Porn is violence against women

[Grennie]

I have never been a supporter of porn, but it is only as I have read more feminist blogs and books that I have realised this is true, for the following reasons.

1. Porn always objectifies women
2. Most porn nowdays features men being violent to women as part of sex
3. Porn gives out the message that women enjoy all kinds of degrading sex acts
4. Porn teaches boys and girls unrealistic ideas of female sexuality

Thus porn has a negative impact on all women, whether you ever watch it or not.

Well here is my problem with liberalism, although I consider myself very liberal indeed. People throw up notions of choice as some sort of talisman to ward off change or perhaps painful examination of the status quo. Yet (I hope at least) we are all in agreement that one should not be at liberty to commit murder, or rape, or in fact violence of any kind.

Now for fear of wading into informal fallacy at that last point let me qualify that by saying you are of course more than welcome to draw the line with pornography firmly outside what you are willing to restrict people's choices in, but there is a compelling case for those who choose to include it.

To reiterate something Buffy said up thread, allowing people to watch pornography would be perfectly fine all other things being equal, but here's the thing: they aren't. Not by a long shot, and unless we are willing to ask the hard questions and get to causation they won't be.

To bask in my own ignorance a moment, I am not confidant I can point to causes and solutions, at least not by myself. However I think discussions like this can serve to shine a light on such things if we don't get too bogged down in blanket banning and using choice as some sort of shield. There is a middle ground here where I think progress can be made.

And thanks Buffy you among others have given me the space to listen and learn a few things of real value on here.

When we consider things that many people wouldn't even consider porn these days - page 3, some adverts, etc, no they are not violent, but they do objectify women.

When we consider what most people in the UK consider porn, then yes, most of it nowdays is violent. It is not like the kind of porn that was around 20 or 30 years ago.

For example, deep blow jobs that make women gag and retch are very very commonplace and at the tamer end of porn. Overt violence is now the norm in most material marketed as porn.

TeiTeuta, Gail Dines is interested in all pornography from a sociological perspective and she talks about how what used to be considered 'soft porn' has migrated into popular culture and how what used to be considered 'hardcore' has had to become 'harder' in order to distinguish itself from what is now popular culture (think music videos, lads mags, etc). She examines the porn industry from its very birth with the publication of Playboy magazine, and she analyses all kinds of porn. Her area of interest is the porn industry and therefore she is interested in all products that come out of that industry - as the industry has got harder, so, by default, has her area of interest.

She is interested in the capitalist model of pornography and porn as a profit generating industry which works in the same way as any other capitalist venture - by expanding markets, creating new markets, developing logistically and technologically in order to increase profit.

Below is a link to a talk she gives on this - the beginning of the talk is about prostitution, but the meat of the talk is in how porn has changed with technology and the explosion in access to pornography via the internet and how the industry is capitalizing on this and intends to continue expanding (through developments in mobile phone technology).

It is pretty hair raising. I agree with her that we are looking at a macro social experiment and a public health issue. I think what is particularly concerning is that we are looking at a powerful industry which makes a lot of money and intends to keep on making a lot of money by selling a industrialized sexual product which is detrimental to the cultural socialization of existing and future generations. (Right at the end there is some very worrying stuff on mass cultural grooming of underage girls.)

SGB I know you don't have much time for Gail Dines but please watch this talk. The porn industry is not going to be changed by a few well meaning people making their own porn. Things have gone far far beyond that. What we are looking at is much more to do with money than it is with sex. Sex just happens to be the product that is being used cynically to generate profit. I use the word sex loosely as we are really talking about sexualized violence against women. To use a Dines style metaphor, to think that a few independent film makers can change the industry is to think that a small local store selling reasonable quality burgers is going to revolutionize the fast food industry. It 'aint going to happen and is only hijacked in order to legitimatize a massive cynical capitalist venture that doesn't give a shit about individual sexuality.

The consumption of porn seems very much like the consumption of drugs. I'm aware this is a well worn theory.

You wind up needing more and more extreme porn to get the thrill you're after. The "gateway" porn - page 3, softer stuff may be enough for some - but for many it won't be and harder stuff is sought out. Like drug use, porn use then influences behaviour and desires.

So it's not enough to say let's ignore the crack cocaine of porn because the fluffier more mainstream MDMA exists.

Porn is not sex. But unfortunately sex is becoming porn and only legislation and education is going to stem this tide. I genuinely fear for the sex lives of future generations thanks to a predominately white, male take on what is "sexy"

Is there a porn problem in non-caucasian areas of the globe? As in, do these regions have their own industries and participants, or does everyone get what comes out of the USA?

I don't know Art about non European / non USA porn. But like Hollywood dominates the mainstream film industry I think US porn industry dominates the market.

SauceForTheGander, Dines talks about this (not much in the talk I linked to above but in Pornland and in other talks).

She has interviewed a lot of porn producers and they all tend to say that porn is both inherently boring and desensitizing. And the reason for both, is the lack of emotional investment on the part of the consumer. This is another distinction between masturbating to porn and having sex with a partner - porn becomes boring because it is dehumanized, lacking in emotion and lacking in positive feelings of human attachment. Porn can also be more violent and nonsadistic men will watch acts of sexual sadism because the women in porn are dehumanized and othered, and porn has to become more violent in order to stem the boredom, with the dehumanization and othering of the women allowing for the escalation in violence.

Another thing Dines relays from porn producers is that they can't believe that they have got away with it. They cannot believe that they haven't had some regulatory body come down on them like a tonne of bricks considering the material that they produce. They are also amazed that society in general hasn't mobilized to stop them, particularly given how accessible porn is now to minors via the internet. Porn is a big industry that somehow seems to get away with working conditions that would have you in jail were you to try them in any other industrial context (other than prostitution).

ArtetasSwollenAnkle, Dines talks about this too.

It is all about distribution. Those who control distribution channels are those who control the market (and therefore make profit). American distributors have, in the past, found it hard to tap markets in poorer countries due to limited consumer access to computers and lack of privacy (from wives and children due to living in more densely populated homes) in which to consume porn. The porn industry is working with the mobile phone industry in order to improve the screens and therefore viewing experience on mobile phones in order to expand into the markets of poorer countries; many of which are of course non Caucasian.

This is the same strategy which the porn industry used WRT the development of the internet, with which they were (and still are) heavily involved.

Beach thank you for that. It was my gut feeling but good to have it explained so clearly.

I'm interested in what you say about the porn producers thinking "wow, no one's stopping us"

There's no point in waiting for those in power to say "hang on, beating a woman to shit in the name of porn isn't right" is there?

Gail DInes is a self-aggrandizing dishonest bully who confuses anecdote with data and sometimes seems not to understand the studies she's quoting. SHe gets fairly well deconstructed here. Basically her bullshit is the same bullshit that was being peddled twenty years ago by Mackinnon and the even more batshit Catherine Itzin.

An insistence on separating porn from every other kind of media is (and always will be) a disaster for feminism and for women's rights. It's playing right into the hands of that element of the patriarchy that finds the madonna/whore division useful and is always eager for more ways to keep women quiet.

SGB - The article you link to does not deconstruct Gail Dines at all. It basically says, hey porn is so well used how can we possibly tackle this issue. Which ignores the fact that Iceland is trying to do exactly that by banning all violent porn. It ridicules her and other feminists with similar views.

The madonna/whore division is encouraged by porn. Porn is not sex. Women can and do enjoy sex. They are not the same at all.

Porn is violence against women that harms every one of us, including you, whether you see it or not.

I see tackling porn as about as distant from keeping women quiet as can be.

You only have to glance at the relationship section to see that porn is already ruining real life relationships - men so addicted to it that they're doing it when their children are around, and refusing sex with their real life partners.

Men are reporting being unable to climax during sex because they're so used to wanking to the pornified version. Porn is already damaging lives and relationships. It is dehumanising the sexual experience.

Doesn't porn feed into the madonna / whore complex more than being anti porn?

Did you watch the talk SGB?

I'm interested in your views on what Dines says about the aggressive capitalist nature of the porn industry and where that fits in with the strategy you present here of a few independent film makers' attempts to revolutionize this powerful million dollar industry by making the odd film they think is fair to women. As I say, that position strikes me as extraordinarily naive as to how both capitalism and the porn industry actually work.

I somehow doubt that Dr Dines does not understand the studies she refers to, she is a Professor of Sociology with a Ph.D in social sciences, and clearly extremely educated and intelligent. Dr MacKinnon is a Professor of Law and a legal scholar and adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Professor Itzin has similar credentials, wasn't she an adviser to the DoH on violence against women? You may disagree with these women but pretending that they are stupid or insane isn't going to wash (and to be frank comes across as a bit misogynistic).

SGB, that is just an opinion piece from some bloke saying, "I don't like what Dines says and porn is ubiquitous anyway".

An insistence on separating porn from every other kind of media is (and always will be) a disaster for feminism and for women's rights.

Yes.

Which is exactly the situation at the moment. Porn is treated differently to other forms of media, but it is not feminists who are treating porn differently. Feminists wish to have porn held up to the standards of mainstream industry and mainstream media. It cannot meet those standards and yet it is disseminated through mainstream media distribution channels that make it available to minors and able to reach entire populations with its racist sexist violent messages and images of real women being verbally and physically abused.

I didn't watch the clip because, frankly, my veteran laptop and unstable internet connection don't let me watch video clips.

And the thing that really is violence against women is religion. Far, far more dangerous and damaging than porn and always has been.

Fallingleaf Thank you for the erudite reply. Dropping the libertarian/choice dimension for this post and going straight to causation and comparing women's lot 80 years ago. Dealing with the latter of course broadly speaking you are quite right things have improved, but I do not think its enough to say that it's better than it used to be so "mission accomplished". Bringing to mind a particularly vacuous looking George W. Bush on an aircraft carrier looking particularly pleased with himself following the Iraq War. Just because things are better doesn't preclude the possibility that they could also be better. They are not mutually exclusive states.

Getting to causation, I have a few notions but to be honest I can only submit them to discussion with the caveat they are wild stabs in the dark. I am hoping that maybe perhaps somebody can point me to some salient literature re: the objectification of women as sex objects preferably from a feminist, but also I suspect from a psychoanalytical perspective (I have a hunch that maybe that discipline can offer some crucial insights there, and I'll do some research in that area myself over the next few weeks).

As to the contention that all porn is violent towards women which is the original proposition of the OP, I suspect you are right in saying that is not the case. Although I do lean towards the OP's bias on the subject in wishing to explore and maybe look towards addressing it, as my position is that enough pornography depicts violence towards women! I would like to add that a lot of pornography does depict women as passive participants, rather than enthusiastic equal partners in the act, this may well be as damaging if not more so than the actual violence.

I will try not to dodge your query as to what I think are the causes, and wether indeed pornography is a cause in and of itself. I suspect you are right in that pornography is not the root cause of the problem, but in its present form it certainly propagates and worsens the effect. I guess that had western society managed to get to a position of genuine parity between the sexes at least as far as sex is concerned before the internet had sprouted up as it has, we may have nothing much to debate now.

So my list of causes relate in essence to what is wrong in the collective unconscious of humanity as a whole. Not just in men, but women too as I fear the prevalence of pornography is becoming increasingly responsible for what particularly younger women feel is expected of them, but from a male point of view here goes:

1. Men see sex as a competition, and reducing women to numbers is a step to reducing them as people.
2. The concepts of active and passive in sex is hard locked into male and female stereotypes, when I think it is far healthier to interchange the two so sometimes the male takes the lead and other times the female, and still other occasions nobody has to.
3. Society has a legacy of propagating the idea that men are highly sexed all the time, and we are somehow less of a man should that not be the case, we make that the case and that incites a level of fear in the male psyche of not measuring up. Fear and sex do not mix, unconsciously or otherwise.
4. Sex devoid of intimacy, which is probably linked to another locked in societal attitude that emotional equates to weak and feminine, and men have and to some extent still are expected to be strong at all times. When in fact the reverse is actually true, greater emotional intelligence and capacity allows for greater fortitude in many other avenues of life.

The above points are just me spitballing, I fully expect it to be wrong in part or in full, or at best just a very superficial and incomplete list. I am eager to hear your thoughts.

Take as long as you like! I've been mulling over my response all afternoon whilst looking after my little one, and now he's tucked away comfy in bed I'm afraid you got dealt a massive brain dump! :-p

I didn't watch the clip because, frankly, my veteran laptop and unstable internet connection don't let me watch video clips.

OK, SGB, fair enough. I really would prefer to read your comments on the talk than a link to Random Bloke. Shame you can't access it, I think the commentary on capitalism might interest you.

And the thing that really is violence against women is religion. Far, far more dangerous and damaging than porn and always has been.

I agree with you that religious institutions, paradigms and hegemony do a great deal of damage to girls and women. However, these institutions' influence is not homogeneous the world over, and it appears to me that patriarchal control does not lesson with the (localized) decline of organised religion, it just changes its manifestation. Misogyny via religion is damaging to women, and misogyny via porn, objectification, dehumanization and normalization of sexualized violence is damaging too. I have no desire to try to figure out or quantify which one does the most damage; that it is obvious that they both do serious, far reaching damage, is enough for me.