Perverts and perversity: a 21st century conundrum
My ex boyfriend was a pervert. Not in a bad way, but in that he was obsessed with pornography. He downloaded terrabytes of the stuff (no, I'm not joking), and one of his proudest moments was when he did a search for porn on Kazaa and found he already had everything that came up.
But porn wasn't a sexual thing for him, particularly. It had no place in our sex life. We'd have friends round to watch the weirdest things he found (traffic warden porn, anyone?), and we'd laugh together over dinner while watching midgets covered in whipped cream spank a woman dressed up as a pony. It was an amusement, part of our extensive media library, and that was it.
I never felt threatened by the porn we watched together. Whether it involved BDSM scenes, DVDA (look it up), Jenna Jameson looking stunning, or Tera Patrick at her poutiest, I was comfortable with it. I didn't compare myself to the women on screen, and my cries of 'I want her lips / eyelashes / bleached arsehole' were of the admiringly covetous sort, not the jealous sort.
So why is it that when I discovered a huge pile of back issues of nuts and zoo under my new boyfriend's bed I became paranoid and uncomfortable?
Time for some background. I'm a cyber-goth, and I'm covered in plastic hair, tattoos, and piercings. My ex was a metaller, and similarly pierced and tattooed. My boyfriend, odd as he is when you get to know him, looks very normal. His exes have all looked very normal. All his friends look very normal. Which is all fine. What bothered me was that his porn looked very normal.
I'm a modern woman. I enjoy erotic literature (I'm a bit desensitised to porn these days), and I expect men to as well. I would be more shocked to find that my boyfriend didn't have a secret porn stash than to find that he did.
But I want their porn to have an element of me in it. So bleached blondes with fake boobs are out, and tattooed hotness like the Suicide Girls is in. Fetish porn is great, because the rubber outfits and 9-inch heels are like the rubber outfits and 9-inch heels I wear. While I may not be starring in the porn (and nor would I want to) at least I know that there are reminders of me in it.
More fundamentally than that - to my confidence at least - is the fact that if a man finds fetish and alternative porn attractive, he finds me attractive. To be the first weird girlfriend of a heretofore normal guy with a vanilla porn collection is unnerving. You're never quite sure if you're the life-changing turn on, or the distraction in an inevitable procession of identikit blondes.
But the discomfort I feel from nuts and zoo is yet more fundamental than that - they're not full of porn stars or page three girls. Instead, they're full of normal women, like you and me. Women in their early 20s, working on their careers. Women who take naked photos of themselves and upload them to websites, women who willingly strip off in nightclubs when asked to for the cameras, women who invite these magazines into their places of work and then strip to their underwear for pictures. At work.
What on earth does this say about our generation and our gender? What is it saying about us to the men who read these magazines? You'll just have to wait till next week, when I tackle these very issues.
Kate Walker is now totally confident that her boyfriend thinks she's the sexiest woman to ever have walked the face of the planet. She still hates nuts and zoo.
hmmmmmm. . . .
i see what you're saying about the normal porn when you tread a bit outside of the mainstream in your own preferences (so far as style and the like). i've photographed quite a number of different things, and i've never really felt the need to censor myself or NOT shoot something. . . . typically, i'll have the camera with me every day and if the opportunity comes up to shoot something -- i do it.
maybe it's the same with your boyfriend -- he's just interested in all the different ways people project their own sexuality in the different types of explicit material he can access. hehe, maybe he's only hiding the more traditional porno because that's what he's been doing since he was a younger man. . . or he's not as keen on revealing his interest in the mainstream stuff because it actually doesn't push boundaries (and maybe also perpetuates the issues that you raised about the current generation of women who do capitalize on sex).
hell. . . . i've got a friend that's in the adult film industry (reagan maddux). . . so i think for her (and most people) if they're uninhibited they can find a way to carve out a little money from the cash vaults of the porn empires out there.
anyway. . . i've drank too much rum and i'm rambling. . . .
it was great seeing your site. i've bookmarked it and hope to see more of your writing in the future.
Posted by: michael | April 29, 2007 8:56 PM