Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

you know, i had this happen to me while making out with a younger man.

he started talking all funny and using dirty talk while we were still fully dressed and i was seriously looking around for the cameras. he was even making funny faces for no reason like he was trying to “act” horny…

I wrote about something tangentially related to this on my (very infrequently updated) blog:

http://blog.birthcycle.com/2009/07/14/utopian-promise-of-porn/

And then someone came along and suggested your blog in response. And now I follow you on my google blog reader. waves

I feel pretty certain that porn watching is likely problematic for most everyone, though for many people the problems may be quite subtle and impossible to tease out of the greater societal sex baggage we’re all carrying around.

I say that not because it’s depictions of sex and sex is bad – which is not what I believe – but because most porn is pretty awful, full of misogyny, bad bad sex, awkward “for the camera” positioning, and disaffected or uncomfortable and unnatural looking people.

Anywho, I probably said it better (though maybe not – I ramble too much) at the original post and at the second one rebutting a wacky defensive comment that came after:

http://blog.birthcycle.com/2009/11/18/in-which-i-avoid-my-nanowrimo-commitments-by-blogging/

I’ve often wondered the same thing, Figleaf. Culturally, we seem to be a group of folks who are trying to imitate “entertainment” — which we either cannot or will not believe is a structured, surreal creation — and end up being dissappointed with real life. In regards to sex, in real life women AND men have a wide range of real experiences to explore, to seek out, to accept as “fucking great!” and to reject as “uhm, no, not for me.”

But porn producers, sit-com producers, action film makers, young adult novel writers, reality TV developers, televangalists, etc. all have a tried and true playbook that they kinda must pull out in order to meet their production nut and please their target audience as well as the paying distrubutors.

Whether it’s men (and women) short changing themselves and their partners in bed, or people who think you really CAN get dropped in the middle of a freakin’ island and have time to fashion yourself a swell, seashell necklace while you forage for food in a mysteriously bug-free environment, we could all benefit from a reguar dose of super-sexy, sweaty, REAL, turn-off-the-TV, fantastic, fun, funny, messy, hard, but oh so worth it reality.

This all seems to boil down to the problems that result from inadequate sex education, as acknowledged in this remark: “I am knocking, however, a culture where the primary input for the equivalent of driving lessons is often the equivalent of Fast and Furious.”

Porn isn’t supposed to be real sex, and criticising it as if it is makes no sense to me. Its job is to enable a viewer to imagine a scenario and get off on it. That requires awkward positions etc because you have the awkward problem of letting the camera see what’s going on, and cameras of sufficient quality are still pretty bulky compared to the amount of space normally found between two bodies engaged in sexual acts!

If I were to design a sex education class, there would be a series of lessons about porn, that would involve looking at a few porn scenes and in each case explaining why it isn’t realistic – all the hours of preparation required, why the bodies are positioned that way, and so on. In short, I would use porn to teach how not to do sex. Doing so would also make talking about sex seem normal and okay.

This brings me to another point. The quoted anecdote about bad porn-style sex said:

“You like that, baby? You like that?” he asked, though he didn’t notice I wasn’t answering.

Maybe giving an answer would have been helpful – that answer being “no, not really, maybe you should try something else.” Part of the kkey to good sex, i always thought, was communication. Porn can cut both ways here: for some, it opens up the ability to communicate about sex; for others, it replaces communication because the porn viewer believes he (or she) knows how to do it without communicating. Again, good sex ed would help to deal with that!

Just to be clear, here, I’m not saying consuming porn makes anybody bad at sex. In the presence of other inputs, as Chingona points out, it can be a source of inspiration. Nor am I saying that not consuming porn makes someone good at sex. (That would be heh.)

I have noticed, though, that an awful lot of people, previously mostly men but I’d guess increasingly women, do get their primary input form porn or porn-like sources. And those forms of input color our expressions of sexuality. And not always for the better.

(I know, by the way, that it’s a bit uncouth to bring up the influence of romance but I’ve had interesting conversations with several people who were just sure their first time was inauthentic because they hadn’t felt fulfilled, “a woman/man now,” or any of that stuff. Similarly I know a number of people (again not just men) who are freaked out by hair, breasts that don’t stand up when you lie down, and (this one’s weird to me) wet or engorged vulvas.

Anyway, without making too much of an issue out of it I’m still going to stick to my thesis.

—fl