In last September’s issue of The Monthly, Cordelia Fine started from the premise that porn is bad, male sexuality is, by its nature, mechanistic, dominant and bad, then analysed some studies and comes to the surprising conclusion that, you guessed it, Porn is Bad.

Meagan Tyler, on The Drum, used straw-man arguments to prove that those of us who are vaguely pro-porn are using straw-man arguments against those, like her, who are anti-porn. You think that sentence was convoluted, try following the logic of someone who honestly believes that it was Dines being shouted down, rather than doing the shouting, on Q&A.

Everywhere I look, women are telling me that I’m bad. Well not me, personally, I don’t think, but men in general. Our sexuality, at its very best, is bad and, at its worst, is monstrous. Men and our sex drives must be guarded against because we are made even more dangerous to women by our consumption of any kind of porn. We must be controlled, because female sexuality is the only right moral way to be, we are just penis-driven morons.

All these women, I’m sure, mean well. They are rightly concerned about what happens to the young women who appear in violent degrading porn and just as concerned about what watching it is doing to young men and the young women with whom they’re learning how to have sex.

On specific examples of gonzo porn, I cannot help but agree with them. But they are women. They’re watching porn through a woman’s eyes, feeling somewhere between mildly offended and utterly horrified, then extrapolating those female reactions into what they imagine is the male brain and ranting endlessly about what they know men think. I’d like to see their reaction to a man telling women that he knows what’s wrong with female sexuality.

Before I launch into a sadly necessary defence of my brain and my penis and the link between the two, a bit of housekeeping on porn itself.

Gonzo is the niche that’s getting the anti-porn lobby excited, with good reason in many cases. Gonzo grew from the realisation that we all fast-forward through the “storyline” in any porno flick, straight to the fucking. So Gonzo doesn’t bother with any pretence of being a story; the director and crew are often in shot and can be heard talking, the set is just a room with enough couches and lights to show the bits that matter.

We all know when we’re watching a porno, like any other film, that they’re just actors, doing a job for money. Gonzo acknowledges this and does away with the tiny little bit of magic that used to be there, reducing the fucking to a mechanical process.

Somewhere along the line it started to get ugly and violent and just plain nasty. Gagging, choking, slapping and degradation are there to be found, if you look. Perhaps it was a reaction to the explosion of free porn and the need to have something that was worth selling, something most people wouldn’t do for no pay, I really don’t know.

But I surf various porn sites pretty regularly and while the Gonzo stuff certainly exists, so does acres and acres of porn that is just regular, enjoyable fucking and fiddling and posing. The biggest growth in free porn is Natural and Amateur, monikers that speak for themselves. Porn seems to be splitting down the middle — viewers like me have grown tired of (or were never interested in) dopey-looking body-builders pounding away at orange, hairless, silicon-filled starlets and are looking for normal, healthy-looking participants.

The industry, having forgotten how to make fuck movies that at least looked like fun, have ceded that field to the home-made and the few professionals who fill the ever-growing niche of realism.

That there will always be a market for nasty shit is both sad and frightening, but that is not the only porn market, there’s an even bigger market for regular shit. The existence of hardcore gonzo has not eliminated the regular stuff. There are still millions of photos all over the net of a kind you used to see in, ahem, gentlemen’s magazines. There are still movies being made by pros and amateurs that are just a regular-looking bloke and a regular-looking chick getting it on. Many of these blokes and chicks (in fact my research over the past few years shows more and more of them) have pubic hair, sometimes quite a lot and look like they’re enjoying themselves — both of them, not just the man. And it is watching someone enjoying the fucking that most men find arousing

It is worth remembering too that women also watch and enjoy porn — something the likes of Dines and Tankard-Reist steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Pornography is not the sole refuge of sexually damaging man-beasts, it’s much wider and far more varied than any anti porn activist will admit.

So that’s a potted What Is Porn. The bigger question, one that the female academics seem unable or unwilling to answer is Why Is Porn?

I’ll let you in on a secret. Men like looking at it because, and here’s the kicker: we masturbate. I’m guessing that the same is true of women who watch it, but not being a woman I wouldn’t presume to speak for them.

You know that old truism that the Inuits have over a hundred different words for snow, because snow is a big part of their lives? Think about how many synonyms we have for wanking. Without googling for new ones I’m confident I could fill the next three pages, but that’s a column for another day.

We do it because sometimes we need to or just want to, because it feels good. In the world of sweeping generalisation, men are generally more easily and more quickly aroused than women. So, we wank. Simple. It’s about relieving tension or just dealing with a recalcitrant hard-on when your partner is either not in the mood or not in the house; porn is an aide to efficient wanking and nothing more.

When you masturbate, you’re just doing something to yourself to achieve a physical result. When you have sex, you’re doing a whole lot of something with and for someone else and, if you’re doing it right, there are things being done for you, too.

Men know the difference between having a wank and having sex. I’ve been doing both for over a quarter of a century and they are Completely. Different. Things.

Wanking is about orgasm, that is all.

Sex is about being close, so close that you are joined together more than physically, sharing sweat and skin and soul and loving each other completely. Or, if you’re with someone you’re not in love with, it is about having fun, feeling good and sharing that with someone else.

If a man is thinking about porn when he’s having sex with his partner there’s something wrong with the relationship or with him, something that goes deeper than just his porn watching habits.

If a man demands anal sex or deep-throating or anything at all from his wife, girlfriend or casual shag that she doesn’t want to do, that’s not porn’s fault, that’s his fault; he’s an arsehole.

Porn does not turn men into arseholes, not unless they have a natural predilection toward arsehole-ness and although Dines/MTR et al seem to assume that all men have this, its not actually true. Sexual brutality has been around since we came down from the trees. So have men who find it repugnant. Neither of those things is related to porn.

The only concern about porn influencing male sexuality is, in my opinion, adolescent boys discovering sex on a diet of pure gonzo. I cannot see that as being in any way healthy, however they will go looking, because boys are very interested in girls and what girls look like without their clothes on.

Like all the other “serious talks” we have to have with our kids about smoking, drugs, and sex, we need to accept that the internet is there and it’s full of weird shit. We need to talk to our young boys, make sure that they that know some porn is bad, and some, although the thought of them looking at it is mortifying, is not so bad. We need them to know that they are not one small step from becoming a sexual predator because they are aroused by watching couples from the internet shagging each other’s brains out

This is where the anti porn activists fall over, because the likes of Tankard-Reist and Dines have gone beyond activism and into zealotry. In their world, because some porn is degrading and violent, all porn is degrading and violent. Some men become obsessive about the degrading porn therefore all men who watch porn will become obsessed with degrading porn. Some women who participate in porn are damaged by it, therefore every woman is a victim of porn. They see only black and white, refuse to acknowledge all the shades of grey and do their cause and everyone involved in the debate a grave disservice thereby.

But then again, I’m just a dumb porn watching man, what would I know about male sexuality?

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