From time to time I have guests blog whatever it is they feel like blogging. I will not tell them what to blog; I won’t edit it; I won’t influence the Guest Blogger in any way.
After posting Art’s guest blog on “the angry porn fan” this weekend, I got some e-mails…and another take on the same subject from a reader named Shane. So I’ll run his take on the angry fan, and then I think it’s safe to say we’re gonna put this topic to rest.
Shane writes:
My $0.02 on the issue:
I’d like to pass on my theory about “angry porn fans”. While I do agree with many points made by the guest poster, and think he makes some good arguments, I don’t think that it is any one thing or common cause for this phenomena. I think that it is a complex issue that has mental, social, and physiological components that all play a part.
If you only consider one part of the equation, then it’s fairly simple to explain.
Guy’s a racist? Then it’s easy to see why he gets inflamed over IR porn. Guy lives in his parent’s basement and his only sexual experience has been tugging off the family dog? It’s easy to see why he resents hot chicks. Some guy is a henpecked jerk with low self esteem who can’t get a blowjob from his spouse? Easy to see why he is ashamed to be punching the monkey huddled over a computer monitor late at night.
Pretty straightforward. So why do some of these guys get so agitated then? Why do they continue to view and seek out materials that disturb and upset them? Why does that anger become so great that they need to express it?
Because I don’t think that it’s that simple.
Jut the simple act of jerking off even without external stimulation causes a powerful cocktail of hormones and natural chemicals to be activated in the body. It can cause strong emotions. Pornographic materials can stimulate and feed into these emotional responses, both mentally and physiologically. Well adjusted porn viewers make the differentiation between the reality that they live in and the fantasies they engage in to get off. Those that can’t are the ones that become angry. They’re the guys that take it personal. At worst, for some of these guys, porn becomes sex by proxy and they internalize it.
The anger develops when there is a factor that causes a conflict with this internalization. This can be due to societal reasons for example. A married man may feel guilty about pulling his pudd to porn because of what his wife or friends might think. There could be personal reasons. Feelings of inadequacy over penis size. Deficiencies in personal sex life. Things like that.
I think that it’s also important to make a distinction between degrees of “angry porn fans”, because I think there is a difference between an angry fan, and an Angry Fan.
Lower case angry fans are the ones that perhaps feel some self loathing after masturbating to pornography. There may be some guilt as to the nature of the materials that stimulated their libido. Their expressions of anger are limited to easily accessible targets. Forum posts, comments on sites, that sort of thing. These are the kinds of guys that are probably angry in general anyway. The guy that flips out and goes into a frothing rant on other (non-porn) forums is this kind of angry guy.
Upper case Angry Fans are those that become angry to the extent that they actively go out of their way to cause harm to specific targets. These are the ones that try to find out the “real” identities of porn actors, and out them, among other things. This type of behaviour is more akin to stalking and to me indicates deeper issues than just anger.
In either case, I think that it is important to note that the cause of the anger is not necessarily related to the porno princess herself, but to the “angry fan’s” feelings about themselves. It’s just that the porno princess becomes a convenient target because of the disparity of anonymity between the “angry fan” and the porno princess, and the social status of the porno princess’s occupation. In other words, it’s easy for a stalker or other wing nut to make ad hominem attacks on a porno princess because much of society will permit or accept it, with little risk to the attacker.
However, porn or no porn, these guys would still be angry, it would just be about something else.