sex/porn/power

 I don't know how exactly, but last Friday I stumbled upon this article. And I was so angry at the whole thing that it took me the weekend and then some to process it enough to write something intelligible. Her basic premise is that the rise in hardcore pornography (some of which is truly wretched and demeaning to women) reveals so-called "eternal truths" about men and women in regards to their views of sex and how they treat the opposite gender. In particular, the following passage pissed me off:

Men, so the conventional wisdom goes, tend to desire more than women are willing to give them sexually. The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men. Yet in each new sexual negotiation a woman has with a man, she not only spends down that capital, she begins at a disadvantage, because the potential losses are always greater for her.

...WTF.

While I agree that biology makes for greater "potential losses" for women (you can't run away from an unwanted pregnancy if you're the one with the uterus), almost everything else she says in this particular passage is crap. The most powerful tool we have is the granting of sex? Not our minds, not our wit, not even our bodies in a general sense...nope, just the fact that we are the gatekeepers. Add to that the fact that with each new sexual encounter, you "spend down that capital." The capital of what, exactly? My bargaining power of withholding vagina? What if I don't want to? Doesn't that put me in an even more disadvantaged position, if I'm not even getting what I want (it might not be double anal, as she repeatedly discusses, but can't I want sex too)?

source

What I hate about this piece is that she makes broad, sweeping generalizations about men and women based on the rise of porn (and while I do agree that the mainstreamed aspects of porn have changed some of our ideas about sex/sexuality, this lady just goes too far). She says, "A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche." War? Really? Sex (and I mean sex, consensual healthy sex, not rape or assault or anything undesired by one party) is not war.

She admits that porn gives only a partial view into the male psyche, but does it really even do that? Or does it just give a view into the fringe that has always been there, and now at least has a more healthy outlet for their (sometimes unsavory/exploitative) desires? She goes on to say that "removing pornography won’t alter the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn depicts and legitimizes. The history of civilization would seem to show that there’s no hope of eradicating those qualities; they can only be contained—and checked—by strenuously enforced norms." Can we please give men a little credit here? The vast majority of them are not brutes, trained merely to defile and debase the women they come across. Similarly, the vast majority of women are not helpless dames who have no interest in sex. Maybe if our culture approached sex with a healthier attitude and helped teens make informed decisions about it and to learn how to clearly identify and verbalize their boundaries to their partner(s), we wouldn't imagine it to be this game, this volleying back and forth and negotiating process that leaves one party invariably at a loss in the cultural narrative.

I don't know, I'm mostly just frustrated with what she says. What do you guys think? Does porn and its "legitimization" by the mainstream put women in a real disadvantage in normal, consensual sexual experiences? Are men just total vikings, ready to pillage at a moment's notice?

Much love,
The Sheriff