Wow. You make a lot of sense here and I (embarassingly) see some of my younger self in these descriptions. I’m not nearly smart enough to figure out why, when or how I changed, but I have. That probably has a lot to do with meeting my wife and (literally & figuratively) settling down. I am thankful for that. When I read these things and recognize myself and the things I’ve done, I want to hide.

I’d like to find someone who admits to watching this kind of crap so I can ask him what he gets out of it. It’s way too ubiquitous for at least one person I know to not be watching it. And that makes me really, really uneasy.

You want to see the angry young man effect? Go to digg.com and read the comments. [shudder]

The idea that women have “all” the power is an obvious rationalization---in my memories of those years, such guys realized that as a rule, they ruled over women their age, who had to jump when they said jump if we wanted any social esteem at all

I think this is the kind of situation that gives rise to Niceguyism.  You end up with a situation where men are in control - both over women and over other men, which somehow causes the Nice Guys to see women as collaborators with their oppressors, rather than people who are also victims of a patriarchal system. 

It’s a standard oppression system, I think, where one oppressed group gets played flawlessly against another, on the overarching message that they’re superior and the other is subhuman.  The analogy I’m thinking of here is between upper class white people, lower class white people, and black people: clearly the dominance of a certain class hurts both lower class whites and blacks alike, but whites - the racial nice guys - blame everything on black people.

So while I was going to post on more Republican evil shit, I don’t have the moral stamina.  But I do want to highlight this interesting post ...

This is tangential to your main point, but I wanted to let you know that I’ve missed these sorts of posts as the political season has really heated up, and these sorts of posts are fewer than they used to be. I like politics, but I get tired of all politics, all the time (like electioneering politics, not like the personal-is-political politics). It’s your blog. You can write what you like. But if you’re feeling the urge to go in this direction, I’m at least one reader who doesn’t feel let down in the least. As for lack of moral stamina, the ubiquitousness of misogyny is far scarier and takes far more moral stamina to confront than contemplating dirty tricks and another four years of Republican rule, in my opinion.

Why video games and porn?  Why not something else?

To give the most obvious, stereotypical answer, they’re what angry losers do with all that time they spend not getting laid. They’re very visual and engaging media that take up a lot of mental and emotional energy, so it’s easier to get caught up in the fantasies they offer than in those of, say, poetry or blogs or paintings.

Thanks so much for the link love and the validation, Amanda—there’s a lot here for all of us to unpack.

Mikey: yes, exactly, especially in closed off social situations such as say, high school.
To the extent a young girl’s self-esteem is hung on the attention and approval of boys, it’s not any boys, or all boys, it’s the cool ones—cool being at least partially a function of how well they oppress *and* attract both the boys and the girls.

I found really interesting is a description of the sort of hostility towards women that’s common now in porn, and has made me question if the porn market is really driven by innocent and non-misogynist lust, as is wishfully claimed often.  It just seems that misogyny is the selling point of so much of it.

This is what ultimately brought me around to hold a pretty hardnosed anti-pr0n line.  Precious little of it, and almost none that isn’t made by women with a specifically “empowering” bent, is not hostile to the extent of being a severe turnoff. 

Which makes me wonder about the men it turns on, and the motives of the people who produce it.  And the industry in general, because this sort of thing makes up like 99% of all pr0n I’ve ever seen (and my taste in pr0n never got too far beyond Totally Vanilla even before I decided to cut it out of my life).

Oh, and ditto Chingona - I’ve been thinking the exact same thing.  Not that I don’t love the election issues coverage, too.

I too don’t want the entire blog to be all election all the time. I like these sorts of posts.

I think this is what’s remarkable about porn - that there’s virtually no market (relatively) for naked people having sex with each other, compared to violent and exploitative imagery. 

And I want to toss out the word ‘racialized’ in here - there’s some appeal, and I’m not sure what it is - to interracial porn, virtually always black man/white woman, and I don’t think it’s only for black men convinced that whiteness=beauty.

Thirding on the something-other-than-elections posts. 

Also, though I am not familiar with Hugo (yet!), I heart Micheal Kimmel.

To give the most obvious, stereotypical answer, they’re what angry losers do with all that time they spend not getting laid.

For porn, I guess.

For video games, depends on the genre. MMORPGS? Definitely true. That’s the most extreme genre in that respect. They’re borderline evil in how they can consume some peoples lives, I’ve seen it.

But stuff like racers or FPS? You don’t really get that emotionally invested in it, it’s something you do for one hour when you have time to kill.

Not to create an echo chamber, but add my vote to the “yes, please, more” category.

The idea that women have “all” the power is an obvious rationalization---in my memories of those years, such guys realized that as a rule, they ruled over women their age, who had to jump when they said jump if we wanted any social esteem at all.

Seriously?  That wasn’t my experience, not at all.  (If anything, they had to say “yeah, right, nerd” when I said jump if they wanted social esteem.)

I think what may be happening is that we’re talking about different sets of young adults here.  When we think about young people of our own gender, we think of ourselves at that age, or our friends - generally, a fairly representative group.  When we think about young people of another gender, at least when we’re talking about relative power, we tend to think of the socially privileged ones - the pretty, the cool, the popular.  So of course everyone thinks that every other group has it easier.

But stuff like racers or FPS? You don’t really get that emotionally invested in it, it’s something you do for one hour when you have time to kill.

Speak for yourself, Ben D.  I’m a gearhead and car nut.  I’ve spent days at a time on racing games- it’s why I don’t have a console system anymore.  I still have a scar/callus on my left thumb from the original Sony Gran Turismo and that was like 10 years ago.

The obsession potential is there for all games: the type that any particular individual ends up obsessing over isn’t relevant to the fact of obsession.  For some, it’s online RPGs.  They never did much for me.  Real-time strategy games, on the other hand… well, I apparently can’t have those in my house anymore either.  I spent way too much time last year on Total War: Rome.

It occurs to me that certain types of games, like Sony GT with its emphasis on tuning the cars and the act of racing, combat flight simulators (in both the “player character” is an invisible and anonymous driver/pilot) or RTS games where one manipulates entire armies, is that there simply isn’t much chance at all of the sort of gender stereotyping possible. 

It’s only games that involve actual characters in social situations that the potential problems as Amanda describes arise.  It’s pretty hard to be misogynistic when you’re just trying to make that Subaru go a bit faster.

When we think about young people of another gender, at least when we’re talking about relative power, we tend to think of the socially privileged ones - the pretty, the cool, the popular.  So of course everyone thinks that every other group has it easier.

Even the guys I knew growing up who were nerds or other “undesirables” lorded it over the girls. 

Though I’m wondering whether what you said might be true of yourself—you’re not remembering the girls of your social status you had power over, you’re remembering the popular cheerleaders who wouldn’t give you the time of day.

While I agree that the hierarchical nature of American high school means that just about everyone has both a status superior and an status inferior (and thus is both tortured and torturer), ultimately the guys in any particular subculture have higher status than the girls in the same subculture.

Seriously?  That wasn’t my experience, not at all.  (If anything, they had to say “yeah, right, nerd” when I said jump if they wanted social esteem.)

It’s more what Aaron said:

To the extent a young girl’s self-esteem is hung on the attention and approval of boys, it’s not any boys, or all boys, it’s the cool ones—cool being at least partially a function of how well they oppress *and* attract both the boys and the girls.

And it worked pretty much the way oppression always works:  both the nerdy/lower social status guys and the girls were in competition to get the approval of the cool boys.  Since you didn’t realize you’d been set against one another, you blamed the girls for oppressing you when it was more a function of the competition for attention than any power the girls themselves actually had.

It’s only games that involve actual characters in social situations that the potential problems as Amanda describes arise.  It’s pretty hard to be misogynistic when you’re just trying to make that Subaru go a bit faster.

That’s *kind of* what I was trying to say I guess, you put it much better.

Turn-based strategy is my addiction, and old-school 2-D Nintendo (and especially) Sega. The former actually impacted me positively, I got really good at geography and history from the them.

Still, I mean, have you ever heard of anyone playing Sega GT so much that they lost their job or had to drop out of college, or would only speak to their girlfriend or parents if they logged on as a character? That’s what I’m talking about.

Well, I guess with Mario there’s the “helpless princess” thing but Sonic doesn’t have that at least (not in the old school ones).

I’m not a big gamer (more like a casual MarioKart kinda guy), but my half-informed impression is that there’s a substantial difference in which ethnic groups play which games: black kids tend to heavily favor sports games and white kids tend to heavily favor the war games and the misogynist extravaganzas like Grand Theft Auto.  Is that true?  Does it matter in this discussion?  Maybe there’s something about the varieties of privilege playing out here.

And are the MRA and NiceGuyTM groups racially distinct?  Everything I’ve seen seems to be white as a McCain rally.

I never noticed that, Loneoak. Pretty much everyone likes sports games, there’s a reason Madden is the best selling game in the world. Black kids aren’t a big enough demographic to push sales THAT high.

This is a very, very angry society, and with good reason.  The problem is that a small number of people/interests benefit from the system, and would rather not become the target of the anger themselves.  Thus, all the groups and subgroups set against each other, in an, “I can get one half of the working class to kill the other half” kind of way.

Thus, the effectiveness of the GOP’s kind of populism.  Angry people don’t want to be told to calm down.  They want to have a target for their anger, even if it’s a phantom (e.g., the Liberal Media), even if it has nothing to do with oppressing them (e.g., women and feminism).

And here I’m about to show my age and my geek background:  Only a fool fights in a burning house!

Loneoak, I have no idea what the actual demographic answers to those questions are, but I think they’re definitely worth looking into.  (I don’t really know where we’d start mining that kind of data. I suppose video game registrations might have that data - but who registers games any more? Really?)

I’ve never met a non-white MRA either, but that’s totally anecdotal.

“Why Porn” or “Why Video Games” sort of misses the point.  You’re correct to assume that neither one is inherently evil; but in reality they (as everything else) serves the society they are a part of.  I can easily imagine porn or video games that do not focus rage on women.  Instead, because our culture focuses rage on women, so do all cultural productions.  All of us focus too much of our attention on the symptoms, and not enough on the cause: men are taught, as part of the acculturation process, that women are “the other.” Men are socialized away from women, even at an early age.  When women are viewed as something “else” they are automatically objectified, because that’s the way the human mind works.  Some men (and really it’s a fairly large percentage of all men) learn at some point that the world is a more complicated thing place, and leave that rage behind.  But I remember feeling it when I was an adolescent, and I know of few boys who avoided it.  They want to get laid, but they don’t know how.  They want to connect, but they don’t know how.  So they project their rage on the object of their desire.  It’s almost painfully simple, but until our culture as a whole starts to figure this out, it will remain a constant, and there will be a substantial percentage of the male population who do not outgrow their adolescent impression of women as the evil other.

“Video games were too absorbing to remember meetings scheduled, and porn wasn’t a fun thing to look at to get turned on by, but something you---a miserable flesh and blood young woman---failed to live up to.”

Ah yes… my lack of tattoos and piercings reduces me to less than a porn star. I think porn (at least a great deal of what is out there) has always been class-coded. It would be weird if most women actually felt some sense of competition with porn performers, since the performers are the equivalent of Mexican guys on construction sites with no protection: they do the shit that respectable middle class people won’t do.

I don’t watch a lot of porn, but think the “deception” and “degeneration” motifs are ancient ones in pornographic genres. Nice girl/guy goes to the big city, meets bad people, gets fucked (literally and metaphorically) and becomes more corrupt. Wedekind’s LULU is one example, but I think these story lines are pretty old. Of course, when they are combined with today’s Reality TV perspective, it is not surprising to see people taking them more seriously.

The really obnoxious thing, in my mind, is that any woman in her right mind would star in porn. Now that it’s on the internet for all eternity, I just can’t imagine how anything less than a lifetime paycheck for all the real jobs you might lose because of your 18-year old stupidity could be worth it

I think this is what’s remarkable about porn - that there’s virtually no market (relatively) for naked people having sex with each other, compared to violent and exploitative imagery.

I dont think that thats true at all

(and no, I dont need anybody to volunteer to do reaearch)

I think this is what’s remarkable about porn - that there’s virtually no market (relatively) for naked people having sex with each other, compared to violent and exploitative imagery.

I think this has come up before, and it’s basically the gangsta rap problem.  Gangsta rap is primarily purchased by white kids in the suburbs, and they have a lot of purchasing power, so it’s distorted the rap/hip-hop market overall and slanted it in favor of what that specific CD-buying audience wants.

Similar thing with porn.  Most guys are pretty casual users of porn—they buy maybe a magazine a year or rent a few movies.  The guys who buy a LOT of porn are going to be the ones who are more into the misogynistic stuff, and since they’re the biggest consumers, the porn companies cater to them.  Why should they try and get the guy who buys one or two movies a year when they can go after the guy who buys a movie a week?

As for why people watch ... well, watching other people fuck is pretty interesting to us as humans.  That’s what we get for being descended from bonobos.  But then we put all of the cultural crap on top of it and it gets creepy.

Ok, as someone who is male, a Niceguy, married/divorced, dates smart women who have-it-going-on in all senses, plays videogames and yet also indulges in porn, I can boil it down to one thing: power.

That is the line between “couples erotica”—which is usually as boring as watching paint dry—and the various themes promulgated by mainstream porn franchises (your Bangbros, Brazilbangs, and various others which come up on the seemingly infinite, cross-linked universe of thumbnail gallery sites). The most compelling porn is about “situations” more than the act itself—where the male character, usually a cipher, gets to tell the female(s) what to do. It doesn’t happen in real life, we’re socially discouraged from being Sexist and Bossy, so when we are denied the satisfaction of a real relationship, we wish we could have that kind of power.

Why?

To use a pun—Mikey nailed it early on in the thread. There are those of us who do what we think we’re supposed to do (Be a Good Listener! Be Sensitive! Exercise and Be Fit! Pluck your Eyebrows, you Ape-Man! Etc.) and yet we see all of our Strong, Beautiful, Talented, Brilliant female-friends-we-have-secret-crushes-on go again and again for hairy macho schmucks who always end up either being psychos or cheaters or worse.

How many times have you seen the “I need a REAL man” trope come up on dating sites? Just this week, my local free-weekly-alt-paper has a ‘rant’ from someone saying men are wusses who won’t come out and approach women. But we’ve been socialized not to! Which is it, fercrissakes?

Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe the Gen-Y crowd are different.

Um, broker, men have been socialized to not approach women? Maybe to fear rejection (though I’d say that’s innate rather than socialized), but when was the last time you saw a movie where the shy kid who never asked a girl out was the one who ended up dating the cheerleader? How many popular “couples” in high school did you see where the boy was the wallflower?

Back on topic: Why porn and video games? Well, they’re visual media, for one. Violence and sex are deeply intertwined with visual cues. Also, they tend to be solitary activities, where “guys” can indulge in what they know would push social boundaries: thus, the accumulation of the more violent and oppressive media.

Shorter broker:

Here, let me write a comment which Pandagonians can link to whenever someone wonders what a Nice GuyTM looks like. Would that be of any help?

… and yet we see all of our Strong, Beautiful, Talented, Brilliant female-friends-we-have-secret-crushes-on go again and again for hairy macho schmucks who always end up either being psychos or cheaters or worse.

And the not-quite-so-beautiful female friends of yours who have a crush on you stand by wondering, “Why are guys so shallow that they only pay attention to the hottest girl in the room and the rest of us could drop dead for all they care?”

Then they realize that you really are that shallow, and they move on to date men who are actually nice to them full-time and not just nice to them for as long as it takes to get them into bed.  And you’re left standing there wondering why your best female friend doesn’t seem interested in listening to your long rants about shallow women anymore.

The thing that always strikes me about the descriptions for these kinds of productions (the misogynistic porn, anyway) is the contemptuous descriptions of the girls.  They’re dumb, clueless and ignorant, but also bitches, sluts and whores.  Their supposed lack of brains doesn’t make them innocent victims, because they’re also doing it for the money.  It’s a trap that allows the broken people and outright monsters who get off on humiliation and degradation a marketplace justification. As Carlin might say, “It’s bad for ya”.

In my experience Mnemosyne is right about the porn thing. I and most people I’ve talked to prefer the “boring, vanilla stuff” that’s just two people having sex and seeming really into it. But if all you’re looking for is the fucking, there’s no need to ever pay money - there are countless vidoes on free and amateur sites: which is convenient, but it means that those who prefer plain vanilla sex videos aren’t going to be driving the market at all.

Hmm. My experience as a geek who grew up in the 80s is that geek girls were privileged in the geek world. There weren’t as many of us, and while it was a good idea to have a thick skin in class because highly competitive boys tend to put down their competition (and at least as much with each other as towards the girls, but as I had an older brother, I was used to it and competed and dissed back at them). In play situations, be it Call of Cthulu, hanging out at lunch discussing astrophysics, and eventually going to scifi conventions, there was always a certain deference to my social choices. 
I could be atypical because of my self-confidence and social skills, but it was definitely different from mainstream boy/girl interaction.

In play situations, be it Call of Cthulu, hanging out at lunch discussing astrophysics, and eventually going to scifi conventions, there was always a certain deference to my social choices.

Er, Samantha, when your Investigator was invited to go first whilst the group was hot on the heels of Dagon-worshippers, it *wasn’t* because they were being polite to a woman…

I think people are being a bit hard on Broker.  Completely understandably, but unfortunate.  Yes, this is the stereotypical nice-guy-ism, and we’ve seen it a thousand times.  However, this is exactly what it looks like from the inside, and it’s very hard to work your way out of, even or perhaps especially with a superficial understanding of feminism.  This can become toxic when combined with views of women as other and to be protected.  The casual dismissals and sneers don’t help get past this.  They are in fact unenlightening and alienating.

Just as society gives girls mixed messages about sexuality, it gives guys mixed messages.  Yes, they’re told to go for the girl, and that they need to pursue, but they’re also told that hitting on women can upset or offend them, and this is really bad to do.  This internalized message can eventually become exaggerated to the point where they strive mightily to avoid ever giving any hint of sexual attraction, or try to act completely asexual in the presence of women.  They might know in theory that girls can and do like sex, but they’ve seen this pattern of intrusive, demanding, and threatening male sexuality and don’t know any good way of communicating “I find you attractive.  Is there any reciprocal interest?” that can’t be taken the wrong way, that doesn’t feel crass or crude.  Sometimes his builds up until they say “fuc
k it—I gotta be crass and crude” and try to act like the assholes they’ve constructed in their mind.

Unfortunately, there is no guaranteed playbook that you can read to negotiate this mental trap you’ve constructed for yourself; women are individuals.  The general dance of communicating attractiveness often doesn’t start with clear unambiguous words, but with ambiguous hints here and there, body language, and so forth.  People are complicated.

(As a sidenote, I think this pattern is especially common with those that have a hard time navigating many implicit social rules and interactions, particularly those that are in opposition with explicit social rules.  Most human interactions are studded with hypocrisy, and sexual attraction is no exception.  These people tend to be those that are a bit socially awkward and may not even notice flirtatious behavior or other signs of attraction from these “not-quite-so-beautiful female friends of yours who have a crush on you”, unless these female friends take the initiative in ways explicit enough to not be mistaken, which may be a step or two beyond where they think it is.  If you’re going to pine over someone you think is unattainable, it might as well be the super-hot one.  The one next to you seems just as unattainable.)

The whole point of the misogyny in these kinds of films is that the girls are judged neutrally until they do say yes, at which point the guys watching can say: “She’s a whore so she deserves everything she gets”. Everyone’s seen similar logic in rape trials, you’re either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and there’s precious little inbetween.

Course when girls do say no, the guys in question assume she’s ‘stuck up’ or ‘frigid’.

It also seems to stem from the political necessities and their drive of the masculine ideal. For instance, porn (mainstream) began devolving into misogynist rape fantasies in the 1980s at the height of Reagan’s reinforcing of masculine dread and Republican policies that required that dread and stupidity to support.

Video games similarly have begun featuring violence porn games with no redeeming values at the time that the American developers started dominating, which coincided with Bush riding high and the successful fear of masculinity that has driven the more reprehensible views of that movement.

And I think you’re on to something in that when the public narrative is all about big tough manly men and the culture that seeks to destroy them from being kick ass, you’ll inevitably get a demand from younger men who are victims of that worldview desperately trying to make it up in fantasy worlds that cater to it or can be manipulated to cater to it (by say trolling and stalking any women or decent people who would play it online or talk about it online or design the games or violently attacking games that don’t cater to their petulant whims). When advertising and their young men are the only demographic that matters starts to butt their heads in, it often gets exasperated to the point where games and porn that isn’t violently misogynist become greater and greater rarities.

So yeah, interesting article and I hope to read the book too.

Hypnotrick is even nastier still. They “hypnotize” a young woman then rape her.
The whole time the guys is talking in a soothing voice this is OK this is normal.......AS IF!!
It is neither OK or normal.

I play an online MMORPG and I must say...it is extremely sexist.  It doesn’t matter what you chose, male or female, for your character.  The attributes are exactly the same, so game play is the same either way.  What is sexist is the dang armor you get.  I used to play with a male character of the same class, and we were the same levels so we would get the exact same armor rewards.  When we equipped the armor, we were usually totally shocked by the differences.  On him, the armor looked like, well....armor.  On my female character, it looked like stripper attire.  Happened every time.  And that’s only one example of the sexism inherent in a game made by and for “guys.”

Aaron and broker:  What about the MENZ?  Oh, it’s so sad when you become friends with a woman because you expect her to fall into bed with you gratefully and then you find out she has agency and she can choose to be with whomever she wants to be with!  What a shock that she doesn’t want to be with the guy who thinks she owes him a fuck!  What a shock she can see through your ulterior motives!  It’s a horrible day in your world when you find out a woman is a living, breathing human being, instead of some sexbot who’s there for your pleasure.

If you’re going to pine over someone you think is unattainable, it might as well be the super-hot one.  The one next to you seems just as unattainable.

Not that I was ever self-destructive enough to have a secret crush on a Nice Guy, but from what I’ve heard, once a Nice Guy’s long-suffering female friend finally does ask him out, he’s likely to decide she’s a loser who deserves to be made fun of for having the bad taste to like him, and certainly not worth being attracted to. Nice Guys, like all other depressed people, enjoy their unhappiness on some level because it’s comfortable and familiar, and don’t simply need to be saved by someone else who gives them what they think they want. So I’m skeptical of the “Nice Guys just need someone to ask them out” theory.

Not to mention that it often turns out that there’s no real difference between the “nice guys” and the “asshole guys” when you actually do start going out with one.  Let’s just say that the “nice” part of the term is supplied by the guy in question—it’s not an absolute. 

In fact I sometimes think that the men who complain that women always go with assholes and bad boys do so more out of projection than anything else.  Women are actually avoiding the asshole (them) and dating men they’re honestly interested in who exhibit perfectly normal behavior.  The Nice Guy is just projecting his assholishness onto these men in a desperate attempt to explain to himself why women don’t want him.  Which is luckily sometimes aided by the fact that everyone complains about their partner sometimes, everyone has lover’s spats, etc. 

The main reason I bring this up is that the one Nice Guy I ever dated happened to be… wait for it… my abuser.

So the Nice Guy basically just wants what he can’t have, and as soon as he gets it, he doesn’t want it anymore? That’s really warped.

What does MRA stand for, btw?

So the Nice Guy basically just wants what he can’t have, and as soon as he gets it, he doesn’t want it anymore? That’s really warped.

It is warped, but I get that depression is a vicious cycle that turns you into the biggest asshole in the world, which makes other people want to avoid you, which reinforces your belief that the world sucks and you suck. So it’s not exactly abnormal. I guess it’s just easier to alienate yourself when you’re inclined to believe half the human population owes you something.

Come to think of it, I do remember once having a secret crush on a Nice Guy, but he was actually nice enough when he found out about it, as embarrassing as it was. I did get the sense that when he said “girls don’t like me because I’m a nice guy,” he intended the ironic interpretation of “nice guy” as “sad sack.”

MRA stands for Men’s Rights Advocate.

In other words, broker, because you don’t get the women you feel entitled to, you watch porn where women are degraded as revenge.  Exactly what we’re saying. Have you considered the possibility that because you have all this seething rage at women for not giving you what you think they owe you, that might turning women off? 

I do see a lot of strong, beautiful women date men beneath them, but frankly, it’s because a lot of the time there doesn’t seem to be much of alternative, and one does get lonely.  Sometimes the appeal of the “macho brute” is that he doesn’t play games or try to guilt you into bed with “you owe me, I’m a Nice Guy” eyes.  When the only apparent alternatives are a guy who’s not that great and probably sexist, but comes right out with telling you he likes you, and doesn’t seem to have some boiling rage and a guy who is too spineless to say what he wants, but passive aggressively guilts you for not picking him and no doubt goes home to watch reels of porn of women getting degraded, it’s easy to go for the other guy.  Much less concern about hidden surprises.

Of course, there’s a lot more personality types out there than those two, but I do see women get stuck in a loop where it seems those are the only choices available.

Instead of hating women for not realizing you have a secret crush, why not hold your own self responsible a little bit?  Quit hating women for not being super-human mind readers.  Treat women---gasp!---like you’d treat men that you want to be your friends.  You don’t lurk around men, throwing daggers because they don’t immediately give you what you want.  You realize that they’re humans and have to have communication and fair treatment.

But I do appreciate your comment, broker, because it does illuminate exactly what hostility drives the market.

What about turning it around? Let’s say there’s this huge market for porn like this:

A group of normal-looking (not hawt) 30 and 40 year-old women trap a very young man—about 18—trick him into going to some deserted place with them, and hurt him badly until he cries and vomits from the pain and abuse. The women then laugh at him, mock him, and leave him stranded.

And this is presented as sexual desire and freedom and it’s defended as such. And women don’t even have to defend getting off on it to men—because girls will be girls—and men are expected to just deal with it with understanding and good nature or else be accused of trying to kill women’s perfectly innocent fantasy lives.

And this all happens in a world where men, especially young men, are raped, beaten, and murdered all the time, and when they are, any criminal investigation focuses on their fault and responsibility.

Oh, and they are charged for their own forensics exams.

Everytime I see an Ivy-Taki match in Soulcalibur IV, I get uncomfortable, especially if both characters are wearing their default outfits- and I use that term loosely. If you’ve played the game in question, you’d understand. Everyone else should Google it with the image filter turned on…

So many video games are Japanese (like Soulcalibur) though you really can’t say that they’re a product of American culture (even if their popularity is).

Grand Theft Auto, OTOH…

And it worked pretty much the way oppression always works:  both the nerdy/lower social status guys and the girls were in competition to get the approval of the cool boys.  Since you didn’t realize you’d been set against one another, you blamed the girls for oppressing you when it was more a function of the competition for attention than any power the girls themselves actually had.

I think this is a really interesting comment, in that it misses the complexity of social relationships in an attempt to make them simple enough for easy answers. A reasonable enough desire, but one that will always lead to a dead end.

‘Cool’ and ‘powerful’ guys is not a fixed group. Power of different kinds will always move between people based on circumstances. A guy who is good at sports will be laughed at if he is illiterate, and competition about who is cool is a constant struggle among individuals.

To assume girls and low status guys will alwayds be struggling to impress a certain group of guys is ridiculous. Most subculture is built on the idea of not belonging to society, or rejecting the perceived standards of society.

And as far as ‘why games and pron.’ Why anything? It’s like saying in the 50’s why television and comics? It’s the media we have.

Has anybody else noticed that this discussion of porn seems eerily similar to MSM discussions of blogs?  “Sure there are many types of [blogs/porn] and [blogs/porn] aren’t inherently evil, but let’s talk about [what some random commenter on DKos said one time/a particular type of borderline-rape porn] as if it were representative of [blogs/porn].”

I say this not to defend this particular type of porn or even porn in general, but because, like blogs, porn reflects the people who are interested in it.  There’s enough variety out there that people can, and do, seek out exactly the type of thing that turns them on; they certainly don’t passively accept the messaging.  Yes, some types of porn can be dangerous to a consumer’s mental health because they reinforce very, very wrong ideas and tendencies in people’s heads.  Just like blogs. 

I do appreciate that Amanda put in double disclaimers about porn in general, so I don’t want this to come off as a straw man attack, but I think the focus in discussion about porn in general has been too 1-dimensional and too outsidery, and that this line exemplifies it:

what I found really interesting is a description of the sort of hostility towards women that’s common now in porn, and has made me question if the porn market is really driven by innocent and non-misogynist lust, as is wishfully claimed often.

The porn market is driven by the lust and broadband connections of millions and millions of (mostly) men.  Innocent lust, malicious lust, indifferent lust, foot-fetish lust, straight lust, gay lust.  Desires to humiliate.  Desires to be humiliated.  The types of desires that porn is filling are far too numerous to list off, but porn, like blogs (and violent video games, for that matter) is truly about giving people what they want.  Like it or not, there are millions of creepy people out there who like creepy stuff.  There are also millions of normal people with healthy relationships with their spouses and children… who like creepy stuff, in private.  And there are creepy people who like uncreepy stuff (think of Robin Williams’s character in One Hour Photo, who flipped out violently because he couldn’t stand the idea of somebody having sex and ruining what he thought was an innocent, idyllic family.  Or something like that, I don’t remember exactly, but I remember him being a total prude).  It’s complicated.

I’d like to find someone who admits to watching this kind of crap so I can ask him what he gets out of it. It’s way too ubiquitous for at least one person I know to not be watching it.

The thing that always strikes me about the descriptions for these kinds of productions (the misogynistic porn, anyway) is the contemptuous descriptions of the girls. They’re dumb, clueless and ignorant, but also bitches, sluts and whores. Their supposed lack of brains doesn’t make them innocent victims, because they’re also doing it for the money.

Bingo.  One of my close friends once told me about a porn series her boyfriend watches, along these “trick the bitch” lines. (Note that the boyfriend identifies as liberal and has shared many activist causes with her.) A woman is followed around a bit, coaxed into having sex for money—a LOT of money—and then afterwards the guys drive away laughing while the stunned woman disappears in the horizon.  My friend didn’t have a problem with it, noting several times that it was staged and not real, so I didn’t push about why he would enjoy such an obvious humiliation scenario, instead of what I imagined “normal” porn to be. (I don’t get out much, apparently.)

My guess is that guys get around acknowledging they’re watching a coercion fantasy because she’s an unofficial whore—the fact she eventually consents thinking she’ll get money (even a tens of thousands of dollars) proves that this kind of woman, or maybe ALL women, are shallow gold-diggers.  The older MRA types remember their mean ex-wives who bilked them for cash; the younger Nice Guys think about a specific breed of attention-seeking skank they learned about from reality TV and Girls Gone Wild.  They deserve to be degraded and laughed at.  Even my friend, while not being the porn’s target audience, thinks the premise is more funny than insulting; the fake victims represent those other, slutty women, not her.

I suspect that theme runs through the films described in this post too.  You can rationalize watching a group of men control and demean a woman by figuring she’s really bringing it on herself—for the promise of modelling fame/money.  The interesting part is that the actresses in these movies are being paid for their sex work, and the viewers no doubt look down on them for that and would rather imagine them getting screwed (literally and figuratively) for nothing.

I agree that ‘American Porn’ (as I think of it) is unwatchable, because of the tedious intro scenes where they either ask detailed questions about a womans breast size etc or go through a staged coercion scene.

But in the ‘driving off without paying’ scenes there is an interesting critique of sexual behaviour that shouldn’t just be dismissed as ‘humiliating girls.’ The idea of sex as a sacred thing is still very prevalent in our society, and the taboos around it are directly connected to many of the fucked up behaviours that are being discussed here. But it is also accepted that most people have their price, and that if enough money is offered any sexual act will be performed, and that this would be a rational choice. When a sex act is performed in exchange for money, and then that money is not payed it creates an interesting moral paradox. Is the crime committed rape, because a sex act was performed under false pretences, or was the crime simply a matter of property, as money was promised but never given? It blurs the line between the Victorian idea of rape as ‘A fate worse than death’, as reprised in ‘The Usual Suspects’ where Kayser Sozey shots his wife after she was sexually assaulted, and the more modern idea of sex as an agreement or transaction between two individuals.

mg_65, unless you can name me one of these specific cases of a cadre of older women taking an eighteen-year-old boy and gang-raping him, enjoy your alternate universe, kthxbai.

Fascinating thread, and thank’s to broker for coming on and proving everyone’s point. But I want to pick up on what Nicole is talking about and point out that its very significant that some of these fantasies revolve around the notion that the woman “consents” because she accepts the promise of money.  Lets face it, the fantasy element for the male viewer is two fold--that he actually gets or controls the girl and that he *has money* or *power* or *friends* of any kind that can tempt or threaten her to be controlled by him.  The nerd/loser/nice guy scenario that broker painted for us is that lots of guys feel they have nothing to offer women that women actually want. They claim to be pissed off because, they say, women want the fool’s gold that those other jerky, assertive, guys offer them. But actually they are pissed off because they see lots of things that high status women “want"--money, cars, power, intelligence, sense of humor, generosity, education, skill, high status, etc… and *none of those* are things that the loser/broker/nice guy has to offer. In the video he *does* have those things to offer, at least money, a car, a group of agressive buddies to get the woman.  You could probably have quite a sucessful porn video in which the male character purchased the desirable traits and used them to “get the girl” but the final element is that it is a *revenge* fantasy directed at the viewer’s own feelings of helpless rage that he never gets the girl in real life.  So the *revenge* part can’t be satisfied without humiliating the woman and revealing to her that her “choice” was no real choice, that her payoff (money, good looking guy, an actual nice guy) will never happen.  In the pron scenario discussed the men drive off and abandon her without paying her *because they can’t.* In an imaginary pron scenario that wasn’t aimed at humiliating women for the benefit of the angry viewer the male would have to build himself up, attract her, and abandon her and which of the two characters would be humiliated then?

This whole thing reminds me off a funny and off hand scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Xander is the typical “nice guy” loser who eternally lusts after Buffy while ignoring the true love right in front of him, in the form of Willow or other women. And the show calls him on it over and over again. But he’s recognizable as the prototypical “nice guy” who is really angry about it and in one show he confesses to Willow that he has a recurring fantasy in which he returns to Sunnydale in a jet, all wealthy and powerful and Buffy has lost everything and he “takes her out for a steak” and she cries. 

These revenge fantasies are so embedded in our society that they are simply taken as natural. If my husband were watching pron with this stuff I’d kick him out of the house and I advise Nicole’s friend to do the same to her boyfriend. When you are a teenager its ok to fantasize childish spite, when you are an adult and still doing it? creepy.

aimai

INTPagan,

What? I was turning a common porn story around to make it clear how unacceptable it is.

Amanda, I think the term for that genre is “ambush porn”.

Hugo’s entirely right about the mentality - it’s a combination of entitlement (how dare you bitches try to nudge me out of my rightful position as King of the World) and a need to use sex as a weapon.

Matthew, you’re saying that because there are many varieties of porn, we shouldn’t talk about the kinds of porn that are hateful, or that are reflective of larger trends - especially socially acceptable ones, like sex being something that men are supposed to trick, force or bribe out of women in a zero-sum game. If it’s all too confusing for you, you’re fully entitled to throw up your hands and walk away, but please do not try the fluffy bunny version of “STFU bitches” here.

Hi Mythago,

I’d love to respond to your comment, but I honestly can’t work out what part of either of my two posts you’ve drawn on to construct your straw man of my argument.

I never said anyone shouldn’t talk about hateful porn. My best guess is that you consider pointing out the tension of ‘sex as sacred’ and ‘sex as a transaction’ is somehow threatening? I think the two views are an important part of the confusion about sex that leads to ‘hate porn.’

Matthew, I apologize, for some reason I misread the author tag and attributed Some Guy’s post to you.

lol, fair enough. I guess I’ve been inadvertently trolled.

To assume girls and low status guys will alwayds be struggling to impress a certain group of guys is ridiculous. Most subculture is built on the idea of not belonging to society, or rejecting the perceived standards of society.

Most subcultures are actually more socially restrictive than the general culture.  How many people do you see who call themselves Goths but wear jeans and t-shirts?  There are pecking orders and hierarchies within subcultures, and you have people who are part of the inner circle and people who are trying to impress the members of the inner circle so they can break in.

Our entire culture right now is built on sucking up to rich white guys.  You have millions of people voting against their economic self-interest because they want to please the rich white guys and hope to be accepted as one of them one day.  For the vast majority of people, that will never happen, but that’s the carrot that’s held out to convince people that eliminating the estate tax is in the best interest of someone who makes $30,000 a year.

First, please let me apologize for not wording my comment as well as I had intended. Aaron’s comment at 4:40 outlines what I was trying to get at in much better detail.

Amanda, I’m not sure where you’re getting “seething rage” and “hating women” from though?

I wasn’t really outlining my own situation, nor my own preferences. I was really just drawing a, probably oversimplified, picture of the thought processes that underlie the appeal of certain genres of porn—the fact that men have difficulty negotiating relationships and sex, many men feel (or are made to feel) like the beta or gamma dog, they curse their own ineffectiveness, and they fantasize about having power and control.

It *is* adolescent, but plenty of grownups go to see superhero films, and if those aren’t also adolescent power fantasies, what is? Why else do some men have very well-tended collections of power tools, tricked-out gaming PCs or (in my case) kitchen gadgets? It’s about having knowledge, power and control over some specialist domain.

Why do some of these genres get more extreme? I suppose once something that was formerly taboo goes mainstream, you need to top it somehow…

Let’s not forget, of course, that we are discussing niches in a very, very broad spectrum of tastes. There are indeed “reverse gangbang” or “faux-male-rape” genres out there, I suppose again more to cater to men who prefer the idea of being ‘forced’ to service as many women as possible, but whatever. And then there’s a lot of male-slave, female-domination stuff out there too, and I’m not sure exactly who it’s supposed to appeal to.

In any case, ahem, I don’t hate anybody. If it matters

Something else I haven’t seen brought up here:  young men seem to watch porn in groups, not alone, and since most of the men who do so are (or claim to be) heterosexual, they’re clearly watching it for reasons other than sexual arousal.  I suspect that the kind of guys who watch porn in groups are also the kind who would really get into the nasty misogynist stuff—again, they would be the ones who drive the marketplace, while the guys who just want to peacefully watch people fuck get squeezed out of the market.

Which makes me wonder if that’s the reason amateur porn has become so popular—some people are turning away from commercial porn because of the nasty misogynist undertones so they can see what they actually want to see, people fucking and having a good time.

Mnemosyne: In groups? Really? That’s not been my experience. I suppose it is true, but it does seem a bit strange.

Is it acceptable to say that while I do sometimes watch porn videos of this kind, I watch them in spite of the unpleasant plots, rather than because of them?

A little secret here that I’m surprised none of the other guys who have posted have brought up - with modern computer technology, you don’t have to watch the whole video.  You can fast forward right to the sex parts.  Once the sex is over, one can then move on to another video, if necessary.

I wouldn’t want to deny that the kind of misogyny discussed here is not involved in devising these scenarios - obviously it is a prime motivating factor.  Nor would I deny that a decent percentage of the people watching these videos get off on that kind of thing - if that weren’t true, this wouldn’t be such a popular genre.  But I would suggest that one can certainly watch this kind of thing without engaging in that kind of misogyny.

Also, it’s just not true that this is the only kind of porn that exists.  Even in the “short vignettes with plot preceding sex scene” genre, there’s quite a bit of variety.  There’s a pretty decent percentage where the woman is the aggressor - and often the woman is an authority figure, like a doctor or a boss or a teacher and takes the lead in initiating sex.  Others present what are reasonably close to normal sex scenarios - there’s a whole series called “my sister’s hot friend,” in which a man has what is normally perfectly consensual sex with the friend of his (almost invariably never seen) sister.  Others are self-consciously absurd fantasies.  I’ve even seen some straight, intended for guys porn which is essentially a revenge fantasy for a girl - a girl who was nerdy and rejected in high school goes to her reunion, has sex with the guy she had a crush on in high school but who was cruel to her, and then humiliates him.  Obviously there’s a lot which would be pretty conventionally misogynistic or sexist - not only the scenario Amanda describes, but a whole ton of others too numerous to describe - a large variety of “male teachers extorting sex from students,” for instance

So, basically - there’s a lot of variety, and I think most people watching ignore most of the plot and just go straight to the sex.

Also - I watch way too much porn.  Sigh.

young men seem to watch porn in groups, not alone,

Err....no.  One might occasionally watch porn in a group, and it’s true that in that case you mostly watch to laugh at the plot rather than to masturbate, but most porn watching is solitary, and done for the purpose of aiding in masturbation.

Mnemosyne: In groups? Really? That’s not been my experience. I suppose it is true, but it does seem a bit strange.

Yep.  My brothers used to do this with their friends, and it’s pretty common in fraternity houses.  (Maybe it’s a middle-class suburban white thing?) We used to be able to see the “screenings” from our dorm room.  It’s a social bonding ritual, which again points out a possible reason why the nasty misogynistic stuff is so omnipresent.

To disagree and laugh at Hugo,

I am an MRA who is an MRA due to PC politics in college and due to my mother’s vindicitiveness at my father.  I did not have regular contact with him for 21 years.  She told him, via phone, that I hated him.  She threw away his presents on my birthday.  She threw away or sent back his cards.

I love my mother, but on this one subject, she’ll forever be wrong.

I’m an MRA, in part, because I had a RIGHT to know my father, and he had a RIGHT (court ordered) to be my dad.  It was ignored, and no punishment was conferred to stop this abuse.

Steven

Mnemosyne - yeah, sure frat boys and the like do watch porn together.  But don’t think that this is to the exclusion of watching it alone.

See The Onion for more on why you might be under that impression.

One might occasionally watch porn in a group, and it’s true that in that case you mostly watch to laugh at the plot rather than to masturbate, but most porn watching is solitary, and done for the purpose of aiding in masturbation.

For guys who are primarily interested in watching people fuck, yes.  For groups of guys who are interested in reinforcing social norms, not so much.

As I’ve said, I seriously doubt that most guys who watch porn are interested in the creepy misogynist stuff, but there are other market forces driving the production of that stuff, and groups of young men watching it together is one of them.  If you’re watching “Fun on the Farm” by yourself, then I have someplace else really important I need to be.

Most subcultures are actually more socially restrictive than the general culture.  How many people do you see who call themselves Goths but wear jeans and t-shirts?  There are pecking orders and hierarchies within subcultures, and you have people who are part of the inner circle and people who are trying to impress the members of the inner circle so they can break in.

I think it would be more common for people to dress like a Goth but refuse to call themselves that. The Sisters of Mercy would be a good example. Subcultures aren’t really as strict as that. There is no official hierarchy in a Goth community. It’s more likely that there would be different groups of such subcultures in any area, and some of them may well consider themselves more important than others, but they probably haven’t even met the majority of those who belong to that particular subculture.

The point is, although hierarchies exist in every relationship in some sense, (you may be closer to some friends than to others, which can be viewed as a hierarchy) at the end of the day there is no single hierarchy which we all aspire to belong.

Your presidential elections should make this clear, with debates about which party of is too elitist, and which one really represents working class people. I don’t think anyone on $30 000 a year has ever voted to remove the estate tax. More likely they voted for a representative who would represent their feelings about migrants(or whatever), and disregarded the estate tax thing because it was less important to them than migrants.

I think it’s somewhat insulting and dangerous to portray these people as foolishly voting to remove the estate tax because they wanted to impress Teh Rich White Man.

Fillmore, I wouldn’t say the plot is totally unimportant, but you’re right, in that the fast-forward control is there. Most movie-thumbnail-galleries will break up a scene into 3 or 4 parts, and some people like to watch the setup / conversation part, other people will cut to the climax.

To a great degree, genre porn is *about* the situation, and that is usually about roles and power. That is the turn-on.

Then again there is also body type, clothing fetishes, certain poses, high quality / regular / amateur style, and a hundred other criteria that go into it.

The question to me is, do men realize that these are fantasies? I would hope so. If they’re taking things as templates for how-to-interact-with-women, then there is something wrong, but I don’t think it’s with the porn, it’s with their upbringing, education and/or ability for self-reflection.

There are also lots of women—strong, professional and feminist I might add—who enjoy being submissive. so there’s another factor.

I don’t really have answers, just more questions…

Mnemosyne - okay, yes, I think we mostly agree.  There are definitely some kinds of porn that are primarily marketed at guys watching together in groups.  And those kind of group viewings are probably more into the misogyny than guys watching on their own would be.  It’s just that your initial comment seemed to be that guys watch in groups to the exclusion of watching on their own, which I suspect is not really true of anyone - even those frat boys are also watching porn quietly alone and masturbating.

Speedbudget: chill the fuck out.  I’m not saying nice-guys are right, or justified.  I’m saying that there are actual reasons.  They don’t decide to suddenly hate women for no reason.  Misogyny (and that’s what this is) is a product of the culture.  And the culture is a product of how everyone acts, in a really complicated cycle.  I think seeing how that develops (even in a very incomplete way such as this outline) might be useful for helping to combat it, one nice-guy at a time.  To compare with a recent partisan political battle, understanding the goals of terrorists is not sympathizing or condoning them. 

Junk science: yep, depression and self-loathing can really fuck you up.  I have seen that exact scenario.  I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that all that’s required for a guy to escape nice-guy-ism is to have a girl hit on him—just that the someone in this position can grab anything, including this, to fuel the self-pity.

Oppoponax: yes, there is projection there, because the nice-guys conception of sex is stuck at the level of something you get from women, either by tricking or paying, so anyone who is successful at getting it must be an asshole, because that’s the only way they can approach it.

The idea that women have “all” the power is an obvious rationalization---in my memories of those years, such guys realized that as a rule, they ruled over women their age, who had to jump when they said jump if we wanted any social esteem at all.

Seriously?  That wasn’t my experience, not at all.  (If anything, they had to say “yeah, right, nerd” when I said jump if they wanted social esteem.)

I second that!

I think this is what’s remarkable about porn - that there’s virtually no market (relatively) for naked people having sex with each other, compared to violent and exploitative imagery. 

Er, um, well, heh heh, I disagree.  I think I’ve seen my share of online porn sites, and not only are violent and exploitative imagery the exception, it’s a lot harder to find than other kinds.

you’re not remembering the girls of your social status you had power over

Since you didn’t realize you’d been set against one another, you blamed the girls for oppressing you

Who are you gonna believe:  anonymous internet person or your lying eyes?

Oppoponax: yes, there is projection there, because the nice-guys conception of sex is stuck at the level of something you get from women, either by tricking or paying, so anyone who is successful at getting it must be an asshole, because that’s the only way they can approach it.
Aaron on 09/13 at 02:21 PM

Just to draw a line here, thinking that ‘one must be an asshole to be attractive to women’ is a misconception that is easy to fall into even for genuine, Actual Nice Guys experiencing self-doubt. I would add that, mistaken though it may be, the trope has some basis in reality, because it can’t all be projection, can it?

I mean, are there not Good Girls who cannot resist Bad Boys (and vice versa?) Leaving the nice guy/girl-next-door wondering what’s wrong with themselves if ‘the kind of people i am attracted to are never attracted to me?’ Who hasn’t experienced or thought that at some point in their lives?

However, I don’t think that that idea is necessarily joined at the hip with the idea that ‘sex is something you get from women’. In that sense, I think Aaron is making a logical fallacy. Some of us want relationships and to settle down with someone!

What is sexist is the dang armor you get.  I used to play with a male character of the same class, and we were the same levels so we would get the exact same armor rewards.  When we equipped the armor, we were usually totally shocked by the differences.  On him, the armor looked like, well....armor.  On my female character, it looked like stripper attire.

Which game was that?  I play “World of Warcraft” pretty heavily, and while it’s true that some armor is hilariously revealing, a player has the option of wearing a shirt under their armor and/or a decorative tabard that covers most of the body. 

Most of these games offer a free trial period.  If someone wants to see what it’s like, give it a shot.

In fact I sometimes think that the men who complain that women always go with assholes and bad boys do so more out of projection than anything else.  Women are actually avoiding the asshole (them)

No, not really.

Broker: I’m not necessarily describing what they want, but they paths and options that they can see working to get there.  They’re looking at the world through a flawed and distorting filter that confirms the biases they have.

broker, what catches me up on the “do you understand that these are fantasies?” is that unless we’re talking hentai they are happening to real women - that is, the real woman who is being filmed. I have about eight hundred percent less trouble with the most disturbing hentai on earth than, say, fairly conventional anal porn, because real people aren’t being harmed. What happens in your head is your own damn business.

It’s actually fairly common for women who write gay erotica on the internet to write men into situations where their consent is so constrained by their circumstances that sex is essentially nonconsensual. It’s called dubcon and it’s a huge genre. To me the differences are, first, that these are fictional characters who exist only in writing - a real person isn’t being physically hurt by, say, someone’s need to construct an overblown, cartoonish depiction of penetration - and it’s very, very rare for the emphasis to be on humiliation and degradation.

My boyfriend watches porn. Fairly vanilla porn. And I have absolutely no interest in policing anyone else’s id, but I made a deal with him that he will make sure I never, ever see it, because usually the first thing I think (after the queasy feeling) is “goddamn, men hate us.” I didn’t expect to feel that way, and am disappointed that it’s apparently true.

Broker: “I would add that, mistaken though it may be, the trope has some basis in reality, because it can’t all be projection, can it?”

I don’t think it has much basis in reality, but I don’t think it’s projection either. In my experience it’s often an inability to distinguish true asshole behaviour (say hitting on a woman in an obnoxious or implicitly threatening manner) and assertive behaviour (showing interest in a woman even if it might be unreturned and make her mildly uncomfortable having to turn they guy down.)

Notorious P.A.T.: “I think I’ve seen my share of online porn sites, and not only are violent and exploitative imagery the exception, it’s a lot harder to find than other kinds.”

While I’d that is true for violence and exploitation, degradation seems a lot more common. It seems like half the videos out there involve obnoxious cameramen who have to call the women filthy sluts and whores.

I don’t think anyone on $30 000 a year has ever voted to remove the estate tax. More likely they voted for a representative who would represent their feelings about migrants(or whatever), and disregarded the estate tax thing because it was less important to them than migrants.

You really are unfamiliar with American politics, aren’t you?  You get plenty of people making $30K or less a year who vocally support the elimination of the estate tax and vote that way.  Americans really overidentify with the rich and assume that what’s good for Bill Gates will automatically be good for the rest of us.

It’s certainly not a perfect book, and he stretches to get to some of his points, but Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? hits on a few of the areas where working-class and middle-class people overidentify with rich people and assume that they’re in the top 1% of income earners when they aren’t even close.

Who are you gonna believe:  anonymous internet person or your lying eyes?

Who are you gonna believe, someone who actually was one of those girls or someone who spent their time coming up with theories about why girls thought that way without ever asking one?

I don’t think I ever was completely a Nice Guy because I never really blamed women for my lack of success (I tended to go the other direction and assume that I must be ugly and repulsive), but I made some of the same confirmation bias mistakes.

One thing I did was filter out all of the times I did the rejecting. Upon reflection I realized that for about half the first few dates that didn’t go anywhere, it was I who decided not to pursue it further, not because there was anything wrong with the woman, but simply because I wasn’t feeling any chemistry.

Now I guess this doesn’t apply if a guy isn’t getting any first dates (in which case I think extreme shyness is usually the issue), but I think remembering all of the times you’ve rejected someone (with no hard feelings) makes it easier not to feel bitter, guilty, or excessively frustrated when you are turned down by someone.

I’ve got a theory (hypothesis, actually, for you sciencey types) about the proliferation of “trick the bitch” porn, goes something like this: the vast majority of consumers just want to watch reasonably attractive people having well-lit sex. There’s a small subset of consumers, seriously screwed-up dudes, who can’t get off without seeing a woman being degraded. Solution: vanilla porn with a framing device to appease the latter group (since the objectionable stuff tends to bookend the action rather than threading through it, the distributors won’t lose the former).

Might be wishful thinking on my part that porn doesn’t reflect a general rise in misogyny, but it seems to hold up. Plus it sort of explains why ninety-something percent of straight porn treats anal sex as the ne plus ultra of human intimacy even though most of us don’t put a value on it higher than “sure, okay.”

It blurs the line between the Victorian idea of rape as ‘A fate worse than death’, as reprised in ‘The Usual Suspects’ where Kayser Sozey shots his wife after she was sexually assaulted,

Point of order, Matthew, and at a complete tangent. Keyser Söze does not shoot his wife because she was sexually assaulted. He shoots his wife and children when they are taken hostage and an attempt is made to use them against him. It was not done to “punish” her, but because he was a ruthless bastard who would never bow to anyone.

Or, at least, that’s the legend.  The term “unreliable narrator” springs to mind…

I have to make this quick (my unhealthy obsession seems to be reading really good blogs), and a number of things I’ve read over the last few days have come to mind from this discussion:

- One thing part of Hugo’s post that I found interesting was that most older men, outside of the 16-26 age group didn’t find the deception scenario a turn-on, so that suggests that it’s a recent phenomenon.  Personally, I blame the other Kimmel, Jimmy.  I could be wrong, but the Man Show (and to some extent, South Park) seemed to be another, darker backlash against attempts to eliminate male entitlement.  For example, I definitely think South Park helped bring the “gay == !guy” concept to the mainstream.  I really think it’s intensified over the last ten years, and MRA groups are more than willing to take advantage of it.

- I also think cruelty as “just a joke” has become more and more mainstream over the last 10 years.  From comedians, to lulz (warning: not work safe), the concept of comedy being used against the powerful has been turned on its head, and it’s now about empowering yourself by ennervating anyone else.  Also, it’s hyper-nihilism: Anything you care about is considered fodder for a joke, so the only way to “win” is not to care about anything.

This isn’t to say that the impulse to degrade the powerless wasn’t there before, but it seems to have gained a lot of currency over the last 10 years across all cultural mediums, not just videogames and porn.

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the vast majority of consumers just want to watch reasonably attractive people having well-lit sex. There’s a small subset of consumers, seriously screwed-up dudes, who can’t get off without seeing a woman being degraded. Solution: vanilla porn with a framing device to appease the latter group

Yes, exactly.  I think Gil may be minimizing the number of people into that kind of thing (and I think Mnemosyne is onto something with the idea that that kind of stuff is made partly to appeal to dudes watching porn in a group, rather than for actual masturbation), but it is notable that the degradation aspects are normally largely confined to

I wonder how far one could get doing a detailed analysis of the plots of various porn vignettes of this sort.  One I remember would probably encapsulate the whole “nice guy (TM)” syndrome everyone seems so on about.  Girl is upset that her boyfriend never has time for her and spends all his time playing poker with his buddy.  She cries on the shoulder of her friend’s brother, apparently a “nice guy (TM)”, who has always been in love with her.  She realizes that she should stop dating assholes and instead go with the friend’s brother.  They have sex, and agree to go to the movies afterwards.  While she goes to change, he gets a call from his buddies.  They ask him if he wants to go play poker.  He ditches the girl to go play poker with his buddies.  I’m not sure the lesson here, but it seems an illustrative example of the confusion of the “nice guy”.  Does he want the hot, unattainable girl he has a crush on to reciprocate it so that they can get together and have a relationship, or so that he can humiliate her and treat her just as badly as he imagines all the “assholes” treat her?  Or is the issue that this guy wasn’t a “nice guy” at all, and was actually just another asshole, thus showing how the woman, again, always chooses the asshole?  The twist ending could perhaps be viewed as an ironic twist, showing the hollowness of the typical “nice guy” fantasy, and how the “nice guy” is ultimately indistinguishable from the “asshole” that he hates.  There’s a cultural studies dissertation in this, somebody!

Phoenician, you’re right about the point Soze was making, but Spacey’s voice-over alludes to the fact that his family was as good as dead anyway because of what they went through.

I only know that because it was on TV the other day and I noticed that part for the first time. It seemed to dilute the whole “what will really was “ thing.

[Some Guy], you’re saying that because there are many varieties of porn, we shouldn’t talk about the kinds of porn that are hateful, or that are reflective of larger trends - especially socially acceptable ones, like sex being something that men are supposed to trick, force or bribe out of women in a zero-sum game. If it’s all too confusing for you, you’re fully entitled to throw up your hands and walk away, but please do not try the fluffy bunny version of “STFU bitches” here. 

@mythago: My phrasing “this discussion” was misleading, in context.  I was referring to the larger societal discussion of porn, which the original post only tangentially alluded to (”...as is wishfully claimed often").  Not to this discussion specifically. 

That said, I’m only trying to point out the similarities between blogs and porn: they’re hugely diverse, and the differences between the content can vastly outweigh the similarities, because in both cases, the subject matter is mostly driven by the desires of the creators and/or the target audience.  How you read my post as telling people to shut up is beyond me.

If you seriously, without hyperbole, think it’s “socially acceptable” for men to “trick, force or bribe [sex] out of women”, either you and I live in very different societies, or we have different ideas of what “socially acceptable” means.  We may not be able to stop certain segments of the population (pick-up artists and the like) from having attitudes like that stuff is OK.  But if I found myself at a party talking to anyone supporting that sort of attitude, that would be where the party ends.  Which is my most succinct test for whether an idea is socially acceptable or not: would I feel like a hypocrite talking to a person I know to believe it?

I feel like all this worry about video games and adult “cinema” is crazy. I play video games and I have never ever had thoughts of running out and hurting anyone as a result. Anyone who does have these violent tendancies is unbalanced to begin with and in an incredibly small and disturbed minority. There is no need to manage society as a whole based upon a tinsy disturbed group of deviants. They’ll be locked up for somethign anyway.

As for the porn stuff, it’s just a cry for help as well. Just like any Crappy Wood Film turd like say Alec Baldwin, people will either like it or they won’t. I think it’s all pretty weird and unnappealing and I’m a guy. Anyone watching for the plot is probably disturbed and very old as well.... ;^)

If you seriously, without hyperbole, think it’s “socially acceptable” for men to “trick, force or bribe [sex] out of women”, either you and I live in very different societies, or we have different ideas of what “socially acceptable” means.

It’s “socially acceptable” to the extent that, say, serial killing is.  It’s something that people wonder about and talk about, but very few of them actually do it, and we’re horrified at the few who do.  We want to watch The Silence of the Lambs, but very few people want to imitate it, and you would be completely horrified if you met Hannibal Lecter.  But still, we watch and we read about it and get our vicarious thrills.

It used to be very socially acceptable to trick, force or bribe women to have sex—hell, I’m reading about Mary, Queen of Scots right now, and her third husband raped her in order to force her into the marriage.  We still have a lot of cultural baggage that refers back to those times not so long ago when a woman who was tricked or forced into having sex was completely socially ruined and pretty much had to become a prostitute to survive.

Degradation porn is good old-fashioned male entitlement staying alive in a modern context.

Ok, first of all, how did video games get thrown under this bus along with the porn?  It seems like the worst thing being said about video games is that they suck up your time, and that some of them feature women in ludicrously skimpy “armor.” How is this even in the same conversation as what is basically rape porn?  Are some games violent?  Of course, but I can’t really think of any where this is violence directed especially at women.  Even Grand Theft Auto is just general violent.  It’s only particularly misogynist if you chose to play it that way, in which case I’m going to blame user error. 

Anyway, when it comes to the porn I think this is a case where a small subset of the market is driving this demand.  I think the vast majority of male porn consumers are basically just wanting to see a woman they find attractive naked and having sex.  I think a lot of men, me included, don’t really care about the whole stupid scenario or setup, and happily skip over or ignore it.  However if there is a sub set of men that do enjoy the coercion or degradation factor, it’s easy to include that in order to cater to them with out impacting the majority who don’t care about what ever contrived scenario there is.  So the porn producers throw it in.  I think the majority of men watching these types of porn are doing so in spite of the coercion scenario, not because of it.

I think it’s the same thing that has lead to the ubiquitous cum shot to the face scene.  It’s gross, and degrading, and I have no use for it.  But obviously some one out there does, so now it seems like every porno has it.  I don’t think most men have this desire to shoot their load on a women’s face, but as long as some subset does we all get inflicted with it. 

Ok shifting gears to the other half of the discussion, I wanted to talk about the whole good girls date assholes, and force the nice guys to be assholes thing.  I think this is pretty clearly a case of confirmation bias.  Let’s say nice guy has two female friends, we will call then Jane and Mary.  Jane is a serial dater.  Her relationships rarely last over a year, and she always seems to date assholes.  When Jane finally breaks up with whoever she is dating she cries on the nice guys shoulder and talks about what an asshole the guy was.  Mary has been with the same guy for 8 years and married for the last four of them.  Mary never cries on nice guy’s shoulder after breaking up with her boyfriend because she is still with him.  Nice guy doesn’t think of Mary romantically because she has been in a relationship for so long.  Nice guy does think of Jane romantically because she’s always dating different people, and wonders why she wouldn’t date a nice guy like him?  Nice guy concludes that women only like assholes, and decides he should try to be more of an asshole.

From the outside it’s easy to see that Mary is the obvious counter example to Jane and should be given just as much consideration in forming opinions of what women like.  But the nice guy doesn’t think of her that way because she is taken, he thinks of her as a friend and not a romantic possibility.  He then draws the erroneous conclusion that all women like to date assholes, when he really should conclude that Jane likes to date assholes for some reason.  The nice guy is basically throwing out the vast majority of women from his sample because they are either married or in long term relationships.  If you try to draw conclusions about what women like from the 10% of them that for what ever reason don’t form long term relationships you’re bound to end up with some pretty warped ideas.

One final thing regarding the whole women like assholes idea.  I think another factor fueling this idea is the fact that confidence and arrogance are basically two sides of the same coin.  In surveys women seem to always rate confidence very high on the list of things that attract them to men.  However someone that comes off as confident to one person might come off as an arrogant asshole to another person.  I would bet there are a lot of men that would be rated as confident by the women they are hitting on, but would be rated as either arrogant or as an asshole by the nice guy watching.

Some Guy, your poetic waxing about lust is creeping me out, as it often does when guys do that sort of thing---imply that lust is some wonderful, human emotion that women just can’t understand.  Being not human, I guess.

Broker, you strike me as remarkably passive-aggressive.  So I have zero doubt that you are the person you’re describing.

Mnem, good observation about the “watching in groups” or even “sharing on the internet” thing.  That is obviously a situation where norms of masculinity are being developed and enforced.  Maybe a guy won’t bring a masturbation fantasy to a girlfriend and humiliate her, but he absolutely will bring the message shared amongst friends that women are inferior and deserve to be be degraded to her.

Amanda, I respect your insights, but you don’t know me. That’s a remarkably shallow thing to say.

What I’m doing is describing feelings that some men (not all) may have had, perhaps fleetingly. Some people get hung up on those feelings and never progress out of them; others do. Like I said, my first post was written too quickly and didn’t really express what I wanted to say correctly.

I disagree with you about “norms of masculinity being developed and enforced”—do you think that men are empty vessels, who merely absorb what they are shown and mimic it unthinkingly? I know, having been male and hetero for about as long as I can remember, that I consciously disagreed with the sexist “norms” expressed by my other male friends, and avoided those kinds of people growing up.

That said, as someone upthread posted, trying to legislate the id is a very tricky subject. One can enjoy “clean, well-lit sex” and gentler erotica, and still do “the nasty” from time to time, precisely because of its perceived taboo, or because it is a fantasy about power. I would make the argument that sometimes we don’t even know why we like a certain kind of genre / setting—like surrealist art, it resides in the realm of the subconscious.

It seems a very specious argument to then try to link a “worrying trend” in porn to an uptick in general misogyny among the population. I’m simply not seeing it—beyond, perhaps, some sensational outlier statistic. I see it hand in hand with Jackass—there is a ‘we want to look at stupid / offensive stuff’ trend among people these days, and it isn’t strictly confined to men. I had a female friend who was a serial e-mail forwarder of NSFW “joke” images and videos, who actually took offense when I asked her to stop doing so.

There is perhaps a larger argument about “appropriateness” here. People display appalling rudeness and zero manners these days; people are loath to criticize offenders because they’re afraid of lawsuits or being accused of being anti-PC or something. If there is something at work here, perhaps it is just a generalized lack of thoughtfulness and respect for other people.

Maybe the “pornification” of America is just a phase it’s going through until it reaches a more mature national sexuality (there’s no topless sunbathing in Washington, DC, but there certainly is in Berlin...then again Berlin has no Richard Ashcroft.)

As for why people watch ... well, watching other people fuck is pretty interesting to us as humans.  That’s what we get for being descended from bonobos.  But then we put all of the cultural crap on top of it and it gets creepy.

Attaching weird social or cultural significance to just about ANYthing makes it pretty creepy, honestly.  And we didn’t descent from bonobos—we’re a close relative who diverged from a common ancestor, though they diverged roughly five million years or so after we did, if one is to believe the DNA Clock.

Anyway, agreed with the OP, this variety of vague-consent pornography is more than abominable.  Genuine consent is more than just any initial “yes”—it’s ensuring that that “yes” is there and sincere throughout.

However, I’m not entirely sure what any of this has to do with video games.  And if one can’t tell the difference between gunning down random computer-generated images in Grand Theft Auto and doing the same thing in real life to actual people, then they have substantially greater and more dangerous problems than being a misogynist asshole.  Just because someone kills a hooker in a video game, it doesn’t mean they’re sincerely hoping to in the real world.  I’m sure most video gamers aren’t about to believe that mushrooms can affect the proportions of their bodies, either.  (Though, admittedly, I find myself wishing people would take some of the messages from Bioshock a little more seriously.  Objectivists could stand to be demonized until they’re no longer in any way influential in politics.)

Anyway, I completely agree with the post, but I have no idea at all why video games are even mentioned, and I think the seemingly arbitrary inclusion might provide a weak point for the post as a whole to the kinds of people who like picking out inconsistencies and semantic/logical weirdnesses and using them to completely dismiss the contexts in which they find them.  There was a strong enough point to be made without dragging something tenuously and tangentially related into it.

Well, an uh interesting conversation developed in the comments… so without responding to anything specifically, some random thoughts for the crowd:

1. I’ve watched this kind of porn, and I’ve even um “enjoyed” it… but, at least since I turned 17, I’ve known how misogynistic it is.  A shit-ton.  The leave-without-actually-paying (or using fake money) is really super-creepy.  At least the ‘Young Girls 4 Money’ or ‘Latinas 4 Money!’ (names changed to avoid porn spammers) actually (on the screen) pay the women.

2. The “seduce a previously-innocent partner” is an attractive trope (imo, ymmv, etc etc), that gets taken (due to the misogynistic core fanbase) to creepy sexist areas.  I won’t bother defending that, but the trope in and of itself doesn’t have to be bad per se.  It’s just portrayed as such near-universally.

3. I was a proto-NiceGuy in high school (I think it’s something of a natural state for high schoolers in our culture), so I know a lot of the “zomg i haz a crush on the superhot female friend”, though i never got beyond the “i wish we were dating and will occasionally mope about it but will still appreciate our friendship” stage, thankfully, but in retrospect that was mostly because of relationships I developed with other women.

4. There’s no real point to these comments beyond making them.  I’m just typing down my thoughts.  It’s 4 AM, leave me aloooone!

5. Also, I forgot: leave my MMOs alone dammit.  Yeah the armor models are sexist as hell, and the general chats oh dear god the general chats, but seriously I can’t stand people taking shits on the MMO players.  F off.

Porn and video games are just two of the many ways men can avoid having any potentially serious times with those scary women who scare them.  They can also become hermits, work long hours, go to school and study long hours at the library or a coffee place afterwards, go hunting, join the military (which doesn’t work as well as it used to, but is certainly a masculine place no matter how many women are around,) do yardwork, hike, exercise for long hours, read a lot, spend a long time reading blogs, stuff envelopes in the back room of a political campaign, carve gnomes out of bars of soap, watch television, hang out at record stores, collect comic books, become a writer or artist, or rebuild a sailboat and disappear for years at a time.  It’s possible to be a misogynistic asshole and be a vibrant part of everyday, sexually-integrated society, too.

As for the ambush/trickery porn, I don’t like it.  It just doesn’t thrill me to see that any more than the lure of sex to trick men in movies like Hostel or all the other moralistic (and usually very misogynistic) crap found in horror/thriller movies.  I generally think video sex is pretty lame, overall.  My favorite porn is a still photograph, usually.  The situation can be kinky, absurd, natural, or posed to obvious extremes, but I don’t get turned on by forced situations.  If she ain’t into it, I can’t get there.  On another part of the spectrum, written erotica (just plain words are almost never called “porn") is overwhelmed with submissive women, but I find very little of that worth a second reading (though I’m still willing to give it a chance.) There’s a fine line between admiration and objectification and between fantasy and idealization, but not between right and wrong.  And trickery is wrong.

Some Guy, your poetic waxing about lust is creeping me out, as it often does when guys do that sort of thing---imply that lust is some wonderful, human emotion that women just can’t understand.  Being not human, I guess.

Glad I could be an inkblot for you.

Amanda,

“Video games were too absorbing to remember meetings scheduled, and porn wasn’t a fun thing to look at to get turned on by, but something you---a miserable flesh and blood young woman---failed to live up to.”

Seriously? If it hadn’t been for porn I wouldn’t have seen a naked woman until the age of 23. After my alleged sexual prime at 19. So I suppose porn had not a lot to with escapism, and a lot with being turned on by it. I’m not blaming women for my late blooming, but it’s not like “porn” was ever considered to be better than even a make out. It’s just that it was the only thing that was available that was closer to reality than my own imagination. Does porn beat the reality as you seem to suggest - “ a miserable flesh and blood young woman” - ? No way. I have no idea what made you miserable as a young woman and what made me miserable as a young man wasn’t porn. It was a band aid and technical assistant, not taking the place of reality. Porn is still 2-dimensional, real women usually have three dimensions.... they are real people. Their attraction and arousal is something so completely beyond what even the best porn and erotic movies can display. Maybe Hugo and so many other radical feminists aren’t able to see that difference because of their belief in media as dominant form of social construction, which is just as 2-dimensional as a model of the real world as porn is 2-dimensional as a model of real sex.)

ZZ, what you fail to realize is that this is becoming more common in the standards at which interactions within youth culture between genders take place. Consider: how many strong female (humanoid) characters in a video game are the main character, compared to how many female characters are either inhuman (animal, something else), or support roles/sex objects? How many video games market women’s terror versus male terror (if any), or how many video games do not engage in these gender politics?
As a gamer, I am constantly surrounded by this bullshit and I’m tired of it. Any time I get mad about it, the boys in Guyland describe it as “flying off the handle”; however, if the situation were at all reversed and the guys were made to feel alienated by their gender, that single situation alone would be the rod to use to make the misogyny acceptable.