Read the following paragraph and you'd probably feel pretty confident making some assumptions about the author and the rest of the article it appears in. Those assumptions would probably be mostly wrong. But, play the game with me. Read it and imagine the person and the piece.
First of all, however, I think she is very much right in two claims she makes that appear in that paragraph;
Her name is Natasha Vargas-Cooper and the article is called Hard Core: The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women. Before you click on that, you will want to know that while the article is completely unpornographic, Vargas-Cooper is very direct and detailed in talking about what sort of subjects are increasingly portrayed in modern porn.
The piece has caused a lot of buzz on the Internet. Some people have attacked the piece for being yet another anti-porn crusade but it isn't that. As the headline says, she is more interested in what she believes modern porn is telling us about human sexuality. Others have zeroed in on something else: although the headline talks about revealing truths about men and women, Vargas-Cooper is actually much more concerned with men and the supposed pathologies of our sexuality.
There are some obvious and real problems with the article. For example: Millions of young women are fans of Taylor Swift but no reasonable person would allow that you can successfully generalize about all young women based on the personal style of Taylor Swift and the lyrics of her songs. And such generalizations would not be any more convincing if I told you about an encounter with one young woman who clearly modeled herself on Swift. Likewise it simply does not follow that because a lot of men use porn and some of that porn portrays something really ugly that every man's or even most men's sexuality fits into this model.
Another huge problem is that the numbers Vargas-Cooper cites are less than convincing:
That said, I think Vargas-Cooper is on to something very important when she writes things like this:
Let me give you a mundane, by today's standards, example of how women's sexual responses can surprise women themselves. A woman I have known since high school told me that when she was thirteen years old, one of her friends snuck a sex manual out of her mother's underwear drawer and a small group of girls her age read it aloud to one another. This was in the late 1970s. Anyway, they hit the section that discussed fellatio and all the girls had the same reaction: "Not in my mouth—never, ever ever, ever."
As my friend related it, all she had to do reduce one of those women to hysterical laughter five to ten years later was to remind them of that incident. As she put it, "Women's sense of what we will really want to do when we are really aroused is not very dependable". And we men get a lot of pleasure from pushing women a bit; we get a lot of pleasure from a woman surrendering herself to us by allowing herself to reach that point where that arbitrarily shift Vargas-Copper discusses above takes place. I suspect most men have had the experience where the harsh, ugly little word that a woman has said she hates suddenly becomes the harsh, ugly little word that puts her over the top.
Really good sex is always about surrender
One of the odd things about sex is that allowing the other person to please you is a form of surrender. And it is precisely because that pleasure involves a loss of control. Even to enjoy having your neck massaged requires you to put yourself, quite literally, in someone else's hands. In really good sex you reach a point where you are out of control and the other person is very much in control. And Vargas-Cooper correctly points out that this sex—sex where we surrender completely to another—is the very best sex there is. (She doesn't acknowledge, but we should, that this is a much more significant surrender for women than it is for men and that doing so will leave a woman more vulnerable than it does a man.)
If you don't feel comfortable about that surrender, you have three choices:
And you can see how that just might set up an ugly power struggle. If you cannot, you can read an account of just such an ugly power struggle in Vargas-Cooper's article.
But lots of other women will read what Vargas-Cooper wrote above and say, "Speak for yourself sister." As I say, she is revealing a lot more about herself here than she realizes.
Marriage?
But I would like to move onto the issue of marriage because Vargas-Cooper really reveals herself when she talks about marriage. In the quote above, she not only doesn't want to have her best sex in a committed relationship, she describes marriages as "domestic gulags". Later on, she will respond to another author by writing:
Because she relentlessly slams the door on marriage every time it rears its head, Vargas-Cooper has to blame something else: male sexuality. But read her own words and there is an undeniable admission that female sexuality complements male sexuality. She is pushing to make sex meaningless and male dominated precisely because she won't allow the kind of relationship that is based on complete mutual giving. In other words, it is her own insistence on a lack of any moral sense to sexual relationships that gets her where she ends up. And that is a funny way to oppose nihilism.
More tomorrow.
This isn’t to argue that pornography is harmless or even that it shouldn’t be censored: its pervasiveness clearly exacerbates the growing moral nihilism of our culture. But removing pornography won’t alter the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn depicts and legitimizes. The history of civilization would seem to show that there’s no hope of eradicating those qualities; they can only be contained—and checked—by strenuously enforced norms. And given our à la carte morality and our aversion to cultural authority—a societal direction made plain by porn’s very omnipresence—I wouldn’t put much faith in enforcement.What attracted me to this quote on another site is that word "nihilism". You read this paragraph and you think, here is writer who is opposed to nihilism. She is actually a very unconvincing opponent of moral nihilism and is, I suspect, actually a moral nihilist despite herself. You might also think she doesn't like sex much but you'd be very wrong about that too. The things she doesn't much like are men's sexuality and marriage. Not just the institution mind; she doesn't like the kind of relationship that marriage institutionalizes.
First of all, however, I think she is very much right in two claims she makes that appear in that paragraph;
- The problems of modern sexuality do not arise from pornography but from inescapable facts about sexuality. She clearly seems to believe that these are facts about male sexuality but her article reveals, again despite her claims, that this writer knows better than that and that female sexuality also plays a huge role.
- I also agree with her that our culture's commitment to individual autonomy and aversion to authority make it impossible to deal with the issue through culturally enforced norms (assuming that would be a good idea, which I doubt).
Her name is Natasha Vargas-Cooper and the article is called Hard Core: The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women. Before you click on that, you will want to know that while the article is completely unpornographic, Vargas-Cooper is very direct and detailed in talking about what sort of subjects are increasingly portrayed in modern porn.
The piece has caused a lot of buzz on the Internet. Some people have attacked the piece for being yet another anti-porn crusade but it isn't that. As the headline says, she is more interested in what she believes modern porn is telling us about human sexuality. Others have zeroed in on something else: although the headline talks about revealing truths about men and women, Vargas-Cooper is actually much more concerned with men and the supposed pathologies of our sexuality.
There are some obvious and real problems with the article. For example: Millions of young women are fans of Taylor Swift but no reasonable person would allow that you can successfully generalize about all young women based on the personal style of Taylor Swift and the lyrics of her songs. And such generalizations would not be any more convincing if I told you about an encounter with one young woman who clearly modeled herself on Swift. Likewise it simply does not follow that because a lot of men use porn and some of that porn portrays something really ugly that every man's or even most men's sexuality fits into this model.
Another huge problem is that the numbers Vargas-Cooper cites are less than convincing:
The Internet has created a perfect market of buyers and sellers (with the sellers increasingly proffering their goods gratis) that provides what people—overwhelmingly males (who make up two-thirds of all porn viewers)—want to see or do.If two thirds of porn viewers are men, then one third are women and one-third of porn users is an awful lot of women. And when you consider that people use porn as a masturbatory aid and that most men masturbate a lot more often than most women do, this statistic alone demolishes Vargas-Cooper's claim that today's porn tells us something unique to male sexuality. (Something that is also clear reading between the lines of her own piece.)
That said, I think Vargas-Cooper is on to something very important when she writes things like this:
The heated act of sex often expunges judgment, pushing the participants into territory they hadn’t previously contemplated. The speed at which one transgresses, the urge to reach oblivion, the glamour of violence, the arbitrary and shifting distinction between acts repulsive and attractive—all these aspects that existed only in sex are now re-created through Internet porn.And this:
The manner in which one physically, and emotionally, contorts oneself for sex simply takes sex outside the realm of ordinary human experiences and places it in the extreme, often beyond our control.Sex is like Huckleberry Finn, it defies sivilizing. It is one of those experiences where we are confronted by our raw animality. We surprise ourselves by responding positively to things we don't think we are going to or that we should like. Interestingly, however, Vargas-Cooper is honest enough to admit here what she is less comfortable acknowledging elsewhere: women are not immune to this reaction. And if that is true, we can't really say that it is all men pushing for this sort of experience that is to blame. And yet that is exactly what Vargas-Cooper wants us to conclude.
Let me give you a mundane, by today's standards, example of how women's sexual responses can surprise women themselves. A woman I have known since high school told me that when she was thirteen years old, one of her friends snuck a sex manual out of her mother's underwear drawer and a small group of girls her age read it aloud to one another. This was in the late 1970s. Anyway, they hit the section that discussed fellatio and all the girls had the same reaction: "Not in my mouth—never, ever ever, ever."
As my friend related it, all she had to do reduce one of those women to hysterical laughter five to ten years later was to remind them of that incident. As she put it, "Women's sense of what we will really want to do when we are really aroused is not very dependable". And we men get a lot of pleasure from pushing women a bit; we get a lot of pleasure from a woman surrendering herself to us by allowing herself to reach that point where that arbitrarily shift Vargas-Copper discusses above takes place. I suspect most men have had the experience where the harsh, ugly little word that a woman has said she hates suddenly becomes the harsh, ugly little word that puts her over the top.
Really good sex is always about surrender
One of the odd things about sex is that allowing the other person to please you is a form of surrender. And it is precisely because that pleasure involves a loss of control. Even to enjoy having your neck massaged requires you to put yourself, quite literally, in someone else's hands. In really good sex you reach a point where you are out of control and the other person is very much in control. And Vargas-Cooper correctly points out that this sex—sex where we surrender completely to another—is the very best sex there is. (She doesn't acknowledge, but we should, that this is a much more significant surrender for women than it is for men and that doing so will leave a woman more vulnerable than it does a man.)
If you don't feel comfortable about that surrender, you have three choices:
- You can never lose control by either making sex about the other person's pleasure or simply abstaining.
- You can lose control in circumstances where the other person is distanced; that is to say you can lose control in conditions where they are reduced to something like a masturbatory aid.
- You can lose control only in the context of a loving, committed relationship wherein you have both pledged to fully give yourself to the other.
But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their “serious relationship.” But the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life.Perhaps surprisingly, Vargas-Cooper's preferred choice from my list above is clearly option #2. Lots of women, but not all I am happy to be able to say authoritatively, want exactly what Vargas-Cooper wants. Relevant disclosure: been there, done that, was the man my ex claimed she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and consequently suffered through years of mundane sex and boring underwear while occasionally hearing about how other guys before me got to push her boundaries and that experience does have an impact on the way I see things. And I know I'm not alone here.
And you can see how that just might set up an ugly power struggle. If you cannot, you can read an account of just such an ugly power struggle in Vargas-Cooper's article.
But lots of other women will read what Vargas-Cooper wrote above and say, "Speak for yourself sister." As I say, she is revealing a lot more about herself here than she realizes.
Marriage?
But I would like to move onto the issue of marriage because Vargas-Cooper really reveals herself when she talks about marriage. In the quote above, she not only doesn't want to have her best sex in a committed relationship, she describes marriages as "domestic gulags". Later on, she will respond to another author by writing:
More important, the sort of sex that Dines envisions—where respect, love, and civic connections are merged into erotically rewarding experience—is utopian (and not perhaps all that enticing).I don't, as I say, entirely disagree. The rewarding sexual experience doesn't come as a result of respect, love and civic connections. Sex is and will always be something that defies control but is precisely that which makes the respect, love and civic connections so essential. The uncontrollable aspects become something you make a gift of to one and only one other person and you can do that because you trust them. You don't trust them because you know they will always be trustworthy; you do it because you love them and have decided to trust them. Marriage is a promise without a guarantee. But if you read the article, you will see that Vargas-Cooper provides lots of evidence of what happens when you take respect, love, and civic connections away and it isn't pretty.
Because she relentlessly slams the door on marriage every time it rears its head, Vargas-Cooper has to blame something else: male sexuality. But read her own words and there is an undeniable admission that female sexuality complements male sexuality. She is pushing to make sex meaningless and male dominated precisely because she won't allow the kind of relationship that is based on complete mutual giving. In other words, it is her own insistence on a lack of any moral sense to sexual relationships that gets her where she ends up. And that is a funny way to oppose nihilism.
More tomorrow.
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