Frank Talk About Porn, Jokey Talk About Sex (from a generalist geek)

First off, apologies to anyone who typed "porn" or "sex" into their search engine, hoping to immediately land on some "HOT PICS BARELY LEGAL" or something like that. This is not your thing, believe me, and I can see you've already moved along...

I wrote on some ideas about sex HERE a month or so ago, and it got a lot of hits, and I thought people were appreciating my humor. But that dashed-off post continued to get hits, sometimes five or eight times the number of the next article people found from the OG. Now I realize people accidentally found me when they typed in keywords. <sigh>

A friend asked me why I put "pornography" in my About Me dealio here (in margin---->). Mostly because it's taboo to say it. I think most adults like porn of some sort, but virtually no one will admit in some public forum that they like porn. It's just not done. And so how can a guy like me resist? I do like porn. And so do you. Sometimes I really enjoy it. Other times - most times - I agree with Erica Jong, who once said - I paraphrase from memory - "When I watch porn, after about five minutes all I want to do is fuck. After about ten minutes, I never want to fuck again."

Aye, consuming porn and the Law of Diminishing Returns...

Ubiquity of Porn

I had no idea how accurate I was when I asserted the almost-universal popularity of porn, especially on Internet. I came across this 2009 study discussed in the London Telegraph in which scientists at the University of Montreal couldn't find any men who didn't consume porn. And the average age in which the men first consumed some porn was ten (10). And they don't seem to have turned into maniacs, depraved perverts, or chainsaw-killing pedophiles. Admittedly the sample may be small. ("That's what she said.") 

But if the sample is small, what do we make of 14.7 million web searches in 2009 as monitored in the study discussed HERE? When looking at what the 13-18 year olds typed in (YouTube, Google, Facebook, Sex), it's interesting to note the 8-12 year olds typed in those same four terms, in the same order of popularity. But Under-7 year olds typed in "porn" in fourth place? What do you make of this? Is it a pseudo study meant to alarm parents about the importance of "filters"? Maybe. To quote from Stairway To Heaven, out of context: "Ooooo, really makes me wonder."

Let's get this straight. According to the study of search engine use among kids 7 (seven!) and younger (!), the top four keyword searches did NOT contain "Miley" or "Spongebob" or "Barney" or "Dora the Explorer" or "game with lots of monsters." Nope. "Porn" showed up in the top four. Hoo-kay! 

This may be reaching, but if we combine a five year old male typing in "porn" and then becoming part of a study at a place like the U. Of Montreal years later, hey, the kid's alright! Good for him!

A Very Good Reason To Study This Stuff

The stupendously great and underrated phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz developed a term translated to English as "finite provinces of meaning." Schutz thought one inhabited a "primary reality" but this - whatever it is - splinters off constantly into finite provinces, which are alternate "realities" one may temporarily escape into, away from the primary reality. And these are numerous and familiar: aesthetic experience, humor, what William James called "the varieties of religious experience," worlds of abstract thought, sex, and I'll let you think of a few more. This interest in sex - not only your own experience, but what Others find there - seems ultra-healthy and (I hate this word) normal. 

And yet in some other semantic sense there's no way in hell I'm normal. And I hope you aren't either. (Or why are you reading the OG?)

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Relax and take in this pic (author unknown) before moving onto the next bit:

A Curious Practice in Porn Films

The porn film empire-biz in the San Fernando Valley is in a tizz, because an AIDS prevention group wants the "adult film industry" to quit with the "money shot" already. They think it sends a bad message, or perhaps a milky, somewhat viscous reminder? Meanwhile, the skin flic industry sees the "money shot" as a distinctive feature of their genre's overall style and ethos, its bread and butter. So we have yet another conflict of values. See this wonderful reportage from the L.A. Weekly.

First off, not one of us is reading this unless some private, carefully-confined, even "sacred" money shot occurred, in some jungle-like midst. It probably was not filmed, although with the relatively sudden omnipresence of camera phones, etc, on the historical stage, probably a lot more will be recorded from here on out. Onto hard drives. Can you imagine? As we've learned above, it's not unthinkable that soon, one seven year old boy will ask his friend, "Hey! You wanna see the night I was conceived?" And then whip out the latest iEverthing gadget. All that worrying about porn was crying over spilled milk! <rimshot?>

These kids grow up so FAST these days, I tells ya!

I confess I never quite "got" the appeal of the "money shot." It seems like some highly stylized baroque ending to a performance, much like some mad free-flight virtuoso cadenza from Romantics like Liszt. A raw display of elan and male potency... It's graphically, astoundingly crass to some exponential point that's somehow magnificent and contrived at the same time...I've never known carnally any women who thought that was the preferable way for the...uhhh...efflorescence to occur. As they used to say on Internet in 1996, "YMMV," or Your Mileage May Vary. And I kinda hope it does. What do I know? Maybe I just tend to run with a somewhat less theatrical crowd?

Vaginas, Vaginas Everywhere, But Not a Drop...

Because I find it difficult to keep up with some strains of very popular culture, it took me awhile, but I found that, suddenly, ever since Oprah talked about her "va-jay-jay" on her show, mainstream media, including TV, has witnessed a seemingly much more wide-open discourse about women and their relationships with their genitals. Which seems suspicious to me, I don't know about you. (See HERE for something about the alleged sudden Appearance of the vagina in the public eye.)

Why no big discussion of penises too? Something seems askew here. Although I have noticed a higher-than-normal level of douchebags in the mainstream media, that's mostly just the political coverage, I suspect. Statistically within the range. But I concede the "cradle of civilization" point. And just in general, I think It's a real swell site, my kind of thing - the vagina, that is.

But when I read that article about increasing popular acceptance of the cradle of civ, I thought of a famous sociological paper by James Henslin called "Behavior in Pubic Places: The Sociology of the Vaginal Examination," which the experienced Mae A. Biggs helped him research. Basically, when a male gynecologist does his thing, it's a heavily planned series of events, ritualized behind a professional-specialist's bureaucratic veneer, meant to smoothly and delicately transition the doctor-patient relationship temporarily into a doctor-vagina-nurse standing-nearby to talk with doctor relationship, and then back into the doctor-patient relationship. And it's hard not to see the vagina as treated like a truly Sacred Thing. Very near the end of the article, just before the footnotes, we read:

Apart from the husband and significant others, except in a medical setting and by the actors about whom we are speaking, no one else may approach the vagina other than the self and still have it retain its sacred character.

After the word "character" there's a footnote, which reads:

It is perhaps for this reason that prostitutes ordinarily lack respect: They have profaned the sacred. And in doing so, not only have they failed to limit vaginal access to culturally prescribed individuals, but they have added further violation by allowing vaginal access on a monetary basis. They have, in effect, sold the sacred. - retrieved from Down To Earth Sociology, 12th edition

This would constitute just about the deepest level, for me, in the arguments for and against the legalization of prostitution. I'm for legalizing it, considering it a victimless crime and no matter for the State, but this "sacred" argument does carry some appreciable weight with me.

Is Oprah culturally guilty of anything here? I leave it to the better crackpots to decide this, for now. This OG crackpot gotsa keep movin' along...

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A "Rubenseque" Beauty:

Getting Personal
I love reading personals ads. I think it instructive how people present themselves - quite often entirely in language - and how they seem to want to be perceived in a relatively abstract medium. I wonder what I would write were I in that...market. And who knew some hetero-identifying guys seek Asian transexuals, or how seemingly quite a lot of females seem to frankly have "Daddy" issues they want to work out? Etc, etc, etc. For some reason the personals have perennially provided an intellectual's springboard, and see HERE for a recent glaring example. Note how Dalrymple assumes a coding and decoding, a secret language. Which I guess is about right...

Prof. George Carlin once attempted to write a personal ad that would attract no one:

I've always wanted to place a personal ad no one would answer: "Elderly, depressed, accident-prone junkie, likes Canadian food and Welsh music, seeking rich, well-built, oversexed female deaf mute in her late teens. Must be non-smoker."

Next Installment: Molly Gets Her Wig On!

The Sociology of Knowledge: a Micro-View

A simple tripartite system, circular-causal, easily modeled as your own way of being, phenomenally, in the world.

I have randomly numbered each of the three parts, but any one can come first, second or third, as they are always interacting with each other. I hope you cop an intellectual buzz from this simple system, which you may find "profound," to varying degrees, depending on who's reading/thinking about it:

1.) Externalization: Everyone is pouring forth themselves, their "being" into the world, whether physically, or with mental activity. I'm doing it right now as I write this. "Reality" becomes a human-produced byproduct of externalization, and we cannot help ourselves. We externalize. It is an anthropological necessity. Whether you're building a treehouse, gossiping at a cocktail party, or planning an invasion of Yemen, you are externalizing.

2.) Objectivation: There seems something - call it "omnipresent hypnosis"? although some sociologists and other thinkers would vigorously dispute using "hypnosis" here - that has us constantly attaining the products of other people's physical and mental activity. Other people's externalizations flow through us and confront us - and, it seems the producers of externalizations themselves - as somehow "facts" that are external to all of us, and, further, appear as if in the order of the natural world, although there seems some crucial differences between these human-made "products" and oceans, butterflies, microbes, and the West Wind.

3.) Internalization: We take in other peoples' objectivated "reality," let it work around in our own nervous system, try to make sense of it all. We therefore transform that objectivized "reality" into part of our own subjective world. "It" becomes part of our consciousness, and then...see #1 above.

And on and on and on and on it goes, seemingly to some sort of eschaton...
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The above heavily indebted to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, but especially Berger. Both sociologists were heavily influenced by Alfred Schutz, yet another emigre from fascist Germany/Austria, who worked at The New School for Social Research in New York. Schutz was in turn heavily influenced by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and William James the great American pragmatist.

Husserl was very much influenced by Franz Brentano. Brentano influenced Sigmund Freud.

Freud seems to have been influenced by a plethora of the most interesting thinkers in Vienna and the entire European scene of the 1870s-80s, but also he seems to have chewed, swallowed and digested the entire Western canon, and then externalized himself with his books, his psychoanalysis, which in 2011 university life, seems to mostly be read by literary critics and teachers, historians, and other social scientists. Which seems ironic to me, because what he wanted was for his thought to be a "hard" physical science.

Say what you will about Sigmund Freud, but I applaud him for his heroic artistry as a cartographer of the human mind, an invisible landscape, and for pointing out the correct idea that most of what goes on in our nervous system is non-conscious, or at least not available to ourselves.

This simple/profound phenomenological model and daisy-chain brought to you by:

The Overweening Generalist, blogging since May 6. See the OG on most any Internet connexion!