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mdegges

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http://www.pornmd.com/sex-search#

 

Here you go Robert. Its not a sampling of aggregators but I think it works. Top porn search terms by country. 

 

America's being at the time of writing...

 

1.Teen 

2. Milf

3. College

4. Creampie

5, Massage

6. POV

7. Asian

8. Compilation

9. Amateur

10. Hentai 

 

The strangest thing on that list is hentai, which doesn't actually involve people having sex.  Americans are kind of tame compared to other countries. Look around you will see some funny stuff and some scary stuff.  There are four phrases in China's top ten referencing Japan. Iraq has "pain" as its fourth top search term and "classic forced sex" as its fifth. 

Edited by Hairnet
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Now isn't that interesting? What does it say about Iraq culturally that those who view porn in that country experience such a strong overall preference for pain and "classic forced sex" (whatever that means?).

That's the central feature and functionality of porn. It's a quick satisfaction of the sex drive that doesn't bring with it all of the complications of real-life sex. As long as viewers understand the difference between fantasy and real life, this isn't necessarily a problem.

I agree. Yet the attitude I cited is what makes a lot of mainstream porn personally somewhat distasteful to me. And X-Art does stand as proof that you can depict "quick satisfaction of the sex drive" (their videos aren't plot-heavy or anything of that sort, they just depict two or three or however many people having sex) that has a benevolent sense of life resulting from its generally positive and reverent view of sex.

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There are four phrases in China's top ten referencing Japan.

That's because Japan has a porn industry. China doesn't (it's illegal).

I heard a theory that the more culturally repressed a country is, the more screwed up its porn. For Japan, that certainly seems to be the case.

How familiar are you with Japan's culture and/or porn?
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The Japanese search terms aren't even that weird. The big thing I see about Japan is that they only want to see other Japanese people have sex, with seven search phrases referencing Japan and one search phrase being "Asian".  I can't say if this preference is normal for other cultures or ethnic groups. If you exclude references to ethnicity, then you get the terms Wife, Milf, Teen, Massage, Anime, and once again Hentai. Japan isn't any more strange than the USA according to the stats of this site. 

 

Sexual repression = perversion is an interesting theory but I wouldn't use this site for trying to judge foreign cultures. It probably won't capture all of the important information. I think we would need Google's information to get really detailed. Then you have to deal with language barriers and the fact that internet use isn't common in every country. 

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Japan has a more collectivist culture than Western countries, especially within the corporate and education spheres. Individuals are often expected to put the good of the team ahead of themselves and form social cohesion based on the existing organization framework. Hence the Japanese tendencies of company loyalty and workaholism.

 

Japanese culture emphasizes shame and honor, and most Westerners regard Japanese as being more formal, polite, and shy.

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Criticizing any porn I think is putting the cart before the horse. As long as sexuality has cultural stigma, the porn isn't going to be "ideal." Even if we take a 100% moral person, if he likes something "weird," so what? That doesn't necessarily reflect something negative about his person. What is weird, anyway? As long as there is no confusion over the fantasy/reality line, and as long as physical safety an health isn't being compromised, I don't see any problem with any kind of sexual activity, as long as each person wants it.

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Japan has a more collectivist culture than Western countries, especially within the corporate and education spheres. Individuals are often expected to put the good of the team ahead of themselves and form social cohesion based on the existing organization framework. Hence the Japanese tendencies of company loyalty and workaholism.

 

Japanese culture emphasizes shame and honor, and most Westerners regard Japanese as being more formal, polite, and shy.

Sorry, but it doesn't sound like you know more about Japanese culture than most. You're just listing the same cliches everybody lists.

You'd be amazed at how strikingly individualistic and self-asserting modern Japanese popular culture is, if you actually found some interest in it.

Edited by Nicky
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Criticizing any porn I think is putting the cart before the horse. As long as sexuality has cultural stigma, the porn isn't going to be "ideal." Even if we take a 100% moral person, if he likes something "weird," so what? That doesn't necessarily reflect something negative about his person. What is weird, anyway? As long as there is no confusion over the fantasy/reality line, and as long as physical safety an health isn't being compromised, I don't see any problem with any kind of sexual activity, as long as each person wants it.

Would you say the same thing about conventional art? Doesn't matter what it is, as long as everyone realizes it's not real?
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Would you say the same thing about conventional art? Doesn't matter what it is, as long as everyone realizes it's not real?

I would say the same thing about anything that involves personal taste. Your taste *might* suggest this or that about your ideas or personality, but it's difficult to know for sure. Even if it was fairly obvious that a person likes some "malevolent" art or another, that fact alone doesn't imply something negative about him. And good luck assigning labels like "malevolent" or "benevolent" with certainty.
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I would say the same thing about anything that involves personal taste. Your taste *might* suggest this or that about your ideas or personality, but it's difficult to know for sure. Even if it was fairly obvious that a person likes some "malevolent" art or another, that fact alone doesn't imply something negative about him. And good luck assigning labels like "malevolent" or "benevolent" with certainty.

Are you only against assigning those labels to art with certainty, or against assigning them at all?
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I should have emphasized "with certainty," and also "per individual." Obviously, broad judgements can be made about bondage, violence, or anything else -- about the *possible* reasons behind an individual's taste. But those judgements don't necessarily apply to any given individual, and don't necessarily lead to the "obvious" conclusions of judgement toward an individual. It's easy to say, "Violence is bad and thus violent sex is bad. If you like violent sex, you are bad." I'm not saying you think this way. But, I think it's wrong to simplify personal taste in this way, basically because it is never this simple. Personality is much more complicated than that, with all of its elements playing off each other, changing continuously.

Edited by JASKN
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I agree in part with both sides. I think it's possible to lay down in stone judgements of a piece of art's sense of life. For example, I think it's clear to everyone that a feature film whose theme was that mankind is innately evil and will always tend towards violence has a very malevolent sense of life. But I think that while we can judge with certainty a piece of art to be malevolent or benevolent, we cannot make the same judgement of a person based solely on that knowledge. Ayn Rand, of course, appreciated Dostoevsky (whose sense of life was, according to her own description, the opposite of hers) on the basis of his literary merit.

Obviously porn isn't the same as great works of literature and it is art only in the most basic sense. But I don't see why the same basic principle shouldn't apply. We can most certainly judge most mainstream pornography to have a malevolent view of sex. But I don't think we can extrapolate from that judgement the judgement that a particular consumer of it, perhaps one who dislikes the sense of life of such porn but enjoys it just for the quality of sex or attractiveness of the performers(?), has a malevolent view of sex.

I also want again to point out that art is a selective recreation of reality (and porn, as a selective recreation of reality, is art, though it is obviously art with a rather narrow theme and generally of relatively lower quality) and therefore that you cannot draw a line of "rape is wrong therefore watching rape porn is wrong." It's like Howard Roark destroying the housing project. It's wrong to blow up a building that you do not own, but it is not wrong to read a book about it and even to enjoy it when the character does it. Now, it is significant that Roark is established as a sympathetic character who stands for significant positive values in the novel—it is demonstrated that he is not a nihilist. Reading a novel about a nihilist who destroys buildings would be of questionable value, and enjoying the actions of this nihilist would probably be considerable evidence that a person has a malevolent sense of life. I think the similar idea would go for violent porn. I think it would be highly questionable what value one would gain from watching a nihilist rape women, and I think that the person who enjoyed this material probably have some seriously bad premises—though he would not necessarily be acting immorally. However, I have already cited an example of a depiction of violent sex where the aggressor is displayed sympathetically and the overall sequence depicts a positive sense of life. That, of course, is the "rape by engraved invitation" in The Fountainhead. Roark is quite violent towards Dominique in that scene, and in return she is violent towards him. But the scene portrays a benevolent view of sex and still holds Howard Roark in a positive light. And I see no reason why someone could not make a pornographic film that conveyed this same general idea, even if it perhaps was not this well-developed.

Edited by 425
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I see what you are getting at 425 but pornography is there to help people masturbate. That doesn't seem like art. 

 

By the way, the kind of pornography you like is critically acclaimed.  X-Art, Abby Winters, MetArt, and other studios that feature what I would consider healthy sexuality are all critically acclaimed. It is not as though the industry shuns this stuff. TheBestPorn.com gave X-Art a 90 out of a 100. Abby Winters is its top rated site with a 95.5 tied with what is essentially the netflix of pornography. MetArt is its second place pick at 95. 

 

Anti-porn feminists and Christians often claim that pornography is a driving force of degeneracy, sexual harassment, and violence against women. They usually find whatever obscure site they can to shock normal audiences into believing that the porn industry's plan is to make men into bloodthirsty animals. Honestly, considering the some of the advertisements I have seen I can't completely discount their assessment. 

 

Critics and the general public are not consuming snuff with glee though. Nothing of the sort is happening. The top search terms in America were boring. The top search terms in most of the developed world were very generic. Just like the rest of our culture things are mediocre, not good but not horrible. The critics aren't much different, praising things that are good and praising things that are bad.  

 

The truth is that there is a certain kind of guy that makes "Reality Kings"  successful. Reality Kings is pretty much the definition of what I consider wrong with mainstream pornography. Its also critically acclaimed. Studios like this exist because there is a market for it. Its that simple. Pornography will not change unless the producers decide that they will only make good stuff (unlikely), or the consumers will only demand good stuff (also unlikely). Its not any different than movies, novels, television, or video games. 

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  • 6 months later...

I'm The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I'm Telling The Story In My Words

 

Saw this article on my feed today, written by a (you guessed it) porn star attending duke univ. Thought I would share it here in case you haven't read it.

 

Memorable snippets:

 

 

She had me here..

but I got lost further on in the article.

 

 

The author goes on to say that society doesn't care about sex workers, that no one listens to their stories about abuse and exploitation (though she personally admits she has not faced any problems in the industry), and that sex workers deserve to be treated with respect because they're human beings.

 

 

What do you think?

And now for the updated version of the story. Unsurprisingly, the polar opposite of the previous version:

http://youngcons.com/duke-university-porn-star-who-once-said-porn-is-empowering-tells-the-real-heartbreaking-story/

 

Duke University porn star who once said “porn is empowering” tells the real heartbreaking story

 

A student at Duke University started doing porn to pay for her tuition. She became a media sensation and liberals everywhere loved telling her story. She would do interviews and say things like porn is “empowering” and “freeing”.

She is in a documentary coming up and now that she has been in the industry for a little bit her view of porn has dramatically shifted.

“The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter,” a tired-looking Weeks tells an off-camera interviewer, “In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and a bit cynical.”

Why? “It teaches you to be street smart and not to trust people…I’m so used to being on the lookout for scammers, people who are going to try pimp me out or traffic me. I think my experiences have aged me. I don’t have the mind of an eighteen-year-old. I have the emotional baggage of someone much, much older than me.”

Some of this baggage is what propelled her into the porn industry in the first place.

She went on to talk about how she has literally been abused on camera before which left her sobbing. It is truly heartbreaking to think about how many woman have been affected by the porn industry.

Miriam herself admits that her first scene, shot for a company she refers to as “Facial Abuse,” was “a really, really rough scene. I wasn’t prepared for how rough it was. It was weird having some random photographer watch me have my a** kicked on camera.” She talks about getting literally torn up during porn shoots. She admits that porn shoots in which she was physically beaten up until she sobbed were probably shoots she should have refused. Yet she didn’t.

The control is a myth too, of course. The porn industry has many ways of coercing the human beings they market into doing what they want. For one shoot, Miriam recalls almost tearfully, her agent wouldn’t tell her who she had to “work with.” When she arrived at the set, she realized he was fifty years old. She wanted to leave, but then she’d have to pay a 300 dollar “kill fee,” the director would have been furious, and, she says, she could never have worked for that company again. So she did it.

“I felt like crying during the entire scene and afterwards I was really, really upset,” Miriam says tearfully to the camera, looking like nothing more than the hurting 18-year-old girl she is. “I just thought of my mom, who was always there for me and always protected me…I think about my mom a lot when I do porn scenes. Just how sad she would be that her little daughter was doing this.”

Our prayers for Miriam and all the other girls lost in the pornography industry need to be diligent.

 

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Both versions of her story seem to speak more about young naivety than about working in porn. Self-respect, drawing workplace boundaries, following your own standards, etc. is necessary in any profession. It's not just in porn that ambition is killed, if you don't look after yourself.

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Both versions of her story seem to speak more about young naivety than about working in porn. Self-respect, drawing workplace boundaries, following your own standards, etc. is necessary in any profession. It's not just in porn that ambition is killed, if you don't look after yourself.

Yes, but porn is the only industry in which naivety means you're going to get literally beaten.

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Yes, but porn is the only industry in which naivety means you're going to get literally beaten.

Do you think this would be the case if it didn't attract so many skeezeballs? Also, by definition working in porn leaves you vulnerable in (naked) ways unlike other professions. Accompanying this would be openings for abuse unlike other professions, not just beatings.
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Do you think this would be the case if it didn't attract so many skeezeballs? Also, by definition working in porn leaves you vulnerable in (naked) ways unlike other professions. Accompanying this would be openings for abuse unlike other professions, not just beatings.

I can't say for certain what the cause is. But I think it's clear that there is something seriously wrong with the porn industry, which justifies some of the stigma society places on it. 

 

I think journalists and feminist writers who seek to "challenge that stigma" are doing a huge disservice to their audience. Young girls should be made aware of the valid reasons for the societal pressures against doing porn, not fooled into disregarding them.

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