Audrey's Reviews > Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
by
by
Overall, disturbing content. While many people think of pornography as harmless entertainment, the evidence is mounting that it is not. Porn is seriously misogynistic. It robs users of real, fulfilling intimate relationships and leaves addicts unable to function in society.
The book first covers the porn industry: how it started with magazines and moved to the internet, and all the marketing and greed that go into it. It is a male-dominated industry that exploits people for profit while offering nothing of value in return. The book also goes into how porn has leaked into the culture, from television to hookup culture. The whole thing is insidious.
Next the book covers porn’s effects on women and men each, specifically. It’s damaging to both. As porn races to the bottom in degredation, the women in porn are abused more and more. It teaches men to see and treat women as objects. It portrays consent as meaningless as all women and girls are inherently whores. Men become addicted, with altered brain chemistry and spending all their time and money on it.
There is a section on racism in porn. The racism is so over-the-top and beyond ridiculous I could hardly believe it. Basically, black men in porn are portrayed as sex-crazed animals violating white women. Asian men are feminized; Asian women are stereotyped in geisha-type roles, and black women feature much less often. The whole thing was repulsive.
As porn users get more and more desensitized, they have to turn to more shocking and taboo topics to get a thrill and eventually turn to pseudo-child porn (PCP) and ultimately child porn. PCP involves barely legal girls made up to look like young teens and children. Going with that are sites dedicated to girls losing their virginity, often violently. The link between porn and sexual assault crimes is still being debated and researched, but there is a clear link.
Ultimately, pornography, like the tobacco industry and drug cartels, get rich off of making victims. There is no positive benefit from porn and a host of damage to individuals and society at large. The effects will become more obvious with time.
The author is a progressive, left-wing feminist frequently accused of being anti-sex by critics who seem to refuse to examine any evidence of harm. After spending the whole book discussing men and women separately, the author says that gender is not real. How is that possible when you just recognized the differences in male and female anatomy? I’m still puzzled by that.
There are some things the book does not go into much that I would like to see (which is not a fault, as books can’t be infinite), but I think further research will come out with time: porn in the LGBT community (its forms and effects); porn made for women (more likely to take book form?); and more scientific research into the effects on the brain
(Strong language in quotes has been censored by me and appears in full in the book.)
Language: Lots of strong language, including some slurs
Sexual Content: Clinical but graphic sexual content that is often violent and misogynistic.
Violence: Sexual violence
Harm to Animals: (view spoiler)
Harm to Children: (view spoiler)
Other (Triggers): (view spoiler)
=========================================
Porn sex is not about making love, as the feelings and emotions we normally associate with such an act—connection, empathy, tenderness, caring, affection—are replaced by those more often connected hate—fear, disgust, anger, loathing, and contempt. In porn the man makes hate to the woman, as each sex act is designed to deliver the maximum amount of degradation.
The pornographers did a kind of stealth attack on our culture, hijacking our sexuality and then selling it back to us, often in forms that look very little like sex but a lot like cruelty.
[Re Girls Gone Wild] While they might have thought sexually performing for the camera was fun at the time, their families, communities, and peer group turned against them once they found out what they had done, labeling them as sluts, a label they carry with them wherever they go.
[Sean Thomas, founder of Maxim magazine] “The purpose of the lad mad is to tell guys that it is OK to be guys—to drink beer, play darts, and look at girls. When we started Maxim we consciously felt that we were leading a fight-back against the excesses of sneering feminism. I believe we succeeded.” Part of the anti-feminist stance that Maxim so proudly adopts is the way it constructs masculinity as predatory and aggressive. Sex in Maxim is what men want from women, and articles abound on how to please her, not for her sake, but as a way for him to manipulate her into having more sex.
In this world, men dispense with romantic dinners, vanilla sex, and postcoital affection and get down to the business of f—ing. In porn, sex is the vehicle by which men are rendered all powerful and women all powerless; and for a short time a man gets to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands.
The process of dehumanizing a group as a way to legitimize and justify cruelty against its individual members is not something that porn producers invented. It has been a tried and trusted method adopted by many oppressors; the Nazi propaganda machine effectively turned Jews into “k----s,” racists defined African Americans as “n-----s” rather than humans, and homophobes have an almost limitless list of terms for gays and lesbians that strip them of humanity. Once the humanness of these individuals is collectively rendered invisible by their membership in a socially denigrated group, then it is that much easier to commit acts of violence against them.
In porn, the women’s lack of human qualities often results in men’s inability to see just how violent the sex act is. No matter how cruel the sex, the one question I can always count on hearing from a man after my presentation is, “Women enjoy what they are doing, so why is porn a problem?” Of course, these men have no empirical evidence to support this, just their observations of the porn that they masturbate to. When I ask them if they would like to see their wives, girlfriends, or sisters in the position—in an attempt to humanize the porn performers—they are quick to respond that their loved ones are different from the women in porn; their women would never “choose” such a job. The image these men seem to have of women in porn is of a woman accidentally stumbling onto a porn set one day, and realizing that this is what she has been looking for all her life. That these women are acting, and may have come to porn not so much through choice but due to a lack of alternatives is rarely considered because this premise threatens to puncture the fantasy world created by both pornographer and user.
Men may think that the porn images are locked in that part of the brain marked fantasy, never to leak into the real world, but I hear over and over again from female students how their boyfriends are increasingly demanding porn sex from them. ... And from male students I increasingly hear how they thought that they could separate the two worlds, only to find out that industrially produced porn images do indeed seep into their intimate lives.
Missing from porn is anything that looks or feels remotely like intimacy and connection, the two ingredients that make sex interesting and exciting in the real world. Drained of these, porn becomes monotonous and predictable to the point that users need to eventually seek out more extreme acts as a way to keep them interested and stimulated.
The men in the small Catholic college dismissed this opportunity to explore their sexuality and it was apparent that, knowingly or now, they adhered to the porn world’s story: pornography is fun and harmless fantasy. My questioning the real-world implications of such fantasy elicited neither interest nor curiosity but a kind of consuming rage that closed down the possibility or reflection, analysis, and reason. The rage was directed at two places, both female—either the women in the industry or me—and it certainly conveyed to all women in the room what happens to those of us who don’t follow the porn party line. Conversely, the men who were concerned about their use seized the opportunity to explore how porn had affected them; the result was a serious and painful reflection of their porn use that left me, and many people in the audience, deeply moved.
These are not “fantasies” constructed in the head of each individual porn user, based on his own creative imagination, past histories, longings, and experiences, but highly formulaic, factory-line images created by a savvy group of capitalists. ... Ironically, what the “Porn is fantasy” camp misses is that porn actually works to limit our imagination and capacity to be sexually creative by delivering images that are mind-numbingly repetitive in content and dulling in their monotony.
Progressives have, for good reason, singled out the media as a major form of (mis)education in the age of monopoly capitalism in which a few companies dominate the market and use their economic and political power to deliver messages that sell a particular worldview that legitimizes massive economic and social inequality. But many of these same progressives argue against the view that porn has an effect on men in the real world, preferring instead to call anti-porn feminists unsophisticated thinkers who don’t appreciate how images can be playful and open to numerous interpretations. So now we are in a somewhat strange place where people who argue that mainstream corporate media have the power to shape, mold, influence, manipulate, and seduce viewers simultaneously deny that porn has an effect on their consumers.
Imagine what would happen if suddenly we saw a slew of dramas and sitcoms on television where, say, blacks or Jews were repeatedly referred to in a racist or anti-Semitic way, where they got their hair pulled, faces slapped, and choked by white men pushing foreign objects into their mouths. My guess is that there would be an outcry and the images would not be defended on the grounds that they were just fantasy but rather would be seen for what they are: depictions of cruel acts that one group is perpetrating against another group. By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence.
One pattern I have seen emerge is the way many of these men don’t mind the porn images intruding into their sex lives as long as the sex partner is a hookup. They start to mind when they have met someone they want to forge a relationship with and they are unable to get rid of the images. Try as they may, scenes from their favorite movies come hurtling back as they become aroused. They find themselves comparing their girlfriend to their favorite porn performers, with the girlfriend coming off the loser. Andy put it succinctly: “When we have sex, I try not to think of some scenes from porn that I like, and then I feel guilty because I can’t help myself when I do think about that. I feel like a s–t because she doesn’t even know I watch porn.” Tony, voicing a similar sentiment, said, “I hope she never knows what’s going through my mind when we have sex. She’d hate me.”
The intimacy, igniting of senses, and connections developed when skin meets skin are all either absent or overridden by the industrial product that these men have come to depend on for sexual pleasure. Trained by the porn culture to see sex as disconnected from intimacy, users develop an orientation to sex that is instrumental rather than emotional. No wonder one man described pornography as teaching him “how to masturbate into a woman.”
The men I speak to at colleges who are addicted do indeed end up in serious trouble; they neglect their schoolwork, spend huge amounts of money they don’t have, become isolated from others, and often suffer depression. They know that something is wrong, feel out of control, and don’t know how to stop. ... This seems to be such a problem on some campuses that the counseling center is now offering support groups for such men. Whenever I hear these stories, I feel both sad for the men and outraged at the porn industry for hijacking the men’s sexuality to the point that they feel so out of control.
For this group of men [sex offenders], the regular gonzo pornography became boring, and they moved into more violent, fetishistic pornography, often that which looked like overt torture. When this also started to become boring, most of the men moved into child pornography. Some accidentally came across child porn while surfing porn sites, and others sought it out to masturbate to something other than the usual porn. The average length of time between downloading the first child porn and sexually assaulting a child was one year. Most men told me that before becoming addicted to Internet porn, they had not been sexually interested in children.
The connection between porn and rape is without a doubt the most debated and most controversial question of porn’s effects. Some argue that porn causes men to rape, while others counter that sexually aggressive men seek out more violent pornography and would rape with or without the visual stimuli. Studies, however, suggest that there is a link between porn consumption and violence against women. Neil Malamuth, one of the most well-known psychologists studying the effects of porn, and colleagues reviewed a broad range of studies and concluded that “experimental research shows that exposure to non-violent or violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and in actual aggression.”
And then there are the women who have been raped as adults by boyfriends, husbands, teachers, priests, doctors, colleagues, and strangers, who either made them act like the women in porn or told them about their porn use as they raped them. I have heard from wives who were forced to put a centerfold over their face as their husbands raped them; girlfriends who, during the assault, had to moan just like the woman in the movie; women who thought they could trust a male friend only to be drugged and raped while the camera was recording; and students who went to fraternity parties and were gang-raped by the brothers as a porn movie was playing in the background. Traveling the country, I have heard just about every possible way that porn is used against women, children, and some men. I have listened to stories of lives devastated by men who use porn, and for these survivors, porn is not a fantasy but a nightmarish reality.
What anti-porn feminists are saying is that such myths promote a culture that will affect men in myriad ways: some will rape but many more will beg, nag, and cajole their partners into sex or certain sex acts, and more still will lose interest in sex with other human beings. Some will use women and disregard them when done, some will be critical of their partner’s looks and performance, and many will see women as one-dimensional sex objects who are less deserving of respect and dignity than men, both in and out of the bedroom. Whatever the effect, men cannot walk away from these images unchanged.
Susan Bordo looks at the ways the culture helps shape women’s ideas about what constitutes the perfect body. The bodies of the women we see in magazines and on television are actually very unusual in their measurements and proportions, with long necks, broad shoulders, and high waists. Yet because these are more or less the only images we see, we take them to be the norm rather than the exception and assume that the problem lies with us and not the fashion and media industries that insist on using a very specific body type.
It would be a mistake to glorify sex for women in the pre-hookup days, as feminists such as Shere Hite have documented just how unfulfilling sex was with men who were clueless about women’s bodies and sexual desires. But if previous generations of men didn’t understand women’s bodies, then what must this generation of men be like who have grown up on porn? As my colleague Robert Jensen always says, “If men are going to porn to learn about women’s sexuality, then they will certainly be disappointed.” In porn a man just has to have an erection for a woman to be suddenly overtaken by orgasmic responses. Porn sex assumes that women are turned on by what turns men on, so if he enjoys pounding anal sex, then she does too. Little surprise that studies show that men in hookups experience orgasm more often than women, or that they report more sexual satisfaction from the encounters.
With hookup sex comes, for women and girls, an increased possibility of being labeled a slut—a term that is used to control and stigmatize female sexual desire and behavior. There is, after all, no male equivalent of a slut since men who are thought to be highly sexually active are called a study or a player—labels most men would happily take on. ... But for all of women’s so-called sexual empowerment today, the effects of being labeled a slut are as devastating now as they were in the past. A study by academics Wendy Walter-Bailey and Jesse Goodman shows that these girls and young women “often resort to self-destructive behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation, academic withdrawal, or risky sexual conduct.”
Black men have been socialized over the years by the increasingly pornographic images in mainstream hip-hop. Highly sexualized images of black women are a staple of these videos, and while, as some black critics argue, these images reinstate black women as sexually desirable in a society where the beauty standard is racist, they do so in ways that objectify their bodies and teach boys and young men that they are not equal partners but rather f— objects who deserve to be treated just like the women in porn videos. Hip-hop helped develop the black porn genre, and Mireille Miller-Young argues that “white pornographers were acutely interested in how black men consumed images of black women—how they fetishized them in popular culture—so that they could expand their market beyond the standard white male consumers who generally purchased adult tapes featuring black sexuality.” Hip-hop was the main source of information for porn producers eager to open up the black porn movies released, that it successfully provided a blueprint for porn imagery.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
The book first covers the porn industry: how it started with magazines and moved to the internet, and all the marketing and greed that go into it. It is a male-dominated industry that exploits people for profit while offering nothing of value in return. The book also goes into how porn has leaked into the culture, from television to hookup culture. The whole thing is insidious.
Next the book covers porn’s effects on women and men each, specifically. It’s damaging to both. As porn races to the bottom in degredation, the women in porn are abused more and more. It teaches men to see and treat women as objects. It portrays consent as meaningless as all women and girls are inherently whores. Men become addicted, with altered brain chemistry and spending all their time and money on it.
There is a section on racism in porn. The racism is so over-the-top and beyond ridiculous I could hardly believe it. Basically, black men in porn are portrayed as sex-crazed animals violating white women. Asian men are feminized; Asian women are stereotyped in geisha-type roles, and black women feature much less often. The whole thing was repulsive.
As porn users get more and more desensitized, they have to turn to more shocking and taboo topics to get a thrill and eventually turn to pseudo-child porn (PCP) and ultimately child porn. PCP involves barely legal girls made up to look like young teens and children. Going with that are sites dedicated to girls losing their virginity, often violently. The link between porn and sexual assault crimes is still being debated and researched, but there is a clear link.
Ultimately, pornography, like the tobacco industry and drug cartels, get rich off of making victims. There is no positive benefit from porn and a host of damage to individuals and society at large. The effects will become more obvious with time.
The author is a progressive, left-wing feminist frequently accused of being anti-sex by critics who seem to refuse to examine any evidence of harm. After spending the whole book discussing men and women separately, the author says that gender is not real. How is that possible when you just recognized the differences in male and female anatomy? I’m still puzzled by that.
There are some things the book does not go into much that I would like to see (which is not a fault, as books can’t be infinite), but I think further research will come out with time: porn in the LGBT community (its forms and effects); porn made for women (more likely to take book form?); and more scientific research into the effects on the brain
(Strong language in quotes has been censored by me and appears in full in the book.)
Language: Lots of strong language, including some slurs
Sexual Content: Clinical but graphic sexual content that is often violent and misogynistic.
Violence: Sexual violence
Harm to Animals: (view spoiler)
Harm to Children: (view spoiler)
Other (Triggers): (view spoiler)
=========================================
Porn sex is not about making love, as the feelings and emotions we normally associate with such an act—connection, empathy, tenderness, caring, affection—are replaced by those more often connected hate—fear, disgust, anger, loathing, and contempt. In porn the man makes hate to the woman, as each sex act is designed to deliver the maximum amount of degradation.
The pornographers did a kind of stealth attack on our culture, hijacking our sexuality and then selling it back to us, often in forms that look very little like sex but a lot like cruelty.
[Re Girls Gone Wild] While they might have thought sexually performing for the camera was fun at the time, their families, communities, and peer group turned against them once they found out what they had done, labeling them as sluts, a label they carry with them wherever they go.
[Sean Thomas, founder of Maxim magazine] “The purpose of the lad mad is to tell guys that it is OK to be guys—to drink beer, play darts, and look at girls. When we started Maxim we consciously felt that we were leading a fight-back against the excesses of sneering feminism. I believe we succeeded.” Part of the anti-feminist stance that Maxim so proudly adopts is the way it constructs masculinity as predatory and aggressive. Sex in Maxim is what men want from women, and articles abound on how to please her, not for her sake, but as a way for him to manipulate her into having more sex.
In this world, men dispense with romantic dinners, vanilla sex, and postcoital affection and get down to the business of f—ing. In porn, sex is the vehicle by which men are rendered all powerful and women all powerless; and for a short time a man gets to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands.
The process of dehumanizing a group as a way to legitimize and justify cruelty against its individual members is not something that porn producers invented. It has been a tried and trusted method adopted by many oppressors; the Nazi propaganda machine effectively turned Jews into “k----s,” racists defined African Americans as “n-----s” rather than humans, and homophobes have an almost limitless list of terms for gays and lesbians that strip them of humanity. Once the humanness of these individuals is collectively rendered invisible by their membership in a socially denigrated group, then it is that much easier to commit acts of violence against them.
In porn, the women’s lack of human qualities often results in men’s inability to see just how violent the sex act is. No matter how cruel the sex, the one question I can always count on hearing from a man after my presentation is, “Women enjoy what they are doing, so why is porn a problem?” Of course, these men have no empirical evidence to support this, just their observations of the porn that they masturbate to. When I ask them if they would like to see their wives, girlfriends, or sisters in the position—in an attempt to humanize the porn performers—they are quick to respond that their loved ones are different from the women in porn; their women would never “choose” such a job. The image these men seem to have of women in porn is of a woman accidentally stumbling onto a porn set one day, and realizing that this is what she has been looking for all her life. That these women are acting, and may have come to porn not so much through choice but due to a lack of alternatives is rarely considered because this premise threatens to puncture the fantasy world created by both pornographer and user.
Men may think that the porn images are locked in that part of the brain marked fantasy, never to leak into the real world, but I hear over and over again from female students how their boyfriends are increasingly demanding porn sex from them. ... And from male students I increasingly hear how they thought that they could separate the two worlds, only to find out that industrially produced porn images do indeed seep into their intimate lives.
Missing from porn is anything that looks or feels remotely like intimacy and connection, the two ingredients that make sex interesting and exciting in the real world. Drained of these, porn becomes monotonous and predictable to the point that users need to eventually seek out more extreme acts as a way to keep them interested and stimulated.
The men in the small Catholic college dismissed this opportunity to explore their sexuality and it was apparent that, knowingly or now, they adhered to the porn world’s story: pornography is fun and harmless fantasy. My questioning the real-world implications of such fantasy elicited neither interest nor curiosity but a kind of consuming rage that closed down the possibility or reflection, analysis, and reason. The rage was directed at two places, both female—either the women in the industry or me—and it certainly conveyed to all women in the room what happens to those of us who don’t follow the porn party line. Conversely, the men who were concerned about their use seized the opportunity to explore how porn had affected them; the result was a serious and painful reflection of their porn use that left me, and many people in the audience, deeply moved.
These are not “fantasies” constructed in the head of each individual porn user, based on his own creative imagination, past histories, longings, and experiences, but highly formulaic, factory-line images created by a savvy group of capitalists. ... Ironically, what the “Porn is fantasy” camp misses is that porn actually works to limit our imagination and capacity to be sexually creative by delivering images that are mind-numbingly repetitive in content and dulling in their monotony.
Progressives have, for good reason, singled out the media as a major form of (mis)education in the age of monopoly capitalism in which a few companies dominate the market and use their economic and political power to deliver messages that sell a particular worldview that legitimizes massive economic and social inequality. But many of these same progressives argue against the view that porn has an effect on men in the real world, preferring instead to call anti-porn feminists unsophisticated thinkers who don’t appreciate how images can be playful and open to numerous interpretations. So now we are in a somewhat strange place where people who argue that mainstream corporate media have the power to shape, mold, influence, manipulate, and seduce viewers simultaneously deny that porn has an effect on their consumers.
Imagine what would happen if suddenly we saw a slew of dramas and sitcoms on television where, say, blacks or Jews were repeatedly referred to in a racist or anti-Semitic way, where they got their hair pulled, faces slapped, and choked by white men pushing foreign objects into their mouths. My guess is that there would be an outcry and the images would not be defended on the grounds that they were just fantasy but rather would be seen for what they are: depictions of cruel acts that one group is perpetrating against another group. By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence.
One pattern I have seen emerge is the way many of these men don’t mind the porn images intruding into their sex lives as long as the sex partner is a hookup. They start to mind when they have met someone they want to forge a relationship with and they are unable to get rid of the images. Try as they may, scenes from their favorite movies come hurtling back as they become aroused. They find themselves comparing their girlfriend to their favorite porn performers, with the girlfriend coming off the loser. Andy put it succinctly: “When we have sex, I try not to think of some scenes from porn that I like, and then I feel guilty because I can’t help myself when I do think about that. I feel like a s–t because she doesn’t even know I watch porn.” Tony, voicing a similar sentiment, said, “I hope she never knows what’s going through my mind when we have sex. She’d hate me.”
The intimacy, igniting of senses, and connections developed when skin meets skin are all either absent or overridden by the industrial product that these men have come to depend on for sexual pleasure. Trained by the porn culture to see sex as disconnected from intimacy, users develop an orientation to sex that is instrumental rather than emotional. No wonder one man described pornography as teaching him “how to masturbate into a woman.”
The men I speak to at colleges who are addicted do indeed end up in serious trouble; they neglect their schoolwork, spend huge amounts of money they don’t have, become isolated from others, and often suffer depression. They know that something is wrong, feel out of control, and don’t know how to stop. ... This seems to be such a problem on some campuses that the counseling center is now offering support groups for such men. Whenever I hear these stories, I feel both sad for the men and outraged at the porn industry for hijacking the men’s sexuality to the point that they feel so out of control.
For this group of men [sex offenders], the regular gonzo pornography became boring, and they moved into more violent, fetishistic pornography, often that which looked like overt torture. When this also started to become boring, most of the men moved into child pornography. Some accidentally came across child porn while surfing porn sites, and others sought it out to masturbate to something other than the usual porn. The average length of time between downloading the first child porn and sexually assaulting a child was one year. Most men told me that before becoming addicted to Internet porn, they had not been sexually interested in children.
The connection between porn and rape is without a doubt the most debated and most controversial question of porn’s effects. Some argue that porn causes men to rape, while others counter that sexually aggressive men seek out more violent pornography and would rape with or without the visual stimuli. Studies, however, suggest that there is a link between porn consumption and violence against women. Neil Malamuth, one of the most well-known psychologists studying the effects of porn, and colleagues reviewed a broad range of studies and concluded that “experimental research shows that exposure to non-violent or violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and in actual aggression.”
And then there are the women who have been raped as adults by boyfriends, husbands, teachers, priests, doctors, colleagues, and strangers, who either made them act like the women in porn or told them about their porn use as they raped them. I have heard from wives who were forced to put a centerfold over their face as their husbands raped them; girlfriends who, during the assault, had to moan just like the woman in the movie; women who thought they could trust a male friend only to be drugged and raped while the camera was recording; and students who went to fraternity parties and were gang-raped by the brothers as a porn movie was playing in the background. Traveling the country, I have heard just about every possible way that porn is used against women, children, and some men. I have listened to stories of lives devastated by men who use porn, and for these survivors, porn is not a fantasy but a nightmarish reality.
What anti-porn feminists are saying is that such myths promote a culture that will affect men in myriad ways: some will rape but many more will beg, nag, and cajole their partners into sex or certain sex acts, and more still will lose interest in sex with other human beings. Some will use women and disregard them when done, some will be critical of their partner’s looks and performance, and many will see women as one-dimensional sex objects who are less deserving of respect and dignity than men, both in and out of the bedroom. Whatever the effect, men cannot walk away from these images unchanged.
Susan Bordo looks at the ways the culture helps shape women’s ideas about what constitutes the perfect body. The bodies of the women we see in magazines and on television are actually very unusual in their measurements and proportions, with long necks, broad shoulders, and high waists. Yet because these are more or less the only images we see, we take them to be the norm rather than the exception and assume that the problem lies with us and not the fashion and media industries that insist on using a very specific body type.
It would be a mistake to glorify sex for women in the pre-hookup days, as feminists such as Shere Hite have documented just how unfulfilling sex was with men who were clueless about women’s bodies and sexual desires. But if previous generations of men didn’t understand women’s bodies, then what must this generation of men be like who have grown up on porn? As my colleague Robert Jensen always says, “If men are going to porn to learn about women’s sexuality, then they will certainly be disappointed.” In porn a man just has to have an erection for a woman to be suddenly overtaken by orgasmic responses. Porn sex assumes that women are turned on by what turns men on, so if he enjoys pounding anal sex, then she does too. Little surprise that studies show that men in hookups experience orgasm more often than women, or that they report more sexual satisfaction from the encounters.
With hookup sex comes, for women and girls, an increased possibility of being labeled a slut—a term that is used to control and stigmatize female sexual desire and behavior. There is, after all, no male equivalent of a slut since men who are thought to be highly sexually active are called a study or a player—labels most men would happily take on. ... But for all of women’s so-called sexual empowerment today, the effects of being labeled a slut are as devastating now as they were in the past. A study by academics Wendy Walter-Bailey and Jesse Goodman shows that these girls and young women “often resort to self-destructive behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation, academic withdrawal, or risky sexual conduct.”
Black men have been socialized over the years by the increasingly pornographic images in mainstream hip-hop. Highly sexualized images of black women are a staple of these videos, and while, as some black critics argue, these images reinstate black women as sexually desirable in a society where the beauty standard is racist, they do so in ways that objectify their bodies and teach boys and young men that they are not equal partners but rather f— objects who deserve to be treated just like the women in porn videos. Hip-hop helped develop the black porn genre, and Mireille Miller-Young argues that “white pornographers were acutely interested in how black men consumed images of black women—how they fetishized them in popular culture—so that they could expand their market beyond the standard white male consumers who generally purchased adult tapes featuring black sexuality.” Hip-hop was the main source of information for porn producers eager to open up the black porn movies released, that it successfully provided a blueprint for porn imagery.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
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Reading Progress
December 17, 2017
– Shelved as:
maybe
(Paperback Edition)
December 17, 2017
– Shelved
(Paperback Edition)
February 6, 2022
–
Started Reading
February 6, 2022
– Shelved
February 6, 2022
– Shelved as:
non-fiction
February 22, 2022
– Shelved as:
2022-books
February 22, 2022
–
Finished Reading
September 8, 2023
– Shelved as:
duplicates
(Paperback Edition)
Comments Showing 1-3 of 3 (3 new)
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It would appear that the long-held image of black men as spoilers of white womanhood was in fact tailor-made for porn, so it should be no surprise that the industry has cashed in on these stereotypes in the form of the very successful genre of interracial porn.
As we become more desensitized to images of hypersexualized young women, the fashion industry has tried to capture our attention by sexualizing young girls.
All the [child porn] sites discussed so far, even the gonzo ones, depict scenarios where the men do not use overt force to get the girl to comply with their sexual demands but rather seduce, manipulate, and cajole the girl into submission. This picture actually mirrors what goes on in the real world of child molestation where most of the victims are subject to a seasoning process in which the perpetrator first seduces the child with gifts, affection, calculated acts of kindness, and offers of friendship and/or mentoring. Having forged a bond, the perpetrator then manipulates and exploits the emotional connection to erode the child’s resistance to sexual activity and to ensure the child’s silence. For perpetrators, which is a safer way than overt force since it does not leave visible scars, and because it is an act of breaking the child’s will, the victim is more likely to keep the abuse hidden for fear of appearing disloyal to the perpetrator. Moreover, the bond acts as a kind of emotional glue for the child, keeping her connected even when the adult is perpetrating awful acts of sexual violence. Pornographers are well aware of this seasoning process since they do an excellent job of depicting it in their movies by showing a whole range of techniques: from gift giving to strategic acts of kindness, where the perpetrator poses as a kind (sexual) mentor. Always brazen, the pornographers constantly use the word “breaking” to refer to what they are doing to the girls, and one site even calls itself Breaking Them In.
While these [Pseudo-Child Porn] sites may satisfy the user for a time, desensitization eventually leads to boredom and the need for harder-core and more extreme porn. The obvious next place to go is real child pornography, since here a real child is used and the truly illegal and hence secretive nature of the porn is only going to add an even greater erotic thrill for the, by now, somewhat desensitized user. Quale and Taylor found in their study of men convicted of downloading child pornography that even the real thing becomes boring after a while, with men seeking out more overtly violent images involving younger and younger children. While this descent into utterly abusive and violent child porn is not a given for PCP users, these sites can only serve to whet their appetite for more images of real child pornography since they will always fall short of delivering on their promise of watching a real child turned into a “whore.”
The research on pedophiles does not point to a model of two clearly defined groups (pedophiles and nonpedophiles); rather, there is a continuum: some men are clearly situated at either end, but others are scattered at various points. ... Men’s position along the continuum is subject to shifts, depending on the particular constellation of their life experiences at any one time. ... Recent studies suggest that ongoing use of pornography is increasingly playing a role in shifting men along the continuum.
The research on the relationship between consuming pornography and actual contact sex with a child suggests that there are a percentage of men who will act out their desires on real children after viewing child porn. Quayle and Taylor found in their study of convicted child offenders that “for some respondents, pornography was used as a substitute for actual offending, whereas for others, it acted as both blueprint and stimulus for contact offense.” While the actual percentage of child porn users who also sexually victimize children varies from study to study, with some putting the number as low as 40 percent, and others as high as 85 percent, the weight of the evidence is that masturbation to images of sexualized children is, for a significant proportion of men, linked to actual child sexual abuse. A government study conducted in 2007 of convicted child pornography offenders found that 85 percent of men convicted of downloading child pornography had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors, from inappropriate touching to rape.
In addition to the psychological literature on the effects of child pornography on individual men’s behaviors and attitudes, we know from the research conducted within media studies that people construct their notions of reality from the media they consume, and the more consistent and coherent the message, the more people believe it to be true. Thus, the images of girls in PCP do not operate within a social vacuum; rather, they are produced and consumed within a society where the dominant pop culture images are of childified women, adultified children, and hypersexualized youthful female bodies.
This cultural shift toward sexualizing girls from an early age is bound to have real social consequences. Not only does it affect the way girls see themselves, it also chips away at the norms that define children as off-limits to male sexual use. The more we undermine such cultural norms, the more we drag girls into the category of “woman,” and in a porn-saturated world, to be woman is often to be a sexual object deserving of male contempt, use, and abuse.