I’ve seen a few documentaries that are for the idea that its degrading but now I would like us to throw arguments back and forth until we come to a conclusion.
However this might be a difficult topic since there is a wide variety of genres and I don’t know if it would be appropriate to sweep them into one. I’ll leave that for everyone to decide.
I think porn can be degrading for its participants of any gender, and there are plenty of examples of this on the interwebs.
But it doesn’t have to be, and the “all porn (or other forms of sex work) degrades women and/or necessarily constitutes violence against women” is just reductive rationalization used by people who don’t like sex work.
A culture inflicts harm on the psyche of many when it sends women and girls the message that they matter only inasmuch as they are beautiful and sexually appealing to men, and not because of their intellect, spirituality, artistry, talent, or anything else. Some women of the SDMB spoke out about it in this thread, and someone linked to this opinion piece.
Obviously this message comes in many forms; just look at the magazine covers in any supermarket. But almost by definition, pornography carries the message more strongly by anything else. In pornography, women exist to be sexually appealing to men and for no other reason.
Depends on what kind of porn you are watching.
The existence of porn made by women, for women makes blanket statements like this suspect.
All sexual thoughts about women are inherently degrading to women, therefore porn is degrading by definition. How can you think of a woman, a creature like yourself, your very equal, a robot made by god for the purpose of denying our animal natures and worshiping the divine, as a sex object? How can you possibly think of the intense, throbbing, pounding, thrusting pleasure of animal intercourse, imagining over and over the thought of sticking your wee-wee in her pee-pee? What is the matter with you?
What does this have to do with porn? Does any porn actually send such a message?
Literally none of the porn that I have seen/read has ever sent a message even remotely like what you describe. Porn is, by definition, about sex, but that does not mean that the only worth of the people involved is sex.
This is as bizarre as saying that romantic comedies send a message to men that they they matter only inasmuch as they are providers and emotionally appealing to women, and not because of their intellect, spirituality, artistry, talent, or anything else. Or saying that action movies and thrillers send a message to men that they matter only inasmuch as they are strong, emotionally resilient and able to function under incredible duress, and not because of their intellect, spirituality, artistry, talent, or anything else.
It’s all a total nonsense. Movies in certain genres focus on certain aspects of the characters and invokes certain stereotypes and tropes. Horror movies don’t focus on the hero or heroine’s artistic abilities any more than porn does, because it’s totally irrelevant to the purpose of the movie. A man’s political or spiritual views in a romantic comedy are also rarely mentioned unless they somehow offend the female lead. None of this is evidence that those stories are sending a message about what men are valuable for. All it means is that movies have a set plot, and characterisation that is utterly irrelevant to those plots is inevitably ignored.
Unless intellect, spirituality, artistry or talent are somehow relevant to the act of physical sex, of course they aren’t mentioned, That isn’t at all the same as saying that those traits are valueless.
Shit, I bet you can’t tell me anything at all about Jame’s Bond’s spirituality, artistry, politics or talent. Or Peter Parker’s. Or Jack Sparrrow’s. So clearly that means that thrillers send a message that men are not valued for such things.
I don’t know what supermarkets you frequent, but the ones on my area don’t display porno mags. They display “fashion” and “family” and “gossip” mags. And the covers are mostly of celebrities and the blurbs focus on the spirituality, artistry, talent of those celebrities.
I put “US Weekly cover” into Google images.
The first hit is this. A picture of a female celebrity and crap about her wedding focussing on her relationships, fashion choices and musical tastes. Pictures of Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama talking about the polictis of their spouses.
The next hit is this. Proudly declaring that it contains nothing about Paris Hilton is a good thing, but the picture is all babies and the blurb is just fluff about celebrity babies and fashion. Not even a hint of anything about female sexuality, unless you want to draw the long bow that babies = sex.
The third hit is this. A picture of a male celebrity. Blurb about meaningles trivia such as his dating life, which could be construed as sex, but this is hardly supporting your point that these magazines give an image that women are valued only for sex.
These are not cherry picked examples. These are simply the first three that Google turns up. So at this stage I am calling bullshit in this claim that supermarket magazines somehow send a message that women are valued only for sex. It appears that they don’t do any such thing.
Since we have no evidence that anything else carries this message at all, it wouldn’t be hard for that statement to be true.
Cite! Seriously, do you have any evidence at all to support that claim?
Of course all the main characters in porn exist primarily in reference to sexual appeal. If that wasn’t the case then it wouldn’t be porn. In the same way that all the major characters in a war movie exist primarily in reference to war and all the main characters in a horror novel exist primarily in reference to the horror du jour and so forth.
But none of this allows us to conclude that Rocky exists only to be beaten up or that James Bond exists only to kill Russians. All those characters have other reasons for their existence. Often shallow two dimensional reasons, but most characters are shallow and two dimensional.
So I would like to see your evidence for this claim that in pornography, women exist to be sexually appealing to men and for no other reason. I’ll even accept evidence that this is true in even a tiny majority of porn: 51%. Present your evidence that women in 51% of porn exist only to be sexually appealing to men. It can be a peer reviewed study or a “random” selection of porn such as my random selection of magazine covers.
I’m guessing that you won’t be able to back this statement up with anything at all.
It seems obvious that you can’t sweep all the genres into one; many of them don’t feature women at all, so how could they possibly be degrading to their image?
Nah, you’re completely off base there. Porn is made so men can fap. It has nothing to do with an overall demeaning of women any more than kung-fu movies have to do with advocating assault on the Chinese.
It’s like my family motto says:
*Fapping. If you don’t have lady pictues, it’s slightly more difficult.™
*
If the OP can define “pornography” for us, maybe I can try to address the issue. I would guess that half of today’s American TV shows would have been considered pornographic 50 years ago.
this is beautiful. May I steal it and embroider it on a throw pillow?
We can conclude that Rocky exists for reasons other than to be beaten up because he is presented in other contexts, and shown in the work to be operating for other reasons. There is a plot, and character development, and so forth, that shows Rocky as a character who has meaning apart from being beaten up.
How successful that effort is, is another question. The point is that the majority of the movie is spent where James Bond isn’t killing Russians. How much of a hard-core porn movie is spent where the participants aren’t having sex?
What would the peer-reviewed study be of? I don’t see that the question can be quantified.
Regards,
Shodan
Only inasmuch as sex is degrading to the woman. Which is to say: most of the time, not as such, no.
That’s awesome. Given the subject matter, I’d ScotchGuard that pillow.
I’m that on this very day, somewhere deep in the bowels of a university campus, professors and graduate students are crunching numbers on pornography, armed with a vast array sensors, detectors, recorders, and… lubricants.
And when their results are finally published, we will all think to ourselves, “Why didn’t I write that grant proposal?”
It’s worth nothing the liberal democracies have lots of porn and women’s rights, while (for example) the Islamic theocracies have neither, so I’d say social concerns about the effects of porn are a waste of time.
Is ejaculating all over a woman’s face degrading?
There’s sex, and then there’s what happens in porn videos, and I don’t think the two are closely related.
eta: That’s not to say that porn itself is degrading, but I worry that it may be teaching young men bad habits.
And the answer will be “because you work in the Veterinary Sciences Department”.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s only degrading if the woman in question feels degraded. As a bisexual male, I enjoy it, and I do know some of my (girl)friends enjoy it. An equal number don’t, of course, but that just shows that everyone is different. There’s nothing inherently degrading about the act though, no more than a woman ‘forcing’ a man to pleasure her by sitting on his face is degrading to the man.
You’re right that porn has little relation to actual sex, just like kung fu movies (to borrow the earlier example) have little relation to actual fights. But it’s all fantasy, it doesn’t teach anybody anything. And it’s supply and demand. It’s what people want to see, not what they’ve been forced to think should be normal in the bedroom.
I think people who are misogynistic will seek out misogynistic porn. Misogynistic porn (if you can call it that) does not create misogynistic people.
Gay porn is degrading to women because they’re not in it! Sexist gays!
