Math Magazine and 'good' porn.

I can see where you're coming from with the issue of a workable compromise which achieves tiny incremental improvements, versus the moral high ground which gets us nowhere (and the analogy with Blairite labour versus Corbyn is well put - while Labour fights among themselves over this one, the conservatives are going to destroy the NHS and education, and no-one will even be trying to stop them because they're preoccupied with whose socialism is the right one...)

But I think it's a huge step from "as a pragmatic strategy, let's get the kids I work with talking about consent in their real life sexual relationships, rather than worrying about what's on their phones" (though I still worry that the latter may be undoing all the good work you do on the former) to "and therefore I'm okay with it morally". I think you're right - we all do things we're a bit uncomfortable with because... "reasons". As a single parent whose income is not huge, I've (in the past) bought quite a lot of stuff from Sports Direct. With the latest wave of revelations, I finally steeled myself to by DS's latest pair of footie boots from a more reputable store, and god, the financial hit! We all of us do stuff we know we shouldn't. And giving it up usually comes at a cost (double the Sports Direct cost, in this case). But for me personally, the thing is there is no absolute need for porn. I can have a sexual fantasy life without it, it is not necessary to me in that sense.

It's not so much Frodo and Sam I worry about, it's the foursome... (Have you discovered any of the polyamory on AO3 yet? It's like trying to read a verbal description of a game of twister, only with genitals instead of hands and feet. And about as erotic as trying to disentangle three beds' worth of sheets and duvet covers when you get them out the tumble dryer).

Thanks for that Buffy really interesting stuff and you pull together the intellectual arguments. My background is political rather than sociological so please excuse my adaptation.

So "Choosing happy doesn't necessarily mean you've chosen something liberating, " It's a bit like the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, you might not like it but it will be to your benefit (liberating?) in the long run and be of benefit to wider society. The people might not like it but it is in there best interest. But I like being happy - so shallow.

You suggest the "not all porn" argument has to "neutralise the broader arguments that can be made about inequality generally," and to a large extent I agree. But it comes down to idealism vs realism. The left is plagued by this argument. Better New Labour than the Tories. Should the left remain pure but out of power? People on the left have to abandon some principles to make some gains don't they? Or are they just Tory apologists?

Is it better to make improvements to something bad (but enjoyable?) than to call for an idealistic but hopeless ban? The "not all porn" argument would suggest less people will be harmed in a less severe way but harm will still occur. Can you live with the compromise? I understand lots of you will say no.

I admit my "not all porn" argument is not idealistic and may result in some harm. It will contribute to society's body discipline of both men and women. This is not good, but it's not totally bad either. You could gain tiny incremental steps.

An idealistic opposition to porn moves nobody anywhere, idealistically pure and morally secure but in a practical sense useless. One could say 100% of nothing. While I am scrabbling around in the dirt for a little bit of something, and something is better than nothing.

I know and respect the view that if something is wrong it should always be opposed absolutely. Any harm to any one is always bad. I have spent a long time putting forward that argument myself. I just think it is impractical - for me in my life.

This is where I link back to my posts about my work. Small gains. We keep positive by saying "you can't change the world but you can make small gains." Any little victory moves us forward.

The "not all porn" argument put into practice would be a small gain. When I look at bigger issues FGM, I can't get enthusiastic about banning porn. There are bigger, better fights. FGM makes NO one happy. (I'm not putting forward the 'people starving somewhere' argument).

I like being happy (checks make-up in the mirror), I am aware I am being manipulated (need to loose some weight) bottom line I choose practical with the hope of small gains - ethical porn?????

I post with trepidation because I know a moral high ground response is very easy to type and I am being very honest about the compromises in this argument.

Now, I need to decide who I will vote for in the Labour leadership contest and then find out what that naughty Frodo Baggins has been up to with Sam.

Wise words from a very smart woman about "lesbian" porn:

"The kick of girl-girl porno lies partly in its catering to the fantasy of violating the privacy of lesbians, of making even sex between women - something quite threatening to male sexual prerogative-serve a male agenda; the other, tacit element is the kick of seeing “normal”girls made to emulate homosexual activity. The assumption is that homosexual activity is repulsive, and that therefore the models are disgusted by it and endure it under some compulsion - whether the compulsion of money, force of personality, or physical threat.

Pictures of real lesbians - at Gay Pride rallies, for example - kissing, necking and flirting are often considered disgusting and ugly by the same men who enjoy girl-girl fantasy porn.

Lesbians in the public world who kiss, hold hands, or otherwise behave like a sexually intimate couple (in a restaurant, in a park, at a movie) have often been subjected to abuse, threats and violence from hetero men - the same men who constitute the market for ever-popular girl-girl porno."

-Catharine A. Mackinnon, Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, (edited by Christine Stark & Rebecca Whisnant), “Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution & Pornography.” 2004. (p. 198)

Can you say more about what you mean by a 'female superior position sex act'?

Perhaps the women are of superior beauty?

Well, anyway, I don't believe the women in mainstream porn are in any way, shape or form dominant, or even assertive. The submissive pout of the women in the porny pictures I occasionally see on advertisements for porn and the like does not look like they're advertising femdom/malesub there!

In fact I wonder how we can discuss pornography unless we've seen a fair amount of it!

Well, it is of course difficult, but there's no avoiding it. You can't do unethical things just so you know for sure exactly how unethical they are.
I've read more descriptions of porn than I would, in retrospect, like to have read, and they give a rather detailed picture.

You are right about not all porn showing violence against women, but I have read an article on so-called "lesbian porn", which apparently looks rather vanilla, but behind the scenes there's actresses who are not lesbian, do not know how to pleasure a woman and cause pain instead, and of course all have to pretend they are enjoying themselves. It's ugly.

So even if it looks nice and fun, that doesn't mean it is.

In the posting I just made I missed out some thought about pornography which shows a woman being enthusiastic about sex actually being quite insidious, and not as positive as I implied. The issue would be that the woman would be shown as having motivations out of male fantasy, something very unrealistic compared with most people's lives. So there wouldn't be any coercion or violence involved, but the woman herself would be presented as eagerly having sex with a man outside the bounds of, shall we say, a trusting and mutually respectful relationship. So I'm not sure we can say that take away the male domination and everything would be fine: we have to think about whether the people in porn are being sexual in a way that respects themselves.

I think "female superior" just means a position for penis-in-vagina sex when the woman is on top. It doesn't necessarily imply "male inferior" at the same time!

But I think there's a kind of pornography where women are shown as enthusiastic, even dominating, participants. Not necessarily to the point where the men are being forced into something; it might show a man as initially naive, but he soon gets the idea.

Or maybe I'm imagining it, not knowing much about pornography. In fact I wonder how we can discuss pornography unless we've seen a fair amount of it! I have the impression that it's a pretty varied field, not limited to sadistic portrayals the way people here often talk about it. But it might be seen as disloyal to the cause to say "Not all pornography shows women being harmed". That would suggest that we have to get in and dissect what pornography is about, and what the underlying motivation is, and that's an uncomfortable thing to contemplate.

I suppose it's convenient to the argument of the "pro -sex" brigade to pretend being opposed to porn and prostitution is the same as being anti- sex. (Stupid phone)

Lass in terms of stickies - as I said previously you have to choose them carefully, if the list is too long people stop listening.

Not quite what I meant but I suppose it's convenient to the argument of the "pro -sex" brigade to pretend being opposed to porn and prostitution is the same as being anti-Semitism.

And female, in porn, is submissive, accepting, opening, passive recipient of this violently dominant form of male sexuality....

Except most 'common' commercial porn features female-superior position sex acts, not exclusively male-superior ones. You are using language that better describes a porn sub-set- 'submission' (light-weight BDSM).

Lass in terms of stickies - as I said previously you have to choose them carefully, if the list is too long people stop listening. Mine are:
No means no
FGM - in that it must be stopped
Women's right to choose

Thanks Italian I want to hear you views and I will be forwarding them to the people I work with. Using views expressed here will allow me get the kids to listen to them without expressing them as mine.

I will have to be careful with this bit so please allow me some leeway.

It is interesting discussing morality as some young people are very moral and religious (with a capital M, IYKWIM) and they condem porn. As a general rule I find some of their attitudes towards women significantly more challenging than they stereotypical porn obsssessed teenage boy.

My concern about rape culture is where it is firmly embedded in wider cultural issues.

Moral judgment very much depends where you are standing. Avoiding moral judgments is common practice in most counselling, mentoring, youth work.

Thank you for writing that xenophile. It's one of those posts that made me go YES. Captured something that's been niggling me perfectly.

What Lass said.

We make moral decisions every day, and yet it only seems to be a problem when morality infringes on someone's desire to harm women, be it in the production of porn or in the business of prostituting women. Then morality is rewritten as prudery and/or frigidity. It is amoral to perpetuate an industry where the vast majority of it is intrinsically harmful, not just to the women involved in its production, but also in perpetuating rape culture and harmful beliefs around women's and girls sexuality.

You equate a zero tolerance politic on porn with abstinence only sex ed. These things are not equivalents

That should be a stickie really. This idea that if you are not cool with porn, you are some sort of religious zealot who only approves of sex within marriage.

I don't really get why avoiding moral judgements is so important unless again you are using morality in a very limited sense of the word.

Bitof "We avoid moral judgments as they just stop sharing and some dialogue is better thasn none. This has now filtered into all areas of my life."

I am not sure exactly what your professional role is (nor do I expect you to say so on here) but I do hope you have support in your job to help you, especially if the work if filtering into your home life in a way you perceive as negative. I do genuinely mean that. My work influences my life a lot, but then I love my job and I love pretty much all aspects of it so I know that is very lucky.

And I will also say I am sorry if I am telling you how to do your job (which I am not even sure what it is), I should only really do what I came on here to do, express my views on porn. Exactly how things work out in your job are not something I can really understand so i will keep quiet! On this bit

" I do not promote porn with my young perople." I never said (or thought for a moment) that you did. Honestly.

"I'm sorry if you feel I am not doing my job properly." bitof sorry that was below he belt, I apologise.

Many of the kids my mum taught were absolutely lovely too - messed up by their home situation and poverty and lack of opportunity, but lovely.

And you have my admiration for doing a job like that. A friend of mine (who was tiny - about 5 foot and 7 stone) worked in a pupil referral unit - the physical courage it took to do her job (and yours too I'm guessing) was something I couldn't even come close to.

Oh, you are talking about that kind of teenager ... yeah, I can imagine that telling them how porn harms women won't help.

Though perhaps the girls won't be so envious of female porn stars anymore if you give them a list of exactly what damage those acts of violence do, physically. Pretty sure anal prolaps and incontinence are somewhere on the list. Not very glamorous.

Or give them a link to AO3 and hope they'll be exposed to some different ideas of what is erotic and what is not ... though I suppose they already equate sex with violence and won't even read anything vanilla.

I just have a real problem with people speaking in confrontational statements " I will not tolerate this". It's cos if I spoke like that at work I would get thumped.

Work is work, private life is private life. Confrontational statements have served me very well in deciding which kind of behaviour I tolerate in men and which I don't. Sure, they won't change, but in my experience, adult people hardly ever change, anyway,

You equate a zero tolerance politic on porn with abstinence only sex ed. These things are not equivalents. Porn inherently harms women. Sex does not (though it could be argued that PiV inherently harms all women who do not want to get pregnant at the moment), so safe sex is not a less unethical alternative to unsafe sex, it is ethically neutral.

Besides, I very much doubt that those boys you work with can be persuaded to watch violence-free porn wherein at least there is no violence against women visible any easier than they can be persuaded to stop porn use, period. They have already learnt to eroticise violence, and are probably more likely to turn to erotic literature with those elements than switch to porn where the violence is not visible on screen. The girls to whom I talked about their preference for rape-as-romance certainly weren't open to reading vanilla erotica, but probably also watched rape-porn.

As a general rule. We question the kids "what would you say to someone who said xxxxxxxxx?" (One of the reasons I am seeking opinions).
"If it was your sister then ....."
We avoid moral judgments as they just stop sharing and some dialogue is better thasn none. This has now filtered into all areas of my life.

I have this real issue in my head. If I do know sites I think are ethical I can hardly give them a photocopied handout. Blurgh, yuck, yuck, yuck.

I do work with girls and as Buffy would say they are well and truly buying into the patriarchy. The girls often are harder on other women than the boys. They admire porn stars "big tits all that money!"

So back to my argument - they use porn so can we improve their reality. Although I am fully aware non of them buy organic food.

P.s loads of the kids are lovely and sweet and very, very vulnerable.

Sorry last post a bit of a rant.

Italian - I do a really difficult emotionally stressful job with real elements of personal physical risk involved in it and yes I get paid, and yes we joke. I'm sorry if you feel I am not doing my job properly.

Do you really honestly think we haven't tried those arguments?
Do you really honestly believe it's that easy?
Do you really honestly think we wouldn't do this if it had any chance of working?
Do you really honestly think we make life more difficult when we could just say that?

I struggle with issues I can not begin (legally) to discuss. I am hoping MN can give me some perspective because it's easy to get lost in their world. Which is why I have personal and professional issues with porn which I am exploring at the moment. And before anyone says anything I do not promote porn with my young perople.

I am trying to be realistic "just say no" is so far from my reality to be laughable.