Sex blogger Violet Blue told AlterNet that not only does the piece [“Hardcore,” in the Atlantic by Natasha Vargas-Cooper] misrepresent the huge variety of porn out there, but the huge variety of sexual experiences across genders.
“Frankly I don’t know what’s worse: the ‘all males are aggressively, dangerously sexual’ undertone or that it maintains that all women are sexual victims.
Both value sets are harmful to perpetuate, in addition to being false.”
Cooper Fleishman, an editor at the Good Men Project– a web magazine founded to counter the trite and offensive depictions of masculinity and male sexuality in mainstream culture — points out that there is such a thing as safe, consensual exploration of power dynamics, for both men and women.
“Men who fantasize about rough sex and act out those fantasies consensually don’t deserve the stigma of brutishness or violence or rape behavior,” he says.
What’s more, Vargas-Cooper’s depiction of desire is not only false, but sex
ist and harmful, particularly in its implication that men are ruled by uncontrollable biological urges.
“Women don’t contend with insurmountable urges to breed; likewise, men aren’t slaves to some compulsion to dominate and subjugate,” says Fleishman.