I'm saddened that people treat something so bound up with intimacy like they would any other tool or topic.
Frankly, ever since you posted nude pictures of the female celebrities you'd reserve to have sex with if in a committed relationship, I've thought less of you.
Aren't mix tapes typically a flirting device?
"Hey, I really like how we're getting along. I had a great time the other day having coffee and then the walk in the park. I really felt alive talking with you. I've made a mix tape for you. It's some of my favorite stuff. I figure that if it strikes a chord with you like it does me, then we'll know we're compatable. Anyway, check it out, and then let's get together and talk about it."
Gives a whole new meaning to "power pop".
it sets off my fuddy-duddy antenna
You give Bob Dole his penis back right now.
I fear that Ogged is one of those people self-described as "hopeless romantics". Pretty soon he'll be talking about "long walks on the beach".
Incidentally, a friend of mine in Oregon had a first date with an outdoorswoman whose idea of a walk on the beach was 17 miles (with a few stretches of grade 3 rockclimbing). No second date.
Our frat had a tradition of showing porn as some kind of pre-rush psych-up. The whole thing seemed stupid and uncomfortable and soon degenerated into wise cracks and not too much watching of the screen. Granted they showed some pretty wild stuff.
I guess I'm old-fashioned and have not been de-sensitized to porn. Also, I make a strong distinction between porn and erotica.
Still, sharing erotica with someone is something I could only do in a long-term commited relationship.
And a mix-tape? WTF? Who watches so much porn they can make a mix tape of the "best" parts? Not to get too graphic but those guys ought to try real women. They are SO much better than any porn.
"ever since you posted nude pictures of the female celebrities you'd reserve to have sex with if in a committed relationship"
Are these in the archives? What month?
Ogged, Did you know that there has been prostitution and erotica throughout the entirety of human history? As such, the "tide" had always-already "turned" in the direction that you're lamenting. In fact, historically speaking, the people who view sex as a means to intimacy (such as myself) are the real perverts.
I am aware of that, Adam, but the insouciance with which people talk about those things rises and ebbs. More ebbing, please.
bob, I think Ben is deliberately misrepresenting this tame post.
my two cents: i think it's pretty weird, yes, and frankly, i don't even think it's always that great in the relationship context. sure, going and picking out something together is fine, but the sort of "mix tape" thing you describe would probably just creep me out. i think a lot of couples try to use it as a subtle hint for some kinky thing they want to try - like, woops, you stumbled across my stash of gay porn! - but i think in general it's probably just better to be frank and talk about things.
i think what people watch when they masturbate should remain private, frankly - i had an ex-boyfriend whose porn stash was organized into a complicated array of folders whose significance i couldn't figure out. one day it dawned on me that they were separated according to race/ethnicity. i never could look at him the same way again.
I don't actually own any porn, unless you count the horrible mental image that SB's comment about Bob Dole left me with, but if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have a complex filing system for it. Is this normal? Have I been missing out on another chance to manifest OCD behavior?
Well, silvana did say "folders," which makes me think this was all downloaded porn. Nevertheless, organizing your porn collection indicates that it's occupying far too much of your attention.
i suppose 'complicated' is a bit of an overstatement - it was just like 5 folders, no sub-folders. but still.
i don't know if it's normal or not. i think it's creepy.
Oh, god, I'm glad to hear that everyone else thinks organizing your porn is weird. I'm not a blushing innocent like Labs, but seriously, how much time do you need to spend thinking about such stuff?
(My wife discovered the porn folder on the computer one day--that was a fun discussion.)
I think the porn mix is probably an artifact driven by consumption patterns and the medium rather than new developments in men's understanding of one another's sexuality. Used to be, some guys would exchange porn videos. But then MPEGs came along and replaced videos, so now some guys exchange discs instead.
As for the "mix" aspect of the enterprise, well, that's just hilarious. Probably that simply refers to the fact that there are lots of short porn clips on a disc, right? Still, there's something marvelous/disturbing about the image of a guy carefully reviewing his collection, trying to find that perfect clip to kick off his Summer of Pron mix for his buddy.
If you had a large enough collection to assemble a porn bloopers tape, that might be amusing.
"tape"
Showing my age, I suppose.
Although I'm totally against anything but utilitarian sex, I should also note that my fuddy-duddiness extends to not having a "porn collection" as such. I assemble an ad hoc collection every time I wish to look at porn, a collection that is dispersed as soon as it is no longer needed.
I think that counts as having porn on your PC, if I'm understanding you correctly.
I never could quite grasp the difference between utilitarian sex and consequentialist sex.
So before VHS, did these guys give each other porn collages?
Armsmasher,
Before VHS there was, what, 8mm movies? The kind you show on a home movie projector. I remember coming upon my friend's Dad's stash.
Since I'm a parent my home PC is scrubbed as far as I am concerned and keeping the work PC squeeky clean goes without saying. My kids do need to learn about the "history" function if their browsers. So far I haven't found anything too worrisome. I delete what I find.
I guess it's "technically" on my PC until the next time my browser cache is cleared, but I don't refer back the next day or something. I'm not really an avid user of porn.
I'm looking for a committed, long-term relationship based on mutual respect. Sometimes I can't get it up because I realize, "Man, as hot as this barely legal teen is, she's never going to nag me, or grow more and more distant once kids enter into the picture, or force me to sacrifice my career for her."
Didn't anyone see The 40-Year-Old Virgin? It's really quite good. I don't mean "good for a movie with that title." Key line spoken by the title character early on: "I love titties." Ogged, take note.
(Number 1!)
Anyway, there's a scene in it involving a guy sharing his porn collection and mix tape with his buddy (the 40yov, who is embarrassed), which makes me think it's supposed to be a buddy-buddy thing. "Hey, get a load of these cool ones!" And thus not really bound up with intimacy. More like sports fandom, except possibly without the favorite performers thing.
(I of course don't do anything like this. Really. In related news, I just revised the uncancellable implicatures paper, though I haven't posted the new version yet.)
40YOV is what started the discussion over at PG's place.
My ex had about 10 gig of porn arranged by hair color, type of act, indoor/outdoor setting etc, neatly labelled on his computer.
And when I learned that I stopped wondering why he spent all night on the computer.
And shortly thereafter, he became an ex.
indoor/outdoor setting
Now that's just strange.
Or maybe another example of "what people notice." But I'm pretty sure it's strange.
so i guess we can conclude from our very small sample size that while categorizing porn may not be all that abnormal, it will probably get you dumped.
I'm really surprised that a sex blog like Unfogged failed to cover Cristina Nehring's masturbation-related essay, especially when it trends so closely to Ogged's conservatism.
That depends—is having the porn collection what got your and winna's boyfriends dumped? (Question addressed to silvana, obvs.)
Although I'm totally against anything but utilitarian sex
Then shouldn't you have stuck with that mid-thirties woman who may or may not have landed you with kids?
I don't know if this has been linked from unfogged before, but it seems relevant.
Also, this predates mix tapes by a few years.
Thanks for the link, Kriston. I hadn't seen that, and I think it's good. I'm afraid to post it because I think we all have "mystery" fatigue.
no, at least in my case it wasn't the porn collection itself, but the categorization, and the basis of the categorization (race), which i though demonstrated a creepy perception of sex and women: i can't quite articulate it fully, but some sort of racial commodification, and race itself being a substantive component of preference.
i guess it was sort of a "marketplace" mentality that i saw in it. gross.
and even if the categoization was on the basis of something else, there still would have been that "marketplace" element.
w-lfs-n's latest comment is the best argument I've seen to date in favor of anonymity.
Maybe Ben will also make a greasemonkey script to add a link to "they don't call it a w-lfs-n Indiscretion Error for nothing."
It would be a pretty straightforward modification of the last one, really.
I don't think we have any real evidance for the phenonomon that PG is talking about. It all seems very friend-of-a-friend.
Nobody admited to personally doing anthing like this in the comments of unfogged or PG.
It also seems to me that PG's friend was talking about a commercially available product rather than a "mix tape". Even the "mix tape" in the movie, wasn't made for the recipient.
Anthropologists of the 22nd century, move along. Tthere is nothing to see here.
I seem to be at either end of the spectrum on this one. I think it's weird to even talk to friends about porn. What could you possibly have to discuss? "I like naked women." "Me, too."
OTOH, if you don't void your living space of all porn immediately after use while trying to believe the deep shame you feel is somehow sufficient punishment for the error you committed, why wouldn't you categorize it? I can see that the fact that you have triggers (race, hair color, hair length, etc.) seems creepy, but ... you do. We just spent a gawd-awful amount of time discussing this. Is this another case where pretending there are no triggers is supposed to lead to there not being triggers?
I didn't think that people were objecting to "triggers" per se, but to a) the interest in porn that categorization indicates, and b) the specific triggers in question, e.g., race.
SCMT, I'll take a stab (if you will) at this.
What creepifys the whole thing to me, is that maintaining a categorization system implies a VAST pr0n collection, sufficient to require said categorization (see comment above, 10GB). Don't get me wrong, stuff accumulates over time, but how much porn do you have to have to require organization, especially since it's not exactly an unpleasant task to spend a few minutes finding the clip you had in mind for tonight's round of boxing the bishop?
Agreed on (a), but (b) seems like an act of self-denial: "I find all types and races equally attractive. It just so happens that I've only ever dated tall blonde white women." Maybe I can see the point if the narratives in porn, when broken down by race, fall into categories that mirror larger stereotypes about race. I don't have the experience necessary for an informed comment, so I don't know if that's true.
Maybe he just figured since his Nascar collection was organized by race he should do the same with his porn collection?
Remember that old Daily Show segment that featured a middle-aged guy who was a librarian at the Library of Congress and who lived in his mom's basement with his vast library of porn organized by the Dewey decimal system?
No, I have never seen a friend jerk off.
We're all friends here, right? Am I alone in think ogged needs to be sent innocuously named video files? Everybody wait a week or so, so he forgets.
For the record, my pron is completely disorganized, except to some slight extent in my head. But, then, so are, at present and for quite a while, my non-pron books, videotapes, and DVDs.
I used to be quite the hyper re-organizer of my book collection from childhood through many later years, to be sure.
And I've never made a pron mix.
A fairly large problem about pron, for my utilitarian purposes, is that the overwhelming majority of it sucks. Er, that is, I mean that it is very very very un-erotic and unarousing, and a very high percentage is downright repulsive. So finding the relatively few bits that I do find arousing and erotic is more than a chore, and doesn't seem worth making a great investment of time (let alone money, ha, and I really wish I had enough for decent food this month).
On the other hand, while I believe that pron does objectify body parts to varying degrees (and some of it ranges from utterly objectionable to quite objectionable, while some of it does not), I don't believe that viewing of it causes mandatory Objectification Of Sexuality Only in the brains of most. People are far more complicated than that. Interesting people are, anyway.
109 MB (115,022,580 bytes), but most of it needs to be deleted for being completely uninteresting or worse.
Is this another case where pretending there are no triggers is supposed to lead to there not being triggers?
it would be one thing if a particular person's porn stash just consisted of all, say, white women. i am sure that's pretty common.
but if you have relatively equal amounts of pictures/video of, say, white, black, latino, and asian, categorized as such, it just gives me the mental image of someone sitting down to jack off, thinking, "hey, i'm in the mood for asian," which is hella creepy. trends in porn aren't what's creepy (at least it's not surprising), it's the sort of fetishing of race alone as an arousing factor. it would be different if you were a bisexual who had your porn organized by, say, girl-on-girl, boy-on-boy, girl-on-boy, et cetera. i think that would be less creepy, although in general i agree with Chopper's 46.
The guy's collection could easily just reflect the way the porn market is structured -- different racial groups are represented at different sites (or there's the other niche of "interracial"). I know there are a lot of people who generally have too intimate a relationship with their computer and who also are really attracted to Asian women, and, you know, people of different races do actually look different from each other, an important factor in a visually-oriented activity such as porn.
In any case, anymore, I only look at Aboriginal porn.
My linguist said says that positive 'anymore' is a Midlands thing, and Chicago isn't Midlands, so you, like Ogged, are posing.
Either the Daily Show needs to do some research, or that librarian just likes having to deal with two classification systems.
Porn on rye, like pastrami on rye.
Ogged, you left off "Dead Tree."
If your tree is dead you don't need porn.
The contrast is with 'anymore' as a negative polarity item.
Matt, shall we just say that your linguist isn't as cunning as some I have encountered? I've heard plenty of people in the Midwest use "anymore" in precisely the way I just did.
Having moved to Chicago in January, I can't reasonably claim to have a Chicago "accent" should such a thing be found to exist, aside from a general mafia-esque accent (such as that sported by Gov. Blagojovich).
There most certainly is a Chicago accent. Unf does a wicked imitation of it, so ask him the next time you see him.
silvana,
"hey, i'm in the mood for asian,"
Well, that is silly because, you know, an hour later you'll be hungry again.
Seriously, though, I don't get it. Most people not only like a variety of things, they like variety. I'm not sure why that is creepy.
I thought it was perhaps a reference to the small British town of Porn-on-Rye.
It's sort of a Polish blue-collar thing. Like the guys in the "da Bears" skit, or the detectives in The Fugitive. Or Liev Schreiber in Glengarry, but I suspect most people didn't see that performance.
There are a couple Chicaga accents. Dese and dose instead of these and those, and the Eyetalian "you's guys". I've heard "strength" and "length" pronounced with the "e" sound from "bend."
In my case it was the fact that categorising it and interacting with it (I am at a loss for what else to call it) apparently took so much of his time he couldn't be bothered to interact with the real live girl in his apartment. Then again, I fit none of the parameters he found attractive according to his voluminous collection, so perhaps the Imaginary Ladies are working out better for him.
It was the act of making the effort to maintain the collection and the classification of women into various types/acts/settings in addition to the fact I was neglected because of it that widened the rift in our lute. Among other things, of course.
It's a flat a sound. I read a description of it from some author as "A's so flat you could slide them under a door."
'I've heard "strength" and "length" pronounced with the "e" sound from "bend."'
Aren't they supposed to be pronounced with the same ĕ?
I wonder what the quickest route is from Porn-on-Rye to Fucking, Austria. A minimum of two riders for the HOV lane?
I say it as more of a long A sound. Stray-ngth. Lay-ngth.
It sounds kind of like the perennial problem of how to pronounce the name "Craig."
I'm originally from Michigan, and as recently as six months ago, I was identified as having a Michigan accent.
Like "cregg". That is how to pronounce the name "Craig".
I've also heard the 'ng' sound ignored entirely. 'Strenth', 'lenth'.
I don't know which is correct. My accent, which has been described as Michigan-like though I've never been there except to two Michigan games, definitely includes the 'ng'.
If the town Porn-on-Rye exists, then I obviously and very publicly didn't get the joke. And I shan't google anything with the word "porn" whilst at work, thanks.
Strain-th here -- I can't quite figure out how to pronounce it so I could hear the 'ng'.
These conversations would be so much easier if we all knew how to produce and interpret phonetic symbols. Ad hoc phonetic spelling never makes much sense.
Craig: like "cregg, but with a slightly rounder, moving towards long 'a' middle vowel.
Strength, length: short e, distinct 'ng' sound.
Oh, for cute!: Very, very long 'o' in "Oh," for pronounced "furr", "cute" pronounced with a long u at a high pitch.
(Tripp may be the only one of the regulars who gets this.)
finding the relatively few bits that I do find arousing and erotic is more than a chore, and doesn't seem worth making a great investment of time
I sense a business opportunity.
finding the relatively few bits that I do find arousing and erotic is more than a chore, and doesn't seem worth making a great investment of time
Maybe they should introduce tagging in online pornography. Oh, wait!
I've heard plenty of people in the Midwest use "anymore" in precisely the way I just did.
Well, the distinction isn't supposed to be Midwest v. elsewhere--the Midlands, where positive 'anymore' is supposed to be prevalent, includes many definitely Midwestern places such as Ohio. I'm not sure how Michigan is supposed to count. Maybe this is a case of the world becoming flat, like the 'a's--I'm pretty sure my linguist friend (who is Chicagoan) is quoting pretty well-established wisdom on accents.
Did I tell you this story? At new faculty orientation, here in the panhandle of Texas, a fellow from Kansas by way of Oklahoma heard me say that I was from Pittsburgh and had been in Milwaukee last year, and asked, "So is this your first time in the Midwest?"
I didn't realize that "Midlands" included the Midwest. I had assumed it referred to someplace in the UK.
To 82:
In US dialectology "Midland" (divided into North and South) refers to those dialects that are descended from the dialect of the English Midlands. Both North and South Midland areas are largely in the Midwest.
Here's a map:
Re 43 -- my friend was not talking about a commercially available mix tape. His friend had compiled it at home and gave it to him thinking he might like it.
In the movie the tape was not compiled as a gift for a friend, but it was not a commercial tape, either.
I see that "porn on rye" is quite popular. I wonder what David Brooks (or Malcolm Gladwell) would make of that.
Looking at the map, though, Chicago and Michigan are not Midlands. It is a mystery.
My original citation for Midlands including Ohio and using positive 'anymore' was here, from a (I think) big-shot linguist polling the American Dialect Society. Go figure.
But isn't this exactly what your linguist friend said (according to 55)? Positive anymore is a feature of the Midland area, which doesn't include Chicago (or Michigan).
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