Some issues with pornography

A couple of initial caveats:  First, due to the topic, this post will contain some fairly explicit references to sex acts, something I don't often have on this blog.  Readers who are uncomfortable with such references may prefer to skip this post.

Second, this is not a call to ban pornography.  As a free-expression absolutist I oppose such efforts, and my policy of deleting all comments which support censorship (or try to argue that banning porn would not constitute censorship) applies to this post as it does to others.  That's not what this is about.  The proper way to deal with expression you don't like is not to ban it but to do your own expression to explain why you don't like it, and that's what I'm doing here.

I do not have any objections in principle to the general concept of pornography in the sense of explicit depictions or descriptions of sex.  What bothers me about the pornography we actually have is that most of it depicts sex in ways that are ugly, formulaic, unrealistic, disgusting, dull, devoid of affection, and sometimes cruel.  I'm not talking about niche genres such as bondage, S&M, etc.  I'm talking about the nearest one can easily find to what purports to be "ordinary", normal, "vanilla" sexuality.  I don't claim to have made a systematic study of the subject; this post is all based on what I've seen during casual searches on the internet (yes, I have as much interest in sex as men normally do, and I sometimes have gone looking for such material, though for reasons that will become obvious, I hardly ever do so any more).

There is an odd pervasiveness of behavior which is more just peculiar than erotic, such as slapping the penis against the woman's face or body.  There's usually a rote, by-the-numbers succession of awkward, uncomfortable-looking sexual positions.  Oral sex is often depicted to suggest the penis is being shoved all the way into the woman's throat, which would surely cause gagging or choking in reality.  Everywhere, anal anal anal is thrown in your face relentlessly.  I've even seen some porn videos in which condoms were used.  The man very often slaps, chokes, hair-pulls, or otherwise physically abuses the woman.  The slapping is sometimes hard enough to leave a red mark on the skin.

(Most porn sites have helpful categories like "gangbang", "pissing", "double penetration", "incest", "fisting", etc.  I don't recall ever seeing a category like "abuse-free" or "normal" or whatever they would call it.  On one site I saw a "romantic" category, but the material there was just like all the rest.)

Performers on video often have tattoos or piercings and the males are sometimes seriously overweight.  I know hiring is a challenge these days, but this is a genre in which the physical attractiveness of the actors is a legitimate issue given the nature of the product being produced.

There is almost never any suggestion of love or affection, and only the most threadbare and perfunctory effort to show who the characters are or why they are having sex with each other.  If there's dialogue at all, the vocabulary is the most vulgar, obscene, and degrading possible.

Finally, in most videos, the man pulls out before orgasm and ejaculates externally, often on the woman's face or body.  In the rare cases where this doesn't happen, the camera almost always zooms in on the vagina afterward to show semen oozing out.

If there is a more effective formula than this for wilting away whatever nascent arousal led the viewer to seek out the material in the first place, I have a hard time imagining what it might be.

As I say, I don't object to pornography on principle.  Genuinely erotic, affectionate, realistic sex scenes would actually interest me, and you occasionally see such scenes in mainstream movies or on small niche sites, but on major porn sites they don't seem to exist.

Is such an abusive and degraded vision of sexuality what the market wants?  If so, this has disturbing implications.  Or is it just a set of conventions which has become entrenched and porn hounds watch it because it's all they can get?  Maybe the audience for porn consists only of whatever fraction of the male population has a fetish for this kind of stuff?  I can't claim to know.  But it's disappointing that our society's strong protections for freedom of expression have, in this area, enabled only such limited and repulsive results.