Let's Talk About Sex

This is where I am worried the most about offending, because I am going to be criticizing some things that are very popular right now, and criticizing their popularity. Obviously, I am referring to “Magic Mike” and “50 Shades of Grey”. I have not seen the movie or read the book, and I’m not going to, though I have read about them both, and for what I am going to write, it is not so much about their specific content as themes and trends. So, that’s where I’m coming from.

Some of my more interesting reading came from a friend on Facebook who posted a link to a blog “I will not be reading 50 Shades of Gray”. I thought that was interesting, because I have been surprised at some of the people who have been reading it. I clicked on the post, and, well, it’s not that her points were bad so much as they were made in such a self-righteous, supercilious manner that it was pulling the wrong reaction from me—you know, like those anti-smoking commercials that make me want to start.

I was fairly solitary in my feelings. Of course, it being a Christian woman site, there were many supportive comments, with people sharing how they felt the same way, or had just decided that they needed to give up television to avoid bad influences, or how they felt sorry for those other women who were reading it.

One of the dissenting comments was especially interesting. She criticized the judging, which is also in the Bible as something not to do, that since the girl is still a virgin upon graduating from college she is clearly moral, the guy suffered horrific abuse and this was his healing process, besides which he was a total romantic, always opening doors and offering jackets, and finally, this was completely different from porn and her desire for her husband was doing just fine.

There is so much wrong there, it is hard to know where to start. One thought is that even if you managed to make it untouched through college graduation, but then shortly thereafter you essentially signed a prostitution agreement (a kinky one), regardless of how attracted you are to the john/pimp, it just seems possible that maybe the reason for your continuing virginity is not really strict morality.

Also, I am not sure that opening doors is such an important part of chivalry that it outweighs spanking for all offenses. Likewise, the concern for nutrition could be seen as very caring, but putting it into the contract (even with room for negotiation), moves it from caring to control freak, in my opinion.

The other two things are really important, and their own topics, dealing with how a relationship should function, and what is porn, and what makes it bad.

The commenter’s point (and I am doing some extrapolating, but not as much as you might think) was that the purpose of pornography, which is pictures of actual people, is to cause men to have an unrealistic image of a woman, which would come between a husband and a wife, and the reading and being turned on does not do that.

Actually, I thought the specific purpose of visual porn was simply arousal also, and maybe getting a false ideal of how a woman should look is one side effect, but that could certainly be an issue with written content as well. I know of at least one woman reading Twilight and wondering why her husband could not be more like Edward, and it totally seems like the same thing could happen with NotEdward, and that the more sexual nature of the content would not lessen the likelihood of that.

This is not a particularly new argument. I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend who had just been house-sitting, and a mutual acquaintance was gossiping with her about how the couple who owned the house was splitting up, and he was so awful because he had porn. My friend was surprised by this, and mentioned it, because she had noticed a large erotica section of the wife’s in the library, and it seemed a little hypocritical. Well her friend was shocked, because the two are totally different.

I think we have two ideas that lead to this concept. One is that words are classier than visuals, and the other is that women are classier than men. Therefore, 50 Shades of Grey is classier than Playgirl, but both are classier than Playboy. I am not convinced that this is true.

I notice men being stupid pigs just as often as any other woman, but I also notice men being smart and loyal and classy, and I see women being stupid and mean and crude, and really, there is no inherent moral high ground for either gender. Men have a longer history of subjugating women, because they have a longer history of being in power (much bigger topic there), so that probably does make some things feel different, but ultimately if it is demeaning for a man to stuff dollar bills into the g-string of a women, then it is demeaning with the genders reversed. I am totally equal opportunity in that way.

I guess my first point here is that “mommy porn” is not superior to any other kind of porn, and the Chippendales are not superior to, hmm, I guess the closest equivalent would be Stars Cabaret (I admit I am out of my element here). I suspect women are less likely to put up with poor hygiene and needle tracks, so there may be some improvement there, and that is probably its own post, but the point is, stripping is stripping.

And, the point I was going to make before I got sidetracked there is that if Magic Mike is superior to show girls, it is not because of inherent moral superiority, but it probably did have a better script and choreography, based on what I have heard.

I think that’s already getting to be a fairly long post, so I think I will break for today, and separate the remaining content into two separate posts, both related to the topic of consenting adults, and I have no idea which one should come first. I told you organization was a problem.