Day 8

Day 8, 16/3/10
I just yped up my writing from the past six entries so I can add it to my blog, so I re-read them all. That's a good little reiniforcing thing to do. I've got criticisms of what I said in most of them, though.

In particular yesterday's. To say that I control my behaviour successfully after doing this writing is a rosy way to see it. I do have much greater awareness and I do make more good decisions and better ones. But I am also capable of still objectifying women right after doing this writing or even while I'm doing it.

It's a very habitual act. It has gone so unchallneged (or not challenged in any truly confronting way) that it has become something I do in the background while my conscious mind is doing something else. In the past few years, I have had times of calling off that action when I spot myself doing it but the habit is still unmistakably there.

Right now is not the strictest I've been on stopping all those behaviours. I've had times when I was very firm about always avering my eyes every time I check out a woman in a sexualising way. But it didn't last. I don't think there's anyhting OK about that and I don't mean to imply that some of the subtler kinds of perving are not abusive and perpetutating male supermacy. In fact, I don't ant to try to give any justification at all because they would all be fake. But it is what is going on now. I am concentrating my effort on doing this writing and keeping my awareness on my actions and their effects and then noting what I'm no longer able to do because of that awareness.

And it seems that looking at porn is not something that I could do right now. Right then when I wrote that sentence, a conflict went on in my head where I disagreed and totally imagined myself sitting at a computer and digging up some porn, but then I thought of my partner and the reality of the porn industry and what I'm actually doing when I look at porn, and I felt less like I was able to do that again. It's a risky thing to put a lot of certainty in, though.

I also noticed I was planning to write about why I look at porn, what I get out of it. I wrote a bit of that on day 1, but not really since. It's a bit of a grisly topic but it illuminates the issue a lot I think.

Fundamentally, the thing I get from porn is sexual pleaure. That is a basic need and it is eas to see how something can become a strongly-formed habit if it is linked in my mind to that need. This is not any kind of excuse or lessening of what is wrong, it is jsut an investigation of the process behind forming the habit.

It is not necessary for me to use porn to fulfill my need for sexual pleasure. I have sex in real life with my partner, but even without that I am able to imagine sexual situations and mastrubate. From this perspective, using porn is lazy.

If it was just an issue of laziness, it would hardly be worth all this writing. I have already written about the selfishness in it, as well. But I have been challenged by a friend to see the way I prop myself up in my privileged male position by this and I'm beginning to get that too.

Porn is created for men. (Even Playgirl is probably aimed at gay men.) I won't say absolutely that no women could enjoy the fantasies that are implied in any porn but they are structured around the viewer being male.

Consuming porn is not just feeding my sexual desire; it is affirming my position as someone to whom all this sexual gratification is available. It is not out of nothing that all the porn material is made. People have done a lot of work producing it all, to feed desires like mine. There is an industry devoted to it and there is no similar industry devoted to ensuring that women have access to the sexual pleasure they want.

It's quite obvious stuff, really, but this is the first time I've thought it all out. Seen in its context, it's pretty gross.

It goes on, too. Because not only do women miss out on an industry devoted to their pleaure but the industry of porn for men requires the participation of huge numbers of women performing for men's pleasure. There are stories about it having terrible effects on women's relationships with their sexuality but I don't know the detials. But, very starkly, they are quite consciously giving their bodies and sexuality for men's pleasure when they do this work. At its most basic, it is a real life manifestation of male supremacy. Men actually do have access to women's bodies
through this industry. They are real women who have really done what they are seen doing, in most cases, and more or less any man is able to get access to them. It is a very stark example of male supremacy.