Porn

I am not saying that matrilineal heritage is a bar to wealth creation. I'm not saying that marriage caused capitalism???????? I certainly don't think that people didn't pair up before monotheistic religion. They did. The Greeks did and marriage wasn't great for women then, so it isn't religion that's been bad, it's marriage and marriage came about because of competition for resources and wealth, pre capitalist society.

If you haven't understood what I was trying to say (I apologise if I am unclear) then I don't see how you can either agree or disagree.

Did women not like sex? hmmm, why were they socialised into not liking sex? who did that and why?

Why would men get married to women who didn't like sex? Why would men go to prostitutes?

"The legitimate wife was expected to put up with all this, but herself to remain strictly chaste and faithful" Origins of family life

Marriage came about in all societies as a response to man's desire to pass on property to his progeny. The first economic class within all societies to be married were the upper classes, this isolated upper class women and banished them to the home, at the same time historical records show that these classes brought about slavery. Later with the a steady stream of slave labour, poor women, and a healthy dose of religious doctrine it is hardly surprising we end up with the Madonna/whore complex where women from certain social classes marry for purely economic reasons and they are indoctrinated to not like sex.

The bible is quite interesting and backs up other historical references. In the old testament a wife can divorce her husband for not having sex with her. The jews married but children followed the Matrilineal line, just as other civilisations would have done before personal property and the exchange of surplus commodities to create wealth.

Surely it is more about sex based oppression than class based oppression?

Pre porn culture - women's sexuality was defined by men (women don't/shouldn't like sex, they do it as a marital duty, Madonna whore complex yadda yadda.)

Porn culture - women are liberated and emancipated huzzah! Women's sexuality is still being defined by men (women like abusive, humiliating, painful, body punishing sex, Madonna whore complex yadda yadda).

Keeping women in pinnies watching adverts for food mixers feeds the capitalist machine with free labour, encouraging women to take off the pinnies and make porn films makes money for the capitalist class. Two sides of the same coin.

Yes I agree with garlic, both cultures are basically man-made and shit for women.

I said 'porn culture' rather than 'porn', as some people seem to conflate the two things. Porn ie the depiction of sex or sex-related/associated stuff for the purpose of provoking arousal is not inherently positive or negative, it's just another genre of media. The mistreatment of porn performers is a different issue from the idea that the existence of porn or the ideas portrayed in porn are socially harmful, same as the percentage of clothing on sale that is made by sweatshop labour is a different issue from whether or not women's clothing is pandering to the values of the patriarchy.

sgb, that question might only stand if we thought that porn had stopped those practices from happening

and I don't think that is the case

'cos it's kinda like saying prostitution lowers rape stats, and porn prevents ole Jim from next door from perving on my teenage daughter

not gonna happen

Genuine question: is 'porn culture' worse than than the former culture of repression and hypocrisy? You know, when rape victims were locked up in mental hospitals for being 'morally deficient' and women who became pregnant while unmarried either killed themselves outright or died from botched illegal abortions, and 'respectable' women lay back and thought of England on those few occasions when their husbands weren't raping the servants...

I think you might be right AF.

Although I would say, healthy shagging could include penetration with objects -- it's not for me to say what turns people on or not. Certainly there's a huge market for dildos and other sex toys. The problem is how this gets translated into porn memes, where you don't really see loving couples experimenting with each other but lots of women being violated in a very clinical and objectifying manner. (A lot of them seem to be, hey what kind of crazy stuff can we stick inside this girl )

IMO, the porn culture has gone too far for "ethical porn" to be a realistic solution

People want more and more horrible shit. The likes of penetration with objects isn't even about sex, is it ? That's not people enjoying healthy shagging. That's about pain, domination, objectification and humiliation.

It's too late for fair trade in the sex industry, except for a very small minority of people. The market is actually niche for ethical porn, which tells us just how much damage the widespread availabilty of porn has done to society.

I think fair trade and porn will never be natural bed fellows. I am anti-porn for very many reasons, too numerous and I think that porn exploits because all forms of paid employment exploit, where the employer (capitalist) seeks to make the maximum profit with low wages and poor conditions being a pre-condition to making profit when competition drives price.

If you share the profits and no one employs and it is modelled on anarcho-syndicalist model, that would at least be a step in the right direction?????? but why invest energy into making it ethical? it won't feed the world, it won't stop women being exploited on the Ivory Coast for 3p a day and it won't stop something like 1 child dying every minute.

The problem with porn though is that too many consumers have now been socialised to want porn that exploits and is harmful to women, will they buy ethical porn? Is there even a market for it with consumers? As you said the prevailing culture sets the tone and that culture means that people are angry, they are embittered and they lack empathy.

SGB - Not convinced there can be such a thing as ethical porn.

I think the idea of fair trade porn is interesting. It just feels like a drop in the bucket though. It's not going to reduce the amount of nasty porn out there, or mitigate against people getting addicted to it.

Mini: No one's stopping you working for those things. Other people prefer to work for animal rights organisations/funds for drug rehab/preservation of ancient buildings or whatever. We each pick our own important causes.

I would rather work towards fair trade food, fair trade clothes and all other commodities. The porn is not really in the same league as all other life sustaining commodities.

Well I've watched a lot of porn and been involved in the making of a fair bit of it, too. I worked with and around consenting adults and we generally had a lot of fun and treated each other with kindness and courtesy: certainly when I was directing stuff I made damn sure that my cast were happy to be there, properly paid, properly looked after etc. I am in favour of 'fair trade' porn and would like there to be a more active movement towards this eg makers of porn featuring real live performers to trumpet the fact that the performers are not only willing but well-treated during the making of the porn.

Jackass is awful. I don't understand how that is entertainment

I haven't really watched much porn at all other than what my ex used to insist on me watching with him which was more of the "Here is a giant penis with no other part of the man visible and a plastic looking woman doing things to it in an uninterested manner" variety, but I have seen one of the videos mentioned where items are inserted into various places - I was staying with my cousin and her boyfriend said "This is funny, look!" - it wasn't at all and both her and me were quite distressed by it, both the way it's apparently entertaining/sexy/(I don't even know what the intended audience of this video was ) to watch someone's insides literally be turned inside out and before that, the way they were moving her around as though she had no free will, as though she was dead. It was easy to forget for a second that she wasn't actually a person because the whole scenario, shooting angle, lack of interaction etc wholly suggested that she wasn't one.

:(

To anyone who honestly believes porn is harmless I will share a post I made some while back about the effect of porn on mine and my husbands lives.

I will share a little of our history as an illustration of where it can lead.

DH was a heavy porn user a few years ago and we had some serious intimacy issues. He had became so desensitised by looking at porn that he was virtually unable to have a normal sexual relationship. It took some serious couples counselling to pull us through that period. I sat down with DH one afternoon and went through exactly what I didn't like about his addiction. We looked at the lives of the performers and the risks they faced. We also looked honestly at the impact it had already had on our lives and our relationship.
DH decided that porn was not worth losing what we had over and sought professional help to deal with his side of the issue.
What we both learned is that the porn had replaced healthy lust and sex with a warped substitute that killed the intimacy we had. I don't totally blame DH as I had always been fine with his porn viewing (as I had been with my ex's). But we learned the hard way what it can do to a loving relationship.

DH no longer views porn as harmless, and no longer watches it as in his own words to a friends teenage son "it messes with what you think is right and normal and almost stopped me functioning as a normal bloke in the bedroom"

I agree with anyfucker. Fine when people don't understand what porn means and what is the normal for porn. But there does come a stage when it is wilful ignorance. But of course each situation would have to be judged individually

I think that as soon as you look at someone as an object, then you dehumanise them. The fact that viewing porn does that is the root of the problem.

As soon as you start to look at another person, without engaging with their humanity, then you cease to be in any kind of a human relationship. It's how slave owners viewed slaves etc.

All the other stuff about money and coercion is built on the lack of humanity

there does come a point, IMO, when being "uneducated" is no longer a valid excuse

it's a very individual line to draw though