Sex lessons

Do you have good skills in bed?

If you don’t, then you’ve got to watch a porno.

If you do, then you do have watched a lot of porns.

Yes, Dr. Strangelove said that pornography does educate people about sex techniques, and it is the function and purposes of the society. According to Fiona Attwood, “some new forms of pornography are developing to construct sexual display as a form of recreation, self-presentation and community building.” But by the way, don’t watch too much, because the more porns you watch, the more you get dissatisfied with your girlfriend’s body.

As far as I know, the most popular porns are made by Japanese and American. And next I am going to further discuss each of them.

Japan

I would say that pornography is one of the biggest industries in Japan. Japanese porns are heavily exported to Western countries because they have a unique feature that is very different from that of Western countries.

The porn industry occupies a notably different cultural role in Japan than it does in the US, with adult publications readily available in vending machines and elsewhere. (Japanese porn industry goes HD blue)

In Japanese tradition, men are the breadwinners and women are the homemakers. While men work hard to make money and do little housekeeping works, women need to take care of the house and the children, even if they have a job. In porn movies, Japanese still adopt their traditional gender roles, and they have certain features: 1. Men do not talk much; 2. The scene is set at when the man gets home from work; 3. The woman has sex with other man while the husband is out for work.

Another phenomena in Japan is family incest. In Japan, incest is not a crime unless rape has taken place, but the issue is still a taboo. Yet Japanese porn adopts this theme in order to sell to the market. However, Japanese porn can really improve your sex life, Britney Simpson said. No wonder Japanese produced porn is always so popular.

Bloomberg News reports that more than 1,000 Japanese adult film companies churned out about 17,000 titles last year. The largest adult-film websites are adding as many as 1,000 new customers a day. One of them, Soft on Demand, generates 160,000 in revenue each month, much of it from mobile sales. (Porn Business Booming in Japan)

Now porn has become a theme or means to promote… almost EVERYTHING!

Magazine

Doritos

USB

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United States

While Japanese are quite supportive for their porn industry, Americans either hate it or love it.

American Family Association (AFA) is an anti-pornography organization. It lays out five reasons to fight pornography.

1. Economics. Pornography consumption adds costs to police services, courts and jails, as well as the costs that cope with prostitution offenses.

2. Public safety and health. Pornography fosters and reinforces the probabilities of spreading AIDS virus or other sexually transmitted disease. Pornography would also increase sexual violence like rape and child molestation.

3. Mental health. It concerns with violence in pornography that may negatively affect children and adolescents. Children and adolescents who are exposed to violent porn would grow up with unrealistic and morbid ideas of what to expect from sexual relationships, and they would encounter unstable marriage/intimate relationships.

4. Morality. It concerns that pornography appeals to the prurient interests. And it is wrong to dehumanize women, for that women are sexually abused and used as objects for sale.

5. Religion. Pornography promotes not only unequal power, but also the behaviors and attitudes that are virtually forbidden.

Despite of these persuasive reasons, people still watch porn. Same theme is used in American music videos, such as Britney Spears’ Womanizer.

Some scholars have studied the social influence that porn brings. According to professor Todd D. Kendall, Internet access to pornography reduces rape incidents.

How could the Internet access to porn reduce rape incidents? It may be that rapists are just indoor looking for porn on the Internet, and it could be that porn gives rapists more visual fun and excitement when masturbating, or it could be that rapists find their true love on an online dating website. Anyway, porn has become a substitute for rape, which is a good thing for societies.

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YouTube and Shanzaiism

For centuries the freedom of speech is in the control of the few elites including the government and major corporations.  Recently this has been changed, with the availability of YouTube, normal people can create and share videos with the masses. It is an unregulated and unfiltered platform that can threatens the corporate and government control of its audiences. Several countries has blocked access to YouTube since its inception, including China, Morocco, and Thailand. Some argues that YouTube culture is the driven force of Chinese Shanzai movies. Shangzai movies have low budget but achieve commercial success by making fun or borrowing elements from high-end Hollywood standard blockbuster movies. The first movie to do this is the “Crazy Stone”. With only around 500,000 Canadian dollar budget, “Crazy Stone” achieved 4 million-box-office revenue.

Shanzaiism is a philosophical term denoting a Chinese style of innovation with a peasant mind-set. It ranges from Shanzai products, Shangzai movie stars, Shangzai Olympic Torch Relay to Shangzai advertisement.  Some of these Shanzaiism is just for fun and a break from the mainstream media. Shanzaiism is a personal artistic expression that is non political. It is a challenge to the Chinese government control of culture. Both YouTube culture and Shanzaiism are an escape from the mainstream culture and tries to create something that is more personal to people’s life. Although both has criticism on piracy and and copy right issues but they continues to become more and more popular.

In this advertisement, Chinese shanzai phone maker HAFF-COMM promotes the new shanzai phone blockberry 9500 and has Obama’s figure appeared in this phone’s poster with a slogan “Obama has Blackberry, I have blockberry.”

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Does Sex Sell?

Does sex sell? I thought it would be interesting to open this discussion with a personal story.

Last week, I was shopping at La Senza. I saw two men stopped in front of the La Senza store, stared at the poster with an attractive sexy woman on it, and then one of the men took a photo with the poster.

There might be many motives to why they took a photo with the photo but one of the obvious one is that they thought the woman in the poster looked very hot and sexy. Although they are not interested to buy the products in La Senza but the sexy picture grabbed their attention. Sex in advertising is to use sexual and erotic images to sell a particular product. Sex and advertising is a powerful combination. First, you have sex, a potent instinctual drive. A drive that ranks high among essential survivalist drives and motivation such as the need for safety, shelter, appetite, thirst and companionship. There’s truth in the old saying “Every species on Earth does two things well – eat and fuck.”

Sex sells has always been an effective advertisement technique. While men are wooed by the sexy advertisements, the women want the products so they can look just like the model by consuming the product . The illusion of advertisement creates a desire to possess. The hyperreal images make us dissatisfied with our own body. We start to consume commodities to satisfy our needs such as the needs to be sexy and attractive.

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How the society sees women in the 19th century America

Today we were shown an example of Dior’s ring ad of the 1960s. It was the first ad which promoted masturbating. There is a nude woman in the poster, covering her private area with one of her own hand, which hand wears Dior’s ring. As Dr. Strangelove explained, what’s throwing out from the poster is that the nude body is saying:”I pleasure myself.” This poster is very daring and apparently Feminist.

The first wave of Feminism movement was in the 19th and early 20th century. At that time, there was a belief in America that all women would go insane at some point of her life, no matter if they were beautiful/intelligent or not, because wombs would wander around inside women bodies and cause psychological disorders (known as the “Wandering womb”).

Men do not have wombs so they were powerful, and they ruled. Women would be sent by their husbands to a house for treatment, and they were not allow to step outside their rooms.

Furthermore, women and men did not sleep in the same bed unless they wanted to have sex; they did not have sex unless they wanted to procreate. And women who were sexually active would be considered as whores. So my point is, in the late 19th and early 20th century, women were not only depressed, but also sexually dissatisfied.

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About the Semiotic Democracy

On June 29’s lecture, Dr. Strangelove talked about Semiotic Democracy, which means the democracy of meaning. We, the audiences, decide the meaning of a symbol/ad according to our knowledge and cultural background. Instead of being passive to absorb the intended meanings that the producers make, audiences can determine the meaning freely of whatever is inside their minds at that moment.

Take this video for example.

Scene 1

As the singer’s voice raises, she appears in a shadowy figure, sitting in a couch beside the window and flirting with a paint brush. The audience knows immediately that she is Christina Aguilera, even though her face has not been exposed yet. She wears a long transparent robe and has a curly hairstyle like Monroe’s, which are pretty recognizable as Christina’s symbols. Not to mention that her voice is pretty distinguishable from other artists.

Scene 2

An anonymous man looks through a window to where the voice comes from, smoking and wondering. And as the video continues, the man even gets intrigued to peer furtively. When he sees a fine, sexy female figure, he moves forward to the window and uses a telescope and loosens his tie. Obviously, this man is just “thirsty” for sex.

Scene 3

It is when Christina applies lip gloss and mascara. According to Dr. Strangelove and the Semiotic Democracy, audiences would determine the meaning in an unmediated way. Lip gloss touching at Christina’s lips, and light flashing at the back… Isn’t that flirting and seductive? Well, male audiences may determine the lip gloss as a man’s penis, since men think about sex more than women.

In Western culture, sexuality and body exposure are very common. In traditional Asian culture people generally do not talk about sexuality in public, or people will be considered rude, dirty and uneducated. But nowadays people are getting more and more open to sex, because Western values have affected Asian values anyhow. Sexuality and hint of sex are seen in many advertisements now in Asia. Below is a banned South Korean noodle commercial.

The woman’s voice sounds like she is giving oral sex to a man. Even though there is no man or body exposure in the commercial, it was banned showing on television because of its hint and meaningful voice.

The last but not the least, I remembered that I read a Chinese magazine article many years ago, and it had a poll for all men across different cultures like Asian and White and Black. The poll asked men what they expected their female partner to do and to list 10 critera. One common in these cultures is that men hope their girlfriends to give them oral sex.

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To start

Hello!

We are three Chinese students in Dr. Strangelove’s class CMN2173. This blog is one of our midterm project requirements, and the other is to make a 5-minute video. The purpose is to create a research source for erotic advertising on YouTube.

To start our project, we decided to do a study on cross-cultural values of sex-sell, societies’ reactions to erotic advertising, and changes that brings to stereotype gender roles.

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