tronvillain

luvluv:
Ah, but that is not what I said. If that were generally the case I could easily make do with simulated pictures and written text. I just don't think that is the case, and you certainly haven't backed it up with much.

Perhaps some of them aren't. So what? Some women in accountacy probably aren't emotionally healthy either. Even if there are more emotionally unhealthy women in porn than in accountancy, will eliminating porn get rid of them or will you just not have to think about them?

tronvillain

Oh, and I still want a response to my points about the Essence article:
Well?

Amen-Moses

OK I'll wade in around now.

There is a TV programme on Bravo over here called real sex or raw sex or some such that is a sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary series on the porn industry (it must be an American made programme because it is the US porn industry that is covered). They are filming on set as porn movies are being shot and the talk to the actors, actresses, producers etc whilst they are at work.

It is a really illuminating series and whilst they only seem to concentrate on the main-stream porn makers and it must be admitted that they may only be only showing the good side, the overall impression is that the long term actors and actresses are in the business because they enjoy it (in fact I was struck by how much fun they have on set).

The other point worth making is that the evidence from this documentary series seems to point at the male actors being far more likely to burn out than their female counterparts, probably for purely physical reasons which as a male I can certainly appreciate.

Other things I glean from the series is that the majority of the actresses seem to be married to actors or director/producers (it seems that virtually every male producer is an ex actor) and that when preparing for action the women and men are equally interested in the technical aspects (i.e before the filming begins they chat about their best angles and likes/dislikes so as to improve the quality of the product) whch probably accounts for why the professional productions are far superior to the amateur stuff out there.

Amen-Moses

Viti

Okay, I am going to nutshel this from everything I have read so far.

luvluv, your assertion is
"the majority of women in the porn industry have severe emotional problems, therefore porn is exploitive and watching it supports the destruction of their lives"

Now, to back that assertion you have stated "There is some evidence that women may have a more emotional investment in sex than men due a combination of biology and socialization"

Do you see the huge disparity between your assertion and your evidence? The severity of your original assertion and the vagueness of your evidence do not agree. Therefore, you have not made a good case for your POV.

Now, have I summed it up correctly or incorrectly

Bree

Are you quoting yourself? I never said anything like this.

Why do you need to know anything about my sexual habits? You have made allegations about nameless women in the sex industry - you don't know anything about their sexual habits except for the fact that they like to have sex with multiple men. You don't know anything about me except that I like to have sex with women - namely, one woman in general.

I'm waiting for an analysis. It seems to me that you're either afraid to hurt my feelings or you realised your comparisons make no sense.

seebs

Okay, to fully understand this, you need to know that there are multiple classes of statistical errors. We have sample errors, population errors, reporting errors, and many others.

Imagine, if you will, that 45% of women, and 10% of men, would like to have "only one partner" in their love life. Women would seem to be substantially more likely to be monogamous - but this doesn't mean that a given woman, who prefers to be promiscuous, is "lying" or "deluded" - in fact, most women, in such a scenario, would prefer *NOT* to have only one partner throughout their lives.

The problem is, you're taking a tendency ("women tend to prefer more stable relationships") and trying to extrapolate that any behavior not predicted by this is "abnormal" or "not natural to people". This isn't so. A tendency may just mean that the average woman only wants to spend five or ten years having flings, while the average man wants to spend twelve years having flings.

The data just don't support the kinds of practical or applied conclusions you're drawing.

livius drusus

Call me emotionally disturbed, but that last post of yours really turned me on, Seebs. Mmmmm, clear and rational stastical analysis....

Pomp

luvluv,

Somewhere in the middle? Speak for yourself, Pompous. Seriously, do you really think gonad size is the only relavent criteria for judging how sexual behavior among humans is supposed to operate?

Of course not. I was simply responding to your challenge to look at the behavior of our closest evolutionary relatives for hints as to our "natural" proclivities by pointing out that a sexual lifestyle somewhere between monogamy and promiscuity is, by at least one indicator based on the other primate species, "natural" human behavior.

At any rate, nature was only one source I was using to justify my position, and I used it not because I thought it to be the strongest argument but the one which you guys would at least partially respect. I am only trying to get you folks to conceed one tiny point: that at least SOME of the sexual differences between men and women are grounded in biology. I'm sure of it is socialized, but some of it is not.

Of course. This is uncontroversial. You're trying to draw an unwarranted conclusion from this premise, though. Even granting that women tend to desire more committed sexual relationships than men, you still can't jump to the conclusion that all women, or even most women, who engage in casual sex are being exploited or somehow acting out emotional problems, as you are trying to do. The real picture is much more complex than the simple "women want to settle down" scenario you're trying to draw.

First of all, you're talking about a statistical trend, not a universal feature of all women. If it's possible to represent the level of commitment desired in a sexual relationship in a single variable, let's call it C, then it seems likely that a graph of the distribution of C will follow a standard bell curve. You're pointing out that the graph of C peaks higher (i.e. further to the right along the x axis) for women than for men and trying, then, to claim this as evidence that it is somehow unnatural for women to engage in casual sex. Obviously, some women can and do fall further to theleft (less desired commitment) than many men. Making the general claim that women ought not engage in casual sex because of this distribution is a bit like claiming that black men ought to be preferentially given jobs involving physical labor because they have a statistical tendency to posses more muscle mass than other men; both claims ignore the obvious fact that individuals can and do fall outside the "norm" for their group.

Second, you're ignoring socialization in much the same way that you're accusing us of ignoring biology. As uncontroversial as it is that our biology affects what sort of sex life we desire, it is equally uncontroversial that our society has a similar effect. Mead and Samoa aside, a number of other cultures have been observed (I believe several are mentioned in the PDF I linked to) that do not place the same emphasis on committed sexual relationships that modern western culture does. In addition, the already discussed differences between European and American society demonstrate the same thing. Socialization can alter our biologically influenced desires.

Finally, our behavior is not ruled by simple biological determinism. If A wnats to have casual sex, enjoys it, and experiences few or no negative consequences, telling her that there is no good evolutionary reason for her to engage in casual sex and every evolutionary reason for her to seek out a committed mate is not a valid argument against her behavior. Although our genetic heritage does influence our behavior we, as rational agents, have very different goals then the ones our genes "have."

I would probably reccomend that you read the Great Disruption by Francis Fukiyama, if you haven't already. Is that a deal?

I've read it. It's been awhile, so I can't give you a detailed critique, but I wasn't impressed. Much as you are doing here, and as he does in his more well-known work, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama draws sweeping and unwarranted conclusions from limited data. His role is less an objective assessor of society than an academically respectable cheerleader for traditional Western values. For example, in TEoHatLM, he looks at the events of the 20th century and concludes that liberal democracy married to capitalist economics is the ultimate form of human social organization, never to be surpassed, and that history, in the sense of the unfolding of new ideas about how humans should live, essentially ended when the Berlin Wall came down.

luvluv

bonduca:

"I would like to see the studies these conclusions are drawn from."

FANTASTIC! The book is called the Great Disruption and is now availiable in paperback at your local book store.

"I do not understand what you mean by "real illegitimacy." Is this legitimate illigitimacy? Could you clarify."

Fatherlessness.

"Since time began, people have been both monogamous and promiscuous. This is new?"

At the level it is occuring now? It is absolutely new, and more than that, it is localized and tends to occur only in industrialized countries. If you really give a good gosh darn about any of these issues I highly reccomend you pick up the book. Formerly, a man would have had to have been a king or filthy rich to have sex with as many women as the average sexually active American male has today. Your average medieval peasant did not sleep with a dozen women in his lifetime, and a quite ordinary modern man might do that in his twenties. I really think you should read the book. Fukiyama gets deep into that.

"Not since birth control."

So, you are under the impression that illegitimacy and unwanted pregnancy is less of a problem now than it was 50 years ago?

As for STD's, people sleep around more now than they did before there was widely-availiable birth control and that has largely off-set the advantage of the condomn. To paraphrase one of my favorite rappers, it would seem self-control works better than birth control.

"I have told you repeatedly that orgasm does not equal imprinting."

Okay, so should I believe you or the person with the PHD in the field? Oh, and that person happens to be a woman.

"Your depiction of women as weepy characters who are clingy, whiny, and less sexual than men is, frankly, even more offensive to me."

Wouldn't you say that, RELATIVE TO MEN, all of the above statements are true? I'm not sayig women go around being clingy and whiny all the time, but I am saying that most people would be more likely to associate that kind of behavior with women than with men.


tron:

Your asserion re: the Essence article seems to run this way: if a woman is interested in sex only for pleasure, she should try to avoid an orgasm lest she develop an emotional attachment. So if they want to have sex just for fun, they should try their best not to enjoy it, correct?

And secondly, you say that the way someone avoids forming a single attachment, is to form so many of them that one can't keep up with all the people you are attached to. I'm sure every clinical psychologist in the world would be willing to endorse your ingenious prescription.

From now on, if I don't respond to one of your statements, you can assume I didn't consider it worth responding to.

Shea:

"Now, have I summed it up correctly or incorrectly"

Incorrectly, in my opinion. I am saying that in general women view sexuality different from men. Then I said that many women have a tendency to act out deeper problems they have with themselves with sex. I stated that all of us have probably known such women at one time or another, so we know they exist. I said that we can generally agree that if we met a woman who slept with a different man every night, and occasionally two at a time, and occasionally women, and quite often in public, most of us would assume that the girl was not emotionally healthy. I said that women in pornography fit all of the above descriptions of sexual behavior, so one might have to assume that at least SOME of the women in porn have some social problems.

Have you guys ever seen the film Boogie Nights? Well, I was lucky enough to meet the director, PT Anderson, when I was out in L.A. once. He gave us a lot of background about the film and about the research that went into it. He told us some pretty grim tales about some of the things he saw growing up (his hometown in Cali is supposedly the porn capital of the world. He often came across porn film crews in his neighborhood). The view of the porn world he had when he wrote the movie came from his research and his expereince, and it was his definite opinion that porn preys on messed up people and that it messes people up who weren't previously messed up, that many porn stars depend on drugs to function, and that the industry cares nothing about the women involved beyond their capacity to make them a buck.

Bree, I'm sorry, seebs said that little statement that I quoted.

"I'm waiting for an analysis. It seems to me that you're either afraid to hurt my feelings or you realised your comparisons make no sense."

I will analyze you. Tell me everything about your relationship with both of your parents and everything about your sexual history to date in as great detail as you can. Homosexuality alone, in my opinion, is not enough data to form a hypothesis. Gargantuan promiscuity in women, however, is a warning signal and I dare you to find a therapist who deals with women who would disagree. I am just saying in terms of women in pornography, the signals point to pathology. If you were running a fever and were throwing up, it would not be a radical hypothesis to guess you had the flu. If a girl is being double-teamed by strangers on a regular basis, even when she WASN'T desiring sex, and if she did this in front of strangers, I think I can safely hypothesize a problem. Agreed?

seebs:

"The data just don't support the kinds of practical or applied conclusions you're drawing."

We aren't talking about all women, we are talking about one particular set of women: porn stars. These are women, as I described above, who engage in sex far in excess of their desires with strangers and in public. Now if we took a case study of THOSE women to a clinical psychologists, what percentage of THOSE women would turn out to be psychologically healthy?

[ June 08, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

luvluv

Pompous:

"You're trying to draw an unwarranted conclusion from this premise, though. Even granting that women tend to desire more committed sexual relationships than men, you still can't jump to the conclusion that all women, or even most women, who engage in casual sex are being exploited or somehow acting out emotional problems, as you are trying to do."

I am not at all trying to do that. I only started talking about average women to provide a general context for understanding women in pornography. I am certainly not saying all women who engage in casual sex are being exploited, I am saying that it is highly probable that a significant portion, perhaps even the majority, of female porn stars are being exploited. My broader point, that women tend to have more negative consequences from promiscuity than men, to provide the basis for the more exacting point. It all started when Shea said that she knew healthy pornstars, and I told her I knew psychologically unhealthy promiscuous women. It all digressed from there.

I am not trying to judge anybody or criticize anybody about their lifestyle, but I believe some choices are better and definitely safer than others.

Okay kids I've had enough of this particular subject for a few days. I'll be back after the fight or tommorow.

[ June 08, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>