I think with porn, there are a load of different issues that get jumbled together in people's heads in a less than helpful way ... is it wrong to want to look? Is it threatening to a relationship? Is it necessarily exploitative? What are the effects on young people's expectations and on wider society? etc.
Leaving aside the production issues and the wider societal effects (for a moment - I'll come to them later) - I don't mind DP using porn as long as it's not instead of having sex with me and as long as it's not excessive (I do think it can be addictive). Visual porn doesn't do much for me but I can thoroughly enjoy a smutty book and my wank fantasies are no less hard-core than a lot of the stuff that's out there (do any of us really just think of our hand at these times?) I think porn is to do with fantasy. That's why it is full of unreal-looking women with exaggerated proportions and highly unlikely, excessive scenarios. I'm pretty sure most men would be terrified at the idea of a threesome in RL, for example, and I've never met a man who prefers plastic boobs (of course they could all be lying
).
I think men are more visual than women in general but that doesn't mean they have to use porn, any more than I have to read a smutty book, or even just a romance novel. I don't think anybody should have to put up with their partner using porn (or books) if it bothers them. Anybody who just has to use it obviously has a problem. On the other side, I think it's unhelpful to brand men who are caught using it as perverted monsters, especially if it's never been discussed in a relationship. IME, most men, and quite a large proportion of women, will at some point have used it and enjoyed it.
So ... onto the wider issues:
I am fully aware that it's a pretty ugly industry and that a lot of the people involved are horribly exploited and sometimes raped but it's simplistic to pretend this is the whole story, or that this is the only exploitative industry out there (did anybody watch the programme about the mass rape of women in the Congo? That war is a lot to do with the control of mineral resources used in all our lovely high-tech toys). I don't think porn is going to go away, so I'd like to see it a lot better regulated and controlled - I'd like 'fair-trade' porn to be available and easily recognisable.
I hate the everywhereness of it too and am actually more concerned with the 'soft' and 'glamour' end of the scale here, right down to page 3. If porn was only available through licensed sex shops with blanked-out windows, I don't think it would be nearly so 'normalised'. It's the drip-drip-drip of lad's mags and the pornification of more mainstream media that does most of the damage to society's attitude towards women, IMO.
Thankyou for starting this thread. I wanted to say something on the other thread but it wouldn't have been right to. Please nobody link to that thread - for those who are curious, it was a very sensitive family/relationship problem that got hijacked 