Does Porn Degrade?

I contend yes. I contend it degrades everyone who touches it from the model to the director to the distributor to the consumer. Just look at what happens to the societal position of all those who are outed in the porn chain be they working for Vivid or Playboy or JM Productions. As far as degradation goes, what unites the spectrum from Playboy to Extreme Associates is far greater than what divides it.

I don’t believe degradation is necessarily bad. With Dr. Robert Stoller, I believe the desire to degrade, to make dirty, to defile, is essential to all sexual excitement, including that between happily married and very religious people.

As Dr. Stoller put it: "The human species is not a particularly loving species, particularly when it makes love."

One reason that married sex is rarely as exciting as unmarried hook-ups is that it is easier to objectify the other when you have no commitments to them.

One proof of my theory is that many people in porn feel no excitement in watching the pornographic couplings of people they know (because they can no longer objectify their friends).

Holly Randall writes on XPT: "Luke, your reasoning here says so much more about you than it does about porn. Sorry."

Moxie writes on XPT:

Luke is painting with a slightly broad brush, but only slightly. What porn are you people watching? The banner for this board used to be "Whores Degraded Daily". The predominant force in porn is gonzo which consists of recruiting pre-pubescent looking girls, dressing them up in pig tails for movies like "who’s your daddy", "Its a Daddy thing" ect. You think thats not degrading? Then when you have girls that aren’t made out to resemble school girls, they get spit on, slapped, pissed on and take loads on the face and choke fucked until they vomit. Drinking cum from a martini glass, cum fart cocktails, gag factors, blowbangs, bukkakee, gokun, gangbangs. Not degrading? Whats left? Anal, double anal, interracial, calling the performers whores. Is there any porn that is not degrading to the women? Very little that I can see.

The fact is that most of porn today seeks to degrade women. I acknowledge that and thats why we watch it whether consciously or not.

Why porn has gone down this path I don’t know. Perhaps the rise of degrading Gonzo has to do with feminism and the rise of women in the workplace and the sexual harassment culture that makes men afraid to even talk to women in the workplace and essentially feminizes them driving their true feelings underground. Perhaps degrading porn is the outlet for all of that.

Holly Randall posts:

If you are speaking of most of the people here at XPT, who it seems do watch the gonzo type porn, then I can see your point– they do enjoy the harder stuff. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I often do too (but I tread a middle ground, no Meatholes scenes for me, thanks). But if you’re talking to the general public, the kind of porn consumers that DON’T post on chatboards and are a "Vivid-type" porn consumer, then I think it’s a bit off the mark. I don’t know the current ratio of sales in terms of who watches what, but I assume that the general public still favors the "couples-type" movies, such Jenna’s, Wicked’s, etc? As far as I know there is only a small niche of people who watch the Khan Tusion/Max Hardcore movies, but it’s a strong niche, the kind of people who consume a lot more porn than those who purchase a Vivid flick every once in a while. I personally do believe that there is a lot of porn out there that is NOT degrading to women, but you just won’t find the audience for those movies here.

For example, I don’t believe that the porn we produce is degrading to women, because if I did, I wouldn’t have chosen this as my career. My members really glorify the girls I shoot: they want to see them portrayed as strong, sexually powerful women, not pre-pubescent school girls. Which is why we lean so heavily on the glamor aspect, and in virtually every fetish/domination scene we produce, the woman always plays the dominant role. Now that being said, we have filmed scenes where it’s gotten a bit rougher than what we normally turn out, but this has always been at the behest of the girl. I am always adamant that the model is in control of what she is comfortable with, and how she wants to be treated in the scene. I only allow the girls who want to be treated roughly to do so, because I myself enjoy being submissive in bed, and I know it has nothing to do with being unwillingly coerced into such a situation. Nor does it mean that women are generally weak whores, because I’ve discovered that many people’s personalities totally switch when they’re having sex. What is important in these cases is that the viewer can differentiate between fantasy and reality.

…A big inherent problem in human beings is that we are a complex mix of deep-rooted, animalistic urges, combined with an intelligence that has tacked on the bothersome baggage of morals and a conscience. So though we would like to think that we can rise above our carnal desires via our evolved mental caliber, we often find that fun part of our brain that Freud named "Id" tugging us back into the shameful recesses of bestial behavior. So basically if you suppress men’s outlets for sexual aggression in one factor, it finds a way to spill out into another.

But in the end I think what Hyperion said is as deep as one can get when you’re analyzing the adult industry. It’s a business that produces a product that is in high demand, which is why it’s powerful and prolific. Perhaps if you really want to dig deep into the subject of the human condition, one would be better off trying to figure out why the general populace consumes our product, not why we produce it.

The one sentence that I actually had a problem with was: "The desire to degrade is essential to sexual excitement." Perhaps that sentence was just taken out of context, but as it stands alone in the way in which Luke presented it, it’s just another bullshit blanket statement that unfairly generalizes porn consumers.

Well, if that’s so, how would you like to be stuck in a room with a random selection of your customers? Do you think that the people who pay money to see your pornography are as socially well-adjusted as the next guy or are they predominantly losers who hate and fear women?

My hunch is that people who have lives and love don’t subscribe to porn sites.

Porn is for losers (and I include myself in that category). Most of the people who make porn were unable to make it more esteemable professions (again I include myself). Most of the people who pay to use porn do so because they are unable to make it with live women. Couples porn is a delusion. This stuff is overwhelmingly bought by lonely men. Porn wrings its profits from society’s most pathetic addicts.

Hyperion posts:

I have no doubt that this doctor that you quoted said what he said, but I’m equally sure that there are a number of doctors out there who look at porn as normal human reaction to sexual stimulus.

You seem to be looking at the the situation of porn with an eye to finding the story of human morality or immorality within it. But you always seem to overlook the fact that porn is a business and nor a search for whatever truth your looking for. Pornography is a business where adults engage in sex or pose nude for either photo shoots or movies. I would hope with full disclosure on both sides with an idea of everyone knowing what they’re getting into. If not it becomes a commercial legal question, not a open inquiry into the idea of porn itself.

As for you insinuation that all porn is humiliation, its very well known that there is a group of people within the BDSM sub-culture that practice submission as part of their sexual lives. Its not for me and I really could care a less what they do on their own time, for the simple reason is that they are not trying to enforce their personal views of their lifestyle on me. Some of them even do it professionally and are paid for their time – as a business. That being said porn is about providing a service, a service people are willing to pay for and there are companies out there who provide that service and they in turn hire people to be the talent for that service.

If there are men and women in porn who would rather do something else, they can join the club with the rest of us. but porn from what I’ve seen isn’t about looking for the definition of the human condition, its a commercial enterprise that caters to a demand and the talent and the producers and distributors are the suppliers – end of story.