My ex-gf just gave me a call. Interesting 2 hours. It always is, talking to her. The same tired narrative--"I've finished applying to med school, got accepted to UCSF, UCLA, etc etc I just hope I pick the right school cuz I want to specialize in pediatrics. I'm going out with a junior investment banker from Salomon. How's business going. yadda yadda yadda What are YOU doing with YOUR life?"
And as you know, guys, as fun as these conversations [instant judgments and ego whippings] go, it inevitably wandered to the topic of "Don't you think your exposure to pornography led you to a DEGRADED view of women?"
What I said to her shocked her. Shocked her enough so that I hope our next verbal soiree will revolve less around the MCAT admission levels for west coast medical schools and other yuppie bullshit and focus on more REAL things....like how women and men interact. My answer to her was "Actually, porn has given me a better appreciation of women because it stripped me of their sexual mystique."
Really, whether you do galleries, content production, graphic design, or, like me, mass opt in mail/intelligent databasing, you reach a point that you start looking at women's bodies and faces as CONTENT. Accordingly, your interest is not so much what makes a woman HOT but what makes a woman NOT HOT. You think along the lines, is this content 'commercial grade' so that it converts the niche audience I am targetting. Some people would say that this dehumanizes women. I look at it as a process that strips the "Gee Whiz, I'd like to bang that" factor in a man. An adult webmaster judges content based on formulas gleaned from hours, days, months, years of looking at server logs/ref logs, sales counters, chargebacks, and other minutiae. This formula guides us in weeding out content. But it also has an important side effect---it allows us to look at women in a different light outside of sexuality.
Applied to dealing with women outside of content selection/marketing, I see implicit in this formula, the ability to DIVORCE OURSELVES from being drawn to the physical uniqueness of a woman and leaving ourselves, at least its been my experience, open to a woman's other qualities--the way she thinks, the way she argues, the way she strings her words together, etc. I find this liberating....for both parties.
Non-adult webmasters, guys who either don't look at pornography or only dabble with it, have to deal with the sexual veneer of a woman and this can be intoxicating specially if you don't realize that the sexual aspect of a woman [or a man for that matter] is most interchangeable and, really, uninteresting quality about a person. Its easy to be trapped in physicality instead of using it as a door to exploring other facets of that person and sharing/exploring yourself at the same time.
I think my profession allows me to get past this veneer and blow open the door---and actually be honest about wanting to look inside. Sure...pornography is degrading...it degrades the sexual veneer and allows for, should we choose it, more mature peeks into a person's world.
Just my rant for tonight.
Its back to Branford Marsalis, a glass of Chablis, and editing tonights mass porn mailings.
