By David Futrelle
Can “Gender Critical” feminists — a.k.a. TERFs — talk about anything without turning the discussion into an excuse to bash trans women?
I was browsing through the Gender Critical feminism subreddit — Reddit’s main hangout for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists —
and ran across a discussion of the ever-more-extreme nature of online porn.
“Stuff from 10 years was your soft porn – missionary, blowjobs, and sure, male orientated but the female had some sort of pleasure at least,” wrote a commenter called DetectiveSpaghetti.
These days the dark stuff (the hardcore youd find ONLY if you really wanted to find) its everywhere. Anal sex, face-fucking, its the norm not the exception. Its disgusting
I don’t doubt that porn is getting more extreme, but anal sex? People have been putting things in their butts for thousands of years, and I’m pretty sure that there were plenty of anal sex videos readily available ten years ago.
Someone called DowntownOrange replied:
Yeah, I went to see what they had in some supposedly soft core/female-oriented category and one of the first vids was something like “skinny teen gets her ***** destroyed by 5 big guys”
She followed up with more results from her, er, research:
I just went to pornhub again to check what they called it and the category name is “romantic”, the first vid is called “Giving her good dick after falling on her Ass In night club”, the third one is “I suck him in the public pool shower and he cums all over me”. Incredible.
She’s got a point, or at least half of one, in that not all of the titles in the “romantic” category are particularly romantic in nature. I just went and browsed the first couple of pages of “romantic” results on PornHub and the titles listed ranged from “Couple have romantic sex” and “Passionate couple falls in love having sex” to slightly-less-romantic-sounding titles like “30-year-old Slav very much asked to work on her fat ass” (huh?) and “Romantic sex leaves her showered in …” well, you get the idea.
It’s at this point the discussion got a little weird.
There’s a separate one “popular with women” that apparently shows the vids that “real women” watch the most. I do wonder how many of those “real women” have dicks though, skewing the results, considering TiMs are obsessed with porn…
Yep, she’s accusing trans women of messing up the video recommendations for cis women with their (presumably) degenerate tastes in porn. (A TIM, or Trans-Identified Male, is deliberately misgendered TERFspeak for trans women.)
I went and looked at the “popular with women” section of PornHub too, and honestly the only particularly weird video I noticed involved someone called Miss Banana taking something called the “Fire Noodle Challenge while getting Fucked.”
I don’t know if it was cis or trans women (or both groups working together) who got that video onto the front page of the “popular with women” category, but I can report that Miss Banana did in fact manage to eat the entire bowl.
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@Crip Dyke:
Thanks for your perspective. I still can’t really relate to it, but I’ll just file it under “things I don’t understand about other people’s libido”.
@Katamount
Is it just me, or did Joe D’Amato bear a striking resemblance to Paul Elam?
I think your criticism of American vs European porn is also applicable to American vs European cinema in general. Nobody here seems to be interested in making experimental films when you can instead make a thousand superhero films and make more $$$. I mostly watch foreign films for this reason.
Also, for future reference, my pronouns are they/them.
@Naglfar
Duly noted! 🙂
And yeah, ol’ Joe does look a lot like Paul Elam. It’s the beard.
I suppose everyone’s seen this, but the comments are priceless….
https://twitter.com/tomilahren/status/1156366940320874496
And… oh, first, content warning: GIRLS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/01/tech/ewok-fortnite-soleil-wheeler/index.html
David’s probably ass-deep in the shitty gamergate responses to this….
@ Allandrel:
The All Andrew reply was ‘posed to be a reply to your post… autocorrect is TENACIOUS!!!
Someone has a fetish for fat-shaming phrases in Slavic languages?
I had a dream last night that this woman started getting trans porn on ever site she went on because of talking about trans people on other places.
Idk why I had this dream. I think it probably had something to do because I was on pinterest last night. I follow a lot of feminist boards on pinterest, I saw a lot of shit about respecting and stuff that could help trans people and because of that pinterest gives me anything in relation to trans people. Which means I also get so many terf pins that are really horrible.
Re: the necrophilia question, I read a manual of human sexual behavior a few years ago that claimed that “pure” necrophiles were extremely rare; it was nearly always only encountered in people with who also showed other extreme personality disorders: think Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer in the US, or Denis Nilsen in the UK. Though that might just be a reporting issue: such are the taboo surrounding and reverence for human remains in most cultures, anyone with such proclivities is almost certainly closeted, and their activities only come to light if they commit outrages on the scale of the aforementioned individuals. Then again, most cultures have similarly strong taboos around sexual contract with children, yet that hasn’t stopped pædophiles using the internet. I don’t know. This manual was pretty old, as it happens, and had some really regressive things to say about gay and trans people so I’m not sure if it was a trustworthy source.
@Katamount: Gonzo porn squicks me out too. I, for one, cheered when that human garbage pile Max Hardcore (one of the preeminent makers of the stuff) was sent to prison a few years ago. A thoroughly loathsome individual.
@Cat Mara
My guess would be that there are necrophiliacs on the internet (I’m not going looking), it’s just we probably put less effort and media attention on them because, well, as gross as necrophilia is, it doesn’t compare to how wrong child molestation is and so police aren’t trying to shut down any necro forums that may exist.
Remind me again what the difference between gonzo and other porn is. Does it just mean the super misogynistic hardcore stuff? Because that stuff makes me sick.
Also, @Katamount, re: the Romans and their love of porn: I think a lot of Victorian archaeologists got more than an eyefull when they uncovered the frescoes in Pompeii. And that was before they unearthed the statue of Pan having intercourse with a she-goat (so NSFW) that they locked in a special room for decades that was only opened for– cough– respectable gentlemen.
(Another funny story about Pompeii, particularly in light of the alt-right and general fashy tendency to idolize the Romans as paragons of virtue and enemies of “degeneracy”, was their widely documented practice of anal sex, both straight and same-sex. The former because they had no reliable form of contraception. Apparently, in one of the brothels in Pompeii there’s a sign over one of the couches which would be at eye-level if you were, um, performing that says, “go slow” ?)
@Cat Mara
I had heard about the Romans having anal sex. If I am not mistaken, they tried various methods of oral contraceptives, but none worked very well.
@Moggie:
I’m also going with “we can just shoot vanilla porn and claim the performers are step-siblings or whatever.” The other things you mentioned would require special FX to make and/or risk everyone involved getting arrested.
@Katamount:
At least two “porn parodies” I’ve heard of– one a Hope-and-Crosby Road Movie thing my husband saw years ago, one a Star Trek piece that vent viral a few years back for the reason I’m about to describe—sound as though they were actually straight-up fan pastiches with some sex scenes thrown in to either circumvent copyright (parody-is-fair-use) or to make them financially viable. I forget the Star Trek “parody” but people on Boing Boing were saying that if you edited out the sex it was a really well-done fan film.
@Naglfar: Yeah, “gonzo porn” is that extremely aggressive variety where the woman performer is literally assaulted, verbally abused, spat on, and worse. It turns my stomach, honestly. There is an article in The Guardian by Martin Amis about it that’s extremely grim reading.
@Moon_custafer
That makes a lot of sense tbh. I’ll admit I’ve watched some of the step siblings stuff not because of the idea they were step siblings but because it was pretty empty of violence and I would just pretend I didn’t see the title. In my own fantasy they are just a married couple or something. Also if both people in it are really attractive I’ve been like “okay gonna give you guys my own back story in my head because the title is gross, this is your very loving boyfriend and your his very loving girlfriend who are not related in anyway by blood or marriage”. Side note when I watch it I was it with sound off so again I can create my own story in my head. I’m more of a erotica reader then a porn watcher because there can be random things that trigger me that weren’t in the description. With so many lonely people in the world I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who does this.
@Naglfar
While ostensibly “gonzo” simply means that it’s filmed from a point-of-view shot (taken from Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo journalism”), in practice it involves a lot of squicky and arguably degrading closeups in order to titillate the viewer. A lot of content that abuses and humiliates the actress is a direct result of gonzo’s popularity as a genre.
No doubt European producers have their own abusive practices (looking Pierre Woodman’s way), but what they shoot is often more cinematic, which offers a sense of detachment to the viewer, for better and worse.
@Katamount
There was this one Wizard of Oz parody that was actually pretty ambitious. It had song and dance sequences, they got an little person, adult actress for the munchkin sequence and the Wicked Witch of the West managed to remain green throughout the whole thing.
They also really hammed it up, so it works as a comedy if you just cut out the sex scenes.
@TheKND:
Yeah, I’m sort of charmed by the concept of alleged porn in which the sex scenes are just there to justify the rest of the movie.
@TheKND
That sounds hilarious
I saw some SFW clips from an Aladdin porn parody on Twitter the other day that was actually really funny because the whole thing was just incredibly campy and the actors really hammed it up. Some of them really do feel like they were made by competent comedy writers that just ended up in a porn company instead of SNL somehow.
Sounds like the ‘Clerks’ parody, in fact I’m watching a 30 minute edit with all the sex removed as I post this. the people who made it are obviously fans of the original movie.
I saw a parody of Kick-Ass once (which, naturally, was called Ass-Kick). It was pretty hilarious, but nothing made it more so than the fact that the performer doing the Nicholas Cage role genuinely managed to get the Cage growl right. The sex was too well integrated into the story for there to be a no-sex cut, though.
@Fabe:
Are we sure Kevin Smith himself didn’t direct it? 😉
@Rabid Rabbit:
The sex was too well integrated into the story for there to be a no-sex cut, though.
Please tell me they didn’t sexualise Hit-Girl!
@Moggie
Oh, of course they did. If it’s any consolation, at no point did they pretend she was ten.
@Katamount
The use of the term “gonzo” to refer to what is being filmed (degrading or violent acts) versus how it is being filmed (director interacts with the subjects, a la gonzo journalism) seems to come from anti-porn “activists” like Professional Liar Gail Dines.
The industry simply defines gonzo as a filming style – if the director talks to the performers, then a simple striptease video is classified as gonzo.
Dines, and others like her, use whichever definition of “gonzo” suits the purpose of the moment, changing from sentence to sentence and hoping the audience doesn’t notice (i.e. classic Humpty-Dumptying).
There was at least one presentation where she defined gonzo as basically Max Hardcore (his stuff is VILE), claiming that he was the Big Name in gonzo and that all of it was like his product. This is doubly untrue – the Big Name that defined gonzo was John Stagliano, and his work was pretty mainstream in content.
Then, having convinced her audience that “gonzo” meant “Max Hardcore,” she put up stats that showed gonzo was by far the most popular genre the previous year. Except, of course, that she was now using the industry’s stats and thus the industry’s definition of gonzo – which, like I said above, includes things like striptease videos so long as the director converses with a performer.
The audience, of course, was not supposed to notice the deception.
Most of Dines’ for-profit “activism” works like that. In the same presentation, she compared the previous year’s total revenue for the porn industry to Hollywood’s box office revenue. The porn total was somewhat bigger, thus proving that porn was bigger and so “proving” that porn was more culturally influential than Hollywood.
The audience was not supposed to notice that she had compared the total of ALL sources of revenue for the porn industry to JUST box office revenue for Hollywood, which anyone who follows the film industry can tell you is NOT the main source of revenue. She left out all of Hollywood’s other sources of revenue, such as home video, rentals, streaming, and licensing… while including those sources for her porn total. Unsurprisingly, a complete comparison still showed Hollywood eclipsing the porn industry. Hell, Disney’s (non-theme-park) revenue alone eclipses the porn industry.