How Some Men React When They Think You Want to Take Away Their Porn

From CounterPunch:

Everyone who has ever worked as an activist in progressive organizations fighting gender, racial and economic inequality, has had the experience of seeing their words and ideas twisted by mainstream corporate media. This is what happened to me on Penn and Teller: Bullshit! that is airing all this week on Showtime. And one thing in particular I have learned for sure, after many years of being an anti-porn activist, is that men get very upset when they think you want to take their porn away.

And

The porn that makes most of the money for the industry is actually the gonzo, body-punishing variety that shows women’s bodies being physically stretched to the limit, humiliated and degraded. Even porn industry people commented in a recent article in Adult Video News, that gonzo porn is taking its toll on the women, and the turnover is high because they can’t stand the brutal acts on the body for very long.

And

The producers saved the best for last, when they talked about the lack of research on effects, and they edited my words down to: “there are no good studies.” This was a perfect ending for the show as it granted them the final word. The only problem is that the whole thing was a set up. The producer had asked me about studies showing a direct link between porn and rape. While there are no studies that show direct causation, I had told him about a wealth of research on the impact of porn on men’s attitudes and behavior.

Click here for the rest.

And there's the rub. I've always thought it absurd to suggest that porn causes rape, but suggesting that porn affects "men's attitudes and behavior" is a completely different proposition. That is, porn has to affect men's attitudes and behavior. If we're going to accept that advertising and images of conspicuous consumption on television dramas and comedies affect people's buying habits, which they do, then we have to accept that porn does the same thing with men's attitudes toward women.

On the whole, I'm very sympathetic to Penn's hostile attitude toward the anti-porn feminist who wrote the above linked essay. Since the 1970s, the debate has always been in terms of porn/not porn. That is, there has never been, to my knowledge, much of a debate over differing varieties of porn, or how video images of people having sex might be altered to portray women more as human beings than as objects to be fucked. Penn was obviously having a knee-jerk reaction to the decades old monolithic discussion that brands porn as either bad or good.

But he's not really helping anybody out by perpetuating what is obviously a false proposition. Some porn is very woman-friendly: I'm thinking of the stuff that shows women as independent individuals, with their own desires, thoughts, dreams, personalities, who have sex because they like having sex. Unfortunately, an ever increasing percentage of what's available, especially on the internet, shows women as things, existing only for the pleasure of men, who are often behaving like enormous assholes, dominating them just because they're men, and just because that's what men do to women. Okay, this is acceptable, I suppose, in the weird BDSM niche world, but, like I said, such portrayals of women in mainstream porn appear to be taking over.

And I think it has less to do with what men want to see than it does with porn-makers trying to stand out in the cutthroat and profoundly competitive internet porn market. That is, the business is leading the way here, not porn consumers. Indeed, I've found lately that I'm getting bored with porn. Or, at least, I'm getting bored with the shit I find for free on the internet. I'm seeing a lot of naked women who look bored themselves, or sad, or sometimes scared, or disgusted, suffering through humiliation and degradation in order to get a paycheck: that's not erotic; that's not arousing. Pretty lame.

How I long for the laid back, goofy narrative-oriented, "let's get it on" style of 70s porn. At least the women appeared to be having a good time.

The whole point here is that it seems likely that this might be where the entire porn market is headed. And if men keep watching, which they will because that's all that will be available, I just don't see how it won't affect men's attitudes toward women. In short, we're talking about a cultural dehumanizing of women, rolling back decades of feminist gains.

And that bothers me.

Personally, I think it's entirely possible to create hot, filthy, taboo, shock-your-mama porn that portrays women as people rather than things. So it's not about porn versus no porn. It's about what certain kinds of porn do to our culture. Frankly, I think we actually need more porn in America, some kind of counter balance to those religious abstinence lunatics. It's just that we need porn that doesn't oppress women, which is what those religious abstinence lunatics are, ironically, trying to do as well.

Strange bedfellows.

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