When I saw that the current issue of the Atlantic had a piece about how “[t]he new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women,” I was initially excited. Then I read the piece.
Was it too much to hope that the Atlantic—a relatively open minded, liberal publication—might approach the topic of adult entertainment with a fair and balanced perspective? Probably, but a girl can dream. Sadly, my dreams of reading an informed, insightful piece on the way today’s porn industry interfaces with American sexuality were pretty much shot by the end of the third paragraph, in which author Natasha Vargas-Cooper declares double anal to be “a fixture on any well-trafficked site.”
I’ll let you take a moment to process that one.
I should have given up at that point, but I soldiered on, working my way through what has to be the most pretentious published piece ever to discuss double anal. As I finished the piece, I felt nothing but disgust. And it wasn’t simply Ms. Vargas-Cooper’s ignorance about her subject matter that disappointed me, nor was it the fact that she apparently confuses name dropping with creating a well-crafted argument. No, it was her dismal view of human—particularly male—nature, her broad generalizations about human sexuality, and—most troublingly of all—her apparent inability to separate fantasy from reality that left me frustrated and disappointed.
Vargas-Cooper’s thesis seems nebulously based on her own experience as a consumer of internet porn and a sexually active female, combined with a handful of statistics, some high minded citations, and an overlong analysis of “Last Tango in Paris”—hardly a firm basis from which to paint male sexuality with so broad a brush. At no point does Vargas-Cooper engage anyone from the adult industry—or, for that matter, any male consumers of porn—a strange omission for a piece that seeks to prove that porn offers irrefutable evidence that men are brutes and women weak, passive, and desperate to please.
Now, I will admit that, as Vargas-Cooper states, there are plenty of porn sites that plumb the Hobbesian depths of human sexuality. There are also plenty that offer a very different view on sexuality, one that hardly squares with her idea of debased, ravaged women undone by aggressive male sexuality. Nica Noelle, Tristan Taormino, Shine Louise Houston, Lee Roy Myers, Tom Byron—these directors bear little resemblance to the vicious, manipulative pornographers imagined in Vargas-Cooper’s article (which is, of course, probably why she neglected to include much discussion of almost any actual porn—besides, of course, cursory mention of titles like Bang Bus and Barely Legal).
But even if all porn were as Vargas-Cooper suggests, it would hardly be proof that men are as fundamentally contemptuous of women as she seems to believe. Many video games invite us to engage in disturbing acts of violence and depravity, yet reasonable human beings understand that we can separate our urges to decapitate our CGI foes from our relatively peaceful, daily lives. So it is with porn: a violent, abusive fantasy is hardly proof positive of a violent, abusive nature—or even tendencies towards violent, abusive behavior.
Though it’s wonderful to see a publication like The Atlantic taking interest in the world of pornography (and, by extension, human sexuality), it would be even more wonderful if they’d actually present a fact-based analysis, instead of one that trades in tired tropes about beast-like men and victimized women. I know I wasn’t the only one disappointed with The Atlantic’s choice to run this piece. I can only hope that, if more people speak up and express disappointment, that they’ll actually take note—and maybe, in a future issue, run a piece that actually tackles the topic in an informed, respectful manner.
· Hard Core (theatlantic.com)
