why porn?

[Diana York Blaine]

The good question of why porno attracts men more than women has been
raised. One school of thought suggests that men are physiologically more
visual and women more tactile, hence the greater male interest in looking
as a mode of stimulation.  Interesting theory, but I'm always wary of
explanations which conflate the division of labor in biological
reproduction with vast, profound differences in every aspect of
male/female existence. Social construction of gender differences seems
much more common and likely and logical in most cases, including this one.
I suppose one could argue that the little boy's earlier and more profound
exclusion from touching the mother's body could set up a dynamic in which
libidinous stimulation becomes primarily specular.  It's just more obvious
that the image of the ideal middle-class matron that emerged in the
18th-century and has continued into our own encouraged her to eschew
sexual pleasure (her own that is) thus problematizing
self-gratification--a taboo only recently shifting at all and by no means
entirely gone.  As Irigaray says neither as virgin, prostitute or mother
does woman have any right over her own desire--we still lack the
convention of a sexually mature autonomous woman, one free of negative
associations that is.  Plus men have controlled access to resources
including publishing and education so we're only now in an age where there
could be a viable critical mass of educated and independent women ready to
develop and mass-produce erotica for women. All I've seen so far has been
vapid and steeped in boring cultural conventions (though the lesbian
things are generally stronger than the heterosexual ones. I might add that
reading Henry Miller makes me grit my teeth not head for the bedroom). We
may never be completely rid of some sex-stereotypes and as someone on the
list mentioned, fine. But there's simply not been hundreds of years of
development of erotica in the west from a woman's perspective as there has
been from men's, so I  am wondering what will "get women off" after we are
no longer told what that will be by a primarily masculine culture. It will
be interesting to "see" what emerges in the twenty-first century.
-Diana