The Problem of Porn

The first thing that pops into many men’s minds when they think about how to get their wives interested in having sex is porn, especially film or video porn, because all you have to do is sit there and enjoy the images. If a man could just get his wife to sit down for a few minutes of hot video skin action, surely she’d be turned on and want to hit the sack, right?

I’ve even heard of men who were so sure that getting their wives to see porn is going to be the magic bullet for their sex lives that they’ve tried to sneak porn tapes into the VCR or have gotten angry and sarcastic when their wives declined to watch the stuff. This is probably understandable given that the majority of men respond quickly and reliably to sex acts depicted on film, so it is hard to understand why many women don’t.

Notice that I’m saying “many,” because there are plenty of women who DO get a major charge out of porn of various varieties, but those women are not likely to be the sexually reluctant wives we’re concerned about here. While it is not true that all people who enjoy sex also enjoy porn, you can be pretty sure that a person who enjoys porn is going to like having sex, too. So it seems that there is something interesting going on here. If the connections between enjoyment of porn and enjoyment of sex is causative, maybe it would be a good idea to get sexually bored wives to watch porn, even if it has to by by hook or by crook.

Yes, I’m kidding.

While I’m not going to claim that I am necessarily a “typical” woman, I think I do have some reactions that are fairly common, espeically in my own “Baby Boom” generation. So, remembering that none of this may apply in your situation, let me outline why film porn — hard or soft core — has never done much for me erotically.

My first problem with it is that it isn’t realistic. (Yeah, yeah, I know that’s kind of silly, since for a lot of people its unreality is part of the fun of it.) In hardcore the first unreality is the absurd situations (we can’t dignify them as “plots”). I mean, “Hello Mr. Job Candidate, wanna fuck?” is sketch comedy, not erotic storytelling.

As a matter of fact it’s the emphasis on the detached, almost disembodied mechanics and the closeups of naughty bits interacting (which could just as easily be rubber sex-ed visual aids) that turn me off the most in hardcore.

I do like movie sex that makes me feel like the people involved are really, REALISTICALLY enjoying themselves. But when I watch porn the silly details the camera thinks are important bug me too much. I keep thinking how stupid it all is. I keep laughing at all the idiocy and ugliness.

For example: WHAT is up with that constant rhythmic moaning the women do in porn movies? It’s like their vocal chords are on some kind of digital loop. It actually sounds like they’re bored with that unrelieved jackhammer of everlasting humping going on behind them, but (impatient sigh) they still have to follow the script. Which reads either “Make 62 perfectly symmetrical, robotic noises before faking steam-whistle orgasm” or “Yell ‘harder!harder’ twelve times before switching to ‘deeper!deeper!’ twelve times and then finish up with ‘yes baby oh baby oh oh’ — but be careful to say these lines with NO EXPRESSION WHATSOEVER.”

And here’s the absolutely hysterical, stone dead mystery of hardcore: WHY does the guy take his dick out right when any normal man would want to push it way, way in, up to the hilt? Not to mention that money shots are disgusting. To me, anyway. Messy, mechanical, the very opposite of erotic. (And while I’m ranting, can I just say here that I hate the word “cum”? It conjures up pimple-faced, snaggle-toothed fourteen-year-olds furtively whacking off in the teacher’s lounge after school hours. The word is ‘come,” people. The event and the stuff. “Cum” is the way Beavis spells it.)

You might think that it’s odd that I don’t appreciate money shots when I say the major aggravation of these movies for me is their fakeness. After all, when a penis is pumping it out on camera, that’s undeniably the real thing, and nobody could deny that the guy is genuinely enjoying himself, right? Well, yeah, but it’s the almost inhuman, unconnected “thingness” of the thing burping up fluids that’s off-putting there. It’s just…icky, okay? The disgust factor hits me big time, and it overwhelms my potential appreciation of the sexual content.

The fakery I’m talking about is really anything up on the screen, ugly OR pretty, that keeps me from entering or identifying with the scene. In that respect, sex scenes in mainstream movies and softcore make the opposite mistake: they beautify and idealize things too much.

Most of the sex in mainstream movies strikes me as trying too hard to fulfill commonplace fantasy formulas, so we get the shower scenes and the bangbang “up against the wall” scenes and the golden afternoons of overlapped dissolves. Yawwwn. And again the distraction factor kicks in, and I’m annoyed by the things they get “wrong” from my point of view, like the fact that movie women always come in fifteen seconds from a standing start, with their mouths all pretty and softly open in a big round “O,” and their legs lying all relaxed and boneless. Few of them ever even come close to a straining sexual grimace or the tense, shaking muscles of my experience — mostly, I suspect, because actresses don’t want to look “ugly” on camera.

Then there are the scenes in which, say, the male partner studiously avoids kissing the woman’s breasts (I’m sitting there thinking, “Her nudity contract probably prohibits mouths coming within 6 inches of her tits”), or when they get into all sorts of artistic but improbable poses (Sylvester Stallone doing his Mr. Olympia routine in the shower with Sharon Stone springs hilariously to mind), or when the nipples of the woman’s huge artificial chest torpedos remain totally unaroused … well, you get the picture.

All in all, movie sex offers me far too many opportunities to notice incongruous physical details, improbable positions and absurd scenarios, so I’m always off into MST3K mode inside my head, snarking and giggling and generally Not Getting Into It.

Read more about cinematic inspiration in “Heroes of the Silver Screen“

And yet there have been films and television series that have turned me on and inspired my erotic imagination.