Hot Porn, Girl on Girl, XXX, Hardcore

The title is a little experiment to see how many more blog views I get with a headline like that. I will report back my findings next time. To those who have landed here by mistake: I am genuinely sorry to have wasted so much precious wank time.

But it also leads neatly into my theme for today. Yes boys and girls, today we’re talking porn. The launch of this fantastic site has people seething and spitting all over the UK as opinions are hurled like molotov cocktails over the well-worn barricades of gender, morality and political correctness. Porn, it seems, is divisive.

The usual arguments are present, appeasers vs Andrea Dworkin-esquers, the ‘not all porn watchers are bad’ line, and the ‘shouldn’t we focus on something else and stop talking about this subject because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable’ approach. In the Mad Max style post-apocalypse of the sexual revolution, it is definitely not cool to be anti-porn.

So the anti-porn men project is a breath of fresh air. It aims to be a collection of articles written by ordinary men which delves into both their personal experiences of the effects pornography has had on their own sexuality, and the cultural pervasiveness of an industry that, like rats in London, we are never more than a few metres away from.

Feminists have been disregarded, ignored and discredited if they’ve shown the slightest signs of an anti-porn stance for years. It is regularly waved as proof that the feminist movement is anti-man, because why would a woman want to deny a man sexual pleasure from the ritual humiliation of a complete stranger unless she was a total bitch, probably fat, who is jealous of pretty young girls that choose to make their living prostrating themselves subserviently before an endless supply of well-endowed men.

There are so many layers to the anti-porn argument that I don’t even know where to start. According to Naomi Wolf, we are merrily wringing out the last drops of authentic human sexuality as men and women alike turn to the pornographers to tell them what to do, how to do it, when, where and for how long. All sense of genuine spontaneity is lost as we solitarily figure out what scene we’re acting today, and as the real eroticism of sex is unrelentingly pummelled by the terrifying perfection of porn, the possibility that this generation will never know sexual connection beyond the readily available fantasy worlds of Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Hefner becomes frighteningly real.

So seeing men come out and explain why they won’t be subscribing to this seemingly unstoppable juggernaut is magnificent. Not only because it gives voice to a perspective that ‘lad’ culture has effectively suppressed for years, but also, in its attempt to introspectively interrogate personal motivations for porn use, it asks us all to open our eyes to a hyper-sexualised world that stealthily steals true eroticism and replaces it with a sanitized, synthetic sex we’d be better off without.

Advertisement