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The idea that somehow pornography is good for society, or that it serves some sort of preventative function for males, or (insert rationalization here), make me ill. Pornography, like religion, has no place in a civilized society. I found this awesome quote while browsing the interwebs and I agree with much of what it has to say about pornography, the porn industry and human sexuality. Thank you Jasmina for writing so eloquently about this important topic.
Hello,
I would like you to know, in a nutshell, that I am against the porn industry.
I am against white men who admit that they literally hate women making films to express that hate. I have absolutely nothing against sex or sexual activity or sexual expression or even sexual exploration through consuming sexual content. I am so glad that you love your body and are content with your sexuality — that is a very good thing.
I am against mainstream gonzo porn which depicts very violent misogynistic sex where the synonym for ‘woman’ is ‘slut’, ‘whore’ and bitch. I am against very violent porn where a woman is being slapped around and ripped to shreds is the most available type of pornography; being the default when accessing pornography. I am against the idea that the very accessible porn, free porn, depicts very rough sex as the norm — something which young curious boys (and girls) will access as possibly their first look at ‘sex.’ I don’t like that hardcore porn is now normal porn and softcore porn is just pop culture. I don’t like the way mainstream, popular pornography depicts women. I don’t like that violent acts such as choking on a penis or ‘ripping a tight virgin apart’ are ‘sexy.’
I don’t like that rough, violent sex, which I accept is the way SOME consenting adults choose to have sex is portrayed as NORMAL, as mainstream, as the ‘right’ way to have sex.
Porn isn’t sex, its the manifestation of male directors’ fantasies. I am in no way targeting the sex worker; but I am furious with the porn industry’s extreme mistreatment of the sex worker. I am furious that, because of pornography, men are conditioned into thinking they are entitled to sex because the storyline almost always pans out as ‘soft rape’ where the woman ends up liking it. I am furious that most women in pornography have an average life expectancy of 35, that they have sexually transmitted diseases they shouldn’t even have, that they are unable to leave, that they are beaten, coerced and raped, that their wishes aren’t respected and that most of the time they can’t say no to a film they aren’t comfortable with unless they are highly paid public figure porn stars. This is an industry that has a temper tantrum when the government proposes they should use condoms.
So when I say I am anti-porn; I am not anti-sex, I am not anti-sexual exploration, I am not anti anything people decide to do in their bedrooms. But I am anti-rape-culture and I am anti- to the idea that violent misogynistic sex is the first thing a 12 year old is going to see when they try and google porn. These things aren’t labelled as BDSM or tagged as particularly violent sex aimed at a kink — this is for mass consumption and I am sick to fucking death of boys who haven’t even seen a vagina in real life thinking that a cumming on a girl’s face after she chokes on your dick is healthy sex for everyone.
I have been sexually harassed countless times in my school days and they all tie back to porn. These boys tried to ask me if I had done ____ or _____, which were fucking bizarre actions but they saw them in free porn. In grade 7, 13 year old boys were talking about glass dildos and women shooting ping pong balls out of their vaginas; vaginas which are hardly an accurate depiction of what diversity there is in the actual physical look of a vagina (don’t get me started on the Australian ‘airbrushing’ laws which note that no visible ‘lip’ can be shown in porn that could be accessed by younger boys???).
I’ve been threatened by a 15 year old boy not even 6 months ago that he would shove his dick down my throat, after I confronted him about speaking rudely to me. How did he come to that conclusion? How did he make the connection between a sexual act and violence against me? How did he know he could use his penis as a weapon against me? How did he know that to really threaten me in a way that would grant him power he could use sex as violence? If I were a boy, he would threaten to beat me up, but he chose that instead. These are the things I’m thinking about.
I want this trillion dollar industry to be held accountable for the way it treats its workers and the ideas it passes off as mainstream. This is an unregulated industry. It contributes to the sex trade. It drives supply an demand for child pornography, for rape pornography, for sex trafficking. You can’t have one without the other.
So if you want to be your own boss and be a cam girl that is YOUR choice and your choice alone. You decide what is right for you. I’m not targeting you, I’m wanting this giant, abusive, global industry to be held accountable for the shit its caused. So until sex workers are treated fairly, women are not treated like slabs of meat, violent misogynistic sex is not portrayed as healthy and normal, etc. then I cannot succumb to the idea that mainstream pornography is okay. Because at the end of the day, the average john is going to see these women as dehumanised figures and ultimately will use their body to have an orgasm. And if they’re doing that for a long enough time alone in their rooms, they’re going to, if not develop a power complex, view other women that way, and ultimately possibly develop the idea that they can use sex as a weapon.
This is not black and white; nothing ever is. Sex is healthy but the sex industry isn’t. And sometimes it’s hard to break free but there’s a bigger power at hand here and a lot of things happen behind the scenes that we don’t all see. I’m just very very concerned about the harmful effects of gonzo pornography and the well-being of sex workers everywhere.
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
In a word, “No”. As a tonic to what liberal porn-sick dudes would like you to believe, here is the long answer.
“Akin to art. LMAO
Porn is the antithesis of art. Porn destroys creative minds. Porn both reflects and creates a culture that stifles creativity and instead serves up (wholly unoriginal) female degradation on a platter, a truth that is immediately verifiable when we examine our culture. Porn teaches men to see women as fuck objects, and in our society, women are treated as fuck objects. Porn teaches people there is no rape. Our society treats rape as a joke. Porn teaches men that there is nothing you can do to a woman that will hurt her. Sexual violence, rape, BDSM, VAW, all thrive in our reality. Porn teaches women their sexuality is dirty, disgusting, and only relevant when found appealing by a man. Porn teaches women their bodies are inadequete, and surgeries to ‘correct’ female bodies abound.
There is nothing artistic about porn. Porn is capitalism + patriarchy, both of which are completely incapable of being creative except when dreaming up new ways to subjugate women, destroy cultures, and ruin lives—all to MAKE MONEY AND KEEP WOMEN IN SEXUAL SERVITUDE.
The fact that some people find themselves aroused by violent and sexually abusive imagery is NOT a positive benefit of pornography. It’s the opposite. The fact that you can type abuse into a search bar and be presented with a plethora of REAL WOMEN sustaining REAL INJURIES and pretend that it’s just masturbation, it’s just fantasy, is so fucking ignorant, and the cognitive dissonance it creates is the foundation of a society that can’t understand women beyond stereotypes. Men have learned and continue to teach that women are there to take care of them, as mother and whore, and women SUFFER.
Yes, porn is something that has an effect. But that effect is not ejaculation. It’s human trafficking, a global rape epidemic, and everyday suffering of human females everywhere. If that makes you come, you are a sick fuck.”
–Source.
Just a note to our porn friendly sex-positive types out there…
“How porn is implicated in rape is complex and multilayered. Clearly, not all men who use porn rape, but what porn does is create what some feminists call a “rape culture” by normalizing, legitimizing, and condoning violence against women. In image after image, violent and abusive sex is presented as hot and deeply satisfying for all parties. These messages in porn chip away at the social norms that define violence against women as deviant and unacceptable, norms that are already constantly under assault in a male-dominated society. In most mass-produced images a woman has no bodily integrity, boundaries, or borders that need to be respected. Combined, these images tell us that violation of these boundaries is what she seeks out and enjoys. This is one among many rape myths that porn disseminates to users. Embedded in porn are numerous other myths, all of which seek to present sexual assault as a consensual act rather than an act of violence.” — Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
Or as Sinfest would put it –
The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination. Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of woman as whore.
Another quote of the day? You betcha. Our culture is toxically pornsick and Andrea Dworkin realized that in 1979. 1979!! So talk about prescience –
Contemporary pornography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning: the graphic depiction of vile whores, or, in other language, sluts, cows (as in sexual cattle, sexual chattel), cunts.
The word has not changed its meaning and the genre is not misnamed. The only change in the meaning of the word is with respect to its second part, graphos: now there are cameras – there is still photography, film and video. The method of graphic depiction have increased in number and in kind: the content is the same; the meaning is the same; the purpose is the same; the status of the women depicted is the same; the sexuality of the women depicted is the same; the value of the women is the same.
[…]
The word pornography does not have any other meaning that the one cited here, the graphic depiction of the lowest whores. Whores exist to serve men sexually. Whores only exist within a framework of male sexual domination. Indeed, outside that framework, the notion of whores would be absurd and the usage of women as whores would be impossible.
Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination. The pornography itself is objective and real and central to the male sexual system. The valuation of women’s sexuality in pornography is objective and real because women are so regarded and valued. The force depicted in pornography is objective and real because force is so used against women. The debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is objective and real in that women are also debased. The uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used.[…]
The definition of women articulated systematically and consistently in pornography is objective and real in that real women exist within and must live with constant reference to the boundaries of this definition. The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “sexual representations” or “depictions of sex” emphasizes only that the valuation of women as low whores is widespread and that the sexuality of women is perceived as low and whorish in and of itself. The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “depictions of the erotic” means only that debasing of women is held to be the real pleasure of sex. As Kate Millett wrote, women’s sexuality is reduced to the one essential: “cunt… our essence, our offense”.
The idea that pornography is “dirty” originates in the conviction that the sexuality of women is dirty and is actually portrayed in pornography; that women’s bodies (especially women’s genitals) are dirty and lewd in themselves. Pornography does not, as some claim, refute the idea that female sexuality is dirty: instead, pornography embodies and exploits this idea; pornography sells and promotes it.
-Andrea Dworkin:Pornography – Men Possessing Women. pp. 200-201
“When I asked male interview subjects what they would like to do in bed, “ejaculation on a woman’s face” was most often at the top of their lists. But when I asked them what the attraction of this act was and whether it meant anything, their initial response was puzzlement. They had never given it much thought. With time for reflection, however, most came up with answers very similar to those of the pornographers I interviewed: it is about controlling women, doing something disgusting to them. It’s like spitting or urinating on them. Thus something unsettling about gender relationships mediated by pornography is revealed: on-screen male domination is sugar-coated — portrayed as causing women ecstasy — which in turn arouses further desire on the part of the male viewers: the desire to experience the pleasure derived from control and aggression.
And deep down, these viewers understand it. “The second you have an orgasm and that passion sinks out of your body, and you’re still watching the movie, you start to really see what’s going on,” one male college student said. “This is not sexy. This is not sex. This is not how I want to experience sex.
-Chyng Sun, co-director of The Price of Pleasure
“The most terrible thing about pornography is that it tells male truth. The most insidious thing about pornography is that it tells
male truth as if it were universal truth. Those depictions of women in chains being tortured are supposed to represent our deepest erotic aspirations. And some of us believe it, don’t we? The most important thing about pornography is that the values in it are the common values of men. This is the crucial fact that both the male Right and the male Left, in their differing but mutually reinforcing ways, want to keep hidden from women. The male Right wants to hide the pornography, and the male Left wants to hide its meaning. Both want access to pornography so that men can be encouraged and energized by it. The Right wants secret access; the Left wants public access.”
— Andrea Dworkin, Pornography and Grief
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