Slate, that bastion of feminist mental gymnastics, has an article about some male porn star who appeals to women because he supposedly embodies nonthreatening boyishness.
In the winter issue of Good Magazine, Amanda Hess has a fascinating profile of James Deen, a young, handsome porn star who is becoming famous for actually appealing to women. Due to his boyish, slightly skate-punk aesthetic, naturally toned body, and ability to connect emotionally (or at least appear to) with his female co-stars, Deen has garnered a following of devoted young women in an industry that in most cases ignores them entirely. Hess explains that Deen’s school-boy charm is what makes him approachable—and sexy—to his female fans:
Deen has carved out a niche in the porn industry by looking like the one guy who doesn’t belong there. Scroll through L.A.’s top porn agency sites and you’ll find hundreds of pouty women ready to drop to their knees, but just a few dozen men available to have sex with them. These guys all have a familiar look—neck chains, frosted tips, unreasonable biceps, tribal tattoos. Deen looks like he was plucked from a particularly intellectual frat house.
Hess goes on to discuss why there aren’t more guys like Deen in the male porn-star stable, and her findings tell us just as much about male viewers’ hang-ups as they do about women’s erotic preferences. Part of the problem is that men (who largely control the porn industry) imagine that women want everything big—“Big arms. Big abs. Big dicks,” as Hess puts it—when what they really want is something a little less overwrought. One of Hess’ subjects described her attraction to Deen thusly: “He was almost like a guy that you would just hang out with at Hebrew school.”
What a robust theory from sex-positive feministland! A hardcore male porn star women love because he’s a caring, emotionally available niceguy. Except it isn’t true.
A number of commenters familiar with the field pointed out the factual problems with Hess’ theory.
You’ve got to be kidding. This guy, while lacking in tribal tattoos, makes up for it in being like every other incredibly raunchy porn star. As a normal heterosexual male, I’ve seen him in tons of porn (as there’s really only like 5 male porn stars, as the article says, and there [sic] in everything), and, past looks, he is in no way some sensual lovemaking hebrew camp dude. He does not stare longingly into their eyes and whispers in their ears. He chokes women, slaps them, does pretty degrading things to them. He fits perfectly into the stereotype of porn as a male-centric, women-as-objects display of power. If women actually watch him, If a women who did not like porn watched one of his, they would in no way find it any different, save the frosted tips, ect. This artice is really silly.
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Do a google search or xvideos search for “pornstar punishment” with “James Deen” and you can see for yourself how well he “emotionally connects” with the women while he chokes them and slaps them. The article seems kind of funny after seeing that. Poorly researched.
Hilarity. Another crackpot feminist theory bites the dusty muff. It seems the truth is as it always was, particularly of women who love to watch male-oriented porn: chicks dig jerks, especially jerks who choke and slap them during “lovemaking”.
Why do feminists run like rats from a spotlight beam whenever they are confronted with the reality of female sexual nature and women’s preference to surrender to dominant men? What is it about that fact that sends them into paroxysms of nonsensical deconstructivism babble?
Steve Sailer has pithily remarked that the goal of feminist writers is to rearrange the world so that, come the revolution, ugly feminists will be desired by men. I have a corollary to that theory.
Feminists loathe the objectification of women because they know they don’t measure up as objects of desire.
The natural female desire to submit to a powerful man is especially galling to feminists, because it strikes at the heart of their conceit: that women can, and more importantly, *want* to scale the heights of achievement just like men do, and the only thing stopping them is misogyny and the patriarchy. If feminists were forced to acknowledge that most women have no such inclination, that in fact they prefer to support with their love and affection a worthy alpha male, they would have to face the unpleasant truth that they are a minority of masculinized freaks out of touch with the majority of their own sex. Outcasts are always fighting to make the rest of the world seem deluded and tyrannical.
That Slate article has another doozy of a theory about why there aren’t more James Deens in male-centric visual porn.
But the real obstacle to the proliferation of female-friendly male porn stars is, oddly, a rather nasty and subtle strain of homophobia, revealed in the following double-bind:
The straight male performer must be attractive enough to serve as a prop, but not so attractive that he becomes the object of desire.
Hess is spot on. Men need to see a penis in straight porn (presumably to stand in for their own), but not one that is attached to a guy who might be threateningly attractive, not to mention plausibly appealing to the woman involved. Maybe this insistence on a male blank slate (a kind of reverse objectification, when you think about it) makes it easier to project oneself onto the disembodied penis, but it also protects men from the potentially scary experience of being turned on by both partners of a heterosexual encounter—which, yes, does involve another dude. In other words, the bland interchangeability of the “unreasonable” looking men allows them to avoid confronting the terrifying specter of homosexuality.
Yup, homophobia is the reason why there aren’t feminist-approved male role models in porn.
Folks, you can’t make this shit up. Unless you’re a graduate of Columbia University.
Gay fabulosity is most likely biological in origin, so straight men are not going to be turned on by the penises pounding away in porn or the men attached to those penises, no matter how nonthreatening they look. Straight men watch porn because the sight of a hot babe’s body in the throes of sex, and the visual of various female orifices getting penetrated, is arousing. Straight men don’t like to see the faces of the male porn stars because it’s distracting from the action, and BONER KILLING.
The NewYorkBetaTimes, of all organs, even had a story about a study which proved that the sight of penises or men engaged in gay sex has no effect on the penile responses of straight male viewers. But I guess to the gatekeepers of the homophobia grievance flame, such inconvenient truths are mere speed bumps in the road to an ego-ensconcing distortion of reality.
I wonder if people realize that three quarters of mainstream internet websites would disappear overnight if a law mandated that no more than half of their content could be feelgood, made-up shit.
[crypto-donation-box]
