straight pornography is male gay in sensibility

It was me who said that all men had seen porn at least once. I can't find wheer I said it now though

I do think you would be extremely hard pressed to find a man (or woman) who has never ever seen even a clip or image of something pornograhpic ever.

Even if you reduce it to just pornogrpahic films, I think you'd struggle to find many men who have not had unsusually isolated upbringings who have never ever seen any. And espeically if you narrow it to people under 40, say.

I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that no-one in our society escapes exposure to this stuff. Look at the fact that coke was posting references to scat porn on childrens facebooks, that certain magazines and newspapers are put at childresn eye level, that hugh heffner is a household name etc. It's everywhere.

Sammyuni wrote - "the single largest group of internet porn consumers is reported to be children aged 12 to 17".

How depressing. For them, porn seems to have become equated with learning about sex. The mind boggles at the implied creation of all those 12-year-old misogynists?

I wonder if these teenage users of porn ever stop to think "is watching porn online necessary to a good sex life?". Do they just passively consume porn, with brains in neutral, assuming, through ignorance, peer pressure and marketing that they must look at all this porn.

Millions of people had good sex lives before all that porn arrived on the Internet, didn't they?

I assure you i am not admonishing anyone

Max Hardcore is not the norm of porn at all he is branch of it and i think he is in jail now and from what i have heard of American prisons he is probably getting as good as he gave.

I am not defending people who watched Max or anything just saying that what he did was disgusting and the people who watched his stuff are no better than he is but his stuff is extreme and most pornography is not like that, so most people who watch pornography were most likely not watching his stuff.

I am talking about the 'normal' (i say normal as in normal for the industry) stuff the ones they churn out the most which people will have watched the most.

Excuse the first comment i made i read the quote wrong thought it said all men.

Not all men have seen porn it's presumptuous to accuse any group of people of all doing something. But most men have seen pornography in fact most people (both men and women) have seen pornography especially children/teens.

The average child sees their first porn by the age of just 11. Between 60 and 90 per cent of under-16s have viewed hardcore online pornography, and the single largest group of internet porn consumers is reported to be children aged 12 to 17.

www.psychologies.co.uk/articles/are-teenagers-hooked-on-porn/

Also most men don't hate women even those that watch pornography (also there are different types out there not all are of the same material.) i think their simple don't empathise at all they see it as just acting and that most of the women in pornography are not forced to be there so they just think that if they hated it then they shouldn't do it.

People uses reasons not to feel guilty about things all the time, when people buy chocolate they are not thinking of the exploited cocoa farmers or when they buy clothes (cheap/brand names) they know that for some of them children are being made to make them but that is not in their thoughts when they are picking up the product.

Yes. yes it does

Does this help with your analogy?

Yes exactly.

And as a group, and often without even realising/thinking about it (which is an effect of a sexist culture in itself), men are consuming a product with is implicitly and often explicitly degrading to women and abusive etc. So as a group, and with this product, we have a problem.

In an ideal world we could all have access to ethical happy porn, but that's not where we are now. I agree with whoever upthread said that in the situation we have now, then the only option is to not use any, on the basis that it's all the same industry.

A really crap analogy might be to, um, eating eggs. So you have the desire to eat eggs. Big business resonds to that with caged birds to maximise profit. In eating the eggs you are complicit to the torture of these animals. So then you have free range eggs. the difference here is that if it were paralleled with porn, there would be no independent bodies checking that the eggs really were free range, and people could sell caged eggs as free range wihtout any recourse. in that case, i guess all you can do is avoid eggs altogether. Or keep your own chickens?

No, but there is a general culture of misogyny. The entire concept of plastic surgey is based on misogyny, for example. So individual men don't "hate" women per se, but the culture is woman-hating.

"Are a lot of people finding it difficult to believe that men watching porn might really mean it? That they enjoy watching women hurt and degraded and prostituted and turned into sexual objects for their use?"

Yes, I find this hard to accept. It may be true for compulsive porn consumers, but I do not believe that is true of every man who has seen some porn. I don't believe that most men fundamentally hate women.

that's true ISNT. If it was, say, (unpaid) people in your living room, aquaintances, people you'd met at a party (grasping at straws here!) it'd be less of a problem, perhaps? It's the industry that's the problem. Although I think even the first scenario might be open to abuse too.

For me, with this, what I think is the problem is the portrayal of women across all types of media, which is reflected in porn. So the fact that more and more extreme things are becoming mainstream. Plus the huge powerful expoitative nature of teh mainstream porn industry. Plus the fact that porn is seeping into society, that children are exposed to it younger and younger, that it is so freely available. And not just films - images of women that reference the porn industry are everywhere, for children to see from when they are tiny.

The idea that some people would want to watch some other people having sex, is not for me, a problem in itself. it is how that desire is being met that is the problem.

Yes that was what I was getting at - girls and women didn't used to watch porn, what is the effect of themn watching it now, and nastier stuff, and increasingly young ages. I am not surprised by the result of that research about girls who watch porn and sexual experiences.

Isn't showing porn a grooming thing? As was mentioned on the coke/scat porn thread? the problem is that girls and women are not just being groomed by individual abusive men, but from all sorts of quarters.

On the "But porn isn't a necessity. It's not a necessity to watch women being prostituted on film. If people wouldn't be happy for their husbands/partners to pop down to the local brothel to watch the action, why should porn be acceptable? "

I suppose that I am coming from it from teh perspective that most men first encounter porn with their friends at school. In that situation, where they are immature and there is peer pressure, combined with the fact that most teens have not got fully developed empathy/altruism type things going on, and you have a situation where most boys will go along with it and watch it. So by the time they are men, they are in a situation where porn is completely normal, and has been their companion through their years growing up etc. So it's just like a normal background thing. That if they saw for the first time ever aged 40 with wives and female children etc, they might well be horrified.

So when wives etc express disgust at them viewing porn, they are as the fact that it's degrading etc has never even crossed their minds. Becuase they started using it when they were very immature.

I'd agree with your last point Dittany - I think watching it screws up notions of "normal" sexual behaviour for both sexes.
Ariel Levy made the point in Female Chauvinist Pigs that young girls feel sex is something they perform for the benefit of boys, rather something they experience as an exxpression of their own sexuality.

"There isn't a class of women who it is OK to treat like this"

That's true, I'm desensitized to that too I suppose. I do sort of think soft porn is okay at least, but when I get my head around the fact here's a camera crew, and a tea lady, and a director and a bunch of other people right there in the background giving directions while she's lying there spreadeagled... and then, when I think about my own sexual experiences, I have to start admitting there's something not quite right.
Then when you factor in the economic side and wonder why it is that it's usually men behind the camera you begin to see this as a definite 'woman problem'.

Sakura yes we had that CSI conversation recently, there is something really disturbing about all these (usually) american detective shows and the whole representation of women in them.

I watched something the other day which is a bit crap, it was the last episode, and the storyline was just really openly and lovingly rendering various rape fantasies. It's just unbelievable and bizarre and a real concern I think.

Wukter's point is correct - all of the men we know will have seen porn, almost certainly more than once.

And of course women watch it as well.

Could this be doing something to women in the wider world as well?

To answer your question, Dittany, I think it's hard to accept because statistically we know that the men in our lives watch porn.
It's difficult to accept that the man you go to bed with, in your vulnerable state, gets off on degradation. Rather he only watches happy people having happy sex.