Bbc article about filmed rape on pornhub

We should do both and remember that educated people still bully and harass others.

We don’t need to protect our daughters. We need to educate our sons

Sounds blissful, bd67th. Yes please.

We know from experience that, contrary to Robert Heinlein's idea that a scarcity of women would make men value us, a scarcity of women increases male sexual violance against women. First Nations women tell us this and we know that in places like India where sex-selective abortion of female foeti and female infanticide are rife and men outnumber women, men cooperate to gang rape women and girls. Thought experiment aka thinking the unthinkable: imagine if women did abort their sons en masse, such that within a generation only 5% of people were male? What would the effect be on sexual violence?

• If men made up 5% of people instead of 50%, they'd not be able to gang up on women to rape us.
• If you were on the train and 95% of passengers were women, you'd worry a lot less about some arsehole wanking down your leg.
• You could go running at night, knowing that 95% of passersby would be female and gang rape wasn't a risk.
• Most tradespeople would be female out of necessity, so getting a female plumber etc would be easy.
• The porn industry either wouldn't exist or would be radically different, with the abuse of women no longer featuring.
• Prostitution would end through lack of demand.
• Rape would no longer be a tool of warfare as most armed forces personnel would be female.
• If your car broke down, you'd not fear rape.
• You could go for a drink without men chatting you up and groping you.

We're always reacting, never ripping the problem out at its roots.

The root of the problem is that men are bigger and stronger than us and can force us to be pregnant against our will, and as long as they exist as more than a few percent of humans they will use the structural fear that women have of rape to oppress us all. The only way to resolve this is morally unacceptable to most people: the sex-selective abortion of boys, which women, understandably, won't do, so we're stuck.

@Antibles “We have to ditch them when we discover them using porn.“

100% this! Once the negative effects from porn use accrue to the users of it things will change. If porn is a one way ticket to a lifetime of loneliness, dying alone, a wrecked family life and erectile dysfunction things will change.

Totally agree. It's unbelievably depressing. Men just want to see naked women. They are gorging on the unbelievably plentiful trough of internet porn, they're totally unable to control their use of it anymore, they're making themselves sick with it, and they're vomiting on us. I've said similar before, I know, but that's how I feel about it.

I think this is part of what the sex positivity movement really failed to grasp. And it's weird, because most other societies and cultures have recognised that the sex drive can get really out of control and be very destructive. That's why it's always been the subject of so many boundaries and taboos.

Essentially, all of a sudden there was the possibility of pretty reliable ability to control having babies, along with this sense of all boundaries of the past being oppressive and unhealthy. It's why the 60s and 70s produced some things that people look at now and think were clearly crazy, like young teenage girls dating much older men - many fairly normal but liberal people thought, well, if you are old enough to be interested in sex, than nature is saying you are ready for sex. And it would be the prudishness of the past to stop you!
That looks incredibly naive now, but we are still naive about sex more generally. Where do we really teach young people about how to manage their sexual urges, or how do we help them learn to redirect them? Most cultures have some way to deal with this problem, even if it's not a great solution. But all we really offer now is porn, and we make out like its a sort of healthy release.
With the average age of kids first seeing porn is 11, these kids are growing up without ever learning how to manage their feelings. Any form of addiction that starts in the teen years tends to affect brain development and personality development of the individual in a profound way, and it's not clear that it is possible to reverse those changes.
There is a whole cultural sort of knowledge, or set of bounddaries and knowledge, that we no longer have as tools. We tend not to teach any kind of self-disapline about the sexual body, and not much about the body at all - we talk about diets and clean eating etc but I would not say those create a healthy relationship with food. In terms of sex, we don't value it either - we don't hold up people who live clearly well controlled, thoughtful sex lives, or who put their energies into other things and remain celibate, as people to admire. Not only is there not really shame about porn use, if anything people are embarrassed not to be sexually active.
I think change in this area will have to offer some new ways of thinking about this for young people. The boomer generation decided the old ways were no good and threw them out, but clearly what they replaced them with is inadequate.

I think a substantial proportion of men simply think that being female is degrading by its very nature becuase we are the ones that are penetrated.

That goes back to Ancient Rome, if not before.

We have to ditch them when we discover them using porn.

That's a good start. It doesn't help the women whose rapes are already wank fodder online. It doesn't prevent men from raping women now, filming it, and uploading the footage.

I'm now afraid to date or even be alone with a man or group of men because of what they could do to me. In a male-dominated job, this is not fun. I'm scared to have the plumber or sparky round for the same reason. This isn't a phobia though: a phobia isn't justified by reality whereas my fear of men is.

We have to ditch them when we discover them using porn. Be the change we want to see, as someone said to me on a previous thread. It gives the message that it's unacceptable and brings back something of the shame surrounding it that is fast vanishing.

Individually, treat it the same way we would treat cheating. Cheating still happens of course but it's socially unacceptable.

bd67th yes. Where civilisation breaks down, women are raped in pretty short order.

Short of birth striking (a deliberate and principled decision to refuse to bear children, in this case to refuse to bring a daughter into a world where she will treated like dirt and refuse to bear a son who will likely become part of the problem), I don't know what the answer is.

Even then, if we birth strike en masse, they'll take away our contraceptives (see Romania) and ban abortion (see Romania) and rape us (see the whole of human history).

bd67th yes. Where civilisation breaks down, women are raped in pretty short order.

I think a substantial proportion of men simply think that being female is degrading by its very nature becuase we are the ones that are penetrated. That's why they still reject anything strongly associated with femininity in their culture (or get weird fetishes about it).

Also explains language for being a bad situation: you're fucked, buggered, stuffed, shafted. Someone putting their penis up you is a very clearly victory for them and a defeat for you. Humiliating. Explains homophobia too.

I think that victory-defeat mentality towards women and sex is a significant aspect of many men's psyche. The degradation and objectification of women in porn reflects this perfectly.

Another number of years on, his porn addiction was uncovered. So I don't have any faith in that conversation. They'll do it anyway, as "every man does it", "there's nothing wrong with it, because there's no physical interaction", "What you don't know won't hurt you", "Its private", and all the other usual excuses. Bottom line - they enjoy watching it. And until it's seen as the unsavoury and damaging activity it is, most men don't care.

Totally agree. It's unbelievably depressing. Men just want to see naked women. They are gorging on the unbelievably plentiful trough of internet porn, they're totally unable to control their use of it anymore, they're making themselves sick with it, and they're vomiting on us. I've said similar before, I know, but that's how I feel about it.

Most people don't think it's ok for women to be degraded and abused.

A substantial proportion of men do at some level, but they know that admitting to it publicly is unwise. It takes very little for that "decent guy" to become a gang rapist. A quick review of what the Russian Army did to hundreds of thousands of German women and girls at the end of WW2 proves this.

I don't think there is much women can do to tackle this tbh - women having red lines on porn when dating will either mean they struggle for dates (possibly worth it but puts lots of pressure on individual women) or men lie and don't even think it's wrong to do so.

What worked in the past was that other men by and large thought that the men who went to dodgy cinemas and porn shops to get porn were sad or weirdos who resorted to porn because they couldn't get women. Out of the choice of having a relationship with an actual woman or using porn, the answer was always the relationship and if not you were considered very odd. I don't think that's the case any more.

goosefoot brilliant post

fritz. Solidarity fist bump.

Do people not have these conversations prior to getting too involved in a relationship??

Back in the day, when we started going out, it never occurred to me that the nice guy I was seeing would be heavily into porn, because afaik at that stage it was a mag passed around teenaged boys until you got a gf type thing. So no, no conversation was had.

Down the lie a few years, after he discovered internet porn, yes, the conversation was had. Promises were made about not using it anymore.

Another number of years on, his porn addiction was uncovered. So I don't have any faith in that conversation. They'll do it anyway, as "every man does it", "there's nothing wrong with it, because there's no physical interaction", "What you don't know won't hurt you", "Its private", and all the other usual excuses. Bottom line - they enjoy watching it. And until it's seen as the unsavoury and damaging activity it is, most men don't care. So many good points raised on here, but I still feel no further forward dealing with it as a society. Scary stuff for our daughters to contend with.

Move the goalposts, why don't you? You asked what the wider beliefs that enable porn are, so I told you. That that truth is unpopular is neither here nor there

They aren't really though. Most people don't think it's ok for women to be degraded and abused.
That raises the question why it's become something that is so pervasive even though people explicitly don't think that's ok. What is it about people's knowledge or interaction with the media, or their feelings or ideas about sex, that got us to this place?

Some of this stuff is shocking enough that just exposing it might wake some people up, but if we don't look at what changed, it's unlikely that we will be as successful in changing people's thinking.

Part of it is probably the technological change, and that's important. Suddenly the availability of por completely changed. Easy to get, anytime, no one has to know. No ordering brown packages from the back of a magazine. No pretending to look at the sports magazines being eyed by the guy in the convenience store. No slipping into the theatre with other dodgy men or even going to the video store.

What people didn't realise was how quickly, with this kind of exposure to thousands of images, the images stop working. (That's been a failure of understanding in the sexual revolution really, the inability to predict or comprehend that as soon as you make something sexually normative, it first of all becomes expected, and then promptly loses much of its erotic power.)
But this began happening at a hugely accelerated rate with the introduction of internet porn, so the only answer from the point of view of the producers and sellers, the people making the money, was to keep pushing the limits. This actually seems to have alienated some older men, but not so much the younger ones who grey up, cut their teeth sexually, on this kind of material. In a real way many of them are an audience of addicts, and like many active addicts they don't have the insight to recognise it.
The supporting element has been the sex positive movement which is the modern expression of the sexual revolution. Anything is ok as long as there is consent, completely individualistic, sex is transactional. And everyone, even a lot of people who really hate the porn element, are scared to challenge a lot of those views, because they think it will challenge other ideas about sexual freedom as well.

sagrada that's horrible.

Men and porn. It's like a toilet that's backed up.

Goosefoot

How is that working for you, in terms of political traction?

Move the goalposts, why don't you? You asked what the wider beliefs that enable porn are, so I told you. That that truth is unpopular is neither here nor there.

Radio 5 talking about porn right now...not FWR but talking about harms.

Because noone could have envisaged then that we would end up where we are today. in respect of the free availability of fairly extreme porn I mean.

I agree with a PP, most music videos would have been banned as porn when I was a teen.