Daily Archive

I saw this quote on the Anti-Porn Feminists blog. Too good not to share.

I have seen a sixteen-year-old boy weeping in distress after getting a girl’s pube stuck in his teeth, I hear he was unshaven. I have seen boys showing each other porn on their iPhones on the train home from school, in bars and whilst strolling along the Champs-Elyséés. I have had a boy ask me to text him screenshots of porn films because he was on a wifi-free family holiday. One boy turned to kiss his date in the cinema but not before romantically whispering ‘don’t struggle’. One friend drunkenly walked off into a park in the early hours of the morning and when a male friend brought her back without ‘trying anything’, he was heralded as being ‘soo nice!’ rather than ‘soo normal!’. I have friends whose boyfriends have posted naked pictures of them all over the Internet. I have heard consent described as ‘de-romanticizing’. I have had a shockingly sober boy say to me ‘Why can’t I just slap my dick on your arse? Doesn’t cost you anything!’. This just scratches the surface of my store of depressing anecdotes; the most violent of which I won’t go into out of respect for the girls involved.

2014 is not a good year to be a teenage girl. The last of the 90’s kids are growing up and we are starting to see the effects of being raised with the Internet. For generations before us, hormonal teenage boys looking for sexy images of women had limited options; they could brave the embarrassment of going to the counter and buying Playboy, they could look through their sister’s Cosmo or they could use their imagination. Porn today has rid itself of the embarrassment-factor by embracing the anonymity of the World Wide Web; Playboy isn’t really considered to be porn anymore, the real stuff lives in your phone, on your laptop, your tablet; it is available anywhere, anytime at the touch of a button.

Violence, Teenagers, and Gonzo Porn, Clara Bennathan