That my father had a stash of strange smelling magazines in the bottom of his wardrobe was a curiosity to me: black and white images of nakedness which neither aroused me or repulsed me, but merely interested me. I didn’t understand sex when I began to furtively peruse those magazines, did not even know what the titles Ribald and Bawdy meant. I had no idea why people took their clothes off and allowed themselves to be photographed in strange positions, connecting to each other awkwardly. I read the accompanying stories without understanding."
Lovesick chapter 12
"Nobody was directing my course in matters of sexuality. My dad was more absent than present, and his best example of manhood was his affection for pornography, carousing and late night boozing. I heard about most of that from loud conversations between my mother and father whenever he arrived home at some ridiculous time of the morning. I figured out that was what men did, and how women reacted to it. They complained but they had to endure it because that’s the way men were. That’s where it went wrong. That’s when I saw male female roles demonstrated in stark and confronting technicolour."
Not a fan of pornography by any means, but get this. A study was carried out recently on some macaques, to ascertain whether they could understand the concept of money. Tokens were given to the monkeys, which they were to exchange with humans for food. The subjects had no problem at all with the concept, but what the humans weren't expecting was for a miniature economy to spring up. Money started changing hands before it got to the humans. Male macaques started to give tokens to the female macaques in exchange for... sex. Then the female monkeys would exchange the tokens for food. There was another experiment where males were shown pictures of other monkeys. They most enjoyed looking at high-ranking females' faces and bottoms. They did not want to see pictures of low-ranking females' faces or bottoms at all. They would give up their daily treat of fruit popsicles to see more of the desirable pictures. So just how far back does porn go?
ReplyDeleteI'm flabbergasted. This information is both fascinating and disturbing. Thanks for sharing. Where the hell did you find this study? Not the kind of thing that pops up in a Facebook newsfeed. Thanks for visiting and for taking the time to comment.
ReplyDeleteBBC global news a few months back. Actually I'd meant to look it up because it sounded like a hoax, and I found I remembered it slightly wrong: it was ANY female bottom but high-ranked male faces. http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050131/full/news050131-5.html It's interesting that in this article in Nature the researchers don't think it's 'pornography' but a social urge and compares it to the function of celebrity magazines. In either case I think it's valid because pornography itself is also a social phenomenon... not sure which I hate more, celebrity magazines or pornography. Both are exploitative, unhelpful, misleading and cause social imbalance. They may indeed have very similar functions and be driven by similar underlying urges.
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