7/12/11
Wise Guys: Why Do Men Email Porn Clips to Friends?

photo via Flickr

Advice from three of EMandLO.com’s guy friends. This week they answer the following: “Why do so many guys forward really gross gonzo porn clips around to their friends? Why do they find it funny instead of disgusting or offensive or just plain sad?” To ask the guys your own question, click here.

Straight Single Guy (Colin Adamo): Don’t worry, we find them disgusting, offensive, and sad too. But we’re stuck in a world of proving our masculinity to one another in some way or another. Locker room antics don’t disappear just because we haven’t been to gym class in a decade. Sending around shocking internet finds to your friends is like a modern-day version of a game of Chicken, an electronic equivalent to a frat house panty raid. It’s our way of showing others that we are not wusses, that we’ve got the bravado to view even the most odious images that the Internet has to offer — and laugh about it all the same. Grossing out our friends is a guy’s way to gain social status. And if our friends are too far away to fart on or expose our testicles to, we’ll settle for an appalling e-mail thread.

Straight Married Guy (Irad Eyal): No idea. I’m against forwarding of all sorts, be it wealth-creating chain letters, warnings about anthrax in detergent samples, or gross porn. I just don’t get it. Once someone sends you the 2 Girls 1 Cup video, your relationship moves to a bad new place. I have friends who send me captioned JPGs of xtra hairy women or pokey nipples and I honestly think they think it’s hilarious. They’re tapping into their 4th grade reptilian brain where poopoo and boobies are solid gold punchlines. If they had to send that crap on a postcard they might think twice, but email is too easy. Thank you Al Gore for inventing the Internet.

terence_100Gay Committed Guy (Terence): Not having a clue what gonzo porn was, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Now I get it. Gonzo porn is porn. Plain and simple. I can’t remember the last time I accidentally came across highly produced porn with costumes and storylines. We pass around gonzo porn because we can. DVDs and VHS tapes just don’t travel well over the Internet. Besides, it’s fun porn. It’s group porn. It’s collaborative, point and shoot, easy to upload, easy to download and easy to offload. There’s no going back. So much so that vintage porn is becoming just plain sad.

Our “guys” are a rotating group of contributors. Irad Eyal is a writer, TV producer, and founder of celebrity gossip site Sexdegrees.netColin Adamo is a recent Yale grad and author/blogger behind Hooking Up & Staying Hooked, the only sex and relationships resource specifically for high school guys; and Terence is an American living in Sydney. To ask the guys your own question, click here.



5 Comments

  1. Men sharing porn has always struck me as a bit queer.the fact that my mans best friend sends him porn and cares about what turns his male friend on strikes me as creepy , homosexual and makes me leave the guy im with.i was always raised that porn is for single men and its private not something you show off to your buddies. I mean its not ok to let somebody watch your wife gett fucked but if you watch a video of somebody your not married to fuck with your straight best friend sitting by you on the couch its perfectly ok. Sounds a bit twisted and weird to me. If you want the women in the video go marry them. Ther out ther afterall.

  2. … and by the way, if you think this is limited to guys, you haven’t met my girlfriend.

    I shock-imaged her for a laugh by resetting her homepage to tubgirl. Quickly I discovered that I had picked a fight I can’t possibly win. She knows my weakness – surgery images. Penis surgery and balls surgery and hemorrhoid surgery and labiaplasty… I eventually waved the white flag, but too late. I opened Pandora’s Box with this one.

  3. Porn? Nah. Shock images, maybe. It’s a big difference, as I think the wiseguys have suggested.

    Ten years ago when the internet was still relatively novel, and I had the maturity of a 7-year old (as opposed to my current 11-year old maturity level) I sent tubgirl and lemonparty more times than I could count. But I’ve never been like, “hey bro… check out this hot sex scene… it gets me so hard… how bout you, man? Does that make you hard…? Are you gonna stroke it? Yeeeaaaahhhh…”

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