What makes me feel excluded as a gay man?

[gorgik9]

What makes me feel excluded from my own Swedish society and culture as a gay man?

Hardly anything makes me feel as excluded as when there is some kind of public discussion going on about porn. Why? Because it's ALWAYS taken for granted that PORN IS NECESSARILY STRAIGHT PORN while gay porn is quite often not even mentioned. The ONLY thing to discuss is if porn is the baddest thing done by men to women...let's have another debate for the umphteenth time about this question...againandagainandagainandagainandagain...~X(

This is a kind of typically Swedish debate in which the non-existance of gay men and women is just taken for granted and all the happy people included in the discussion feel soooooooooo damn liberal and cosy. Oh yes, we have such a liberal view on homosexuality - but dammit, there's no necessary reason to think that gay people actually exists. Let's have a very liberal view on these non-existant people. :angry:

What makes me angry this time is a debate about a recently published book about the history of porn in Sweden during 100 years which I've just ordered. This discussion was just posted on the TV-channel of the Swedish newspaper Expressen with two scholars and a journalist talking about this new book - and everything followed the ordinary route. Gay porn doesn't exist, gay sex doesn't exist, gay people doesn't exist. No-one says so - the non-existance is just taken for granted in total SILENCE...:angry:

 

[Mardo]

What makes me feel excluded from my own Swedish society and culture as a gay man?

Hardly anything makes me feel as excluded as when there is some kind of public discussion going on about porn. Why? Because it's ALWAYS taken for granted that PORN IS NECESSARILY STRAIGHT PORN while gay porn is quite often not even mentioned. The ONLY thing to discuss is if porn is the baddest thing done by men to women...let's have another debate for the umphteenth time about this question...againandagainandagainandagainandagain...~X(

This is a kind of typically Swedish debate in which the non-existance of gay men and women is just taken for granted and all the happy people included in the discussion feel soooooooooo damn liberal and cosy. Oh yes, we have such a liberal view on homosexuality - but dammit, there's no necessary reason to think that gay people actually exists. Let's have a very liberal view on these non-existant people. :angry:

What makes me angry this time is a debate about a recently published book about the history of porn in Sweden during 100 years which I've just ordered. This discussion was just posted on the TV-channel of the Swedish newspaper Expressen with two scholars and a journalist talking about this new book - and everything followed the ordinary route. Gay porn doesn't exist, gay sex doesn't exist, gay people doesn't exist. No-one says so - the non-existance is just taken for granted in total SILENCE...:angry:

Gay porn 99% of the time = porn for gay men, not gay women.

Porn = str8 porn probably about , what 90% of the time, or more? In terms of internet traffic anyway.

Women, gay or str8, are not really interested in 'porn'. They prefer feelings, and the nearest think they have to porn is textual, romantic erotica in the form of text only romance novels.

So, it follows quite logically from this that mainstream debates about porn revolve around the objectification of women, and how women feel about this.

It's not the whole story, but it's most if it. That is just a fact of life.

Actually, porn is not so important. It is about as important as any hobby, like train spotting. And, unlike trainspotting, you should grow out of it, certainly if a hetero male. Otherwise it warps you appreciation of women. For gay men it's a different scenario - and most gay men are quite revolutionary sexually (at least in their own little minds), having open relationships etc.

A hetero guy I think has to move away from porn, and his sexual hunger is tamed by having offspring for example. Aggression towards other males is tamed by this. It is the natural order - happens in the animal kingdom too.

So, long story short, women as a collective, are always suspicious of porn. Porn is largely for men.

So gorgik9, get thee to a leather bar :cheers: ... and forget about mainstream thinking, for you will never belong in it.

 

[gorgik9]

@ Mardo

Thanks a lot for this thoughtful answer!!! I don't agree on every point but it's getting late and I'll have to go to bed very soon, so I'll give you a better answer maybe sometimes tomorrow.

 

[gorgik9]

Gay porn 99% of the time = porn for gay men, not gay women.

Porn = str8 porn probably about , what 90% of the time, or more? In terms of internet traffic anyway.

Women, gay or str8, are not really interested in 'porn'. They prefer feelings, and the nearest think they have to porn is textual, romantic erotica in the form of text only romance novels.

So, it follows quite logically from this that mainstream debates about porn revolve around the objectification of women, and how women feel about this.

It's not the whole story, but it's most if it. That is just a fact of life.

Actually, porn is not so important. It is about as important as any hobby, like train spotting. And, unlike trainspotting, you should grow out of it, certainly if a hetero male. Otherwise it warps you appreciation of women. For gay men it's a different scenario - and most gay men are quite revolutionary sexually (at least in their own little minds), having open relationships etc.

A hetero guy I think has to move away from porn, and his sexual hunger is tamed by having offspring for example. Aggression towards other males is tamed by this. It is the natural order - happens in the animal kingdom too.

So, long story short, women as a collective, are always suspicious of porn. Porn is largely for men.

So gorgik9, get thee to a leather bar :cheers: ... and forget about mainstream thinking, for you will never belong in it.

I was pretty angry when I wrote the first post in this thread, and anger isn't the best start if you really want to clarify and explain something. I've had time to calm down and I hope I can do a better job this time. :blushing:

There's one thing I regrettably can't do something about and that's the plain fact that all material is in Swedish and the main material has been published the last 3-4 days, so there's no translations. Instead of quoting, I'll just have to try to explain and describe in English.

So my point of departure is a threefold: three different points of departure folded into eachothers. Let's begin with the first: In this year 2021 it's exactly 50 years since the production, distribution and consumtion of pornography was decriminalised in Sweden in 1971 as the second country in the world (Denmark was the first in 1967 (written pornography) and 1969 (visual pornography)), but it's also exactly 100 years since a pornographic movie was legally indicted for the first time in Sweden.

My second point of departure is that four Swedish scholars (film scholars and historians) thought that both these anniversaries should be remembered with a commemorative publication. All four scholars (Klara Arnberg, Elisabet Björklund, Tommy Gustafsson, Mariah Larsson) have done a lot of published research concerning pornography in Sweden so they thought should make a synthesis of their various results and publish this in a book - which they have done just a few days ago. I've ordered this book and I'll probably get it in a couple of days; I obviously haven't read it yet but since I've read what they've published earlier in the last 10-12 years about pornography in Sweden, I think I already know what will be at least some of the main points in the new book. We're talking about serious competent scholars wanting to present the results of serious scholarly work to a wider audience.

So far so good!!! The third point of departure is what has made me angry and sad: The public discussions so far concerning this recently published book, "Såra tukt och sedlighet: Hundra år av pornografi i Sverige." (The main title is really difficult to translate into English; it's a phrase from the paragraph in the old Swedish Penal Code prohibiting pornography and making it criminal. The subtitle is a lot easier: "A hundred years of pornography in Sweden.")

So I have two important examples of this public non-discussion or anti-discussion. I wrote about the first example in my first post: a conversation in the TV channel of the Swedish newspaper Expressen. The serious problem with this conversation i my opinion was that the Expressen journalist Jens Liljestrand who moderated and housed this discussion didn't really want to discuss this new book. I didn't get more than a VERY vague sense of what this history of porn in Sweden would be all about - instead I got all the usual cusswords from Swedish anti-porn rhetoric from the last 40-45 years. Let's just say "objectification" a million times - how utterly-nutterly uninteresting. And let's pretend that straight porn is the only existant porn, yeah, let's pretend...

Today I had another example of public anti-discussion about the new book, a possibly even worse example in Swedish public service radio. So they sang "objectification" a gazillion times just like they did in 1985 - so why on earth pretend to talk about a new book? Just repeat the glorious anti-porn movement of the 1980s and let's repeat the Meese-comission!!!

I don't like fake discussions and non-discussing anti-discussions...

 

[dargelos]

Instead of being angry, try being proud.
Public disscusion of porn, as with most subjects, tends to emphasise it's downsides. If gay porn porn gets ignored in such disscusion I propose it is because there are too few downsides to report. Our porn quickly grew out of the bad practice that still troubles the hetty porn world. To be crude about it, girls with big tits can be easily replaced, boys with real massive cocks are harder to find, as we have all discovered in our own shopping for meat. So our porn biz cannot afford to mistreat the talent, that talent can walk away so fast.
It would be nicer if the superiority of our porn could be celebrated instead of ignored but it is enough to be able to celebrate it here amongst friends.
Fuck the straights (I'd rather not) our porn is better than theirs, even if they can't bring themselves to admit it.

 

[gorgik9]

Instead of being angry, try being proud.
Public disscusion of porn, as with most subjects, tends to emphasise it's downsides. If gay porn porn gets ignored in such disscusion I propose it is because there are too few downsides to report. Our porn quickly grew out of the bad practice that still troubles the hetty porn world. To be crude about it, girls with big tits can be easily replaced, boys with real massive cocks are harder to find, as we have all discovered in our own shopping for meat. So our porn biz cannot afford to mistreat the talent, that talent can walk away so fast.
It would be nicer if the superiority of our porn could be celebrated instead of ignored but it is enough to be able to celebrate it here amongst friends.
Fuck the straights (I'd rather not) our porn is better than theirs, even if they can't bring themselves to admit it.

Gay porn is better than straight porn - in particular if you're a gay man as I believe we both are We're in perfect agreement on this point!!! :thumbs up:

But my first post in this thread is really a mess - my anger had more to do with me as a scholar than as a gay man. So my anger was provoked by the ridiculous non-discussions and anti-discussions of the recently published book on the history of pornography in Sweden and I should have clearly stated this from the very beginning.

The reason why I started talking so much about gay pornography was that taking it for granted that porn is necessarily straight was the logical presupposition for transforming the announced discussion about a recent book by historians and film scholars into endless blabbering about "objectification".

So I got the message today that I'll probably get the new book by mail tomorrow - and maybe I should make another thread here on GH to talk a bit about the book when I've read it in a couple of days! Who knows, maybe I'll do that!!!

 

[slimjim]

I was pretty angry when I wrote the first post in this thread, and anger isn't the best start if you really want to clarify and explain something. .

Yeah, but sometimes it might be ....

 

[gorgik9]

Yeah, but sometimes it might be ....

Thats very true, but not if your anger confuses your own thinking - which was what happened in my first post. That's NOT god...:thinking:

 

[slimjim]

Thats very true, but not if your anger confuses your own thinking - which was what happened in my first post. That's NOT god...:thinking:

I understand..... but any excuse to post my favourite moment from the Marvel Universe :thumbs up:

 

[gorgik9]

I understand..... but any excuse to post my favourite moment from the Marvel Universe :thumbs up:

Oh damn - I finished my latest post with the words "That's NOT god..." as if God allmighty had anything to do with my argument. I meant of course "That's NOT good..." :blushing:

Maybe I'm getting a bit senile...

 

[dragonscub]

I don't like fake discussions and non-discussing anti-discussions...

I understand all of your points (and agree with most of them), however in the real world we live in sometimes "benign neglect" is far far better than being "noticed and discussed". The very last thing we need in the current insane anti-everything-fun environment is a majority-straight group of activist scholars shining a bright light into the gay porn industry. All they need to do is highly publicize just one of the countless "Austin Young" videos from any of the Legrand Wolf sites, and society at large will come after gay porn with pitchforks ablaze. We've had a relatively nice, quiet two decades with few outbreaks of the poisonous "gays prey on children" rhetoric: I'll gladly trade being "ignored in academic discussions" to remain free of that toxic slur.

Porn is porn, fundamentally: we don't fly completely under the radar just because we're all-male. While we do get a huge pass for not exploiting women and the whole "female objectification" issue, which is 90% of the argument against porn, our flicks tend to feature problematic plotlines (utter nonsense to us, but taken seriously by many straights). And gay porn still includes a significant percentage of guys who look "too young" (like they just stumbled off a bus after being served grain alcohol by Lou Pearlman). It may be much less important to anti-porn activists than the "exploited females" topic, but the "preying on innocent youths" angle remains a potent gambit, esp when anti-gay groups join with the anti-porn groups. Having lived thru that era in my own youth, I'm in no hurry to repeat it (more feverishly amplified by social media).

As for the "superiority" of gay porn over straight porn, that sort of evaporated after OF/JFF took over the industry completely last year. Gay or straight, this sloppy crap is about as erotic as watching Olive Oyl shriek at Bluto in the old Popeye cartoons. I know huge numbers of men find this clunky inept style of porn "more gripping and real", but it just gives a frustrating headache to many of us. Very little of it has good camera angles or decent lighting: when I see gorgeous hunks like Jonas Jackson churn out clip after clip where the camera is so far away you can't even tell its him, all I think about is what a waste of hot men in their prime. The sheer cruddiness of most OF/JFF productions may eventually do more harm to porn in general than any moral crusades.