Naomi Wolf’s ridiculous, blissfully data-free piece on how teh pr0n is leaving guys uninterested in actual sex with real women has already come in for a well–deserved bludgeoning, but a couple more points worth making. First, the idea that guys are opting for unrealistic fantasy-women over the genuine article seems to run counter to the big trend in porn of the last few years, which is the explosive growth of alternaporn: sites like Burning Angel and Suicide Girls or directors like Eon McKai (all of these, needless to say, NSFW). This suggests that there’s a substantial number of porn consumers who’d rather fantasize about the kind of girl they might meet at a local bar than about some siliconated caricature—that they’re trying to more closely approximate the real erotic experience they’re not having.
Also, a minor point, but one piece of evidence (one of astonishingly few) Wolf cites for the baleful influence of porn is that:
In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.
It strikes me there’s a perfectly functional explanation for this in light of the documented trend of teens and twenty-somethings substituting reciprocal oral sex for penetrative intercourse. If I can go a little blue for a second here: If you expect a large proportion of your sex life to involve someone going down on you, why wouldn’t you (whether you’re male or female) be more likely to keep the business trimmed so as to make that more appealing to the other party? Sure, this trend might be partly porn-related, but it might also be a sign women are getting more head, which seems like (if you will) a blow for gender equality.
6 responses so far ↓
1 LP // May 31, 2007 at 5:02 pm
What do you think Wolf makes of the “Porn Up/Rape Down” hypothesis, based on the idea that the men who bypass actual women in favor of submissive porn actresses are exactly the kind of men who might be inclined to act out those fantasies forcibly, if they weren’t continuously available via the internet?
2 Dave W. // May 31, 2007 at 7:25 pm
“adult pubic hair” as opposed to . . .?
3 stuart // Jun 1, 2007 at 6:47 am
Are 14 year olds adult?
Quirk related point (you started it); it wasn’t really needless was it?
4 Julian Sanchez // Jun 3, 2007 at 11:21 am
“it wasn’t really needless was it?”
No, but I didn’t meant to give the impression that I was trying to purge my writing of every expression that’s not literally true. There are plenty of deliberate falsehoods I want to keep.
5 kate // Jun 5, 2007 at 6:02 pm
The original piece is 4 years old. Why are people ranting about this now?
6 Julian Sanchez // Jun 5, 2007 at 7:42 pm
I think someone just happened to link it and set off a feeding frenzy–it’s quite possible it already got adequately thrashed the first time around.