Cindy Gallop’s Online Effort to Promote ‘Real,’ Not Porn-Fed, Sex
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So what she is making is just porn geared towards an audience with certain tastes, which is, of course, perfectly okay. Equating that with "real sex", however, is nothing but condescending.
Yet your logic would be that "the moment you try to judge what 'real' families are, you have stopped being reasonable." I do no think I am being unreasonable to say that Ozzie and Harriet does not portray a real family. Yes it was very popular, and that show is still used as short-hand expressing a longing for an idyllic bygone American life, but the situations and reactions were only valid for a very small percentage of the US. It took another 15 years, with shows like All in the Family, for more realistic themes like miscarriage, impotence, and racism to be included as part of the issues that families might deal with. Roseanne would also fit into that category, as Barr included a lesbian main character because Barr sought "to portray various slices of real life, and homosexuals are a reality."
Why can't I also say that most pornography does as good a job of portraying real sex as Leave It To Beaver does at portraying a real family with husband, wife, and two sons?
Our disagreement could be a simple as a difference in what 'real' means. I use it as "more likely to be characteristic of the general culture practice." You seem to interpret it as "whatever can happen in the physical world."
In which case, sure, I Love Lucy could be a perfectly accurate portrayal of a real family - unlikely, but it could. And it misses the point. That being: “The issue I’m tackling is not porn,” she said. “It’s the complete lack of open, healthy dialogue around porn and sex.”
Okay, the stories definitely don't happen (pizza boy/girl etc.) but nobody knows why those are a part of porn anyway, everyone just skips over them.
And I'm guessing the logistic problems make three+somes less frequent than in porn, the tabooness of it all as well I guess.
But the sex itself, is it that much different than "real" sex? Are there really that many people having boring sex to make the amount of people coming close to and/or surpassing porn a statistical anomaly?
If I recall the movie correctly (yes, I only watched the movie), Kinsey found out people are a lot kinkier than they let others believe once you really get down to finding out their true behind-the-scenes actions.
With the shifting social mores, has that changed? Do we now let others think we are far kinkier than we really are?
The settings are fake, the lighting is fake, the actors' physical appearance is fake (make-up, post-processing, etc.), the emotions are fake. Often the actors lie about their age, their sexual experience, etc.
As a specific example, many of the 20-year-olds she has had sex with believe that coming on a woman's face is part of normal sex. She's fine with telling them that she does not want that. Her concern is that a young woman who does not want that, but where her boyfriend does, and where "hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women's faces, that all women love having their faces come on, and therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it."
She explicitly states that this is not a good and bad sex view, and indeed asserts that sex "embraces the vastest possible range of proclivities." Instead, she says that hardcore porn presents a "one-world view" and she wants to say "not necessarily."
Which means that no, porn is "not real" in that regard. The "makelovenotwar.com" site has examples of "porn world", where women have no pubic hair, and "real world", where some do, some don't, some men actually prefer women with hair, and it's a personal choice. In "porn world", "women come all the time ins positions where nothing is going on anywhere near the clit." In "real world", there needs to be something. In porn world, "all women love anal sex." In the real world, a lot of women are not. In the porn world, camera angles are important. In the real world, one of the pleasures of sex is the full body skin-on-skin contact - which would make it hard for the camera. And so on.
(Yes, porn is vast, and there are niches with all of these examples. That's not part of mainstream porn.)
So yes, the sex shown in hardcore porn is real sex. But so is a lot of other things which makes for great sex but boring porn. Do you really want to watch the foreplay of a couple, naked but under a warm blanket, talking about how their day went or the frustrations at work while enjoying the nearness of each other? And then stopping for a moment to look something up in the dictionary? No, no more than you want to watch video of most real families going about their lives.
There are many other ways to learn how families work than by watching TV. Where does one learn about how sex - and I of course mean more than the mechanics - works? Her argument seems to be that porn is not diverse enough, and that instead viewers are channeled into a certain set of ideas of what sex is.
This is nothing to do with kinky. This is nothing to do with boring sex. Hence I don't see how any of your comments apply.
It's different from real sex because many of the things done in porn are done more because they look good on camera than because they actually feel good. Traditional and boring as it might be, missionary feels nice. It's uncommon in porn because you can't see the girl.
It's a lot like the relationship between stage fighting and real combat. A spinning jump kick to the face looks really cool, but a rabbit punch is far more likely to end a fight.
This question highlights the worst effect porn has on male understanding and perception of sexual intercourse.
First of all, there's very little porn out there where the woman truly enjoys the experience. It's not always glaringly obvious (although we'll get back to that in the next point), but if you actually stop and look, you'll see the discomfort and/or indifference very often.
Second, a lot of porn out there focuses on and glorifies the woman's suffering, pain and degradation. Seriously, you only have to read the word "painal" once to realize that. However, if that's not enough, you might also look for the occurrences of "choke", "gag", "destroy", "slut", etc.
Third, even the porn that doesn't focus on pain teaches wrong stuff. One might get the idea that the only thing a man need do to make a woman enjoy sex is to pound her fast and hard. On top of that comes the whole issue of hygiene: the way anal is portrayed means that if you try it at home, your female partner will likely end up with an infection.
Fourth, it creates unrealistic expectations. Let's just say that gag reflex is not as easy to suppress as the porn makes you believe and that anal sex is not a matter of just sliding in any time you want.
TL;DR: No, it's not just about whether the sex if fun or boring.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that I'm male.
This is a bit like asking if Hollywood hacking is really that much different from real hacking. Real sex is exciting to the participants -- if done right, more exciting than porn sex -- but that excitement doesn't show up well when the act is filmed, so porn producers have settled on a series of tropes intended to make it exciting to the (predominantly male) audience. So there is lots of emphasis on body parts moving against and within each other, and the event of male ejaculation. To allow the camera a good view, porn actors fuck in positions that would be fatiguing if used regularly by people of ordinary fitness levels.
For most people, real sex involves a lot of kissing and fondling non-genital, non-breast body parts. (Sometimes biting, smacking, or pinching if you are kinky.) They may be seated or reclining, next to each other or one atop the other, for long periods of time with relatively little movement. Bringing a woman to orgasm is especially tricky: some can cum in 15 seconds while others require long and careful attention. Some have physical needs which change with time; I recall one girl who preferred a bit of roughness early in play and a gentler touch later on. When she does cum, a woman may scream and holler, moan quietly, or not at all; sometimes the only clue she gives you is holding you tighter, or an involuntary twitch of the hips that can be felt more than seen. Joe Six Pack stroking it at home doesn't want to see that shit, he just want bang bang bang. And that's what porn delivers, but imho it's the easiest and most boring part of a sexual relationship (whether committed or not).
Oy vey, you're constructing a spectrum with "porn" on one end and "boring" on the other. I strongly (strongly!) disagree with that sort of assumption about sex--- getting naked with a partner who you're excited about and is excited about you can be so damn varied, and spontaneous, and goofy, and expressive, and...well, just all around great. Porn, on the other hand, is generally bound by some weird and arbitrary genre conventions. If you were having sex as contrived and indifferent as you see in a movie, you'd probably get bored!
However, I actually am using "real" very similarly to your definition. If porn has an impact on cultural practice, sex that is influenced by porn is real in that way, and so is sex influenced by romantic novels. We probably are less aware of the latter, though, since the ubiquity of porn on the internet is a newer phenomenon.
The quote you use sounds quite sex-positive. But please also note that the article uses "real" in quotes (sometimes even capitalized), so it is fair to assume that Gallop uses that term extensively as well, and probably in a judgmental fashion. Also, her site is called "make love, not porn". I find both quite hypocritical, since, after all, she is operating a porn site.
All that is in her TED presentation. Perhaps watching that video would give you a different sense of the person than that NYT article about the person?
I think you are right to argue that she's advocating for more of the variant of reality pornography which is a higher quality of amateur pornography, or for more erotica. However, I think her real goal is that pornography is not where people should be learning about sex, and she's using this as a way to advocate that goal.
Framed your way, she thinks porn's impact on cultural practice is too constricting, and detrimental to the type of society she wants there to be.
I'm just under 30. When I was a teen, almost everyone around me had broadband (well, DSL). My family had dialup. So no internet porn for me. My father/mother did not have a stash nor did any of my friends. So no VHS porn. Somehow I managed to never watch porn during my secondary school years. I did do a lot of reading though. Alt.sex.stories was nice back then.
At university I got real internet, but still did not watch porn. (Roommates.) I did however start dating. These girls had seen porn. Lots of it, compared to me. It was odd, because they'd ask me to do things I found completely disgusting. (Voyeurism, anal, simulated rape.) The same girls would refuse to do things I thought deeply compassionate. (Oral sex was more appealing to me than straight sex.)
It was not until after school when I got my own place that I finally watched some porn and finally made the connection. All mainstream porn is horrid. At a most basic level it is about one thing and one thing only - giving the viewer something to look at.
The fundamental issue here is that for flesh to be seen, it has to have an unblocked line to the camera. If it is unblocked, no one can be touching it. If no one is touching it, it is being neglected and someone is not having as good a time as they could be. Nothing happens in porn because it feels good, only because it looks "good". You end up with truly ridiculous sex in porn where there is no physical contact between the two parties except at the genitalia. And even that is kept at a minimum! (I could provide specific if requested, but given my literary upbringing they might be a little too detailed and graphic for this forum ;)
It is about as bad as hackers on TV where they are using two keyboards simultaneously while a projector plasters their face with scrolling text. Sure looks impressive, but it just can not work that way.
Thinking it was an interesting topic our conversation went something like:
Me: East Asian sexuality? That's a pretty focused topic.
Her: Yeah, he had a hard time getting actors who would have sex with each other on film.
Me: So....it's a porno?
Her: No! It's an art film!
Me: But they actually had to have sex on film?
Her: Yes! Of course for authenticity! It's about the ways in which East Asians feel their sexuality is repressed compared to the West!
Me: Compared to the West?
Her: Yeah! The West is so open about sexuality, L.A. is the home of porn, Playboy is from the U.S. etc. etc.
Me: You...are aware that something like 50% of all porn on the planet comes out of just Japan. A country with half the population of the U.S. and several countries in East Asia tend to be visited by foreigners almost entirely for sex tourism? There are several studies that indicate the ready availability of cheap pornography catering to just about any proclivity imaginable has been a major contributor to the declining birthrates in the more developed East Asian economies? If anything, much of East Asia is oversexed!
Her: ???
Me: It sounds to me like your friend just wanted an excuse to make a porno, but saying it was an art film kept it from being part of the seedy underbelly of society and gave his project an air of legitimacy. He didn't, by chance ask if you were interested in acting in it were you?
Her: Yes, he did. sigh
So, I think people who are interested in the titillating parts of porn, but who are turned off by the various associations it has, will jump through all kinds of mental hoops to pretend that various attempts at it, perhaps by coming through non-traditional channels, are in fact not porn when they most certainly are.
This is a common, unfortunate misconception about SEA countries. They aren't visited "almost entirely" for sex tourism. Sex tourists form only a small minority of visitors, but loom larger in our minds when we discuss them.
I think fantasti.cc has been doing a great job at this for more than a year now (when they started featuring user-submitted porn on the frontpage and became more of a social network for sexy vids) ... except it's free and without the moral baggage.
However I do agree with her that most mainstream porn of the freely found online for free variety has become completely ridiculous.
That said, I might be willing to pay $5 to watch amateur porn that's longer than 3min bits and pieces and recorded at more than one pixel per frame.
And I don’t think it’s appropriate to protest against “moral baggage”. She’s just offering an alternative, a different point of view, not pushing for new legislation against the forms of intercourse she doesn’t like.
That said, I think fantasti.cc is a mixed bag. As a community driven site, there are users with excellent submissions and a lot of mainstream porn.
-Sarah, Madam Curator, MLNP.tv
> Amateur pornography is a category of pornography that features models or actors performing without pay, or for whom this material is their first or only paid modeling work. Reality pornography is professionally made porn which seeks to emulate the style of amateur pornography. Amateur porn has been called one of the most profitable and long-lasting genres of pornography.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_pornography
There sure is a lot of fake amateur porn but there's also tons of authentic amateur stuff out there (whatever that means). This genre isn't novel at all despite what this woman would like us to believe. Also, she is apparently going to pay people to post videos which makes it not so clear whether it falls under the amateur label.
I think the only website I know where, even tough they never try to disguise it as non-porn, the participants actually seem to enjoy themselves consistently is Abbywinters.
The reason porn addresses something of a human need is that it provides intense sexual stimulation to people without access to (or even the emotional maturity for) sexual relationships. I hate to say it, but the emotional needs of a beautiful woman are pretty academic to a 19 year old guy that hasn't figured out how to talk to girls or an overweight 45 year old guy whose options are limited. I doubt that disabusing them of porn's ridiculous conventions is going to substantively improve things for them. I mean, it's just hard to compete with intense sexual release.
The real opportunity is for authors/educators/leaders/academics that can help guys without access to sex understand sex and relationships in a truly useful way. We've seen this with things like the world of "seduction education" and things like "nofap" on reddit.
Actually, reddit is a real problem I see for her business - there are already active, technically astute and fairly well moderated forums for exactly these types of discussions.
Complaining about porn not being real is similar to claiming soccer isn't real. "Real people don't run that fast." "He's just trying to impress the cameras." "What he just did was super dangerous." But it is real, because those are human beings having sex, so if "real" as a word has any meaning, it's real. But the word is being used as a prescriptive code as in the phrase "real women," which simply means "women who are not thin."
Just because models being used in "real" campaigns are not thin does not make them representative of the general population - they are more attractive, their bodies in rarer proportions, they are still thinner, and they lack the actually thin - because 'real'ness is simply a reaction to thiness. The usage of the word "real" in that industry is simply disguising that reaction as a call to authenticity, something that advertisers have done since the beginning of advertising.
If the models were as the general population, why would anyone pay to look at them? If professional footballers played the same game as wekend footballers, why would anyone pay to look at them? If people in porn looked like you and your girlfriend and had sex like you and your girlfriend, why would you pay to watch?
If "real" models become the standard, and you are a thin person, will you have to go underground to find representations of people like you in the media?
I'm just being silly, though. This clarion call for real porn is cyclical, and predictable in its failure - because that market is already being pandered to, and because most people would rather have real sex tham watch it. We have terms for people who want to watch averagely attractive people have average sex within a loving relationship. Peeping Toms.
There is a very BIG market for "amateur porn" which is filled with "normal-looking" people as opposed to porn stars. This is more about education and promoting a different vision of the behavioral side of sex.
>This is more about education and promoting a different vision of the behavioral side of sex.
It's moral education, promoting a particular vision of how she thinks people should be having sex. My guess is that it's also going to be a bit puritan, with soft focus, obstructive camera angles and a lot of cuts. It will probably make people whose sex lives are pretty statistically normal feel perverted and judged.
I don't know why I know this, but Tony Comstock made "real love, real sex" videos at while at http://www.comstockfilms.com/ . They're intended to be "documentaries that simultaneously explore the vital role of sexual pleasure in committed relationships and the problematic place of explicit sexuality in cinema"
He also has a recent blog post about why he stopped making the films: http://www.tonycomstock.com/2011/09/12/why-i-dont-make-movie...
http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/post/30727363965/the-bus...
However, I do think porn has introduced me to some new, valuable ideas. Maybe this lady has just had some bad lovers? Anyway, while I think the rationale is condescending, I'm all for some more "natural" looking porn on the market.
There is no doubt that the easy access to porn is shaping contemporary expressions of sexuality for all genders. But maybe focusing on just young 20 something men as a sexual partner can hold a problem in an of itself.
From my late thirties point of view... early twenties don't know much about anything.
As a sidenote:
So much of porn is free to access, i wonder about the paywall (what with the "educational" statement, why not make it free? and get Durex or Astroglide to foot the bill". Making a the site a paysite, just makes it yet another specialized porn site, albeit for specific tastes.
http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/post/29383253943/hellowo...
Neither are romantic comedies, princess stories, and the rest of the relationship-porn genre.
Do sign up for beta, and we would love your #realworldsex submissions :) - anyone contributing content gets fast-tracked into beta immediately. Just email cindy@makelovenotporn.com - many thanks.
Has anyone ever tried to correlate societies porn consumption with the decline of birthrate? I could imagine different countries would have different access to porn, maybe this has an effect?
Of course, Internet porn is only around for a decade and birthrate decline for much longer, but maybe even cheap color print and VHS had lasting effects, not just the pill and women education. Man might not be as horny anymore as the used to be.
http://lynseyg.com/cindy-gallop-will-make-you-think-and-brin...
and my launch post on the details of our business model and why I designed it the way that I did:
http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/post/29383253943/hellowo...
Yours, Charlatan :)
http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/post/29383253943/hellowo...
Yours, Ms Blecch! :)