January 4th, 2011
It would be easy to make fun of Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece on porn and sex in the new Atlantic, for its leaning on Susan Sontag, its personal anecdotes (“. . . he asked if we could have anal sex. . . . and without hesitation, I complied”), and its wry dismissiveness about marriage:
Hard-core porn, which is what Internet porn largely traffics in, is undoubtedly extreme. 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 that would be a mistake, I think. In her own way, Vargas-Cooper is working out a natural law view of sex and pornography—and, despite the recurring theme of double-anal—it leads her to some pretty traditional places.
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Last,
I promise to read the whole thing, as they say, but anyone who uses the phrase “marriages that double as domestic gulags” in a non-ironic manner needs help.
Kathy January 5, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Well, unlike Jeff, I won’t read the whole thing because she gets something so patently wrong in the second paragraph that it casts doubt on everything else:
Really? Broadband sprung up out of nowhere? It just magically appeared, fully formed, from the depths of some Death Star geek’s brain? There’s absolutely no mention that the reason broadband became industry standard was because of the pr0n industry? After all ,who wants to pay $19.95 for a video you can’t watch RIGHT NOW (remember dial-up? remember the days when a 56K connection was godlike?) particularly when you’re dealing with people who already have impulse control problems.
You can go on all day about how pr0n is degrading the sexual mores of our society via easy peasy, high speed internet access, but until you cover how much the industry itself has manipulated the situation to its advantage, well, you’re really only telling half the story, aren’t you?