Rock of Love

China is a place full of contradictions: for example, Facebook is blocked, but you can watch free porn on R#$ Tube (name slightly scrambled so no one googling it will be directed here.) In fact, if you are, like me, a parent concerned with exactly what sort of crap your child can expose herself to through the internet, you may well be horrified to learn that you can access ALL of R#$ Tube through the local internet even though your computer is turned on to "safe search." Even in China.

Not being that familiar with porn in this progressive age, I decided to look at the content of "amateur" porn, figuring it would be badly-shot home camera images of faintly unattractive people humping on sad-looking bedspreads. Oh, sadly, that was right to a tiny percentage, but what I found was far, far worse.

First of all, the sort of porn on R^& Tube is often violent and very abusive. The majority of the titles of the flicks were of the "Stupid Whore Gets Damaged Severely in Highly Sensitive Area" genre, eg, Bitch Gets Wrecked in Three Holes. That's a mild example: most followed the pattern of  (Bad name for Women or for Women's Genitalia) Gets (Receives the Abusive Action of Some Thing or Some Other Person) in  (Name of Body Part). Categories include Asian, Big Titted, Lesbian, Gay, MILF, Granny, Japanese (isn't that a subgenre of Asian?) Hentai (ugh, Japanese animated) and Barely 18 and Wrecked. I kid you not. Note: in not one of the categories save Gay were the MEN referred to--and even then it had the honorific of "Gay" as opposed to, say, "Fudge Packing Faggots."

Second, production values varied. Some of the German porn, for example, was indeed the grainy hand-held camera with bad lighting and might I add extremely unattractive lumpy-looking people, usually two chubby men and a woman who looked less than happy to be there. Some of the videos on offer featured very lovely people, beautifully made up and with exquisite lighting and camera work. Most were fairly standard, an ok set, ok lighting.  As for the people--the American porn tended to use male actors who were clearly recruits off a freshly docked Naval ship ready to earn some cash while on shore leave (and definitely not of the officer class.) Most had tattoos, were pierced, and had enormous members made preternaturally stiff with the use of pharmaceutical  enhancements--trust me, no lover that bad lasts that long (although it may seem like it at the time.) As for the women---the lower the quality of the video overall, the less attractive the woman. As the Rose put it, "The longer the nails, the bigger the skank." Fake nails of the talon variety seemed to be the lower-middle class version of "classy" and I watched in horror as skanks sank their  Lee Press-On Nails into one another's most tender bits. Ouch. Plus--and this is the former nurse in me--the HYGIENE, people! Many of the women were in real pain, which is no turn on. In fact, most of the "grunts of pleasure" I recognized as signs of extreme discomfort and real anguish, particularly in the younger women. The louder they yelled, the more bruises on their bodies, an indication perhaps of what was really going on behind the scenes. I will comment on couple of girl-on-girl sequences which featured tasteful French manicures and overall excellent hygiene, but they were few and far between.

I won't comment on the "sex slave" stuff--I was horrified beyond belief to see one of the sweetest-looking young girls I have ever seen dressed in chain performing miserably on her "boyfriend" in what was clearly their house, one that was painfully clean and tidy, furnished with the most basic of cheap goods. What was she running from, I thought, that made THIS a viable alternative? Many of the "slave" scenarios were carefully scripted and clearly part of a larger pay-per-view but a few seemed to be homemade by stupid jerks who had no idea of normalcy.

As for the plots---people, I have said it time and time again. For women, Sperm is The Enemy. Bukkake is a male fantasy. Shooting your wad on your partner is yucky and not sexy. Women do NOT like to use it as face cream. I have never sat by a pool playing with three dildos and wishing I had a REAL man. I have never had a friend over and confessed that I've never had a Lesbian Love Fest and could she help me out. As for the anal stuff--I can't believe how standard this seems to be. In fact, the money guru I read on MSN once wrote casually about how she had a boyfriend who wanted to try it and "so she added anal to her repertoire." Oh God--talk about your dirty money. I cannot read her financial advice now without thinking, "Yeah, but you take it up the a##." This is hardly empowering all the women struggling to get ahead in business now, is it?

Maybe truth is the ultimate weapon to empower ourselves. Maybe these people who are setting up their home cameras and recording themselves are just trying to capture a moment for posterity. Well, let them. Screw it. I don't have to watch. As for the professional film makers, they're out to made a buck. So what' s the harm?

Well, as a woman, there was little there I found uplifting, gratifying, or educational. I felt dirty, disliking to see my gender as a whole reduced to--well, a hole. (Or even three.) Second, the basic biological facts were ignored--women do not continue to have orgasms once the stimulus is taken away. You stop, they stop: they don't continue  to writhe shouting "MMMMM, yeah, baby" for half a minute while being flipped into but yet another silly but camera-friendly position. Third, I have never fantasized about ANY of the content I found there. I've never, ever used a dildo, much less pulled it out and licked one. A gay friend of mine confided that what turned her off about lesbian porn the most was the emphasis placed on two women licking a dildo at the same time. "As if!" she huffed, and couldn't understand why I laughed in agreement.

The real harm in pornography, I think is two fold: first of all, a lot of teenagers or sexually inexperienced people access porn for information, and they're shown an unrealistic and graphic depiction of something far more akin to rape than lovemaking. It's not exactly conveying the mystery and beauty of intercourse as communication, as love, or even as a biological function. It's violent image of women as holes, whores, hos, and bitches is as unacceptable to me as referring to our current political leader as a --well, you know, the N word.  Second, it's far too easy to access, and yet  impossible to control. Part of the advertising on this particular site has some of the most disturbing visuals I have ever seen, pornographic images of cartoon characters (Family Guy, Shrek, the Flintstones) actively engaged in intercourse complete with monster-sized genitalia. One of the first things I learned in Psych is that a child being groomed by a pedophile is often shown this type of material in an effort to convince the child that this is normal--if Shrek does it, so can s/he. Here's my thought: by looking at the site which advertises this link, do I somehow encourage the site to keep this link up? (Under no circumstances would I ever click on it.)

However, did I learn anything? Yes; there are a few "pornographic" videos which I found interesting and educational and not offensive. They may have been explicit in content but they focused on communication, love, trust, technique. I'm not particularly offended by anyone's genitalia on the screen but I prefer not to have terms thrown around like the C-word unless I'm using it to describe my sister-in-law. A video of a man performing a Tantric Yoni Massage with Oil on his partner, while extremely explicit, does not offend me. God knows I wish some of the men I've known had bothered to model themselves on this, rather than the "Give it to me you stupid bitch" school of love. I adore my godson and I hope he never has to turn to the internet for information or stimulation but given the prevalence of the Net in our lives, if he DOES look there, I hope he finds something natural, kind, and loving: yoni massage, rather than GlassA#$ dot com.