Reply #21: I voted "other" [View All]

It's an interesting debate, and one, I find, that is often framed in a way that overlooks a rather obvious point: there are vast differences between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation. Yet a common talking point in porn's defense is that it's somehow "liberating" for people to literally sell their sexuality, often for very degrading acts that they wouldn't participate in if they weren't being paid.

The biggest money making porn is not "soft" porn for "her," or for "couples;" it's the typical stuff that portrays women as salivating animals who lust for endowed men to sodomize them and to ejaculate in their mouths and faces. Now, whatever weird psychology people want to express or "act out" or "work through" sexually is their own business, and is something that, to a large extent, we all experience with our partners.

However, taking the fleshy substance, if you will, of sexual expression, and "framing" it within a capitalist pop culture medium - which by it's nature effectively flourishes through a monkey-see-monkey-do mentality - seems to significantly downplay the personal aspects and instead promotes a "sport sex" mindset where emotional bonds and love are unconsciously dismissed as passe' and boring. I think that young people, who quickly move onto adulthood, find that message reinforced at every turn in our Consumer Culture, and I think that ethic of greed and superficiality, the seeming preferrence for it, has come about through corporate "values," which are a determing factor in our "pornographized" culture.

I'm not saying that I think porn is just bad, or that it shouldn't exist. Nothing is that simple. I tend to see it - especially in its current, derogatory, gross out "reality" tv form - as an offshoot of largely unaddressed, misunderstood social roles ...so it's likely just an odd way of the ridiculous "battle of the sexes" playing itself out.