People who are against porn for these reasons use the word to mean only the violent and misogynistic stuff (calling the rest of it 'erotica' or something a little more hoity-toity). Then there are other people who are not against pornography because they use the word to mean all material depicting sexual activity (and they can still be against the violent stuff, but by their definition they are not against all pornography).
The confusion is leading to divisions between people who would otherwise be united in their opinion. Do the feminist anti-porn crusaders believe that all sexually explicit material is harmful, or only the exploitative kind? If it's the latter, why hog that word for it, when consumers and the industry already use the word more broadly? I just can't see the benefit to the movement of introducing that confusion. Even though I don't disagree that a lot of mainstream men's porn is degrading, I can't bring myself to say I'm 'against porn' in general, because I use the broader definition myself.
Sounds to me as if this particular person was saying: If the vast majority consists of 'rotten apples' ('degrading, 'bad porn'), then what, really, do the few good ones ('positive erotica') matter? Practically speaking?
And that brings up the next obvious question: If consumers who vote with their wallets do influence the 'porn' market...
...what does the fact that'porn' is currently skewed so far in the 'bad apple' side of things say about this society?
As far as I'm concerned, all it says is that people like what's easy to get. People eat junk food because they weren't raised on anything healthier or taught how to cook from scratch. Men read magazines full of pseudo-rape scenes and women who look like they're in pain because that's what's available. If you put a magazine full of the Suicide Girls (punky/gothy pinup models who don't seem to be going for the victimization angle, and who look like real women instead of plastic dolls) beside Hustler at the 7-11, guys would buy it. Put enough of it up there and the next generation of guys might just have a different set of visual/emotional turn-ons.
The industry doesn't move to change the formula because it works, and it's self-perpetuating. Get people to think it's normal and good to be turned on by this stuff, and they will be. And they'll give the same stuff to their sons and nephews and little brothers when they're old enough, and the cycle will continue.
Honestly, what I've seen of the anti-porn movement looks to me like the last bastion of genuine anti-male feminism (which is rarer than some people think, but not a myth -- I think it was Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat who said less than ten years ago that men are less capable of being vegetarians because they're inherently less compassionate). They can point to the success of mainstream victimisation porn and say that it says something about men, but there aren't really any controls on the experiment. I'll bet if someone applied the same marketing techniques to some healthier images of sexuality, they'd change the industry for the better. It's just that nobody's tried it on that scale yet.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
The confusion is leading to divisions between people who would otherwise be united in their opinion. Do the feminist anti-porn crusaders believe that all sexually explicit material is harmful, or only the exploitative kind? If it's the latter, why hog that word for it, when consumers and the industry already use the word more broadly? I just can't see the benefit to the movement of introducing that confusion. Even though I don't disagree that a lot of mainstream men's porn is degrading, I can't bring myself to say I'm 'against porn' in general, because I use the broader definition myself.
From:
no subject
And that brings up the next obvious question: If consumers who vote with their wallets do influence the 'porn' market...
...what does the fact that'porn' is currently skewed so far in the 'bad apple' side of things say about this society?
From:
no subject
The industry doesn't move to change the formula because it works, and it's self-perpetuating. Get people to think it's normal and good to be turned on by this stuff, and they will be. And they'll give the same stuff to their sons and nephews and little brothers when they're old enough, and the cycle will continue.
Honestly, what I've seen of the anti-porn movement looks to me like the last bastion of genuine anti-male feminism (which is rarer than some people think, but not a myth -- I think it was Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat who said less than ten years ago that men are less capable of being vegetarians because they're inherently less compassionate). They can point to the success of mainstream victimisation porn and say that it says something about men, but there aren't really any controls on the experiment. I'll bet if someone applied the same marketing techniques to some healthier images of sexuality, they'd change the industry for the better. It's just that nobody's tried it on that scale yet.