Looking at Pornography

Most everyone wants to explore pornography

At one time or other, just about all of us want to look at or read or watch pornography.  Kids find ways to get hold of it so they can investigate what sex is "really" like.  Young people turn to it for ideas and sophisticated things to try.  Older people turn to it for inspiration when the day-to-day humdrum quality of their sex lives needs some added juice. 

What is pornography?

Let's define pornography as sexually explicit writing or visual art, including movies and videos, that has as one of its central purposes to produce sexual arousal in its audience.  Does that sound very ominous or dangerous?  Does that sound nasty, brutish or unpleasant?  I'm afraid to me it sounds rather sweet and innocent.  In particular, I've always found depictions of people having intimate sex to be sweet and innocent and really sexy. 

But I remember a time when I was a child when you could be put in jail for selling a full frontal picture of a naked person — it was a serious crime!  The idea of visible genitalia really scared a lot of people, and still does, although now, thank goodness, most people growing up have an opportunity to see pictures of naked bodies.  At least our anatomy is no longer considered a mystery or a state secret that you need a security clearance to get access to. 

All the same, watching other people have sex still seems weird, embarrassing, threatening and possibly dangerous to many people.  My personal experience has been that it's none of those things — I've watched quite a few people having sex with each other, sometimes in a public context, and it has never seemed distasteful, or tedious, or gross, or even particularly odd.  Really, there doesn't tend to be a great deal of variation in the basic patterns.  For those of you who think that sounds shocking, I assure you it just isn't — you'd be amazed at how ordinary sex really is. 

What I have found quite astonishing is to watch two people who really care about each other having sex.  You actually feel their energy, and it's sexy and innocent and deeply moving.  It just plain feels sacred.  If you don't want people to believe that sex is sacred, I can understand why you'd have to ban that sort of thing.

I would really enjoy porn that shows people having intensely intimate sex!

Where can you find good porn?

In my view, the best porn at the moment is literary.  More and more good erotic writing seems to be coming out all the time, spearheaded by the success of people like Susie Bright, who have brought literary porn into the mainstream. 

How about the magazine, video or movie equivalent?  Although I know a lot of sex-positive people who have absolutely nothing against porn, many of whom have watched a lot of video porn, and a few of whom have even tried their hand at making it, I don't know anyone who is very satisfied by what you can get by way of commercial visual porn. 

Why not?  Is it just that our society is so repressed?  Partly, but also, we're only beginning to get to a point where there's any way to break even making beautiful, sexually explicit movies in America. 

"Hey, wait a minute," you may say — "I can go down to the corner news stand or video store or up on the internet and find any kind of sexual activity I want, documented completely explicitly, with beautiful actresses and handsome, well-endowed actors. How can you say there's no good porn available?" 

Well you're right, but as I look at the mechanical, anonymous sex in a lot of those magazines and videos, I usually feel after a short time that I'd find a knitting documentary more lively.  And I really like watching people having sex!  So what's the problem? 

Why is commercial porn the way it is?

The short answer is:  Market forces have made porn a limited and stylized form aimed at a fairly small audience.  There's an interesting logic behind this that reveals a good deal about our society:

• Most people are hesitant to buy porn.   Although many people are interested in sexually explicit material, porn remains embarrassing.  Nice people still don't like to admit to an interest in it.  People believe it's "dirty," and if you're sexually "normal," you won't need or enjoy it.  People fear that liking it indicates you're a pervert, and/or sexually inadequate. 
• Most people aren't satisfied with the porn they see.   Almost everyone experiments with watching a porn video.  Even though it's usually a turn-on, few people end up really finding it satisfying, for reasons discussed below, and this reinforces their reluctance to buy more of it at highly inflated prices.
• People who rely on it are the main buyers of porn.   Given the above, the people who most often buy porn tend to be those whose circumstances and/or psychology make porn a central part of their sex life.  Because it's so important to them, they're willing to break cultural taboos and pay a lot of money for it regularly. 
• Heavy porn consumers make a great market.   There's a lot of money to be made catering to the relatively narrow audience for whom porn is a central part of their sex life.  Add to this that the broader public doesn't feel comfortable paying for porn at all and it's no surprise that porn is aimed at the part of the market that's willing to pay a lot.  All its structures and conventions have grown up specifically to serve that audience. 
• Heavy porn consumers tend to be scared of intimacy.   The audience that pays is mostly male and emotionally timid.  Many in this group lack relationships, or have relationships in which exploration of sexual fantasy is difficult or impossible.  What they're looking for is sexually explicit imagery that they can use in fantasy but that doesn't allude to or exacerbate the pain they usually feel around relationship issues. 
• It's easy to film what heavy porn consumers want.   Although making good films or videos is a big challenge, especially when you're trying to capture complex human emotions, documenting sex acts is relatively cheap and easy. If all that matters is that people be naked and doing certain things on camera, filming is straightforward and inexpensive. 

Under these circumstances, what mainstream porn delivers is hardly surprising: iconic images of people who are often amazingly impassive and whose responses are often amazingly stylized.  The details of their sexual activities are documented in great detail, but the emotional complexity that makes sex dangerous is usually downplayed or stripped away entirely. 

And yet, the emotional complexity is what makes sex beautiful and interesting outside of fantasy.  It's what turns most of us on! That's why I believe an alternative to mainstream porn could be attractive and successful, even though it's much harder to make.