Friday, December 31, 2010

Eight Reasons Not To Date A P**n Star



I happened on an article with that title on some site called Guyism. Probably the place where guys are made into guys? You should read the post, with its eight reasons, because it is hilarious, though not perhaps in the way it was meant to be. I'm only going to discuss a few of those reasons here, though I should mention that none of the reasons consider the danger of getting sexually transmitted diseases.

My instant thought after seeing the title of that post is that of course most men wouldn't want to date a pron star! That's for masturbation, not for marriage, after all, and the whore/madonna dichotomy is still strong in the culture. Besides, as I have suggested before, the ownership of women's sexual availability has that public/private division and pron starts definitely fall on the public side. Dating tends to fall on the private side of that fence.

Let's have a look at the few of the reasons why a guy shouldn't date a pron star. Here's reason number eight:

The fact that someone is a porn star is often misconstrued by men as "she'll be most likely to have sex with me because it is her job, after all." And while you may be basking in the thought of sleeping with one; you probably couldn't be more off-base. But, if you were dating an adult actress, men would hit on her everywhere she went. Of course this happens with every beautiful woman, but coupled with the delusion that every guy that hits on her in a grocery store probably thinks shes going to immediately take them to their car and change their life sexually in the back row of the Trader Joe's parking lot — you have a makings of a potentially volatile situation every time you go out in public.
Guess who else might not want to date the pron star for that reason? The star herself. Wherever she goes, pron-consuming men will think that she is available in the public sense of women's sexuality. The imaginary guy here can avoid the situation by not dating her. She cannot.

And what about reason number seven, that the man dating a pron star would have to defend her against the approaches of other men? Well, that goes for the star herself, too, unless she is expected to be open to such approaches.

Reason number three points out that people will call her a slut or a whore and you might not want to be around when that happens. But she will be around when that happens.

Finally reason number two:

People are going to want pictures and autographs from her

This is probably going to be uncomfortable and borderline inappropriate. "Can I see your piercings?" and "Will you sign my ass?" and "Now, tell me this isn't the biggest one you've ever seen?" will become the questions you will start to hear in your sleep.
Sigh. Guess who else is hearing those questions in her sleep.

So it goes.

Well, the whole post is not that different from some dating pieces in women's magazines (though I'm yet to come across one where people debate the pros and cons of women dating a male pron star). It's meant as something light and entertaining, not as something that a mean feminazi will try to take apart.

But I'm concerned about the way pron is changing the expectations of people when it comes to sex. The linked post suggests that roughly 100% of men watch pron, and if that's true then it is very important to keep asking what it is that pron gets wrong and how it presents a one-sided view of sex which could bias the assumptions men and women hold about real life sexuality.
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The euphemisms are so that this blog doesn't get x-rated again.