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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

From my point of view online porn looks boring because it objectifies women too much. It’s just so mechanical nowadays. Whenever I happen to view porn from the eighties it looked much more natural. But then again I guess back then porn actors where only a few dozen and they knew each other quite well so this allowed some kind of intimacy to grow between them. Now porn has become a commodity, there are thousands of actors, a gazillion of different styles and the production is too big for anyone to bother bringing some quality to the mixture. I feel that this would be a threat to youngsters if they were to believe that sex doesn't require any kind of sentimental bonding.

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Perhaps you can explain to me what "objectification of women" means? Does it mean being attracted to their bodies? So what would be an OK thing to be attracted to - their ability to recite the digits of PI perhaps?

To me it seems that the "anti-objectification" campaign only seeks to replace one attractor with another. So maybe less pretty women would prefer to be measured by their IQ? Why is one better than the other? Or is it generally not OK to be attracted to somebody - or only once you are married and officially in love?

I'm not saying that I like everything that is done in porn, just that I don't understand what "objectification" is supposed to mean? And it seems ridiculous to me to presume men should not be attracted to the female body. So we should just as likely want to have sex with a horse or a hedgehog as with a woman? "American Pie" was just fiction - at least I personally was never tempted by an apple pie, because the looks of "the object" matter.

I'll start by acknowledging that "objectification of women" has become a buzzphrase, and it means whatever the speaker/writer wants it to mean, and the following discursion is (mostly) not intended as a prescriptivist scold. As such, the following is (mostly) a tangent from your comment, and entirely a tangent from GP's comment, since clearly GP was not using "objectifies" in this way. But anyway, here goes.

My understanding is that originally, in feminist studies of pornography, "objectification" meant to be made into an object, in the syntactic sense, as contrasted with the syntactic subject. In this sense, to objectify something is to have it be the recipient of verbs. In the context of feminist critique, the verb in particular is "desire", and the complaint is that pornography is (allegedly) interested in women as objects of desire, not as subjects. That is, the wishes and desires of the women are, allegedly, less valued than the wishes and desires of the men.

I personally suspect that this critique is overwrought and largely missing the point, although not without any truth at all. Perhaps irrelevant to the feminist point, speaking as a male, I'm pretty fond of being an object, although I wouldn't like to be only an object.

It means having sex for a half hour without one kissing the other even once. It also means that women must have at least a dozen plastic surgeries to be considered acceptable by the industry.

The plastic surgery part certainly isn't true. The porn industry caters to all sorts of tastes, including imperfect bodies. A single visit to a popular porn site will demonstrate that.

As for kissing - OK, so that is one understandable definition, thank you for that.

I think sex is simply weird - if you think rationally about sex it is not really appealing. It only works in a state of arousal. That plays into the hands of feminists who frame sex as something disgusting being done to women - it works because people are rarely aroused while reading feminist pamphlets...

The problem with pornography is not that it reveals too much of the woman, but rather that it reveals too little.

Really like that quote. I was thinking, G. K. Chesterton, or maybe C. S. Lewis on a good day, but it actually seems to be from Pope John Paul II!

“There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.” --Pope John Paul II

The pope is bound to be a foremost expert on porn and sexual attraction.

It's rumored that the Vatican has the world's largest collection of pornography. I'm sure that was said before the age of the Internet.

Why not? Did anybody said that catholics, including priests, don't use porn and don't feel sexual attraction?

I find American porn to be crude and artificial. Russian porn is much better; it just shows attractive people having sex with each other and enjoying it. Wonder what that says about our respective cultures.

I don't buy this. I agree that the quality of modern porn is low, but we need only look to the modern tv/movie market to know that it is possible to produce high quality works in a large industry with large productions.

That's why Amateur is one of the most popular categories - though most of it is fake.

Indeed, intimacy and passion for each other is beautiful, but it is hard for two complete strangers to fake it. Sex is great, but it is an order of magnitude better when it is an expression of love.

It is like eating a hamburger vs a fancy French meal. In both cases you satisfy your hunger. But the experience of getting there makes all the difference.

It is called acting, and the television/movie industry seems to have figured it out. Of course, you do not want strangers, but rather long-standing co-workers, but this is as true for porn as it is for acting and coding.

Even if, for some reason, intimacy and passion could not be faked, you could just hire couples.

Couples have been hiring themselves for a while now :-)

A lot of couples don't mind publishing their intimate scenes for the world to see. I'd rather young people watch other people in action than professional videos which seem to have gone so plastic/mechanical/unrealistic.

The problem with saying that porn objectifies women is that it's only half-true. Porn objectifies women as well as men. The only difference between the two is that for cultural reasons we consider sex something "men do to women". But if you think all porn portrays women as the passive "recipient" of sexual activities, you haven't been paying attention.

The problem is that even when women play the active part it they're considered victims because a) we see sex as something "done to women" and b) most porn is targeted at men (so porn consumers "use" the women, too).

Of course what this really boils down to is the sexist idea that men can't be raped (without being penetrated) and therefore can't be the "object" of porn to the same extent as women (except in gay porn because we like to pretend gay men are just men acting as if they were women).

In the end, the most common arguments against porn can be summarized as "I don't like it, therefore you shouldn't like it either" (or "I feel guilty, therefore you should feel guilty too").

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