How Porn Debases Men
Try to see beyond the allure, the addictive pleasures of our hypersexual culture. Examine more deeply why porn makes you feel good. Is it just sex, as you might think? It’s not just sex for most of us, if you think that just sex would mean there is a woman present. By just sex, do we mean masturbation is sex?
Masturbation was presented to me as an adolescent as an inevitable reality that only someone destined for mental problems would even seek to avoid. I never thought of it as sex, since sex was something far greater that I was hoping to get to do some day, with a girl who wanted to do it with me.
Is masturbation sex? Here’s a question men should ask themselves: Is masturbation having sex with myself? Just me and my dick, enjoying the purely physical sensation? No, it’s not. You can’t prove this any other way than by not lying to yourself and figuring that you are probably not that much different from most other guys. But who out there is man enough to just lie there, thinking of nothing but hand, cock, and the sensations they provide? What man masturbates with no thoughts of anything but themselves?
Hence, porn. Porn can be completely in the realm of personal fantasy, with no external references except those provided by the world around you. And yet, because these fantasies are not real, they are still porn. Porn can be fantasies of projected wishes of being with someone you love, yet this is still porn. Porn can be any desire that replaces the real presence of another with the imagined presence of another. It’s all abstract substitutions of imagery and imagined actions with actuality.
When I have sex I’m in the moment with someone I’m really into, if not in love with. I can’t invoke the porn feeling of abstraction when I have the actual flesh in front of me. Maybe this has caused problems of arousal for me, maybe this has made it easier for me to be a better lover, maybe this has kept me from invoking that same abstract arousal in another and led to the kind of semi-failure of arousal men fear. But I can distinguish easily between how great sex is with a woman and how masturbation gives me a really mixed bag of chaotic emotions that I find hard to examine, and therefore cannot understand.
Men are ashamed to admit they masturbate. It indicates so many negative things they don’t want to think about themselves that they refuse to even think about consciously, that they typically just avoid the subject completely, with themselves and with anyone who might bring the subject up.
A man who masturbates uses porn of some kind to get himself excited enough to do it and to make himself excited enough to come. Only rarely, in the heat of youth, when hormones flow like flooding rivers, do men ever get excited for no reason and come with little stimulus. Even young men, excited by their ability to come over and over again, will use porn to arouse themselves to higher and higher levels of orgasmic achievement, so that they achieve a state of hypersexual arousal from sheer habit.
Why shouldn’t this all be just fine, the way men like to see it? Why be ashamed? Where’s the negative? The negative is the porn. The negative is the idea that arousal as men know it depends on some kind of imagery or imagined actions in order to take place at all. Men would like to think they are just so incredibly virile that they can have all this sex, and all their masturbation is some kind of practice or some kind of proof that they could do this with a girl, too. But the reality, they suspect, and which I think is horribly true, is that it is the porn that takes them to this level, and that if you take away the porn, you take away much of the ability that porn promises.
Men also feel unloved and unappreciated when they masturbate, of course. They feel like they are going to waste. What a great feeling, what a big hard cock, it feels so good, why isn’t there anyone here to share it with me? They feel reduced to a lower, unlovable and undesirable level. Men who masturbate feel debased by having to resort to masturbation. If they were as great as they wanted to be, they would never have to jack off again. No man can honestly deny this feeling, no matter how hard he tries to hide it from himself.
Next post I will try to explain further how using porn to masturbate debases men, and how this feeling can be turned outward to create a need to debase women, too. Or maybe some of you can help me by leaving comments.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:19 am
Please keep writing, I think you have a very interesting point of view here.
February 4th, 2008 at 9:40 am
A commentator who’s post was deleted noted something like - the urge to use women sexually comes from a sense of entitlement, not from nature. It’s very hard for men to imagine a state of nature when thinking of sex; we are born and raised in a culture predicated on the idea that women are created and exist as sexual receptacles first, and human being some dim and vague second.
Men have created a culture that is increasingly sexual. Religion has served to put a kind of cultural limit to the excesses of artificial desires, but has never really been able to do so, owing to the schizo nature of a male-oriented, male-dominated paradigm that never seeks to understand the central problem of sexual desire being created and continued by the male sense of domination and entitlement being in any way oppressive or immoral. Rather, religion suggests and encourages the idea that sexual desire is created and and continued by female existence, ie walking around being visibly female and thereby forcing men into an arousal they would presumably otherwise never suffer.
One note I need to make is that for men, masturbation is literally drugging yourself with your own hormones. Without making any excuses for men culturally, I will admit that men act exactly like drug addicts when they masturbate to excess. We live in a world without any conception of the idea that perhaps we should admit and deal with the problem of unchecked male arousal and masturbation. Just thinking of it as a problem, and as a central impediment to men understanding and accepting feminism, would be a huge step forward.
Way better than the simplistic moral injunctions of clueless religious censure.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
“But who out there is man enough to just lie there, thinking of nothing but hand, cock, and the sensations they provide? What man masturbates with no thoughts of anything but themselves?”
I am often surprised by how freely our culture accepts the notions of sex as a purely physical act, a mere physiological drive, etc., yet here we have evidence that even masturbation has social aspects. It’s almost as if we are afraid to dwell too much on the idea that the Other exists for then we must acknowledge the humanity of that Other and treat him/her with the respect that demands.
April 5th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Since I am a man, and have been masturbating my whole life, I find I have gone through the gamut of emotional responses to what I do when I do it, and why, and what it means to me. I can never pretend to be free of misogyny myself, since so much of it enters into arousal, much to my own consternation and shame. I could blog about nothing but the politics of male masturbation for years and never exhaust the subject.
I think changing our cultural attitudes about male masturbation could do a lot to decrease misogyny and liberate women. I think it is strongly connected to men’s misperceptions of women. It is how men hypnotize themselves into becoming more and more angry at women.
April 6th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
That’s an interesting idea. I have been wont to think of masturbation as the manifestation and reinforcement of the predominant understanding of sex as misogynistic and power-seeking. What do you think our cultural attitudes about masturbation ought to be?
April 6th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Men and women tend to masturbate differently most of the time, but it seems to me that women are starting to masturbate like men, too. Pornography works, I’ve always noticed, even when someone who dislikes it or is directly degraded by it sees it. It’s the monkey-see monkey-do phenomenon. Coupled with the hypnotic insistence of trying to force yourself to come.
I’m all for a natural outlet for our sex drives, something devoid of exaggeration and desperation. I can see no answer short of masturbation for teenaged boys and young men. Since we need to have some outlet, masturbation makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that when men masturbate to pornography they are teaching themselves to become aroused by artificially extreme sexual situations. Soon, you need this extreme titillation to get off as often as you think you need to get off. Next thing you know, you’re thinking it normal to expect women to do things far beyond the normal bounds of sexual communication in order to get you off because you know pornography far better than human beings.
If men masturbated without pornography, just thinking of their own arousal, enjoying their own dicks and all the feelings of stimulation, not depending on artificial and degrading stimulus to force themselves to come whether they really need to come or not, then I think we’d be closer to normalcy.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:18 am
“If men masturbated without pornography, just thinking of their own arousal, enjoying their own dicks and all the feelings of stimulation, not depending on artificial and degrading stimulus to force themselves to come whether they really need to come or not, then I think we’d be closer to normalcy.”
EXACTLY. Society defines male sexuality as using a woman for sexual pleasure (thanks to porn). Having sex with a woman makes you a ‘real man.’ Whereas a male having sex with a male (which is essentially what masturbation is) makes you no longer male, and it is difficult to be aroused by something that turns your whole identity upside down.
Also, porn turns sex into an act of consumption rather than an act of love. I think masturbation is an important part of a healthy relationship with yourself — you should be able to treat yourself with as much love, respect, and desire as you do your lover. But if sex is an act of consumption, then sex with yourself becomes cannibalism.
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I am VERY happy to have found your blog! I signed up just to comment
do you have a livejournal? I am always happy to meet feminist men. I do believe men can be feminists — I define feminism as the belief that all human beings should be treated with equal respect. Obviously, one’s body parts certainly don’t prevent one from holding that belief.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:59 am
belenen, you are saying some really smart and insightful things there. Noting that masturbation is a man having sex with a man gave me an “a-ha!” moment. Maybe some of the shame men feel at masturbating is from a misogynistic and homophobic undercurrent. God knows it’s no longer about religious shame these days.
There’s a great book for men that’s about porn and how it affects men, that could go a long way to explaining to feminist-friendly men about what they are participating in when they view porn to get off. It’s called “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity”. Don’t read it yourself unless you need to find out how truly sickening the world of porn can be.
For women, an inspiring but extremely passionate little essay by the immortal Catherine MacKinnon “Only Words” will shake you to the core of your soul. She is so incredibly brilliant in her reasoning, and builds her argument so solidly, piece by piece, that the sheer injustice of porn being legal becomes unbearably oppressive yet indisputable. She brought me to tears like three times before I had finished as many pages.
As for men being feminists, that’s something I have figured out just lately for myself. I agree that nobody who considers himself a man can ever be a feminist, and that there is nothing but contradiction in the term “feminist man”. For myself, I don’t care to think of myself as a man. I have the male sex parts, I conform to the patriarchal norms I probably shouldn’t, but I don’t want any part of masculinity and the so-called privileges that come with it. I just want to be a human being.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
That book has been on my wishlist since I read some excerpts of it a while back — I try to space out my depressing reading material so as not to overwhelm myself, but I think it will be very enlightening when I do read it.
and I added “Only Words” to my wishlist also, on your recommendation
“I don’t care to think of myself as a man”
YESSSSSSSSS. OMG yes. I consider myself genderfree — I may have female parts and be treated as a ‘girl/woman’ by society, but I am not a girl/woman, I am a PERSON. And I view all people this way and try to speak and live accordingly (which has created a LOT of annoyance, mainly among my more sexist friends).
though I have to say I find it a little ironic that you recommended one book for males and a different one for females.
I can see the reasoning behind it, but I think that it is important to know how porn affects men whether you happen to have the same experience/body or a different one…
I think that I can understand a male human’s pain at being an unwilling oppressor (though I feel it differently of course) and I think that males can understand a female human’s pain at being oppressed. I used to be of the opinion that women suffered so much more that men’s suffering hardly mattered, but then I thought about how I would feel if I were male — being trained in such emotionally restrictive, lonely ways, feeling like I was never allowed to be vulnerable, hiding my feelings and having hardly anyone reach out, and then when I finally stop being numb, realizing that I am participating in hurting others simply by being part of a destructive structure, that even if I am the most enlightened and equalist person people will still see me as sexist, AND people see me as less of a person because supposedly my biology makes me insensitive/selfish/uncreative/unexpressive/animalistic/a rapist/etc — that is also a lot to overcome. I now feel that people suffer equally from sexism whether they are female or male — society cripples us all.
July 26th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I agree completely. I think men should read both books, which I should have made clear. And women can read whatever they want without ever needing me to guide them.
Male supremacy ends when masculinity ends, which makes teaching men about feminism a part of overthrowing oppression.
My experience has shown me that men can feel annoyed by all the things that you call oppressive, but being that they are still on the top of the shitpile of patriarchal culture, they can’t really feel oppressed since they are only oppressing themselves. It’s your innate kindness that projects this feeling onto them, I suspect, and I find it more admirable than anything else.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Well, men don’t suffer in an oppressed way, true, but they do suffer from sexism. I don’t think that they actually feel the sting of it until after becoming aware of how much women suffer and are oppressed, which is an odd irony. There’s the fake ’suffering’ where women supposedly have ‘power of the pussy’ as you pointed out, and then there is the suffering an aware, compassionate human being feels when ze realizes ze has hurt / is hurting others. And I know some of this is just me imagining how I would feel, but some of it is what I have heard/felt from feminist males that I know, such as my partner and another close friend of mine. So yeah, that’s a rambling way of saying “men are not oppressed, but are yet harmed by sexism.”
I think it is just as damaging for a child to learn that ze is better than others by simple fact of body shape/skin/size as it is for a child to learn that ze is lesser. Do you know what I mean? obviously the oppressor has all the material perks, but they aren’t really positive when you consider the price of harming others. Hm. I feel like I am not explaining this very well. I suppose it comes down to a philosophy of mine — that by harming others you yourself are harmed, and that one cannot gain any true joy by harming others. The ‘joy’ some get from harming others I would call false, like the ‘joy’ that comes from intoxication. Oppressors like Hugh Hefner are constantly drugged with lust and power but they are not happy. Not that we should allow them to continue harming others! But just to realize that they are not to be envied.
Sorry if this is incoherent — I haven’t really put this into words before so it’s a little disorganized.
October 14th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Post deleted! By request of the commentator. I also took the name out of my response to your deleted post, just in case.