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Male Sexuality and Internet Porn
Jan. 10th, 2011 03:15 pmThe Atlantic has given us another long-form essay, this one on Internet porn and the fiercer evolution of sexual attitudes, titled “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a subject near and dear to my heart. I particularly like the way she tracks my own beliefs on the brutish sexual nature of men. She goes on from there to argue that the prevalence of the wilder kind of pornography on the Internet has gone some way to make the more aggressive tendencies of men more acceptable, legitimating them in a sense, and that this hasn’t been a good development for women:
Armed with a “Take Back the Night” pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor. The key to sexual harmony, so the thinking went, was social conditioning. Men who sexually took advantage of women were considered the storm troopers of patriarchy, but women could teach men to adopt a different ideology, through explicit communication of boundaries —“you can touch there” or “please don’t do that.” Thus was the dark drama of sex replaced with a verbal contract. Once the drunken frat boys and brutes were weeded out, if we gravitated toward a kind of enlightened guy, an emotionally rewarding sex life was ours for the taking. Sex wasn’t a bestial pursuit, but something elevating.She does not necessarily call for censorship, but I am concerned that the logic of this sort of argument leads in that direction. Still, I am going to have to copy & paste the whole thing. After all, it even gives us a good exegetic take on the Marlon Brando movie “Last Tango in Paris.”
This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril. Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. 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. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.
