Beefcake, Cheesecake, and the Meaning of Women’s Lack of Surfing for Porn
There are two ways that discussions of women’s sexuality can stop making sense to me. One is when the other person seems to be saying that women can be expected to be sexual in just the same way as men – or, perhaps, would be except for some social conventions that we can be expected to doff as easily as an extra coat. The other is when the other person seems to be saying that we’re totally, totally different.
Somehow, I felt as if I was confronting both of these things at once as a conversation I had on a thread at Hugo’s blog went seriously astray (through no fault of Hugo’s, I hasten to add). It started with a conversation about why men can go topless and women can’t. I hasten to make clear that I don’t feel all that deeply offended that I can’t go out in public without a shirt, and I certainly don’t object to seeing men shirtless. Especially men with nice, buff chests, with just enough hair on them.
How I got entangled in an argument, despite not caring all that much about the issue of what shirts people wear, was that I happened to remark that women find men’s chests attractive, and was surprised to find – opposition. Strong opposition. Silly me. Women don’t find men’s chests attractive, or not all that much. This should be obvious, because, you know, if women were really aroused by the sight of bare chests, they would be turned on by the sight of guys in swimming trunks, and we all know that never happens.
Probably Hugo is right that “Ultimately, I don’t think anyone is going to get anywhere by arguing about whose naked chests are more arousing.” And, hey, maybe men really are a zillion times more visual than women. More often than not, I suspect the “men are more visual than women” stereotype of being true. Or at least, I’m more willing to buy it than that other stereotype about men being genetically programmed to throw their socks on the floor, and women programmed to pick them up. I’m not committed to the notion that women must be just as drawn to men’s naked chests as men are to women’s. I’m just weirded out to find what I thought was the actual normal part of me seen as improbable and beyond belief.
Because the truth is that my eye is more drawn to strange women in the street than to strange men, more drawn to actresses than to actresses, and more likely to be caught by women in an underwear ad than by men in a similar state of undress. I’ve long assumed that I differ from the average woman in this, since I’ve mostly seen women admiring Johnny Depp, talking about how they admire this guy’s butt or that whole athletic team’s legs, and holding late night dorm conversations about (sorry, guys) guys’ parts that shouldn’t be described too explicitly on a work safe blog. So, the part of me that is pretty much like other women, I figure, isn’t the part where my eye is drawn more quickly and often to other women than to men, but the part where I do, nevertheless, find men’s chests attractive.
And I do find men’s chests attractive. My very first memory ever of being seriously attracted to a guy, way back in high school, is forever tied in my mind with the sight of his chest, and the glimpse of hair peeking out over the top of his shirt. I have similar memories of looking at the chests of other guys I was really drawn to, later in life. And yet, I don’t generally spend a lot of time looking for web sites that show buff, scantily clad men. Sure, those guys are nice eye candy, but the chests I really remember have names attached and letters saved.
This is called being less visual than men. Sometimes it’s even called trading sex for love, because apparently to some people desire is only real if you’d be quite happy sleeping with the guy and then having him totally ignore you in public. Otherwise it’s mere romance, which doesn’t have much to do with sex at all.
But it’s those web sites that are the reason for this post, why, after utterly failing to have a useful conversation with the commenter at Hugo’s thread, I’m trying again here, to see if someone other than this guy can give me some sensible commentary. “Sensible commentary” is allowed to be “men are very different from women in such a way” as long as it isn’t also “you’re being dishonest in not seeing things the way I do.”
Here’s the deal. Exhibit A in why I was dead wrong was the fact that men surf for porn a whole lot more than women. Something seems wrong to me about this line of argument, in large part because I know I find men’s chests attractive and I also know I don’t spend hours surfing the web for them. But also because, how can the current state of online porn be a good indicator of what women’s desires are? How am I supposed to infer what women truly find sexy from all the porn they aren’t looking at?
My first thought was to suggest that perhaps men surf more for porn because porn is written more for men. No, I was told, that’s wrong. Porn is, apparently, the one market in the world that never misjudges its audience or misses a market opportunity. In this, it’s quite unlike the software industry.
But, after some thought, I’m not entirely sure I like my first answer. It seems to suggest that I’ll only consider the world truly equal when women consume just as much Internet porn as men – go, porn! More porn for women! I know there are some women who do like to look at a lot of Internet porn, and you can find them over at Susie Bright’s blog. But I’m not about to argue that those of us who aren’t surfing for porn are deprived. So, here are other thoughts about what’s wrong with making inferences about what turns women on from the porn we’re not looking at.
- Moral objections to porn – are they really evenly distributed between the sexes? Because it doesn’t look to me as if they are.
- If you’re just looking at the porn we’re not using, you’re ignoring all the parts of our culture that do appeal to women’s desires. There’s a whole industry producing romance novels, which are mostly read by women (and which, pertinent to my own point on the other blog, generally include guys with hot chests, often displayed on the cover with partly open shirts, who proceed to have explicit sex with the heroine at some point during the course of the novel). There are magazines for teen girls with gossip about cute male stars and photos of the same. There are romantic, R-rated movies in which good looking actors have hot simulated sex. It just seems wrong to ignore all these things that women are actually consuming, and make the porn that women aren’t consuming the gold standard for determining what our desires are.
- It assumes that women’s porn consumption, or lack of porn consumption, is mainly going to be driven by turn ons. But I think it’s just as much driven by squicks. I got a boatload of porn ads in my email, before I set my spam filter to dump them, and most of them were quite explicit that they were selling images of women being degraded while having sex. They couldn’t, for heaven’s sake, advertise a woman having sex with a man of another race without selling it as “big brute of a black man has degrading encounter with delicate flower of a white woman.” Even if I had no moral objection to watching the stuff, that’s not exactly an enticing ad for me.
And as for the much less explicit magazines that I’ve actually seen, when wandering through stores where they happen to be sold – OK, they’re not as into degradation as that spam ads, but they’re heavy on submission. I’ve seen one photo after another that struck me, not as “here’s a photo of a hot naked or semi-clad woman” but “here’s a photo of a hot woman submitting to a man.” Either she was put in a very submissive pose relative to an actual man in the picture, or she was put in a very submissive pose relative to the gaze of the presumed male viewer. And for me, nakedness plus female submission is a squick. Nakedness is cool, scanty clothing is cool, but if I’m getting female submission with it, it turns me right off.
If women differ from men, is it more because we don’t experience the same turn ons with the same intensity, or more because we don’t experience the same squicks with the same intensity?
May 23rd, 2006 at 6:38 am
I have a not very coherent half-thought that women differ from men not in intensity of desire, but in what they (are maybe culturally trained to?) use that desire for. My limited and anecdotal impression of men’s consumption of pornography is that it is for them a pleasant distraction — there’s something they’d prefer not to think about, they are looking to relax, so they go look at some porn to experience an intense desire that helps them compartmentalize other things.
While it has definitely been my experience that women experience the same intensity of desire, even very similar visual stimulation as men — they tend not to use that desire as a form of distraction from something else. Maybe they use romance that way? I’m not sure.
I’m not sure if that observation says very much though.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:53 am
Yet again, I can’t understand how people can assume innateness for things that are so heavily culturally reinforced. From birth, men AND women are being trained to look at images of men and women differently. This has almost nothing to do with actual sexual orientation – ordinary clothing for 5 year old girls is cut much closer to the body than clothing for 5 year old boys. I’m talking about jeans and t-shirts. My best theory for why children get hyper after eating sugar is that *they’re constantly being told that children get hyper after eating sugar*. I don’t think the way adults look at naked bodies is any different. Men have been told their whole lives that they are supposed to like porn, and women have been told their whole lives they aren’t. So guess who seeks it out?
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:51 pm
I wonder, how does slash fiction fit into this? Granted, it’s not generally visual, and therefore not directly related to the question of whether women like looking at well-defined pectorals (to which my response is similar to yours: No duh!). But it is a type of erotica that’s almost exclusively female, and it can often be really kinky. (Yes, there is Harry Potter slash.)
Your post also reminds me of some research into romance novels that my mother did for her doctoral thesis, which was on adolescents and reading. Basically, for fans of a genre the high point of the story is generally the moment when the hero overcomes whatever pride or inhibitions or other objections and confesses his love for the heroine. It strikes me as kind of the female counterpart to the whole “submission” theme that squicks you (and me) in male porn, and probably helps explain why most men feel just as squicky about romance novels. Slash fiction tends to ramp this up by making the forbidden love even more forbidden and therefore the release becomes greater.
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:30 pm
You ask a great question — would you like me to link this post and send readers over here?
May 24th, 2006 at 2:02 am
I’m not sure most men know enough about romance novels to be squicked by them — whereas the squickiness of mainstream porn is hard to miss. The fact that romance novels are defined as “girl stuff” allows men to exercise the privilege of never giving any real thought to whether they’d enjoy them.
(Also, from what I’ve heard, plain old Harry Potter slash is among the tamer stuff out there.)
May 25th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
There’s one thing that got mentioned, that I find interesting. You said: Because the truth is that my eye is more drawn to strange women in the street than to strange men, more drawn to actresses than to actresses, and more likely to be caught by women in an underwear ad than by men in a similar state of undress
I’ve found this too, and I’m mostly hetero. It’s just, it seems women are…prettier. I find they tend to put more time and effort into their dress and adornment then the average guy, and that they tend to dress in brighter colors.
I enjoy attractive men, ESPECIALLY chests. But, it seems guys don’t really bother to look as nice. I wonder if this adds to this: woman are made to be looked at (either naturally or culturally-imposed: I suspect the latter) and guys are not.
May 26th, 2006 at 7:45 am
I wonder if this adds to this: woman are made to be looked at (either naturally or culturally-imposed: I suspect the latter) and guys are not.
And also, as Jean says, everyone is taught to look at women, but not men. There’s a subtle difference between these two assertations. I think if we’d spent our lives being confronted by images of scantily-clad men wherever we look, our behavior and expectations would be different.
PS. Whoever came up with the claim that “Male bodies are inherently less attractive than female bodies” was an idiot.
May 28th, 2006 at 3:41 am
I agree with the person talking about slash fiction. I don’t know whether it’s women are “less visual” than men, or women are less capable of believing porn actors are genuinely enjoying themselves, or if porn is just not way the way women want it, but all the women I know love written porn. Can’t get enough of it. Write it themselves.
Three of my friends are planning on setting up a porn webcomic (again not sure why we didn’t consider using real people) – what we want to see in it is boy on boy. Think of the ratings Queer as Folk got for just hot boy kissing…
May 28th, 2006 at 11:58 am
I think a comparison like this is hard to immpossible becuase the systematic errors are emomous. The cultural baggage atatchedto porn, or any images of unclothed bodies is gigantic. All media proffer crzy amounts of images of half naked ladies but hardly any guys…any half naked guys that do appear are fethishized for mostly nonsexual reasons eg strengthathleticism etc. This overload is bound to effect male/female reactions to porn( a subset of naked people imagery). If one compares a male/female asking is themale more visual one iscomparing unnormalized groups.All media have produced tons of images for the males sexual enjoyment that the female hasnot experienced. There is no control group to be selected of males/females that have had thesame exposure to sexualizedimages of the halfnaked sex they each are sexualy attracted to.
I can’t imagine that anyone could begin to make statements about males vs females being= visualas anunbiased experiment cant be done, and just trying tothink out the soution is not consistent vith good scienceat all(in fact itmostly leads to incorrect conclusions just look at Aristotle.)
May 28th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Point of view. Who’s eye, and where is it looking. The eye is a man’s and it’s looking at the woman. Or child as it seems to be increasingly in porn. Those few times in porn that the camera focuses on the man, the eye is a man’s too. A gay man.
In fact, the eye is always assumed to be a man’s eye. In advertisements, in movies; in news photography. As a news photographer I learned fast that the shots with the pretty blonde (work your way down from there the male photogs said laughing) had the best chance of making the deadline cut.
May 30th, 2006 at 11:16 am
The first thing that popped into my head while I was reading this is that I’m generally more afraid to look at men then women. Especially men in my age group to just about the point where they become non-threatening (the retirement cohort, with individual exceptions of course). For the most part I don’t want their attention, and eye contact tends to make them think you’re interested. Or, um, starts a conversation, even if non-verbal. Some of this is social order/status (not an alpha or beta type pack member here). But some of it is I don’t want to attract anyone’s attention that I’m not positive I can deal with.
And part of it seems cultural and for comparison purposes, even when I don’t want attention, because, a lot of time when I look at women I think ick, your hair is so frizzy and mine is curly if properly produced. But then if it’s the right ratio of hip to breast it’s god that’s hot with an edge of I wish I looked like that. And, damn, do I hate that. I mean, I’m fine with finding people attractive, but I hate this comparison thing that always seems to be the first thing I think.
As for porn, my problem with most porn is that it’s boring and seems to highlight the messy, embarrassing, humiliating and ugly parts of sex. I mean, sex is all those things at different times but, for me, unless I feel safe or it looks or seems like the people involved feel that way, there’s some connection, it’s not a turn on. In fact, it makes me feel bad, ashamed and scared.
And I don’t seem to be finding porn made for women by women, it seems pretty much written for men by men to me. But I mostly prefer romance novels and slash anyway. Which shows much more of a connection between characters then porn does. I also find, a lot of what I think is hot, is not in of itself sexual. I was just reading a story where part of the cultural was that you put your hands in the monarchs when you pledged your loyalty and it was treason to switch it up. It was this whole ceremony. The sexist act was the monarch put his hands in the person that he loves to show what he was asking for. There’s this fun meta-post thing about gen and how it can be porn. Which seems relevant.
Which plugs into the submission thing, I think.
Sometimes it’s even called trading sex for love, because apparently to some people desire is only real if you’d be quite happy sleeping with the guy and then having him totally ignore you in public. Otherwise it’s mere romance, which doesn’t have much to do with sex at all. *Boggles* Um. Wow. That’s deeply offensive. I have nothing against sex for itself and no other reason or deeper commitment, but that doesn’t mean that wanting sex with other stuff is bad/wrong. Or somehow less.
For progeny purposes, as a female, you don’t want someone who won’t talk to you in public (abandon you in the jungle) because it decreases both your and your child’s survival. When I talk about this, it’s on a conscious and, well, as much as I hate using this term improperly, instinctual level. And I’m not putting a moral tag on this, some women want to get married and have babies. A lot of women are influenced by this cultural and on a biological level that they don’t really acknowledge.
On the other hand, as a women, you have to be a lot more careful about who you have sex or show interest in because we are a lot more vulnerable to men then they are to us. In not just a physical sense, although that is certainly part of it. Which I think is also part of the reason that women have this stereotype of not wanting the sex without the connection. We can’t always afford it.
I think I’ve drifted all over without explicitly attempting to answer the actual posed questions. A feat!
May 30th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Ok, I spent about 45 minutes writing that and switch stuff around, and you can tell because Which plugs into the submission thing, I think. this is really in the wrong place now.
May 31st, 2006 at 7:38 pm
prefer not to say: What you say about men thinking about porn as a pleasant distraction actually made me realize that I had been imagining lots of guys super driven and motivated to look at it (because of everything I’ve heard about “porn addiction”), and that it’s actually easier for me to understand it from the pleasant distraction angle (even if what I’ve seen isn’t pleasantly distracting to me).
Antigone: Yeah, I wonder if maybe the bright colors is actually part of the reason I look at women more, because I’m really drawn to bright colors.
Good points from several people about the cultural messages, and about the slash fiction.
Thanks, everyone.