Grr.

"The Porn Myth," by Naomi Wolf, I found surprisingly infuriating.

Her assertion is that, contrary to what anti-porn activists in the 80s claimed, pervasive availability of sexually explicit media did not turn men into rapacious, pawing beasts who were only capable of seeing women as sexual objects. Instead, she claims, it ended up setting the bar too high. Real women cannot compete with what they see in sexually explicit movies, and this had led to detachment, loneliness, insecurity, separation, etc.

Horse puckey. First of all, if you're going to make an assertion like that, I want to see some psychological and sociological research to back it up. Wolf provides precisely no evidence beyond the dubiously anecdotal to support her claims. It's nothing more than long-winded bias as she has presented it. She assumes her conclusion and then attempts to rationalize it. Bleh. It's all the more telling that she holds up the life of an orthodox jew as the epitome of the sacredness of sex and the ultimate "hot" to share your bedroom only with your husband and your very image (hair, body, etc.) only with your husband. Excuse me? You're honestly going to hold up a culture that defines itself by a fear of sexuality and the female form as the epitome of sexual enlightenment? A culture that almost _defines_ women by their physical appearance by mandating what must be covered?

Fuck.
You.

I don't buy it for a minute. At best, the insecurities that women feel in relation to their boyfriends' porn are, if real at all, self-inflicted. They're assuming that their boyfriends want from them what they want from porn. I don't think that's true. Porn is, at core, a masturbatory aid. It's almost the equivalent of a vibrator. Sure, some couples make porn a part of their collective sex life, but I think for most guys porn is, for better or worse in a world that still stigmatizes the sex drive (while at the same time relying on it for most of advertising, but anyway...), intensely personal. Ask any guy whether he stops jacking off, or even does it less, when he's in a sexually active relationship. I think you'll find that most guys don't, and the reason is that sex and masturbation serve slightly different purposes. One is cooperative while the other is intensely self-absorbed, and quite reasonably so.

Think about it, actually...Wolf seems to be implicitly suggesting that sex is nothing more than mutual masturbation. It's just masturbation that someone else is around to help you with. Is that really true? Is sex nothing more than that? Does she really think so little of men that she believes that's what sex for guys boils down to?

Lastly, whatever additional novelty a nude female body may have held in the pre-porn era is, I think, more than eclipsed by the byzantine notions of a guy's role in sex that were held back then. Remember that this is a world where popular culture didn't even mention the idea that a guy should worry about his partner's pleasure or even that her body might respond sufficiently differently than his own for there to be something to worry about. Maybe there was a brief moment in the 70s after sexual enlightenment but before sexualized mainstream media where you did, in fact, get the best of both worlds, but it seems to be there must be a natural correlation between a culture willing to talk, openly, about issues of sexual satisfaction and one that is more accepting of sexually explicit material.

You can't eat your cake and have it too, boys and girls.