The Porn We Don’t Show You
It sounds like the Girl With A One Track Mind has been getting some of the same emails ErosBlog gets, trying to promote some of the porn I try not to promote:
During the four years I have been writing this blog I have regularly received emails from one particular contingent of the internet. It doesn’t take much guessing who: porn sites who want me to link, plug and promote their products. Usually I just scan these emails and deposit them straight into my spam folder. Why? I’ll explain, using an email I received last night as a good example.
“Dear Abby,” it begins, “Like you, I am very interested in getting discussion of sex, naughtiness ad [sic] all things deeed [sic] taboo by the Great British public [sic] into the wide world.”
Even given the atrocious spelling, this sounded promising.
However, the email then continued and asked me to plug a certain satellite television station where there would be “lezzed-up action,” “two girls will get seriously hardcore,” and where the show would include “full-frontal bean-flicking, boob bouncing, cunt lapping fun.”
As soon as I read that the email got junked, along with all the other offers to extend the size of my penis or buy generic viagra.
Yeah, you can bet I get mail like this every day. The Girl has a variety of issues with it, but I pick up here with her third issue, which I endorse wholeheartedly:
I might be willing to plug some porn, if the stuff recommended to me wasn’t so dreadfully offensive and insulting to my sex. Clicking on the link the porn webmaster (and yes, besides wonderful people like Ms Naughty, there are very few porn webmistresses) sent me, I found the following titles:
“Hotel Bitches”
“Bitch in a box”
“Cunt suckers”
“Babe spotting”
“Dirty pig”And this is a sample that is relatively pleasant; there’s also the usual labelling of women as sluts or whores, alongside the bitches, babes, cunts and nymphos. Whichever it is, it’s the same thing overall: if there is sex onscreen, it’s likely to be focussed on the women, and those women have to be insulted and degraded (in words and/or perhaps actions) in some way. To my mind, this is just as offensive to men as it is to women – suggesting that men can not get off on explicit imagery that is not disrespecting women. Excuse me, but I think that is utter bollocks. Naked people fucking are naked people fucking and it’s hot to watch – so why bring in the sexist and misogynist titles?
It’s this position that most porn defaults to, that I find so offensive. And, let me be frank, a turn off too. There’s nothing like a bit of sexism (and racism) to put a girl off her stroke – and this girl likes her stroke very fucking much, thanks, hence why I am so particular about the porn I consume.
I’ve called this the “bitch-cunt-slut” porn marketing syndrome, and frankly it baffles me. Who enjoys that? Obviously some pornographers think that’s what heats up their male market, but are they right? Who are these men supposedly buying this stuff? The men I know love women. Yeah, some of them have old fashioned redneck attitudes and don’t really respect women as equals, but they still love them.
They don’t want a “bitch in a box” — even in a bondage fantasy, they want a hot babe in a box.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=2154
I have no idea what the common “appeal” of this type of marketing is, but I have a couple of theories.
One is that the type of person who selects this type of porn is not really paying attention to the labelling. That it’s “porn” is enough in itself, and it may be attached to certain words (like “FREE!”) or its method of dispersal may imply that it’s cheap, and boredom/habit kick in to promote clicking of the link. Maybe, just maybe it won’t be the same old thing as last week or yesterday!
Another type of person may also succumb to this appeal. Ever received or felt your heart-strings jerked by some anonymous (albiet badly-typed) email requesting you keep forwarding the email — to save women and babies everywhere who will otherwise not know of the scam they are reporting to you, to avert 7 years of bad luck and wrinkles, blood in your urine, or whatever? That vague feeling fueled by superstitious natures that they must invest or else bad luck will happen…. is not that different from those who believe that clicking on the link is like rubbing the genie’s lamp for a little good luck/hot action.
I harbor no such hope for my fellow man that I do not think this sort of thing appeals to him. My take on it is a bit more clinical and seems to me to be common sense: so much porn is marketed that way because marketing it that way simply works. It’s effective because there is a large segment of the male population to whom that appeals. It’s depressing, I know, but I don’t have much faith in American society to believe otherwise.
To expound a bit further: consider the mass quantities of absolute trash outside of the arena of porn. The marketing geniuses decide what to sell, and they sell it hard enough that a consumer eventually believes he or she really wants that product. Sort of the reverse of my initial point, I guess; they buy it because it’s what’s being sold to them.
The insulting titles show a power imbalance; if you can call someone names, they are lower status, and therefore compliant. If you get rejected when attempting to deal like a real person with real women, the bad words emphasis the availability of the fantasy.
It is a badly self-reinforcing loop. Fantasize about treating women badly in porn, train to treat women badly in life. Get rejected, return to porn.
Chris, if the efficient market theory applies to porn marketing, and if the efficient market theorists are correct, you must undoubtedly be right. But, I’m not sure whether porn marketing is economically efficient, and arguing about the efficient market theory keeps wall street theorists arguing away, so I’m not sure you are completely right in practice. It may just be that porn tends to be badly marketed in ways that limit its audience, and (because markets in porn are stigmatized in various ways that interfere with normal market signalling) the marketers haven’t figured out where they are going wrong.
Stupid_handle, you may indeed have hit upon a reason porn is marketed this way. But even so, the question remains: is it smart marketing? Or is it stupid marketing, by pornographers who are stuck in the loop and (wrongly) assuming that everybody else is, too?
Sadly, the top Google hit for “Bitch in a Box” points to an extremeley un-erotic meaning.
http://www.guar...ory/0,,1216579,00.html
This is the slang for a method of torture currently in vogue in Iraq: throw some poor sod in the trunk of a car in 120 degrees Farenheit and drive around as he suffocates, believing he is being being taken to his execution.
Lovely.
I think the titles themselves have become somewhat generalized. People click on porn labled as such because thats the way porns labled. I know I paid for and own a DVD of “teen” sex. I’ve no desire to see teens having sex. I like my men my age and older and even 19 is just too young. So then why would I have a “teen” DVD? Well, for 1 — none of them are actually teens. And two — and mainly — teen just implies general fucking — not “anal” or “blowjobs” or something — it implies I get a nice mix of general porn.
I think the terms “slut” “whore” “bitch” have become the same way. I’ll watch something labled in these terms not because I want to see woman degraded — but because these have become general tags tacked onto every video uploaded/posted and I assume a girl will be involved.
I believe Stupid_handle may well be onto something there… Keeping males clueless about females may make them porn-dependant, thereby feeding the porn purveyor’s wallets. My intuition tells me that the market is geared to mostly teen males who can’t yet quite figure out how to get into the panties of the young goddess sitting next to them in (calculus/trigonometry) class, that thinks surely those “other” females, the “bad” or “dirty” ones, the “slut/whore/bitch” females, are unashamedly sexual beings who will come across with the goods. I guess this makes it an extension of the madonna/whore complex (or syndrome). Sad.
I’d love to see more hardcore porn along the lines of Abby Winter or DOMAI — pretty but real people having fun sex, where the women and men seem to like each other.
You ask “Who enjoys that?” Many people feel the same way about BDSM porn. Yet clearly there’s a market for BDSM. Perhaps the women in the “bitch-cunt-slut” videos enjoy being being called sluts, cunts, and bitches, just as some women enjoy being whipped with a cane. Presumably you believe the most men in BDSM like women, despite their sexual practices. Why not assume the same about the “bitch-cunt-slut” crowd?
Just letting you know I appreciate such a well put together blog. Thanks for filtering out the crap, and not selling out.
@ Stupid_handle & @ Dr.Whiplash: I totally agree with you both.
@ Christopher Rasch: To my mind, humiliation/degradation etc. in sex is all fine and good IN CONTEXT, so if these had been BDSM titles, then I might not have had such an issue. But not one of these titles contained BDSM content; they were, for want of a better phrase, just “mainstream porn” and so, SO much of mainstream content represents women in an offensive or degrading way.
Let me add another thing to the mix here: in none of the mainstream hetrosexual porn, do we ever see men called whores, or pricks, or fuckers (or similar put-downs); it’s always the women who bear the brunt of the offensive terms. In this context, it has nothing to do with BDSM and all to do with how the porn industry sees its viewer – who is assumed to be male – and how it then treats him, and the women onscreen.
Women also like to watch people fucking and wank. It’s time to kick the sexism out of porn.
This is probably an over-simplification, but the growing incidence of sex sites using demeaning terms for women seems to be an age-based thing. I first started noticing a lot of it on websites aimed at college-aged men, and I think it reflects some of the attitudes in music aimed at that age group. This is also the way I sometimes hear high-school aged guys talk about women on the rare occasions when I’m around groups of them (concerts usually). I think it’s basically an ugly case of juvenile insecurity that they will hopefully grow out of. That porn sites have picked up on it is sad, probably market-driven, and, as many of the astute comments above have noted, more a case of devalued language than actual contempt.
But, whatever the cause, it’s the opposite of erotic and I thank you for your stance.
I don’t think “bitch-cunt-slutâ€? implies hatred at all. I know that I am not hated but those are certainly words that I am called on a daily basis.
I enjoy them. I enjoy how it makes me feel. It makes me smile.
I think Christopher Rasch is right, in that those titles most certainly appeal to the BDSM crowd. I can tell you that for my own porn preferences? I don’t have any interest in porn that doesn’t include those words or that mindset. In fact, I have a huge pet peeve about false advertising; using those words and finding out that what’s in the porn is nothing more than your typical, boring sex. Bah. Who likes THAT I ask? ;-)
If it’s that it’s becoming comonplace to use those labels on ALL porn (I’m not a porn officianado, believe it or not), then my suspicion would be that it’s being marketed that way because it sells. Maybe not to you, maybe not to 5 people you know… but in my experience, sellers don’t market things that don’t work. Apparently, people DO like those words, and they are buying porn, so… bottom line says people buy “bitch-cunt-slutâ€? porn.
With the internet porn so big these days I don’t know who the juggernauts are, but when I was a lad, it was Playboy and Penthouse, and at that time, they weren’t calling women by disrespectful names, and they constantly ran articles on how to sexually please a woman. Despite what the Andrea Dworkins said, I believe they genuinely adored women, and put them on a bit of a pedestal. I also believe that this positive attitude toward women is what made them the juggernauts that they became.
A decade ago I attended several BDSM gatherings, and except for the occasional use of degrading terms for purely dramatic effect, I found the percentage of actual women-haters there to be almost non-existent, and constituted a much lower percentage than found in society in general. These oddballs were usually pretty well shunned by the rest of the group. In fact, if they went as far as to ignore safe-words when used, or their activities otherwise became offensive, they were immediately expelled from the premises, and promptly escorted to the door. So I don’t think the vast remainder of the BDSM community is the women-hating group to which Bacchus refers.
Where I HAVE found a disproportionately large percentage of men who spewed vile and venomous words about women, even worse that bitch-cunt-slut-whore terms herein mentioned, was the locker room, and it was ALWAYS the guys who were on the high school football team, and yet they presented to the world as heterosexual. I thought this odd at the time, and years later had good reason to believe that these fellows had gravitated to certain all-male activities (they were also in a fraternity together) for a somewhat logical reason.
These misogynists made no bones about showing how much they disrespected women, and their only use for females was, well, to USE them. They associated with them only long enough to “conquer” them, and then spoke degradingly of them to their acquaintances and anyone else who would listen. Either these pornographers ARE these guys, or they only seem to want to tap that market. I like to think that they are merely a highly vocal minority.
if these had been BDSM titles, then I might not have had such an issue. But not one of these titles contained BDSM content; they were, for want of a better phrase, just “mainstream pornâ€? and so, SO much of mainstream content represents women in an offensive or degrading way.
So if the porn had actually contained BDSM content, it would’ve not been degrading? That seesm like an odd distinction.
@ Christopher Rasch: (from what I understand) certain elements of BDSM involve using degradation of some sort in power-play by one party to another; so if someone who’s not into BDSM finds those activities degrading is neither here nor there.
The point I was making was that if humiliation/degradation in BDSM is your ‘thing’ then porn packaged to include that ‘does what it says on the tin’. But “mainstream porn” is regularly degrading to women* with its sexism and misogyny and if the content does not include BDSM activities, then why portray women in a subjugated position?
So yes, I do find that degrading; if I just want to watch people fucking onscreen, without any power-play or BDSM activities, then I do not need to see or hear women being portrayed in a derogatory manner, because that really turns me off.
*as I mentioned before, where, in hetrosexual porn, is the equivalent objectionable labelling of men?
Christopher – if something is being done within a consciously BDSM framework, you can generally assume that it was negotiated and that the models involved have no issue with it. Bacchus has linked to so, so much BDSM porn here in which you can clearly see that people are making it wiht their hearts (and their genitals) in the right place, even if it’s not your style of thing.
Whereas if you click on just a random porn site like roccosiffredi.com you really don’t get that feeling at all (and this is a mild example, but it turns me off in two seconds flat). Sites like this simply use ‘whores’, ‘bitches’ etc as a synonym for women, and I agree with every word Girl wrote on the topic. It really squicks me, to be honest. If someone specifically wants humilation themed porn that’s absolutely fine, and it’s perfectly possible to indulge that while acknowledging that it’s a fun fantasy. If humiliation is the unacknowledged base state from which it’s difficult to escape, I get a bit worried.
Dr Whiplash: I completely agree with your first comment. On the second, I’d just like to point out that misogynist most certainly does not = closet case. In my experience it’s usually the other way around, but I’ll admit it’s a tiny sample.
Back on topic… I find it really difficult to think why pornographers use this language, as it’s so alien to me. I know it does not sell well within my circle of acquaintances, but I also know we’re atypical. I can only assume that for the most part people are buying it because it’s what’s on sale (please, let what remains of my faith in human nature remain intact…). I really hope that as porn starts getting scrutinised more openly, this style will fall out of favour.
S – You are absolutely right. I have a good number of gay and lesbian friends and I should not have let my attempt at brevity, leave my statement open to misinterpretation. In my experience with this community, I believe that I have observered that a SMALL percentage of closet cases (and out of the closet cases) are misogynist, and a slightly larger percentage of mysogynists are closet cases (or out for that matter…), but it would certainly be unfair and untrue to say that the gay community as a whole are mysogynistic. Many gay men have deep friendships with females. I just wanted to “out” that very small vocal minority of (macho affecting, female degrading, homophobic yet homo-erotic activity engaging in) males, that many people don’t realize are of the sexual persuasion that they truely are, merely because they don’t fit the “swishy, lispy, limp-wristed” mold that has been stereotypically thrust upon the gay community, due mostly I suppose to Hollywood’s portrayals. I have little or no wish to protect this group. Otherwise, mea culpa…
I think that it has to do with the fantasy of control, and not in a BDSM way.
When we look at porn, we do so because it is a fantasy. Porn has (for the most part) very little basis in reality, and the point of that particular ilk of porn is that the girl is being controlled by the man. The point is that there is no fear of rejection.
The men that this porn is targeted to is the old-fashioned “guy in the porn store parking lot in a trench-coat” stereotype. That stereotype has yet to die, and probably has some basis in reality (how ever small). This consumer of porn is using porn as a replacement for real intimacy in their lives, not in a healthy way (i.e. enhancing their real sex lives). Because this man’s real fear is rejection, the women in this porn are put in a position where rejection is not an option. It’s not exactly rape, but the girl can’t say no, which is the fear.
as said – Maybe it’s not so much that the “…the girl can’t say no…”, but that as a “dirty girl”, WON’T say no. I’ve read spam ads in my E-mail where they claim the girl featured is a “cum guzzler” who is “addicted to cum”. Whereas the “goddess” I described in comment #7, with a mind of her own, might very well reject their advances, the bitch-slut-whore is always sexually available.
The “hot babe in a box” must harken back to “Boxing Helena”, which was a truly atrocious, woman-hating movie. I remember that the lead was offered to Kim Basinger, who wisely turned it down. Sherilyn Fenn took the part.
As a part-time porn affecianado I always wondered about this type of degredation that creeped into the mainstream porn arena. At one time you had to go looking for that stuff, know the right magazines to pick up and all. But now it’s to be found in just about any porn outlet.
My two cents is that it crept in through the phone sex advertising. Copyrighters quickly found that the more outrageous they got the more money they made through the advertisement. It was a way to stand out from the crowd. And since porn was a small arena, at least until the turn of the century, guys who put together the ads were also the ones writing the sex articles and putting together photo shoots, marketing the sex toys, etc. Before long they were deluded in that the shocking ads were what people wanted in all of their porn.
Or it could be a partitioning mechanism. If you assume that the bulk of the customers are mild-mannered middle class gents who are of the opinion that not only do they think highly of women, but that it’s important to think well of women, labeling the females in porn as “fallen women” of one stripe or another allows the customers to enjoy the porn but still treat their wives, girl friends, and female colleagues with respect, but still enjoy their “smut” with a minimum of cognitive dissonance.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that I know some men who do enjoy that kind of porn attitude toward women. These are typically men who never matured past the age of 14. Quite frankly, I find almost all porn very boring as it cannot compare with being with my wife.
Commenter Brian has brought up a disturbing point about the segment of male society to which he has referred. That being, that it seems as though certain men can’t “respect” a woman who has sex.
One online dictionary simply defines “cunt” as a term applied to women who are a source of sex.
“Bitch”, it would appear, is a term reserved for sexually assertive women. In other words women who may flirt with a man, and then decide that he’s not worthy of her sexual attention, or rather of her sexual “favors”, a woman who doesn’t easily “come across with the goods”.
“Whore”, would seem to apply to women who choose to have sex with men of means (whether in exchange for actual cash, or because he can provide her with property such as access to an expensive automobile, or a big home in the suburbs, or a gold credit card).
“Slut”, seems to be a term applied to women who have such a healthy sex drive, that they actually want to repeat the sexual experience on some sort of a regular basis if possible, and (gasp) may not have settled on only forever having sex with that one first boy to take her virginity in the back seat of his car on prom night.
Personally, I have WAY more respect for a woman who may have “shopped around” a bit, than I do for the “frigid” or “goody-two-shoes” variety that some men want to place on some sort of pedestal.
The aspect that sexual women are undeserving of men’s respect is preposterous.