Why would you watch porn?

[AmIHumanYet]

How can anybody ENJOY seeing a woman being treated as a sex object? I watched some as research (seriously!) a few months ago, the general themes were men disrespecting women. it was focused on the mans pleasure and orgasm, why do some of you think that that's okay? There's NOTHING equal about this industry

Young men are getting weird and wrong ideas about women and how they should be treated from watching porn. Women are shown as sex OBJECTS, not human beings, they're shown as always being up for it, that basically using her as a wank-tool is enough to make her orgasm, that being selfish and focused on your own pleasure and orgasm is acceptable

I really want to hear some male opinions on this, it has been really upsetting me for a long time now and I feel powerless.

RCheshire I agree with what you say and there should be guidance, but it would also help a great deal if the Government took a very severe stance on it, set an example by massive prosecutions and very public raids, it has to become a morally repugnant thing again, as it was in the past.

The challenges faced by governments is not that the internet is geographically diverse it is because they don't want to face the conflict involved in order to change this. I don't think it's good enough to say 'well it's out there, there's nothing we can do'. People are starving around the world, do we say that about them? No - we make very clear to other governments that it's not acceptable. It's a bit half-arsed to say the internet is cleverer than us so we can't control the horrific things it condones.

Teenagers are at huge risk of addiction as their brains develop an extra sensitivity to the reward centres. We are treating them like mini adults yet they are, for a time, an almost entirely different species for a number of years with entirely different psychological needs due to this neurodevelopmental stage.

The present stance is pitifully inadequate and I would say neglectful.

When you refer to prosecutions and raids are you talking about greater enforcement of the laws that exist or changes in the law to encompass broader content?

If talking about existing laws and focusing on identifying and prosecuting UK-based publishers of 'illegal pornography' (by which I mean that defined as 'obscene' under the OPS (a painfully vague definition by the way)) then I agree that this is simply a question of focus and resources, or to be more blunt - how much the electorate cares.

You can't control the production or publishing of pornography worldwide because not only does each country have it's own approach to legislating against it (or not) but fundamentally each has its own cultural and moral definitions of what is sexually explicit vs obscene. I accept that common agreement on certain genres (e.g. pornography depicting rape) should be easier to get a relatively broad consensus on.

This issue though is that even if you can agree common definitions and legislation on certain genres with a select group of countries (i.e. those you have a relationship with that enables this) then you still have the same content produced and published from those countries that you cannot control.

If you accept you can't control production/publishing/hosting globally then how do you prevent access over the internet to those places it is still available. The simple answer is that you can't, at least not without blanket address bans as per China, N Korea etc, but even then there are ways round it.

There are a number of approaches that I believe could work

• focusing more on the identification and prosecution of producers of illegal pornography in the UK
• Expanding the definition of obscene to specifically target certain genres, e.g. rape
• Working with other countries to agree common governance and legislative approaches for certain genres, e.g. rape.
• Education of children and teenagers beyond that available today.

There are a few approaches I do not believe can work:

• expecting all parents to be more internet security aware than their teenage children. Parents are being lulled into a false sense of security that ISP controls, browser controls and/or reviewing browsing histories are sufficient.

• getting an international consensus against 'milder' pornography, e.g. pornography that presents apparently consensual sex between adults.

• identifying pornography which has been published without the knowledge and/or consent of one or more participants.

There is a shift from 'studio' pornography to 'amateur', and my final point above is one which does concern me. We've all heard of examples of the trauma caused to children/teenagers when pictures/videos have been published without their knowledge. I do not see how this can be prevented. Although (subject to support from hosting companies) the publisher could be identified retrospectively in some cases and prosecuted under the CDA.

The other approach of course is changing the UK law to make pornography (challenge #1 is definition) illegal full stop, including the possession/consumption.

I believe this would have an impact on how much was viewed (although I'm not sure how large) but I'm not remotely convinced there is the breadth of support for such a change in the law. Policing it would be as near as impossible as makes no odds. I've some exposure to the police computer forensic audit teams investigating child pornography access - the man-weeks of effort expended for each machine confiscated/investigated may surprise some.

If a major issue for you is public attitude (i.e. the lack of broad moral repugnance) then I believe this could only be addressed by introducing a 'step-gap' between what is acceptable and what is not. Girls in rap music videos were mentioned earlier - that is one example of the sliding scale that makes each next step of material to consume not such a big jump.

PS. I may not reply to this again for some time. I have to avoid web distractions and work!

I still struggle to understand why a woman appearing naked should magically alter my opinion of her agency, humanity or otherwise.

It seems like male sexuality is like the White Witches wand in Narnia - you point it in someones direction and poof! suddenly they are less of a person.

I think it's tragic that so many women (feminists in the main) want to perpetuate the victorian idea that women are without sexual agency, or those women that like to explore/expand/display their sexuality are somehow undermining other women. It honestly makes me sick.

Damn, not victorian, behind closed doors they were quite liberal. I mean the goddamn edwardians, with their "men are barely restrained beasts, women unsexed-childlike-victims" mentality. Gives me rage.

NeoFaust

I think the majority of feminists on here are of the anti porn side whereas there are many sex positive feminists that do not necessarily think this way. Sadly this type would be given short shrift on MN so this type of discussion only goes one way.

But I agree with your sentiments entirely.

Not liking pornography has nothing to do with not accepting that women have sexual agency. Absolutely nothing.

There is no feminist divide here. Pornography isn't entirely a feminist issue, it's an issue of humanity and society - of where do you draw the line, what should be private and what should be public, what should be bought and sold.

You can very easily say that pornography reduces womens power but you can just as easily say that it elevates their power. Ultimately it reduces the power of human relationships, it's a cheap quick way to get sex without the integrity and accountability it deserves.

The power games played out in some porn are more often than not misogynistic and of course that is a feminist issue. But porn per se isn't.

I think RCheshire's idea of a step-up is a good one. Let's not have a sliding scale. They only very recently cut misogynistic music videos - was it last year? And Page 3? Glamour models in newspapers read at the family breakfast table is just weird. You'd think they would have phased that out before newspapers died their natural death, which they just about have now.

Neofaust

Your remark about the Edwardians is interesting. I'd have said the Victorians were no different. Care to comment?

I disagree, I consider myself sex positive but you know, misogyny negative...
Please tell me what's equal about mainstream porn and stop denying that it has strong negative effects

horsetowater, misogynistic music videos still very much exist and are extremely popular.

I've done a one week course on porn?!!?!
You may have watched porn but have you actually experienced any of the negative effects? You're not a woman for a start
Just because YOU treat women with respect, it doesn't mean that all viewers of porn do.
This is particularly affecting whole generations of young people, young women and girls who feel like they must do what the women in porn do, even if it physically and mentally hurts them, whole generations of young men and boys who have learnt how to treat a woman during sex FROM PORN i.e. like an object, disrespectfully, selfishly

Are you trying to patronise me, RiverMan?

I have watched enough to see that mainstream porn is focused on the mans pleasure, objectifies women, shows dangerous acts like anal sex followed by a blow job, degrading and physically painful acts (for the women) etc. etc.
More importantly, I am a young women, I am part of the generation that porn has had a huge and damaging effect on!

It seems that none of those things matter to you though, I get the impression that you'd rather ignore these issues because YOU don't disrespect women

Toadinthehole I saw a fascinating documentary a while back, which I wish I could remember the name of. It was examining misconceptions about the Victorian attitudes to sexuality and I found it so interesting that I did a bit of digging of my own.

Turns out that when you start looking at diaries, private memoirs and other source materials at the time that the Victorians were relatively sexually liberal when not projecting their formal image. Men carrying on 'hidden' affairs were common (male sexual entitlement throughout history, naturally) but upper class women, after producing an heir, were also subtly permitted a high (if discreet) level of promiscuity. The lower classes, always written out of official histories, were cheerfully bawdy and debauched. Most interestingly the Victorian period was literally when most modern kinks and fetishes originated.

There was an example of a diary that was found where an upstanding, churchgoing middleclass housewife used to dismiss her servants, put on blackface makeup and ask her husband to spank her like a naughty slavegirl. According to her diary the whole mutually satisfactory activity continued for years and was just one example in the documentary that was totally 'wtf?'

The whole neo-puritan family values thing started appearing later in the Empresses reign, at least partially as backlash against the social hypocrisy of the earlier period. The Edwardians, children of the Victorians, took it to extremes - the whole anti-sex attitude, as opposed to pro-discretion, really exploded from this period to infect the nascent suffragette movement and poison a good deal of future feminist discourse.

Examining pro-discretion versus anti-sex is going to be a good starting point to respond to your post horsetowater as soon as I've got a little more work done... please be patient, this is all good intellectual discussion and a little less bitter than I normally get on this topic in the CiF.

AmI

You do realise that for some women "degrading and physically painful acts" are just what they want?

Rare, perhaps, but not as rare as you think; And even so, why should that side of sexuality be a source of shame and repudiation? If people are into that, why shouldn't an industry produce material that fits the niche?

RiverMan, porn has affected my generation massively! I have (and so has every woman my age who I know) been asked and pressured into performing sex acts which are demeaning and/or PHYSICALLY PAINFUL!
Young women and girls are EXPECTED to do these things because men have learnt from porn that this is how you treat a woman and that it's what women should do, that we are here to be used for sex and that sex is for the mans pleasure.