Generally I shy away from popular magazines, specifically men's magazines. Living with my parents though, my bathroom is stocked with Maxim, Cigar Aficionado, and Details, my Dad's favorite magazines. When I forget to bring a book into the bath with me, I will wave my white flag and page through one of the afore-mentioned magazines while I let the tub fill up around me. I never read Maxim, the cover alone gets my skin boiling and Aficionado might as well be called WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE. So, generally I succumb to reading Details, in a pinch.
I found myself paging through this magazine in the bathtub last week and came across an article called "Generation XXX" in the September 2009 issue. Intrigued by the sub -headline ("Forget awkward fumblings in the back of the bus, Junior's thinking more along the lines of reverse-cowgirl anal. Raised on internet porn, today's teenagers are sowing the seeds of a sexual revolution.") I began to read.
Fury ensued.
I am not new to the fact that porn is available to anyone at anytime. In fact, I write this on my fifteen year old brother's laptop and one of his Google QuickLinks is porntube.com. Never though, have I considered the overwhelming amount of porn and the people who watch it starting a sexual revolution.
This article cites an unidentified study that claims that 90 percent of 8-16 year olds have viewed pornography online. The article then draws the conclusion that "there is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face." A money shot to the face... not exactly what I would consider the building blocks of a sexual revolution.
After doting on how knowledgeable men are about porn the article goes on to quote two 21-year-old college students in Florida. Travis says, "Pubic hair is disgusting. Girls should keep their vaginas porn-star trim. " Again, I must ask, where is the proof of the sexual revolution this sub-headline promised me? Women must keep their vaginas looking pre-pubescent and sex ready. I remember the first time I went bald in 8th grade afraid that at any moment some guy will want to feel me up, and be disgusted that my vagina matches the boobs I have been dealing with since 4th grade. It's been eight years and the only thing that has changed is that I have gotten older, and I am still supposed to front like I don't grow hair?!?!
Cody, presumably Travis' amigo, describes the first time he ever ejaculated on a woman's face. "It was the happiest moment of my young life. There is just something about blowing a load in a chick's face that makes you feel like a man." So, according to the editors at Details magazine, the sexual revolution is that ejaculating all over a woman's face is now a rite of passage all men should expect to hit.
Ignoring that six paragraphs in the author of this article, Eric Spitznagel, defines a sexual revolution one that demeans women and its effects are only felt by heterosexuals with access to porn online, I read on.
My hand was already on the trigger. The virgin (shaved vagina) and the whore (ready and willing AND turned on by taking a "money shot to the face") dichotomy was alive and working in the article. I kept reading. In retrospect, I must have been suicidal. The next paragraph released the safety and I took a bullet.
Eric Spitznagel finally got to the real story. "But boys have always been perverts, " writes Spitznagel, (ahhh, relying on the old "boys will be boys" adage) "since a facial requires a female to receive it, the real story might be in the apparent surge of willing participants."
Ohhhhh. Okay. I get it now, Eric. The story isn't that porn is unbelievably accessible, or that men want to act out what they see, it is that women are also willing to participate....and are empowered by participating.
Spitznagel then quotes 22-year-old Lindsay. "Lindsay sees the act as empowering to women. 'Even if she has eight dicks on her face, she's still the queen of those eight dicks. I definitely like come on the face."
Wow. Having eight dicks on the face is empowering to women?!?! What about receiving quality medical care that would make taking eight dicks on the face safe? What about equal rights? What about representation in government? The revolution at work then is one in which women can be the queen of eight dicks, instead of the President of the United States.
While I personally do not like sperm on the face, I wouldn't doubt that there are women out there who do. Unfortunately I believe that the majority of women (or should I say teen girls, because that is who this article claims is at the foot of the revolution) are not taking a money shot to the face because they like it, but because they now feel that they have to.
Two paragraphs later Spitznagel quotes Joanna Angel, a "veteran porn actress," who describes being taken aback by the skills a new porn actress had her first day on set.
"Then the scene started, and the way she was giving a blow job and the things she was saying, and the way she was moaning--I was like, 'What the fuck?' When I was 19, I was not giving blow jobs that were nearly that exciting. The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready."
Great, the women who are influencing the sexual revolution need to be nineteen and know how to give a blow job well and be completely and utterly excited by it. Straight girls then, must be porn-star ready, a fact Eric Spitznagel also realizes.
"Porn-readiness is now a source of pride [for young girls]" writes Spitznagel. In synchronization with the chastity movement, young girls who wish to have sex must be ready to do it like a porn star. There is simply no grey area. Either today's young girls must be Virgins or Whores masked as Virgins. This article claims that porn-star Jenna Jameson was stunned when 13-year-old girls told her that she was their role model.
Due to my recent enlightenment of the concentration on the virginity/sexuality of young women thanks to Jessica Valenti's brilliant book, The Purity Myth, this article sent me into a frenzy. Young girls today must be ready to have sex, yet keep their gentials looking like they are not old enough to know what sex is. They must know how to give one helluva blowjob and take the cum to the face...and like it. Yet, they are not given proper information on how to have safe sex in schools.
In "Generation XXX" Spitznagel quotes Mary Eberstadt a Former State Department stagger in which she compares attitudes about porn to attitudes about tobacco in the 1960's. She claims that since there is a want in the public to be seen as cool, and since porn is seen as cool, there is no reason to make a public issue about porn consumption.
Great. So there is absolutely no reason to be pissed about the sexpectations young women have due to the porn industry?! I find this the most alarming. We are to turn a blind eye to the porn industry and the effects it has on young women, yet make no changes in the quality of sex education young women receive. Furthermore, we are to turn a blind eye to the fact that young women, young girls, are finding empowerment in having eight penises in their faces, not empowerment in the statistics in which they are attending college at record-breaking rates and in their lifetime they saw the first woman presidential candidate.
Finally, this article features a picture of a young girl in a hot pink bra on a wet bed, suggestively licking her lips, covered in silly string that is presumably supposed to look like cum. The caption on this article reads, "Mission Impossible: Forget locking up your daughters--they'll just fire up the webcam. Yet, tells these same fathers that they will be missing out on all the fun that younger boys are having. Great, end on the note that they must lock up their daughters, yet still covet the sex that boys are having with other men's daughters.
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Mm, sounds like the 60's all over again. Women are now free to shed their repression and put out for men.
Doesn't sound very liberating, does it? Now you "have to" do this, that and the other. What do guys have to do? Nothing. They just don't feel the same pressure, Dan Savage's column notwithstanding. Feeling pressured to do anything sexually is oppressive. Period. The revolution in question is only for guys.
It's so frustrating that so many people simply expect women to do these degrading things. It seems to be the norm now. I am a virgin and I'm so worried that the first time I'm with a guy he'll think I need to fuck like the women in porno. Can you say Performance Anxiety?
What do guys have to do? Nothing. They just don't feel the same pressure
Nobody? Nobody's gonna even touch this?
That's pretty absolute. Guys do feel pressure. What evidence at all do you have to postulate otherwise? Of course they're probably not the ones engaging in acts described in the article, but I'm just guessing on that one, maybe those also feel the pressure, who knows.
I do agree that on average the pressure is indeed less.
But.. you can't blame porn for ANYTHING! Only the assholes who are affected by it can be blamed, and even then, porn isn't part of the equation, just the fact that people suck. Even without porn the way it is in the mainstream now, all those men would have thought to feel empowered by giving facials on their own, and women would feel that to be empowered was to have 8 dicks in their face on their own! Porn has nothing to do with it! Porn is NOT like other forms of media, people realize it is fantasy and don't think about it when they aren't looking at it!
I am so happy that my fiancee never found the money-shot to be a big turn on, and I am just as happy that he sees pubic hair as a *good* thing.
I think part of the problem though is that now children have access to porn, and unlike adults, they have a harder time recognizing fantasy from fact. Not everyone realizes that it's fantasy, and I think that's part of the issue that the OP is presenting.
I was actually being sarcastic... I wish sarcasm was easier to detect online.
To clarify, I find nothing wrong with people liking to do what actors do in porn, but I do have a problem with people saying "fuck you for being analytical about sex and desires," or having that attitude. I was simply trying to say that people should be more open to being critical about porn, instead of treating it like a spoiled child and ignoring when it could be having a negative effect. Obviously people can do what they want with proper consent, but we should realize how things like porn can shape consent and how people .
With regards to your comment, I think people of all ages have trouble realizing it's fantasy, not just kids. I completely agree with the OP. ^_^
Thanks for the clarification, I agree completely with your comment here.
I'm sorry, that should read "porn can shape consent and how people define consent." Also things like what people think they SHOULD be enjoying or are weird for NOT enjoying.
The sarcasm was not lost on me. Great post. ;)
Well you can't blame porn for the problems but you can blame the people who view that as fact in regards to sexuality. Alot of people think what they see in porn as how women want to be treated in bed. Worse yet I'm dating someone who thought what he saw in a hentai (drawn) porn was pleasurable to females. He was 22 at the time. So it's not just kids, it's adults too who have trouble with reality vs fantasy.
I'm nearly 49, have dated men in
their fifties who have the most
bizarre ideas about women's sexual
pleasure that can only have come
from porn. I try to be open-minded
about porn, but it's almost
impossible given the way it almost
always distorts how women enjoy sex.
A man (I wish I could remember his
name!) once said that pornography
"tells lies about women and the truth
about men." These days, those are
some pretty harsh truths.
That was John Stoltenberg, I believe.
Actually, I read somewhere that teens are looking at porn less than in the past because why look at porn when you can join a dating website and get the real deal?
In other news, Men's Health magazine is AWESOME. And I love reading it even though I'm a girl.
I have subscriptions to mens magazines and love alot of the topics. (sigh) If only womens magazines could have the same topics and layout. However, I dont trust mens magazines to be 100% safe from misgynistic blather. Alot of masculinity is built off of insecurity and proving youre not 'a woman.' So theres going to be alot of 'how to make yourself a manly man' or 'things every guy should do' crap. Women who go outside the gender binary in magazines are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
As much as this summary of the article disturbs and offends me, I think it's important to note the source of the article.
It's an over-privileged men's mag. I think they're trying to be titillating. And I doubt they have very good sources. College boys, who are probably just randoms who were happy to agree with what the article's writer wanted (keep in mind, there are a lot of college-aged men out there)... Porn stars (as well as aspiring porn stars) whose job is to sell a single, overwhelmingly boring/degrading style of sexuality.
I do think that there are some pretty serious issues with the porn industry (similarly, current mass media in general) - but consider that we* are the generation that the writer is talking about. We're not exactly the mirror image this guy's talking about.
*by "we" I mean those of us who are highschool-college/university aged.
...I should proof-read, that final sentence should read "We're not exactly the mirror image of this guy's article"
Porn, for the most part, is like the McDonald's of sex.
I like that quote.
I certainly hope that the article in question is bunk. I would be disturbing if it represented a large trend. Though I wouldn't be surprised at the attitudes of many young people. If someone gets exposed to a lot of porn right when puberty hits they're likely to get confused. Unfortunately with parents being too embarrassed, schools skimping on sex ed, many guys exposure to what sex is actually like comes from free internet porn, 90% of which is somewhere between nonsense and disturbing.
I certainly hope that the article in question is bunk.
I do too. It's also interesting that of late (meaning the last 5 years) there are a plethora of NiceGuy tm articles about men complaining that they can't get laid at all.
Two extremes of a supposedly masculine perspective are getting a lot of airtime: High-fivin' quasi oldschool players-with-new-bases-to strive-for bragging about pushing boundaries (at least in their mind)
or they can't get laid period---in the land of never ending rejection.
And note that in both of these instances, women are not talked about in positive terms.
I see these types of articles as the final grasps fighting to maintain women as the dreaded sexual gatekeeper so that last holdouts can blame someone else when they fail; or so they can have a series of ever increasing challenges and boundaries to overcome to feed a frail psyche that has been gingerly constructed out of fantasies and distortions about sexuality.
When will these magazines start talking about how porn aesthetics seem to be affecting younger men and boys as well? In at least 1 survey I found online, 1/3 of girls and 1/4 of boys admitted to sending someone nude or semi-nude compromising photos of themselves? And roughly equal numbers of teen boys and girls when asked in surveys report being pressured to do sex stuff that they weren't comfortable with.
This is hardly anybody's revolution. Sounds like a de-evolution.
Ew. That's all. Have you ever talked to your father about reading this stuff? I'm wondering what he, as part of the target audience, thinks about it...
I have subscriptions to mens magazines and the misogyny always pisses me off. I read that article too and hated it. Nothing wrong was seen with things like "While on tour promoting her memoir Jenna Jameson was reportedly stunned that 13 year old girls kept telling her that she was their role model," or "In a survey of 1000 British girls between the ages of 15 and 19 roughly 25 percent said they aspired to become professional lap dancers" or Joanna Angel's of BurningAngel.com remarks about the 19 year old girl doing the porn shoot and her amazing blow job talent. This misogynistic trend was completely glossed over. The skills of the guys werent important, maybe because its not a reciprical trend? Did you enjoy "The Rise of the Lesbro?" Complete shit, but its the only magazine that features interesting articles on work, autmotives, technology gadgets and adventure stories. Except for Bitch, Ms. and Bust most mainstream womens magazines aspire for pats on teh head by the patriarchy. I would like something that wasnt fluff, or only about fashion. For twenty somethings its fashion for older women its housekeeping.
Yea, I agree. Not a whole lot of quality mags for women out there. Hm, Cosmo, tabloids, Home and Garden, Vogue etc...no thanks.
Gawd, its like the 50's. It reminds me of when I was in Girl SCouts and found Boys Life (teh magazine for boy scouts) to be way more stimulating than Girls Life. Or your troop would be working on the 'beauty badge' (even though I protested) and you'd look over in envy at the Boy Scouts a table over and see them racing their wooden cars.
Ohhhh man I am so mad I was in girl scouts instead of boy scouts. Boy scouts get to learn to do shit like build fires and make lean to's... You know what I learned in girl scouts? How to make a yarn doll.
--Now I'm not trying to hate on the fiber arts, I love sewing, embroidery and knitting, but knowing how to make a yarn doll is not gonna save me if I'm stranded in the woods. I wish I had known about the Venture Scouts when I was at the right age for that.