Nov

I’ve been thinking about porn lately. (There, that got your attention.) In part, it’s because Marge Simpson is on the cover of the November issue of Playboy magazine in one of its most blatant and bizarre stunts ever. I haven’t yet worked up the courage to buy the mag to do my first-hand research (“Really, my dear shopkeep,* I am purchasing this periodical for the Tracy Morgan interview. Don’t you just love 30 Rock?”) but I’m working on it. Feministing.com, however, has this devastatingly succinct take: “Given its long-standing tradition of printing photos of women whose bodies look like cartoonish exaggerations of the female form, it was only a matter of time before Playboy gave up on human women altogether, and started putting actual cartoons in the centerfold.”

I’m not sure I wouldn’t applaud a world where pornography featured only cartoon characters. It could mean an end to the worst kinds of sexual exploitation for the real-life women who don’t choose to work in the industry and a return to comfy white cotton briefs for the rest of us (not to mention less sadistic waxing practices). But women aren’t the only victims of the cartoonification of porn — unrealistic ideas about sex are setting up men like Wile E. Coyote at the Acme Factory. And in the end, we’re both losing out.

As Mary Elizabeth Williams argued in “How not to make love like a porn star,”  a terrific (if not for the sensitive) essay posted yesterday at Salon.com,  men (okay, and some women) appear to have started studying skin flicks as if they were educational documentaries, bringing learned moves into the bedroom with some not always happy endings results. She writes: “The problem is that thinking you can learn to make love … from watching porn is like thinking you can learn to drive from watching “The Fast and the Furious.” In other words, it’s one thing to like porn, it’s another to act as if you’re starring in a porno when you’re having sex.

What do you think? Has human sexuality gone all Looney Tunes?

*Yes, in my head I’m saying this in an English accent, because it is more respectable.

- Rebecca Caldwell

Chatter