Not advocating banning it, just wish it didn’t exist.
I’ve said before here on the boards how destructive was the influence of Playboy and Penthouse reading material on my attitude towards women during my youth. I truly believed that if I didn’t get laid within the first several dates, that the relationship had no future and that I was wasting my time. The trajedy is that what I most wanted at the time was shared intimacy. So, that is point 1, misrepresentation of general female character resulting in negative male response behavior.
Point 2. Its all fine and dandy to talk about the mature consent of females to expose their body parts and act out normally intimate acts for the public but as been pointed out before, in many cases , economics/drug dependancy and even slavery are behind the consent. There are many shitty jobs that I hope my daughters avoid as a career, but if they temporarily are cleaning toilets, I would not feel sad for them. If they decide to appear in a porn video, I’m sure it would destroy me. So its okay for your daughter, but not mine.
I’m sure most loving parents would agree with me when it comes to their daughters, but since so few of us are actually in that situation, society is free to follow the unfettered capitalistic law of supply and demand. When we expect others to raise their children to titilate us, but do not wish to reciprocate, Then that is exploitation.
Yes - I think a lot of porn degrades women, not all. Some degrades men.
I would never advocate banning it because I don’t think that is possible in any society (you guys have no idea how much porn and prostitution is available here, and even in Saudi, according to Saudi associates).
In terms of harmful stereotypes/body image - I find it ridiculous blaming just “porn” because such tapes and magazines are usually at least slightly hidden away from view. Far more harmful are men’s mags with scantily clad, porno-style covers which even here - yes, an Arab muslim country - are located at the supermarket checkout at eye-level of children and everyone else. Loaded, FHM, etc etc.
And likewise women’s fashion mags - they’re just as (deliberately) detrimental to women’s body image. It sickens me to read phoney articles on feeling-good-however-you-look and then seeing articles on losing weight, colouring your hair, how to enhance yourself, ads for hair removal, weight loss, cosmetic surgery.
To me, these magazines are far more damaging than porn because they are mainstream. They have a deliberate financial interest in undermining women and making them insecure about themselves and their bodies so the advertisers that fund the mags can sell products.
i don’t think this is going to be a very intelligent or well-thought-out post, so please forgive me, but here goes.
personally i find some porn “uncomfortable” to watch. not anything i can put my finger on, but there you go.
i don’t like hardcore anatomical shots, or that “give it to me baby” voiceover. i just don’t find it does it for me.
however, an erotic passage in a book, a piece of photography which has more “soul” or “atmosphere”, or a soft core or mainstream film with some sort of plot/ realistic characterisation is more likely to turn me on and gives me no such qualms.
so, do i find pornography bad?
yes, in that i am disappointed with the quality and soulessness of so much of it.
no, in that i don’t find the concept of visual/aural/written stimulation abhorrent.
do i think it degrades women?
yes, in that i think the crass, fiercely hard-core, sex-as-physical-process porn degrades all who participate in it or watch it.
no, in that i think that an image of people enjoying sex together in a loving, trusting relationship (be it casual or otherwise) is not degrading to anyone.
i thank you for your time, normal programming wil now be resumed.
I find it degrading to the sex act to consider that it must be done in a loving, trusting relationship. Sometimes sex is just sex: raw, unfettered, non-contextual. And I like that. This is why I like many porno mags over movies; sure, they put on some kind of overall theme to link the images, but it is far from an actual context.
Not that there isn’t a need for the representation of a loving, trusting relationship, too. I am longing for the day when a great drama inculdes hardcore sex scenes. It is my personal fantasy that I make just such a movie. But this does not describe the totality of consentual sex.
Degrading to women? I’ll wait to read AHunter’s paper before commenting further.
And I find this characterization of pornography to not be value-free, either. Certianly none of the pornography I enjoy centers around this Barbie (™) Doll.
I would like you to expand upon the word “degredation” and “degrading” in the context of the thread. Specifically as it relates to this quote.
It sounds to me like something along the lines of “Born Again Christians brainwash people, therefore you cannot choose to be a Born Again Christian.” The only way for a woman to enjoy multiple partners is to succumb to this tunnel-view of pornography? What sort of tar-baby are you handing us here?
I’m going to say: bullshit. Unless the very act of sex itself degrades women, pornography itself cannot degrade women or cause this effect merely by its existence (that is, as a portrayal of sex).
Given a picture of two people having (presumably consensual) sex and apparently enjoying it, even if they are just acting, I can’t see how one can draw the conclusion that the image is degrading to women unless she starts with the assumption that heterosexual intercourse is itself degrading to women. Every justification I’ve seen, including those here, sounds a lot like “I don’t like it so you shouldn’t either”
To open another front here, how does women’s porn, aka romance novels, fit into the equation. Other than being verbally rather than visually oriented, I think they can reasonably be accused of the basic underlying sins attributed to male porn. They present vastly misleading notions about the opposite sex to impressionable young minds, presenting a view of sex and relationships that panders to one genders idealized vision, and thus creating impossible expectations that can cause lifelong damage.
A bit of hyperbole maybe, but where are the people shouting for romance novels to be banned or least sold only to adults? Why is it that porn (the kind men like) is socially shunned but women’s porn is available in the checkout line at the grocery store?
I have the perception based on circumspect discussions that romance novels are used at least partly as masturbation aids, sorta like male-oriented porn is. Can any female dopers set me straight on this?
I see a lot of intergender porn, and most of the time the men are just there just because they have a penis and “magic hands”. Sometimes that’s all the body parts you see of them.
Taking up the point of expoloitation, would an analogy between women and blacks, say, be appropriate? Both traditionally oppressed by white/patriarchial structures, and when restrictions are loosened have to compete with the rest without any memory. Doesn’t that set up the stage where tons of women who want to make their own money choose pornography as a career? Not really a Hobson’s choice, but somewhat close. For this thesis to be valid, we need to prove a surge in the pornography “labor” market.
There is the empirical evidence. The reality is that women are the power in the adult fim business. Actresses get paid the big money and have the power to decide when, how, and who they’ll work with while actors receive almost token sums. And women are a substantial force behind the cameras as well.
So you have an industry controlled by women, which gives the largest share of money to women, and where men are either paying the money or underpaid low level employees. And this is degrading to women?
Well, I have no brilliant arguments for you, sorry, just a couple of things I’d like to say about this issue, I hope you don’t mind.
First off, I’d like to second what this poster said:
I distinctly recall reading about an anti-porn feminist, I think it was Andrea Dworkin, who was opposed to gay porn…that is, porn in which no women are featured or even seen…on the grounds that it was, in fact, degrading to woman.
I’ve been scratching my head over that ever since. If someone reading this thread could explain it to me, I would greatly appreciate it. As far as the purposes of the OP go, I would think bringing up the subject of gay porn in an argument with “porn is degrading to women” types would be a good way to get them off balance.
Secondly, I just wanted to say, in response to this:
The slippery slope argument can be worked both ways. Condemning or banning pictures of 25 year olds in Playboy leads to doing the same with the Victoria’s Secret Catalogue, and then “Baywatch”, etc, etc, and at the other end of the slope you are in Taliban-era Afghanistan, with all the women wearing burquas.
I have been so tardy, and in my own thread! Well, as I said at the beginning, I wanted to see what both sides had to say…I’m poaching from y’all.
Thank you. < --extremely sincere.
Maybe. At best, maybe.
You answered yourself, as you can see. Adults make bad decisions all the time. And for some people, being in porn is * not *a bad decision. So whose job is it to make that distinction for each person? Each person’s.
Same could be said of alcohol, gambling…all the vices. Will we deny the majority the right to partake moderately because some partake immoderately? Is that the American way? (It certainly seems that some would like it to be, which is the constant struggle of a free, yet puritanical society.)
Let’s do it! We’d make a mint!
Actually, I think it was already made… it’s called “The Joy of Sex”.
This argument and anything like it, falls apart on close examination. Why? Because who is it that takes their world view from pornography? Who is educated about women by pornography? You may claim that today’s young people, more than any others, are being educated by pornography because of the internet. But here’s the thing: for every stolen moment spent sitting in front of a computer, fantasizing about the busty blonde that does every Tom, Dick, and Butthead, there are a thousand other moments spent with mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, teachers, other kids, and all the other women in the world, who do NOT behave like that. So anyone who decides that that is the way women must be, is doing so willfully, because he wants it to be true, not because he’s learned it legitimately.
Ahunter, thanks for directing me to the paper. I printed it out and I’m going to read it at my leisure.
It isn’t a matter of “expect”. I don’t think there are many people who “expect” that some women should be “raised” to be sex workers of any kind. Some women just do, and always have.
I have not read much Dworkin and am certainly no fan of hers, but we did cover some of her work on pornography when I was studying rhetoric. If I remember her position correctly, her main problem with pornography is that it is degrading to women. However, she objects to all pornography, even that not depicting women, on the grounds that all pornography is based on the sexual degradation, exploitation, and humiliation of someone, be that someone a woman, a gay man, a transgendered person, a child, or even an animal. If a person feels that pornography is by its very nature degrading to someone then simply bringing up gay porn is not going to catch them off guard.
Of course, one could argue that pornography is not always degrading to anyone, but I believe that Dworkin would say that such works are not actually pornography at all but non-pornographic erotica. It would not be unfair to accuse her of playing a semantics game here, but I don’t think even Dworkin’s fiercest opponents can deny that at least some pornography is based on degrading someone. The only questions are how important and damaging such degradation is and what, if anything, should be done about it.
Did I? I mean, I am willing to go on record now as saying that I do believe that in most cases degrading media representations of people are a bad thing, but I think
leaves ample room for an argument that such representations are not damanging or that what damage they might do is insignificant.
First, I’m thinking you need to realize there’s definitely differences among the various types of porn (i.e. vanilla porn is different than, say, child porn). Therefore you need to clarify the differences between ‘acceptable/non-harmful porn’ and ‘unacceptable/harmful porn’. Lots of times anti-porn people immediately jump to bestiality and kiddie porn to make their points so it’s usually best to clarify this issue early on before everyone starts rioting and throwing things.
Secondly, you have to realize that any sort of porn, even vanilla porn, can be harmful if the people view that as an accurate depiction of sexual relations between people and base their sexual activities on those assumptions. In other words, don’t behave in real life like they pretend to do in porno flicks 'cause it’s not healthy (a good example would be pointing out that serial killers tend to have an attraction to bondage porn). Of course this unhealthy mentality can be equally applied to any number of other things such as taking the Bible literally, thinking D&D is an accurate representation of reality, etc. etc.
Lastly, porn is not a good substitute for a relationship. Remember, we’ve all got a biological imperative to reproduce and porn doesn’t enable you to do that…
What, exactly, makes that a sexual depiction? The breasts? The nakedness?
Not all cultures see breasts and nakedness as sexual symbols. And as far as I know, the Venus figurines were more likely used as fertility symbols than as, say, ancient porn.
Stoid, when I thought about why porn is degrading to women, I came up with a gut answer. I would never post this on a message board, in intellectual debate, but if you’re looking for possible objections, here’s one:
I find porn degrading to me. Kinda hard to refute that, though it’s a useless point.
I have very limited experience with porn, so I may be wrong in some of these assertions, but here’s another few ideas to be thrown out there:
Men are usually depicted as, even if sexual objects, controlling sexual objects. They make the conquests. By portraying women as sexual objects (much more overtly than men) there to be conquered, one harms both women’s self-image and men’s image of women.
I think someone has mentioned this before, but it creates false ideals of sexual behaviour. I know I don’t act like people in porn. If that’s what turns men on, one might think, should I be acting more like them?
Finally, this point is VERY relationship-specific. Meaning, there may be a vast majority of relationships and people involved in them that DON’T work this way, but some do. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of my boyfriend getting sexual gratification from other women. Understandable. Do pictures of women fall into this category? For some people.
I’m not entirely clear where you’re contradicting me. I called it a “sexual depiction,” and in the exaggerated breasts, clearly carved line for vulva, and lack of face and any other distinguishing or individualizing features, it is obviously meant to have a sexual meaning. You yourself call it a fertility symbol.
And note, further, that I don’t call it porn. That, in fact, was the whole point of my post. When depictions of sexual subjects are common and in the open, there’s no such thing as “porn.” Porn is secret, shameful, in the shadows. Venus figurines, and similar works, are about sex, through the lens of fertility and reproduction – up front, not hidden. If sex is not regarded as dirty and unhealthy, and isn’t set aside as something to avoid confronting or discussing, then no distinction between “fertility material” and “pornography” can be made. I have to assume you’re forgetting about Japanese screens painted with brothels, and African statues with huge erections, and Indian murals cataloging sexual positions, and all the other examples of artwork from societies that (at least at one time) celebrated sex rather than hiding it out of culturally-conditioned shame.
I wasn’t even coming close to talking about any of that other stuff (Japanese screens etc.), so I doubt I “forgot” them.
I suppose it depends what I mean by sexual. If you mean that it’s obvious she’s a woman, yes. If you mean that it’s obvious that this statue has something to do with the symbolism of sexual feelings and relations, no.
Breasts and vulvae (vulvae?) maybe to you be inherently about sex, but to other cultures they’re inherently about birth and breastfeeding. And I don’t think it’s fair to say that fertility necessarily = sex (not in a symbolic way, of course I think you could argue biologically that they’re related!)
If you meant that the Venus figures were a depiction of sexuality in the sense that they depicted a member of a sex, I’d agree with you. If you meant that they depict something having to do with sexual feelings, I’m going to have to say that there is no where near enough proof to claim that.
