We live in a bifurcated media world. There is mainstream media, and there is porn, and there isn’t much in between. You know what sex in mainstream media is, here’s a pic if you need a reminder:
No genitals were seen in this scene! But it's shocking, you betcha! Somehow.
You know what porn looks like, here's a pic from an online porn vid:
So OK, you say, let us grant that we live in a media world where readily available and pretty much uncensored online porn has very different standards than relatively heavily censored mainstream media, which often can't show female breasts or butts or male butts, and of course no genitals, ever. (Well, almost ever.) As a result of this bifurcation, people who write for mainstream media, and for mainstream online sites, generally pretend that porn does not exist, or that they're only watched by a small subset of freaky men.
This is of course bullshit, almost all men watch porn of one sort or another. Google AI says 69 percent of men watch porn and forty percent of women watch porn. I personally think Google AI has been lied to a lot, and we need to add 30 percent to both of those numbers to get at the truth. Lot of lying goes on when it comes to sex and porn.
When men and women who watch porn (which is MOST adults) watch mainstream movies and TV shows they don't forget that porn exists. The memories of the porn they've seen remains. And that affects the way they perceived the mainstream stuff. And believe me, they aren't buying the bullshit the mainstream put out while they're pretending porn doesn't exist.
And this has had a number of implications that mainstream media writers miss, either intentionally or simply because porn is by definition outside their Overton window. Problem is, porn is inside the Overton window of almost everyone who watches mainstream media, because almost everyone watches porn. When viewers think "racy" or "sexy" or "shocking" or "wild" they're thinking of images from porn as well as mainstream media. And when they compare those porn images in their minds with the images that mainstream media call "shocking" and "wild" they know they are being bullshitted, and that the writer is a bullshitter and hence, not credible.
They don't even have to do it consciously, in fact, I strongly suspect the vast majority of viewers don't make conscious comparisons, but still, they make those comparisons. More on that later. In the meantime, just look at the nice pictures.
Gratuitous nudity, you betcha!
And that is how mainstream media lose credibility, by repeatedly demonstrating that they don't understand that while the WRITERS have neatly parcelled off mainstream media from porn with their words, viewers have done no such thing in their minds. I'm not saying that viewers don't understand the difference between porn and mainstream media. They do. I'm saying that when they hear a media image or video described "shocking" "wild" or "sexy" that the images that come up in viewers' minds includes things they've seen in porn. Their mind isn't parsing things with the care the mainstream writers are paid to. So when viewers hear "wild" "sexy" or "shocking" they see those porn images and the mainstream images that come up in the article are just lame compared to the porn images.
But the issues don't stop there. The readily availability of online porn vids also has other effects on viewer perceptions of mainstream media. It greatly diminishes the viewers' interest in seeing mainstream "sex scenes" or "nude scenes" because if a viewer wants to see a sex scene or a nude scene, they can just watch a stardard online porn video and get much nakeder, sexier images. Especially now that porn is full of absolutely beautiful women who are in many cases just as beautiful as Hollywood stars.
So sexy is no longer the selling point for mainstream movies and TV shows that it once was. It's not even close. When viewers see a mainstream sex scene like the one in "Blue Velvet" they are absolutely unimpressed because they have seen WAAAY sexier and WAAY better sex scenes in porn, often featuring very attractive porn stars.
Viewing mainstream sexy content with alarm falls flat for the same reasons that calling it sexy falls flat, but damn, they still do it. One of the biggest offenders in this regard are the Youtube channels WatchMojo and MsMojo but there are plenty of others. Sex scenes that go "too far" "grautuitous" nudity, etc. Invariably the tame mainstream scenes are Not All That compared to actual porn. And viewers know that, undermining the intended effect.
It's an even more pronounced phenomenon when, as most often happens, the media attempt to have their cakes and eat them too, by viewing mainstream nude/sex scenes with alarm while at the same time using the appeal of nude/sex scenes to attract viewers. This is clearly the mechanism in a lot of WatchMojo and MsMojo nude/sex compendiums. Porn imagery just puts the "shocking" nature of such scenes in perspective and makes viewers realize how very thin the rationale for such compenediums are.
The awareness of porn imagery also makes all the conventions mainstream sex scenes have to prevent nudity more obvious and unbelievable. Like the scene when a woman sits around after sex with a sheet covering her breasts. Women don't do that for real unless the room is cold or they're insecure about their body. But gorgeous actresses do it in mainstream sex scenes all the time, because they have to hide their breasts for censorship reasons. Nobody buys it, people know how they behave after sex, and what the porn people do after sex is a lot closer to what real people do than what mainstream media people do, i.e., they lie around naked. They've just been naked and fucking each other, what do they have to hide from one another?
This also extends to mainstream documentaries about sex in the movies. Generally such documentaries deal only with mainstream movies and TV shows, either leaving out porn entirely or mentioning some porn films without pointing out how very different they are from mainstream sexual imagery. And so the old familiar happens: everybody who has watched porn, which is practically everybody, knows the documentary is bullshit because it only covers mainstream sexual imagery which is incredibly lame compared with porn.
Now comes the part I was talking about talking about later earlier in this post, the part about people not making CONSCIOUS comparisons between mainstream and porn imagery. This is where we get into BRAIN SALAD SURGERY. Er, brain surgery. Ok, so the brain is divided into two halves, the left half and the right half. Bilateral symmetry to the max. They're connected by a thick bundle of nerves running between them called the corpus callosum. It's what allows us to have the illusion that we have a single brain instead of two half wits, which is definitely what all of us are.
The two halves of the brain handle separate tasks. For example, the right hemisphere handles visual stuff, creativity, nonverbal communication, spatial processing, basically all the cool stuff. The left brain handles math, verbal communication, analytical thinking, logic, science, reading and writing, basically all the square stuff. The two halves swap information via the corpus callosum, and everything is hunky-dory as scientists say, allowing us to think we're one person instead of two halfwits.
I know this sounds like pseudoscience, but it's all borne out by experimental evidence. People who have particularly violent siezures that are life-threatening are sometimes treated via surgery that severs the corpus callosum, confining the seizures to just half of the brain, making them less severe and hence less life-threatening. Such people have been tested by psychologists and the results of that testing show that these various functions are confined to the different halves of the brain. For example, if you cover up the left eye of a person whose corpus callosum has been severed and show them a picture of a chicken, they can see it but they can't describe it verbally or name it but they can draw a copy of it, because the left eye is controlled by the right hemisphere which handles spatial analysis and nonverbal communication, which includes drawing. If you cover up the right eye of such a person, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brainh, they can name the chicken, they can write down the name and describe it verbally, but they can't draw a copy of it. Many such experiments have been conducted, and they give very consistent results. That's how we're wired.
Fortunately most of us have intact corpus callosums, so we function as single minds which is confusing enough as it is. But here's the thing. Our right brains and left brains do the processing of what we get from our various sensoria before we swap it over to the other half.
So when you have those visual memories of porn images you've seen and you compare them to the mainstream "sexy" images you've seen, your right brain has already processed it, because that's what it does. And so when it goes across the corpus callosum, you already "know" at a fundamental, nonverbal level that the porn image is a LOT sexier, wilder and more shocking than the mainstream images are. And that the claims about the mainstream images are a variety of bullshit.
These porn images totally destroy the verbal narrative about the mainstream media images in the text even before the analytical mind can compare the images. So there's never an argument, people don't have to verbally process the imagery to know that the claims about it are bullshit.
That is exactly why I have larded this article with mainstream media sexy images in conjunction with hardcore online porn images. All the words in this post, as artfully composed as they are, are just spacers for the images that have actually convinced you of the truth of my proposal that mainstream media are losing a battle they do not even know they are engaged in. You have already been persuaded by the images, my words are just to explain how and why.
Mainstream media think they can wall off their little section of the internet, but they can't. Porn is out there, the images are their own propaganda. They jump right over any garden walls and get to work right in the brain before any words can get in there and confuse things.
These phenomena have a lot of interesting implications. I'll address some of them in a future post.
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