Down the Rabbit Hole or Reginald and Jim Watch Some Smut

The other day (when everything happens), Reggie Hopscotch and I decided to take a tour of the Internet. Reg has not quite grasped our technology since the great thaw so I thought I'd lend him a hand. We checked out facebook, which he is part of, and all of the other networking sites. Then we saw a fine array of news sites.

"What of sport?!" he asked and we checked out espn, foxsports, mtvsports, foodtvsports, and aint it sports news.com. Our examination of all things sport was exhaustive and exhausting, mostly because I had to explain to him how "big metal chariots sail around a big, black river with so much haste." It took me a couple of minutes to realize he meant NASCAR. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it's one of the most popular "sports" today.

Poor Reginald was pretty pooped after the sports extravaganza. He asked, with a raised eyebrow and a hushed tone, whether the Internet had any sites that "appealed to the discerning gentleman." I sat there in confusion and typed the links to here and here, thinking it would sate his needs. He browsed the sites for a minute or two.

"While I'm impressed by these two electronic sites, Jim, I'm not quite sure it's what I had in mind." I asked him what, exactly, it was he wanted to see. He thought for a second, as if trying to find a way to explain himself to a three-year-old. "Something a little more provocative. Something a little more...bawdy."

Oh.
Porn.
He wanted porn.
Great. There's not much that skeeves me out more than watching porn with other people, unless I'm about to give my lady the business.

We started with the obvious sites and continued to the less obvious sites for two hours. It was like we were walking down a very dark alley, stealing glimpses of intimacy, but continuing until we saw something bigger, better, baser, and more disgusting. We ended up watching a fairly explicit video on a free movie website whose name is a not-so-clever play on the more famous youtube. We clicked on one of the highest-rated videos. In the video, a bland...err...blond girl is being interviewed about things of a sexual nature. I've seen this kind of thing before: it's merely a prelude to main attraction. This one was a bit disturbing, though, because when the action started Reginald and I could tell that the girl was 100% not into it. Clearly she had been duped and didn't know she'd be getting her tonsils checked by a young man wielding a bayonet. The worst part was that the man was "guiding" (ramming) her head back and forth, presumably to test her gag reflex. The girl's eyes start to water a little and she makes this face...like she's tasting something rotten (which, I guess, she is) or like she's in a great amount of physical or emotional peril (which, again, I guess she is). But, after the vocal protests of the girl (a gurgled "mmm. MMMMM!!!" that I still remember), the man stopped, removed his member and...started all over again, riveting away at the back of the poor girl's throat.

"Jim?" Reginald asked, but with reluctance in his voice.
"Yeah?" I answered, a bit shell-shocked by such a violent display.
"Why do people watch this?"
"I don't know, man."

And I don't know why people find that particular video (and millions of videos like it) arousing. I understand that there's a wide variety of sexual desires and proclivities. It would be short-sighted of me to say which are right and which are wrong. I don't think there's anything wrong with the people who like the kind of thing Reginald and I saw. Personally, I have always had a big problem with making girls do things that they don't want to do. It's a huge turn-off for me if I notice that a girl just isn't into it. But that might just be me. Maybe I'm wrong and the real men are right. That's fine if they like seeing girls dominated to the point of pain. I can't fault people for liking that, can I?

On the other hand, I can't help but be a little judgmental of it. What I saw offends me, not so much because it degrades the girl (she certainly had some hand in degrading herself), but it degrades men even more. It paints this picture that we are cavemen who don't really care whether we're boring a hole through the back of our mate's head, as long as we get off! Is that what it means to be masculine? Taking all media, pornography included, into consideration, to be masculine is to only care about one's self. When did this happen? Haven't things changed?

What makes a man: compassion and empathy or force and lack of emotion? If we go by pornography's example, it's the latter.