Why do so many people seem to think porn is OK?

[CurlewKate]

I want to make it clear that I have no problem with masturbation. But there is no way of knowing whether the people involved in making porn are fully consenting and properly paid. Obviously some are. But many are trafficked, exploited and coerced and it’s impossible to tell the difference. So why condone it? I know people will say that there have always been erotic images. Of course there have. But there is a big difference between a cave painting or some 19th century etchings or the erotic writing I enjoy and the online porn which has flooded the internet for the past 50ish years.

As the pp you quoted said: "Even porn that doesn’t involve real people normalises the concept of women being sexual objects- in the world for the convenience and pleasure of men."

Yes, one issue with porn is the ethics of performing in it - the coercion, the potential for physical harm, the vulnerability of people in the industry, and the reduction of real people to things.

But the other issue, which is even greater than the first, is the effect of watching it - the impact on people (including children) who are exposed to it; the addictive nature; the spiral of escalation as desensitisation occurs; the way it presents painful, dangerous, or non-consensual behaviour as normal and sexually desirable; and the misogyny and dehumanisation inherent in so much of it that viewers will want to emulate, etc.

The fact that in the future it's possible it won't be 'real' and will be 'just AI' won't mean that it is healthy for the brain to consume, and that it won't continue to have a wide and negative impact on society, warping sexual interactions, and promoting dangerous trends, and more deeply entrenching misogynistic, objectifying attitudes to women and sex.

For instance, you say that AI porn would mean that the issues of consent and exploitation would no longer be an issue, as though the performers are the only concern...but obviously AI pornographic material involving children would still be morally wrong and deeply harmful. It's the effect that viewing these things has on society at large that is the real issue.

So I think the moral questions are pretty clear, and not that difficult to figure out.

Although I'd like to ask - you say: "that the real reasons for outrage about it are something else" - what did you think those reasons were? Because I suspect I know what you might have thought, and I'm curious to know if I'm right.

@SoftlyDoesntItYou quote me-and you appear to think you understand me better than I understand myself! Would you like to tell me what you think my motivations are?

In theory that should be wonderful, ethical porn.

In practice have you seen what people are actually using AI to create? It's the worst side, it's the porn they'd be arrested for making for real.

I used to enjoy some of the free user-contributed erotica, cartoon and computer animation porn sites. I don't any more, because the content became the same misogynist crap that fills the mainstream video porn sites.

I wish this wasn't the case, but it is. And I can't see porn produced by people telling AI what they want to see will somehow be different.

So I think your world of AI porn, while not hurting women or exploiting women in the production, will nevertheless mostly serve to legitimise and normalise hurting and degrading women in real life.

What do you understand "the Female gaze" to be?

What it doesn’t remove though, is the other issues , like children being exposed to it and promoting warped views of bodies and what passes as “sex”, or the issues around addiction and escalation to more and more extreme content.

My DH watches porn. I hate it. We have a daughter and I said to him… those girls you watch are somebodies daughter. It makes me feel sick.

Do you really think there hasn’t been a way to get porn before the internet? What about dirty mags, porn films on VHS, adult cinemas etc.?

To be honest, I’ve answered this point so often-including in my OP that I can’t be bothered to answer it again! Just to point out that people have been masturbating for 300,000 years..so predating dirty magazines for a year or two.

For the most part, I think porn is terrible.
When I was in my early 20s I watched small bits of it in an exploratory way, but I didn't really like it, so never really watched any more.
I don't have much knowledge about it, but even the lesser offending stuff is not beneficial to anyone.

Part of the issue with it now is that it’s everywhere, available at the click of a button , in incredible quantities, including extreme content.
Once upon a time you had to put some effort into it and spend money.

And because it's everywhere, free and a click away, anyone who wants to make money out of it either by advertising or subscription has to find a way to keep their audience despite all the free content. And that keeps driving porn norms to become more extreme simply to grab and hold attention among the 100s in the scroll.

Yes, one of the great truths of the universe is that a 12-year-old boy who doesn't have access to dirty magazines, porn, or indeed any other form of visually stimulating media, is physically incapable of masturbation. It's a very sad problem that has plagued humanity since time began.

...Oh wait...that's not right...

I'm certainly not saying the concerns you raise aren't valid. But a lot of them are quite hard to turn into objectively provable, irrefutable reasons why porn should be restricted or why people shouldn't consume it if they want to.

For example "the way it presents painful, dangerous, or non-consensual behaviour as normal and sexually desirable". For a start, plenty of porn does nothing of the sort and doesn't portray any such behaviour. And that which does could be viewed a number of ways. People in the BDSM community willingly explore pain as an element of sexual desire and, while it's not my particular thing, I see no reason why they shouldn't be free to. And then there are questions of cause and effect. Are representations of people being murdered in films responsible for real life murder by "normalising" it?

These are big an nuanced questions and I'm not suggesting we're going to resolve them here. My point was only that many people express their objection to porn with a focus on the reasons that are most obvious and unarguable (such as trafficking) that is somewhat disingenuous, because actually they object equally to all the porn that is not subject to those factors, for reasons that are less obvious and more arguable.

As for your question: I think the reasons you list are some of them. I also think a lot of women just don't like seeing the less palatable aspect of male sexuality laid bare for what they are. So they think if we could somehow get rid of the expression of it, it would no longer exist and we could go back to our previous illusions about it.

So, right off the bat, your comment does nothing to address the fact that having AI porn available means that young children will be exposed to it, and teenagers will be watching it while their sexuality is still forming, and it will have a detrimental effect on them. It conditions them to want what they see on screen, or find it arousing, and the fact that it's not real people doing it doesn't change that - if anything, it could result in them wanting to do even more unrealistic things, as the AI isn't constrained by human biology.

It also doesn't address the fact that porn viewing generally results in escalation - studies have shown that humans, on a demographic scale, become desensitised to what they began watching, and begin seeking ever more extreme pornography to scratch the same itch.

It also doesn't acknowledge that while only positive, non-harmful, collaborative sex could be shown in AI form, that is not what actually happens, and pornography isn't restricted to that for the aforementioned reasons. In fact, I disagree that most porn presents non-harmful, non-painful sex - most porn, even 'vanilla' porn, involves choking on penises, rough handling, a lack of proper behaviour around consent, and the infliction of discomfort if not outright pain, as well as submission on the part of one participant (the female one, in hetero porn).

Additionally, people are not cementing 'murder is good' in their minds while watching films by masturbating to it. Orgasm is a very powerful conditioning tool, and if people were masturbating and achieving orgasm while watching people being 'murdered' in films, I would be very concerned, yes.

I'm curious - do you think that pornographic material depicting children is 'fine' if the content is AI made?

"I also think a lot of women just don't like seeing the less palatable aspect of male sexuality laid bare for what they are." What do you mean by this? I think women are generally extremely aware of the ways in which male sexual behaviour can be harmful, never mind porn.

I am strongly anti porn for feminist reasons but I'm also bi and think some people on here are a bit naive about female-centric porn not being possible. I'm aware of various porn made by and only featuring women. But I thunk that's just as wrong, or nearly since I think the financial pressure means consent is inherently under strain.

Men surely can...they may find it easier with a picture but they must have been able to before video was invented! It's pathetic for them to claim it's impossible without.

I will say that I quite like some sex scenes in films & TV & that's similarly 'fake' in the sense of 'acted'. But obviously in that case you aren't supposed to believe they're having actual sex. I suppose to men (and some women) who watch porn and enjoy it, they don't have any interest in how the performers feel, they're just interested in the images, not whether there's any actual attraction behind them.
Depressing...

So yes, I do think emotional intelligence is part of it.

I have a higher sex drive and as I said in pp, do find visual stuff arousing like some film/TV sex scenes.
But I would never watch porn because even if the scene doesn't involve horrible things like choking, I think, like prostitution, the money makes it intrinsically suspect as to whether the consent was impacted by pressure to earn a living.

Moreover : I think your reply gets at the fact that arguably it's very unhealthy that what's essentially voyeurism has become so normalised. Another reason I wouldn't watch is that I strongly think sexual acts should be private and the porn industry has shattered a lot of conceptions of that.

I would add that probably most high sex drive people who do watch porn would obviously prefer to be having sex themselves : but maybe they haven't got a partner, or the partner doesn't want sex that night etc (which is obviously no excuse)

Another point is that porn tends to focus on extreme genital closeups (unlike film sex scenes etc which obviously can't do that). I can't imagine anything less sexy but I imagine this draws a lot of men (hence the thinking that men who send dick pics are sending what they'd like to receive themselves)

I'm a bit sceptical of some of these claims.

'Most men spend a considerable part of their lives desperately wanting sex that they can't have' - do the majority of men find it very hard to find a partner?

'For those that do have a partner, sex still comes with requirements and effort attached, some of which can be successfully managed for a fulfilling sex life but much of which comes down to elusive emotional issues that can be hard or impossible to understand'

• you think women often don't want sex for 'elusive emotional issues' which are often 'hard or impossible to understand'? 🤔 Can you elaborate on this?

I think you have a very strong point here : ' And people find the idea that they internalise the values of the society that they're in even if that goes against their own interests or even if that makes them act like a bad person really hard to handle.'

• I suppose for a minority of women who use or even appear in porn/on Onlyfans, they may not have bad experiences themselves and simply don't care about other women. I'd argue that the objectification of being in porn would harm anyone but some seem not to see it that way (though arguably that's harmful in itself)

Absolutely. It reduces what should be a collaborative and pleasurable experience between two eager people down to a collage of dehumanised body parts and generally, very combative-seeming interactions between two paid actors. The opposite of what sex should be, really.

My sex drive has fluctuated over the years, but at times it's been higher than many men's, and well written smutty novels are about as much as I want to indulge in. Firstly, I can't divorce it from the ethical issues, but even if I could, it just doesn't look attractive to me! There's no suspension of disbelief or fantasy there, and without that it mostly looks deeply uncomfortable, with the pleasure faked and pain covered up, and leaves me cringing.

With sex scenes in normal films, I think so much of what's appealing is the creation of a 'moment' thanks to good acting, with emotion and context that manages to suspend disbelief, and allows the viewer to believe in the attraction and arousal between the two participants. It's not so much about what's physically being implied, but about what the characters are feeling/experiencing. But even then, I think a lot of sex scenes these days just seem shoved in for 'shock' value, and are cringeworthy too.

This is such a brilliant comment . I agree totally.

Who gets to decide what sex "should" be, for everyone else, and why?