Competing With Porn
I have been ignoring the Naomi Wolf antiporn article as utter nonsense. No need to rail against it for this crowd.
But I simply must link to Eric Raymond’s cogent comments — they are too blunt and too true to ignore. I’ve excerpted heavily, you need to read the whole thing:
You show me a young woman who makes herself sexually available but has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and I’ll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.
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Show me a young woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn for a man’s attention and I’ll show you one of two things. Either (a), she’s having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn’t notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she’s not having sex with that man.There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in Ms. Wolf’s informants’ reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don’t deliver.
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Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is “no”, then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill.On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this.
This is pretty basic stuff. Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=605
This man is definitely onto something here. For the benefit of the young man who may not yet have the wisdom that comes from experience, I offer some corroborative attestation in support of his theory: In my own experience, I can say that these women may not be malicious teases, they may merely be lesbian and not even know it yet themselves. Mr. Raymond is quite articulate here, and I thank Erosblog for bringing the link and the knowledge to light. Thanks for the legwork Bacchus! It’s why I read this blog.
A link back to this posting has caused me to revisit the aboved mentioned link to Naomi Wolf’s antiporn article. I have to disagree with her premiss that competition is bad for sex. Females expect males to compete for sex, why shouldn’t females suffer the same scrutiny? Male peacocks have to have the biggest fan, male deer the biggest antlers, male humans have to have the biggest penises, or the biggest houses, or the biggest cars, or the biggest paychecks with which to buy the biggest diamonds…
I can however agree with her on two points that she has made in other writings. One, that women need to shatter this polarizing view that they are either virgins or whores, and two, that women need to agressively pursue publishing accounts of their own personal sexual coming-of-age stories. Accomplishing these two goals would greatly enrich the sex lives of BOTH sexes, and ultimately bring women and men closer together.
However, in the article referred to above, she seems to contradict this, when she laments the loss of “mystery” in sex today.
Methinks what she really misses might be a women’s ability to control a man with a mere flash of her naked ankle. Perhaps her own personal ability to command a room in her youth, being as she wrote the above cited article when she was passing the age of forty.
Ms. Wolf certainly has nothing personally to fear from today’s access to pornography. Six and a half years after Bacchus first published this article, she is still a MAJOR M.I.L.F. at the age of 47, and if porn indeed deadens the male libido, I would not have said such, trust me!