Debbie Does Market Research
An oft-stated lefty premise is that the United States is a "puritanical" nation with a repressive attitude towards sexual expression. The quickie rejoinder to this argument is simple: "Look at the sex-drenched media we are surrounded by! You can't turn on your teevee without seeing some buxom young nympette cavorting about in a wanton Dance of Lust! We're a sex crazed society!"
Watching the documentary Inside Deep Throat, about the most popular adult film of all time, you get a sense of what the difference is between the culture we currently have, and an actually sexually liberated one might look like. When Deep Throat opened in 1972, it played in actual movie theaters across the country, and ordinary Americans lined up, in the daytime, to see it. Middle aged suburban couples, professionals, pillars of the community, showed up at public auditoriums, sitting next to each other to watch a woman take a man's cock tonsil deep into her mouth. Now, I know that porn has become a multi-billion dollar a year business; more money is spent on porn than first-run movies these days, but that doesn't mean that we live in a sexually uninhibited society. The porn that people consume by the metric ton nowadays is viewed behind locked home and hotel room doors. It's completely private, and not talked about. Sure, mainstream publications and news programs will do stories about the porn industry, but those articles and segments might feature a bunch of quotes from porn producers, actors, and a few egghead sociologists, but, most likely, not a single quote from an actual porn consumer. An entire industry churning out product for two or three affluent perverts. There is absolutely no way that something like the Deep Throat phenomenon could ever happen again. Porn is everywhere, but it's nowhere at the same time. This situation allows for denial on a society-wide scale: if the millions of people who watch porn are watching it in their basements, then hiding their DVDs in their crusty sock drawer, and never discuss it with anyone else, then it's easy for those who would persecute pornography and project a national moral character to campaign against this thing that no one will admit to consumming. In a society where people stand together in the daylight, waiting in line to watch porn with their neighbors, it becomes harder for our moral policemen to try and perpetrate the fraud that we are a "moral" society. Just like those hypocritical, kinky Victorians, we maintain a mask of sexual decorum in our public pursuits, then whip out the ether rag and cum-stained corset when the blinds are drawn. So, instead of being sexually uninhibited, we're just schizophrenic, which is just another word for repressed. And this doesn't even begin to address the question of how much the solitary consumption of pornography warps our perceptions, expectations, and relationship to actual sex.
Besides the popularity of porn, the other oft-noted component of our culture that supposedly indicates America's status as a libertine nation is the ubiquity of sex in American media. But consider all that so-called "sex": it isn't sex at all. It's titillation: suggestions of sexuality meant to arouse the senses, to get your attention, but devoid of any real sexual content. More depressingly, all that sexual imagery is not used to promote thinking about sex, but rather to promote thinking about consumption. "Sex Sells" advertising philosophy is designed to create sexual thoughts, but instead of connecting that aroused state to its logical, sexual conclusion, it seeks to connect that sense of arousal to a highly illogical conclusion: products. Sexy ads don't want you to have sex (that's usually free, and there aren't that many necessary acutrements...at least not ones that advertise on television), they want you to associate the tingly frission of sexual excitement with the product their hawking. Even television and film depictions of sex are largely meant to tease, to suggest, but to turn away from the act itself. A society with media devoted so fervently to utilizing sexualized bodies in the interest of attention-grabbing, but which can't bring itself to contemplate the actual act, is not sexually liberated: if we weren't repressed, the juvenile titillation wouldn't be effective.
Watching the documentary Inside Deep Throat, about the most popular adult film of all time, you get a sense of what the difference is between the culture we currently have, and an actually sexually liberated one might look like. When Deep Throat opened in 1972, it played in actual movie theaters across the country, and ordinary Americans lined up, in the daytime, to see it. Middle aged suburban couples, professionals, pillars of the community, showed up at public auditoriums, sitting next to each other to watch a woman take a man's cock tonsil deep into her mouth. Now, I know that porn has become a multi-billion dollar a year business; more money is spent on porn than first-run movies these days, but that doesn't mean that we live in a sexually uninhibited society. The porn that people consume by the metric ton nowadays is viewed behind locked home and hotel room doors. It's completely private, and not talked about. Sure, mainstream publications and news programs will do stories about the porn industry, but those articles and segments might feature a bunch of quotes from porn producers, actors, and a few egghead sociologists, but, most likely, not a single quote from an actual porn consumer. An entire industry churning out product for two or three affluent perverts. There is absolutely no way that something like the Deep Throat phenomenon could ever happen again. Porn is everywhere, but it's nowhere at the same time. This situation allows for denial on a society-wide scale: if the millions of people who watch porn are watching it in their basements, then hiding their DVDs in their crusty sock drawer, and never discuss it with anyone else, then it's easy for those who would persecute pornography and project a national moral character to campaign against this thing that no one will admit to consumming. In a society where people stand together in the daylight, waiting in line to watch porn with their neighbors, it becomes harder for our moral policemen to try and perpetrate the fraud that we are a "moral" society. Just like those hypocritical, kinky Victorians, we maintain a mask of sexual decorum in our public pursuits, then whip out the ether rag and cum-stained corset when the blinds are drawn. So, instead of being sexually uninhibited, we're just schizophrenic, which is just another word for repressed. And this doesn't even begin to address the question of how much the solitary consumption of pornography warps our perceptions, expectations, and relationship to actual sex.
Besides the popularity of porn, the other oft-noted component of our culture that supposedly indicates America's status as a libertine nation is the ubiquity of sex in American media. But consider all that so-called "sex": it isn't sex at all. It's titillation: suggestions of sexuality meant to arouse the senses, to get your attention, but devoid of any real sexual content. More depressingly, all that sexual imagery is not used to promote thinking about sex, but rather to promote thinking about consumption. "Sex Sells" advertising philosophy is designed to create sexual thoughts, but instead of connecting that aroused state to its logical, sexual conclusion, it seeks to connect that sense of arousal to a highly illogical conclusion: products. Sexy ads don't want you to have sex (that's usually free, and there aren't that many necessary acutrements...at least not ones that advertise on television), they want you to associate the tingly frission of sexual excitement with the product their hawking. Even television and film depictions of sex are largely meant to tease, to suggest, but to turn away from the act itself. A society with media devoted so fervently to utilizing sexualized bodies in the interest of attention-grabbing, but which can't bring itself to contemplate the actual act, is not sexually liberated: if we weren't repressed, the juvenile titillation wouldn't be effective.
posted by matthew christman at 7:40 PM
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