Fuck Sexism

[Sajainta]

I think in general it is treated more lightly, in that right-wing males hold male and female sexuality to two different standards.

I've always been under the impression that lesbianism is treated more lightly because it's thought as "sexy" to most men--even conservatives.  It's so hypocritical.  I've known people to condemn homosexuality between men, but feel differently about homosexuality between women.  Two men having sex?  Ugh, that's vile.  Two women having sex?  Super hawt, yo.

I also have a question that I'm very curious about, having followed this thread since I joined.  Apologies if this has already been addressed; I could not find it in this thread.

How do you guys feel about porn and the porn industry?

[Zephira]

I'm all for the porn industry, so long as it's done legally and with full consent of everyone involved. It can be considered an art, just like and other form of film.

[ZeaLitY]

I haven't studied the issue enough to know, but it seems very possible and extremely likely that pornography reinforces degrading attitudes towards women.

Yes, there are women who like facials in the world. But fundamentally, it seems so, so demeaning. And in some places, the pornography trade is hand-in-hand with the sex trafficking industry.

[Lord J Esq]

My thoughts about the porn industry are based on my thoughts about the prostitution industry. I see modeling, pornography, and prostitution as three degrees of the same thing. I have big problems with the abuses and exploitations committed by the people who control these industries. At the same time, I recognize the economic opportunity that exists in the human body's sexual appeal, sensual appeal, and, as Zephira mentioned, artistic appeal.

As a matter of principle, while my attitudes toward the prostitution industry are mixed, I am supportive of the pornography and modeling industries. That's in principle, mind you. In practice my support is tepid, as I would want to see the worker abuses corrected by government oversight and law enforcement before I could say that I more strongly support these industries.

That's the gist of what I think, although there's a lot more about human psychology that I almost added.

How about you?

[Sajainta]

My opinion is probably closer to Z's.  I have no issue with pornography in general or people who want to perform in pornography and I do think in some cases it could be seen as artistic.  But there's that huge, shadowy half of the industry.  Could someone ever be fully sure that what they were watching is completely divorced from that shadowy side?  It's because of that that I'm hesitant to view the industry as something beneficial.  Not on any holier-than-thou ground, but simply because there is so much abuse that goes on behind so many cameras.

[FaustWolf]

FW's X-RATED EXTRAVAGANZA!

ENTER - or LEAVE. We're warning you!
(Poster was over 18 at the time of writing this in accordance with USC yadda yadda yadda).

I think pornography was the 800 lb gorilla in this thread for some time, so thanks to Sajainta for breaking the ice on this. Everyone brings up excellent and valid points so far.

Zephira's observation that porn can be artistic hints at a common fallacy of traditional conservatism -- the attitude that the human body is somehow inherently evil, and that we'll all be scarred if we see nude animals of the human variety. I think this is primarily where sex-positive feminism is coming from: by embracing pornography, women might feel that they're regaining some respect for the female body and its daring beauty. The catch is, a sex-positive feminist like Betty Dodson would have to produce for this to be true, and I suspect most pornographers are not sex-positive feminists named Betty Dodson.

But in this effed up world, any art involving the human body is going to be a double-edged sword; hence the importance of Zeph's concern that pornography indeed be filmed under fully consensual circumstances. I'd be interested to know how much of the activities of full-fledged sex trafficking are in fact filmed and distributed as "porn." You always see things like the following in pornography: "Hey dudes! We found this sexy Russian babe on the streets of, uh, So-Cal, and filmed her doing x-y-z! She doesn't say anything, because she doesn't really know English or anything, but what a nasty slut! Just $49.99!" How does the porn consumer know that he (or she) is getting what's in the advertisement? Are porn consumers taught to look for telltale signs of abuse? Probably not, and therein lies a huge danger. When rape is being simulated for the viewer's (sick) pleasure, how is the viewer to know what the heck's really going on? And when the latest "Girls Gone Wild" whatever is released, are these women really 18, or are 15, 16, and 17 year-olds being exploited?

That is only the most egregious concern we can come up with regarding pornography, and probably what most government resources need to be devoted to investigating and destroying. What's sad is that our society's very tendency to label porn "icky" is preventing those who are on the front lines of this battle -- the end porn consumers -- from receiving the kind of training that might clue a law enforcement official in to the possibility that something is seriously, seriously wrong in whatever they're observing.


Now, for some other issues that we need to dissect seriously:

To ZeaLitY's observation on the demeaning of women I'll add something that, quite frankly I'm not 100% sure about since I'm not a woman, but which I highly suspect: women and men do not experience sex in the same way, and often do not receive pleasure from the same act. Male orgasm and female orgasm do not go hand-in-hand in some magical way, contrary to what movie love scenes would have us believe.

Why should we honestly care whether the female actress in a porn scene is actually experiencing pleasure (the "cum shot" Bob and Tom like to bring up every five minutes ensures us that, oh yes, the man is to some degree)? Because pornography reaches our children before sex ed does, and quite frankly, sex ed doesn't teach us about sexual politics -- it teaches us that sex is about male orgasm, reinforcing the message of pornography. Sex ed is slightly more noble in that it tacks on: "By the way, she can get pregnant! Wear a condom if you don't want your orgasm to result in a fetus, doofus!"

Yeah, I don't think we need to beat around the bush here. When I was in fifth grade in a fairly rural school district, both boys and girls were already referencing what they'd seen in pornographic pictures and perhaps videos they found online. The specific example I remember was a conversation about coprophagia. I'm dead serious about that; I didn't realize it at the time, but I'm pretty sure that's what the kids were seeing online and talking about. Kids were literally talking about this in class; it wasn't anything special. When I began tutoring special needs kids in high school, I caught seventh graders looking up sexual terms online and having to admonish them on the existence of cookies, and that any school administrator who happened to jump on that library computer would know exactly what the kid was looking up.

So, with that example in mind, back to the question: Why should we honestly care whether the female actress in a porn scene is actually experiencing pleasure? Because pornography is the primary sexual teacher in Western, wired society. It's simple as that; pornography, a male-dominated industry that produces goods meant to stroke men's egos as well as their libidos, is reinforcing models of sexual behavior that place men's pleasure over women's in importance, and also gives men the impression that their wonderful, magnanimous phalli are somehow the keys that open gateways to all pleasurable human experience. If a man's sex partner isn't sultrily moaning like the women in the pornography he's seen, it must be because he isn't "performing" well.

I wish I could stop there, observing that the porn industry is merely ignorant of its huge de facto responsibility in our society. But it becomes downright evil when porn producers know men are going to replicate the sex acts they see in pornography under the false impression that these acts somehow constitute a full episode of lovemaking. I forget which Wikipedia page it was now, but I swear I saw a reference about a company producing deep-throat films so hard-core the actresses sometimes vomit and the company won one of those Adult Entertainment Awards, and advertised with a slogan like: "More couples are demanding rough sex thanks to us (insert insidious wink)!"

I don't mean to make a moral judgment here; if "couples" are really into what some of these companies are putting out and women want to have their gag reflexes triggered during sex in the privacy of their bedrooms, it's not my business. But it becomes my business as an upstanding member of society to help stamp out this company's activities if it's something women feel pressured into doing just because societal messages imply that this is normal behavior, and not because they're turned on by the idea of spilling their stomach contents.

Phew. Man, sorry if anyone had to stop reading there, it's just that this stuff is really out there, and we cannot ignore what it could be doing to our society. I just get extremely pissed thinking about sexual politics for some reason, and my sneaking suspicion that women are being victimized regularly in sexual relationships, especially in ones in which they're afraid to communicate for whatever reason.

Obviously we should also worry about the porn industry's capacity to produce HIV-infected people (link probably NSFW). The one thing the Catholic Church and some porn producers share in common is their discouragement of condom use, as can be seen in the linked example. Pornography, being probably a good through which the viewer experiences some kind of vicarious pleasure, is going to show condom-less men engaged in various fluid exchanging activities with condom-less partners, due to the popular, effed up notion in a lot of men's heads that condoms decrease sexual pleasure.

Next thing to excoriate: use of language in pornography, and especially its sexist expression. Men in pornography, though they aren't nearly highly paid as women probably are, are nevertheless "studs." Women, on the other hand, are "sluts." They're "hos." They're "nasty."


And that's just addressing ZeaLitY's post. Now to add to J's:

I would place pornography far closer to prostitution than modeling. While it's true that "pornography" is a blanket term that encompasses nearly harmless erotic photography as well as the more unscrupulous things I've been describing, a large portion of pornography is still subject to the linguistic sexism aspect. Whether the "slut" fucks or the "slut" strips, we're still talking about a "slut." Let's not give pornography as it currently exists any more credit than it's due: this isn't a celebration of women's sexuality, otherwise they'd be called "goddesses" and "beautiful." How often do we hear terms like that used in any pornography produced by someone who isn't Betty Dodson?

Also of concern should be the reasons why both men and women get involved in the porn industry willingly; J said before in the prostitution thread that undereducated women getting into that industry should give us some pause, and I think the same very much applies here. We may glamorize pornography in our minds, thinking that beautiful men and women are happily jumping into opportunities to be pleasured by hot members of their preferred sex. But come on, take a look at some of the people who are actually in the industry: does anyone here think it would be cool to spend time naked with Ron Jeremy? Furthermore, both heterosexual and homosexual scenes are built solely for the viewer's pleasure, and may require straight men to engage in gay porn, straight women to engage in lesbian porn, etc.

This tells us, intuitively, that money is probably the main motivation for people to go into the porn industry. I'm interested to know how many down-and-out actors and actresses, dancers, etc., get pulled into it. I think economic desperation driving people into this industry, with all its hazards, represents a kind of victimization, even if it's a soft kind of victmization.

Furthermore, I tend to view pornography as a type of de facto prostitution. Both involve people getting paid to engage in non-intimate, unemotional sexual acts for the customer's enjoyment. Whether the customer is interacting directly with the object of physical desire or is content to remain a voyeur, or perhaps experiences vicarious enjoyment through the actor of his or her own gender, money is being traded for sexual pleasure. It's probably fair to say that modeling and swimsuit competitions are similar to some degree, but porn and prostitution are far more similar to one another in this regard than modeling is...though I could very well be missing some of the less savory aspects of the modeling industry.

I admit I haven't done any research whatsoever on the modeling industry, nor read that many feminist critiques of it, so given Lord J's and ZeaLitY's concern over abuses rampant in that industry, perhaps it will be a good topic to move into once we've chewed on this one for awhile.


Now, I'm not saying pornography is necessarily a bad thing. Rather, I think the industry should be reformed after all instances of blatant abuse of unwilling participants are rooted out. I'd like to see a porn industry that does the following:

*Acknowledges its role as the primary sexual educator in western society; or if it is not, that it is still extremely significant in that regard.

*Reflecting on the above, illustrates episodes of balanced sexual behavior scientifically proven to be titillating for the average man, woman, and transgendered person.

*Employs language that emphasizes the fundamental goodness and worth of the bodies of all genders.

*Fosters the impression that sex is best performed within an emotionally intimate, communicative relationship. Okay, on one level that might nix the whole "actor" and "actress" thing -- but when you really think about it, don't mainstream movie actors and actresses also simulate close relationships? Why should there not be emotional chemistry between porn actors and actresses as well? Any sexual episode that involves no real communication  between the sex partners has something wrong with it, as any sex psychologist worth his or her snuff would probably tell us. "Real" communication must include something more than in-out-in-out.


If anyone's interested in examining the porn industry, you don't have to "get dirty" and go buy a bunch of hard core porn. Wikipedia has its own sex industry and human sexuality portal filled with all this info if you can stomach some nudity and diagrams of naked people doing various things with each other. I think every American citizen owes it to him-or-herself to investigate this industry in depth. As we've derived elsewhere time and time again, "out of sight, out of mind" does not equal "out of existence." There are major, major issues in this industry that need to be solved. And with its increasing mainstream appeal, I feel it is swift becoming the main purveyor of sexist attitudes in our society.

[FaustWolf]

Damn, sorry to add even more to this, but reflecting on the movie Perfect Blue got me thinking about potential sexual exploitation in the mainstream movie industry. I think it was Sharon Stone who once quipped something about being unable to keep her pants on in any movie she was in. I wonder how many times film writers and producers use their power over the movie's content to serve their own, or their male audience's, voyeuristic desires. Oh, wait, we got Sharon Stone!? Duuude, let's lengthen that sex scene and do some close-up shots!

It might sound kind of silly, but this is a dead serious issue. Take a peek at Last Tango in Paris, for example. Again, the link might not be safe for work. No screenshots of the movie or anything, but it does involve descriptions of...Marlon Brando, butter, and an actress caught off guard.

So it's not just the porn industry that's at fault, and maybe there's some application to the modeling industry and beauty pageants as well. Something about mixing people, cameras, and money together...it's a powder keg. Add power imbalance, it explodes into something that is often truly horrific.

[Lord J Esq]

Quite true. Hollywood and all of the other avenues of the entertainment industry make a routine of exploiting females. When one is exposed to something enough, one gets to recognize it. These days I can tell a misogynistic book or film or game or television show with minimal effort. They're written by and for jejune males, with little awareness of--and sometimes active enjoyment of--their exploitations.

[Schala Zeal]

I don't know about you, but if I wound up pregnant before I was able to actually give my child the good life it deserves, there is no way I would go through all nine months of a useless pregnancy.

You can't change the minds of those who don't have a mind. This country is so bad that:

- The current surgeon general is an obese woman who used to serve as the nutrition consultant for Burger King.
- Those in Congress debating an issue, let's say global warming, have no degrees or PhDs whatsoever, and yet are telling those who actually have that... that they're wrong.

It just goes to show, if you use the Bible as a reference for issues, make opinion into solid fact, believe in talking snakes and that the sun revolves around the earth... you're incompetent... and likely a hypocrite. My father said that 90% of humanity refuses to accept responsibility of any wrongdoing. They'll justify their actions anyway they can.

What today boils down to is not politics, but sentient beings vs. the apes. Well, I guess you can consider that politics, but if so, politics have been completely redefined over the past twenty years.

[Lord J Esq]

I don't think you meant "surgeon general." There is no surgeon general at present, and the acting surgeon general is an admiral and neither female nor obese.

[Thought]

Zephira's observation that porn can be artistic hints at a common fallacy of traditional conservatism...

I think you mean Puritanism, not conservatism. While the two are largely interchangeable, traditional conservatism doesn't necessary equate the human body (and sex in particular) as "sinful."

However, I think we are first making a fallacious claim. Conceptually I can acknowledge that it is possible for both sex and nudity to be represented in an artistic manner, but I must claim fault in the practice known as pornography. Going back to the etymology of the word, art might be defined as skill, but of course that is a little anachronistic. We might further define the word as an expression of skill designed to invoke an emotional or intellectual response through the use of particular intentional aesthetic concepts. Thus, we can call a landscape beautiful, but we cannot call it artistic without invoking imagery of an entity that created that landscape (which is why a photograph or painting of that same landscape might more readily be called artistic). Pornography does not meet such criteria.

Perhaps the act of sex depicted in such media is the result of skill, but experience rather than observation would really be necessary to judge that. While the imagery might be stimulating, it is seldom intellectually stimulating and it does not appear to invoke specific emotions. Rather, it stimulates an appetite. We do not call our appetite for air an "emotion," nor do we call thirst or hunger "emotions." While having an appetite is not a sin, it is improper to identify art as stimulating an appetite.

Again, this isn't to say that sexual representations could not be artistic, but rather that the manifestation generally known as pornography is not. It is designed to unskillfully stimulate an appetite. It would be prudent of us to distinguish non-artistic pornography from the conceptual possibility of artistic representations of sex and the body.

Why do I address this issue of the artistic possibility of pornography? Because it is under the shield of "art" and "free speech" that pornography attempts to remain free of control. Any ill of pornography thus may hide because other "forms" of pornography are considered art. If we remove the potential from art from pornography and place it into its own, unique category, we may better then attack the problems of the rest without damaging the value of the best.

I believe it was in another thread (or maybe just much earlier in this thread) that a link was provided to an article on the sex-trade. In that it was noted that perpetrator-consumers are demanding more dangerous "products" than they used to. Can we avoid the ad hoc propter hoc connection between this and what Faust noted:

I forget which Wikipedia page it was now, but I swear I saw a reference about a company producing deep-throat films so hard-core the actresses sometimes vomit and the company won one of those Adult Entertainment Awards, and advertised with a slogan like: "More couples are demanding rough sex thanks to us (insert insidious wink)!"

Consider also the problem of self image in the west; porn stars are rarely anything but the product of the surgical arts. Individuals, male and female, are altered literally from head to toe. That is not a celebration of the human form, that is a deviation of it, akin to the use of skin whitening cream or blepharoplastic surgery intending to add western-esq eye folds by non-European ethnicities.

To strive for an ideal can be good; indeed, such behavior is human. But let us be damn sure that the ideal is humane.

I don't mean to make a moral judgment here; if "couples" are really into what some of these companies are putting out and women want to have their gag reflexes triggered during sex in the privacy of their bedrooms, it's not my business.

I would disagree. If the couple was comprised of an 80 year old man and a 10 year old girl, you would make a moral judgment, yes? The mere location of sex doesn't remove it from the oversight of society at large; rather, society may choose to allow acts and then define where they are allowable. Pedophilia is considered by society to be harmful to children, even if the children willingly engage, and so bedroom be damned, we judge, and rightly so. If pornography (or particular forms of pornography) are deemed by society to be similarly harmful to a people group, then even if that people-group willingly engaged, bedroom be damned!

As a society we can determine what we will and will not allow. It is naive to think that this has no power over the individual; if society says that deep-throating aint okay, it will decrease in occurrence. Of course, as a society we have the responsibility to make sure that we do not infringe upon personal freedom without undo cause, but if there is cause, infringe away.


But as this is quite close to condemning all representations of sex, let me be clear that I am not advocating a puritan society. Rather, I desire an intentional society. If we desire to portray sex artistically, then let us do so, but let us also put away such illusions as that porno is artistic. If we desire sexual liberty, then let us have sexual liberty, but not sexual anarchy. Pornography may not be art, but neither is coca-cola and I'm not advocating we get rid of that... but, you know, we don't let them put cocaine into it either. If a legitimate value can be found in it, let us keep it, but the arguments I have seen are ones of potentiality, not reality.

Yeah, I don't think we need to beat around the bush here.

Oh that was a bad pun.

[FaustWolf]

Yeah, it was unfair of me to use the word "conservatism" there; you're right, puritanism is what I had in mind. Both conservatives and liberals should be capable of fostering healthy, non-damaging models of sexuality, though each side would probably pose serious questions to the other on how to best do this.

I guess art has always been in the eye of the beholder; according to Wikipedia's definition of art:

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.

It seems that "appealing to the senses" might allow what we typically call pornography to pass as art, according to that bare definition at least. But I definitely agree with Thought's notion that we should not let the "shield of art" prevent us from criticizing and eliminating offenses we might find in the industry. There is a point all of us reach, I think, where an offense in the name of art can be so grave that the question of whether it's art becomes immaterial. Snuff videos come to mind as an easy example; although the snuff video is somewhat legendary in its apparent non-existence, this is probably because law enforcement officers keep a very tight lid on videos serial killers may have made for their own pleasure. In Asia, there's a subset of what I would call "pseudo-pornography" in which beautiful women in high heels stamp on little kittens until the kittens are nothing but lumps of dead, bleeding meat with crushed eyeballs. I haven't researched this issue since around 2005, so I'm not sure if anything's been done about it. I've seen still photos though; they probably would have been material for Ogrish.com back in the day.

It's probably possible to argue that images of dead human bodies hanging in a serial killer's basement and images of heel-crushed kittens do fit the raw definition of art; they produce horror and revulsion in us, which could be called "senses" and "emotions." But none of us could sanely argue that these activities should be protected under the "shield of art." It's important to use some non-subjective distinguishing standard when judging what should and should not receive the shield legally and perhaps morally; I would say "physical, psychological, and/or emotional harm being inflicted, or inciting others to inflict such harm" but then again the sado-masochists would be after me...with their whips and chains. So how do we handle this rationally?

But if such a standard could be termed reasonable, it is the standard on which I oppose most of what's produced in the porn industry. If you can get past the hours of enemas porn actors and actresses have to undergo to do a "clean" anal scene without calling that undue physical stress or outright physical harm to the actors and actresses, the industry is certainly producing some level of psychological harm; mainly by spreading disinformation about human sexuality, and what gives people of both genders pleasure. A porn actress is not paid to experience pleasure; she's paid to appeal to the male psyche. Girls and boys watching all this at a young age are going to default to these behaviors, thinking they're seeing the real thing. If no communication between partners happens in a relationship in which pornographic behaviors are being reproduced, and the woman doesn't speak up if she feels uncomfortable or just "meh" about the sex, the relationship has been damaged.

Given the ubiquity of pornography in our society and its easy accessibility, it seems that one of the goals of good sex ed should be to dissect and deconstruct what's often shown in pornography; and counter it with a thorough study of sexual politics and sexual psychology. Both "puritan" sex ed that focuses on abstinence and "liberal" sex ed that focuses on contraception do nothing in this regard currently, other than the occasional tacky quip about love. Citizens aren't taught how to express their love, and nor are they taught how to communicate (or that they should communicate) with their partners to find out the best way of expressing their love. This isn't a problem for good communicative relationships, but our society is just fraught with relationships in which far too little communication occurs.


Yeah, my post up there was filled with bad puns; I blame it on occasional exposure to the Bob and Tom Show.


EDIT: Oh, the sexist language porn consumers are exposed to regularly would probably also count as psychological harm, as well as body image issues Thought raised.

Also, I earlier missed Thought's connection between sex trafficking and what's seen in the edgier pornography nowadays. I didn't put two and two together on this before, but it is very much worth our consideration: remember how Thought wrote that pornography is partially about "stimulating an appetite" or something to that effect?

We might give pornography a pass on this, thinking that it's meant to satiate the desire instead and thus deflect the pursuit of "rough" or "dangerous" practices. But have you guys ever seen a college couple watching MTV, and when a music video featuring scantily clad ladies shaking their thang pops on, the guy starts making the moves on his girlfriend? It's a horrific thought on some level, because now the "art" is being transformed into real human actions. If anal porn, bondage porn, vomit porn, coprophagiac porn, and other extreme images stimulate violent sexual desires instead of satiate them, we as a society are moving in the wrong direction indeed.

I imagine there's probably some kind of complex process involved wherein extreme images satiate violent desires in some, and cause others to act on such desires. It's said that Japanese men commit far fewer rapes since they're exposed to all kinds of lolli and rape hentai floating around in their society, but it would be interesting to see stats on that first (I've only really heard the anecdotes), and it's not to say that the Western man and the Eastern man are going to process the same images in the same way.

[FaustWolf]

I forget which Wikipedia page it was now, but I swear I saw a reference about a company producing deep-throat films so hard-core the actresses sometimes vomit and the company won one of those Adult Entertainment Awards, and advertised with a slogan like: "More couples are demanding rough sex thanks to us (insert insidious wink)!"

For those who dare...the NSFW factor is obvious here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JM_Productions

Though I haven't found the "More couples are demanding rough sex" quote, I bet I could turn it up with some digging. Thankfully this studio has been raided from time to time, but interestingly, it's still producing. Meaning that while it's fashionable to raid these outfits every once in a while, nobody really cares from a law enforcement perspective. Reflect on the fact that these guys are still operating, while reading this quote from one of the actresses who participated, lifted from the article:

In 2005 JM released Donkey Punch, which features actresses receiving a Donkey Punch. Actress Alex Devine reportedly posted on ExtremeGirlForum.com that "Donkey Punch was the most brutal, depressing, scary scene that I have ever done." Although she initially agreed to be hit on the head during the scene, she claimed to have misunderstood exactly how physical the scene would be.

And we wonder why there are militant feminists out there who want to castrate all men with knives. Perhaps these militant feminists just want to produce "art."

EDIT: More food for thought. Found this on Xbiz.com, apparently a porn industry news source or something. The article was linked from Wikipedia.

[On one hard core website] the tag line reads: “Feast your eye on the nastiest whores who love to be treated like worthless pieces of meat.”

The attention should be on love to be treated like worthless pieces of meat. 10-year old children, possibly of both sexes, are watching whatever series the article was referring to, I guarantee it. What message does this send to them? Even in the case of grown men who watch this filth, if they do it on a regular basis their psyches could be broken down by the notion that women somehow enjoy being abused.

And this type of porn isn't somehow hidden to all but society's most horrible individuals; this is mainstream. These people get awards, as shown in the linked wiki article. People sitting in plush chairs ooh and ahh, and clap and give standing ovations to this type of material.

Again, we wonder why there are militant feminists out there who want to castrate all men with knives. Perhaps these militant feminists just want to produce "art."

[FaustWolf]

Great article here to drive the point home; couldn't have said it any better myself.
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/pornography&cruelty.htm

EDIT: Once again I'm putting the "FW" in NSFW. No pics though -- but reader discretion advised, the descriptions in this academic paper are pretty graphic.

EDIT: And I want to quote this. For the sake of taste...oh what the hell, can any word be worse than "fuck" to begin with?

We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women. And no one seems to be terribly concerned about this. Right-wing opponents of pornography offer a moralistic critique that cannot help us find solutions, because typically they endorse male dominance, albeit not these manifestations of it. Some segments of the feminist movement, particularly the high-theory crowd in academic life, want us to believe that the growing acceptance of pornography is a sign of expanding sexual equality and freedom. Meanwhile, feminist critics of pornography have been marginalized in political and intellectual arenas. And all the while, the pornographers are trudging off to the bank with bags of money.

I think this helps explain why even the toughest women -- women who at rape crisis centers routinely deal with sexual violence -- find the reality of pornography so difficult to cope with. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime. Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as liberation.

...

In a society in which so many men are watching so much pornography that is rooted in the pain and humiliation of women, it is not difficult to understand why so many can’t bear to confront it: Pornography forces men to face up to how we have learned to be sexual. And pornography forces women to face up to how men see them.

...

When we criticize pornography, we typically are told we are either sexually dysfunctional prudes who are scared of sex, or people who hate freedom, or both. That works to keep many people quiet. The pornographers desperately want to keep people from asking the simple question: What kind of society would turn the injury and degradation of some into sexual pleasure for others? What kind of people does that make us -- the men who learn to find pleasure this way, and the women who learn to accept it?

...

But there should be nothing controversial about this: To criticize pornography is not repressive. To speak about what one knows and feels and dreams is, in fact, liberating. We are not free if we aren’t free to talk about our desire for an egalitarian intimacy and sexuality that would reject pain and humiliation.

That is not prudishness or censorship. It is at attempt to claim the best parts of our common humanity -- love, caring, empathy, solidarity. To do that is not to limit anyone. It is to say that people matter more than the profits of pornographers and the pleasure of pornography consumers. It is to say, simply, that women count as much as men.

If you've never read an article linked by a Compendiumite before, make this your first. Provided, of course, that you're not at work, no parent in the room, etc.

[FaustWolf]

Feminists who defend the existence of all pornography on the basis of anti-censorship grounds probably have qualms with a lot of what I've written and quoted. Accusations might range from "FW is a false paternalist who's really promoting patriarchy in disguise," to "FW wants to constrain others to his subjective standards." However, I don't think it can really be argued that the images invoked in the extreme mainstream cases I've delved into in the last few posts are anything other than misogynistic; perhaps the answer isn't straight censorship -- this is something we could quibble over -- but rather destroying demand for this large and overbearing subset of pornography by eliminating misogynistic attitudes in our society.

However, can we uproot misogyny when we say it's okay to eroticize it at the same time? A lot of non-radical liberals have no hesitation whatsoever to question a priest when he justifies some old Biblical teaching that implies women are worth less than men; but when did it become acceptable for the priest to descend upon a female parishioner, offer her $10,000, toss her onto the altar and initiate rough deep throating, all while pelting her with objectively sexist and hateful terminology, as long as it's taped for the enjoyment of all the other parishioners? When the female parishioner took the money and said "okay"? When a nun came by and said, "Here, I'll direct!"? When the priest revealed his name is Peter North?

To be clear, I'm not questioning a woman's right to welcome harsh physical blows, to be punched and smacked while derogatory insults and bodily fluids are thrown at her if that somehow piques her libido; but only to the extent that I'm not questioning her right to seek comfort within the confines of an Afghan burqa or proclaim herself a Pro Life activist. On an individual level these choices go hand in hand, if you believe that there are often misogynistic undertones in religion (and I have a strong suspicion that we can identify some).

That example probably doesn't work for everyone. Perhaps a better analogy is allowing a young girl to cut herself with blades out of some fascination with her own blood. She's making a decision about her body all right, but I think more often than not we'd try to get help for that person -- doubly so if she enjoys it when other people might be doing the cutting of her body. This is probably directly applicable to some of the more extreme BDSM porn that could be lurking out there, but also consider that the human pharynx was not terribly designed for deep throating, or that the other end of the human digestive tract was not terribly designed for intercourse, let alone intercourse with two or more phalli simultaneously. Also consider that like blades, the penis has often been employed as a weapon of war.

But perhaps most important is this: when captured on film for the consumption of others, her love -- yeah, let's give JM Productions the benefit of the doubt and assume that these actresses really enjoy this stuff, and are happy to return for more and more and more   -- of being physically assaulted while being verbally slandered filters into the wider society, and becomes a cultural artifact that shapes men's perception of women, and sometimes women's perception of themselves.

That, I cannot abide as long as I identify as a feminist or pro-feminist.