gonzo
09-06-2006, 11:29 PM
Interesting essay reprinted from http://blogs.smh.com.au/allmenareliars/archives/2006/09/how_internet_po.html (http://blogs.smh.com.au/allmenareliars/archives/2006/09/how_internet_po.html)
Comments?
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Twenty years ago there were two ways of acquiring pornography. The first was you stole it, either from your parents, older brother or the newsagent. Stealing porn from your father was the perfect crime, because if your dad had a dozen issues of Hustler Shaved tucked away in a cupboard, he wasn't likely to come screaming into the kitchen and demand to know if you'd filched issue 8? Stealing from older brothers was far more dangerous because they knew exactly who was to blame and they'd just straight beat your arse. The newsagent option was forced on us as teens because no kid under the age of 18 could walk into a XXX book store, so we were reduced to sticking mags like Penthouse or Playboy under our school jumpers and hoping like hell we wouldn't get pinged*…
The second option for acquiring porn was you borrowed it.
This was a time honoured tradition and because, as teens, we had no real access to hardcore pornography, when a friend did stumble across a publication that showed actual penetration it was protected like flame in ancient times; it was passed from one boy to the next and, if the owner of the mag seriously thought he was ever getting it back, they were soon pacified by a new item entering the grand food chain of porn.
If you've been following closely, you'll realise that these two methods for the acquisition of porn required some human interaction. Even the most fervent masturbator had to either put himself in some kind of danger by stealing the stuff or, in the path of humiliation by constantly badgering his friends for fresh imagery.
Then came the Internet and now all bets are off.
On the Net, even your most free-wheeling fantasies can be tracked down and flogged over if you have the time and bandwidth. You don't have to sneak around dirty book stores or beg to friends — you don't even need friends. In fact, you don't even need to be looking.
In a speech to the Sexual Integrity Forum at Federal Parliament last year, Dr Michael Flood, a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at Melbourne's La Trobe University revealed some pretty startling figures.
A survey commissioned by the The Australia Institute (http://www.tai.org.au/), a public interest think-tank, and conducted by Newspoll, found 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls aged between 16 and 17-years-old had been accidentally exposed to sex sites on the Internet.
Nearly two in five of the 16 to 17-year-old boys (38 percent), but only two percent of girls, had deliberately searched the Internet for sex sites.
"Porn is many boys' first form of sex education," says Dr Flood, "and the problem with this is that most heterosexual porn offers narrow stereotypes of women as big-breasted nymphomaniacs and men as well-hung studs always ready for sex. Porn rarely connects sex to intimacy and loving affection."
Unfortunately, because of ethical constraints, The Australia Institute was not able to question children younger than 16 in their survey, so their exposure to pornography can only be guessed at.
What it's fair to say is that there is a significant number of young Australian males whose first glimpse of the sexualised female is her engaging in graphic, maybe even violent, hardcore sex.
Director Francis Ford Coppola once quipped that if the James Bond classic Octopussy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086034/) was made today, it would be named Octo-anal such is the pervasive influence of pornography and its pushing of conventions, fetishes and orifices.
In a Sydney Morning Herald article (http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/The-perils-of-porn/2005/02/03/1107228777880.html) published last year, Professor James Ogloff, a clinical and forensic psychologist at Monash University said he believed between 10 and 20 percent of Internet porn users accessed "not just pictures of women or men having sex" but "images that we would have been surprised at just a few years ago".
"If you'd asked me two years ago how many people are interested in serious S & M, or who are bisexual or interested in children, we all would have grossly underestimated the numbers. It's almost like we're seeing a virtual sexual revolution," said Ogloff.
Dr Flood says "pornography is attractive to heterosexual men in part because in the porn universe, women are always ready for sex and eager to please, there is no criticism of men's performance, and there's no need to do that hard work of building trust and intimacy."
You have to wonder what that means when a kid's first taste of sexuality is anal or group sex, re-enacted gang rapes or the sort of degradation all too common on some websites that sees male performers spit in the mouths of females.
In his essay 'Big Red Son (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316156116?v=glance)', American writer, David Foster Wallace, says: "In-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn's been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more 'mainstream' ... it has also become more extreme and not just on the Bizarro margins."
"In nearly all hetero porn now, there is an emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women."
"In certain respects this extremism may simply be porn's tracing Hollywood's own entertainment arc: It's hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw," says Wallace.
It's a sobering thought that many young men may now consider these sort of extreme sexual acts as "normal" and young women, exposed to the demands of these men, consider compliance with them reasonable.
With the genre-bending that goes on in pornography nowadays it is also possible that some viewers' expectations of reality will be similarly affected. In his essay, Wallace also tackles the phenomena of 'Gonzo' porn which "has become one of this decade's most popular and profitable genres of adult video."
"It's more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and hell panel (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/delight/delightr.jpg) from Bocsh's Garden of Earthly Delights," that involves pornographers appearing to pick up innocents (usually paid actors) off the street and within minutes having them engaged in sex acts.
"Whereas traditional 'dramatic' porn videos simulate the 100 percent sexualisation of real life (by creating a kind of alternative real world in which every one from secretaries to firemen to dental hygienists is always just one prompt away from frantic intercourse), 'Gonzo' videos push the envelope by offering the apparent sexualisation of actual life...the porn equivalent of the mainstream trend in docu-dramas like..." RPA, Border Security and The Biggest Loser.
Pornography and masturbation are subjects that tend to be sniggered about and are only intermittently discussed in the media. However, with Internet pornography imprinting itself on the sexual expectations of so many men, it may be time to drag them from behind the school toilet block to join other, mainstream male sex and health issues.
This is a huge topic and one I intend to discuss further in the future, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Let me finish by saying that forty years ago, the advent of the birth control pill changed sexual dynamics across the world. It's my sincere belief that what's happening today with Internet porn will shape male female relationships just as profoundly.
Comments?
----------------------------------------------------------------
Twenty years ago there were two ways of acquiring pornography. The first was you stole it, either from your parents, older brother or the newsagent. Stealing porn from your father was the perfect crime, because if your dad had a dozen issues of Hustler Shaved tucked away in a cupboard, he wasn't likely to come screaming into the kitchen and demand to know if you'd filched issue 8? Stealing from older brothers was far more dangerous because they knew exactly who was to blame and they'd just straight beat your arse. The newsagent option was forced on us as teens because no kid under the age of 18 could walk into a XXX book store, so we were reduced to sticking mags like Penthouse or Playboy under our school jumpers and hoping like hell we wouldn't get pinged*…
The second option for acquiring porn was you borrowed it.
This was a time honoured tradition and because, as teens, we had no real access to hardcore pornography, when a friend did stumble across a publication that showed actual penetration it was protected like flame in ancient times; it was passed from one boy to the next and, if the owner of the mag seriously thought he was ever getting it back, they were soon pacified by a new item entering the grand food chain of porn.
If you've been following closely, you'll realise that these two methods for the acquisition of porn required some human interaction. Even the most fervent masturbator had to either put himself in some kind of danger by stealing the stuff or, in the path of humiliation by constantly badgering his friends for fresh imagery.
Then came the Internet and now all bets are off.
On the Net, even your most free-wheeling fantasies can be tracked down and flogged over if you have the time and bandwidth. You don't have to sneak around dirty book stores or beg to friends — you don't even need friends. In fact, you don't even need to be looking.
In a speech to the Sexual Integrity Forum at Federal Parliament last year, Dr Michael Flood, a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at Melbourne's La Trobe University revealed some pretty startling figures.
A survey commissioned by the The Australia Institute (http://www.tai.org.au/), a public interest think-tank, and conducted by Newspoll, found 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls aged between 16 and 17-years-old had been accidentally exposed to sex sites on the Internet.
Nearly two in five of the 16 to 17-year-old boys (38 percent), but only two percent of girls, had deliberately searched the Internet for sex sites.
"Porn is many boys' first form of sex education," says Dr Flood, "and the problem with this is that most heterosexual porn offers narrow stereotypes of women as big-breasted nymphomaniacs and men as well-hung studs always ready for sex. Porn rarely connects sex to intimacy and loving affection."
Unfortunately, because of ethical constraints, The Australia Institute was not able to question children younger than 16 in their survey, so their exposure to pornography can only be guessed at.
What it's fair to say is that there is a significant number of young Australian males whose first glimpse of the sexualised female is her engaging in graphic, maybe even violent, hardcore sex.
Director Francis Ford Coppola once quipped that if the James Bond classic Octopussy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086034/) was made today, it would be named Octo-anal such is the pervasive influence of pornography and its pushing of conventions, fetishes and orifices.
In a Sydney Morning Herald article (http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/The-perils-of-porn/2005/02/03/1107228777880.html) published last year, Professor James Ogloff, a clinical and forensic psychologist at Monash University said he believed between 10 and 20 percent of Internet porn users accessed "not just pictures of women or men having sex" but "images that we would have been surprised at just a few years ago".
"If you'd asked me two years ago how many people are interested in serious S & M, or who are bisexual or interested in children, we all would have grossly underestimated the numbers. It's almost like we're seeing a virtual sexual revolution," said Ogloff.
Dr Flood says "pornography is attractive to heterosexual men in part because in the porn universe, women are always ready for sex and eager to please, there is no criticism of men's performance, and there's no need to do that hard work of building trust and intimacy."
You have to wonder what that means when a kid's first taste of sexuality is anal or group sex, re-enacted gang rapes or the sort of degradation all too common on some websites that sees male performers spit in the mouths of females.
In his essay 'Big Red Son (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316156116?v=glance)', American writer, David Foster Wallace, says: "In-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn's been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more 'mainstream' ... it has also become more extreme and not just on the Bizarro margins."
"In nearly all hetero porn now, there is an emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women."
"In certain respects this extremism may simply be porn's tracing Hollywood's own entertainment arc: It's hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw," says Wallace.
It's a sobering thought that many young men may now consider these sort of extreme sexual acts as "normal" and young women, exposed to the demands of these men, consider compliance with them reasonable.
With the genre-bending that goes on in pornography nowadays it is also possible that some viewers' expectations of reality will be similarly affected. In his essay, Wallace also tackles the phenomena of 'Gonzo' porn which "has become one of this decade's most popular and profitable genres of adult video."
"It's more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and hell panel (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/delight/delightr.jpg) from Bocsh's Garden of Earthly Delights," that involves pornographers appearing to pick up innocents (usually paid actors) off the street and within minutes having them engaged in sex acts.
"Whereas traditional 'dramatic' porn videos simulate the 100 percent sexualisation of real life (by creating a kind of alternative real world in which every one from secretaries to firemen to dental hygienists is always just one prompt away from frantic intercourse), 'Gonzo' videos push the envelope by offering the apparent sexualisation of actual life...the porn equivalent of the mainstream trend in docu-dramas like..." RPA, Border Security and The Biggest Loser.
Pornography and masturbation are subjects that tend to be sniggered about and are only intermittently discussed in the media. However, with Internet pornography imprinting itself on the sexual expectations of so many men, it may be time to drag them from behind the school toilet block to join other, mainstream male sex and health issues.
This is a huge topic and one I intend to discuss further in the future, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Let me finish by saying that forty years ago, the advent of the birth control pill changed sexual dynamics across the world. It's my sincere belief that what's happening today with Internet porn will shape male female relationships just as profoundly.