Let's go on the porn tangent.
I grew up watching Bill Maher and I appreciated his non-partisan ideas about a lot of thingsāback when he was an environmentalist and no one else was. He gave up the cause of environmentalism a long time ago now, which is a great disappointment, and he has been a great disappointment since.
Although Hugh Hefner died many years ago and he was about 114 when he died, Maher still reminisces about his days at the Playboy mansion and using it as a calling card for his 'coolness,' which I find incredibly creepy.
BUT Maher did something last week I totally agree with. He went on a tirade against porn today, and he was speaking of hetero porn. I don't think he even mentioned the incest component that's so prevalent today and pretty disturbing, but he went on about how porn today is about humiliation and features men choking women. He said "I don't even get it. I don't get it. That's new and it's scary"āor something to that effect.
He's right. I'm 44 and I have watched gay porn since my late teens and it used to feature sex among men. Lots of bad acting but generally scenarios that were standard porn tropesāthe pizza delivery guy, sex clubs, wrestling, etc. Now the porn sites all feature father-and-son or brother-and-brother storylines that are always abusive scenarios. They feature choking. They feature someone being tied up and wincing as they are prodded. I have to sort through a dozen of these to get to one video that's not child sexual abuse translated into a performance with adults.
And of course online, running into some straight porn is inevitable even though I don't look for or want to see it and I see what Maher describes. What I notice even in fleeting clips is that 1) straight porn used to feature fat, disgusting looking middle-aged men and now most seems to feature attractive young Instaho-type guys who look more like gay porn actors and 2) choking.
I haven't sampled straight porn like I have gay porn but the few clips that show up here and there always seem to involve choking. I don't think it is normal or healthy at all. Yes, I have heard people talk about asphyxiation heightening sexual pleasure. That's not what it is about in porn. Porn scenarios are never about pleasure; people contort into uncomfortable positions and do more acrobatics than they do things that look pleasurable. Women don't appear to ever choke men in porn; it's always a man twice the size of a woman holding her down by her neck and her eyes rolling back and her tongue lolling out while she gags.
I find it horrific, and I think it's insanely weird that in this era in which women really are closer than ever to equal in society regardless of the recent change to abortion laws, and women strongly voice opinions and control a lot, men choking women who appear to be on the verge of choking to death in porn is totally mainstream and seems to be considered normal sex by millennials.
A commentator on Bill Maher's show said a young woman she knows confessed to her that she doesn't like to be choked during sexāit hurts and it scares herāand her boyfriend resents her for it and she asked if it's OK that she refuses to let her boyfriend choke her. She thinks it's the normal thing to do and she's being a prude who refuses to make her man happy. Fucking crazy.