Boobs
Average viewing time of a pornographic movie: 15 minutes.
As our ability to entertain ourselves and to be entertained resembles an increasingly powerful immune system, we feed more and more on quick fixes. More and more, we crave depictions of situations that are unsettling in their appeal. Part compelling, part dreadful, and best seen from a distance, we forge intense fleeting attachments – cut short with a click or the press of a button.
As the images available to stimulate us sexually become increasingly extreme and accessible, so our other sources of entertainment have begun to resemble the quick thrill of porn. Peddling slick balderdash about ourselves and others, the prime goal is to titillate and create an illusion of having experienced something extraordinary, allowing us to then return appeased to our dull workaday.
Porn itself has become so pervasive that it now acts as a qualifier. But I think that terms like “food porn” are misleading. It seems to me that fast food joints are more like porn, offering up an odd facsimile of a meal which is effective only in tiding you over. The moist, ripe fruit and luscious, glistening dishes splayed out on glossy magazine pages are more akin to food erotica: temptation, but no delivery.
War footage, reality shows, cop shows, obscenely intimate gossip sites and confessionals… all designed to satisfy some deep urge that we’re still a little embarrassed to talk about.
(Always eager not to disappoint, for those arriving here via Google, here are some great tits.)
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Comment
- Oh, excellent point on the food porn – you’re getting quoted on that one!
— roggey Jan 4, 6:39pm # - I think you’ve got a good point of the food porn, too. And may I congratulate you on your tits link as well?
— Sarah Jan 4, 9:34pm # - Oh, thank goodness, I was a little worried about that link at the bottom of your entry. I didn’t come from google, but I did click on it anyway. Does that make me guilty? What the heck, I can now return to my ‘dull workaday’ appeased.
— joe Jan 4, 10:29pm # - hee hee, i’d wanna get a couple of those so i can show off my great tits! what fun i’d have… =)
— kgrp Jan 4, 10:30pm # - From the great tits link:
“What does it sound like?
Song a repeated ‘tee-cher tee-cher’. Many calls.”
I think I’ve seen about 15 minutes of that film.
You forgot to mention that the scientific name for the great tit is Parus major.
But now that you have me thinking about people watching porn, I’m wondering if anyone has ever tested rental porn movies for DNA samples. It sounds like the sort of “hey! look at me!” project a university student would do, and I’m not sure what you would be able to do with the results (maybe the porn industry would pay you not to release the results?), but sometimes you just experiment out of curiosity. Which also fits with the porn theme. And speaking of great tits and porn themes, boom chickadee boom chickadee boom chickadee…
Okay, I’ll shut up.
But now I’m also wondering: is bird watching—maybe 15 minutes of artificially induced activity excitedly and furtively seen through glass—a sort of nature porn?
— eeksypeeksy Jan 5, 12:08am # - Umm, the reason we only watch porn for 15 minutes is because after you get off what is the point right. Like sex isn;t so hot after you have climaxed. And when you get yourself off it takes far less time that if someone else is trying to do it for you. Like have an orgasm and then put the porn in. Blech.
— Mrs.Strizzay Jan 5, 2:13am # - Okay, then. Thanks for clearing that up.
— gail Jan 5, 9:37am # - This is a really interesting looking site – and funny! V good point on porn – I think it’s one of those things where you can never truly experience the thing you imagine you want. Porn is all about voyeurism – but when you actually have sex, you are generally too close to the person to look at them properly, let alone being able to see yourself having sex with them. But I think buying clothes is similar (seriously!) – the experience you really crave is at once to wear the cool new clothes and to see yourself wearing them and looking cool.
— Dingo Jan 5, 12:49pm # - We are definitely becoming more immune to “normal” porn. My friends and I have had porn on in the background while playing cards before; the most vulgar comment made was “she’s decent looking”.
In fact, I’d say that we spend more time looking for decent porn then we do actually watching it.
— B Jan 5, 4:26pm # - Decent porn. That oxymoron made me laugh.
I see the definition of decency has changed over time also.
Must be difficult to please your average looking partner when you’ve become so desensitized to sex that the woman on the screen is riding a unicycle with clothes pins on her nipples and a water balloon up her butt merely provokes a reaction like “She’s decent looking”.
— Müzikdüde (John) Jan 5, 7:13pm # - Somehow I don’t think that would fall under my definition of “normal” porn.
Also, I don’t think I’ve ever referred to my partner as average looking, a bit of an insult isn’t that?
— B Jan 5, 7:42pm # - I often have the problem that I get one tit confused with the other – perhaps you do too?
Quoting my Kosmos guide to Die Vögel Mitteleuropas:
Parus major E great tit, but F mésange charbonnière and D Kohlmeise
Then there’s Parus ater E coal tit, but F mésange noir and D Tannenmeise (Tanne: fir tree)
And this is without even scratching the surface of the Meisenknödel, literally tit dumpling – an amalgam of disgusting stuff to hang out and supplement wild birds’ food in winter.
— Margaret Jan 5, 11:05pm # - thanks for the tits.
;)
also the post. food porn. i love it.
— romy Jan 6, 4:00pm # - Dean’s watching porn instead of the servers!? You’re a bad influence Gail or a very good one… depending on your birds eye view ; )
— Ray Jan 7, 5:25pm # - I’m surprised that the average porn gandering is as long as 15 minutes. But we sure do expect to be fed, sexed, entertained, loved and all in such a rush. I fall for it all, unfortunately. Thanks for tying porn to something bigger than itself. It’s so pervasive that I’m surprised not to hear more parallels drawn. My own mind is so conflicted about how to process the porn around us that I can’t yet nail down a coherent comment. But you’ve done a good one. Yippee.
— Meredith Jan 7, 10:21pm # - HI
— harry Jan 29, 10:24am # - nice
— zach Feb 1, 5:29pm # - Last night I walked home from work and my girlfriend met me on the bridge I cross over and we walked back to our apartment together. As we turned the corner onto our street I looked across the road at the building of new condos, erected in the last year, 1,250 square feet/unit, $800,000 starting price. The stainless steel appliances do make it look nice. Through a main floor window a flat-screen plasma TV hung mounted on the wall, playing the short, jerky, repetitive action strokes only available in porn, the shot so zoomed in that only the penis and vagina were visible, and it took a second for my girlfriend and I to recognize what we were seeing. This was all at around 7 pm.
In our culture I find that anything designed to arouse without engagement is pornographic. We are pornographic specialists, as spectators and creators, experts at pandering to base human reactions and manipulating them for commercial gain. This is now our main mode of storytelling, of making sense of the world, gossip on an industrial scale.
— James Feb 2, 4:10am #
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