> What makes men want to
> buy imaginary 'intentions'? Doesn't buying imagined 'intentions' make men
> feel embarrasingly stupid? Isn't it the reason why men buy lots of porn
> _even though_ most of them profess not to take it 'seriously'?
You could say the same thing about a computer, though. It's just a highly efficient Boolean compiler with a screen attached, and yet think of the adverts, icons and video clips expended to literally make the tech sexy (not the Victorian desire-to-desire, but the postmodern desiring-to-be-desired). Bourdieu says somewhere that porn is simply lower-class consumerism, the necessary antipode of the upper-class eroticism hegemonic in our consumer culture.
Personally, I find a lot of the explicit sexuality on the Net to be groovy -- the gay and lesbian stuff is occasionally quite wonderful, really liberating stuff, mostly because it's integrated into the fabric of people's lives in a humanizing and not alienating way (e.g. http://www.dykesworld.de, which is actually an English-language site, though it's based in Germany). Sometimes intentions can be positive things.
-- Dennis