Sunday, August 22, 2010


Should we just quietly draw a veil over that porn post below?

Actually there’s a good comment in the box which I’ll reproduce here, as typically its better than my initial post.

"Well I can confess that between all the left-wing news, music downloads, youtube, emails, high theory and shopping for books/CDs that have been banished from the high st. (but NOT the highly alienating, panopticon-with-a-smiley-face Facebook!) I've probably used about 95% of my internet time looking at/waiting for porn.

The bogus horror (of MEN) when I admit to this is shocking. It points to a general wave of denial, bullshit and hypocrisy among western manhood. Funny how those who claim to have nothing but healthy, equal, sexually fulfilling relationships still manage to understand whatever crude sexual terms the porn industry throws up every few years. Funny how no-ones Facebook 'status' never says: "...has been wanking furiously over the degradation of Hungarian ladies since sunrise".

The lack of comments on this matter belies the 'wall of silence' around the whole issue. Yeah 'everyone' is talking about 'Inception' - in the few minutes between thinking about the vast marketplace of fetishes, frustrations and ugly desires that arguably feed into the rage, hate, vanity and childish feuding that the internet thrives on (I'd be interested to see any correlation between online porn and the level of masturbatory resentment that passes for 'comment' on 'news' sites these days).

An other interesting aspect of online porn is how, just over a decade ago, most of us only ventured out to buy 'grumble' during times of stress, extreme boredom, rejection, loneliness or drunk confusion. Now we can accelerate our sense of the above 24/7 without the fear that our ex-girlfriend's mother will walk into the newsagent during our 'moment of truth'. Or indeed, avoid the teenage rite of passage of watching it in groups, laughing a bit too loudly at the bad dialogue while desperate to depart to privacy as soon as the video's over
."


Internet Porn is perfect for not having to publically/personally own your actions though, innit? i mean back in the pre-Internet days I never bought a porn mag or rented a video because effectively I was standing in front my local newsagent/store owner saying " hello.... in about twenty minutes, I'll be drinking a can of special brew in my bedsit and knocking one out over this". I could never do it, I was just too embarrassed, even when drunk. I remember being repeatedly amazed too by that long vanished British institution the be-suited businessman who violently scans jazz mags in the W.H. Smiths on provincial stations with his right eye while also somehow managing to look testily around the entire store with his left.

So it has several advantages, specifically for those of us who always lacked the nerve to face up to the guy in the All-night garage with a pint of milk and a copy of Razzle. Primarily though because it's free, it's completely secret, it’s in your home, there’s a certain amount of comforting disavowal. It’s all just THERE anyway, you yourself are not the consumer or the audience for/of this stuff, it’s all there for the other (you may even experience a kind of wearily amused and pleasurable contempt for its “real” consumers as you click through) and you can dismiss your own involvement as just a kind of browsing/surfing. This I would assume is the legitimating strategy for the “educated” porn consumer. It’s a spot of dabbling, a bit of research: this is the distancing effect, the raising of a slightly sanctimonious shield. Rather as I imagine there’s a comforting sense of alloof dismay around exactly this kind of conversation: isn’t it all just so obvious and commonplace that it doesn’t really get us anywhere talking about it. This thinking is an attempt to appeal to your own “sophistication”, to conjure away discomfort by adopting a blasé posture. It’s so banal it’s not even worth thinking about, darling.

Maybe not, but I’m in the mood to and if it is all banal I’m sure you, dearest blogreader, will patiently indulge me.
There’s always someone who likes to trot out the statistic that men think about sex every 13.7 seconds or some such. I don’t know about anyone else but most of my adult life post-puberty seems to have been one long, sustained, speculative sexual reverie punctuated by occasional moments of focus and engagement. This has tailed off as I’ve got older, and its generally been dissipated in the early honeymoon phases of a new relationship, but still…there must surely be a massive degree to which the internet intervenes in this, takes control of it. I have friends who are/have been effectively addicted to porn. Its kind of like the introduction of a naturally occurring hormone through external means in one way, once the imagination shuts down because its function ( to provide a semi-continuous stream of sexual fantasies, among other things) can be replaced by a “prosthesis” then the tendency is instead to click through every 6.2 seconds or whatever. If you’re telling me that consciousness isn’t (a.o.t) a battleground, a war of attrition, between focus and (primarily sexual) fantasy then I’ll have to believe you, I suppose.

One odd thing about conversations about masturbation that always struck me was that men would happily give you all the details of their sexual conquests and successes in graphic detail, but almost no-one (with the notable and noble exception of Bonsai Silverback, who was possibly over-keen at times ) wants to talk about their masturbatory habits /fantasies, yet it always seemed in much poorer taste/much more obviously a part of male mutually aggrandizing bullshit to talk about the sex you’d just had.

I’ve definitely adopted the strategy of knocking a quick one out in the bathroom (don’t go near that computer in any kind of libidinal torment, you may tell yourself it’ll be a perfunctory affair, it won’t be) before settling down to get some serious work done.

Which is how I managed to write this response so quickly.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

My comment posted? How flattering!

But you're right on the money. 'New' media can pander to and distort consciousness to a degree that TV could only dream of. Buying crap, ranting, showing off or wanking - that's the great British use of the internet (and why officialdom is having such a hard time getting granny online. They had different priorities back in her day).

Another weird one in this sad little island is how I've encountered two decades of male 'activists' (some armchair) who would proudly buy CDs/DVDs/junk food etc. made by companies with investment in the arms trade, but somehow treat the mere mention of masturbation as a brutal act of misonygist patriarchy. Their purity may be admirable, but I dread to think what they hide on their hard drives...

carl said...

hah.. yeah it's like check out my i-pad fresh off the plane from the Foxxcon factory....

been lookinga at any porn on that?

god no, that would be exploitative...

carl said...

actually can i ask you a couple of questions? first of all, are you in a relationship, anon.

Anonymous said...

Yes. When I am, this changes my internet attentions considerably (but is this the case with most men, I wonder?). I'm also less likely to look up detailed political/economic analysis too - ostensibly to avoid anger!

However, I'm kinda grateful for a long period of 'singlehhod' that re-awakened my political interest/discontent. I realised that loneliness isn't 'all about me'...

shotsy said...

i find mastubation kinda boring tbh. i could shag all day, but tugging one out for me is almost an inconvience. (almost, cuz i obvs still enjoy it) i spend maybe a maximum of ten mins a day looking for a big arse vid or pic and having a chug over it. usually not any harder than this (nsfw):

http://luckyass.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/naomi_russell_ass_5.jpg

do have mates who will spend hours on the cyberfilth tho, like you say, a huge waste of time more than anything.

well, back to looking at some old french guy's equations that show how bad america is and all that :p

carl said...

Just one thing : first of all as somebody who was always too self-conscious to buy porn in its pre internet forms (mags ,videos, cinemas etc) and who on fact several time steeled himself to do so and then lost his nerve the act of actually seeing/watching the stuff was accompanied with an overwhelming feeling of transgressive excitement, usually not actually sustained by the porn itself. It's hard to imagine the pre-porn saturated days of the great Internet-before now, but watching porn was a highly charged activity, it also required effort and often the collusion of others in order to obtain it.
My porn consumption, from puberty to probably my thirties was therefore virtually zero.

Interestingly ( to me at least) when I first had a reasonable internet connection at home my attitude toward watching/looking at porn was completely bound up with all the panicky, heart-palpitating effects of my previous attempts to watch/see it. this is also of course due to the sudden availability of hardcore in a country where even getting soft porn felt like a scandalous and epic undertaking. ( I assume that we all had that friend who was mystifyingly unembarrassed by the whole wandering into the shop and getting the Electric Blue video down off the top shelf thing).

Hardcore was a rare occurrence indeed and the fundamental, almost inconceivable excitement stemmed from the fact that we were actually WATCHING PEOPLE HAVING SEX. We certainly weren’t “niche” in any sense, we weren’t fussy about the gils being of a particular type etc, it was this impossible intrusion of the real, unsimulated sex, there in front of you. Something of this kind of "unsophisticated" attitude to porn as traumatic real not entertainment
can wierdly still be found in the daily sport (or could last time i saw it, several years ago.)a paper whose continued existence i honestly think merits serious thought...

So, the “naivety” of this position ( my pre-internet one)is surely inconceivable pretty much anywhere now for anyone under thirty, I don’t feel the same existential shock I used to even in the relatively early days of broadband streaming videos. Music may have moved from a holy/infernal object to become a ubiquitous background but so has porn, I have a friend who basically just has porn j-pegs running semi constantly on his laptop while he plays video games on his desktop: it’s there to be looked at every few seconds/ minutes, occasionally “used”, a kind of pornambience filling in the background of his thoughts…fantasizing for him in that interpassive sense. I’ve done similar things myself when especially lonely ( I mean here deprived of contact with my current partner) one window open on the desktop showing a dvd borrowed from the aforementioned friend as I write on another, toggling between the two in a kind of lachrymose, wistful way. I’m confident this is commonplace enough, in fact I wrote about it in a fairly extensive/exaggerated form in a novel a few years ago.

There has been a kind of grand profanation via the internet, a reduction of the sites and rituals of intense experience that punctured and punctuated daily life and atomized them into a placeless, a-social, quotidian background. This much is well known, but Porn is probably the most spectacularly banalized and hyper-dispersed of all….

So anyway, three questions: how did you feel at first when you shifted over to Internet use (I’m assuming you’re roughly the same age as me)

And secondly, I assume you hide your porn-watching from your other half (or have)….how has that worked out…

And err....thirdly, could you elaborate a bit on any leftist despair/ porn use overlap.

carl said...

Just one thing : first of all as somebody who was always too self-conscious to buy porn in its pre internet forms (mags ,videos, cinemas etc) and who on fact several time steeled himself to do so and then lost his nerve the act of actually seeing/watching the stuff was accompanied with an overwhelming feeling of transgressive excitement, usually not actually sustained by the porn itself. It's hard to imagine the pre-porn saturated days of the great Internet-before now, but watching porn was a highly charged activity, it also required effort and often the collusion of others in order to obtain it.
My porn consumption, from puberty to probably my thirties was therefore virtually zero.

Interestingly ( to me at least) when I first had a reasonable internet connection at home my attitude toward watching/looking at porn was completely bound up with all the panicky, heart-palpitating effects of my previous attempts to watch/see it. this is also of course due to the sudden availability of hardcore in a country where even getting soft porn felt like a scandalous and epic undertaking. ( I assume that we all had that friend who was mystifyingly unembarrassed by the whole wandering into the shop and getting the Electric Blue video down off the top shelf thing).

Hardcore was a rare occurrence indeed and the fundamental, almost inconceivable excitement stemmed from the fact that we were actually WATCHING PEOPLE HAVING SEX. We certainly weren’t “niche” in any sense, we weren’t fussy about the gils being of a particular type etc, it was this impossible intrusion of the real, unsimulated sex, there in front of you. Something of this kind of "unsophisticated" attitude to porn as traumatic real not entertainment
can wierdly still be found in the daily sport (or could last time i saw it, several years ago.)a paper whose continued existence i honestly think merits serious thought...

So, the “naivety” of this position ( my pre-internet one)is surely inconceivable pretty much anywhere now for anyone under thirty, I don’t feel the same existential shock I used to even in the relatively early days of broadband streaming videos. Music may have moved from a holy/infernal object to become a ubiquitous background but so has porn, I have a friend who basically just has porn j-pegs running semi constantly on his laptop while he plays video games on his desktop: it’s there to be looked at every few seconds/ minutes, occasionally “used”, a kind of pornambience filling in the background of his thoughts…fantasizing for him in that interpassive sense. I’ve done similar things myself when especially lonely ( I mean here deprived of contact with my current partner) one window open on the desktop showing a dvd borrowed from the aforementioned friend as I write on another, toggling between the two in a kind of lachrymose, wistful way. I’m confident this is commonplace enough, in fact I wrote about it in a fairly extensive/exaggerated form in a novel a few years ago.

There has been a kind of grand profanation via the internet, a reduction of the sites and rituals of intense experience that punctured and punctuated daily life and atomized them into a placeless, a-social, quotidian background. This much is well known, but Porn is probably the most spectacularly banalized and hyper-dispersed of all….

So anyway, three questions: how did you feel at first when you shifted over to Internet use (I’m assuming you’re roughly the same age as me)

And secondly, I assume you hide your porn-watching from your other half (or have)….how has that worked out…

And err....thirdly, could you elaborate a bit on any leftist despair/ porn use overlap.

Anonymous said...

From your approach to shifting attitudes in British cinema (by far your strong point), and the music references (not my thing, but I know where you're coming from), I probably am about your age.

I think the internet accelerates all kinds of 'sublimated' urges nowadays. Vanity and resentment. Not 'thought'. I mean levels of hate and paranoia - racism has found a distinctly worrying shape in this medium. No surprise how quickly porn gets more aggressive and 'militaristic' in such a short time. There's a whole Abu Gharib trend lately - but I digress...

1. Porn shifted from Occasional Pictures Of Pretty Ladies to an orgy of net grot when I hit my 30s (first regular job with decent-ish pay,but 'relating' to women more difficult than ever). Felt lonely but powerful - in a consumer sense. Not least because I discovered the purchasing power of the internet at roughly the same time (mainly indulged in lost youthful artefacts - the art movie I saw on BBC2 in 1983, old comics etc. - a related urge? I dunno.)

2. I admitted it to most women I've known - but of course watered down the level of past time spent.

3. I doubt anyone looks to porn in a state of general contentment. Speaking for myself, I'm more likely to dwell on it in a state of globalised pessimism - 'capitalist realism' reprocessed into a state of scopophiliac power, perhaps?

I'm seriously thinking of blogging myself - I'll let you know if I'd appreciate a link (vanity!).

Anonymous said...

PS. Your review of Inception was by far the best I've read (I'm the commentator who found it incredibly dull). But why hasn't anyone mentioned how BRITISH (not 'global') its neoliberal fetishes are?

Moreover, why has the language of games, adverts and - yes! - porn infiltrated mainstream cinema so much that we take it for granted? Remember - the most durablel genres are porn, comedy and (to a lesser extent) horror - the ones that explicitly aim for physical response. This was a thesis I chickened out of (the physicality -hence power - of porn viewing) but now I assume it's become banal in 21st century academia.

Anonymous said...

I remember going to the red light district in Amsterdam before the internet porn explosion, and noticing that the customers in the vast porn shops and brothels were almost never Dutch, and consisted of a high proportion of Brits.

I suspect a lot of people in Britain under 30 probably have the same sort of attitude to porn as the Dutch did back in those days (its just something that's there, innit?), whereas those of us in our late '30's to '40's who were brought up on the schoolboy thrills of Hill's Angels and Hot Gossip have a particularly weird attitude in that it does our heads in that what was once forbidden is now ubiquitous.

When I first found porn freely available on the net I had that kind of furtive compulsion to look at it almost incessantly, but it slowly dawned on me that I was simply watching people who had an utterly pragmatic attitude to both their bodies and money.

Quite simply if those women were offered the same amount of money to be filmed painting road signs, they'd be out painting road signs.

As such I almost never watch porn anymore, though oddly I'm still quite keen on watching old Kenny Everett clips on Youtube.

Anonymous said...

Way too crude - Pan's People all the way!

I suppose it's our male generation who were doomed (?) to be more 'sensitive' than those immediately preceding or following. I remember being genuinely shocked by N.W.A. Geto Boys etc. ("Is it wrong to enjoy this?") - now it's as mainstream as Eamon Holmes. Transgression lost it's kick a decade and a half ago.

carl said...

I'm guessing shotsy is younger than the other commenters and I, and i wonder if in fact the " net" effect of porn hasn't just kind of jaded-out a younger generation ie, you get bored of/desensitized to it much more quickly for it always having been there than you do if at some point its been charged with significance...

ie it must be people who are now thirty plus who drove the explosion of online conent, right...

i think that kind of shift back to the "naughty" hot gossip/ pans people/ the underwear selection of your mum's catalogue is interesting too....at some point of maximum saturation then actually keeping your clothes on becomes the transgression....maybe there's a generation of digital natives deeply drawn to increasingly milder forms of Soft porn and eroticism....terminating in some Victorian hypersexualisiation of piano legs or soemthing... a msss flight from the real into symbolism, a hunger for the veiled. f or a return of the imagination/fantasy that has been "outsourced"...is there a burgeoning market in retro-porn (or simualted retro-porn) and who are its consumers...?


re anon 1, yeah, post modernity seeks to abolish "interperatation" one one level and repalce it with "response".... it's a part of the attempt to flatten out criteria of judgement (democratize everything as an "experience") and yep.. this is why horror (increasingly approaching the logic of snuff (hostel, saw etc) and actually attaining it in certain internet sites) porn and comedy are the important genres: who can argue with a hard-on, a belly laugh or a shriek... it unequivocally does the job.

i've tried to write about this before, in novel form and i'm looking at it again at the moment re british films of the seventies which i think express the tension of being caught up in a drive toward the real, and their confused response to it... ceratinly the amped-up porn and horror ( coming in via the states and Italy) is something british film of the time can't really contend with....

if anyone has any futher thoughts on that i'd be grateful!


re the dissertaion... well.. who cares whats old-hat in academia? i'm not in academia, nor, along with 98 percent of the public, do i know what's current, but id love to read something on those lines... re the blog, a link from me is but a paltry thing but you're certainly going to get one should you take the plunge...

i think my email address is in my profile so feel free to send me a message if you want to non-publically say something

Anonymous said...

Anon #2 here.

I'm much more drawn back into eroticism these days - I think there's something about someone being "daring" (e.g. a TV presenter wearing an unusually revealing dress) that can be quite compelling, whereas hardcore porn stars aren't really being daring at all - they're just doing their job.

I also think online porn has changed over the last five years or so - the production values have definitely become cheaper, there seem to be fewer "glossy" clips as the fantasy element ("some people really live like this") has declined, as has any attempt to depict situations as part of real relationships. There's quite a perfunctory aspect to it now, which seems to be connected in my mind (and I'm not quite sure how) with the ever-greater proliferation of tattoos on the performers.

There seems to be a type of girl who does porn, and its not much of a big deal to her, and it's increasingly not much of big deal for the producer to bother with production values, and it's not much of a big deal for the director to make it look convincing as long as the necessary shots are done etc.

I always thought that Fugazi line from "Suggestion" was quite prescient - "You find no reward/In what you discover". It's F. Scott Fitzgerald's "green light" at the end of the day, isn't it? That just-out-of-reach experience whose very distance is its attraction. And hence the paradox of porn - the more frank and open it is the less alluring it is.

At least to this fellow.

Anonymous said...

Anon 1 here.

There is a huge fascination with 70s cinema (from all over the world) among our generation. Not least because it was when the previously 'unsayable' transgressive became mainstream - from the large of amount of 'orgiastic' Euro art movies (Le grande Bouffe, Last Tango, Les Valeuses etc.) to 'orgiastic' Hollywood violence, to the assumption in American movies that Governments and Corporations Are Bad Guys (even early Spielberg riffs on this). Horror movies (a genre that dates easliy) from the period still retain impact now. There was much talk at the time of some 'great' director or movie star or other making hardcore eventually - yet another lost detour in that strange decade.

Also, if you came of age in the 80s/early 90s, this stuff was freely available on terrestrial TV (a month-long season on May 68 or John Cassavetes would be laughed out of the boardroom now). But of course, what gets deliberately banished from the mainstream wriggles its way back, mutated and confused, via other channels eventually.

Anonymous said...

I've always been a bit prey to the (undoubtedly fallacious) notion that there must somewhere out there be some really good porn that is almost as satisfying to watch as it is to have really good actual sex (although obviously you'd have to supply the genital stimulation yourself). Porn where you'd feel warmly affectionate towards the human beings you were watching, thrilled by their bodies, excited by their own excitement with what they were doing. Porn that made you feel better about being part of the human race, that somehow managed to include both performers and spectator in the same imaginary community of sexual beings.

One thing about really good actual sex is that it's fairly self-limiting: you can only have it about two or three times in a row before it really does start to feel like time for a rest. And the kind of really good porn I still imagine must exist somewhere would probably also be quite filling: there would be such a thing as enough of it, and you'd know when you'd had it (for the time being).

What strikes me most about the actually-existing porn you get on the internet is how thin it is, how it dribbles you the absolutely minimal pittance of enjoyment: just enough to distract you, just enough to hook into your own sexual reveries and prod you along into getting yourself off, but absolutely nothing like the all-suffusing satisfaction of getting really properly fucked.

It lacks, in the first place, punctum; and, in the second, any feeling of generous common humanity. The emotions it diffuses are primarily those of contempt and boredom. In effect, it drags you down into a kind of grey despair, intensifying the very sexual morbidity from which it had promised to rescue you.

Porn is gradually turning everyone into Philip Larkin; indeed, I've long held the theory that the Swedish grumble mags sent to him by his pal Kingsley Amis played a significant role in turning Philip Larkin himself into Philip Larkin.

Anonymous said...

Is this Simon Reynolds? There were at least three words that sounded made up, with italics so you pay attention to them.

carl said...

none of them are reynolds.. i don't know who this last person is either...

what's with the reynold's fixation?

Anonymous said...

Maybe getting carried away with the notion that in an alernative universe, Reynolds would be applying his excitable theory chops to porn.

Imagine all the sub-genre names he would have come up with since the early 80s - collected into a volume called 'Spent and Wet: The Blisses of Bongocore and it's Jizcontents'

carl said...

"Oil tit up and spurt again"?

hardcore continuum would have a completely different meaning in this context of oourse....