Later, herein I will have a confession to make. But first, this. Since anybody that has tried it knows from experience and anybody that has not knows it from instinct, it seems pointless for anyone to ask what porn is for. But that doesn’t mean the question has never been asked. I assure you that if you click here you will run into a sample of the dozens of serious scientists who have posed the question to their field and have come up with their answer. Seriously. Porn is for masturbation, they tell you, while catching you pants-down-tissue-in-hand in front of your computer, ball-gagged, and probably at work.
But instead of asking what everybody knows the answer to, why not make the question “problematic,” as AOC would say, by twerking it a little? For we would be saying something if instead we asked What is Porn Also Good For? The short-lived, likely OnlyFans publicity stunt, of cutting porn off its platform just to bring it back, not to deprive itself of a metaphoric money-shot in the form of hard-on cash, makes the moment propitious. Nevertheless, and talking about “problematic,” there is a problem.
To engage the question about what porn is also good for could be done more to reading satisfaction if I go in for confession, something I am not big at, even if what I must confess is no big deal. But since confess I must, let us go.
For the larger part of my life, I have hardly ever been able to walk a whole city block without needing to turn my head back-and-forth more than a half dozen times in a row. I will also confide to you that on account of the whiplash caused by so often rotating my head as I walk, I tend to cover a whole block in twice the time than the innocent passers-bye, who could not have a clue what being out in the world does to me, strong, resilient two-legged creature that I otherwise am.
That is more often so if the weather is sunny and dry or in any degree of warmth, or wet and hot. The peculiar kind of walking I must practice, rotating my head left and right, is always bound to start and restart every springtime, when in places like New York City across the world, sizable numbers of the better half of humanity decide that the show must go on, after a long winter-break. You know what happens then. The mouth-watering sweettits. The boobs flesh. The crotch flashes. The fashionable displays of ass-meat. All nearby and at close range. In the subways and buses no less than on campus and around the library; in stores and parks no less than at bars and entertainment events; on the way to and from work. But if you are lucky enough you just might get a version of this sufferable torture right at the workplace, no place being safe from the disinviting allure put on display not necessarily for you.
All that I sense coming at me from all corners as I walk, passing me by in both directions. It comes dressed in attires which are decided on for their capability to reveal what they were not designed to conceal. I never manage to unspool myself from the sensation of being assailed by these sizable numbers of the better half of humanity. Where this better half goes that I must follow more than I can handle I am delightfully accosted by inexpertly disguised boobs-traps my eyes only reluctantly can pry themselves free from. I feel reduced to less than a man by pants-ass-cracks like metaphoric open manholes which I both desire and fear to let myself fall in. And then, there also come the nudie-jeans, knowingly cut off this close to the bunghole. I tremble from the unfulfillable X-rated fantasies the visuals induce me to and only my abhorrence to obscenity stops me from going sacofricosis on the spot. Hard-ons gone to waste. But I will say nothing of what the chemical radiation that typically emanates from camel-toed yoga pants does to me as it reaches out from within bumping distance. I will say nothing of the painful, arousing disappointment that is to find yourself in crowding spaces where fresh, un-worn-out estrogen gets so dense and condensed its molecules get literally stuck in your nostrils.
If I had to put in feminist terms what I have so far been trying to convey I’d say that I get sexually harassed by the sex opposite to mine in every direction I turn. It happens on the streets, and although less often, also at work, in the public and the private space as well. But no; feminism will not do here. For, it is not my “sex,” but the psycho-physiological components of my sexuality: the bio-specific factors that define me as a heterosexual male are what get harassed on a regular basis. I feel harassed precisely because nobody is requesting sex from me but denying to me the sex which I am at all times invited to stop for, to become aware of, to peruse, and to gawk at. That is, I am always everywhere invited to potentially partake of a sexual pleasure which through the same invitation is withdrawn from me. What is plentifully visually offered, gets factually denied.
Thus, I am incessantly placed in the uncomfortable situation of having to decide whether to look on, after being solicited to look at, while at the same time getting interpelled to look away. Thus, if I go for the former and look on, as I am most inclined to, I expose myself to the summary moral judgment from the same source poking me with an offer the offeror has no intention of delivering on. But then, if I do not and go for the latter, I deprive myself of the torturous pleasure of symbolically confirming and reaffirming─ of exercising aspects of my heterosexuality. Therefore, even if momentarily, while the life-size picture is there, I must deny my sexuality altogether by suppressing its need of self-validation. Yet, sexual self-validation is precisely what those ventilating bunghole nudie-jeans are put on for. I cannot not look on, and at the same time, I shouldn’t not.
I am pressed, torn to look at and on, but I must also suppress the effect doing so has on my sexuality. What gets my rocks off also at the same time keeps me from landing. Few things in the life of male heterosexuality are more uncomfortable than that. That uncomfortableness, physical and physiological as it is psychosexual, and besides that moral, is what being harassed is like. Again, it is not about being approached for sex which I must decline; it is about not being approached for sex while at the same time offering it in the form of an advertisement─ about advertising to me what I am not allowed to approach. Which is something thoroughly immoral. And that takes a real toll on my health, as it does on the health of every other man who does not even know it.
Situations like the above have led me through my adult life to hating the springlike and the warm and hot patterns of the weather. My heart is always racing through those seasons; my breathing often slows down or momentarily halts. Before my age, I’ve become hyper-tensed. It is on this account that in the plenitude of sun-drenched summerish days I catch myself silently praying for the sudden arrival of winter─ for a very long one, all over again. I am not wired in such a way that I can at ease pretend not to see what is giving me an eyeful. I am not hypocritical enough for that.
However, instead of feminist wording, better to express it in philosophical terms evocative of, say, Heidegger. By merely being in the world in the historical times in which I have been thrown into existence (ins Existenz geworfen sein) my sexuality gets harassed and cannot escape being harassed for the very fact of me being heterosexual, and male, who must share his being-in-the-world with humanity’s better half’s freedom to expose what clothes were intended to cover. But that is as it must be because in the end the sexes have differing understanding of the meaning of freedom and what it is for.
But then, the question about what porn is also good for has already been partly though implicitly answered. Porn is also good so that the better half of humanity the world over (minus the Muslim part of it) can move around harassing with all impunity sizable numbers of the other not-better half of humanity, without becoming casualty on that account and while at it. For instance, historically, public rape and sexual assault have been on the way down as porn consumption has been shooting up in correspondence to its availability and ubiquity in society, as made possible by technology. Why that must be so is easy to grasp. For, all the boob-traps, the alfresco ass-cheeks, and ass-cracks and sweetitts, the swollen camel-toes, and the ventilating bungholes in nudie-jeans have no sexual appeal and do not even reach the man addicted to porn. He is thus immune to the harassing freedom that issues from the sexuality of sizable numbers of the better half of humanity toward the number of its not-better-other-half that remains free from porn.
In the end, but also above all, besides being good for cumming, porn is also good for one of the sexes to visually, that is, to semiotically colonize the public and private space with the signs, signages, and motives of its sexuality, while sexually harassing the other’s. And it is also good to free men from that─ although for a big price. That is the price that goes to making Only-Fans’ owners into new billionaires, and into super-wealthy the whores on it. Desensitized to the real-life female flesh publicly harassing their sexuality, porn-addicted men also pay the price in another way: they cannot get it on unless there is a TV set standing in the room. The rest of their time they are zombies moving around with depressed
boner. There goes my hypertension again.