to me as much anymore. I find that I look more for women who have the attributes I see in porn. I want bigger breasts, longer hair, curvier bodies in general.

I find that when I’m out at a party or bar I catch myself sizing up women. I would say to myself, wait a second. This isn’t a supermarket. You shouldn’t treat her like she’s some piece of meat. Don’t pass her up just because her boobs aren’t that big.

Paul went on to cite a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll which found that one in 10 men admitted he had become more critical of his partner’s body with exposure to porn.

Meanwhile, 51% of Americans believe that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look.

Many of the college women Wolf spoke to complained that they couldn’t compete, and they knew it.

Men, she said, learn about sex from porn but find that it is not helpful in teaching them how to relate to real women. She ended with this observation:

Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

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Women Gazing At Men

Lately I’ve been asking why women don’t get so excited by naked men, why women are often uncomfortable with male nudity on stage and screen or in print, and why these nude men can seem “gay” to the women who gaze at them.

Elizabeth Hall Magill has been asking the same questions over at Yo Mama. And she’s wondering how women can better appreciate the male form, without objectifying them. Here’s an excerpt from one of her posts.

So—where does that leave a woman’s gaze?

Neither here nor there.

And yet, we have eyes. We gaze. And we like what we see.

As I pondered this issue, I realized something: perhaps men posing sexually seem homosexual not only because we are used to the male gaze. Perhaps it is also because we are used to the female pose. And here we encounter a difference between media (artful or otherwise) and life: real sexiness is rarely posed. It just happens. But in “sexy” pictures of women, the women are aware of the gaze and arranging themselves for it. So, when a man does the same thing, we read him as feminized. And when a man strips for a woman, he can be seen as “performing” something generally feminine, and therefore we define it as insincere, the object of a joke. Not true eroticism.

In one of my favorite essays of all time, Looking at Women, Scott Russell Sanders says:

When I return to the street with the ancient legacy of longing coiled in my DNA, and the residues from a thousand generations of patriarchs silting my brain, I encounter women whose presence strikes me like a slap of wind in the face. I must prepare a gaze that is worthy of their splendor.

This is how I feel about men. And I bet I’m not the only one.

We’re all conditioned to ignore the fact that women feel this way about men. How many times a week do you think a man checks out his wife as she reaches into the refrigerator to get something from that bottom drawer, or reaches high above her head for a rarely-used dish? How many times a week does he check out the women walking by him on the sidewalk, riding a bike in the gym, or sitting in the next office? Magazines love to make little pie charts telling us about how often the male brain does these things. I’ve never seen a pie chart telling me how often the female brain does similar things.

And yet.

Men get things from the refrigerator or the top shelf, and often look damn good doing it. They walk on the sidewalk, ride bikes, and work right next to us, looking good all the while. And women notice.

What we need is more women noticing themselves as they notice men. Thinking about how they feel when the tide of desire leaves and returns, leaves and returns. And owning that tide.

And then we need women talking about it—not giggling, not blushing, not encouraging men to mock the idea of their own desirability. Somebody ought to talk about it so often and so loudly that a pie chart becomes inevitable, cause we just know women are thinking about sex so dang much that we better measure it.

After that, we need female photographers and directors, tons of them, taking pictures of and telling stories about men being men. Holding babies in the middle of the night, shirtless and vulnerable and full of fatherly love and strength. Squatting in the middle of a road, looking at a rock (clothed, as squatting naked in the middle of the road is unnatural and possibly unsafe). Running on treadmills, making copies in the office while wearing snazzy ties, washing the dirt off their hands after a day working outside, laughing with their friends, kicking a tire and making dinner and coming home at the end of a long day. We need to see men being men through the eyes of women, not men posing as the objects of female desire. And we should see them in all their shapes and colors—in all their splendor.

You know what I think?

I think men would totally get being sexy in this way, and I think they would love it. They wouldn’t feel like objects, they wouldn’t feel feminized, they wouldn’t pose or feel goofy. They’d be themselves, and they’d be damn glad that the women they’ve been checking out all this time are checking them right back.

Which means the female gaze would no longer be marginalized, masculinized, or mocked. It would be honest, and it would be powerful—as powerful as desire itself.

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Magic Mike Turns Tables on Objectification, Desire

I must be obsessed with male strippers, you think, with a third post inspired by “Magic Mike.”

Maybe.

I am obsessed with objectification and desire, and that movie offers the rare turning of tables to see what’s on the other side.

In this table-turning do women experience men in the way that men typically experience them? I’ve already suggested that the answer is no.

However, we’re seeing chinks in the armor.

In “Magic Mike” women’s desire is acknowledged and catered to as the camera hones in on glutes and abs to accommodate the female gaze… and as Matthew McConaughey bends over to give us a full-moon shot.

All this in a place with “no men allowed.” Not formally, as Joanna Schroeder over at the GoodMenProject points out, but because most men don’t want to be there. But that “all-estrogen” space can feel empowering.

And for once women are calling the shots (or feel like they are) demanding, “Take it all off!” and letting ‘em know what they like: “Yeahhh honey, do it again!”

Only problem is that objectification is damaging. When women or men are objectified their looks and their sexuality become their worth – in their own minds and in the minds of others.

Those who objectify themselves are prone to body shame, low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders and sexual dysfunction. They even have more difficulty navigating everyday life because they’re so distracted by how their body looks.

And the objectified are treated like “things,” meant to serve others’ desires. They are things that lack thought or emotion, so they are not offered empathy. And when they age and lose their sex appeal they are worth nothing at all.

Do we really want to turn others into objects? (Keep in mind that it is possible to be sexy without being a sex object.)

But looking closer we see the table is only half-turned: women are also objectified, even in this film. While not revealing any male body parts that are prohibited on a public beach, the film hones in on naked breasts from time to time. One of the strippers even passes his wife around and encourages the guys to fondle her breasts because “she loves it.”

Meanwhile, the simulated sex on stage often mimics male pleasure, with women’s heads shoved against cocks and men humping women’s faces or behinds. How about a little clitoral action?

And in a movie that promises to take us out of our boxes we end up right back inside the virgin/whore dichotomy as Magic Mike chooses between the sexually adventurous Joanna and the virginal Brooke. No surprise, really, who triumphs.

So things have changed and they’ve stayed the same, which provokes the question: Where do we want to go?

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Gays Find Strippers Sexy; Women Don’t?

Male strippers have beautiful bodies. And women find them sexy. But probably not sexy in a way that gets them too aroused.

Last week I considered the lack of excitement. Turns out, women don’t get too turned on by male nudity, at all. When sex researcher, Meredith Chivers, wired women up and showed them sexual images, straight women experienced no arousal — physically or subjectively — when looking at fit naked guys working out. Another time women watched a nude man walking and the only thing that aroused them less were bonobos, an ape species, having sex.

Is it because the male body simply isn’t sexually exciting?

Probably not, since gay men did get aroused looking at nude men.

Why are gay men turned on by male nudity when straight women aren’t? There are various possibilities. And it’s not that women just aren’t visual, after all, women were more aroused by a nude woman exercising than by a nude man. And, some women enjoy porn.

The fact that gay culture celebrates and eroticizes the male body in a way that straight culture does not could play a role.

And then there’s repression. Men are rarely slut-shamed for being sexual. On the other hand, gays are too often taunted as fags or queers. Still, research on men and women who have lived in repressive cultures, like Victorian England, find men less affected (perhaps because they are also less repressed). But even gay men are less affected than lesbians by homophobia-induced repression (even though homophobia is more strongly directed at gay men). Maybe because the male sex drive is stronger, due in part to higher levels of testosterone, while twice as much of their brain is taken up with sex.

Meanwhile, men’s bodies give them better feedback than women’s do. When blood rushes to the penis a man knows it. He feels very excited. But when blood rushes to a woman’s vagina, she can be clueless. Again, this difference may be biological, or due to greater female repression, or because men are less affected by repression, or all of the above. Indiana University researchers believe that women are less responsive for both anatomical and psychosocial reasons.

We don’t have the definitive answer on why gay men get aroused by male strippers when straight women don’t so much, but here’s a little food for thought to munch on.

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Why Aren’t Male Strippers Sexy?

Channing Tatum in “Magic Mike”

Women go to strip clubs for “fun” and female bonding, not to be aroused. Or they might want to prove that they can objectify men as much as men objectify them. Sure, some women find it sexy, but as Tracy Clark-Flory over at Salon acknowledges:

The typical atmosphere in such an establishment isn’t one of arousal and longing, the kind that reliably fills the air in a female strip club. As far as I can tell, female patrons are typically cracking up, shielding their eyes in mock horror or cartoonishly objectifying male dancers as a performance for their friends.

Her observations come by way of the new movie, Magic Mike, which gets a lot right, she says, but shows male stripping as it mostly is: “goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive,” which is how she describes her own first – and last — male strip show outing:

Onstage was an overly tanned dark-and-handsome type dressed like a race car driver. He slowly unzipped his onesie while popping his knee to the throbbing techno music, which was accented by sounds of a car engine revving. Once naked, he took his flaccid penis in his hand, stretched it out as far as he could and let go; it snapped back to his body and flopped around as he wiggled his eyebrows at the crowd.

And so she asks why these strip shows are libido-killers and offers her thoughts. On some points we overlap, on others we don’t (for instance, I think evolutionary psych is full of crap). Here are my own musings:

Some of what I’ve written before applies here. For instance, male bodies aren’t sexualized in our culture. Since I’ve discussed this in pieces like, “Men: Erotic Objects of Women’s Gaze,” or “Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men.” I won’t dwell on the point. But whether out of homophobia or because women have only recently become involved in creating media, literature, art, or anything else that could eroticize the male form, we see few sexualized images of men. So lusting after men isn’t something that women learn to do.

Some say women are just more erotic, yet breasts are only sensualized in places where they are either hidden or selectively hidden and revealed. The U.S. is so obsessed by the secreted breast that even women can develop a fetish. There’s no biological reason for that.

Repressed sexuality may also make it more difficult for women to respond to the visual. I don’t have data on this other than personal experience and talking with other women about it, but a few of us were better able to respond to visual stimulation when we were very young and less repressed.

Forces of repression? I’ve discussed this before (so see refs), but it arises as women are told that sex is bad – for them – and slut-shamed, from being the ones who get screwed and f’d, from being told not to touch themselves (males are more likely to figure out pleasure sources due to differences in anatomy), and from sexual abuse.

Making matters worse, when men do show skin they can look “gay.” This seems to occur because women are so used to nudity being meant for the male gaze that they come to see nude males through male eyes, too. That’s jarring, not a turn-on.

Men doing women-things (stripping) might be jarring, too.

Another problem is that straight women get more aroused by being desired than by desiring men. (Being desired by men they’re interested in, not by any ol’ guy.) Probably due to culture. While women don’t learn to see men as sex objects, they do come to see themselves that way. So in a convoluted form they can become aroused by experiencing how men are experiencing them. Yet another factor preventing women from desiring men in a fetished way.

And then floppiness could add to the problem, erasing any fantasy of being desired by the stripper. Flaccidity – at least on a twenty-something — communicates that he’s just not that into you. (Maybe a male strip clubber’s fantasy is helped when no obvious bodily sign tells him that the female stripper’s not into him.) But standing at attention might not work with a whole houseful of ladies anyway, since he’s still not necessarily into you.

Also, even if the stripper were erect, women may still have the same reaction that they have to strange men who flash or sext them: repulsion, trauma or laughter.

Yes, women have a very different reaction to the male member on a stranger than the men they love.

There are plenty of reasons why women think men look sexier fully clothed.

But why do gay men find male strippers sexy when straight women don’t? I’ll visit that question next week.

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Porn Can Cause E.D.?

I mentioned in class that, strangely, porn can cause E.D. A male student said he’d thought it was the opposite, that porn cured E.D. Oddly, both could be true.

In a New York Magazine piece entitled He’s Just Not That Into Anyone Davy Rothbart, 36, admitted faking orgasm. (Apparently it’s easier for men to fake if they use a condom. Without, they can claim having had a small one.) Rothbart eliminated various possibilities. Antidepressants weren’t causing his E.D. And he got plenty of exercise. It didn’t matter which woman he was with, or what kind of condom he used, or whether he’d had alcohol, or how much.

But after learning that men were increasingly suffering from delayed ejaculation, and increasingly faking it, he began wondering if a “tsunami of porn” accompanied by “over-masturbation” were the culprits, as suggested by sexuality counselor, Ian Kerner.

Rothbart began interviewing others with this problem.

One man was always hard as nails with porn, but couldn’t get anything up with his lady. Another said, “I used to race home to have sex with my wife. Now I leave work a half-hour early so I can get home before she does and masturbate to porn.”

Another had no problem getting aroused by his wife but, “In order to come, I’ve got to resort to playing scenes in my head that I’ve seen while viewing porn. Something is lost there. I’m no longer with my wife; I’m inside my own head.”

And so the real women in their lives fade away as a computer takes over.

Rothbart explains, “For a lot of guys, switching gears from porn’s fireworks and whiz-bangs to the comparatively mundane calm of ordinary sex is like leaving halfway through an Imax 3-D movie to check out a flipbook.”

Typically when a man has sex a combination of dopamine and oxytocin are released with orgasm, creating an emotional attachment to his partner. But increasingly, men are bonding with porn. Their brains are being rewired.

A cure is available: step away from the computer. Rothbart went without for a few days and no longer had to fake it.

Pamela Paul found this same phenomenon when she interviewed men about their pornography habits for her book, Pornified. Those who over-imbibed found it increasingly difficult to get it up with real women but gained relief when they decreased their porn consumption.

The problem isn’t porn so much as overexposure. Are you overexposed? Well, if you’ve experienced E.D. with real women but not with a computer screen, it’s likely.

Read Rothbart’s complete essay here: New York Magazine.

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Men, Women & Internet Porn

girls_jewsThe first time you see Lena Dunham’s character having sex in the new HBO series “Girls,” her back is to her boyfriend, who seems to regard her as an inconveniently loquacious halfway point between partner and prop, and her concern is whether she’s correctly following instructions.

“So I can just stay like this for a little while?” she asks. “Do you need me to move more?”

Those are the opening lines from New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, writing about the HBO series “Girls” which premiered April 15. I wrote a bit about the interview last week asking, “Is male or female sexuality better?” But Lena and Frank have more to say, and so do I.

Bruni says their sex play seems to be all about what “he” wants “her” to do. Dunham’s real life informs the show, and Dunham suggests that what the proverbial “he” wants is often NOT what “she” wants. Amidst aggressive posturing and “a lot of errant hair pulling” she has thought, “There’s no way any teenage girl taught you and reinforced that behavior.”

The scene, and Dunham’ comments, suggest a depersonalized sexuality with women as objects, sex as sometimes harsh gymnastics and, too often, all about “his” pleasure.

She thinks it’s tied to internet porn, which so many young men are steeped in.

Some women get into pornified sex, too, but usually not all the time, or not on the first few dates. And most seem to want something more, even if porn-sex is a part of the experience.

Meet Valerie, who discovered pornography at age 12 and was very excited by it. Today she sometimes finds it exciting when men pull porn moves on her. But at the same time she says, “It’s icky”:

I don’t just want to become Body A. I want men to feel like they are with me, Valerie, a particular woman with a particular body and my own unique personality. I want them to be in the moment, as opposed to going through some form of learned behavior. I want it to be our own experience as opposed to an imitation of porn.

She talks of Miguel, a musician. She can tell he’s into porn by how he acts:

Lights glaring, gaping at her body parts, manipulating her into positions popular in pornography so he could admire her. He was aggressive, he was confident, he was following a formula. He was cold.

As Valerie saw it, “He thought it was hot, that he was a stud. I felt cheapened. I felt so empty after the experience.”

Dunham can relate, saying that, “People can be so available in a superficial sense that they’re inaccessible in a deeper one.”

One woman wrote about her and her friends’ experiences for GQ and offered tips for the internet-drenched generation. She loves both porn and sex, she says, but warns that not all women are charmed by being called a “dirty whore.” Most women don’t want anal three times in one night – and not from men they barely know.

And why is it, she asks, that orgasming inside someone, “the goal of every dude for zillions of years,” now seems to pale in comparison to “facials”? Noting the irony, “It hardly seems fair to call that sex. It’s more like masturbation with a fellow 3-D person. You finish with your hand, after all, like you’ve done with a million clips.” And please, no facials on the fourth date. “That’s stuff to save for later, when the excitement of someone new has worn into a comfortable live-tweeting-Monk-from-bed kind of cohabitation.”

And maybe when there’s a larger context of relationship, and not just empty sex.

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