My mother told me that the benefit of not jumping in and experiencing everything all at once was that I would not grow tired of life’s pleasures as quickly. This statement has never made sense to me. Pleasure compounds and grows as exploration is deepened. With this in mind, Naomi Wolf’s article “The Porn Myth” takes the position that men’s minds are saturated with the plastic-perfect O-queens and their bedroom theatrics. Wolf asserts, “A whole generation of men are less able to connect erotically to women—and ultimately less libidinous.”
But is this, as she postulates, really pornography’s fault?
One can look to porn as the culprit for the maladies of bedroom life in my generation. Wolf is right when she says, “Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.” Loneliness, a lack of connection, generally being less turned on, and the loss of mystery around sex are resultant of being overstimulated by the flood of porn. “The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity,” she writes.
This notion holds true until one considers that being turned on is a process that happens between the ears: one, several, or all of the 5 sense are stimulated, as is the mind. The problem is not pornography, but a culture that uses pornography as an erotic model. The problem is also a culture where the every day and the erotic are not merged.
In modern America, sex has been relegated not so much to the bedroom, but in the bedroom, curtains drawn, with the lights off, under the sheets, in missionary position with your married partner for the reason of procreation. Aside from the lights-off, eyes-closed aspect of that statement, this is true. The only kind of sex legal in every state is missionary sex between adult men and women; the only sex morally accepted by all is sex between married heterosexuals for procreation. Focusing on the act of penetrative sex ignores the largest erotic zone of our bodies: the mind.
Wolf and Andrea Dworkin assert we are a culture of people with sex on the brain, but we are also not a culture of people with sex in our minds. For example, yoga, the popular form of exercise or more spiritual practice of moving meditation, means union. According to my yoga instructor, yoga was conceived as a practice to prepare one’s body for sex. That is: optimize the body’s performance so that in it’s highest state of physical expression, you’re working with an extraordinary and skilled machine. This integration of the every day and the erotic is perhaps one step closer to a healthy attitude towards sex in general.
The pre-Christian Romans believed that what one put in to the act of love, one would get out. Filling the mind with rich thought, cultivating beauty and manners, eating delicious foods, and educating one’s self in the ways of love would create an offspring that would also embody this.
I’m not advocating public sex, forcing sex talk on unwilling listener. I am suggesting that being aware of the erotic self as one part of a dynamic, creative self is key to re-shaping the attitudes towards the erotic in our society.
Porn is great. For every fantasy, there is an armada of DVD ecstasy. For every voyeur, an outlet. Porn, however, cannot be our source for stimulation, but merely one tool of many. One tool of many that a person has cultivated as part of an understanding of themselves, their desires and needs. This is, of course, the hardest part: breaking down the barriers of decades of conservative and stifling sexual attitudes to open a pathway into the realm of the sensual, mindful, erotic.
Image: Weekly Dig
