Hollus bollus quoting from another’s article without adding value of your own is the laziest form of blogging. Well yes it is. But I want to be outdoors today, so, lazy blogging thy name is mine. Here is Naomi Wolf saying something about porn that I find very intriguing (although am not so sure about her observations towards the end of the article about her friend the Orthodox Jew). Aaaanyway.
For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.
Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene.
How depressing. Yet true. Yet depressing.
I hadn’t thought of it like that but its so true. and sad. Sex = performance. ick!
I liked the article and agree with what she puts forth. Thanks for linking to it! I hope to hear her speak this Saturday, actually.
Maybe I’m not quite young enough – I haven’t really experienced that. I can see the logic, but in my experience it is women who have high expectations of sex, not men. I still find you have most men at boobies. (Says the married woman, but I talk to single people!)
Interesting, I know what my next dinner part conversation is going to be.
[...] afternoon at the rally. I had just read her 2003 article on pornography in New York Magazine, which BlueMilk blogged about last week. She was introduced as a leftist (not ridiculing her, but certainly teasing her) and she [...]
Hm. Really interesting article. It reminds me of an author I read a long long time ago whose name disappeared a long long time ago too. He or she wrote something about how it was so much more alluring to watch a woman partially clothed than fully naked because it contained mystery and pieces of unknown. Perhaps that is why many of us like to turn the lights off when we have sex. It’s not for fear of looking at each other, but we like the half concealment. I wonder if all these college kids who have learned through porn get to enjoy anything but the actual orgasm. Because, goodness, there’s a lot more fun in it than just the end bit.
All that said, I thought the turn at the end about her Orthodox Jewish friend was rather forced. I think she could have found a better example than one in which women have few rights of their own.
Sex loses a great dose of energy on both sides when people stop being able to enjoy the simple frenetic unstructured shag. I came up in a generation of males told, both by various media and many of the women they knew, that sex had to be a 5 part exercise involving considerable gymnastic expertise. Think Cosmo, sex in the city, et al.
my neighbor found a graphic porno magazine in the bushes when we were both 14. he kept it for himself but let me look at it once in awhile. I had a copy of the 1992 sports illustrated swimsuit issue hidden under my mattress and later a single copy of the victoria’s secret catalog that came for my neighbor while she was on vacation and I collected her mail.
I never saw an actual porno before I lost my virginity. I am actually really grateful for that. I don’t know how a 15-year-old boy could be stopped from seeing all that’s out there now on the internet. an entire generation of men is growing up with graphic, phony internet intercourse fueling their masturbation fantasies.
I now have a son and a daughter. I’m scared shitless for both of them, not because I don’t want them to have sex, but because I want them to have enjoyable, satisfying sex. the kind you rarely, if ever, see in a pornographic movie.
I really enjoyed the intelligent comments you all left in response to Wolf’s article.
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[...] 15, 2009 by blue milk God, I am so sick of my Did porn kill sex? post leading my Top Posts list all the time. Enough. It is not even much of a post. All the damn [...]
I think porn killed actual sex. Mainly, because I think all the information about how to have “good” sex comes from porn. I can’t believe I’m in my mid-30s and I’m just barely coming to put my own pleasure in the equation in a real way. I’m 35 and I just now realized I’ve been having Porno Sex my whole life. Getting rid of this media saturated idea of sex appears to be the key to having really fulfilling sex. Porno Sex is not for women’s pleasure. It is for men and voyeurs. And like Pink said, “I’m not here for your entertainment.”
While I think its quite possible that porn has given some people the wrong impressions on sex, I really didn’t like how the author described that breakdown. Her view felt even more objectifying than porn usually is. Basically it came down to “damn, men don’t drool over me just cuz I’m naked anymore”.
Now maybe if she felt that way about men and she felt kinda uneven now, I’d understand. She sounds like she basically expects men to fall over in the streets because she had the daring to expose a *gasp* female body!
How would you like it if you were on a date and some guy randomly takes his clothes off and commanded: “PUSSY! WET NOW!” It seems like a lot of women feel they should have that power over men.
Kevin – Naomi Wolf’s article isn’t about the currency of women’s beauty as women age, she is comparing her experiences as a 20 yr old (the kinda prime of sexual beauty for women in our patriarchal culture) with the experiences of 20 yr old women today.. so the article isn’t at all about whether men still find Naomi Wolf hot. Although for the record, seen Wolf lately? She still has loads of mainstream beauty standards worth of hot going on.