Porn Under a Bad Sign

There's a fascinating running debate at Slate about a couple of new books on the mainstreaming of porn, the "masculinization" of female sexuality, and What It All Means. Laura Kipnis is particularly on point.

A couple observations. Wendy Shalit writes:

Girls today have so much anxiety about appearing "hot" and servicing boys correctly, it never even occurs to them that they should actually experience–or wait for–their own desire. Is this not a problem?

Now, if she's talking about 13 year olds, maybe that is a problem—but she's obviously casting a net that includes college-age women as well. In the rather rhetorical way it's framed, of course, it is a problem, since it's presented as a sort of self-abnegation. But Shalit also seems to be hinting that there's something unsettling about people's wanting to look attractive for members of the apposite sex or wanting to sexually satisfy their partners. Now, I do both these things, and it's never occured to me to regard either as unhealthy or degrading or self-objectifying. It's nice to go out and feel as though you look attractive—whatever your gender. And what would we think of a man who said he wasn't particularly concerned with "servicing" his partner "correctly"? Certainly, there would be a problem if this were a one way street, and it was only women who were thinking about these things—but wouldn't it be a problem with the thoughtless men? (As Kipnis observes, recent data on sexual behavior suggests this isn't the case: Oral sex, for instance, is largely reciprocal.) There's also a strange double standard in play in some of the discussion: The authors of the books being discussed (and Shalit) seem to assume that when women are aggressively sexual, this is a kind of performance to meet cultural expectations; when they exhibit uneasiness with that overt sexuality, they're expressing the true "deep down" feelings an oversexed culture has demanded they suppress. Well, doubtless some are. And doubtless in some cases, it's the other way around. Ambiguous or guilty feelings about one's own sexuality are neither new nor the exclusive province of women, after all.

Ditto with people's desires of their partners, porn-fueled or otherwise. The narrative we get from Shalit focuses on women uncomfortable with partners who want them to (say) shave or accept their porn-viewing. Cross-apply from above: Are we really supposed to be shocked that couples are going to need to work through different sexual desires and expectations, whatever their source? I've had various requests from partners to do things that weren't immediately super-appealing: Some, I discovered I liked; others weren't really my cup of tea, but I'd do because the other person liked them; a couple times, I said I wasn't into it. But I always regarded it as part of the ordinary give-and-take of a sexual relationship, not some kind of strange imposition produced by last week's technologies.

A brief note on the "desensitizing" effects of porn: First, if you find that you prefer sitting at home with a box of kleenex and Field of Reams to sex with a real-live partner, your problem probably isn't porn. Millions of men out there have been exposed to their fair share of porn, and it seems a safe bet that this particular preference ordering has never occured to the majority of them. Second, surely this cuts both ways: If porn can make sex boring through overexposure (so/mehow, I'm not bored yet), or get one partner excited about something the other doesn't want to try, can't it also spice it up? And to the extent porn is causing sexual problems, isn't it, in a sense, weird to focus on the porn and not the men for whom porn consumption is a problem, as though porn were some sort of alien brain-slug that had crawled in through the genitals and taken over the central nervous system? How about a sex-ed curriculum that includes a lesson on reflective, responsbile porn watching?