Via Riba Rambles, I see that last month, Northwestern University’s Anthony D’Amato suggested that more porn leads to less rape. D’Amato points out that rape prevalence (as measured by the federal government’s big National Crime Victimization Survey) has gone down in recent years (his comparison – he calls the decline in rape “steeper than the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression” – may be the single least relevant comparison I’ve ever read).
D’Amato points out that even as rape prevalence has declined, porn consumption has gone up:
There is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the rape statitistics [sic]. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My theory is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape. It is like the inverse correlation: the more police officers on the street, the less crime.
The pornographic movie “Deep Throat” which started the flood of X-rated VHS and later DVD films, was released in 1972. Movie rental shops at first catered primarily to the adult film trade. Pornographic magazines also sharply increased in numbers in the
1970s and 1980s. Then came a seismic change: pornography became available on the new internet. Today, purveyors of internet porn earn a combined annual income exceeding the total of the major networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.
(Okay, the “sic” was cheap of me. Whaddaya want? I’m running a blog here. G’way.)
Three problems with D’Amato’s theory:
1) During recent years, the NCVS has found a steep decline in all violent crime, not just rape. It seems likely that whatever’s causing the decline in all violent crime measured by the NCVS, is also causing the decline in rape measured by the NCVS; but it seems unlikely that pornography reduces all violent crime.
2) The NCVS measurement of rape prevalence is crap. Many other studies – including two major studies conducted by the Federal government – have found much higher rates of rape prevalence than the NCVS. Particularly notable is this study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which directly compared the NCVS’s methodology for measuring rape prevalence with modern “best practice” survey design – and found that the NCVS vastly undercounted rape.
(D’Amato does say that the decrease in rape is collaborated by other sources, but he doesn’t cite any specific sources other than the NCVS).
3) D’Amato has no measurement of porn prevalence other than internet access, nor does he do any real statistical analysis. In contrast, studies with sophisticated statistical analysis and more accurate measures of porn usage – such as the study published in Four Theories of Rape in American Society – tend to find that porn usage has little or no correlation with rape prevalence.
D’Amato has one good point; there is no evidence that the rise in internet access (and, presumably, in porn usage) has been accompanied by a rise in rape prevalence. That makes it seem unlikely that porn is a cause of rape, as some radical feminists have suggested.
My own belief is that whatever porn’s effects on rape prevalence are, they’re probably too small to be measured.
UPDATE: Abyss2Hope and Feminist Law Professors both have excellent posts critiquing D’Amato’s paper.
[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where no mouse fears an elephant. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]
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During recent years, vastly increased internet access has also correlated with a steep decline in all violent crime, as measured by the NCVS. By D’Amato’s logic, increased porn consumption must reduce all violent crime.
I agree with your conclusion, but not with this part of the reasoning. If we widen the net further to all crime, are we likely to see porn as a factor in, say, fraud, drug crimes, drunk driving or tax evasion? No. This is a classic correlation problem, but it isn’t proven by comparing with a wider pool of unrelated incidents. Felony DUI is up in many places, so this same reasoning would lead one to belive that porn accessibility were negatively correlated with drunk driving incidents.
Now, it happens that I take on belief (I don’t make any empirical claims) that a less repressed culture is likely to have less sexual violence (that is, I agree with the thesis, but via intuitive belief), and I think that porn access plays a role there. I don’t think our good fella has shown that to be true.
Fishbane, I think the way I worded that was very bad. I’ve rewritten that paragraph to make my intended meaning clearer.
I’m not sure that I think a less repressed culture necessarily means less rape, although I think the two things can go together.
Ampersand,
I hope I didn’t come off as too critical, and I agree with your revised copy.
I can imagine less repressed cultures that are more sexually violent, so I agree with your ‘neccessarily’ construction, and I want to be clear that I’m stating a belief about generalities, not an assertion about absolutes. I do believe that, though, as a general constructor for behaviour. I don’t know how to debate it, though, without resorting to thin anecdotes that shouldn’t convince anyone.
You didn’t come off as too critical at all! You were very helpful – your post pointed out to me that I needed to do the rewrite.
I think we’re in agreement about sexual repression; less sexual repression may not automatically mean less rape, but a society with both less sexual repression and as little rape as possible seems to me to be both possible and desirable.
Forgive me if this is a truism, but isn’t rape about power, not about sex? In which case, the availability of porn won’t make any difference?
Repeat after me, children, “Correlation does not equal causation”.
Knock yourself out:
http://tinyurl.com/l9ejs
http://www.nationallawcenter.org/education/education/the-harm-of-illegal-pornography.html
My recent post that dissects several elements of this study may be of interest. Porn Up, Rape Down Or …
I think no matter how you slice it, with porn decreasing or increasing rape rates, like others have said here, correlation doesn’t prove causation by a long shot.
I can see the porn-rape connection in that violent porn suggests it’s acceptable to use women as needed, that they’re commodities free for the taking (as lots of mainstream film, TV shows, and advertising also suggest). But there’s likely enough people who use porn instead of taking the risk of unwanted contact with a real live woman, and even more who use porn without any desire to have sex without consent at all to even out the stats.
I also agree with the possibility that less repression (and less censorship of sexually explicit materials) can lead to less rape. If we can be more open about our desires, we can understand what is acceptable to act on and what’s not. We can also create an open honest dialogue about past or current abuses in our own lives. If we’re all taking about it, we’ll recognize that the abused in our culture have a strong front with which to effect social change. Better legislation that actually convicts rapists (or even the threat of same) can lead to fewer rapes.
@Helen – I don’t think we can entirely divorce rape from sex. I think many men who rape do just want to get off, and they use a woman’s body without her consent because they can get away with it. The power they have over a woman might add to their experience, but power is not always or exclusively the primary stimulus to action or even a part of the picture for some men. I think your “truism” came out of a rejection of the idea that men are just so gosh darn horny they can’t control themselves. I still reject that notion of the rapist as good-ol’-boy with needs that must be satisfied. I also believe rape is often a means of expressing or maintaining power, just not in every case.
The problem with the whole analysis is that the rise in porn consumption, assuming there is such a rise and it’s accompanied by a rise in porn production, is itself a form of sexual exploitation. I’m not saying it’s rape, please notice (though sometimes it’s that too). But it is paying desperate or naive people to do something most of us find degrading, namely, have sex with strangers for all to see. I don’t know whether looking at porn is harmful or not, but producing it is, so the sanguine attitude about the rise in porn is troublesome in one purporting to be concerned about the incidence of rape.
Comment to Helen: Surely rape is about power AND sex. A rapist’s way of exerting power over the other person is sexual (compare this to someone who exerts power by denying the person access to the bank account, or by hitting him/her).
Could it not be that rape in all probability is not declining – but the reporting of it is? When we see mass images of women constantly ‘willingly consenting’ to intercourse, why would any rape victim think that anyone would believe them? After all, I am assuming increased viewing of pornography is not just by men, but also women and girls. So when you have many women and girls watching other women either ‘coerced’ or ‘willing to sexually please men in any way’ on screen – why would they necessarily believe that their account of rape would be believed.
Why wouldn’t we assume that pornography or let’s say ANY depiction of ‘stereotypically gendered heterosexual’ intercourse would affect how we view sex? It has for sure affected the amount of multi-partner intercourse and frequency of it…. why wouldn’t it affect how men view women in general and how women view themselves?
Part of the problem here is a sort of statistical fallacy at work here related to Josh’s point about causation. What happens at the structural level is not necessarily what happens at the individual level. This data does not show what happens at the individual level, determining causation at the individual level would have to involve a control group and an experimental group. Such a study would then try to see if rape was more common in the experimental group who was exposed to porn, than it was it the control group not exposed to porn.
Here, in Amp’s analysis above, we are talking about structural changes not individual changes. I tend to think that excessive consumption of violent pornography would lead to a slight increase in rape at the individual level. However, none of the data here, and ethical concerns would make such an experiment prohibitive. No internal review board would accept it. Moreover, the room for measurement errors in rape prevalance is really high, as suggested above.
Anthony D’Amato is an untalented propagandist of pornography. Arguments like his have been used for at least two centuries to justify the existence of prostitution and pornography. Only people unfamiliar with the reality of the pornographic industry will take him seriously; them, and those who consider their personal pleasure more precious than the life and health of the women and children filmed while raped (Deep Throat, by the way, is rape, the rape of Linda Boreman on tape).
Ann Bartow has a good take on this. In a comment to this post, she remarks:
Many women are raped for the sake of pornography, but they are invisible to D’Amato and the pornsturbators who cling to his unoriginal “findings”. Apparently, coercing a woman to be “double-penetrated” for some “free XXX” portal is not rape rape.
Although I agree on most issues with the radical feminists I read on line, it woud be dishonest of me to call myself anything else than a pro-feminist with a socialist background. However, I cannot understand why you wrote the following:
Do you still think there is a rape culture, or not? Does pornography have a function in that culture? Finally, and this is a serious question: does pornography have any effect at all on its consumers?
Porn isn’t about sex either. It’s about power and control.
If it weren’t, women would be allowed to go topless in public. Or breastfeed in public. And porn wouldn’t be considered “free speech”. Oh, the list is endless.
Eating food is about power too.
There are still an awful lot of men who coerce women into having sex. Usually these men know the women they coerce. Such men don’t regard themselves as rapists, so it’s safe to say that A) Many of the women involve don’t call the man’s actions rape and B) It’s one of the major reasons why D’Amato’s notion is pretty much a crock.
I think it’s safe to say there’s something much more complex going on here than just “porn causes rape” or “porn lowers incidence of rape.” Neither porn nor rape exists in a vacuum, and there are so many other influencing social factors, that I really don’t think we can reduce it to such a simple black or white statement.
The proliferation of porn increases the incidence of rape and decreases the reporting and conviction.
Porn gives financial incentive (which is the most powerful incentive) to produce porn, which necessarily involves coercing, forcing, and otherwise manipulating women into sex which does great harm to them. I’m talking about the women used in porn, whose humanity Ampersand erases as a fantasy creature.
Porn makes rape seem normal, therefore women are less likely to report, and police are less likely to be bothered.
Porn decreases the likelihood of prosecution, because its message is that women are masochistic beings who are to blame for the harm done to them.
porn teaches that women are less human than men, therefore it’s okay to rape us.
Q, SOME porn isn’t about sex. But (without, really, please, without getting into the whole sex-pos-porn thing again) quite a bit of porn is about sex. Sorry, but such a broad “porn is not about sex” statements sounds fairly ludicrous. I mean hell, there are probably some instances of RAPE which are about sex (at least in part); porn is a lot less violent than rape.
ms_xeno: when you say “such men don’t regard themselves as rapists” are you implying that they should, or should not, consider themselves as such?
They should, Sailorman. You can access exhaustive and exhausting threads in the archives of this very space in which men who profess to at least sympathise with feminism are constantly hedging their bets;Thinking up convoluted reasons why if you force a woman “just a little,” it’s not rape. Or they smugly intone that maybe to some knee-jerk man-hater it’s rape, but really a fellow just needs a woman’s body to orgasm inside sometimes. They can’t help themselves. [snif !]
IOW, you can get some men to acknowledge that rape exists, but they will never acknowledge any remote possibility that they themselves have forced or coerced women into sex. Or that it’s important to consider the possibility. As others here pointed out, you will also find apologists incapable of entertaining the idea that any woman in a porn film has ever been coerced into “performing” acts that she did not want to.
I won’t try to drift too much, Sailorman, but I’m of the camp that in the patriarchy, the majority of heteronormative sex isn’t about sex either. You can’t divest sex, or porn, of it’s power dynamic in a social setting that predicates gender into a power hierarchy. Get rid of the Virgin/Whore dynamic and then we might begin to see porn that is sex. But then again, it wouldn’t be porn, would it?
:p
But there’s that little quibble at the back of my mind that is squeaking to me: “well, if porn is sex, then how can it also be free speech? If it is free speech, then how can it *not* be about power?”
But alas! (ha!) I am drifting.
So, back to rape! pronto!
If someone coerces sex because he wants sex, how is that rape? Rapist are motivated by power.
[exagerated stage voice: ]Sooooo, Qgrrl, how about all this crazy weather we’ve been having ? [/exagerated stage voice]
[whistles, stares at the sky…]
ms_xeno: Oh, I see. Because “coerce” is used with such a wide definition in the blogosphere (esp. the feminist blogosphere), your choice of “coerce” instead of “forced” or “compelled” is what made me confused. I think of rape as involving violence (force, or threat of force) or some other form of nonconsent. While I know the dictionary definition of “coerce” involves force or compulsion, a lot of folks seem to say that a man can “coerce” a woman into sex by promising to buy her diamonds, for example. Which is slimy, and bad, and nasty–but is not technically coercion, nor rape IMO.
So I don’t think we’re in disagreement at all.
Q: Got it ;) Write a post somewhere on the free-speech thing, willya? Sounds like an interesting thread….!
uh, yup. Lotta rain ’round these parts.
Yes! Thankyou, Amy.
But there’s that little quibble at the back of my mind that is squeaking to me: “well, if porn is sex, then how can it also be free speech? If it is free speech, then how can it *not* be about power?”
Easily. “Free speech” means in effect any human product that we can transmit electronically and have no convincing reason to restrict.
“AradhanaDevindra Writes:
September 1st, 2006 at 7:31 am
Could it not be that rape in all probability is not declining – but the reporting of it is?”
Yes, thank you!
I’m old enough to remember that brief period of time in the 70s and 80s when the media took rape somewhat seriously and was fairly responsible in how they reported these crimes. Now rape is either ignored completely or turned into nuts/sluts 24-hour-news side-show craziness. I’m stunned by the type of smears leveled at victims through defense attorneys on the cable shows. Even worse, the most grotesque accusations go completely unchallenged by todays news readers.
Honestly, the media was never feminist, but attitudes about rape and rape victims have regressed so dramatically in the last decade, and that’s reflected in what I’m seeing on my TV screen these days. I can certainly see why young women in particular would be less apt to report at all.
Oh, and yes–I can see how raunch culture imagery would play into this regression, too.
Let’s just say rape is sex without informed consent. Now do you get it Sailorman?
Amy: The problem with the whole analysis is that the rise in porn consumption, assuming there is such a rise and it’s accompanied by a rise in porn production, is itself a form of sexual exploitation. I’m not saying it’s rape, please notice (though sometimes it’s that too). But it is paying desperate or naive people to do something most of us find degrading, namely, have sex with strangers for all to see. I don’t know whether looking at porn is harmful or not, but producing it is, so the sanguine attitude about the rise in porn is troublesome in one purporting to be concerned about the incidence of rape.
Hey Amy. I was ‘talent’ as part of a porn movie, I wasn’t harmed, I wasn’t desperate, I wasn’t naive, and if you find it degrading, don’t watch. None of the people I worked with were desperate or naive, nor were they harmed.
Is there porn out there that meets your definitions? Yes. But try not to paint all porn the same way. My desk job is more degrading, harmful, and treats me with less respect than he porn I was in.
Speaking of which, off to be degraded….
Josh (who is a man?), didn’t get harmed while acting in one single pornographic movie and he can testify that nobody else did, so y’all pron-haters better shut up! If you don’t watch a rape, it makes it stop mangically (not a typo).
Porn is typically about sex, the definition of pornography is ‘The writing(s) of prostitutes’.
Rape is not. It is about power and control.
Sam, I think I would say that erotica is about sex. Shared, mutually fulfilling sex in which the shared nature of the joy and pleasure is evident in the medium. Porn is about power and control. Any time when the pleasure and joy of one party in sex is (at best) superfluous or (at worst) undesired, it is about power and control, not sex. Sex is mutual, not masturbation into a body.
Sam, you are right about the etymology(porne still means “prostitute” in Greek), but the modern meaning comes from the use of the word “pornographer” as “one who writes about prostitution” around the 18th century. It has been popularised in France by Restif de la Bretonne, who published Le Pornographe, a treatise on the ways to regulate prostitution (from a user’s point of view).
(I hope it is clear that this was merely a precision, not an objection to what you wrote.)
I forgot to add the date for the publication of Restif’s book: 1769.
And Odanu:
How long will we have to say that?
Josh Jasper, I once went to a bar and saw people smoking, they were happy and it didn’t harm them. So smoking can’t be harmful.
The truth is, prostituting is far more harmful than smoking and you have to see the whole lives of the prostituted women to see the acute harm. The childhood abuse and molestation is not something that shows to someone like you. By someone like you I mean a john, because men in hetero porn are more like johns than prostitutes. You don’t see the lack of alternatives, the drug use, the destroyed human potential, the shortened life span, the daily humiliation.
For you and those others confused by “rape is not sex therefore if I am motivated by sex I can’t be a rapist”… most of the time, a rapist does not realize he has raped. To a rapist, rape is sex. To the rape victim it is not sex. understand now?
Strippers are never turned on by their job. It’s only about sex to the john. Hookers are not turned on by sucking dick. The difference between prostitution and rape is that the prostitute is supposed to pretend she is turned on, she is suppoesed to pretend it’s sex for her.
Get it now?
I’m reminded of a time when my baby’s daddy asked me if I was ever raped. I told him, not until the time when he raped me. He was like “when?” I reminded him of the incident, and he said “oh yeah, well that wasn’t that bad.”
Yeah, I’m sure for him it was a blast. Yes it was part of the overall abuse and battery designed to make me “act right”, and it was also very pleasurable for him, he got hard, he ejaculated.
Josh (who is a man?), didn’t get harmed while acting in one single pornographic movie and he can testify that nobody else did, so y’all pron-haters better shut up! If you don’t watch a rape, it makes it stop mangically (not a typo).
It looks a lot like I’m getting accused of rape here.
SaltyC:
Strippers are never turned on by their job. It’s only about sex to the john. Hookers are not turned on by sucking dick. The difference between prostitution and rape is that the prostitute is supposed to pretend she is turned on, she is suppoesed to pretend it’s sex for her.
Well, as I WAS a prostitute, and I DID suck dick, and for the record, I WAS turned on by it, so just try and listen before you lecture sex workers on what they feel, and what sort of porn they made.
I mean it. This attitude is more demeaning than making porn. The people I made the porn with were respectful. None of you people are. I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that the anti-porn squad here is nothing but a bunch of arrogant asses who’re more interested in being bluenose dudley do-rights than in the actual lives of the people they claim to protect.
Everyone here LEAPT to the conclusion that, as a man in porn, I was acting in het porn,
Wrong.
And then everyone decided I was a rapist. Real nice going, people. Talking with anti-porn activists is *far* more degrading then actually making it. None of you would ever listen to someone who’s not miserable in amking porn. Those people don’t exist, right? Or they’re rapists making het porn.
Gimme a break, I didn’t accuse you of rape. You wrote “if you find it degrading, don’t watch“. Many of us have pointed out that women and children are raped for pornography, so our concern goes far beyond “fidning it degrading”.
So, you acted in one gay pornography movie? In this case, your experience is even less relevant to the discussion, since you were responding to Amy, who was very clearly talking about straight pornography, which constitutes the largest part of pornographic consumption. What’s next? “Some men get raped, too”?
So we degrade you? Never mind, you too can blame it on “some radical feminists”, I’ve heard it works wonders.
sorry josh, but being in one porn movie doesn’t qualify you as a “sex worker”
And your testimony that you get turned on every time you suck dick for money doesn’t negate the testimony of most women prostitues that it doesn’t. Your experience is not the reality of the ones who as Dworkin put it “do the lion’s share of fucking”
And for uour information, you do not represent “sex workers” side vs the “anti-porn” here, there are many “sex workers” on our side in this very discussion, and we are talking about women living in a male supremacist context, so you are missing the point.
Nowhere in Amy’s post did she mention the word “straight”. Also, the porn I was in was not gay.
Are there any more totally wrong conclusions you’d like to leap to?
So we degrade you? Never mind, you too can blame it on “some radical feminists”, I’ve heard it works wonders.
No, I’d rather blame a lack of respect for people who’ve been in nonexploitative porn, and a general refusal to acknowledge we exist, or if there is an acknowledgement, it’s to attack us as patriarchy enabling traitors. Also, on the tendency of people like you to put words in my mouth.
So what? Senior Wneces never quit smoking and he lived to 103, what relevance does that have to the fact that smoking is harmful? I’m not saying you don’t exist, just that your experience has no bearing on whether Porn exists by destroying women.
I mean Senior Wences.
What I wrote is that Amy “was very clearly talking about straight pornography”; even though she didn’t explicitely state it, the comments preceding hers were talking about “Internet porn” “in general“, which is de facto equivalent with “het porn”. Amy didn’t object to Sage’s gender-specification (in comment nb. 9) through expressions such as unwanted contact with a real live woman”.
It is D’Amato, not “us-people”, who is conveniently talking about pornography in abstract, as pointed out by Ann Bartow in the part I quoted in comment 13.
sorry josh, but being in one porn movie doesn’t qualify you as a “sex worker”
And your testimony that you get turned on every time you suck dick for money doesn’t negate the testimony of most women prostitues that it doesn’t. Your experience is not the reality of the ones who as Dworkin put it “do the lion’s share of fucking”
You know, the more I try and explain myself, the more personally insulting you people get. I see no reason to keep correcting you every time you either put words into my mouth or insult me.
The *only* point I was trying to make in my original reply to Amy was that not all porn is exploitative. I did mention that plenty of porn is, but just that not all is. I figured speaking from personal experience might be helpful.
In return, I got insulted, and had several incorrect assumptions about my experiences explained to me as if they were fact.
There’s not much more I can say here other than that you repeatedly assumed things that were’t true and tried to put words into my mouth. At that level, it’s not a debate, so I’m outta this discussion.
You and Jimmy Ho can have a hearty round of self congratulation for having been so vile to me that I saw no point in sticking around and constantly correcting me when you lied about what I was thinking or saying, or what I had done.
You’re just trying to redefine the terminology.
It was actually through this site that I first came to understand the fact that most rape is about power. It was tough for me to understand this at first since I don’t have the necessary introspection to a rapists mind.
But as a young healthy male, I do have introspection to watching pornography, and I can tell you I don’t get off imagining how much the porn industry might cause suffering to some women. Mainstream porn watchers (or men at least, to generalize my introspection) get off at seeing unrealistically sexually willing hot females. Deep down inside, every sane porn watcher understands that this is just fantasy.
Btw, if porn is about degrading women, why do so many guys get off at watching femdom?
So desk jobs are more degrading than porn. (Same bullshit, different day for that argument.) Which is fun FUN FUN !!! But you’re working at a desk job anyway. I look forward to your explanation that you chose a desk job over porn because you actually love degradation, or someting equally nonsensical, Josh.
But not in this thread, okay ? Somewhere else. Even if you had the time of your life making porn, your experience is not representative of the heterosexual women that are the primary subject of the thread. One important distinction between gay male porn and hetero porn that I love to mention on these threads is that former has a mandatory condom policy nowadays. The latter does not. That ought to provide one valuable clue that even in a heterosexist society, male bodies have more status than female bodies– even in porn.
I don’t know if gay male porn could be linked to sexual assault in the gay community. It’s an interesting subject. At any rate, there is same-sex domestic violence, so with or without porn, the gay community is not a sexual utopia. And I’ll go out on a limb and guess that if a gay man was concerned about a connection between gay male porn and same-sex assault, he’d have to tread extremely carefully for fear of giving homophobes a whole new form of “heterosexual panic” to justify queer-bashing with.
Josh, I believe you can get ‘turned’ on by sucking some random dude’s dick for a camera. Hell, I can even believe that many female prostittutes, strippers and porn-stars are occasionally aroused by sexual intercourse with strangers. As the truth is when you have constant stimulation to your body – you well, are probably going to get stimulated. There are even a certain percentage of women (I think it is about 12%) who ‘orgasmed’ during rape. Hell, about 30-35% of women who breast-feed orgasm while breastfeeding.
But if we look at being ‘turned’ on and ‘liking it’… I think that’s where the difference is. Obviously, the rape victims and breastfeeding mothers don’t experience the orgasm with ‘pleasure’ but with discomfort . A friend who does supportwork on a women’s health phoneline, is always surprised by how many first time mothers are horrified when they are sexually aroused by their babie’s suckling. They often think ‘something’s wrong with them’. It’s quite a natural response really, but no one says that’s having sex with your baby…. No one thinks of it as sex.
Now, I am not saying that you are in denial about having sex in your porn flick. I am sure you enjoyed having sex – it’s like a one-night stand really, and no one here is going to deny that you enjoy having sex in a one-night stand.
But I will raise the criticism that other’s have raised, you are not a seasoned porn star or sex worker. I am sure there are types of porn that are created amongst ‘consenting happy adults’ – but does that really take away from the fact that nearly all het porn is about stereotypical gedner roles, in which women’s bodies are solely about being ‘fuck-object’? As a man who’s starred in gay porn – you should know about stereotypical het sex anyways…. And hearing plenty of criticism about gay porn from profeminist gay men, leads me to believe that many times in gay porn – the man that does the penetrating often uses “SEXIST” terms to describe how he is fucking his ‘bitch’… again drawing on het terms for ‘dominance/masculine’ and ‘submissive/feminine’. I’m not going to add anymore to that, as I’ve never seen gay porn. But I am sure that you can understand what I am trying to get at….
Additionally, I do think it’s offensive that you as a man do not realize that your socialization is far different than that of women and thus your experiences are not reflective of the experience of women and the majority of women participants in the sex industry.
Let me be a bit more clear : I don’t want to talk to people who insult me, and make incorrect assumptions about what I was doing without bothering to ask me. If you can’t deal with me from a position of respect, and if you’d rather jump to conclusions instead of AKSING me about my experiences, I’m not talking to you, because it’s not a conversation to begin with.
Act like a jackass, get treated like one. What a concept, J.
Josh, if you want respect, try earning it. You showed up in this thread to give glowing reviews of your two-hour career in porn, along with the same old tripe about how you’re working a “regular” job even though such jobs are sooooooo much more degrading than making porn films. You knew exactly how a lot of feminists would react to that, so save the crocodile tears, okay ?
It’s the internet, no one really knows you – if you don’t/do want to be clear go ahead – it’s really no loss to any of us who ‘aren’t really listening to you’ anyways. It just forces us to take you even less seriously than we already do, if you aren’t going to step up to the plate.
whatever…
Josh, whether or not you were harmed in the depiction is really not the point. The point is that your pleasure or lack thereof, as the object of the porn, was immaterial, superfluous, etc….you didn’t matter, except as an object which provoked ejaculation. That’s what is harmful about porn…that it creates an idea that sex is a state in which only one person’s pleasure/joy/full, heartfelt participation is required.
As for femdom, again, Sam, the pleasure or lack thereof of the woman performing the domination doesn’t matter. She is again the object, a prop for the pleasure of the man who is masturbating to an idea that he can “get someone to do that to him”. Most people who are into B&D and S&M will tell you, honestly, that in many ways the sub has most of the power, directing the script, as it were. It is not necessary that the depiction of B&D be porn. It can be erotica (i.e. shared and enjoyable to all parties), but it is very common that it is.
I’m not changing terminology. It’s generally agreed that there is a substantive difference between erotica and porn, and that difference is in whether those depicted are subject and object (or just objects, if the subject is only the one viewing), or subject and subject. I.E., the difference between pleasure being mutual and shared, and one (or more) persons’ pleasure being either immaterial (who cares) or undesired (I’m getting off on her/his pain).
Jimmy Ho wrote:
Jimmy, in the post you were replying to, Josh didn’t say that anti-porn folks should “shut up,” or anything that can honestly be interpreted as saying that anti-porn folks should “shut up.” Furthermore, your comment – the first one in this thread which used insulting another poster as its main content – set off a huge decline in the quality of posts on this thread.
Josh wrote:
Saying that the other folks here are treating you with contempt, and not listening to what you write, was entirely legitimate. But the above statement is nothing but insulting other posters, and isn’t appropriate on “Alas.”
Similarly, the general tone of contempt with which many posters here are treating Josh is not appropriate on “Alas.”
The next person, from either side of the debate, who I perceive as treating other posters without respect will have their post deleted and be banned from “Alas” for 24 hours. If y’all want a space where pro- and anti- folks can trash each other, there are literally dozens of blogs other than this one in which you can do so.
Also, my moderation decision is not a subject for discussion here. If you want to argue with me about my moderation, take it to email, or to a thread about moderation. Comments on this thread about the moderation policy will be deleted.
That’s what is harmful about porn…that it creates an idea that sex is a state in which only one person’s pleasure/joy/full, heartfelt participation is required.
No, it doesn’t. Porn certainly didn’t create that view, and not all porn uses or reinforces it.
I’m not changing terminology. It’s generally agreed that there is a substantive difference between erotica and porn,
Generally agreed among a minority of English-speakers who want to change the terminology. Or so it seems in this part of America.
There’ is no “stepping up to the plate” because no one is interested in actually listening unless I say exactly what they want to hear.
What I’m seeing is that lots of the people here seem to think they get a right to personally insult people who disagree with them, make up lies about what they feel, and generally demean them.
And then I get told I’m crying crocodile tears. Look, if any of you think I’m being a troll, go ahead and say it. Don’t be shy. I’ll leave.
odanu, I don’t think there’s an agreement that you can somehow tell pornography from erotica just by looking at it. Would you consider the movie I was in erotica or pornography? Can you even tell without having seen it?
I’m 99.99% certain that no one here has seen the movie I was in. But *everyone* has a conclusion about what I was doing, how I felt, etc… The first thing people did was jump to the conclusion that it was het porn. The second thing was to assume I was in gay porn (still wrong). Also, lots of insults. Which according to other people here, I either deserved, or provoked intentionally.
Fine, Ampersand, I’m out.
When I said I don’t understand why you had to concede D’Amato “one good point” and join him in pointing to “some radical feminists” without giving any name or reference, I meant it.
Sorry, Amp. I’ll try and restrain my hackles.
Way back in post #13, Jimmy Ho wrote:
It’s obvious to me that a woman being double-penetrated for a free XXX portal against her will has been raped.
However, a woman who has “vanilla” sex against her will is also being raped. The way you wrote the above makes it could be read as implying that it’s the double penetration, rather than the lack of consent, that makes something rape.
I wrote that because if porn is a significant cause of rape, then it’s likely that a massive increase in porn prevalence would be correlated with an increase in rape. However, no such increase in rape is apparent in studies of rape prevalence.
I said “unlikely,” however, not “impossible.” It is certainly possible that there has been a significant increase in rape that has not been measured.
It’s also possible that other aspects of society have been changing to significantly decrease the likelihood of rape, while simultaneously increased porn prevalence has been increasing the likelihood of rape, resulting in little or no change in rape prevalence even though porn is a significant cause of rape.
Occam’s razor, however, suggests that if a massive increase in porn is not accompanied by an apparent increase in rape prevalence, then porn probably is not a significant cause of rape.
1) Yes, I think there is a rape culture. This post is the best outline of what I think rape culture is.
2) I think mass media, including but not limited to porn, contributes to rape culture. I don’t see porn as something massively different than the rest of mass media in terms of its impact on rape culture (I do see differences in other terms, of course).
3) Well, obviously it has some effect on its consumers, or else who would buy porn? However, in terms of turning people who would otherwise be non-rapists into rapists, I think it has an effect only on an extremely slim margin. See comment #80 on this post for a fuller explanation of what I mean.
I’m out too. But since this thread has been hijacked by a male and his agency my perspective, as a former *whore, would not be heard anyway.
*We didn’t use euphemisms then, and I never do, now.
Mikko [b] Deep down inside, every sane porn watcher understands that this is just fantasy.[/b]
But do they really? I am sure most men are not just rapists waiting to happen when they watch porn. And I am aware most men do not believe that they are living in one giant porno where gorgeous women will just rip open their clothes at every opportunity. But what is more problematic and insidious about pornography (mainstream het porn to clarify) is that the expectations men place on women’s bodies is unrealistic. The expectations that men have when they want their gfs to perform threesomes/lesbian acts with other women – is demeaning, and influenced by porn. I know, as even I have been asked this many times in recent years. It’s not just that threesomes are ‘demeaning’ (they are) but this act is seldom expected to be performed with two men (of the female partners choosing) – but rather two women and one man. I know lesbians who’ve been picked up at LESBIAN clubs for the sake of het threesome adventures. Whatever happened to women’s only spaces? The assumption under all this IS THAT WOMEN ARE SEXUALLY AVAILABLE ANYWAY THAT MEN LIKE IT. Pornography HAS influeced the way sex is communicated/acted upon between men and women.
When you see that most young girls are ‘competing’ to be more beautiful than the next in a world where men largely ‘only go for hot women’ – don’t you think that pornography has increased the expectations that men have for women’s physically? Why would boob jobs in the UK double ever since the explosion of internet porn? Is this not a correlation? Why are so many women constantly undergoing plastic surgery. Now it’s not just your average celebrity who feels compelled to undergo the knife – but every sarah and sally!
Why would male expectations of how women’s pubic hair should be ‘groomed’ even be an expectation. You’d obviously have had to see some woman’s pubic hair groomed in the first place to know that it ‘looks better groomed’:
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=360
Men have always demanded that women be physically attractive, but since the easy accesibility of porn this expectation has dramatically increased. Additionally, you can see how pornography has affected women’s clothing and accessories, where women are following what/how porn stars dress. Having worked in the accessories industry for sometime, it doesn’t surprise me when people automatically assume that I have seen the latest issue of playboy or maxim and that they want “the earrings she’s got on”, or the ‘bracelet” or whatever shit….
[b]Btw, if porn is about degrading women, why do so many guys get off at watching femdom?[/b]
1) how many guys get off exclusively on femdom? how many guys watch ‘regular’ porn and complement their viewing habits with watching the occassional femdom videos?
2) How many guys watch femdom period? Quite a small number when compared to cazillions made by mainstream porn. Looking at whatever percentage this is, it’s not hard to see that femdom like other types of porn is a ‘fetish’. it’s not necessarily something that ALL men watch all the time.
3) What about the aesthetics of femdom? Sure you can put on a few layers of darker make-up – but what’s a domme really look like? she’s usually a physically attractive woman, usually with an hour-glass figure, possibly a little larger (rarely any much different than what Jayne Mansfield or Anita Ekberg may have looked like – and well, they’re sex symbols) and with the overall visualization of a suicide girl.
See when you talk of performance and knowing that it is ‘not real’, I would agree with you about femdom. Femdom is seemingly a ‘performance’. Subs and dommes “know” and “agree” upon the way they act. It’s a contract with certain expectations. Having said that, female dommes (especially in pornography) are expected to be dommes in ‘high heels’ and ‘leather corsets/bustiers’… is that really any different when you are dictating a way women ought to dress?
It is the rare porno that depicts an ugly, masculine woman having sex with a man/whipping his butt/pissing on him/choking him whatever….
Aside from the visualization of it, who’s really in charge of who in domme? The underlying joke of femdom is that men mutually consent to being ‘victims’ of dommes. Everyone agrees to what level or ‘play-torture’ the domme will exert on the male victim, therefore it isn’t the free choice of the domme to exert her dominance over the man. He knows what is coming to him, and he has pre-established boundaries of what he likes/doesn’t like.
Bringing in the fetish angle again, is foot fetishsizing/midget porn/disbaled women porn/fat porn – is all the same. At the end of the day it is a ‘complement’ to the malestream view of women, it is not the norm. At the end of the day you are the consumer, some guy with a wet dream is the producer. Nothing really changes, women essentially are the ones who are being ‘bought’ the way men want them, not necessarily the way women want to be themselves. The way women ‘act’ in porn depends on how pornographers want to ‘sort’ them on the basis of their looks. So if you look like Rose Mcgowan – you’d be a suicide girl, if you look like Britney spears – you’d be suited for mainstream porn. etc…
It all boils down to male demand/male viewing/male pleasure…
Jimmy wrote:
If you want. You would, however, be welcome to stay, if you can abide by the “Alas” moderation goals.
I didn’t give any name or reference because I didn’t think anyone would disagree that some radical feminists have said that porn is a significant cause of rape (please note that I said “some,” not “all”). For instance, I think that’s a fair reading of Robin Morgan’s famous comment that “pornography is the theory and rape is the practice.” A more recent example is Diana Russell’s book Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny, and Rape.
AradhanaDevindra, I agree with you that porn as a whole has added to the pressure on women and girls to conform to a very narrow ideal of beauty. However, except in fairly specific areas (like pubic hair styles), I think that the mainstream media is at least as blameworthy as porn is. The vogue for extreme thinness for female TV stars is, it seems to me, much more extreme now than it was in the 1960s, for instance.
I also agree with you that the “fetish” areas of pornography shouldn’t be focused on to the exclusion of “mainstream” pornography, or to invalidate judgements made about mainstream pornography, when discussing porn.
* * *
I’m wondering what porn means to the other posters here. By my definition, pornography is any work created with the expectation that viewers (or listeners) will masturbate while reading/viewing/listening to it. So “Playboy” is porn, what a lot of people call “erotica” is porn, and so on.
But I don’t expect that everyone here agrees with me. So…?
Ampersand, you put a lot of faith in “rape prevalence studies”. Can you link to those studies so I can check out their methods, please? Because I don’t believe that there has not been an increase in rape due to the increase in porn, and further, (Josh’s experience in one non-hetero and non-gay porn flick notwithstanding) I don’t believe that porn doesn’t rely on widespread coercion. Channel 6 in the UK did an eye-opening documentary called Hardcore, which reveals the standard methods used, including rape, to compel women to submit to acts they expressly refused to do. One of the porn cretors called it “exploring”, or helping the women “discover what they thought they couldn’t do”. The woman they were about to rape said very clearly she thought that was abuse, but after they raped and asphyxiated her, she was about to “consent” . At long last, the producers of the documentary stepped in and removed her from the house.
Yes, Josh, it is evident. That’s why most visual sexually graphic material is porn, where erotica is more often written. Erotica requires a story line, and full or relatively full characterization. If the plot is “Hi Jane, I’m Bob, wanna fuck”, and Jane says “Oh, yes, Bob”, that’s porn. That’s the woman (or possibly even man) as object that has no humanity. However, if you know from the setup that Jane and Bob have been planning this for weeks, and are both looking forward to it eagerly, for any of a myriad of reasons, it can be erotica, so long as it continues to be mutual throughout.
Erotica is harder to create, because it requires that all players have agency. Unless a film explicitly shifts pov from character to character, exploring what each is feeling with regard to what is going on, or it is told from the pov of the person with the least power in the situation, (again, with full characterization) it is porn.
For illustration purposes (and it’s been years since I’ve seen either of these, so all mistakes are in my faulty memory) The Story of O is not porn, as the person who is acted upon (she who has the least power, both institutionally, and in the specifics of the movie) is the pov character, and her feelings and reality are what drives the storyline. Now, it’s not particularly honest, and not particularly feminist erotica, but it is erotica. Debbie does Dallas? Porn. Though Debbie is the POV character, every word out of her mouth, every thought assumed to be in her head, is some (not very creative) man’s fantasy of what a woman would say if he were able to operate her mouth. She does not grow, she does not change, and she never acts for herself with any character motivation other than “the guy on the screen wants me to…”
Porn is essentially boring to anyone looking for anything other than the objectification of a human being for sexual gratification.
This seems to assume that all porn and all erotica has to include two people having a sexual encounter. How about images of a single person – are they erotica, or porn, or does it depend on presentation?
Does this apply to something like a comic book, where only fictional humans are involved (not counting the cartoonist)?
I’m out too. But since this thread has been hijacked by a male and his agency my perspective, as a former *whore, would not be heard anyway.
I’d be happy to listen to whatever you have to say about your personal experiences, observations, and ideas with respect. I had presumed that I’d be offered the same courtesy.
One of the things that drew me to Amp’s blog was that it wasn’t 100% feminist issues. There was some good space for tlaking about queer issues here as well, especially bi issues. where I was *trying* to come from was from my personal perspective about the work that I did, the people I worked with, and what they (and I) have to say.
I really didn’t feel like taking over the thread, and I’m sorry what I had to say in response to some insulting responses ended up doing so. I mean that honstly.
Hell if I know how to respond to stuff like that. If you’ve got anything to say, I’ll be happy to shut up and listen for a while, as long as I can ask respectful questions. Fair?
Yes, Josh, it is evident. That’s why most visual sexually graphic material is porn, where erotica is more often written. Erotica requires a story line, and full or relatively full characterization. If the plot is “Hi Jane, I’m Bob, wanna fuck”, and Jane says “Oh, yes, Bob”, that’s porn. That’s the woman (or possibly even man) as object that has no humanity. However, if you know from the setup that Jane and Bob have been planning this for weeks, and are both looking forward to it eagerly, for any of a myriad of reasons, it can be erotica, so long as it continues to be mutual throughout.
What I’m saying is that the definition is far from universally accepted, especially among those who produce it what you would call erotica. Plenty of us are happy to call what you’d call erotica by the name “porn”.
You can find three rape prevalence studies I think are reasonably good by scrolling to the bottom of this post . I don’t think these are perfect by any means, but I think they’re the best studies of rape prevalence in the US that have been done to date.
In addition, there have been dozens of local-sample studies using Mary Koss’ methodology (Koss’ survey is discussed in the link above). Although of course with that many studies the results have varied, most find that between 8% and 16% of women experience rape at some point in their lifetime – and I’m not aware of any general pattern of more recent studies finding higher prevalence of rape.
Of course, none of these are perfect. What’s needed is a nationwide study using good methodology repeated every three or four years, so that we could get a real idea of what’s going on over time. Unfortunately, I don’t think that can get funded in the current political climate.
As I said in post #60, I certainly acknowledge that it’s possible that there’s been an increase in rape over the last 10-20 years.
If porn does rely on widespread rape of women who appear in porn, that would be important because that’s disgusting and evil. However, I doubt it would make much difference to the nationwide prevalence of rape – which is the statistic D’Amato was talking about – because women who appear in porn are a tiny minority of all Americans.
Amp…I guess the point is that everyone in the medium must be portrayed as human. I didn’t intend to put a numerical limit on the number of humans that can be portrayed :-)
Odanu, when people make distinctions between porn and erotica, it often feels to me like subjective value judgments that boil down to “what I like is erotica, what I disapprove of is porn.” I’m not saying you intend to do this, it’s just that I’ve seen too many definitions, most of which draw the line based on personal preferences.
Given that men are (supposedly) more visually oriented and women (supposedly) more turned on by porn, I find the separation of prose vs. visuals to play along gender stereotypes in an unhelpful manner.
Even by your definitions, I’ve read plenty of prose porn written by and for women with minimal characterization. The subgenre is even known as PWP for “Porn without plot” or “Plot? What plot?”
Generally, I’m willing to say that a work of art created with an intent of sexually arousing the audience is porn, whether it’s a classical work, professional or amateur. And I’m more than willing to concede that I read porn, mostly fanfic (het and slash).
Lis:
If there’s such a thing as an impartial, objective definition, I have yet to see it. I wish there were a definition for each person who has ever seen products with sexual content. That would show that people are thinking critically about what they consume and enjoy, rather than just throwing up their hands and making sex the sole human behavior that should be exempted from critical thought.
I generally don’t give a damn about the regulation of porn that doesn’t directly involve physical harm to real human beings. Phone sex, for instance, is extremely distasteful to me, and if I found out my husband was using it, I’d kick his ass down the block. Then divorce him. However, I don’t regard it as dangerous in the same way that pornographic films are. I’ll still razz it until the end of time, though. Also, if I find out somebody close to me loves tentacle porn and the like, I’ll definitely be more than a little grossed out.
[Flame-baiting comment deleted by Amp.]
I asked for studies in relation to the assertion that there has not been a change in the prevalence of rape correlating with the increase of porn. None of the studies you refer to discuss rape statistics over time.
I do know that towns that have a lot of porn have a lot of rape, Las Vegas for instance.
Lis. I wasn’t dividing along prose vs visual, but human vs inhuman. It is often easier to depict erotica in prose than in pictures, but it has been done, and done well, in pictures as well. That said, of course people can differ about what does, and does not, depict humans as objects, but it has nothing to do with any kind of genetic “essentialism” regarding what men and women supposedly prefer. I’ve suspected that “men are visual” is code for “sit pretty and keep your mouth shut like a good little object” for a long time.
My opinion is one based on an article in a local paper. It said that according to police that on evenings followning strip shows in the area the levels of rape and sexual assault increased dramatically. This is directly from the police and they should know.
We have been told its harmless and yeh consensual sex is great. But so that men can have their strip shows means I can not go to many places alone. Can’t walk down a deserted beach alone. Can’t live in the country alone. I am in a prison in part because of lenient sentencing by male judges who have the freedom to roam the hills alone. They consider another chance for offenders more important than my freedom. According to some people I should not be in these places alone. Yes my life is a prison in part because of pornography.
Odanu, I just came across a review of Lost Girls. I mention it because the review, written by Neil Gaiman, takes a similar view to yours on the porn vs. erotica question, but focuses on the question of consequences rather than on characterization:
SaltyC wrote:
I don’t think I asserted that “there has not been a change in the prevalence of rape correlating with the increase of porn”; I asserted that there is no evidence of such a change (that I’m aware of). The one nationwide, year-after-year survey we have – the NVCS – shows a decline in rape, but since the NCVS sucks that doesn’t prove anything for sure.
The book I cited in my post, Seven Theories of Rape, did a state-by-state analysis comparing rape prevalence to porn magazine sales in each state, and found a very weak connection, or no connection at all, between porn sales and rape prevalence. A much stronger connection was between women’s status (how many women held political office, how small the wage gap, etc) and rape prevalence – the higher women’s status, the less rape.
How do you know that Las Vegas has more rape than other, demographically similar cities do?
Yes, Amp, exactly. Character has consequences, so that fits. Stereotypes just “are” without context. Sex is an important part of life, and its depiction is also important in art for that reason… but when sex is divorced from life and from humanity, it stops being important and starts being harmful pornography.
Alright the stats i have are for Nevada, and they show a steady per capita increase in rape from the year 1960, reaching triple the 1960 rate in the year 1994, and after that all crime fell, though rape did not fall as precipitously as any other crime.
The prevalence of porn has been increasing since the first issue of the male supremacist Playboy in 1955
In 2000, Nevada ranked 21st in total crime index for all states, but ranked 8th for rape.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nvcrime.htm
From the Amazon review of Lost Girls:
…One of my favorite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows to appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied…
I read that in the original comic, and rolled my eyes. I thought that it was forced and self-conscious. But maybe the story and art went uphill from there. Too bad I don’t have 75 bucks. :/
I agree on Amps general definition of porn (i.e. media aimed at arousal for masturbation). For the sake of this discussion I’d separate live pornography (which requires actors and actresses to accomplish sexual acts) from written/drawn porn (erotica/hentai). Both affect the general attitudes towards sexuality (e.g. rising expectations) but only the former can be personally degrading (e.g. traumatic). These are two very separate things.
As to AradhanaDevindra’s post,
Technically, you’re making the same mistake as the people the original post is criticizing, i.e. confusing correlation with causation. There may be alternative explanations as to why women invest more on their looks these days. I believe that media exposure (which includes pornography as a special case) is a significant factor, though.
I think a good analogy for rising expectations through media is candy: if you have never tasted it, you can perfectly well enjoy your daily vegetables. But once you have experienced the sweeter tastes, it’s hard to go back since you are now conscious of the alternatives. But deep down inside, the desire for candy has always been in your brain, hard-wired – it was only the experience of tasting it that made you conscious of its existence. Or as you epitomized it
I believe that deep down inside, porn producers really only bring outside the inner desires of men, i.e. unrealistically beautiful and sexually willing women. The tragedy is that unlike candy, women are conscious beings and thus the rising expectations hurt them (e.g. require investment and cause depression).
But in our information age, the only real alternative is information scarcity through control, i.e. criminalization of pornography.
Just looking at the graphics suggest this is unlikely on two grounds:
(1) Violent crime started falling in 1994. Rape started falling in 1979. That makes any common cause very unlikely, about half the reduction in rape incidence occured before violent crime started to fall. If the falls are caused by the same thing then why was rape falling while violent crime was stable?
(2) Since 1994 (when violent crime started falling) rape has fallen faster than violent crime. So even the post-1994 fall can’t just be explained by a common cause, presumably you need some additional factor on top of this to explain why rape fell more than violent crime.
Mikko I believe that deep down inside, porn producers really only bring outside the inner desires of men, i.e. unrealistically beautiful and sexually willing women. The tragedy is that unlike candy, women are conscious beings and thus the rising expectations hurt them (e.g. require investment and cause depression).
Do you think it’s impossible for anyone to make pornography designed to appeal to the inner desires of women? I get the sense that people actually do belive that. That consider all pornography, even if it’s designed by women with the intent of arousing women’s inner desires, to be somehow still defaulting to men’s desires.
Mikko:
This analogy is not working for me. Many fruits are sweeter than many candies. Pineapple, for instance, is sweeter than many varieties of chocolate. I don’t think this parallel is useful, unless your point is that a little porn usage is not so bad as compulsive porn usage.
Men who justify rape as entertainment in porn films may be under the impression that they can only orgasm if they see a woman being violated, or at least undergoing a pretend violation. But that sounds like a cheap cop-out to me. First of all, they weren’t watching porn in their mothers’ wombs, so what did they do to orgasm before they found porn ? Also, if it’s the violation/depiction of violation that is so important to reaching orgasm, why do men and the industry require more and more new women to degrade or rape every year ? More women get transformed into “product” than any man could possibly need even if it could be said that he acutally needs it. Why wouldn’t a man just be content with watching the same tape or looking at the same stills over and over again ? Why wouldn’t he be content to just picture scenarios in his head without actually needing live women to perform them ? Obviously just an image of a woman’s degradation is not enough. Somehow, an important part of the man’s arousal is that degradation didn’t just happen in the past;It’s happening now. And tomorrow. And the next day, all for his pleasure. The degradation must feel like it’s happening at this moment and into the future for it to be truly useful to him.
If I really believed that women have to be treated this way because men just can’t fend for themselves with their own imaginations, I really would be as much of a “man-hater” as the trolls love to make feminists out to be.
But I don’t think that. I think that men should behave like grownups and stop thinking that a) Their getting to come is the most important thing in the universe and b) Without porn, they just won’t be able to come. What bullshit.
I assume in the following that you were suggesting that the porn models are not the ideal standard of beauty for everyone.
I disagree on the basis that if there was some alternative standard of beauty which would appeal more to the aimed viewers than the current standard of beauty, the porn moguls would immediately switch to the new standard since it would generate more revenue. (Of course, in this analysis “everyone” is reduced to “aimed viewers”.)
I agree on the basis that people have different tastes. Porn has to appeal to large masses, and as such the standards of beauty have to be somewhat conservative.
I don’t believe that alternating between the words rape, violation and degradation, without any further definitions and explanations of what you mean by them in this context, serves discussion.
Mikko:
No, I don’t think that mainstream porn actresses are –or should be– the ideal of beauty. But that wasn’t my point. My point was that I can’t follow your analogy because I don’t think that candy, and lots of it, is the only avenue to experience the sensation of eating something sweet. Just like I don’t think that porn, and lots of it, is the only avenue to experience sexual pleasure.
Defenders of pornographic film are quick to point out that there are films with alternative standards of beauty, outside the mainstream, but that only addresses some of the issues skeptics have with pornographic film as a vehicle of sexual liberation or satisfaction. Beyond just the images and situations in mainstream porn films, the values expressed in the notion that women’s naked bodies equal sex– that women exist to embody sexuality and to supply sex while men are there to partake of what women embody– doesn’t change if suddenly the woman is fat or over fifty or wearing an unusual costume.
I’d really prefer not to discuss same-sex porn and the like, since we’re talking about male rapists of women and whether or not porn contributes to their existence.
Other posters have already explained their POV that men and the male-determined standards of the industry coerce or force women into sexual acts that they otherwise would not do. If you don’t approve of this belief, I can’t help you. I agree with those people that either real rape of faux rape, and possibly both, are an integral part of the pornographic film industry. Frankly, if you can’t go with this concept, you don’t have to discuss anything with me. I don’t mind.
Are people talking about two radically differnt kinds of porn?
ms_xeno seems (?) to be discussing RAPE porn, i.e.
But much (most?) porn is not rape porn. Usually, porn involves a fantasy world of “too much love”: People are shown wanting sex, and getting off on it, and getting off on pleasuring others.
It doesn’t make any sense to conflate the two. I am certainly familiar with the feminist perspective that all porn is essentially rape (I do not adhere to that belief). But irrespective of my personal views, I think it’s very fair to say that most male viewers do not think–subconsciously or otherwise–that all porn is rape. So I think we need to differentiate between porn which is designed to appeal to those who like violence, and porn which is not.
Sailorman:
Yes, I had exactly the same problem analyzing ms_xeno’s message: was she talking about what is classically understood as rape porn, or was she implying that all porn is rape? (I’ve the the believe for some time that most public discourse arises from misunderstandings in the meaning of words.)
I believe it boils down to the definition of consent. There are roughly three ways in which a person can have sex: out of desire, willingly but paid, or non-willingly (forced). (No matter how one twists and defines the vocabulary, the ideas behind these categorizations remain.)
It’s pretty universally agreed that forced sex is considered rape, and it’s mostly agreed that desired sex is not rape. Paid sex seems to be the gray area.
Personally, I believe that if the woman chose paid sex as an alternative to any other profession, then that at least implies it can’t be considered rape. I can’t really formalize why I believe so, though.
(Sorry for totally sidestepping the original topic.)
ms_xeno, I could kiss you for writing this:
I’ve been musing about this on and off all weekend, but in my mind the question has been posed as why I could watch Star Wars a thousand times over but as a porn user I was always looking forward to the next trip to Times Square.
It’s the question in my head as I remember that when my partner and I went to Amsterdam in December 1999 we considered buying a prostitute for a threesome, because the filmed fantasy wasn’t enough and we felt entitled to what we desired. Why wasn’t the fantasy enough, and did we really back out just because the city was a buzzing madhouse for Y2K new years or was that a convenient excuse for what was niggling our consciences? What was niggling our consciences?
I’ve tried to find the words for my feelings about that, and I’m good with words but there are still holes needing verbal markers before I can dissect them properly. I do feel like using pornography told me in a louder voice than other misogynist media that it was sexy to accept polyamory and bi-sexee threesomes and that it’s okay to bend a woman’s sexuality to my will and use her body for my purposes so long as I compensate her with money.
My favorite short argument for pornography being an important cause of rape, a cause of rape beyond what other media instigate, is news about Norwegian hotel staff asking for a ban on pay-per-porn because women were getting assaulted by men using porn in hotel rooms.
There’s also gobs of evidence and even a porn-supporting Supreme Court ruling that where strip clubs, pornography stores, and other sexually oriented businesses (SOBs) locate, rape increases. Many studies by realtors and property owners who don’t give a crap about women reveal that sex crimes increase around clusters of strip clubs and other places “real time” pornography is made and the U.S. Supreme Court, in decisions Young v. American Mini Theaters, Inc. and Renton v. Playtime Inc. Theater, Inc., concluded “…that municipalities have a substantial interest in protecting and preserving the quality of life for its community against the adverse secondary effects of SOBs….”
Some facts cited in the Land Use Studies used by the Supreme Court in their rulings:
1. In Indianapolis, Indiana crime increased 23% in the study areas containing SOBs versus areas containing no SOBs. Sex related crimes were 4 times more common in residential study areas with SOBs than commercial study areas with SOBs.
2. In Cleveland, Ohio, of the three study tracts with the highest incidence of rape, two had SOBs and the third bordered a tract with such businesses. In these three, there were 41 rapes, nearly 7 times the city average of 2.4 rapes per census tract.
3. In Phoenix, Arizona, sex offenses were 506% greater and property crimes were 43% greater in neighborhoods where SOBs were located as opposed to neighborhoods containing no SOBs.
You could believe Norwegian hotel staff and American real estate agents are making up allegations of pornography seeming to increase rapes and sexual assaults, but what motivation for lying could they have other than the meekly lobbed “sex negative” insult that’s supposed to shut feminists up when they try to point out such information?
Well, in the context that we are discussing, the actual characterization doesn’t seem relevant, only the apparent characterization does. If you’re looking that the effect of porn on viewers of porn, the only thing that matters is the perspective of the viewers. There is only confusion to be gained in breaking the fourth wall.
Which is to say: If I have a fantasy of being raped, and act out my fantasy with a willing accomplice, on camera, that is “rape porn” for the purposes of this discussion though it clearly is NOT rape. People who seek “rape” will find it in my film.
If, OTOH, I have an off-camera person forcing me at gunpoint to act out what APPEARS IN THE FILM to be happy consensual sex, that is not “rape porn” for these purposes though it clearly IS rape in fact. People who are seeking violence will not find it in my film.
Although I am certain that SOME viewers of porn out there are fully cognizant of the porn industry, and would watch “non-rape porn” while simultaneously getting off on the underlying aspects of the industry, these are a small minority of folks.
Lumping “porn” together doesn’t make much sense: There’s a big difference between Deep Throat and rape porn, in terms of the effect they are likely to have on their viewers. So for me, an interesting question is whether violent porn or “rape porn” in particular are linked to rape in any meaningful way. Though this is probably much harder to research it seems more relevant.
Do you mean regardless of any rape that may happen in the making of porn and regardless of any rape that might result because a man utilizes porn to harbor his fantasies?
Who benefits from splitting these hairs? Whose sexuality is left intact and unquestioned?
>> (increase chances you will later rape someone)
I am not so sure of this link, myself. At least as applied to “generic” porn involving what appears to be consensual sex.
But without any evidence (this is pure speculation on my part) I might be inclined to think a subtheory might be true:
(watch porn which involves rape or other violence to women) >>> (increase chances you will later rape someone)
The reason I am “splitting hairs” is that we are trying to talk about the link between porn and rape (if there is one). And the link is NOT the rape which may occur in the making of a porn movie. No, we’re talking about the rape which may occur because someone watched a porn movie. (It’s not that porn-filming-related rape is unimportant per se. It’s just that it is such a small proportion of ALL rape that I am not talking about it here.)
Since the porn only “acts” on the watcher through the screen (he’s not standing thee when it’s filmed) then the important thing is what the watcher sees. And what the watcher wants to see. And what the watcher’s reaction to the porn is: Does it, or does it not, increase his tendency to rape women?
Oddly enough, for this particular question, what actually happened on screen is irrelevant.
The only way it could be relevant is if someone has “full knowledge” of the porn film they were watching. So it is (theoretically) possible that soemone might rent a film, thinking “hey, wow! That looks totally consensual but I happen to know it was really rape! ” That person could be enjoying “rape porn” so to speak. But it’s such a tiny subset of porn users, it’s irrelevant in the large picture.
The first part of my post (now gone, for some reason) basically said
The current theory is (watch porn) >> (rape someone)