(More) Good Porn vs. Bad Porn

Over on his blog, Masterjerker has taken up the discussion of good vs. bad porn. It is true that as a mindful wanker, I am concerned about the state of pornography, which has an increasing number of hostile and misogynistic elements.

Masterjerker expressed a healthy preference for porn with happy, enthusiastic participants. He gives a very nice example of a young woman, pleased to be ejaculated on by one cock after another, an image which is giving me an erection even as I type. (Thanks, masterjerker!)

I love porn (and sexual fantasies) filled with enthusiastic, slutty women. (And, by the way, I love and respect slutty women in real life, and wouldn't date any other kind.) The internet contains a lot of really lovely porn, where the women seem happy to be there, and seem to be well treated, etc. There are the Hegre Archives, Met Art, and other art-porn sites once can find links to at Sensual Liberation Army. For slightly harder stuff, there is the inimitable Abby Winters, whose videos of cute, playful, comfortable, masturbating girls have made me spill untold gallons of goo.

But a random googling for sex terms will turn up a lot of harsher images, many of which are from blatantly hostile, woman-hating pornographers whose goal is the discomfort, humiliation, degradation, and dehumanization of their victims. I'm not going to provide links, but many of you will at least recognize the name Max Hardcore, and can guess the nature of the content of "Eyeball Cum," "Facial Humiliation," "Degrading Facials," and "Facial Abuse," to name a few off the top of my head.

If you see something, it changes you. It's not uncommon to say, about gonzo porn, or about violent TV, that it is "only fantasy," which is true but only to a point. As human beings we can choose the direction of our own personal evolutions. We can choose to expose ourselves to influences that help us grow, and to limit our exposure to forces that encourage our darker tendencies.

Like Masterjerker, I love enthusiastic, slutty, cum-hungry women. But I can also enjoy nastier porn. I can understand its appeal. I recall, years ago, stumbling across a free page of videos and pictures, titled something like I love it when they hate it. Basically, it was pictures of women obviously grossed out by the spurting cocks pointing at their faces. It really excited me.

I have elaborate armchair-sociology theories about why American Puritanism and sex-related shame leads to that kind of twisted arousal, but I'll save it for another time. For now my point is this: I can choose what to look at when I have solo orgasms. I can choose what fantasies to act out with my lover. I can, and do, choose to give most of my onanistic attention to girls who are portrayed enjoying sex and exhibitionism, who are doing so by choice, and to the best of my knowledge are being treated as professionally as anyone else on the set.

About the existence of hostile porn, Masterjerker says, "I probably can’t do any more about these issues than I can do about violence on TV or the movies." But we can all do something, the one thing that matters: We can choose what we support with our attention and our dollars.