I'm going to bet a lot of money that this article gets the most hits on my blog. The current
leader is “Lingerie low-down” (see a few posts below). Either all my
facebook friends and twitter followers are underwear addicts, or maybe
it’s because you couldn’t wait to read about my lingerie collection. Or
maybe, just maybe, the word ‘lingerie’ made you think of sex. Sex may
be a bit of a taboo subject but it’s certainly out there, scribbled
across tabloids and neatly working itself into every television show
known to man. And that’s not even mentioning page 3, or sex shops.
Let’s put it this way: people don’t go shopping in Ann Summers just for
the panties…in fact, one of my all-time favourite purchases was for a
male friend of mine in that very shop. And it shall forever be known as
“the willy whistle”. On the subject of whistles, a few months ago Flo
Rida brought out a hit single entitled “Whistle”. As much as I’d love
to believe that he’s talking about the sort of whistle you’d find
attached to your life jacket when your Ryan Air flight to Barcelona
miraculously lands head on into the Indian Ocean (satnav issues, ahem), I
think it’s safe to say that we’ve hit euphemism city here. So you see
my point. There’s really no hiding from it.
Now I’m not trying to be obscene. I’m just trying to work out what
draws people to themes of a certain nature. Apparently sex sells.
Well, that’s what Rihanna seemed to think when she released S&M.
Can I not even exercise at the gym without being plagued by music videos
filled with female dancers thrusting their body parts along to the
lines “chains and whips excite me”? Apparently not. And what’s even
worse is when you realise your 12 year old sister knows all the words.
Backwards. Kids are taught from a young age that there’s clearly a lot
more to sex than what you learn in GCSE Biology. Films certified as 15
are now being watched by 9 year olds. But covering a child’s eyes with a
pillow isn’t going to blank out the noise.
There’s something innately human about clicking on a link which looks
a little dirty. Is it because we feel that little bit guilty and know
we shouldn’t, or is it because of an unprecedented urge to know as much
as possible about sex? After all, who wants to read articles about the
weather? Topics like fashion and cars only appeal to a certain palette
while sex is a global phenomenon (much like Harry Potter) which you
don’t even have to partake in to be aware of. Ok, that was a bit cheeky
comparing sex to Harry Potter when we both know they’re entirely
different. But in the words of Jane Austen, it’s a truth universally
acknowledged that sex is great. *I may have just misquoted. Well
that’s what we’re taught to believe, right?
Cuisines change from country to country, along with fashions,
education and religion. But kids are only made one way. Maybe the
French fornicate differently from the English, but they’re obviously
doing something similar if they’re both pumping out litters and making
baby showers. I mean…I haven’t read much around the subject, but I
don’t tend to hear stories about English girls ending up in Australia
and having the shock of a life-time when they find out that they do it
upside down. It may be nicknamed “the outback” but I think we can
safely assume that the Ozzies do it up front too. Sorry to be crass.
At lunch yesterday with my grandparents, the book “Fifty Shades of
Grey” came up in conversation. I’ve been told that the book is “highly
pornographic” and “badly written”. I can’t work out whether this makes
me want to read it or not. This new adult genre (known simply as
“literotica”) is starting to become the genre of the decade. People
want to read about sex. They want to compare it, be repulsed by it, be
amused by it, and learn from it. But you want to know the hypocrisy of
it all? They can’t stand the idea of other people knowing they’re
reading it. Literotica’s rise in sales can be linked to two things:
Kindles and the basic need to touch what is off-limits. The feminist
writer Marina Warner considers the popularity of erotic fiction to be a
signal of the struggle to feel aroused in a time when sex and nudity
have become so commonplace. “There has been a general unveiling of the
body in our culture and there is a connection between prohibition and
arousal,” she said. Who wants unlimited amounts of vanilla ice-cream
when there’s one last scoop of honeycomb? Gone are the days of hiding
porn mags under your bed and tightly gripping explicit book covers to
hide them from your peers. Download them onto your Kindle and the
people around you are none the wiser. The NY Times even reported that
Ann Summers has seen a huge increase in the sale of blindfolds, whips
and handcuffs, reflecting the strong sadism and masochism theme running
through the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy. There’s no point denying
erotic literature’s escalating fame. With a 130% increase in sales, the
figure says it all.
I for one will admit hand on heart that I have never watched (or read
for that matter) porn. In fact, I’m exactly the sort of person who
you’d hate to play the drinking game “Never have I ever” with. One of
my girlfriends was so unsatisfied with my naivety in this area that she
was adamant that we spend the evening watching it on the flat screen. I
politely declined. I’ll admit however that my much-loved Sex and the City is definitely bordering on pornographic. Using neck massagers as vibrators? Who would have thought?
All in all, how much is sex shaped by what we watch on our screens or
read in books? Do we over consume the notion of being sexually
complete, sexually compatible or sexually accurate? It seems nowadays
that “sex” has been so overly sexualised that it’s fundamentally become a
subgenre of its former self.
Montana
Some interesting questions; definitely wasn't aware of Ann Summers' huge sales increase in certain fetish items.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the larger questions, though, can easily be addressed by basic urges. Certainly in terms of internet links, there isn't a huge amount of evidence to suggest any level of guilt amongst the majority of users. Rather, it's simply because people want such things and the anonymity of the internet provides without fear of reprisal, embarrassment, etc. Desire for porn makes up about 25-30% of all internet searches per day (so Google, Bing etc.) which doesn't of course take into account the proportion of URLs such as youporn.com etc. actively entered - so already we see that a large number of the billions of people using the web per day are *actively* seeking out porn.
Links to sexual content, meanwhile, are largely quite well-marshalled, so when we see certain sites making the top 100 highest hit rates in the world, it's definitely not by accident.
I'd also generally say that sex selling isn't an entirely recent thing, and the concept of sex hasn't been particularly taboo for half a century unless you're some sort of fundamentalist, but there's definitely something interesting about the rise in S&M and other more idiosyncratic practices on the public sphere - probably has something to do with, again, the acceptability of it all as propagated by the internet. I forget who I was reading recently who wrote a detailed essay on this in relation to the (utterly terrifying) network Kink.com. But it was interesting.
In conclusion, SEX. Yes. That's right.
x
c.b. (I know who you are): I feel like I've been pouncing on the territory of a man who just got a 1st on a dissertation about pornography! haha. But yes, I agree with you about the whole basic urges thing but I suppose my blog posts tend to be speaking on behalf of myself rather than the cyber-sex public. Woops. I know sex selling isn't wholly "recent" but I guess it depends what we'd define "recent" as. I know I was talking a lot about the past decade but I would definitely argue that sex (and everything that goes along with it) continues to be shaped by culture. Hence our perceptions of sex and the way in which we approach it have been modified significantly, rather than come into being.
Deletex
Totes! Yeah, would definitely agree with the last point. ... Also, am ashamed that academic discussions are continuing into summer. I found this too interesting to leave alone. I'm sorry!!!
DeleteSorry, also:
ReplyDeleteThe thing about women craving 'more' in the realms of filthy literature could, increasingly at least, be something to do with desensitisation but the more likely explanation is actually neurological: men (or at least brains more masculine-wired) are turned on by images and explicit, base things; women (or more feminine brains) by scenarios, words and description. It's an interesting thing they discovered a few years ago after the development of viagra - men can use the drug because their libidos are entirely disconnected from the brain, so artificial stimuli can literally turn them on without having to think about it, but they still haven't found a female viagra because the buttons they have to push are in the more abstract corners of the brain, not the crotch (which, y'know, we can literally push).
That's why it's mostly men that download porn pics/videos, and respond better to dirty mags and flagrantly sexualised advertising while women go out and buy up all the copies of 'Fifty Shades... '. In general terms, anyway - like I say, it's all in individual brain-wiring, but it's been slowly proven over time that there's only a very small market for hardcore porn marketed towards straight women (apart from certain feminist heroes from about the '80s on... most of which don't have much internet exposure. I guess it's a supply and demand issue?)