to be surprised at how many Mumsnetters are fine with pornography?

[Elizabetth]

Particularly as porn has become so much more mainstream in the past few years, I'd have thought that people would be concerned about premature sexualisation of children. Also I'm surprised that so many women are fine with it given that the humiliation and degradation of women is the central theme of pornography. You only have to look at the titles to realise that.

"Probably most of the world's population still don't have access to it."

If you have a computer, the internet, or a couple of quid to buy a magazine, you have acces to it.

You have a choice as to whether you action this access though - porn is NOT splayed everywhere; you still have to look for it.

oy policy!

"the pornification of everyday society and behaviour MUST provoke sexual responses in a lot of men, and that SOME of those men will be angry and violent enough to act on those responses in a non-consenting context?"

i think your right, but would express it as..

angry men are told by porn that it's fairly normal to dislike women, and that sex is a good arena in which to express that anger.

I did not say that EVERYBODY has access to the internet, but anybody who does can access porn, it is free on many sites.

Yeah, I'm still trying to work out how many people in the world have access to a computer or money to buy a magazine.

It probably is time the discussion ended. There are too many mad points (like everybody has access to porn) to rebut:

This is a interesting talk by Gail Dines on pornography for people who have time to watch it -

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5003155114018800220&q=anti+pornography

They did. Mankind as always painted pictures on cave walls or carved on pots beautiful pictures of women. It's in our nature. We're aroused by what is visual. Why ever not? Sex is wonderful and porn and erotica is part of that. The Victorians I suppose and puritans may have clamped down a bit but they will never drive the eroticism out of men and women however hard even new puritans try.

What does concern me hugely is this Governments various censorship laws some of which are absolutely dreadful and that is what we should be campaigning against as women.

no probs norma, understand now.

Elizabetth: re your post about the lack of porn for peasants living off the land: do you really think that women lived liberated lives then, free from sexual violence?

Monkeytrousers: I don;t have any psychological grey areas about this. It's wrong to exploit and coerce other people, and when this happens, either in the porn industry or in any other industry (or domestic situation) things should be done to help the victims and support them.
However, this does not make it bad or wrong to enjoy sexual exhibitionism, to depict sexual activity or to watch other people having sex.

This page suggests that global internet reach is about 19 per cent.

OBM - point noted, will put it to the committee (the one that sits in my head).

Please point out to me where I said that most of the worlds population had access to porn.

Please.

Because I must be a bloody idiot as I cannot find where I wrote that.

I used that comment as a copy and paste so you would know what I was referring to. All I wrote was that IF somebody has access to the internet they have access to porn.

committee in head. I have despotic tyrant.

Elf - you didn't say it directly, but in response to Elizabetth point:

"Probably most of the world's population still don't have access to it."

Your posted:

"If you have a computer, the internet, or a couple of quid to buy a magazine, you have acces to it."

Quite a few of us interpreted that as you saying that most people in the world have access to porn via the internet. If that wasn't what you meant to imply - fair enough.

completely missed this totally irrelevant internet diversion. shall i be the one that goes back and adjudicates?

And I remain fundamentally opposed to censorship of words and images (still or moving). When authorities have imposed censorship of pornography or tried to , surprise surprise, the first targets have not been 'rape porn' but lesbian and gay bookshops, self-help manuals like Our Bodies Ourselves etc, material that is questioning the patriarchal heteromonogamous sexual 'norm'.

WIth regard to 'rape porn', many women have reported rape fantasies, certainly in the past (read your Nancy Friday): it seems that the gratification lies, in some cases, with the idea that you are not responsible for what is happening to you and therefore not 'bad' for enjoying it. Someone summed up the concept of a rape fantasy as 'Ewan McGregor/Philip GLenister/[insert sexy celeb name of your choice here] not taking no for an answer.

Maybe next time I should make the if bold, so I wont get jumped on.

yes madamez, yes yes yes! i do know my nancy.

But the difference betw nancy friday and porn-which-depicts-rape is that one expresses the fantasy of the 'victim', the other expresses the fantasy of the 'rapist'.
Do you think that difference is critical.. or not?

Xenia, you are commiting the naturalistic fallacy tp say that 'porn' is good just becasue enjoying sex is part of our 'nature'. Things exist in nature as facts not as values. Rape is part of nature for example, part of human sexual nature - no one would say it was 'good'.

Sex and porn are not synonyms. One is real, the other is a fake.

Just becasue porn arouses you does not mean you need to suspend all your moral facuties and ignore the huge and documented exploitation involved in the industry, becasue you allow your gonads to override your senses. Millions of men and women enjoy erotica and sex without becoming consumers of porn. Not because they are denying their own sexuality, but because they are moral animals.

and just for the record, I am not discussing censorship but morality

I have to come back for Madamez talking about women's rape fantasies. Funny how they are the only ones that ever get a mention.

We never talk about men's rape fantasies which of course are the dangerous ones. After all a woman can't make a man rape her however a man can act out his rape fantasies (and they do) obviously without the consent of the woman involved.

Now it's not as if rape is that unsual in our society. It's also pretty much a punshiment free crime, yet nobody questions men's rape fantasies, nobody questions rape porn.

I think women's rape fantasies get brought up as a smokescreen to hide behind what is really going on - that a substantial minority of men fantasise about rape, that some of them act on it, and that porn encourages them, particularly rape porn.

Madamez, there is nothing wrong with sexual inhibitionism - but when it's being done for money or profit, when it can be industrialised and the exploitation of people legitimsed by such an industry, that is wrong.

If you are doing it for free and posting in on the internet for free, getting no money for it and no one is making money from you, then that is great. But then we aren't talking about the porn industry there are we anyway?

It is the industry that exploits, not the minority of individuals who do it completely by choice.

So watching porn makes a human less moral than somebody who doesn't?

a fantasy is a fantasy - it doesn't exist exept on the head of the fantasist.

What else would you call it Elf? Yes, when you know that exploitation is endemic in the industry yet you still buy into it, and fund it. Yes.