Posts Tagged ‘porn’

Researching via the internet, is always more interesting, than researching at a library.  Inevitably, there are interesting distractions along the way.  I was doing research on the subject of a future blog, when I ended up on one of those wild Google chases.  One minute, I’m making helpful notes, the next I’m reading an article about why women have embraced waxing themselves bare–as in Brazilian bare.

The article was written by a professional in the field of psychology.  It asked the question “WHY?”
A very good question.   Anyone who has never experienced a Brazilian wax, has to ask, “Why?!?”.

Any anyone who has had the experience of laying on a table for hot wax and hair-pulling should be asking the same question.

I’m not a psychologist, but the answer is simple.  It is because men have eyes.
Women have embraced it because it makes them feel better.  It makes them feel better,  because it makes them believe they look better.  Men are initially attracted to women because of what their eyes tell them is attractive–the beauty eye-deal.

(This makes me wonder what we would look like if men couldn’t see.  Since natural eyebrows, lip fuzz and body fat are more tactilely interesting than a uniformly thin and smooth body, one has to wonder what our beauty aesthetic would be in a world of blind men.  Needless to say, make-up and tanning would be obsolete.)

Me suspects the bare-down-there look was popularized by the porn industry, but no matter, it’s just one of many very bizarre or extreme things women do to mold themselves to the beauty eye-deal.
Popular now, are things like having botulism or any number of substances injected into the face.  We can have fat surgically removed or d-cups surgically implanted.  We are told it’s the fault of the media for propagating unrealistic ideals, but are they really to blame?

Before you answer, let me remind you this isn’t new. Women have always done very bizarre things to make themselves more attractive to men.  In modern society, in primitive tribes, in remote places, and in ancient history; there has always been some unnatural standard to which women insanely aspired–the Asian practice of foot-binding comes to mind, but it’s one of many.

Throughout time, women who were starving wanted to appear well-fed, while women who were well-fed, starved themselves to be thin. Today, women spend money to cultivate bronzy tans, in contrast to the age when women ate arsenic to achieve pallid white skin. Curly hair is straightened, straight hair is curled. Long hair is cropped, short hair is augmented with extensions.  Thousands  are spent on everything from eyelash extensions to acrylic nails.

In other cultures, beauty is enhanced by body modifications like tattoos & scarification.  Nostrils, earlobes, lips and even necks are unnaturally stretched to make women more desirable.  The beauty practices of other cultures may seem strange to us, but are they really any more unnatural than what we do?   Even some of the things we wear, like high-heels and thong underwear, are indicative of the unnatural discomfort we will endure to please men.

In contrast, to what women will do, the list of the unnatural things men do to make themselves attractive is much shorter.  What do men do that is unnatural? Shave and wear clothes. That’s about it.

We are constantly conforming to male ideals.  Interestingly, the most misogynistic of these, to most of the the Western World, is the burqa, which is said to hide a woman’s outward beauty, so that only her true beauty can be seen.  That’s a refreshing idea, but I’m not ready to suggest we all shroud-up to swap vanity for virtues. Nevertheless, it seems to me the entire collective of women across time and hemispheres needs a reminder, we are already beautiful.

I love being a girl, but today it would be advantageous to be a guy.  I’m thinking about sex and trying to figure out some stuff.  Even if I get it right, I won’t know if what I believe to be true, holds true for a guy.   Which means, I can 100% right for me and still be 50% wrong.  So with more questions today than answers, I’m hoping that maybe the devoted gentlemen followers of de blog will help those of us with an X-chromosome figure it out.

Okay, so we’ve already established that I’m the happy holder of an x-chromosome, but right now I’m thinking about those born under the Y-chromosome.  It all started the other night when I was in a nightclub.  I wasn’t wearing a nun’s habit, but clearly, I was wearing more clothing & less make-up than any other female in the club.  I was looking at the other women, based on what  they were wearing, it’s clear they wanted to be viewed.  Tight things, short things and revealing things, made me wonder is less always more?

Back in the day, the briefest glimpse of mammary flesh was enough to cause big thrills for those y-chromo-beings.  With breasts on display like 4-H livestock, I was wondering if there is a point at which so many become passé.  Seriously, is a breast really so much more attractive than a great shoulder or a long leg?  Or is it only made more attractive because of the mystique of being kept under wraps?

Since I’m not a guy, I can’t answer that.  Based on  what I know of men, I doubt they’d tire of breasts if  they were in a room with breast-wallpaper.  But thinking so much about sex lately, I’m probably sounding a little like a guy–I assure you there is a good reason–which I’ll get to shortly.  I just finished rereading a book that had a profound impact on me years ago.  It had been so long since I’d read it, I decided to revisit it, to see if I felt the same about it now as I did then.

The book’s main assertion  is that the sexual revolution ruined sex.
Hmmmm.
I have to think about that.  The sexual revolution was well underway before I was, but as the mother of a young teen, I have good reason to wonder about the impact of too much exposure to all things sexual.

The whole point of the sexual revolution was to end the repression that kept people from being able to enjoy sex and free us all up to be more sexually fulfilled.  The new morés of our culture suggested that we should all enjoy more liberty and variety in our sex lives.  That’s when things started to get complicated.

Isn’t sex supposed to be about intimacy and isn’t intimacy about knowing the other person?  So how much intimacy can we expect if we barely know who we’re with?  Does the depersonalization of sex lessen the quality or just redefine it–like those income tax forms where if you don’t want to go through all the trouble you can opt for a shorter one.  You might miss a few benefits, but with the simpler form, you’re done much quicker, and we all know how good it feels to be done.

My background in marketing causes me to always consider the trade-offs between quantity and quality.  Call a focus group so we can get some numbers and determine how many people one can be truly intimate with.  Is it one or two in a lifetime?  or one or two a weekend?  Without intimacy, sex becomes much less personal.  If it’s less personal, it’s probably not as significant and the quality may suffer.  In marketing terms we’re talking about user experience vs.  user satisfaction.  It’s a process vs. product thing.

So at it’s most basic sex is merging one’s physical being with that of another–oneness.  I will assert that if sex is about becoming one with another, their pleasure should be our pleasure and vice versa, however if we don’t know them well enough to really care about them, how invested can we really be?

Traveling with a group of men awhile back, the subject of the hotel’s pay-per-view porn came up.  As the younger men discussed the hotel’s offerings, an older man interrupted their conversation to share the following insight:

“Porn is great for awhile, but ultimately it will ruin sex for you”.

He says it with authority and I’m happier not knowing how he’s reached this conclusion–in fact, I’d be happier if I wasn’t having to listen to guys drool-talk about porn while I’m lunching on a B.L.T.  Nevertheless, it starts me thinking.

Porn is about sex, but it isn’t real sex and though some people can’t get enough, it’s a flimsy substitute for the real thing.  Despite this, porn is now widely available and becoming more mainstream–women, who used to object to porn because it objectified women,  now constitute the fastest growing segment of an  unapologetic market.

But, what if my friend was right?  What if porn will ultimately ruin sex?

Having grown in in an age when everything was “dirty”, I’m not advocating for going backward.  I feel bad about the days when we weren’t allowed to talk about things and didn’t know the names of the things we would have liked to have talked about–but I’m starting to miss the desire that came with that which was previously forbidden.

Which brings me back to the teen in my home.  In this age, I can’t be the same kind of mother I had.  There is simply no way to keep my son from being exposed to sex.  I can talk to him, I can educate him and I can try to imbue him with my personal views, but I can’t shelter him.  At his age, he’s probably seen more skin on TV, than my husband has in his entire adult life.  In the media, sex is a product.  Process is sacrificed to mass-produce what sells.  If he or anyone else translates this to real life, sex is reduced to nothing more than “get ‘er done”.   If it’s common, mass-produced and readily available, the quality has to suffer.

I’m not ready to go back to the era before the sexual revolution, but I wouldn’t mind turning back the clock while my boys grow up.