Discussions about porn

[Wandawomble]

Have noticed a few things and just want to put them up for thought.

Discussion of porn affecting women and girls often gets shouted down. Why do some women in particular get so protective over it?

Discussion of porn affecting women and girls gets hijacked by sex workers saying it’s their right to do it - I don’t disagree that people can do what they want with their bodies but why can we not talk about the effect that porn has on other women and girls? I think they are two separate issues. How do we talk about both in these kinds of discussions and separate the two issues in a coherent and respectful way?

Ideas and thoughts?

I mean, 29% of content bring viewed by females.... I'm still getting around this, so.... Yet we're still more likely to look up violent porn? Than men are?

So all that violent content out there on pornhub.cum including "taxi driver destroys a barely legal teen's areshole" etc etc is just completely overlooked by the vast majority of men and clicked on by women? Right?

^Xcuse typoes

The study quoted upthread was a very small number of female undergraduates, so not representative of the general population.

29% of women look at porn
The most common porn they look at is lesbian and male on male porn
Its hardly conclusive that women are driving violent porn is it

Oh plus around 60% of women never look at porn compared with around 30% of men
ifstudies.org/blog/the-porn-gap

Not read all the thread but an interesting side track.

Whether or not women - on their own and off their own bats- are watching loads of porn or not is kind of irrelevant to the objections to it.

I wanted to point out that it's not uncommon for women and girls who have experienced sexual violence to. Try to parse it? I'm sure I've read stuff. Not an expert though.

The other point is with eg 50 shades and that older study I forget what it was. About women and fantasies of being attacked etc.

I would think there is a difference between fantasising about being the one attacked rather than the one attacking?

In a het context I would feel that a man watching porn where a woman was beaten / seemed to be (or was, who knows) raped is very different to fantasising about being the victim? And are these fantasies where she wants it really? I can't imagine many women or men fantasise about being brutally raped.

If women are indeed heavy consumers of the type of porn where women are being brutalised -and in porn it's really happening of course- then I find that hard to believe.

If it were the case that women were really very interesting in watching other women being abused then would the crime stats look different?

Whatever the true picture is, it doesn't alter the objections. Unless the point is supposed to be that loads of women like being treated with violence and sexual violence secretly and so what's the problem. I don't think that's the argument though!

@QuentinWinters

Yes, you haven't shown any numbers either Thats because pornhub don't provide them. Follow the link tho and their graphs do not back up the view women watch lots of violent porn.

Some numbers have been suggested.

And I think many people know that some women watch porn.

But even if there was no information at all, you have no basis other than opinion to disagree that some group of women are interested in violent pornography. So it seems weird to press the point as if it's a crazy thing to think.

Data (whilst it can be misleading) is important because, as this study shows, public perception is usually very different from reality.

What I find interesting about the survey is that the generation with the greatest interest in BDSM and rough sex is gen Z. A generation which has grown up in an environment in which porn is normalised and in which one might be considered "vanilla" (the new frigid) if you don't express an interest in these things. I think this has come about because our porn saturated culture sells exploitation to women as empowerment. Men have always enjoyed women's degradation now women are expected to enjoy their own degradation too (or at least say they do)...

"This is closer to reportage than to fiction. As our survey shows, for gen Z (those aged 22 and under), “rough sex” — hair-pulling, biting, slapping, choking and other aggressive behaviour — was the second most popular porn category. Almost half (42%) of those aged under 23 stated that it was something they enjoyed watching. No other generation came close: in comparison, just 29% of millennials (23- to 38-year-olds), 17% of gen X (39- to 54-year-olds) and 6% of baby-boomers (aged 55-73) selected it. When it came to BDSM, gen Z again led the way, with 17% selecting it, compared with less than 10% of everyone else."

The article that accompanies the Times piece you shared is actually quite worrying:

"And it is not just on screen: 12% of gen Z-ers say they received all their sex education from porn and another quarter say online porn made up the “majority” of their knowledge. You would assume its consumers understand that porn is not real, but about a third of people consider it to be “very similar” (7%) or “somewhat similar” (24%) to real-life sex. No wonder young women are having bad, anxiety-triggering sex. Here is a thing, and not an unusual one, that happened recently to a friend’s 14-year-old daughter. She was going on a date that she was excited about. Towards the end, it turned out that the charming, polite boy who she’d been having a lovely time with was expecting sex. Anal sex, to be precise. The girl, a virgin, declined, though not without anxiously wondering whether this made her abnormally prudish. She was able to discuss it with her mother when she got home, and has the kind of mother who has told her children about the difference between real sex and internet porn. Not everyone is so lucky — and not every child listens. Besides, this is normalised. Young gen Z-ers are most likely to start watching porn between the ages of 15 and 17, and say they now watch it “most days”. By contrast, the majority of baby-boomers didn’t begin watching online pornography until their thirties or later, and now say they watch it just once a week."

Here's the data behind the headlines. It confirms my fears that the normalisation of violent porn is changing the way that young people view sex & relationships:

Porn survey 2019: how internet pornography is changing the way we have sex

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f4478e4c-b92b-11e9-8b18-4403ae03f399?shareToken=71b1b753ccf6726d89104764210b7b78

That makes sense to me, I tend to think that human sexual response is intended to be affected by culture, by what it's exposed to, it makes it very flexible and adaptable to different kinds of social arrangements.

Exposure to media will be totally outside any kind of evolutionary capacity in that regard but media images would still work on it in the same way, I'd think.

And there is no question that what we consider normal sexually is affected by what we see around us. It's violence, and anal sex, now, but previous generations have had similar experiences. The normalisation of removal of body hair, first by women but also increasingly by men in some circles. And just before mine, there was a similar normalisation of oral sex which before then was niche. The narrative at the time was that people had always done all of these things and were just ashamed and kept it quiet - a lot of the supposed research that supported that has been debunked.

At the same time, there always seems to have been some level of sexual interest by some people in pornography or it's precursors, or rough sex, and so on, maybe that has to do with how we've developed as a social species, or in some cases I think it might come from physiological response - pain can release chemicals that people find pleasurable for example.

Whatever it is, those capacities are there within us, but the social environment also seems to affect how they manifest.

I've read some things that suggest it's the ubiquity that's the problem. A lot of what drives arousal in porn (and in some types of in person sex too) is transgression and newness, but that wears off. So once vanilla porn doesn't work any more, the viewer has to up the stakes.

This isn't such an issue with conventional porn because it's self limiting, it's the easy access to thousands of images in seconds that creates the real problem. The brain becomes used to an unsustainable degree of stimulation and arousal can't happen without it.

So porn producers have been driven to come up with more and more transgressive material in an effort to feed the market they've created and keep them watching. Apparently it's recognised as a real problem that it's now so close to the edge that there is really no where else to go that isn't right out illegal. I'm sure this is also a driver of viewing of illegal material.

The viewers apparently in many cases know what they are watching is gross, but are in a type of addiction cycle. Increasingly with younger viewers they may have lttle normal sexual experience to compare with.

I think the other thing with this is, our culture doesn't include a lot of encouragement of sexual continence generally, and it doesn't give people many tools in terms of behaving within boundaries that are appealing to cross. In general we tend to blur the lines between wants and needs, we encourage a need for immediate satisfaction, and we tend to see people who aren't "sexually fulfilled" as the butt of jokes or pathetic. Self-disapline takes practice and we don't get a lot of it in many areas of our lives. It's hard to encourage it in one area when it's so discouraged in all the others.

@JohannaC

I know the 'decadent west' is a stereotype in media and there are reams of horror films about secret, almost Masonic, societies that indulge in horrific decadent activities, but it does seem superficially that the more civilised societies are more perverse in many ways.

Could this be some kind of pushback against repression, or aestheticising/sexualising of suppressed violence which would historically have manifested in physical combat or males fighting for hierarchy I wonder.

I've sometimes wondered if it isn't related to leisure and privacy.

Historically most humans have had limited leisure, and a lot of physical work, and almost no privacy.

People got up to a lot of sex, but a lot of the time there were other people around. That would limit how much "weird" stuff you might get up to. I wonder too if that isn't related in some way to people's interest in watching others have sex. It would have been a much more usual thing in the past but also more mundane.

I'm just not sure at all.

I do agree with the above posts about being influenced by what you consume, looking for more extreme etc.

I'm not at all sure about the Western decadence thing.

When men are in situations where it's ok, terrible things are done to women. The Isis slave markets. The rohingya women in China. The comfort women in ww2. The mass rape of german women ww2. DRC rape as a weapon of war. Of course it's girls as well and the list goes on and on. In the ', West' women talk about it more, it's in the media etc. Not that anyone's that interested. But what goes on in places where women aren't heard? Where they are still essentially property? What went on here when women were essentially property? Prostitution has always existed and there's always been a desire for young women/ girls. And so on and so on.

Is what is shown in porn- the debasement of women- the male sexual desires as the whole point- a new thing? Or is it that in societies where women have more freedom and more of a voice, another outlet was sought?

Sexual violence, male sexual domination, sadism have always existed. I don't know whether what modern porn looks like is new, as it were. Or just a reflection of what, in the end, lots of men want.

'dry sex'- very painful for the woman- Removing or preventing vaginal lubrication through practices associated with dry sex increases friction during intercourse, which may be perceived as increased vaginal tightness, and enhanced sexual pleasure for the male partner.[5] Some men who insist on dry sex regard "wet" women to be unchaste.[5] Dry sex can be painful for men[6][7][medical citation needed] and women.[1] Dry sex is common in Sub-Saharan Africa[1][2] and it has also been reported in Suriname among Afro-Surinamese women.[8]

The death grip thing reminded me.

War rape is as far from 'vanilla sex' as you can get.

Jesus.

Gang rape. Brutality. Violence. You think women aren't spat on, throttled, subjected to multiple penetration? I don't want to go on.

What a crass post.

It's a means of control. It's a weapon. It's designed to terrorise and degrade women and whole communities.