The Apology of Pornsick Pat
Pornsick Pat will be a popular fellow with commentators, I assume. Everybody loves to complain about porn, or else they love to defend it. It’s kind of scary, but I’m going to attempt to write in the voice of a typical male porn user. Scary, but also easy, since I used to use porn myself and I know all too well how terrible it is for men.
How terrible it is for women is the point of most feminist discussions of porn, as it should be. It’s not too hard to convince most women that porn can be at least somewhat unsettling, especially in the early days of the millennium, when what was once considered hardcore is now absolutely mainstream, and what was once considered inconceivable is now the easily-available hard core. But on this blog I will assume that most of the women, at least, will have a high level of intolerance for all the forms of porn out there, if not my own level of semi-militant disgust.
Men who use porn create the problem of porn. There are far too few voices out there telling them why porn might make them sick and reduce their humanity. Feminist women, having even less empathy than most about the lure of porn, might like help with making men see the obvious degradation of porn, and men need to have the opportunity to hear men discuss their problems with porn in a way that encourages them to decrease or understand their problem.
I find it alarming that men get anti-porn messages from the religious right and feminists only. It used to be normal to see porn as degrading, because what is now seen as a matter of relative degradation was once a categorical label.
Pornsick Pat will defend porn in the sheepish, half-hearted voice of a man defending the indefensible from a woman he loves. He won’t be unapologetically pro-porn. But he will say, hopefully, most of things you hear from any man when you discover some hidden evidence of his private vices.
October 6th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
I’m glad you’re bringing this up on a blog about what this stuff does to men. I’m right there with Twisty when I’m in her blogspace, in that “Dear God, What About The Men?” should not be the overriding concern of feminists. But I *have* long believed that porn erotically and emotionally cripples men.
And I’m sure that any Pat would happily state (as one male “friend” of mine once said) that, in the context of strip clubs, “women have all the power.” My question is: do they actually believe this?
(Honestly, I’m going to try not to hog all your comment space.)
October 7th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Women do have all the power. The power to make me look at them. They dress up in sexy clothes all the time. What are they thinking? That they want to torture poor little me, Pornsick Pat, with their sexiness.
They have the nerve to run around all over the place looking like women, which is the same as looking like something I have absolutely no choice but to want to strip naked and get busy with. If they would only hide their incredible sexiness under burkhas. Even then, what if they have that fuck me look in their eyes? What If I can feel, through all those layers of cloth, their femaleness even still?
Women have all the power, even in burkhas. Women have all the power because they are things we must look at, whether we want to or not. We men don’t really want to look at women, we would rather be doing something important, like watching sports or drinking beer with our buddies.
There is no way I can ever stop looking at sexy women; and the more I see, the more I want to see. I channel surf and all I see is image after image of sexy young women, sexy young housewives, sexy teens, sexy grandmas… I’m drowning in a sea of sexiness, and you act like it’s my fault that I like it.
I spend tons of money on porn and I’m pretty sure that all those porn models are getting rich off it. So they have the power, the power to make me want to look at them and spend money I don’t even have on getting see more and more of them. Do you have any idea how much it costs to get an advance on your credit card at one of those strip clubs machines at 3 in the morning? That’s the power of the pussy, by god!
October 7th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Men like my buddy Pornsick Pat really do believe that women have all the power, because they have no way of understanding the concept of personal responsibility for emotional responses. They believe it as a child does, with his fingers stuck in his ears, jumping up and down, having a tantrum, when you try to tell him that the sky is blue and he wants it to be green.
The standard response from a man when you tell him he doesn’t have to look at women with unbridled lust whenever he sees one is a blank, deaf stare of denial that instantly flares into anger, either hidden or overt. It’s not about the importance of whether it is true that he chooses to be aroused or not; it’s more important that someone is suggesting that something he enjoys could be limited or curtailed in some way.
Men routinely mistake their privileges for natural rights. It’s my right to look at some slut naked if she wants me to! They’ll tell themselves, and each other, over and over again.
They tell themselves these things primarily because they have no idea, no matter how cleverly you try to describe it, what it is like to be oppressed. And the oppression that women voluntarily embrace for financial gain seems like empowerment to them, because they believe that women enjoy being oppressed, since they identify oppression and female sexuality as being one and the same thing.
October 12th, 2007 at 3:35 am
What about women who like porn? Are they erotically and emotionally crippled as well? Do they need re-programming too?
I have to wonder if you or any of your readers have ever made any home videos with your partners for your own personal enjoyment. I don’t want to know if you have, but I have to wonder. And, if so, is there something wrong with it? Home videos of sex with your committed partner are technically porn, yeah?
What about food porn? If we dig around for a minute, we could probably come up with a whole list of people who’re hurt by it, and reasons why it’s a bad thing.
You can find something morally wrong with just about anything if you put the right goggles on. And then, I suppose, I have to ask how you’re *not* assigning moral stigma to other people’s behavior when you stereotype those who “use” porn. “Use” is a charged word, by the way, and you know it.
Am I defending porn? No. I’m defending human beings’ natural born right to define their lives as they see fit, whether they’re women, men, or living in Urundi Burundi. And, I suppose, one has every right to define one’s live by selectively demonizing certain behaviors and practices of other individuals they don’t even know.
I’ll tell you what really cripples people emotionally and intellectually:
-Ism’s.
October 12th, 2007 at 9:26 am
I have a rule that has always proven true. When someone asks three questions in a row on a blog or email, they are not actually asking questions, but actually making statements they can’t prove or are afraid to assert.
I have known women who claim to like porn. I’ve never personally known a woman who was as addicted to porn as my buddy Pornsick Pat, who can spend hours and hours a week on porn.
The idea that some women are just as bad as men, and therefore it is a universal human trait to be bad, is a good one for my list of things men say to rebut feminist cant. As most unsupportable arguments go, it ignores the reality of whether it is generally true, or if there is a relative truth that is more easily seen as true.
So, since most women don’t like porn - counting all the grannies, middle aged women, children and babies as women, rather than just the tiny set of hot young women you meet in bars - I would tend to accept that the exceptions don’t disprove the rule.
Nobody needs to reprogram. But if you want to better yourself, I believe that reducing the hypersexual nature of our current culture would be beneficial to both sexes. We are all being manipulated sexually by the entire culture, most often for quick and sleazy commercial gain. That’s one aspect of the moral problem I have with porn.
Porn degrades men, as well as women. Or else they would be proud of it, and women would be, too. It’s becoming slightly more common to love porn openly, but when you look at the kind of men who are embracing this truth about themselves I think you’d think twice before aligning yourself with them.
October 13th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
The acceptability of porn is part of the loosening up of sexual mores generally in western society. If porn is more readily available than it used to be, then that is part of a general trend of loosening sexual morality. We live in a society in which most things are tolerated. We don’t persecute people for being homosexual any more. Unmarried mothers do not become social outcasts. A woman is not considered to be unmarriageable if she is not a virgin. Birth control is something that can be discussed openly, and birth control devices can be obtained by single as well as married women. Condoms can be bought openly in chemists instead of furtively in barber’s shops.
The wider prevelence of porn is part of this trend of loosening up of sexual mores. We should consider also that those societies that most rigorously suppress pornography are also those societies that most rigorously suppress women. Porn isn’t tolerated in fundamentalist Islamic societies.
‘Porn’ covers a wide variety of material, some of which is more disturbing than others. A man looking at naked ladies is only doing what most men like to do. A man looking at images of children or animals in sexual situations or something has obviously got problems. I don’t think you can lump it all together as one thing.
Louise
October 14th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
The general loosening of sexual morals has, not by chance, also coincided with the general commercial exploitation of what are visceral, low-level instinctive impulses. Along with the commercial exploitation of us all by manipulating our sexuality by creating fears and doubt; and hyping and exaggerating sexual desires.
Now that we’ve lived through a century or so of ever-loosening sexual mores we are definitely approaching a point at which sex is becoming just as oppressive as the oppression of morality once was. The weight of the expectations of a hyper-sexualized culture is as heavy as any victorian weight of sexual sublimation. Throughout both extremes the common thread is control and dominance of women by men.
The toleration of our society for porn has reached such a fever pitch of sex-crazed enthusiasm that we have women and men both clamoring for a world where men have the freedom to sexually exploit women - either by watching or by directly acting on impulses suggested by pornography.
The fact that our commercially-centered world finds it convenient to sell us whatever caters to our basest and evil impulses doesn’t really offer much consolation to me.