Male feminists and porn

[AmyFarrahFowlerCooper]

Can a man who believes he is a feminist be interested in porn? Or does that kind of negate his believing he is a feminist?

where has that study been debunked Libetarianj? I only see it being quoted in lots of well respected publications and by people whose judgement I respect.

You say;
'Also why do we need some study based on a mere 300 + scenes when i have just demonstrated what is actually popular from Alexa stats which covers millions of scenes.'

But you're not bothering to answer or recognise the point that 'Asian' or 'Milf' categories don't preclude them from having aggressive and misogynistic material within.

should all be covered in here, by the legendary Brooke Magnanti www.amazon.co.uk/Sex-Myth-Everything-Were-Wrong/dp/029786639.

but lets take a look at this study titled: Aggression and sexual behavior in best-selling pornography videos.

g.virbcdn.com/_f/files/79/FileItem-273118-AgressionandSexualBehavior2010.pdf

first fatal flaw, they have only chosen a source of DVD's from the AVN network to review, so paid for porn from specific sex shops in the US. umm so why did they go for this?, when they could have chosen to use unbiased stats from sites like Alexa, which would have told them what the most popular viewed sites were worldwide? ( it wouldn't have given them the results they wanted i expect!) So they have narrowed it down to a very specific type of person who buys their porn on DVD from dedicated sex shops. Then having a look at the AVN web site itself. Their so called chart does seem rather odd as nearly all the titles are by the same few studios based in California, and are mostly ones notorious for extreme porn. Also 41% of the scenes surveyed featured ATM!!! Right ok.... so they have basically done a study of 'extreme porn ' dvd's not mainstream at all. What a joke!

Finally going back to that Alexa site, from a bit of further analysis i noticed that when you discount the dating sites, web cams, the hosting sites and porn search engines, the top rated original content web site on that list is in fact Playboy Digital (softcore) and number 2 is Femjoy (softcore art erotica site). So there you go. However it would be quite interesting to do a full study of that list maybe expanding to the top 100 sites or beyond.

So to conclude your average man is not looking at extreme misogynistic porn and therefore their viewing of soft porn shouldn't go against their feminist credentials.

Lib, how do you define soft porn? For me, soft porn means knickers but no bra but I think you mean something different.

"therefore their viewing of soft porn shouldn't go against their feminist credentials."

Why? Who are you to declare such a thing?

I think it is up to women and feminists to decide that. And each woman (feminist or otherwise) will have her own opinion on that .

Golly gosh. Fancy that. Women as individuals with their own opinions.

Soft porn, hardcore porn, gonzo porn, gay porn, amateur porn, so called "feminist" porn are all on a sliding scale of the same thing. This is why they are all helpfully called porn . Because they are, um, porn.

We actually had a thread about this before with some posters trying to make out that most porn consumers are innocently watching soft focus lovey dovey images of women and men having gentle mutually satisfying consensual and straightforward intercourse after a bit of hand holding and gazing into each others eyes.

It Is Bullshit.

And women are not stupid.

The Max Hardcore videos are some of the best selling porn videos. Do you know what he does to women. Or just look up RedTube - here you go, here are some of the titles on the homepage;

warning nasty racist and misogynistic shite coming up***

German Sara Joy gets fucked in the ass
Asian chick enjoys dick
Petite cherry blonde teen Avril Hall rammed
Hot Japanese toilet blow job
My daughter is a porn start
Teen Natalie - Charlie's jail bait # 4
Ebony deep anal is nice

The categories which are in alphabetical order include ; Asian, Anal, blonde, Big Tits, Double Penetration, Facials, Japanese, Latina, Teens.

Down the bottom of the page is an advert for "Extreme videos - 18 and abused"

end*

All these videos have hundreds of thousands of views.

Have you actually read the study you linked to?

It clearly states in the abstract (on page 3) why they chose to analyse video rentals;

Although consumers access pornographic materials in a number of forms?including the Internet, cable and hotel video-on-demand, the telephone, and magazines?videotapes (VHS) and digital video discs (DVD) still generate the most income (AVN, 2006). In fact, rentals at adult video stores increased from US$75 million in 1986 to US$665 million just 10 years later (Stack et al., 2004), culminating in over 950 million adult videos rented annually by 2005 (AVN, 2006). Video rentals generated more than US$4.28billion in 2005, representing 34% of the total market for all adult products (AVN, 2006).

And do you know what that AVN is?

It is the Adult Video News. It is a trade journal for the porn industry - the biggest and most influential one. They also publish lists and reviews of the most popular porn films. If you want to know what porn consumers are wanking to, they are the people to go to.

In the current study, the designation of the films examined as ?adult films? was ready-made by employing lists provided by AVN. The population of titles for this research was drawn from a compilation of 250 best-selling and 250 most rented video lists published monthly by AVN. The researchers selected the top 30 videos appearing on each list from December 2004 to June 2005. After deleting duplications, the population consisted of 275 titles (AVN, 2005). Fifty titles were randomly selected from this list to comprise the sample, yielding a total of 304 scenes. The sample, therefore, is meant to be generalized to the top titles of this 7-month period.

Sounds like a pretty solid method to me.

And another question about your critic of the study.

Do you know why most porn has historically been produced in California? And why the California studios have got so big?

a) they are protected by the first amendment in California. b) they have a monopoly.

www.firstamendment.com/site-articles/content-outside-california/

Yeah sure they can. I'm a feminist and I watch porn. It depends on your beliefs really (and obviously if the porn is consensual).

The Max Hardcore videos are some of the best selling porn videos.

Max is the extreme of the extreme and was even jailed for a couple of years for his obscene works. I would question your claim of him being one of the biggest sellers? He is despised in the industry, he is despised by porn lovers, his stuff is banned from many sites and forums. You will not find his works hosted on many sites at all. It's funny how he always seems to get wheeled out in these kind of discussions, i expect half of his web traffic is generated from mumsnetters using his website for 'research purposes'

also you say hundreds of thousands of views, to put things in perspective we were looking at 15 million views for that 'Next door Nikki' softcore site i mentioned earlier.

Have you actually read the study you linked to?

It clearly states in the abstract (on page 3) why they chose to analyse video rentals;

Although consumers access pornographic materials in a number of forms?including the Internet, cable and hotel video-on-demand, the telephone, and magazines?videotapes (VHS) and digital video discs (DVD) still generate the most income (AVN, 2006). In fact, rentals at adult video stores increased from US$75 million in 1986 to US$665 million just 10 years later (Stack et al., 2004), culminating in over 950 million adult videos rented annually by 2005 (AVN, 2006). Video rentals generated more than US$4.28billion in 2005, representing 34% of the total market for all adult products (AVN, 2006).

And do you know what that AVN is?

Yes, yes and er yes. Ok here we go:

a) Have you verified the accuracy of that AVN chart?, as all i am finding is that people are claiming it to be based on the number of adverts for a particular product not actual sales. Also that $ 4 billion figure has been disputed too as being massively inflated and when they challenged AVN they were a tad vague. Check Wiki (AVN magazine) and look at the history section. It's all there and it appears to be very dubious.

b) So they claim 34% of money is made from DVD products alone, but why didn't they consider the other mediums of the remaining 66%?

c) How many people actually go to a sex shop and buy porn or order it through the post, when it's all free on the internet? Do you really think that there are many people who go to this trouble? I'd estimate it to be only small percentage of people who still buy porn. It may generates a fair amount of profit but is still a niche market in the grand scheme of things. They are basically the equivalent of people who still buy music on vinyl.

So from that i would strongly disagree that the study uses a solid method. It's what i would term junk science

Hi lib.

What do you define as soft porn?

libertarianj - "It's funny how he always seems to get wheeled out in these kind of discussions, I expect half of his web traffic is generated from mumsnetters using his website for 'research purposes' "

Yeah, fucking hilarious. That grin made me feel a bit sick.

Porn hounds always try to argue that Max Hardcore's films aren't popular.
The porn industry and the porn consumers stopped loving Max when he went to jail and became a bit of a liability. Up until then he and his films were hugely successful (1990s). He 'made' a lot of names - it was almost considered a right of passage for women in porn to do a scene with him.

His films have been hugely influential in the industry. He pushed boundaries of filmed violence against women and filmed degradation of women and a whole lot of people joined up to follow in his footsteps. Unfortunately. And now a lot of the stuff that he did that was considered extreme at the time is now all over the internet.

You may not be able to find very many of his films now (I don't know I haven't looked), but there is a whole genre of porn that is directly influenced by him. He is notorious - and not because no-one watched his films.

Nasty piece of low down inhumane shit that he was, he knew what would sell, you have to give him that (dubious) recognition.

Have you checked what this specifically means;

Video rentals generated more than US$4.28billion in 2005, representing 34% of the total market for all adult products (AVN, 2006).

It is in the notes of the study you linked to:

According to AVN (2006), 34% of pornographic texts are consumed through video sales and rentals, 6% through cable pay-per-view, 4% through hotel in-room video on demand, and 20% through Internet sources. Clearly, video sales and rentals are the preferred method of consumption in the United States. AVN, while not a ?traditional? research publication, is the leading reporter of record for the adult industry, with a monthly circulation of more than 25,000 .

You declare it 'junk science' but you haven't even read it properly

I think you are calling it junk science because you don't like its findings - that mainstream popular porn is violent and degrading to women and that the women are often portrayed as enjoying and 'asking for' that violence and degradation.

It speaks volumes that you think you spending 30 seconds on google and glancing at Alexa is much more valid that a comprehensive study conducted by several highly qualified people over a period of several months and hundreds of actual porn scenes. Have you read the credentials of the people who wrote that study?

Ultimately libertarianj even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are right about the majority of what you've posted it does not detract that for x many people engaged in any aspect of the sex industry that are all happy balanced and fine with it thank you very much there are x many people who suffer, are exploited and not even treated with the same common decency you would an animal. Now we can sit and pontificate at what numbers those x's might represent, and at best all either side is going to be able to muster educated guesses.

One unavoidable fact which you have unsurprisingly not addressed is that the overwhelming majority of those affected in that second number will be women, hence precisely why this is a feminist issue and why it is a perfectly reasonable question to raise that should a man consider himself a feminist can he also be a user of pornography? You can also add into the mix all those women who might be all happy happy joy joy about sex work, who may well have chosen other careers that would have been equally as lucrative if not for glass ceilings, patriarchal vested interests etc etc. Point being that the playing field is not level, and at least until that is addressed the choice of selling one's own body is not made in a vacum apart from other issues, so until that day dawn there is not a lot of merit to your position whatsoever.

excellent post Dervel