Article about feminism and porn.

Quentin

My absolute favourite was when that twat said what about if women loved being prostitutes, had a really high status in the community, health and safety regulations, and were admired and feted throughout?

Then would it be okay?

I love it when men do thought experiments on porn threads. It's my favourite.

Don't worry Pooch, no offense taken!

Assuming it is impossible to immediately band porn

Meant 'ban' porn. Obvs.

Pooch can I just say I do agree with what you and a lot of feminists say. The misogyny of porn is a problem, but we are now in a situation where porn extends beyond the issue of patriarchy. Maybe a feminist forum is not the appropriate forum to discuss that, and for that I apologise.

When I said feminists 'want a different form of sexual exploitation' I meant that sometimes the focus seems to be ending one particular type of porn but not others. Why not put forward suggestion for outlawing it all? Because surely that is the only way that you will address the stuff that is so harmful to women and girls.

My suggestion would be:

1. Assuming it is impossible to immediately band porn, keeping all porn to certain licensed sites which are required to keep documentary evidence of all participants ages and consent. Any who do not comply will risk a jail sentence with those responsible registered as sex offenders.

2. Blocking access to all children by imposing a credit card wall.

3. Criminalizing video and pictorial sexting. It is the only way to ensure none of it ends up in cyberspace. If adults wish to create images of themselves that is fine, but as soon as it is communicated or uploaded it becomes an offence because it is a form of unlicensed pornography.

This might sound hardline, but it's the only way.

It is horrendous as is how young children are viewing it and boys start to see girls in this way. Last summer a friend of mine was just walking in the Broadway which contains the Tube station local to our school on her way home eating an ice cream when a group of boys who were about 13/14 at most in their school uniforms started making violently sexual comments at her clearly gleaned from pornography, finding it hilarious of course. In this sense pornography has made girls and women objects and any act can be sexualised into something boys and men have seen in pornography and used to degrade. That's without the kinds of things many boys often expect and try to pressure girls into and the fact degrading treatment of women is considered "normal" sex by many. I can empathise with not being able to get such awful things out of your head, knowing this is what we're being bombarded with and how women and girls are seen due to it.

Sorry, I just looked back and my reply to you looked a bit snippy, mostly - wasn't meant to be! You are very right about the various forms of misogyny...I quite like a game of spot-the-misogynist - sadly it's all too easy to get a full house

I know

Last time I discussed porn on here and I was doing a bit of reading about what porn looks like these days, I couldn't get some of the stuff I'd seen out of my head. And that was just the titles and the descriptions.

I'm probably too sensitive to language such as that and there's nothing wrong with raising it to show how misogynistic and degrading pornography is. That such terms are relatively used in titles to garner views is incredibly disturbing.

Yes, mostly, it's that poster.

Possibly it always is. I do wonder sometimes.

In fairness, nolove, it was me that opened the door to the nasty language. In hindsight, an error, but I hadn't yet realised.

if this negates the misogyny inherent in it and damage it does to all women and girls.

I am negating no such thing.

Definitely time to disengage.

How bizarre.

Not really. With the odd exception it is in the nature of human beings to exploit and mistreat others. That's just what they do. If you give human beings power they abuse it - women and men. Men have raped and killed and abused and enslaved because they have had the power to do so. Power is an intoxicant. Furthermore, it is often unconscious, so the person crushing the other feels nothing while the person being crushed feels everything.

The only antidote to power is love, and love is rare. I don't mean erotic or familial love, but pure selfless love. You can only attain that level of love through extreme suffering - by submitting yourself to the abuse of others. Or at least, suffering can have two possible consequences.

1. The suffering becomes so great that the individual wishes to transfer that pain into the other. This is the definition of evil. You find it in child molesters, serial killers etc.

2. The individual ego is destroyed through the extremity of suffering and then love becomes possible.

Indeed Hedgehog. Along with the persistence in stating some pornography is produced by women as if this negates the misogyny inherent in it and damage it does to all women and girls.

NoLove - comes from the same place as his refusal to respect Pooch's boundaries, and his insistence that feminists are bad people (and the obvious fact that he's now getting angry now he's been called out on it). In summary: misogyny. Dressed up in all sorts of faux-intellectual language with elaborate case studies (not to mention a strange fixation with lesbian porn), but till misogyny.

Perhaps it's just me but there's something a little odd about your persistence in using this kind of language.

1. It was in inverted commas.
2. I was using it in response to Pooch who first used it.
3. I used it to emphasise the vileness of this kind of stuff.

I don't think feminists do want an end to sexual exploitation, they just want to have a different kind of sexual exploitation.

How bizarre.

So, what I am saying is that all porn - whether that's 'barely legal slut gets abused'

Perhaps it's just me but there's something a little odd about your persistence in using this kind of language. I find it abhorrent. I can possibly understand it when once making a point about how misogynistic pornography is but there seems to be no reason for you to keep repeating this.

I don't think feminists do want an end to sexual exploitation, they just want to have a different kind of sexual exploitation.

I know what women are capable of. They're not as different from men as you think. Many human beings are vile shits I'm afraid, and they need controlling. But now we have moral anarchy and it'll only get worse. Read 'Animal Fram' and 'Lord of the Flies'.

Just wait and see how the revolution turns out.

My grandson had a sex education class this week - he's six .

Ah, Pooch, you've inspired me to do an AS. It's that poster. The one that thinks class analysis and identity politics are synonymous. Ooookaaaay then. (Backs away slowly, musing on the interesting point that Pooch says she doesn't want further interaction, immediately to be met by a demand for said interaction. Boundaries, sir, boundaries. As in respect them).

To explain a bit further, one of those women might be a lot older than the other - or one might have a learning difficulty, or be an employee of the other. There can still be a power imbalance in other words.

And therefore, because such a power imbalance is always possible then any sexual exchange that takes place outside an immediate, empathetic, relational context (and the production and exchange of such imagery is definable as such because the two parties are not present to each other) can lead to commodification, abuse and degradation.

So, what I am saying is that all porn - whether that's 'barely legal slut gets abused' or the two women sexting is wrong. Not only is feminist porn an oxymoron, but no reduction of a human being to abstracted sexual imagery can be anything other than detrimental to sexual culture.

Do you agree or not?

So in a sense you're saying some forms of porn (the gay women exchanging videos) are fine and others (teen slut get abused) are not, yes?

NO! That's what YOU'RE saying! I am saying nothing of the sort.

I've now ASed your name, and I understand. Yes, you may be against porn, but you're also against feminists, so...

I'm really off this time, this is irritating me and I don't think it's going anywhere.

Porn is not two lesbians deciding to film themselves having lovely consensual sex and then sharing that with their close friends and knowing it never goes further than that. It's "teen sluts get their arses smashed".

I disagree. 'Teen sluts get their arses smashed' is indeed patriarchal - but it does not follow from that the lesbians sharing their videos are doing so in a way that does not involve any exploitation or objectification. Why would it necessarily?

So in a sense you're saying some forms of porn (the gay women exchanging videos) are fine and others (teen slut get abused) are not, yes? So surely that is an argument for a form of feminist porn or whatever else you'd like to call it (if the definition of porn is visual media designed to sexually stimulate)?

I don't want anyone to explain to me how they see porn. I'm just explaining how I see porn. My questions are rhetorical.

To clarify, I'm against all porn by the way. Literally all of it. I'd ban the lot.