Every time I hear stupid shit about how women are only stimulated by the emotional, not the visual, I want to set things on fire. Like I said in my last post on the subject, it’s not some mysterious inability to get turned on by pictures that prevents women from enjoying porn, it’s the fact that most mainstream straight porn sucks. The first porn I ever found that did anything for me was gay porn.
Speaking of gay porn, one of my favourite pictures is called “Room with a View” by Benoit Prévot. I don’t have permission to use it here, but you can find it in the Tom of Finland Foundation erotic art gallery (scroll down, it’s near the bottom of the page). Why do I like this one so much?
For starters, it’s a picture of an attractive (to me, anyway) man who’s partially undressed. What’s not to like about that? I actually really like pictures that leave something to the imagination. Sometimes it’s more fun to think about what you’re missing than to see everything. I also have a thing for well-dressed men, and the man in the picture was wearing quite a nice outfit before he started taking it off. Even better, the picture shows what I like most about a well-dressed man – upending the power differential his clothing implies. Ten minutes earlier, he was probably the picture of masculine power. Now he’s a wreck, so overcome by lust he couldn’t even wait to get completely undressed.
Which is the other thing I really, really like about this picture. Not only does it show someone desperately turned on, but it shows someone helpless in the face of his lust. From the way he’s hiding beside his window, you can guess he’s doing something he’s not supposed to. He knows he shouldn’t, but he just can’t help himself. There’s nothing not hot about that. And of course it gives me a starting point for all kinds of fun blackmail fantasies. What? Who doesn’t enjoy a little blackmail now and then?
It’s certainly problematic that most of the porn I like doesn’t even have women in it, let alone women like me, but you can’t deny that gay men get how to make men sexy in a way that straight male porn producers just don’t. Straight guys, if you’re going to feel threatened by gay men, feel threatened because they’re better at turning straight women on than you are.
“Straight guys, if you’re going to feel threatened by gay men, feel threatened because they’re better at turning straight women on than you are.”
Ohhhh, apply ice to WELL-DESERVED BURRRRN.
That IS a hot picture. IN ADDITION to all the righteously hot stuff you pointed out, to me, it looks like he JUST ducked back around, out of view . . . and the couple he’s watching? They might know he’s there — the man standing, and the angle of his head and what we can see of his expression imply, to me, that he might. There’s all kinds of layers to it that are appealing.
I mostly watch only gay porn these days. For three years I “reviewed” straight and gay porn sites for money. I was paid to write the review, which wasn’t, really. I wasn’t supposed to be too critical. (Yes, I hated that part. I also really fucking needed the money.) But, still, ten bucks a pop and membership to the sites for a month. Not bad. It was a broad sampling of sites, everything from gross gonzo porn to Bangbus style “coercion” porn, couples-oriented sites, girls-on-girls only (not lesbian porn, girls on girls . . . FOR DUDES) specialty kink sites (cakesitting!), on the het end, and an equally wide selection of gay porn.
And after I quit that job I pretty much stopped watching het porn because I was just sick of how bad it was. I realize there’s good stuff out there, I have no problem with porn as a genre (I write it, FFS), but it’s saturated with awfulness — and that’s a problem. That’s why it doesn’t appeal to women. That’s why I watch gay porn, or genuinely amateur porn (not “amaetur” porn, The Genre). Because after three years of exposure to gay porn, you know what I learned? Anal fisting: not my thing, and sneaker fetish stuff: benign but incomprehensible. It might have bored me, but it never made me ANGRY.
I mean, humans are highly visual creatures. And that’s supposed to suddenly change when it comes to fucking? I don’t THINK so. If we aren’t getting turned on by visual porn, that’s because THAT PORN isn’t turning us on, not because we aren’t turned on by things we watch/see. Every time someone repeats the “women aren’t visual” canard, a part of me writhes thorny tentacles in fury. Give us something to be visual about, motherfuckers, and I will SHOW YOU VISUAL.
Also, demonstrating the level of stupidity we are talking about.
A review of 300. The movie. With the shirtless due in manties running around and looking well-oiled and possibly gropeable.
Male reviewer: “Women are apparently seeing this movie in droves. It’s the strong female characters.” No mention of mostly naked dudes. No mention at all. Saw this several times. Fucking. Oblivious. (For that matter, no mention that women like action movies, too — also bullshit.)
Oooh, I was so focused on the guy in the foreground I didn’t notice that. I’ll have to take another look 🙂
That’s what makes me so sad about the current state of porn. It could be so good! And it’s not like sexuality isn’t fascinating. But instead we get all this crap that revolves around the almighty penis. It’s just one more thing (stupid) people use to “prove” that women just don’t like sex that much – after all, if we liked sex, wouldn’t we like porn too?
I don’t even… Seriously, how is not obvious what women like about that movie? Speaking of which, I should re-watch it sometime.
That is a really excellent point. Humans are extremely visual, why on earth would only men respond sexually to visual stimuli?
This made me laugh for the truthy truth truth truth truth TRUTH! Fucking hell!!
I get ridiculously stupid over men I find beautiful. Like brain-stutteringly, ridiculously, idiotically stupid.
Like Naamah said: “Give us something to be visual about, motherfuckers, and I will SHOW YOU VISUAL.”
Give me something to get stupid over, and I’m there. Again and again. I will appreciate the fuck out of it.
Ferns
I guess that what you and other women want from porn are beauty, eroticism, and vulnerability. This is to be applauded.
As one feminist writer puts it, “Sexuality can be as much a place for male as for female vulnerability.”
Can be, but all too frequently isn’t. Which is why 99% of porn, even supposedly femdom porn, is so bad.
Actually, what I want to see in my porn is sexual violence of the kind where a fabulously beautiful man is treated like a ‘thing’, helpless under the onslaught that arises out of her desire, where he is used for her pleasure. Where she uses him to get off in whatever way she wants, and his orgasm is NOT the point. Where he is the victim and object of her crazy lust and passion that is enacted in terrible ways on him. Where he hates it, where we get to see his fear and violation and helplessness, and he is broken, and he loves it.
In short: I just want to see stuff that turns me on.
Gay porn and M/f porn: Yeah, they both do it better, just with the wrong protagonists.
Ferns
Vulnerability is a huge part of what turns me on, but I also need it to be the focus. Sure, the men in femdom porn are technically vulnerable, but it’s so clearly an afterthought that it doesn’t do much of anything for me.
Oh my fucking god that would be amazing! I would love to see some porn that not just a countdown to ejaculation.
Yep. At least in gay and M/f porn the top is interested in the bottom, who is actually shown as desirable.
Thanks for that Ferns. Brilliant. Agree with every word. To use Yeats’ words from another context, “…and a terrible beauty is born.” If you want to include it at within the concept of ‘vulnerability’, then that’s fine.
Oddly it reminds me of a line from a children’s book by Maurice Sendak, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’:
“And the Wild Things said, ‘Oh please, don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.'”.
One of the reasons you may prefer gay porn is that it is missing an inherently threatening element that pervades pretty much all straight smut. Almost without exception, straight porn victimizes women. Women are the sex objects men view the porn to see. Even very straight up fuck porn, where the woman and man seem to be of relatively equal standing in terms of initiating and carrying out a sex act, the balance is thrown off because the viewers, primarily male, become the bukkake gang, spewing their loads at seeing the woman being well and thoroughly fucked by their surrogate, the male star. In fact, even in BDSM porn where the man is a whipped dog, thoroughly abused by five dominatrices, the women are still the trained monkeys of the piece, pretty much like pro domes who are controlled by the wishes of their client. Gay porn takes the targeted woman out of the mix. Top, bottom or equal, any man in the movie can be your personal sex object and women are safe from aggression.
Giggity. Ladies are getting onto gay pr0n the way we guys like girl-on-girl. 🙂
You said in your last post on-topic: “The men are treated as a necessary evil, to be kept out of the frame as much as possible.” I think there’s something to this in general. There’s something in being an observer of porn of wanting to erase or minimize the role of the supposed “subject” you’re supposed to identify with who is interacting with your preferred gender/object, probably because most of porn’s potential audience can’t or won’t identify with porn actors who don’t look a thing like them. Taken to it’s extreme, the intended audience’s assumed general is erased altogether, and it’s straight(?) women enjoying gay porn or guys enjoying girl-on-girl.