Out of curiosity, what could be the argument against this?
I guess if you don’t find it empowering, or want to be seen as something beyond just a sexy image.
It’s a “power” rooted in emotional/physiological manipulation, and assumes that a powerful woman is one who has access or can manipulate a powerful man.
I have no problem with sex, don’t see any theoretical problems with porn or even prostitution, but rhetoric of “sexual power” always seems problematic: it seems coercive and unhealthy. Sex should be about entertainment or pair-bonding, and if someone wants, money. It shouldn’t be a way to control, and its use as a tool of coercion should no more be celebrated than a man’s use of superior upper body strength to intimidate.
I do seriously wonder what the effects of porn-on-demand will be in 10-20 years. There’s no denying the change has been massive, from Playboys hidden under a bed to 10-year-olds Googling ‘bestiality’ and ‘bukkake.’ I’m not sure what effect it will have on sex-related crimes (if any), but it’s definitely going to have an affect on sex. Actually, strike that. Listening to college kids and 20-somethings talk about their experiences, I think it already does. I’m not anti-porn, but there are enough people addicted to WoW and Facebook at the expense of their real lives – I don’t think explicit, readily available porn should get a pass.
Like Susanann I think other factors have to be looked at, beyond ‘rapists are now happy staying home and masturbate to porn,’ though that is an interesting theory that I hope gets explored further (has the Freakonomics blog weighed in?). For all we know, greater access to violent movies and elaborate videogames are just as effective. As with any dramatic reduction or increase in crime rates, you’ve got to look beyond what could have caused an increase or reduction to what could have affected reporting. While it’s nice to think that the feminist movement, harsher sentences and DNA evidence have helped reduce rates, I’m also not sure how much the rewards have managed to outweigh the risks in terms of reporting sexual assault, even over 25 years.
Lastly, while porn culture has definitely seeped into the mainstream (see: 13-year-olds getting Brazilian waxes), there’s so much indie stuff that I’m not sure the ‘I compare my bodies to theirs’ is much of an argument against porn, especially when there are plenty of fashion and lad mags doing the same job (and with less offensive boobs jobs). On the other hand, as long as porn players are performing for a camera and a male audience, you are going to continue to see poor but well-lit cunnilingus techniques and unbelievably enthusiastic lady moans. Not a great teacher, but even then it should be clear from a few actual sexual experiences that this is the case (and hopefully, depending on someone’s level of exposure, he’ll find the real thing more interesting than the movie… but again, we’ll see in 10 years). As with modeling, female porn stars are going to continue to fulfill tricky roles in the feminist sphere, out-earning their male counterparts when they’re at the top of their game but also finding a not-so-female-friendly place at the bottom rungs. I’ve never met a feminist who wasn’t somewhat torn when it comes to porn.
I’m really curious how the increase in indy productions will affect both the perception of being an adult entertainer and labor standards. On the one hand, the couple you’re watching screw could be the hottest thing ever because they’re real and actually into it. On the other hand, they could be Eastern European prostitutes who’ve never had an AIDS test.
The subject is clearly not a single issue matter. However, if the proliferation of pornography is causative in reducing the numbers of sexual assaults would it not be justified as a less-worse outcome?
That’s fine, but it seems well beyond controversy that the vast majority of human males are wired in such a way that sexuality will always be a meaningful aspect of a woman’s power WRT men.
The quote doesn’t imply that this is the only source of female power - just a significant one.
I’m curious about the decline –has it been steady, since 1984? Were new laws put into effect around then regarding pornography and its availability? Because I realize I mostly referenced the internet upthread, and lord knows that wouldn’t cover 25 years (not even ASCII pr0n).
On a related note, I’ve occasionally wondered if we could take the existing child porn and say, “You sign up and you can get all the child porn you want–legally–but we have your name.”
What would happen? I have no idea.
I think the correlation between porn and rape has always been tenuous, and I don’t really believe rape is about sexual frustration as much as general frustration. The sexual aspect makes it more horrific and intimate for the victim, leading to more pleasure for the rapist. So, as we in our various cultures find ways to reduce the “stain” on the victims, it may be that we are reducing the pleasure for the rapists as well.
Superior upper body strength isn’t the only source of male power–just a significant one. But we recognize that using that power is coercive and results in unbalanced relationships–romantic or otherwise–leading to a social structure that really doesn’t benefit anyone, not even the strong man. So we teach little boys it’s never ok to hit someone except in self-defense. Shouldn’t we teach little girls it’s never ok to use sexuality to manipulate someone?
It also seems to me that no “power” that has to be qualifed “IRT men” is ever something feminists should celebrate: by definition, it’s derivative–it’s a power you only have by fitting into someone’s ideal. It’s the sort of thing where you may feel powerful, but that wears on a psyche: years of pretending to be someone’s ideal in order to manipulate them will transform the person doing the pretending.
I agree with those who say that just as there could be no necessary causal correlation proven for porn → rape, there’s probably no necessary causal correlation involved in the opposite direction. Easier access to porn is a symptom of a society that has loosened some of its sexual mores, which simultaneously involves empowering women so they are less likely to be victims of sexual assault and giving men both alternate outlets for their urges AND pause to consider what the consequences of rape may be, now that it’s (relatively) easier to report and prosecute. As others have mentioned, there has been a 20-year decline in violent crime in general in the USA, save for specific foci of criminal activity.
As to the child porn thing, there you have an opposite situation because of the different nature of the beast. Where there’s demand, there’s supply, but unlike regular porn, where you have people willingly performing staged sexual scenarios in order to give the customer a vicarious fantasy, which will be sold legally under controlled terms, with (real*) child porn you HAVE to **commit actual child molestation itself **to produce it.
Up until the internet and the digital camera, CP was a relatively difficult thing to find and circulate and it was even said in the mid-late 80s to early 90s that the main distributor of CP at the time was the Postal Inspector’s office, in sting operations. Pedophiles had to set up mail or in person contacts and exchange printed matter or film/VHS (which at the time was hard to reproduce at home with a degree of quality). This does not mean the kids were not being molested, but just that the evidence was not getting so widely distributed and the offenders could not offer each other as much support. The 'net and digital video created a boom of supply rising to meet the demand and of networking opportunities for the pervs. But I doubt it created the pervs. (And I have my reservations as to how lucrative it really is as an “industry”, one would suspect it’s a lot of P2P filesharing going on…)
As to the spike in sex-offender registries, I tend to suspect it’s a result of this time period being precisely when enforcement and prosecution stepped up, the registries were made more inclusive, persistent and public, and the restrictions on registrees stiffened; so I would not yet rely on it so much as a sign that there are more sex criminals now as that we’re casting a wider and tighter net.
(*The legislatures insist in trying to outlaw ***simulated ***child porn - drawings, CGI - based on the “whetting appetites” argument; so the “porn in and of itself provokes the viewer to rape” theory is alive and well in this area!)
There’s also been a change, and I don’t know if this is significant or even real, in certain attitudes toward rape.
I’ll use the example of Rosemary Rogers, the romance author. In 2009 if you read her books, you’ll likely be horrified. They were written in the 70s, and the “heroes” pretty much rape the “heroines.” There’s a strong undercurrent, occasionally an overcurrent, of violence and coercion and, ack, this is “romantic.”
Since then, have we redefined masculinity and femininity enough that violence and coercion have less of a place–are less acceptable and therefore rape is not just to the other side of what’s acceptable but all the way across the room from acceptability?
The general public did not even start using the internet until the second half of the 1990’s.
Prior to 1995, almost nobody had internet service.
Prior to 1995, I worked with computers and the internet/data transmission, and I had to use a long distance provider to get it into my home, and a long distance telephone number to connect to. It was not easy, nor cheap back then to use the internet, and it was only available thru a slow telephone modem.
Furthermore, prior to 1995, the internet was pretty much text only. As late as 1995, standard internet service was text only, with graphic and what few pictures there were for a higher charge as premium service.
If you were perverted enough to want to see porn prior to the second half of the 1990’s, a single photo would have taken forever just to load via a telephone modem.
The cost, per minute, was also quite high back then.
If a defined trend regarding rape began in the 1980’s, then it had nothing to do with the internet…better look at other reasons/causes.
And most of them were generated by Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon, two loud ladies who had a distinctly warped view of the world in many ways, especially when it came to sex.
Which makes most theater-goers cringe a little when they see a performance of The Fantasticks, which has a “romantic” scene and a song called It Depends On What You Pay:
A pretty rape!
Such a pretty rape!
We’ve the obvious open schoolboy rape,
With little mandolins and perhaps a cape,
The rape by coach;
It’s little in request.
The rape by day,
But the rape by night is best…
Well, before the internet there was print-porn! While porn was availble for a long time, it seems to have really started going in the late 1970s (as any male, like me, entering their teens then would agree) with decent photography and more graphic images as opposed to the ‘vintage’ late 60s & 70s stuff (as seen on vintage websites) - think Oui, Hustler, Cherri[?], etc. In the 1980s, magazine production got even better, and the same decrease of entry cost that gave us independant second-tier magazines gave us even better niche market stuff (i.e. Orientals or Black or Mature etc.) Then, when there’s lots of print-porn and tape-porn available, comes the mid-1990s and the internet, and the rest is history).
So yes, Virginia, the 1980s definitely had lots of porn, alas not much for free (except woods-porn)
:smack: Of course! Home video!
A historically common thing I understand. “The Catholic clergy and their nuns are corrupt and debauched, and engage in vile sexual orgies. Which we will now go into, with great detail. And illustrations, just to make sure you know how terrbileawfulhorrible they are!”
A good idea. But I wonder if easy availability of porn also helps solve that, as well? A sexually frustrated man would be much easier too manipulate sexually, I’d think.
Heh… so does this mean that the medieval church was right about allowing brothels? I know it’s not quite the same thing, but it reminds me of that. With the church considering brothels to be “a necessary evil”, to prevent much worse things like rape.
I never bought into the whole porn leads to rape thing. Not at all.
Two thoughts:
(1) Wow, rape is down 85%? That’s great news! 
Still, I know far too many people of my generation who’ve been the victim of it . . . .
(2) A hell of a lot has changed in the last 25 years besides increased access to porn, so it’s pretty darn hard to draw a causal connection between that and the decline of rape. But at the very least I think we can say that either the availability of porn doesn’t add to the number of rapes, or at worst adds to it in such a trivial way that it’s been totally washed out by other factors.
Cite?
I’ve never heard any estimation of the size of the tiny and furtive child porn “industry”, and that number seems pulled out of your ass.
Child porn has never been mainstream, unless you count Tracy Lords as “child porn”. I don’t, because she (and her mother) faked her ID, and the producers and directors thought she was 18 when she started. She was not part of any effort to create child porn. I was working at a audio-video shop that had a movie rental club at the time, and we pulled and destroyed all of her films as soon as the news came out. I was the guy in the back room with the bulk eraser. People in the porn business believed that Tracy outed herself as a cold-blooded marketing move/publicity stunt. She was definitely the only person to benefit from the scandal, as she soon released her only legal film, “Tracy, I Love You”.
Playboy researched the supposed child porn market, and found the number one provider was the US Post Office, which had re-printed old child porn to use in mail sting operations, advertising in the back of adult magazines as a honeypot to attract pedophiles.
Edit: One possibility of the decline in rape may well be the ease with which people with fantasies of raping someone can meet people with fantasies of being raped. I know a huge amount of current, fairly mainstream, porn sickens me because of how abusive and misogynistic it is - slapping, spitting, choking, etc. Craigslist may keep most of the potential rapists quite satisfied.
Probably they were right, to that extent. Then again, I understand the prostitution industry has shrank drastically in recent decades. Perhaps easy access to porn, the end of the demonization of masturbation and allowing women to have sex with whom they choose, when they choose has rendered that “necessary evil” less necessary; or rather demonstrated that it was never all that “necessary” to begin with. So they proposed a solution to a problem that mainly existed because of them.