Thanks to everyone who voted, these are interesting results! I expected more to choose “Maybe, in some cases”, but instead the majority went for a definite “Yes”: bareback porn does influence men to bareback.
Personally, I’m not sure. I don’t believe that people copy what they see against their own will. Even if some do, the existence of an impressionable minority should not prevent the rest of us from viewing what we choose. On the other hand, I know porn feeds fantasies which can lead to changes in behaviour. This power is part of its fascination; the way it can heat the mind, helping us into a state where we act on our primal impulses instead of reasoning. Maybe it’s a good and important influence. Maybe it’s just the push we need.
To the people who voted “Yes”: what makes you so sure? Has bareback porn influenced you or your friends to bareback? If so, how do you feel about that? Are you sad that you were influenced into risky behaviour, or happy to have been encouraged into having more fulfilling sex? If you’re in the minority who voted “No”, why do you think so few people agree with you?
I voted No and i go rawdog everytime. I've only used a condom once in my life and i'm still HIV negative (cause i don't fuck everyone i see). Most people will say yes because they want to find something/someone to blame when something bad happens instead of taking responsibility for their actions. If you are influenced to do something that may endanger you or someone else, then you can't think for yourself and need to go back to school.
Roswelltop, I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with an individual making an informed choice to fuck without condoms, put cum wherever his equally informed partner wants and continue to play with that cum in whatever way tickles them both for as long as they like.
I’m saying that TIM neglects to consider the viewer who is inevitably, at the age they view these films, based on the education they have, unable to make a fully informed choice.
Even if it were true that all adults have all the sexual health information they need to make an informed choice, and research has clearly shown that they don’t, at least one third of teenagers (in the UK) get their sex education from porn. Therefore, to present porn that actively encourages sexual behaviour that remains very high risk to anyone who might not wish to become HIV positive, and which is completely devoid of any truly helpful information about sexual health, is socially irresponsible.
There are lots of things in this world that involve risks that we allow people to do because those risks are carefully managed and the people involved are making informed choices: bungee jumping, motor racing, skiing, scuba diving, horse riding. Do you think that a company that offers sky diving and fails to give its customers adequate instructions on opening the main parachute or the reserve should be allowed to continue operating because they are doing a good job of promoting sky diving and serving men who want to jump out of a plane?
I am an adult, capable of making my own decisions. It just amazes me that there are so many people who think that the world has to be shrink wrapped and labled “PG”, to protect everyone.
T.I.M. is far ahead of the curve on bareback erotica. I’ve sampled the various competitors, and in my mind, there simply are none. There’s not another producer that presents the cum-filled action found in TIM videos.
Have TIM films influenced my behavior? Fuck yeah. Far as I’m concerned, TIM has put felching and ass-to-mouth action on the map–and that is a good thing. TIM shows men being driven by their strongest sexual drives, and I say hot damn–keep it cumming!
Anyone who thinks that bareback porn doesn’t influence behaviour is either being willfully ignorant to permit themselves to get off on it or make money from it, or is naive in the extreme. Yes I mean you Liam and Paul.
Billions of pounds are spent on product placement in movies because people associate products with stars and characters using them and go out and buy them. If product placement didn’t work, it wouldn’t happen.
Bareback porn isn’t like violence in movies (a particularly asinine argument against the influence of the genre) it’s like product placement. The very point is that bareback porn doesn’t influence people to do things against their will, it plays upon a latent desire that most of us have to fuck without anything getting in the way.
There’s nothing wrong with people making informed choices to do what they want, and nothing wrong with porn giving people an idea, but for producers of bareback porn to abandon all responsibility to make their consumers aware of the risks, never mind for them to go as far as TIM goes in glorifying without reservation the experience and every transgressive, obsessive, self-destructive impulse to engage in that experience is a grievance against the the gay community, and quite frankly, sociopathic. Yes, I mean you Liam and Paul.
Furthermore, have TIM producers ever considered that gay sex education is still next to non-existent in schools around the world and that as a result, porn provides a key part of a young gay man’s education in sex? Not to mention that gay men still grow up in such a homophobic world, that when they finally realise that being gay isn’t wrong, they’re predisposed to question every other piece of received wisdom about what is right and wrong (not a bad thing per se) and when bareback porn says such a loud ‘fuck that’ to the use of condoms, young men who are NOT making informed choices say ‘yeah, fuck that’.
Bareback porn of the TIM variety tells men, particularly young uneducated gay men, that barebacking is hot, commonplace, risk free and that being HIV positive is no big deal, when the truth is, it is still a serious condition. Yes, HIV is much easier to live with now than ever before, but apart from anything else if you live for getting fucked up the arse then having HIV is the last thing you want – HIV really screws with your ability to clean out properly for sex.
I support freedom of expression, so I would not argue for a ban on bareback porn, but you don’t get to have rights without having responsibilities too, so it is both a desperate shame and an absolute disgrace that producers of porn by gay men for gay men should be so irresponsible in their delivery and marketing of it.
Of course, corporate irresponsibility is nothing new, but how sad that some gay men have so little love or respect for other gay men that they are willing to build their fortunes on their self-destruction.
I think that the issues here are far more complex than is at first apparent. Western gay sexual behaviour is still evolving. When homosexuality was still considered a criminal act this social/legal attitude produced certain behavioral reactions within the male gay community (cottageing being one of the most obvious).
Following the advent of HIV and AIDS, there was also a significant social shift, not necessarily in terms of promiscuity, but in a social attitude where unprotected sex = death. After the 80’s and into the 90’s this fostered the prevailing behavioral shift to protected sex, often even in monogamous relationships.
During this period pornography followed the dominant cultural/social changes, the result was “pre-condom” porn and just “porn”, in other words, an external factor (a sexually transmitted disease) impacted social attitudes which in turn affected sexual habits. (You can see this in the way that cottageing had been affected by the de-criminalisation of homosexuality and now in the twenty-first century, the internet has also impacted on how gay-men procure physical intimacy.)
What we see with the rise of bareback porn is a very male response to a social/external change: the fetishisation on a act/behaviour. It’s an accepted human trait that desire is increased by the very withholding of the object of ones libido (as is the converse: “too much of a good thing…”) so, the “condom as normal” era has produced an Adam and Eve scenario, where the forbidden fruit (condomless sex) has become the secretly most converted of sexual acts, hence the rise of bareback porn.
I suppose what I’m saying is that the desire was there before the action. But there is a valid case to propose that the action furthers the desire and a cycle of desire – action – desire is created. While it’s naive to cast pornographers in the role of the boogeyman, they, like us all, being part of society (though they may like to see/cast themselves as apart from it…), have a responsibility to that to which they belong. Whether they execute that responsibility is of course, entirely up to them. And we as consumers have the power to vote with our wallet and our opinion and ultimately our… vote.
____________________________
The Thinker
bareback is for assholes that don’t have enough respect about looking after them selves or guys who are all ready HIV+ that are happy spreading it around. kinda depressing. bet you’re laughin all the way to the bank sellin this stuff.