Men watch pornography. It's a fact. Men get horny and they need something to satisfy it. Often pornography is the easiest and most convenient way to do it, regardless of whether one is in a relationship or not. Women have a hard time understanding that men can often separate sex from love--for example, men can have sex with a woman they clearly don't love. Women have a harder time doing this because of biological and cultural reasons (hormones, risks of getting pregnant).
Is pornography a problem? I don't think so, because most if not all men watch pornography regularly. It's been around for a while and I don't see a social breakdown in society or men increasingly treating their women in a negative way. Pornography is to men what chocolate and sweets are to a woman. Biological desire. Nothing more, nothing less.
But, feminists argue that pornography is bad because it objectifies women and treats them as sexual commodities. It treats a relationship between a man and woman on purely sexual terms. If that were true, why would a man stick around if all he cared about was sex. What about love, marriage, raising kids? Yeah pornography often demeans women, encourages not-normal sexual practices, and show things that don't happen or should not happen in real life, but movies do the same thing. They are in the business of unreality. Do you think after I watch Terminator 2, I'm going to run around shooting at people? Do you think after I watch the Matrix, I'm going to jump off a building thinking I can fly? People like escapism sometimes.That's what pornography is. Fantasy on video.
The trouble with this wide-open pornography is not that it corrupts, but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is proclaimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.
A recent issue of Sky, a magazine targeting young people, contained the following letter in the advice column: "My problem is that I don't enjoy sex anymore. I'm a virile 22-year-old. I regularly have sex with my girlfriend, but I have no pleasure anymore.... Is there something that I'm doing wrong?" The advisor replied, "Shootin' air, eh, babe? You've caught the sex problem of the 90's: pelvic apathy...Actually all that's happening to you and your bald best mate of 22 years is that you've both managed to forget there's another human being slaving away at the far end of your plank. Remember that person with the high voice and the lipstick?" This exchange was an unwittingly ironic counterpart to all the "sexy" ads throughout the issue. And how dehumanizing to refer to a woman, someone's lover, as "that person with the high voice and the lipstick."
Meanwhile, Mademoiselle offered this advice to young women whose arms start to ache while pleasuring their partners: "Your best bet—short of looking meaningfully at the bedside clock or developing the forearms of Martina Navratilova—is to get him to give you a hand."
In 1997 NBC featured a story about some college students—men and women—who regularly make a practice of getting drunk together and then having sex with whomever happens to be nearest at hand. According to one student, it is a great way to get his sexual needs met quickly without the "time-consuming" hassle of actually dating and getting to know somebody.
In a world filled with fast-food chains and junk-food advertising, many people are deliberately starving themselves or gorging themselves into oblivion. Consuming food for which we have no real appetite, we are never satisfied and lose our ability to gauge our own hunger. In a similar way, the barrage of constant sexual images and perfect bodies being offered up to us like delectable pastries (or perhaps popsicles) leave us sexually numb and out of touch with our own desire. We can get almost any kind of ethnic food in our own hometowns these days, and we also have more sexual choices than ever before in terms of partners and techniques. But when eating is divorced from hunger and appetite and sex is divorced from desire and relationships, both experiences become onanistic, solitary, unfulfilling.
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