让色情网站编辑告诉你色情是怎么回事 | 双语
Kiersten Essenpreis
（本文发表于时报观点与评论版面，作者Lux Alptraum写作有关性、大众文化和女性主义等主题。）
For six years, I immersed myself in the workings of the adult industry. As editor of the porn blog Fleshbot, I spent hours combing the XXX side of the internet, acquainting myself with all manner of perversions and obscure sex acts. At this point in my career, it’s fairly safe to say that there is almost no pornographic image that would be capable of shocking me. What does shock me, on the other hand, is how ill-informed our public discourse around porn continues to be.
整整六年，我沉浸在成人产业的工作中。作为色情博客Fleshbot的编辑，我每天花数小时检索互联网的XXX世界，熟悉各种性变态和令人费解的性行为。到了事业的这个阶段，我可以非常确定地说，几乎没有什么色情画面能震撼我。另一方面，让我震撼的是，关于色情的公共话语依然非常畸形。
In the 10 years since I wrote my first Fleshbot post, internet porn has skyrocketed in popularity. But even as porn consumption has become a commonplace habit, we continue to treat it as something exotic and inherently perilous to our health and happiness.
从我开始在Fleshbot上写第一篇博客起这十年，互联网色情的受欢迎程度极速上升。但是，尽管色情消费已经成为常见的习惯，我们依然把它视为某种怪异的、从本质上对健康和幸福有害的东西。
The arguments that show up in national publications today — and are often repeated by readers — are not so different from anti-porn screeds written decades before. A recent New York Magazine feature dubbed Pornhub, a top porn site, “the Kinsey Report of our time,” arguing that the breadth of perversity found on the site encourages increasingly exotic sexual exploration among its presumably vanilla viewers; other commentators, including Cindy Gallop, founder of the website MakeLoveNotPorn, have also expounded upon the power pornography holds over our sexual tastes and behaviors. Journalists still seem convinced that, first, if an extreme form of porn exists, it’s common and anyone who watches porn will eventually stumble on it; second, that viewing porn rewires our sexual preferences, often in damaging and terrifying ways; and, of course, that pornography gives children unhealthy ideas about sex.
如今，在全国性出版物上发表——且被读者不断复述——的论点，与几十年前所写的反色情长篇大论没有太大区别。《纽约》(New York)杂志前不久的一篇特稿称顶级色情网站Pornhub是“我们时代的《金赛性学报告》(Kinsey Report)”，认为该网站的性变态广度会鼓励它的普通观众探索愈加怪异的性行为。其他一些评论人，包括MakeLoveNotPorn网站的创始人辛迪·盖洛普(Cindy Gallop)，也阐释了色情对我们性喜好和行为产生的巨大影响。记者们似乎依旧确信：第一，如果一种极端的色情形式存在，那它就很常见，任何观看色情片的人都将最终失足；第二，观看色情片会改变我们的性偏好，通常是以破坏性的、可怕的方式；当然，色情片会让儿童对性产生不健康的观点。
In a culture where open discussion of sex is taboo and the adult industry is heavily stigmatized, it’s perhaps not surprising that many people think of porn as a highly addictive, transformative substance. But the evidence doesn’t back that assumption up.
在我们的文化中，公开谈论性是禁忌，成人产业背负着沉重的污名，所以，很多人认为色情产品是一种极易上瘾、具有改造力的东西。但是，证据并不能支持这种观点。
It makes sense that journalists, whose jobs require research, might find themselves drawn down the rabbit hole of adult entertainment, fascinated by the increasingly perverse products they happen to uncover. But most porn consumers aren’t journalists or researchers, and usage data suggests their porn habits are vastly more utilitarian. PornHub, the most popular porn site online, reports that the average time spent on the site is just under 10 minutes — less than half the length of a standard porn scene. Ten minutes isn’t enough time to begin to plumb the depths of depravity contained in the videos of PornHub, or to do even the most cursory exploration of unfamiliar genres and sexual acts. It is, on the other hand, just enough time to arrive at a site, find a video that’s in line with your long established sexual preferences, enjoy the best bits and move on to other pursuits.
记者的工作要求进行研究，所以他们可能会觉得自己被引入了成人娱乐的兔子洞，被自己碰巧发现的越来越变态的产品感到震惊。但是，大部分色情消费者不是记者或研究者，而且使用数据表明，他们对色情产品的消费要功利许多。最受欢迎的在线色情网站PornHub报告称，用户花在该网站上的平均时间不到10分钟，还不到一个标准色情场面长度的一半。十分钟尚不足以开始探索PornHub视频的堕落深度，也不足以对不常见的题材和性行为进行最粗略的探索。它只够打开一个网站，找到一个与你长期形成的性偏好相吻合的视频，享受最精彩的部分，然后接着去做其他事。
In my time at Fleshbot, it became abundantly clear to me that people tend to come to porn with their sexual preferences already intact — and that, with some exceptions, those preferences remain fixed. Like PornHub, Fleshbot offers visitors a vast array of content, profiling porn that appeals to consumers with a wide variety of sexual orientations and preferences. Yet when I worked there, being exposed to the wonderfully diverse world of human sexuality didn’t seem to make readers more excited by unfamiliar kinks and sexual interests — if anything, it made my readers more interested in the various tags and filters that would allow them to quickly zoom in on the specific content that met their needs. Straight men who were accidentally exposed to gay porn didn’t suddenly turn gay; vanilla viewers who happened upon photo sets of extreme kink would complain that they should have been better shielded from, say, the sight of extreme bondage. Tellingly, despite the vast diversity of content found on Pornhub, consumers are more likely to turn to tamer content: For the past three years, lesbian porn — a category generally considered to be less hardcore than its heterosexual counterpart — has been viewed more frequently than any other genre.
我在Fleshbot工作期间清楚地发现，人们去看色情片时，往往已经有了非常完整的性偏好，除了一些例外，那些偏好基本上是固定的。和PornHub一样，Fleshbot为访客提供了广泛的内容，按照各种性取向和性偏好给色情片撰写吸引消费者的简介。但我在那里工作时发现，能够看到人类性行为极其多样的世界，似乎并没有让读者为不常见的怪癖和性兴趣感到更兴奋——它只是让读者对不同的标签和过滤器更感兴趣，那能让他们飞快地找到能满足自己需要的具体内容。直男就算偶然看到同性恋色情内容，也不会突然变成同性恋，普通观众如果碰巧看到几组极端怪异的照片就会抱怨，比如认为极端施虐的画面应该被更好地屏蔽。很明显，尽管PornHub上的内容很广泛，但消费者往往会转向更温和的内容：在过去三年里，女同色情——通常被认为口味没有异性恋色情那么重——比其他任何题材的观看频率都高。
Long before we’re exposed to pornography, we consume pop culture and have formative experiences that help us understand what kind of people we’re attracted to and what sorts of erotic scenarios intrigue us — and we tend to bring that to porn, and not the other way around. Some people may find their palates expanding with increased exposure to pornography, but that’s often because of an existing curiosity or openness: If you come to porn completely uninterested, or outright turned off by, a specific genre, it’s unlikely that you’ll find yourself converted merely through repeated exposure. (I, for example, have always been made uncomfortable by porn that depicts the beloved characters from my favorite childhood cartoons in flagrante delicto — and no matter how many times I was exposed to those scenes in the course of my work, I was never won over by their eroticism.)
早在我们接触色情内容之前，我们对流行文化的消费以及成长期经验，就已经在帮助我们理解我们会被哪种人吸引，对哪种色情场面感兴趣，我们往往把那些引入色情作品中，而不是反过来被影响。有些人可能发现，随着看到的色情内容增多，自己的口味也在扩展，但那经常是因为存在好奇心或开放心理：如果你对色情内容完全不感兴趣，或者某种类型的色情内容会让你很扫兴，那么，就算反复接触那些内容，你也不大可能有所改变（比如，那些描绘我童年最爱卡通人物做那种事的色情产品，总让我感觉不舒服，不管我在工作中看到多少次那些画面，它们从来没有引起过我的性欲）。
None of which is to say that porn is entirely benign, or that its impact on our sex lives is only positive. There is some truth to the anti-porn claim that it negatively impacts the sexual imaginations and awareness of young people. But that’s largely due to the fact that pornography — which, though sometimes educational, is more frequently a wildly inaccurate fantasy — is consumed in a culture where sex education is minimal, fear-based and often inaccurate; where parents treat the sex talk as a shameful task to be gotten over with as quickly as possible; and where pop culture promotes a confusing virgin/whore dichotomy that encourages sexual exploration while demonizing “promiscuity.” Given all this, it’s unsurprising that porn might leave young viewers confused or even scarred, and that it might negatively impact their ability to relate to future partners. But that says less about the nature of pornography than about the dangers of a culture that delegates something as important and essential as sex education to an industry dedicated to crafting fantasy and entertainment.
这些并不是说，色情片完全无害，或者它对我们性生活的影响完全是正面的。反色情言论中有一个事实，那就是，它负面地影响了年轻人的性幻想和性意识。不过，那主要是因为，虽然有的色情产品具有教育意义，但更多的是极其不准确的幻想，而且它是在性教育极少、以恐惧为基础、往往不准确的文化中被消费的。父母们把关于性的交谈视为羞耻的任务，总是尽快略过，而流行文化则鼓吹令人迷惑的处女/妓女二元论，既鼓励性探索，又把“淫乱”妖魔化。鉴于所有这些，色情产品可能让年轻观众感到迷惑甚至留下创伤，可能负面影响他们与未来伴侣交往的能力，也就不意外了。但相比色情内容的性质，那更多地是因为我们的文化存在的危险，它把性教育这件重要、关键的事情，交给一个致力于创造幻想和娱乐的产业来做。
It’s easy to criticize porn, and it’s fun to giggle over the exotic and unfamiliar sex acts the adult industry is all too happy to explore. But positioning the porn industry as an all-powerful force that’s here to wreak havoc on our sex lives is a distraction from the actual problem at hand. If we want an alternative to the vision of sex presented in pornography, we need to start by having open, honest and unashamed talks about sex. We need to stop treating sex as a taboo topic, and start treating it as an ordinary aspect of life, one that young people should be educated about in all its weird, wonderful, risky and rewarding complexity. If we create a culture where sexuality is accepted as a healthy, positive part of life, then we’ll be able to appreciate porn for the wild, unrealistic fantasy that it was always intended to be.
批评色情产品很容易，嘲笑成人产业乐于探索的怪异罕见的性行为也是件乐事。但是，视色情行业为一股强大的力量，对我们的性生活造成严重破坏，实际上是分散我们对手头实际问题的注意力。如果我们想提供色情产品所呈现的性幻觉之外的东西，我们需要开始有关性的开放、诚实和不以为耻的谈话。我们需要停止把性视为禁忌话题，开始把它视为生活的一个寻常方面，应该教育年轻人了解它的怪异、精彩、冒险、有益的复杂性。如果我们能创造一种文化，把性视为生活中健康、正面的一部分，那么我们就能欣赏一直以来为疯狂的、不现实的幻想而创作的色情产品。
Lux Alptraum(@LuxAlptraum)写作有关性、大众文化和女性主义等主题，他是即将出版的一本关于人们对女性不诚实的文化痴迷的书的作者。
翻译：王相宜
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