Offensive to women? Eroding our nation's moral something or other? Or a fun way to pass the time, so to speak? Does porn make you nervous? Are you a porn junkie? Can you tell us the difference between porn and erotica? (My definition: if it refers to a "love pole," a "love tunnel," or a "love" anything else, it's porn. Otherwise, erotica.)

Talk about smut.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

Answers

I like ithe idea of porn more than the reality of it. When I first got my DSL line I downloaded all of these slick fuckfests to peek at. I'm pretty open minded, but I didn't like them at all. The cumshots all over the women's faces made me cringe and feel embarrassed for them.

I downloaded some amateur couples stuff as well, and this didn't bug me so much, because in the main, the people in these videos had a relationship and seemed to be doing this, well, not out of love, exactly, but they seemed to be connected to each other in a way that didn't bother me quite so much.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

I don't object to porn. If George wanted to look at it, i wouldn't be particularly offended. I think i'd only be bothered if he were to spend more time with the porn than with me.

I never got anything out of photos really. Sometimes movies, watched with a partner could be entertaining, but eventually got boring. Also, the actress in me is usually so horrified by the terrible acting that i end up distracted. "Ok honey, hang on a second, i know you're turned on, but did you HEAR how she delivered that line?! My GOD! No WONDER she's stuck doing porn!" Books are good because they let you imagine more.

I tried my hand at writing some once, but i was to engulfed with the giggles as i attempted to write phrases like "throbbing, pulsating member" and "slid into her love box" to finish.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

As Jeff Foxworthy noted, most men would be happy if they could have a beer and see something naked. I'm not gonna make any personal declarations on this point (even though my future political career has already been foreclosed by a previous posting on the "how did you lose your virginity" thread), but in the abstract, I agree with Mr. Foxworthy.

That doesn't lead to a blanket approval for all naked material, however. I agree with Sara Astruc that there is stuff out there that, even without being very perverse, makes you cringe thinking about what the actors were going through, and otherwise drowns out any erotic message with the noise of pure bad taste. I'll go along with the porn/erotica distinction. Now, can we talk about beer?

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

Your wish is my command. Talk about beer.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

I don't really get porn, especially on the web. It just never occurs to me there might be porn out there.

Meanwhile, my only position on porn is don't look at it on the web in a public library, ok? You just make a librarian's job a lot harder and screw it up for everyone else in your community. that's the only real time porn pisses me off. I don't support filtering. Be an adult about it.

I personally prefer to read rather than to look. that's all I'll say. And yes, I am a librarian.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

I think a lot of it is about power over women and is demeaning to us - all those facial cum shots, gang bangs, stuff like that. And 99% of it is just an industry, it's not about self expression or anything other than what people will pay to see. IT still gives a lot of creepy messages: no means yes, all women really want double penetration, all women really would like to have sex with their best friend while their man watches.

I'm very glad that my partner isn't into it. I've had boyfriends who seemed to require specific images to get excited, which I found really yucky. It's the obsessiveness about it that bugs me, the way things escalate for the sake of being far out there. It's not enough to see a naked woman, it has to be a naked woman peeing while handcuffed. Are there really that many people who are into anal sex? I think of a guy like my dad who enjoyed the innocent cheesecake images of the 50s and 60s. I'm pretty sure he'd be appalled at most of the stuff out there now, and I don't mean on XXX web sites, I mean in Playboy.

There isn't much that I can do about it, though, and even I admit there are some images I like to see.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

I went through a stage, about two years ago, where I looked at a lot of porn. But after a few weeks, it just bored me.

My husband looks at online porn from time to time, which used to bother me, but doesn't really anymore.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

Sometimes at work I search for a keyword and get a screen saying my employer's corporate security have decided that the site is inappropriate for business needs. I am advised to fill out a form saying how I got there by mistake, or a form explaining a legitimate business need.

I don't know how many of these screen you are allowed before they decide to investigate your Internet usage and see how much of the day you spend online, what sites you go to, and so forth.

I looked for Out Your Backdoor once, a zine about bikes, skis, small boats, and got a site for anal intercourse. This must have been before they installed the software that detected appropriateness.

A co-worker forwared to me a Paul Harvey paean to "dirt roads," and I informed him that dirt road was a euphemism for anal intercourse. As he was a flag-waving member of the religious right he was appalled to hear this.

I know porn, weapons, hate speech, gambling, pyramid schemes you have a pecuniary interest in, and chain letters are looked down on by one's employer.

These people are heavy-handed and lack a sense of humor. I wouldn't organize for a labor union, either.

That is, there are people out there looking under every bed for porn. They use the possibility of its existence to trample on civil liberties. Just because you don't take it serious is no reason to assume they feel the same way.

They don't.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

Well, I write erotica. I've written several How-to's for the online erotic magazine CleanSheets - topics such as (ok, Mom, quit reading now) How to Suck, Butt Love , Fluffin' the Muffin (female masturbation), An Invitation (to a Sex Party), and How to Look at Girls. So, no, I have no problem with smut (although I am beginning to get tired of writing how-to articles about it).

I write erotica, but I read porn. Well, ok, I read erotica too, but there's something about the nasty, no-holes-barred attitude of porn that really helps when one wants to get off. I'm sure a bushelfull of psychologists could give you a zillion reasons where this comes from in me and why I'm sicko, but then again maybe some of them would tell you I've learned to have an healthy attitude about sex. I certainly think so. I'm extremely open about sex and I can discuss it pretty openly. I do have a few taboo topics - child porn, beastiality, mutilation and scat being among them.

Our society - and by this I mean our American society (which I reside in), and not our global one - spends far too much of its energy worrying about sex and porn and trying to impose certain morals upon the rest of us. I am disgusted to see such efforts go towards fostering hatred about something that, ultimately, provides the incentive to continue our species! And all the while, we almost encourage violence, glorify it through our media, films, TV shows and whatnot. It just seems to be such backward thinking - let's hate what gives us life (sex) and worship that which destroys it (violence)! But we're decended from a puritan society and we haven't seemed to be able to shake that noose off yet.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

Okay, Heather, I have to ask: what's "scat"?

I thought that I was pretty "in the know" about weird sexual acts (I knew what rimming, water sports AND fisting were), but this one has me stumped.

As for my own take on porn? I agree with a lot of what Heather said, and, I too, went through a period where I was looking at a LOT of online porn. (Come to think of it, it was when I got DSL, also. Hrm, something about that easy-access, I guess.)

Ever since I had my baby, I haven't been very interested in Porn, but I think that's normal on so many different levels, so I'm not really sitting here being stumped about it.

Though, I have sat down and tried to imagine if there would be a time when I would be as interested in sex, porn, experimentation, etc as I was before I got pregnant, and I haven't been able to come up with an answer for myself yet.



-- Anonymous, June 24, 2000

Jolene, if you don't know what scat is, then trust me, you're probably better off that way

-- Anonymous, June 24, 2000

As for porn in general, it depends what sort of porn you're talking about. Ordinary vanilla XXX doesn't interest me that much. The general problem with all porn is that, as Roland Barthes said, it's very limited, so before long you've seen it all. This is particularly true of Net porn, where the same ten or so photos keep cropping up at a thousand sites. That said, I do wonder if it's not a conspiracy of some sort; maybe all these porn sites keep putting up the same few pics so that eventually you get so bored you decide to go off and do something useful with your time instead

-- Anonymous, June 24, 2000

Jolene asked, "Okay, Heather, I have to ask: what's "scat"?"

I'll put this as delicately as possible: scat is using the act of defecation (and its consequences) in a sexual manner.

I guess for some folks, this is a fetish. It's certainly NOT something I find arousing in the least, but I try to keep an open mind while avoiding it as much as possible. I suppose I shouldn't have brought it up, but at least now those of you who surf for porn will know better than to waste your clicks on websites offering scat . . . unless you were looking for that sort of thing to begin with, in which case I just gave you the key word you've been wanting . . .

-- Anonymous, June 24, 2000

On a different note:

I agree, Jolene, that it seems totally natural for an interest in sex to drop off during/after pregnancy. There are, I think, waxing and waning cycles of everyone's interest in sex. Personally, I can trace my arousal patterns to my menstrual cycle - usually. I notice my heightened arousal during ovulation more than I notice the small, sharp pain of the egg releasing (I sure that's meant to be that way). But there are greater cycles - sometimes I'm busy or stressed so that I don't feel aroused at that time, and sometimes the stress breaks and my body gets aroused in its search for a relief from the stress.

I guess I'm just saying that I no longer think about sex all the time like I did while I was in college. In a way this frightens me a bit - nature telling me the optimum time to reproduce has passed - but it also allows for more "down time", if you will.

Anyway, porn gives me more independence - I'm not depending on a partner everytime I get aroused or need an orgasm to release some tension. A vibrator helps too - I suppose it's in the same category as porn. Women have not been encouraged to seek their own release in the past - our own sexuality has been ignored or shuned. That's why I love places like Good Vibrations which encourage a healthy sexual attitude, especially for women. By taking matters into our own hands we can make ourselves happier people. It's nice to have that sort of power over one's own sexuality.

-- Anonymous, June 24, 2000

I dig smut in a big way. Comic books, stories, movies, I'm all about it. But. . . (there had to be a but) I don't partake in het smut, just gay smut. Guys all over guys is absolutely thrilling to me mostly because it would be physically impossible for me to ever experience the acts they're depicting.

The whole objectification argument bores me to tears, because the women in porn, choose to be in porn. If that's what they want to do with their bodies, more power to them. I don't expect everybody to like it, or watch it, but affixing vast political statements to. . . well, fucking on camera for money seems kinda silly to me.

Then again, I'm just a girl who likes boys who like boys, so what do I know?

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2000

Well, colour me a great big vanilla square, but I feel porn by and large objectifies women, and I don't think men respect women when they view them as objects. It seems virtually every serial rapist has a great big stash of porn in their house ... coincidence or no?

I have a happy sex life with my husband, and we don't need to look at other people making out to enrich it.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

I watch porn on ocassions. Look at pics when something catches my eye. I don't have a problem with it.

Although I do prefer to watch BDSM type porn, vs. "jus' humpin".

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

"Objectifying" is a term that's become popular in the last decade or so. What does it mean?

It's silly and disingenuous::::of course the women [and men] in porn are "objects" in the sense porn's fantasy. So are fashion magazines and movies and a lot of fiction.

Are the people in the porn films doing it against their will? Are they being abused? If not, there's no reason to turn them into victims [as Andrea Dworkin and her ilk would have us do]. And if you don't like it, don't watch.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Coming out of long-time lurk: What Saundra and Joy say! I tend to enjoy gay porn, too. Oh. and in any porn, I want words rather have words than "just" pictures.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Coming out of long-time lurk: What Saundra and Joy say! I tend to enjoy gay porn, too. Oh. and in any porn, I want words rather than "just" pictures.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Hmmm, a great procrastinating, forum-posting day!

Politically the antiporn argument doesn't stand on it's own. My union (the IWW) does have an IU for sex industry workers and there have been IU 690 (that's the sex workers union number, but it's because it is in the 600 (service) department and 610-680 were taken... what a coincidence) union drives, although those are usually at strip clubs.

I'll stand by my fellow workers in the sex industry and do whatever I can to help them control their job, just like I would for any industry. But like any industry, they need to tell me what they want and I need to support them. I can't just go around saying "this industry is bad for exploiting workers" unless the workers themselves are saying that.

If folks are really worried about the exploitation of sex workers by adult filmmakers and strip club owners, I hope to god they are also worried about the exploitation of taxi drivers and coal miners.

Auch, as depressing as it is to be tied to Capitalism and the need to produce for profit rather than need, amateur net porn has allowed some women to gain financial indepence, which is a good thing.

As far as the statement that most rapists look at porn, it may be true. It's also true that most rapists drink milk. Most rapists breathe air. It's inconclusive evidence. You would have to prove that a) almost all rapists consume porn and b) almost all porn-consumers become rapists for there to be a strong corrolation.

Personally a lot of het porn bores me, probably because I find the standard female beauty image sorta dull. I have *never* in my life been attracted to large breasts, and the wierd pornstar bleach blond bimbo thing just doesn't work for me. Now femdom stuff is another story.. and bend over boyfriend stuff is good too.

I only wish the gay porn I've found wasn't so lame. It all looks like Calvin Klein ads, doe-eyed muscle boys and such. Where's the hardcore fuckin'?

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

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I think that's a little cart before the horse. At the risk of sounding like Psychology Today I'd be willing to bet that believing women are objects and being unable to interact with them on a mature level would lead to a great big stash of porn. Whereas there are lots of guys with tons of porn, who never become rapists, serial or no.

For me porn has its moments. Being single for a long period of time leads to all kinds of things - and occasionally it's porn. I'd have to agree with David that a lot of gay porn is just a little too pretty, but there is enough variety to cater to almost everyone. The problem with finding the "right" gay porn, is that small video stores usually only carry straight stuff. You have to head to the local gay village/boystown to find the good stuff.

Further to objectification. How come no one is ever concerned about men being objectified in gay porn?

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Okay, as some of you know, in my other incarnation I run a sex and gender weblog/commentary site, called mouth organ. I'm also reasonably involved with the doings at Clean Sheets, for historical reasons. And those who read my journal know I write a fair amount of smut. So my biases are obvious :)

I am not going to defend porn per se, I'm just going to point out that Sturgeon's Law applies just as much to porn as anything else - maybe more so: ninety-nine percent of it is c**p. And porn has not traditionally been a bastion of powerful female images, no.

The traditional answer to that, which you'll get from people like Susie Bright, is: Make your own porn. A lot of women have gone and done exactly that, hence the renaissance in the last six to ten years of porn that does not consist entirely of throbbing staves, heartless knaves, and Ivory Liquid cumshots. Gay men have been inventing their own porn for a lot longer. Straight women tend to like gay male porn. This is a not-very-well-kept secret. I know a lot of other statistics that are more secret and might surprise you more :)

I should point out that there are two debates we have permanently retired at mouth organ, because they go on and on and on and never go anywhere:

1. Whether porn, taken as a whole, is demeaning to women. (My usual answer: It's a fallacy to consider porn as a single indivisible entity.)

2. What the difference is between porn and erotica. (My usual answer: It's a useless distinction - to a lot of people, "erotica" is "porn" they happen to like. "Porn" is often derogatory and "erotica" usually isn't. That's why I mostly say "smut" as an encompassing term.)

By the by, there are occasionally concerns about objectification in gay male porn, but not usually. My personal feeling on this is that gay men understand - because of certain aspects of their culture - that usually objectification is what porn is supposed to be about!

Porn, ultimately, is fantasy material, and as fantasy material it is harmless. (If you take it too far - if you can't distinguish fantasy from reality - that may make you dangerous, but that's also your fault, not the porn's.) No two people would agree on good fantasy material. Cumshots across the face do nothing for me either. On the other hand, a lot of the smut I do read and enjoy is so weird that many of you would be hard-pressed to figure out what's pornographic about it :)

Okay, that's the standard porn soapbox. Sorry for the length. I'm done now.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

So what are the other secret statistics?

I've never seen any porn I liked enough to want regular access to, except maybe some gay male pinup pages and slash/fan fiction, but I wouldn't interfere with anyone else's right to have it (as long as no children, animals, etc. are harmed in the process). I think the antiporn campaign on college campuses in the '80s (which you've -I mean "you" in the Columbine sense - probably heard all about from REM) probably interested more people in porn than otherwise. Seeing Deep Throat became an expression of civil liberties.

When I've read canonical porn, I mean amateur stuff on the Internet, I've gotten the feeling that it worked by flashing various sex-loaded words at the reader in increasing frequency, and the non-sex words were there mostly as connective tissue, and to give some context to ensure that the sex words were interpreted correctly. It didn't really matter if they were describing a Renaissance bordello or an episode of X-files. I don't know if anyone's ever experimented with this. If some of the discourse analysts who are currently studying Margaret Thatcher's speeches turned their attention to porn, we might be a happier species - whaddaya think?

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Any correlation between sex crimes and pornography? I remember sitting through high school psychology, where we discussed case studies of sex offenders. There were no correlations between pornography and sex offenders, certainly not to the point where it can be considered causal. However, there was correlation between sex offenders and upbringing. Typically those who were taught that "sex is wrong/dirty" are ones who had sexual dysfunctions and committed sex crimes.

There's been a book by Strossen (president of the ACLU?) about defending pornography, which I haven't gotten around to reading, since the new edition is not out yet. Anyone heard about it? Read it?

I think the bottom line is having a healthy approach to sex. To me, that means that it is deciding for yourself whether or not you enjoy pornography. Don't let the cultural baggage (whether ethnic, religious, or otherwise) make this decision for you.

One thing that I do find a bit curious involves group sex scenes and the argument that those scenarios in particular are "portraying women as submissive". I hear some folks that object to multiple-men/single- women scenes (gang-bang), and others who object to the multiple- women/single-men scenes (harem?). Well, you can't have it both ways, either one portrays the women in control or the other does.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Mostly I'm staying out of this, but I'm going to have to call you on an overgeneralization, Frank.
"One thing that I do find a bit curious involves group sex scenes and the argument that those scenarios in particular are "portraying women as submissive". I hear some folks that object to multiple-men/single- women scenes (gang-bang), and others who object to the multiple- women/single-men scenes (harem?). Well, you can't have it both ways, either one portrays the women in control or the other does."
I can easily think of an example of each situation that would depict the man in control (e.g. one woman chained to a post by many men vs. many women chained to many posts by many men). I don't think it is accurate to say that at least one of those must depict dominant females.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

"I don't think it is accurate to say that at least one of those must depict dominant females"

Precisely my point, though I probably didn't express it well. I don't think the general nature of the situation... in other words, X men to one woman necessarily implies submissiveness and neither does the other way around (X women to one man).

I have no qualms about folks who say that they found this or that particular scene that way. That's reasonable. Admittedly most pornography is geared towards a male audience, so most movies will have that bias.

However, if you were to generalize that any many-to-one scenario portrays women as submissive, it makes little sense to make the same arguments if the genders were turned. If you argue that whenever a man has sex with four women, he's exploiting them, you can't claim that whenever a woman has sex with four men, she's being exploited by them. That's what I meant when I said you can't have it both ways.

To me, this generalization seems to indicate that there's no way for women to be sexual beings (vs. asexual, not objectified) and be empowered. I don't buy that.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2000

Feedback on some comments from Joy:

>"Objectifying" is a term that's become popular in the last decade or >so. What does it mean?

To me, it means viewing somebody as an object instead of a person. In the terms of porn (and from the porn movies I've seen in the past) it means the way the women in the majority of porn movies are little more than somewhere to put a penis.

>It's silly and disingenuous::::

Um, no it's not, it's my opinion. You could think about trying to learn to respect the opinions of others - it might win you a few friends. And you wouldn't seem so bitter all the time.

>of course the women [and men] in porn are "objects" in the sense porn's fantasy.

Yes, I know. But I don't like that.

>So are fashion magazines and movie and a lot of fiction.

Yes to fashion magazines, although the women are objectified as clothes horses, not blow-up dolls. No to the movies and fiction I favour.

>Are the people in the porn films doing it against their will? Are they being abused? If not, there's no reason to turn them into victims [as Andrea Dworkin and her ilk would have us do].

That's irrelevant. I'm not saying the actresses themselves are being exploited, I'm saying women as a gender are being viewed as nothing more than masturbatory devices in these movies.

>And if you don't like it, don't watch.

Thanks Joy, but I'd figured that out. However, this thread was asking for opinions on the subject, which was what I gave. Was that a problem for you?

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

No, but opinions that differ from yours seem to be a problem for you, Jackie.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

On the contrary, Joy. The only thing that bothers me on these forums is people who are snarky, grumpy and unpleasant to everybody else. I know I'm not the only one who finds your posts fairly antagonistic, but I'm not going to enter into a slanging match with you. Life's too short. See ya.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

I'll try to bear the pain.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

As the unofficial bookmaker for Beth's forum, I am now taking bets from interested parties as to which of these ladies is going to bring up Hitler first.

So far, the odds are in Joy's favour, although at this point, it is anybody's race.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

With Joy around, who needs to bring Hitler into the equation?

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

Who's the "grumpy" and "snarky" one now?

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

Comments like "it's silly and disengenuous" don't add anything to the discourse.

I also think that a big problem with porn is the objectification of women - and men - in it.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

What sort of people get their panties in a bunch over the word "disingenous"?

Objectification? That's the point of porn. Generally, people don't read/watch porn for the profound moral lessons or great acting. It's a means to an end. To me, it's like complaining that the ice cream parlor sells nutritionally unbalanced products.

There's porn for every "taste"::::not all stars Playmates and Calvin Klein models. There's plenty for the chubby chasers, bears, foot fetishists, adult babies, ad infinitum.

Most people working in porn do it for the money. I don't think that a Bad Thing. If they're over 18 and freely choose to do it, [and have no plans in the future to run for Congress], c'est la vie.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

Dear Joy:

Sometimes, people become upset when they express their opinion and other people accuse them of being "disingenuous," since that term implies some sort of dishonesty in communication. People also occasionally become upset when their opinions are trivialized and mocked. There are other ways to express your disagreement.

Most of us learned these things in about the third grade; you apparently did not. I really do not want this forum to turn into Diary-L II: Son of Diary-L, so I'd like to keep the Joy bashing to a minimum, because frankly it's boring to read. It will be easier to keep the Joy bashing down if Joy engages her "polite human discourse" switch and practices expressing her opinion without acting like a bitch. (See, for instance, Joy's interesting and enlightening comments in the credit thread a few days ago.) Otherwise, Joy may find that her posts are mysteriously deleted.

This isn't Diary-L, I'm not as nice as Ryan, and I'd really appreciate it if you could all argue like grownups. That is all.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2000

Boy. That killed the topic. Which is a shame, 'cause I was interested.
So tell me, would anyone here be in favor of regulating pornography if it was discovered to be directly linked to sexual crime? Or if it was shown that participants in pornography were 3 times as likely to become bad, bad people?

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2000

It's interesting, I think, to note that ogling someone on the street (in a most obvious and obnoxious manner) would probably make them feel dehumanized, whereas another situation with people having sex (for a video) who have willing consented to all the activities would not.

Why? In the first case, the person has 'not' consented to the obvious leering up and down and almost visual groping.

In the second case, the person has consented.

I think it is the "control" issue that is offensive not what goes on. What goes on in pornography is up to the people involved -- and if they want to participate in sexual acts that look demeaning (and might be demeaning in an unconsented situation), that's up to them.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2000

In a Re/Search magazine about deviant sexual behavior, the most disturbing thing I read was about a guy who had a sexual fetish for women in the act of drowning. While he had never acted upon his fetish, he required constant therapy to help him deal with it. He obtained all of his masturbatory material from broadcast television. Apparently, he had a buttload of videotapes of crotch shots of women drowning that he culled from detective shows, made for tv movies, etc...

In a Harper's Bazaar a few years ago they had a spread featuring pieces of mannequins (severed heads, hands, torsos) scattered about in a park, under bushes. They were supposedly featuring the accessories on the bits of mannequin. That was the last Bazaar I will ever buy.

I have no problem with pornography (I enjoy both visual and written porn/erotica when I'm in the mood for it) but I do have a problem with the casual connections made in various media between sexuality, women and violence. It's insidious, and far more accessible to children forming their sexual identities. I'd really rather hand a kid some carefully chosen pornography to aid in the process than let them form their desires from mainstream TV and magazines, and sensationalized media coverage of sex crimes. Some kids can sort it out, but some can't.

Soapbox summary:

concensually produced smut=good sneaky, underhanded popular media smut=bad

-- Anonymous, July 03, 2000

concensually produced smut

What is that?

-- Anonymous, July 03, 2000

That's a clumsy, but short, way of saying "pornography that is produced by adults who have consented to participate (i.e. not snuff, not children) and also that is for an audience who is aware of what they are purchasing, and are therefore also consenting."

-- Anonymous, July 03, 2000

Honestly, I can't see how porn's enjoyable. It either is extremely ridiculous or nauseating (i.e. scat, etc. Though I once saw a porn mag featuring mousetraps...). My ex liked porn (well, a type of porn) and had it bookmarked, but I never looked at it or cared. It's just all so...lame to me.

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2000

I should elaborate there that when I find something that ridiculous, I have a hard time getting turned on like I'm supposed to...too busy snickering or eye-rolling or yelling things at the screen. Not that I don't get it's about sex :P

I did end up being talked to by a guy from the "Laughing Sex Institute" at Burning Man, but guess it didn't work for me. At least, things being stupid beyond belief doesn't exactly interact with sexual feelings...

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2000

I do visit some of the more extreme sites-- the snuff-sex sites --and find them alternately intriguing and hilarious. There's a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote air to some of the stories, and the stories that feature pop-culture icons (e.g., Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Buffy) being violated and dismembered in some baroque fashion are often funny indeed. (The one where Jennifer Aniston allows herself to be impaled and decapitated by the Times Square ball on New Years Eve 2000 to help usher in a new era of femininity is a major hoot...) A few things (try [oh not on your life -- ed.]) have a very surreal and intriguing quality. But I don't plan on doing any of these things to actual girl humans. Where would I get the equipment? Where do you put the remains? A plastic barrel full of cheerleader parts isn't an easy thing to leave for the recycling people.

Porn-- ordinary vanilla porn --is really utopian lit. It's about a world where everyone is beautiful, everyone lives in a cool house in southern California, and everyone is always willing and able to have incredibly earth-shaking sex at the drop of a hat (or a thong). No one is ever tired, or has a headache, or is impotent. If there are ever job problems, they exist only as a plot device to get the hero's wife in bed with the boss' wife. Porn isn't about "relationships", it's about a world in which everyone is related on purely physical grounds. No problems, no worries-- everyone is beautiful and multi- orgasmic.

And so I'd rather watch porn like that-- pretty people in pretty settings having sex (though I only watch porn that has no male actors in it; girl-girl only for me) --than listen to actors whine endlessly about relationships.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2000

suck my ass it smells!

-- Anonymous, July 17, 2001