Gay porn can make you objectify both men and women
‘Gay pornography’ explores recent territory
Wednesday, January 13, 1999
‘Gay pornography’ explores new territory
FILMS: Audiences may be shocked by sense of identity, sexuality
in male cinema
We Bruin cinema buffs are regularly pleased to see our fair
campus as it appears in various movies. We are all too aware,
however, that UCLA, recognizable as it is, usually plays the role
of some fictional university. Rare are the films that genuinely
take place at UCLA. I possess recently discovered a certain screen gem
that does exploit UCLA as its setting, and it is with wonderful joy that I
share this serendipitous find.
In the motion picture, a young gentleman, Chad Hunter, leaves his buddies behind
in some vanilla, middle-American hamlet to enroll at UCLA. His
major is film, but he has no patience to wait for graduation before
making his first film. Chad’s voyeuristic tendencies and his
housemate’s penury cause him to start a cottage industry: Chad
videotapes fraternity brothers, swimmers and football players as
they enjoy each other’s bodies. Chad’s housemates wind up enjoying
the budding cinematographer’s young body for good measure.
Th
Thehigh-profileand research-based marital therapist, John Gottman, wrote an start letter in April naming porn usage as a threat to couple's love following April's Time Magazine cover story, "Porn and the Threat to Virility." Dr. Gottman has jumped on the bandwagon since the Utah State Senate declared porn to be a public health crisis.
His words caught my attention because Dr. Gottman once wrote after a ten-year study on gay and lesbian couple, that unbent people could learn a lot from gay people. I think this is one area that confirms this analysis because most gay men and lesbians do not experience porn as a problem in their relationships. This is glaringly missing from his open letter, so I thought I would divide my own thoughts about this.
First, his exploit of the word "using" porn rather than "viewing" porn caught my attention. How we talk about things frames how we think about things. Referring to it as "using" makes it sound love an addiction, and that everyone watching porn is a potential addict. Unfortunately, many people see it as such. However, one size does not fit all, although some books and various research seems to support this view. However, lik
Male Sexual Shame and Objectification of Women
As the revelations about male sexual harassment and assault continue, many men are surprised at its pervasiveness, but women are not. Even if never overtly harassed or assaulted, they’ve experienced the destructive effects of sexual objectification, including abuse and violence, eating disorders, body shame, depression, risky sexual behavior, and sexual dysfunction. However, both men and women are largely ignorant of the damaging impact on men that a culture of male superiority can cause. It causes shame to both men and women.
Sexuality brings abundant opportunities to exaggerate both our vulnerability and shame, to feel pleasure and close, but also to feel unworthy, unacceptable, and unlovable.
Shame and Manhood
Boys must separate from their mothers to establish their masculinity. To accomplish this task, they look to their father, peers, and cultural standards and role models to define what it is to be a man.
Hypermasculinity
Hypermasculinity exaggerates stereotypical male behavior, such as an emphasis on physical strength, aggression, and sexuality. Masculine ideals of toughness, success, and anti-femininity are promote
Source: Paul Dawson and P.J. DeBoy by David Shankbone / Flickr
On the surface, this title may successfully seem baffling—or brainless. And, of course, marked discrepancies do exist between the sexual arousal cues distinguishing gays from straights. But as I’ll be displaying, the major (and tiny recognized) similarities between them ultimately suggest that a gay’s “sexual psyche” is much more complementary to a heterosexual male’s than contrasting to it.
As in other posts in this 12-part series on human sexual desire (of which this is # 9), most of my points will be based on Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s groundbreaking book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment [based on voluminous Internet research] Reveals About Human Desire (2011). Many of these two authors’ findings are controversial—counter to mainstream assumptions and beliefs. Yet the massive evidence they frequently garner to back their contentions compels us to take their conclusions seriously.
Although I’ll be focusing on the similarities that profoundly link gays and straights in what sexually turns them on, I’ll start by enumerating some differences that do in fact separate them. But
Both the left and right wings assert that pornography is reprehensible. Right-wingers, including Catholics who urge that the purpose of sex is to have children (and now, secondarily, to strengthen marriage bonds), are against it because it serves neither the production of children nor marriage (not to mention encouraging the sin of Onan). Left-winters, primarily feminists, insist that it degrades women, but vary in their understanding of how this is so. Is it because the women who appear in straight porn are exploited? Perhaps not more than other people who undertake things for capital they’d rather not do. Because watching pornography encourages rape? It’s proven complex to establish a clear causality. So we tend to be left with something more amorphous: it creates an atmosphere, or a paradigm. It represents sex between men and women where men insert and women are inserted into, where men are typically physically stronger than women, and therefore is reprehensible. Given that most porn watchers are male, the suspicion is robust that this is what men wish to see. They shouldn’t be encouraged.
Clearly this attitude toward pornography presupposes that there are women portrayed for