I just stumbled across a post about porn from a long-dormant blog called The London Exhibitionist. It’s old but wow does he have a great take on the state of American-originated porn! I’ve been digging into the intimate link between male insecurity and “empowerment“lately. This guy illustrates the point nicely. (Emphasis mine.)
Gonzo type porn, seems to regard the women as the enemy and the act of sex is punishment (for what?). When you see the idiot with the camcorder talking the woman into bed, their ham-fisted, mono-syllabic sledgehammer approach usually has the women rolling her eyes, even when it’s fake and the woman is a pornstar guaranteed lay.
The men in these pornos always externalise their arousal: (This bitch has turned me on). In doing so they put the woman on a pedestal and then resent them for being there (now she’s gonna get it). It seems to me that sexual attraction isn’t about how a woman looks, but is more about how we look at a woman. Women don’t turn us on, we turn ourselves on.
My take on all this crap is this: Inadequate men who know they cannot exist as equals to women then validate themselves through dominating them and belittling them.
Source: The London Exhibitionist
Ka-sheesh is there gold in there!
The biggest part being about the way men end up indoctrinated to believe that arousal comes from somewhere else. That’s an idea, by the way, that goes waaaay back. It’s roots break the surface back with the myth of Eve as temptress and they’ve been buckling pavement on and off ever since. For instance the nominally saintly Leo Tolstoy bitterly blamed his wife for his repeated failures to practice celibacy. (Her anguished, fearful diaries suggest a… different reason.) And while “women as temptress” has largely gone back underground in favor of the “men as remorseless horndogs,” London Exhibitionist reminds us the earlier notion is obviously still there.
The problem with imagining the source of our lust is someone else’s responsibility is that it leaves us thinking it’s a problem we’re helpless to deal with.
I also really appreciate his point about the two-fold injustice of first elevating women to etherial objects of worship… and then resenting them for that too. It’s kind of a pattern in the dominant paradigm. See also “women see us only as providers,” “men just need a place to have sex, women need a reason,” etc.
The ugly problem in each case is that we’re creating our own powerlessness. That we’re the ones giving it up doesn’t make us any less powerless. But, dudes, you can “get back” at women as much as you like, be as angry at women as you wish, write whole epic Tolstoy novels about how evil women are if you’ve got the patience for it, but at the end of the day if we don’t get that we’re responsible for sense of powerlessness no amount of fuming women females in general or feminists in particular is going to get it back.
When you’re drowning in knee-deep water panicky thrashing and yelling won’t save you nearly as well as standing up.
