Today, Real Naked Women Are Just Bad Porn
Naomi Wolf wrote a fascinating article about the effect of pornography on men in our society, contradicting the predictions of feminist Andrea Dworkin in the 1980s that pornography would breed rapists and abusers. Wolf instead notes that because of pornography, "the wallpaper of our lives," young women, "far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men . . . are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention"! Uh, is she only talking to the ugly chicks?
She goes on:
Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?
Today, real naked women are just bad porn.
Aside from the part about men not wanting real women, I think her assessment is pretty accurate. Who needs a nagging, bitchy girlfriend when you can have virtual sex? And it just keeps getting better . . .
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. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.
The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.
On the one hand, this is all definitely true, but is this really caused by pornography or the lack of class displayed by most women? No offense, ladies, but any guy of merit will have no respect for a stripper, pornstar, sorostitute or slut--that shouldn't be a standard you strive hopelessly to attain.
She goes on:
Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?
Today, real naked women are just bad porn.
Aside from the part about men not wanting real women, I think her assessment is pretty accurate. Who needs a nagging, bitchy girlfriend when you can have virtual sex? And it just keeps getting better . . .
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. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.
The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.
On the one hand, this is all definitely true, but is this really caused by pornography or the lack of class displayed by most women? No offense, ladies, but any guy of merit will have no respect for a stripper, pornstar, sorostitute or slut--that shouldn't be a standard you strive hopelessly to attain.
Unknown @ 5:38 PM
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