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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

bukkake is a form of noodle preparation

I swear, the most interesting part (the part that made me gasp and bust out an email to GirlyNYC to see if she knew this) of this book review was:

Dave confesses he enjoys watching group sex scenes and scenes where a woman seems to be receiving ''pleasure and torture'' at the same time, as in Japanese bukkake, which takes its name from a noodle-preparation method and involves multiple men with one seemingly miserable woman. But Dave's turn-ons, however grotesque, may be fairly ordinary fantasies, rather than signs of porn's dangerous effect on men. Though bukkake may be extreme, the fantasy it depicts long predates this decade.

(According to About.com, "Bukkake udon is simple cold noodle. You may put various toppings, such as boiled eggs, boiled meat, boiled vegetables, and so on.")

But once you get past that, Amy Sohn takes a very close look at Pamela Paul's new book Pornified and finds it wanting. I will say more about Pornified and Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs soon, either here or elsewhere, just busy lately, but it's interesting to me that both books are being published at the same time, saying very similar things but from vastly different perspectives. Aside from the problems regarding Paul's survey that Amy highlights, another issue that cropped up is Paul's not-so-subtle "wasn't-it-better-back-in-the-good-old-days" tone. She repeatedly references how porn has been around, but used to be a good ole' boys club type of thing to be hidden in drawers and passed around in secret. I'm not going to say that there aren't alarming examples in both books (like the young teenagers putting out sex videos of themselves) but the idea that the ubiquity and accessibility of porn is the problem just scratches the surface. It's so so easy for both authors, and the public, to make assumptions, especially the one about "women acting like men." It's so complicated, and even Wikipedia points to Catherine Millet having a taste for bukkake. And on just that note alone, the people I know and have heard about who are interested in it do NOT all take it to mean a single thing. Porn, like any form of art or creativity, has multiple meanings, and can speak differently to everyone, so while Paul seems to go looking for the people it's had a negative affect on, there are countless other reactions, and it's not all good or evil. It's complex, as it should be. We might take away multiple reactions from a single photograph, pornographic or not. I think that's a fairly easy thing to lose sight of, especially for those who are inclined to see porn as an evil; that something you find offensive may turn someone else on, or may affect someone in a way that's different from how it affects you, and that we are talking about the realm of fantasy. Plenty of people, myself included, have fantasies that we don't necessarily want to come true, or even flat out don't want to happen in real life--but they get us off all the time. That's why it's called a fantasy. For some people, their fantasies might merge with their actual activity, but that's not necessarily the case.

Last week I went to the Istanbul Modern, and looked at dozens of paintings. Some I looked at for a few seconds, some minutes. Some I could easily understand (no thanks to the highly, highly academic blurbs on the wall), some I didn't necessarily know what was happening, some I cared to peer at until perhaps a secondary meaning popped out at me. Some made me smile, or think, or simply see, and perhaps it's not a perfect analogy - looking at art in a museum versus watching a porn video at home - but I don't think it's totally inaccurate. To claim that there is a singular meaning, that everyone, or the large majority of people, take away one thing from porn, just cannot be correct. And Paul clearly has a bias in looking for and emphasizing those who feel harmed by porn.

Okay, I've said more than I should. I really wanted to point out the noodle thing, cause that was news to me.

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