I have a bunch of male friends, and they're as varied as could be. Gay, straight and everything in between. Different races, classes and religions. Different political viewpoints. Different living conditions'everything from farms to huge cities, all over the world.
The one thing they have in common, other than being my friend, is that they love porn. Yep. Every last one of 'em. And they're not alone.
Obviously, I'm not saying that every man in the universe loves porn. Relax, everyone. I don't want letters from each and every prude at UW. But admit it, more men you know watch porn than women. Unfortunately, the multi-billion dollar'yep, that's a B'porn industry seems not to interest my sisters as much. For men, the consumption of pornography is practically a birthright.
And really, why shouldn't it be? What's so bad about watching people have sex? What exactly is the big hoo-ha?
\It's like, nasty,"" Tawanna, a Madison undergrad, says. According to Tawanna and her friends, women don't dig porn on the same scale as men because pornography is a disgusting mass of body parts. ""It's like, hairy and veiny and stuff,"" Janet says, and the camera gets ""too close, all up in it."" This makes me sad.
It should make you sad, too. So women don't want to'or, at least, aren't supposed to want to 'see bodies up close. This is dangerous, because what happens when people are excluded from seeing bodies in all their glory is usually one, or both, of two things:
1. They think bodies, and particularly genitals, are disgusting.
2. They are clueless about how their own bodies work.
Every semester as a TA for Human Sexuality, I see lots of women who have no idea what or where their clitoris is. Do the men seem to know what and where their penises are? Did that last question seem idiotic? Uh, yah.
And what's gross about genitals? According to Janet, it's the hair and the veins. I hate to break it to her, but hair and veins are found all over the body. As for the proximity to genitalia, well, all I can say is that if you're having sex with someone and you're not big on looking at genitals up close, your sex life is going to suffer. This is what's sad about it. In a hyper-private culture like ours, porn may be our only hope to see that our bodies and what they look like, feel like, smell like and act like are OK. They're just fine.
OK. So this is where I must hedge a bit and say that a good portion of the porn we've got out there may not be the best for this purpose. Too often, instead of human bodies in ""all their glory,"" we see unnaturally large breasts, pumped so full of silicone and saline that they barely move. We see men and women with practically zero pubic hair, shaved to some unsettling prepubescent ideal that most of us haven't seen since we were 12. We see penises that, when hard, come up almost past the navel and stay that way for 45 minutes. We see people who look like they spend six hours a day at the gym. We see straight sex that amounts to little more than 30 seconds of clitoral stimulation followed by 11 different coital positions that would challenge the frigging Cirque Du Soleil. What we don't see, all too often, is reality.
Ideally, we should have room for some fantasy, yes. But we should also have room for real people, with real bodies, engaging in real sex. The only reason'ONLY reason'we like the big fake boobs and penises so much is because that's literally all we ever see. That vision of what sex ""should be"" is a construction, it's persistent, but absolutely changeable if we decide to change it.
In a way, women consuming porn'the kind of porn they like, whatever that may be for each individual woman'can send a message that they are no longer willing to be made to think that their bodies are supposed to remain a mystery, that a quick kiss and 45 minutes of penetration is supposed to be enough, that they are to remain sexually silent ""good girls."" I guarantee, that multi-billion dollar industry will change if we make it. As it stands now, women as a group are the U.S.'s most increasing porn consumers. So ladies, go out and get some porn, the kind of porn that you like. And watch the world change.
