I’d agree that most modern porn pretty much views the woman as expendable to the man’s wants. He might not physically hit her, but he certainly doesn’t seem to care anything about seeing to her enjoyment.
I’m not sure I’d call that violence, though. But I’d agree that I don’t particularly care for it.
Even gay porn?
I recall noticing that as well; no anal anything on cable; lots on the Net. I always assumed some sort of self censorship was involved.
Porn changed in the mid-90s because of the growth of the internet. Initially just as a venue for viewing box covers and ordering tapes (then discs). Because of the anonymity, market size, and interactiveness of it porn sales exploded just as they did 20 years earlier with the advent of the VCR. Consequently more and more, ahem, “diverse” genres of porn appeared and, if they sold, stayed around.
In the '00s porn just kept growing because now it could be sold and literally delivered thru the internet via high-speed connections. This being the ultimate in anonymity, well, now if there’s an unfilled niche by gum somebody’s gonna fill it! Since the entire pool of available porn is now 1000 times what it was, there’s now 1000 times as much twisted fetish titles. But they still only represent a fraction of the increased total.
I don’t have any sales figures, nobody really does, but my guess is that the more adventurous titles are mainly to get your attention. I still think the vast majority of porn watched in the US is just typical guy/girl (and girl/girl), same race, oral then intercourse fare.
And even though I don’t care for censorship much, I think there’s nothing wrong with the porn industry showing a little common sense and restraint. All those items mentioned in the Cambria list shouldn’t be on the cover because, well, ewww! They’re all, IMO, pretty gross and not anything I would want to watch.
I’m curious- what about porn that involves humiliating men? Is that violence directed toward women? When a woman is literally stepping on a man’s genitalia with all her weight?
Consensual BDSM-type stuff shouldn’t be classified as violence. Just because something looks a little like abuse doesn’t make it so. A man spanking a woman in a porno video is no more advocating you beating your wife than Pirates of the Caribbean was advocating the stuff that’s been going on off the coast of Somalia.
Anyway, I agree with the OP’s point that there’s way more violence in mainstream entertainment. Even in the most hard-core S&M videos, I don’t think anyone is getting killed. In mainstream movies you can hack someone’s limbs off and still get a PG rating as long as it doesn’t look too “realistic.”
Hail Ants
" All those items mentioned in the Cambria list shouldn’t be on the cover because, well, ewww! They’re all, IMO, pretty gross and not anything I would want to watch"
Last one on the list,
No black men-white women themes
Really?
I actually didn’t realize what sort of crap was commonplace now. I was gonna make a lame joke about the violence of pizza men & plumbers insisting on arriving at houses where they know the women never have enough money to pay for goods & services rendered.
Using the twisted logic Dworkin uses, and in the spirit of US vs. Mento, where animated images of children were held by the 4th Circuit Court to injure real people because it simulated sex, probably so. Dworkin might think that gay porn is only a substitute for hetero porn, therefore…
(The Mento decision was overturned by SCOTUS.)
The shocking scenes in the movie were probably pretty easy to find, but also were cherry-picked to get the reaction they wanted. While I would say that there probably is more aggression displayed in a lot of porn now, both mainstream and amateur, their methodology and definitions stink.
From the article:
“Her team then recorded each instance of aggression (including spanking, gagging and verbal abuse).”
Okay, but so what? My wife isn’t especially kinky, but giggles and preens if I smack her on the ass. She likes a bit of hair pulling and other “rough” treatment every once in a while too. While she’s not the most vanilla of the women I’ve been with, she’s downright conservative compared to many.
“Their definition of aggression included ‘any action causing physical or psychological harm to oneself or another person, verbally or physically.’”
And how did they define this? Gut feeling? Presence or absence of specific behavior with no attempt at interpretation based on circumstances and reaction? There’s nothing that explains how they actually defined this, nor what constitutes physical or psychological harm. Let me guess, they know it when they see it.
“‘Overall 94.4 percent of the aggressive acts were targeted at women,’ she said, and ‘95.5 percent of the female characters who were the targets of aggression actually expressed enjoyment or had no response at all.’”
Um, duh? Unless you’re dealing with niche porn where the focus is on men being dominated, or gay porn where men are the only ones involved, women are going to be the majority of the receptive partners. Any aggression real or pseudo is more than likely going to be directed at them. A chick preparing to bite the guy’s cock while blowing him is only funny in a College Humor video. In porn, it’s a wood-killer.
Porn is fantasy, and porn targeted at straight men isn’t going to have butterflies fluttering and kittens preening around a steaming bath while the guy kneels at the foot of the tub awaiting mistress’s pleasure. It’s going to be a smack on the ass and “Hey honey, I’m home, now suck my big cock and service me like I’m the king.” Men have to deal with all the courtship rituals in real life, in porn they want something different.
Her interpretation is that the response of the women encourages the viewer to feel that the “violence” or aggression is acceptable, and that this creates a social environment that’s conducive to rape. Please.
There are at least a couple of other interpretations I can come up with that make at least as much sense. The women are acting out an idealized role in a male fantasy and their non-response or response of pleasure is a stylized expression of wishful thinking where men can vicariously release the tension engendered by fulfilling social norms in lieu of allowing their natural drives full license in real life.
Or maybe porn actresses are dirty little whores who love it when a man talks dirty, treats her like his own personal sex toy, and fucks her like she wants and needs to be fucked. Occam’s razor ‘n’ all that. 
Why not? That strikes me as an example of consensual violence.
Yeah, something like that. I vaguely recall reading an article years ago, when networks like the Spice channel were starting up, that there was some kind of outcry from some moral watchdog or another, and the execs for the porno channels were saying that they would show oral and vaginal sex (including money shots) but NOT anal penetration. So you end up with these PPV pornos on cable with titles like “Doin’ the BUTT 13” and they’ll edit out scenes showing actual anal penetration.
But who the hell pays for porn nowadays anyway? There’s a whole big internet out there just FILLED with free porn. You don’t even have to use torrents or anything to get it, and it’s out there in every conceivable form, including “standard sex”, group sex, anal sex, lesbian and gay sex, some disturbingly violent forms (simulated “snuff films”, rape fantasies, the “Slap Happy” series which has the face-slapping, name-calling, choking on cocks, making the girls cry, etc., every form of S&M that anyone can think of, etc.) and potentially silly fetish stuff like Furries and CosPlay. I don’t see why anyone would want to pay good money to watch the cable porn channels.
I guess you can define “violence” in different ways . . . but not all of those would be a bad thing. BDSM may be “violent” in the way that football is violent – i.e. it’s a bunch of people willingly engaging in a somewhat high-impact activity because they enjoy it (or for pay in the case of professional football players and porn stars). Of course, if “high impact” is how we’re judging, football is more violent that typical BDSM, and with a much higher risk of serious injury.
But consensual BDSM isn’t “violent” in the sense of “bad violence” like rape, murder, war, abuse, etc. Those violent acts are characterized by a real danger of injury and/or death, and by the fact that someone is using physical force or the threat of physical force to impose their will on someone else.
I think the latter definition of violence is at least as reasonable a definition of violence as “high-impact activity”, probably more reasonable given how the word is typically used. And I think this is the kind of thing the anti-porn crusaders are trying to imply in calling porn “violent”. (Although of course most porn isn’t BDSM-style porn.) I’m saying that “violence” in that sense doesn’t describe consensual BDSM.
Haven’t seen the movie in question, but it doesn’t sound too radical.
Surprised more emphasis wasn’t put on the oddly retro racism in porn. A friend of mine write copy for porn videos for about six months in the '90s. I had to ask him if he was writing it for 1968, some of the copy was so ridiculously racist (‘These tight little egg rolls…’ for Asian women, ‘Their mammoth cocks won’t be spewing chocolate…’ for black men). On the other hand, most of the time the women were the stars and described as cum sluts or whatever, loved having their holes filled. But that was relatively mainstream stuff. Can’t speak to all the online snuff-inspired clips.
You aren’t looking hard enough Boyo. If you use Google you practically trip over this stuff dude.
The linked article does report the Cambria list was “controversial within the industry” and that specific item, along with others such as food used as sex toys and bi pictures (what if it **IS **a bi video, genius??), looks more like like an “*OMG!! Republicans in the Justice Department!!!” *overreaction on Cambria’s part. Seen plenty of “Blacks and Blondes” videos on the shelves for the last 20 years and nobody seemed to be bothered… (OTOH, the very fact that interracial IS considered some sort of “fetish” you can sell a tape where it’s the whole point… is it the fault of the porn creators there is a market for that?)
The traditional xxx-industry “rules” about “can’t show violence (or hard bondage) and penetration” and the like actually seem to have been established much before that (at least I read/heard it mentioned as far back as '88) and along with other such practices adopted in “mainstream” porn in the late 80s is a pre-Web artifact of the age of videotape-rental porn, apparently the result of the legal teams observing how obscenity trial juries tended to lean – remember the legal test for obscenity in the USA is based on “community standards” – and adopting certain “standard practices” to save hassles to the the local video stores. In the late 80s/early 90s there was an effort by some pornmakers to indeed become “respectable adult entertainment producers”, who would appeal to the large mass of Middle America, and part of the issues they were facing were that BOTH the moralists and the liberals liked accusing porn of abetting or even causing rape, incest and child molestation. So they sought to “clean up”, with at best mixed results. Of course, all along there were always pornographers who tried to not forget the loyalty of the “raincoater” crowd and kept making “edgier” material, and during the 90s and early 2000s developed a stronger presence. But more on that later.
Before that, let’s see another example of the Cambria list being honored in the breach: One of the items that “should not be featured on the cover”, says there, is “incest”. OK, I can name off the top of my head two multi-movie major-feature series produced during the late Reagan years that are incest-centric, say so right on the box of several chapters, and not only remained in print (meaning, selling well) for 20+ years but were reissued on DVD after 2001. The US porn industry may have ceased to produce and promote NEW “respectable porn” with “incest” subjects back c. 1990 for the sake of Joe and Jane Suburban, but they could see there were people buying the older videos on the theme and had no trouble stocking the shelves with the “classics”.
As mentioned before, the Web changed everything – the direct channel enabled the people who wanted nasty to get their nasty, and no longer have to be subject to what could support a mass marketplace or meet a community standard to be sold in a bricks-and-mortar store. By now, Porn has become a very fragmented market, subject to extreme “narrowcasting” both on the web and on the shelves. Within that, the studios were not blind to the fact that for all their attempts at mainstreaming “nice” porn, there WAS a demand for “edgier” material, which in any case had a better expense/profit ratio. As had happened before with creators going from peepshow loops to theatrical porn, happened now with creators going from “gonzo” porn to “big budget” mainstream porn, and taking their style along with them.
Did this get on to the list because Mr. Cambria believes Republicans, in general, are racists or because somebody in the Bush FCC actually voiced an objection to interracial sex? Both options are kind of disturbing, but the latter is much more so.
Furious_Marmot, AFAIK the Bush Justice Department (not the FCC, they do not deal with web or video-store porn at all) just made its intentions known to become more diligent in helping communities prosecute obscenity in regular commercial porn (after all, obscenity CAN be penalized); Cambria apparently made some assumptions as to what would some communities object to.
And that is how you end up with so-called “mainstream” pornos containing rough play. An up-market “mainstream” from the early 90s would seldom have the “leading lady” put down or treated like trash (unless somehow the …plot…BWAHAHAHAHAHA… OK, just humor me here… unless somehow the giggle plot required the guy to be cast as clearly an ***hole) ; that would instead be in the cheapo “wall-to-wall” tapes. But by the late 90s, guess what, the folks who had been making cheapo wall-to-wallers WERE working for the shops that made the “mainstream” tapes.
With porn being now in a “narrowcasting” mode, it is important to sample carefully. By now, we could be in a situation where we first have to define where the heck the mainstream ends and the fringes begin, or if that’s even a significant distinction any more.
In the end, the whole deal is, as has been mentioned before, what do we mean by “violence” when it is not obvious. You go to a tape or site called something like “Suck It Or Else, Bitch” and you can pretty much assume that there will be rough play. OTOH you will find, for instance, no violence as most people define it in Abby Winters’ website. But some people would say this is just “the violence inherent in the system” that these women even get naked before a camera to start with, and would have an interest in seeking out the least example to support their opinion.
Do we also count when there’s language or situations that are derogatory or denigrating but there is no physical roughness? What about a spank in a sexual context? What of the whole thing is consensual; what if on top of that it’s played for laughs, or it is presented in a highly stylized manner? Say the dominatrix is wearing a black SS cap, is that also antisemitic? A scene of the obviously 30-ish parolee playing “dad” and the 20something-and-looks-rode-hard-and-put-away-wet starlet playing “schoolgirl”, is it a portrayal of child abuse?
The FCC does not regulate pornography.