a.) 'He' has porn but you don't, and
b.) You take the fact that he has porn personally
So in other words, this is what is going on in the author's life right now, and she is using that to make a comment about all women.
The article begins but setting up the fact that Betty is unhappy with her boyfriend watching porn called things like 'Asian ass to mouth' and 'lesbian labia stretcher' despite the fact that she is putting out 'like a High School girl on Degrassi' (Degrassi is a Canadian teen drama that I hadn't heard of either.) Fair enough, I'd probably be pissed off too, though I should probably add that not all of that homogenous group known as 'the ladies' would feel the same way. I'd probably also be even more pissed off after I had the conversation that Betty had with her boyfriend, where he confessed all his porn fetishes, leaving Betty feeling 'weirded out.' I feel that Betty and I have much in common. 'Lesbian labia stretcher' is not my idea of a fun Tuesday, so I empathise. Which is why this next bit makes no sense:
'Realizing I needed to come to terms with my boyfriend’s porn promiscuity, I reached out to expert Allison Vivas,' says Betty.
Sorry, what? I missed the part where you decided you felt comfortable with this, Bets. Indeed, it seemed to be that you were feeling pretty uncomfortable about the whole thing, as many (but by no means all) women would, and that's absolutely OK. Part of being in a healthy relationship is being able to go, 'oh, no thanks, I don't like doing that' or 'that feels weird' or 'nah, not into that, soz babes' and the other person being cool with it. It's like fisting. If I was going out with someone who was into fisting, and they wanted to...y'know...fist me...and I didn't want to, I wouldn't be all, 'Realizing that I needed to come to terms with my boyfriend's fisting fetish, I reached out to expert Fisty McFistucuffs.' But maybe that's just me.
Anyway, Allison Vivas, author of 'Making Peace With Porn', had lots of interesting tidbits, including:
'A lot of women like to think that they look at porn because they want their wife or girlfriend to have bleach blonde hair and big boobs and do all of these things in the videos. You have to realize too, that’s not why men look at porn. It is just entertainment.'
Just entertainment, huh, Allison? It's never about frustration, unfulfilled fantasies, objectification and addiction, it's ALWAYS just entertainment. I'm not anti-porn, and I find the moral panic surrounding what it's doing to our youth worryingly conservative, but that doesn't mean I'd ever put a young woman getting gangbanged by himbos on flat-pack furniture as each of them take it in turns to spaff on her face on a par with the Royal Variety Performance. Let's have some nuance here.
'When it comes to all other forms of entertainment, people are able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. But all of a sudden, when it comes to porn, we have these fears that it’s really going to play into reality.'
I see what she's saying here, but equally it's very difficult to predict what the impact of porn will be on the generation who grew up with it because they haven't even really turned into adults yet. But I would say that, considering the number of guys who seem to think it's ok to ask for anal the first time you sleep with them (and again, if that's your bag, then that's cool), we are seeing some changes. To my knowledge, no-one asked my mum if she was down with the brown on a first date.
'I think that the majority of porn is made for men. If couples are going to watch that type of porn, females aren’t going to enjoy it.'
The majority of porn IS made for men, but HOLY COW, that doesn't mean that some women don't enjoy it. Am I getting too complex here?
Allison continues: 'The first part is women being honest with themselves. One of the studies that I ran into was about women and their fantasies. It said something like 80 percent of women have sexual fantasies compared to 99 percent of men. What distinguished between the two was that, the majority of women are actually fantasizing about a man they already know. Whereas for men, they are fantasizing about a faceless woman, someone that doesn’t exist or they don’t have access to. I think if the roles were reversed and women found out that our man was fantasizing about the woman two doors down, we would be livid.'
Yeah...I don't even. What? Men don't ever fantasise about women they've met in 'real life'? Not only does this muddled paragraph buy into the idea that women fantasise less than men, but also that our fantasies are bad fantasies because they can feature human beings we know in real life, as opposed to, I don't know, men who apparently prefer faceless non-humans who don't count (which in itself is bullshit, as anyone who has talked to a man about sex for more than about fifteen minutes can tell you.)
Matters are made worse by Betty's leading questions, which go along the lines of 'What do you think has caused women to feel so uncomfortable about porn?'
Framing the debate in such a way implies that everything about porn is perfectly OK and that 'women' (that's all of us, by the way) need to just get over it and stop whinging. It completely ignores most of the many issues surrounding the making, manufacturing, and watching of pornography, in favour of a tired old sexist trope about 'uptight' non-sexual women and liberated, sexually motivated men.
' If you look at these porn stars, they are not perfect. The models that we are looking at in our fashion magazines are more perfect and unachievable than these porn stars. They might get dolled up a little bit, but sometimes an average woman getting dolled up can look just as good. We as woman judge each other, so we judge porn stars. If we are confident with ourselves, we won’t have a problem with our guy watching porn.'
Oh, so if average muggins here just makes a little bit of effort in the bedroom, I too could be as sexy as a porn star? And if I could just be a little bit confident in myself, I could happily accept it if I discover that my boyfriend would prefer watching 'asian ass to mouth' to hanging out with me.
'It will be interesting to see the younger generation and if they are having these sexual conversations prior to commitments like marriage or engagement. Like what are their sexual fetishes, getting all of that out a head of time.'
Hold up, I think she's saying that fetishes are something that you experiment with before you get married, before putting them to one side as you look forward to a life of slippers and missionary. Is that what she's saying? I'm not even sure anymore. All I know is that I'm uncomfortable with porn because I'm insecure little woman who's not being honest with herself about her sexual fantasies, and that I need to get over that and also stop fantasising about 'real people' and start fantasising about objectified ones because my fantasies are not ok. I would like to have come away thinking that porn is a part of life and that each and every woman will have an individual response to it and that being able to say what you're comfortable with and what you're not, what turns you on and what doesn't, is part of being a liberated woman in the 21st century. But instead of being told 'you go girl', I'm being told 'you go and get over your personal feelings, girl, because they don't matter.'
This woman is giving porn a bad name. Do not buy this book.
Betty, I hope you sort things out with your boyfriend. Though frankly, he sounds like a bit of a nob.
