Tip: Slate's Thing on Porn

Slate is running a pretty cool "book club" about porn, feminity and sex in America. The participants, in case the names mean anything to any of you, are Laura Kipnis, Wendy Shalit, and Meghan O'Rourke; for what it's worth, I'm entirely comfortable with where Kipnis and O'Rourke are in this; Shalit seems on board as the resident "prude" (though she makes plenty of sense as well). (FYI: As I excerpt passages, I'll note the authors of the relevant text in parentheses.) There are only four entries last I checked (whoops! Now five), but those were pretty interesting.

Of all the ideas discussed, two stayed with me:

(Shalit) "Many of the men Paul interviewed say that if faced with a choice between their girlfriends and porn, they'd have to give up the girlfriends. Yet Paul seems convinced that minus porn, somehow these guys would be fulfilling all the intimacy needs of their partners. Sorry, but who's the compulsive fantasist?"

Um...wow. I can't remotely feature that line of thinking. I've spent my time with both porn and girlfriends/wife and can confidently say I'd stick with the latter without question. I don't even know how a given male brain makes that adjustment.

(P.S. The rejoinder to this is worth mentioning because I think it gets closer to the "normal" interaction with porn, while also getting to the opposite side of the gender divide (O'Rourke): "Some of the men in Pornified [ed. - one of the books under review] consider it perfectly normal, almost a mechanical aid, while most of the women, including Pamela Paul, personalize it.")

The second idea:

(Shalit) "Here is where Female Chauvinist Pigs [ed. - the second book under review] fits in. Levy uncovers the steady pressure on women to be 'cool chicks' and do any number of things that, deep down, make them uncomfortable. She points out, rightly in my view, that competing with men about how piggish we can be is getting us nowhere, fast. Girls today have so much anxiety about appearing 'hot' and servicing boys correctly, it never even occurs to them that they should actually experience—or wait for—their own desire. Is this not a problem?"

In response to this, and without getting into my personal life, I'd only quickly point out that I'm (again) closer to.....whoops...turns out I read I bumped into how I view this on Hit & Run's post on the discussion - which, I should note, was written by a man:

"Are we really supposed to be shocked that couples are going to need to work through different sexual desires and expectations, whatever their source? ...I always regarded it as part of the ordinary give-and-take of a sexual relationship, not some kind of strange imposition produced by last week's technologies."

Anyway, the whole thing is interesting. I've never (to my knowledge) met a man with the porn fixation that the men in one of the books reviewed evince. They sound like frickin' Martians....