See our earlier post, “The Depiction of Whores, pt. I“
For our second post on the topic of pornography, I’d like to get into the real problem here, why porn is such a “big deal.”
To start, I’d like to note that we’re talking about porn in 2008, not nudie pics stashed in a closet, but freely available hardcore internet porn, available to kids and adults 24/7, including tons of porn involving the degradation of women and girls and the sexualization of children.
1. We’re raising a new generation of rapists.
This quote comes from the book Talking Back to Sexual Pressure: What to Say to Resist Persuasion, to Avoid Disease, to Stop Harassment, to Avoid Aquaintance Rape by Elizabeth Powell. It is seriously one of the most useful books you’ll ever come across. It’s easy to read, it’s comprehensive, and it’s goal is to give readers ideas, suggestions and strategies to take a stand against sexist and rape culture. I would recommend it for every parent and every educator. Five stars out of five.
“A young adolescent male is anxious to learn how to treat a woman. He is more likely to see an attempted rape in our media than see a woman engage in consenting sex. He is more likely to see her mutilated than to see her involved in mutual, erotic passion. At one time, older adolescents indoctrinated younger males to the world of sex in the ‘bull session’; now the pornography and sexual violence that young teenagers consume is their ‘primary sexual indoctrination.’
- Elizabeth Powell, Talking Back to Sexual Pressure
2. We’re changing how men see women and how they treat them.
One of the most popular defenses of pornography, especially violent pornography, is that because these are just images, just fantasies, a person with a need to encounter violent material can fulfill their “needs” through pornography rather than acting them out in person.
There are a number of issues with this belief, including some significant issues that it misses. One of these is the relationship between the man viewing pornography in one minute and then walking out and interacting with women in the “real world” in the next.
In Susanne Kappeler’s The Pornography of Representation, she talks about the men leaving the porn theater and how the viewing has influenced how they see women, and how that is enough to affect action. She makes the connection showing how you see people affects how you treat them, and pornography affects how men see women.
“What the men are doing in the world is continuing to see – to see women as objects of their pleasure and their feeling of life. It is quite enough ‘behaviour’ in my opinion. What the man is doing is watching pornography, seeing, fantasizing, and he is doing this already in the world. And he continues to view in the real, without any difference: in fact, he sees nothing at all except what he represents to himself. Under his aesthetic gaze any woman, known or unknown, turns into the ’stranger’, that object of no interest except for its capacity to stimulate the subject’s feeling of life.
The fundamental problem at the root of men’s behavior in the world, including sexual assault, rape, wife battering, sexual harassment, keeping women in the home and in unequal opportunities and conditions, treating them as objects for conquest and protection – the root problem behind the reality of men’s relations with women, is the way men see women, is Seeing.”
- Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, pgs. 60/1
3. It’s going to get worse.
This February I saw some posts covering an article on xBiz (a porn industry news site ) regarding a conference entitled “Pornography: Fantasy, Reality and Industry,” which was held at Notre Dame’s Center for Continuing Education, Indiana.
The conference opener, University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, noted that “When one looks honestly at the contemporary porn industry, one sees some disturbing images of where this world is heading.”
From the xBiz piece:
“Jensen cited adult producer’s growing fulfillment of the broad range of marketplace demands as one basis for his opinion; discussing how adult companies need to continually produce “new and interesting products” that have evolved from straight, vaginal sex in the 1960’s and ’70’s, to anal sex in the ’80’s and even more extreme material today.
“I asked one [pornography producer] about the rise of anal sex in the 80s,” Jensen said. “The producer replied that the majority of women do not seek out anal sex, so when men get angry at their wives, they secretly think to themselves that they would like to do that. Since they can’t, they like to watch it.”
Jensen described anal sex as “the sexualizing of male domination and female subordination. [It's] a disturbing mirror for the culture in which we live.”
Focusing on the market demand for depictions of sexual practices that some women may find objectionable along with the desire for profits are leading adult companies down the road to violence and pedophilia, Jensen claimed.
“Where is the industry going, and what could possibly come after this?” Jensen said. “I have asked this to several pornographers. Some will say, ‘I hate to say it, but the only place left to go is overt violence.’ The other place to go is to continue to sexualize youth.”
