Times article on Pornhub - and the response to it

[RoyalCorgi]

In today's Times, Helen Rumbelow wrote an excellent article about Pornhub, and the preponderance of videos where men are shown to be enjoying violence and abuse of women.

On Twitter, someone called Mic Wright has claimed (either because he's stupid, or because he's deliberately trying to cause trouble) that Rumbelow didn't realise the porn participants were actors, and that she's just a bit silly for not understanding that this is all just fantasy and therefore harmless.

He clearly hasn't grasped, or begun to grasp, the idea that boys watching, for pleasure, scenarios in which women are beaten or choked, is not healthy.

What's depressing is the number of men who have joined in to mock Rumbelow.

What's also depressing is that men like this not only watch the most vile, disgusting porn revelling in the depiction of women being harmed, but are prepared to boast about it publicly on Twitter. They don't have the decency to feel ashamed. It makes me despair about men.

https://twitter.com/brokenbottleboy/status/1656178711627014145

No one is hurt by fantasies, one can have the same fantasy night after night, but no one is damaged in any way.

A lot different to actors in this field.

Do people who fantasize about murder often go on to make pretend murder videos?

I dont know if "my" fantasies are in video form, I've never looked and I'm not about to look either. Am I really hurting anyone with the fantasy in my head that literally no one knows about?

If you made a standard TV drama where all the female characters were abused by the men and this was presented as basically a good thing, people would (rightly) be up in arms; but do that in pornography and many of the same won't allow the slightest criticism of it.

Similar plenty of pornography is pretty clearly racist or homophobic and yet people who would be outraged at similar in mainstream TV or film are entirely unbothered.

Well yes. Because imagination isn't reality

I don’t know (can guess, I think) why someone would choose to repeatedly derail an important and long overdue discussion about the harms done by online porn to focus on their preferred abstract philosophical issues, but I wish they’d stop.

I think it’s so important that national newspapers are writing about this now. I think part of the issue is that people who aren’t porn addicts don’t know how bad the problem is, and porn addicts don’t want the rest of us to know. I only know from reading feminist sites, from watching feminist videos, and from seeing the statistics on age of first porn exposure, sexual assault rates in schools, etc. So I can’t talk on it with authority and I can’t face what I’d have to do to acquire such authority - and if I did decide to watch porn just to know what I’m talking about, it’s not like that would help my credibility! But I have a good sense of pattern recognition, I fucking know there’s a big problem here.

So articles like this are hugely important, even just as something to point to, to persuade complacent women there is an actual problem.

It's probably worth mentioning that Fred Wallace was sacked from his NHS job for the relentless harassment of a severly disabled woman who is campaigning to female-only care.
So that's the level of individual this man supports.

An animated or computer generated porn film isn't exactly "reality" either.

And you are defending even the most extreme possible sexual fantasies as being OK.

So why doesn't your position easily lead to supporting animated forms of extreme pornography?

I think part of the issue is that people who aren’t porn addicts don’t know how bad the problem is, and porn addicts don’t wantthe rest of us to know.

100% this.

I don’t know (can guess, I think) why someone would choose to repeatedly derail an important and long overdue discussion about the harms done by online porn to focus on their preferred abstract philosophical issues, but I wish they’d stop.

As I read the OP, they weren't narrowly focused only on something like you can't morally produce such material using real people. Rather, I read it as involving various aspects including people enjoying that type of fantasy in porn. So I think the enjoyment of fantasy even without porn is closely connected and entirely relevant to bring up.

That's only getting slightly philosophical with it, and if you want to properly discuss ethical issues, you may need to get a little philosophical.

Harmful thoughts are harmful. Having thoughts about raping, children, choking etc are harmful and say a lot about someone.

its also frustrating to see men joke about women researching porn and saying they must have enjoyed it, they must have masturbated etc. the only other research project which came close in terms of how it disturbed me was when I had to read a bunch of materials about the Holocaust. Men, maybe you want to question why this is your chosen wank material.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes how the orthodox priests were treated in the KGB prisons: they were beaten, sodomized, urinated on, dragged around by their hair, had their heads shaved and forced into toilets. All this is also done to women in porn, and is just a click away on Pornhub.

RoyalCorgi · 10/05/2023 18:21
I don't think it's any surprise people think that because it's actors it's harmless.

Agreed. But also, although the participants may think of themselves as actors, they're not really acting. If you see two people having sex in, say, Normal People, they're not actuallyhaving sex. If you see a fight in Peaky Blinders, no one is really being hurt. It's all fake.

But in porn, the woman is being penetrated, slapped, choked, spat on or beaten. The actors aren't pretending to do those things. And you have to ask whether the female participants are truly consensual, or whether they have been coerced.

Read this to learn the reality behind the ‘acting’ ( ignore the transgender part).

http://forthvalleyfeminists.com/dr-em-porn-culture-and-transgenderism/

I have a twelve year old son and I have absolutely no idea how to stop this from becoming part of his life.

DP seems to think we just have to let him learn for himself, and it's hard to know the alternative. Any slight attempt by me to even mention sex or girls is met by 'oh my god STOP' and leaving the room.

I have a twelve year old son and I have absolutely no idea how to stop this from becoming part of his life.

This seems so important, and I've never heard of anyone who's got answers or even anyone who's looking for answers. I hope someone else on the thread has got something useful to contribute.

Even people who catastrophise about what's happening to young men today seem to gloss over the role that young men's porn habits are playing in creating all the bad outcomes they're so concerned about, just like all the people suddenly talking about the decline in teenage girls' mental health talk about "social media" but don't seem to mention porn.

They fill their heads with it because they don't respect us. I wish women would just teach girls to see men for what they are and quit making excuses for them. They are never going to change but we can.

Would women want anything to do with men who like to watch dogs abused for fun? Why do we respect ourselves so little?

Why does he need to learn from it? What is he going to learn? What did adolescent boys do throughout history? Internet porn is not needed. Block it. It's your house. He is free to make his own decisions when he's an adult.

MW also freaked out a while ago when Sarah Ditum (I think it was her) posted a similar piece. Obviously someone deeply wedded to defending the status quo in porn, which is odd for someone so dedicated to projecting an image of being so left wing.

That's very niche.
Most men are watching porn involving real people. When those people are women, the porn involves violence, degradation and misogyny. That's what we are talking about.
Not thoughts in people's head, not erotic writing, not animated porn. The common or garden porn that "all men" watch, that involves harm to women.

I talked to my son about how your brain is wired, how you want to wire it to real life people not images, but if you watch porn you are wiring it to fake sex on a screen.

It seemed to work because it wasn't graphic and was a bit detached from actual sex chat- it was about brains and social development. But who knows?

There's a great tedX talk called "your brain on porn" that you can send them. Again they may not watch it, but at least you tried

I remember a poster once mentioned their sons listened to Jordan Peterson talking about it and that this influenced them nit to be taken in by the pull.

It’s difficult to block if his friends and him have phones. They bypass the blockers by using data. And you have to be sure all their friends parents are as strict. Parents just don’t have the connection they do with other parents at secondary school unlike primary school.

Jordan Peterson has some very anti-woman views. He thinks "enforced monogamy" is the answer to preventing incel terrorism for example. He is a hero for the alt right, antifeminist man. I strongly suggest you don't introduce your son to his thinking

The issue about fantasy and reality is one that is about harm. The difference between actual or intended harm.

Fantasy per se is not harmful. But what you do fantasize about can be harmful. Child abuse, drawn or rendered which does not involve an actual child is unlawful because it is abusive. Child sex dolls are obscene objects, you can commit a criminal offence if you own one.

I hope no one is upset by what I have to say, but years ago I had to check and build a case for a child sex doll being illegal. The law was not clear at that time. As part of this work, I had to research and look at cases of obscenities and pornography. Part of that exercise involved looking at the treatment of those under 16 and women in pornography, and how the courts treated these issues in the past.

I built a successful case in the end. But I also saw that post 2000, there was a huge change in terms of how the law applied to women and obscenity and pornography. What would have been classified as obscene, unlawful or abuse simply disappeared. That distinction simply seemed to be that consent was possible. Not actual. And so there was no more harm, neither actual or intended, and what effect there was beyond the viewer.

It is really important to remember that even 25 years ago, what was obscene or unlawful protected women nominally better than now. And that men agreed that was something that mattered.

This is a counsel of despair. Block porn on the router and monitor his data usage to see which apps he's on. It'll soon run out anyway if he's trying to stream HD videos. Although he'll inevitably be shown stuff by friends, he's not going to develop a full-blown addiction if there's no access at home.