Ken, you wrote:
>>Hefner created for many guys including mysel a world of envy, a world
where someone was Getting More, and was getting it from untouchably
beautiful women.<<
I remember clearly the moment I realized that was part of the point of all
heterosexual pornography. I was in my late twenties/early thirties doing
research for an essay that was eventually published in the now-defunct The
American Voice, and I was reading an article by a guy named David Steinberg,
who was and maybe still is considered some sort of expert on all things
sexual and erotic. In this article Steinberg argued that pornography was
socially necessary because it reduced the likelihood of rape and other
sexual violence towards men. Men who weren't getting any, he reasoned, could
get some porn, get off and get angry, and express that anger vicariously, at
the woman or women on the page or on the screen, and so would not feel the
need to do so with a flesh-and-blood woman in their actual lives. I actually
had to read that passage several times to make sure that Steinberg was being
serious--I should add that I have no idea if he would hold the same position
now--because it so much contradicted my own experience of pornography, which
was that I wanted those women and I was frustrated and resentful that
someone else was having them and that there were no women like them in my
life, and while this frustration and resentment did not compel me to do
violence to women in real life, it would be lying to suggest that the
frustration I felt at the time--before the research I just described--was
directed at the pornography/pornographers for making me feel that way.
Rather, I looked at my own life and found it wanting and at the women in my
life and found them wanting as well.
And as long as we're on the subject of Playboy: While doing that same
research, I was using an issue of the magazine in which the centerfold was a
university students, and I remember the shock of realizing that she was the
same age as some of my students and that Playboy was peddling to me and men
like me--since I was still firmly ensconced age-wise in their main
demographic--the sexualization of my students. Which is not to say that I
never sexualized the women who were in my classes. Of course I did, and
sometimes still do, and I have fantasized about more than a few of them over
the years, but those fantasies were always private. It was a shock to see
them commodified like that, packaged and sold, and therefore separated from
the in-class relationship I had with a student who was the object of a
fantasy--because it was that relationship, and the responsibilities and
obligations I had within that relationship, that kept me from even trying to
cross the line the Playboy spread was supposed to help me, encourage me, to
imagine crossing.
Important stuff you bring up, Ken. Thanks.
Richard
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