Girls on film
Today’s Age carried an article syndicated from the Guardian about men objecting to Pornography.
The article is based around a project set up by Matt McCormack Evans called the AntiPornMenProject but draws on a range of literature out there about the damaging effect porn has on men. Most recently it has been Gail Dines’s Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality which was published earlier in the year.
I don’t think I’m an alarmist (or prudish), but the mainstreaming of hardcore pornography does concern me. I’m quite sure most men can make the separation between the real life women they are intimate with and what they are seeing on their screen. However I also think that it is almost impossible to watch this sort of stuff without it having some sort of effect. As the article in The Age says:
One obvious problem for many porn users is the conflict between their stated belief in equality and respect for women, and the material they’re watching in private. McCormack Evans says he used to exist in a ”kind of double consciousness. For that half hour when I was watching porn I thought, ‘This is separate from my life, it won’t affect how I view the world.’ But then I realised it did.”
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It can also leave porn consumers with sexual scripts and images they can’t forget, and can’t resist calling to mind during sex. Dines reflects on this in Pornland, in her encounter with ”Dan”, who is worried about his sexual performance with women, and tells her: ”I can’t get the pictures of anal sex out of my head when having sex, and I am not really focusing on the girl but on the last anal scene I watched … I started looking at porn before I had sex, so porn is pretty much how I learned about sex.”
It would also seem that porn getting rougher and more degrading. I brought this up with some of my male friends recently who denied it initially but did admit that they were increasingly coming across porn that they were uncomfortable with because of how degrading it was. However there was also a sense that porn was always like that – something I’m not so sure about.
One thing I’m hearing more often to justify the use of porn is “the desire to watch naked women having sex is totally natural and therefore shouldn’t be judged.” It’s an attitude that really bothers me. We judge should and do judge people that commit non-consensual and aggressive acts – sexual or otherwise. I’m certainly not implying that people that watch porn are committing such acts but the notion that you can’t judge such desires clearly does not stand the test of logic.
Whatever its effect, it’s an extremely complex issue. But the mainstreaming of porn doesn’t seem to have lead to much constructive discussion around its effect. There will always be a lucrative market for porn – that’s the side effect of all the things I love about the Internet. So what is vital is that we start talking about it; start talking about the effect this sort of imagery has on men and their attitudes towards women and sex.
I’m adding the AntiPornMenProject to my RSS feeds and I hope you do to.
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Hey Ham,
The internet is a product of our (collective) desires, not the other way around. Humans need and love sex (so we should, it’s why we were born), therefore we see sexualised imagery on the internet. We need and love to communicate, therefore we have the internet.
Porn is not sex, sex is not violent and most importantly in this discussion, not all porn is violent. We’ve always had people in our socieities who don’t have an appreciative understanding of human relationships, sexual or other.
I think the case is that the current and next generations will have different methods of interacting with each other. But underneath it all, we have the exactly the same Human desires and needs.
Hell is not in the ihandbasket. Sex is not the problem, nor is porn. I believe it’s the influence of the instant communication and gratification that comes with ready flows of information that is really the issue here.
Thanks for posting. It’s vital that we (you know, the entire internet peoples) talk about this.
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I do find what Gail Dines says is particularly terrifying. That is to say she seems to know little about sex and how consumers of porn actually use it. She also lumps porn into one category, which is really untrue. You can’t lump a girly magazine like Mayfair with a solo masturbation video, or a gonzo video, or something like Pirates, or 2 girls 1 cup. They’re made for different consumers in mind. It’s kind of bizarre to say most porn is violent and degrading when it’s not, unless you consider normal “vanilla sex” to be violent. Dines seems to be projecting her ideas about sex on others. How the hell does she know what I or anyone else is thinking?
And if McCormack Evans can’t separate fantasy from reality, that’s his problem. Is he telling us that he can when watches any other type of film, but he can’t with porn? It makes no sense. He’s using the old discredited “media effects” model here. Would he start to think about torturing and killing people if he watched “Saw”? Let me guess, he wouldn’t would he? I really don’t buy into the whole “porn has magical powers” thing that they seem to be pushing here. The whole thing reeks of bad psychology and I honestly do think it’s wowserism under thin layer of bad science and alarmism. Dines needs to explicitly point out what is wrong with society because of porn and to show that correlation does imply causation in this case. Except she hasn’t. Also I think it’s a bit hard for her to claim that “mainstreaming of hardcore pornography” is recent thing, especially when you watch a documentary like “Inside Deep Throat”.
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Matt, I think you’re simplifying things a little although I do accept your point that there is a wide spectrum of porn out there and not all of it necessarily violent. I’m also sure that men can separate porn from real life but you have to admit that it promotes attitudes towards women.
I’m open to the idea that it is possible to make porn that doesn’t objectify women but pretty much all porn does – which is problematic for me.
Porn has become mainstream recently. I haven’t seen Inside Deep Throat but porn has worked its way into mainstream pop culture in a fairly unprecedented way lately (you only need to watch an episode of Two and a Half Men to realise that). You’re right to say that porn has always been fairly widely consumed (which I assume is your point), but it has become completely ubiquitous in recent years and the stats back that up. People are watching more porn and from an earlier age – perhaps an age where it is harder to make the distinction between porn and real life.
And that’s ultimately why I say we can’t simplify these issues and we have to talk about it more – it is ubiquitous so we need to equip the youngsters with the tools to critically analyse porn so that they can make the distinction.
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Hambo, I think you have found the issue here in the last bit in your re:. Why won’t someone think of the children!
Sex needs to be talked about within the family. I really think a sexophobic (yea i’m making up words now and loving it), conservative family is more dangerous than watching some titillating imagery
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Hammy, I don’t think porn “promotes attitudes towards women” any more than say “Hostel 2” or James Bond slapping a women in “Goldfinger”. Porn is NOT the be all and end all in how men learn and view relationships with women. I think most children model how they treat women on the relationships on what they see from their parents and others, not the media. Sure it has some influence, but hardly as much as parents.
Yep, male heterosexual porn does objectify women. I’ll agree to that. But it’s fantasy for men. I also understand that men in mainstream heterosexual porn are often to referred to as “carbon units” in the trade as all they are there for is their penis and sperm. Just sayin’.
I kind of disagree that porn has become “completely ubiquitous”. I know there is certainly a lot less in hardcopy form, especially in newsagents (I don’t consider Zoo or Ralph to be porn) and surprisingly a lot of porn shops have been closing down (methinks online and bootlegging has been hammering them to death). As for evidence, yeah it’s probably mentioned more in the general mainstream media and pop culture, but probably has more to do with people being accepting more of sexuality than some odd porn industry conspiracy (which Dines occasionally pushes, naturally with no evidence to back this up). Also note that in the last decade, censorship of porn has become more restrictive, especially in Australia. Back in 2000 when Senator Brian Harradine managed to get fetishes banned in X rated films in this country (but bizarrely it’s OK in magazines) and any hint of violence. The laws are still the same since 1984 in regards to the sale of X rated videos; they’re illegal to sell everywhere except ACT and NT. If you saw Four Corners earlier this year in regards to the net filter, it was noted the battle scenes in the porn film “Pirates” had to be put on a separate disc than the porn, even though there is no violent sex scenes in the film. It was also noted that Australia is the only territory in the world which did this to the film. Add in the dozens of titles which have been flat out refused classification in Australia in the last couple of years. The violent and “weird” stuff just isn’t hitting video shelves here. To make sure I’d legalise the industry (the bootleg stuff being sold illegally in porn shops outside NT and ACT isn’t regulated at all), but it’s obvious politicians find the subject a bit “icky”.
As for kids watching porn (we know they shouldn’t, but hey, teenagers going through puberty are curious. I know I was), well children can distinguish fantasy from reality at around age 8, much earlier than when they first hit puberty. If they aren’t going through puberty, why would they feel anything sexual when looking at the material? Kids wouldn’t bother with it if they hadn’t hit puberty. I found a great article on New Matilda about sociologist Michael Flood who co-authored in the infamous “Youth and Pornography in Australia: Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects” which led the government to think about censoring the web. In the article he said; “It’s well-documented that children and young people, who are exposed to sexual content, in advertising and other mainstream media and in porn, develop more liberal attitudes. They are more likely to think that other people are having sex. They are more likely to think that pre-marital and non-marital sex is OK, they are more likely to think that homosexuality is OK (I think that’s a good thing) and so on”. He certainly didn’t let porn off the hook and thinks to some degree that porn may cause “a growing tolerance of sexual aggression and a growing willingness to participate in sexual aggression”, but then surprisingly says “we say that 16 and 17 year olds can have consenting sex, why can’t they look at pictures of other people having consenting sex?”.
Most importantly and I think sensibly he says; “We argued for porn education. We said that we should be going into schools and teaching children how to respond more critically to the material that they see online whether deliberately or accidentally, so that they become more critical media consumers”, which is a whole lot better that the “lets ban everything” attitude that Dines has, which never works if you’re trying to solve social problems. I know my sex education (back in the 1980’s) was dreadful. I had no idea what female genitaila looked liked until I saw Penthouse. All I saw in sex education was a mass of pubic hair from a text book published in the early 1970’s and scientific cut away diagrams of “sexual intercourse” which was the missionary position. No discussion on relationships, masturbation, very little about contraceptives (think it had something to do with the grim reaper bowling and AIDS or something…), nothing about negotiating consent in relationships etc. Dreadful, Did they just expect us to go at it awkwardly and hope we’d work it out for ourselves? Sure I’m fine now, but I would have liked a tad more bloody guidance.
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Matthew, your comments on Australian censorship being very tightly regulated and quite conservative is true and the net filter (which I strongly oppose) is another extension of that. I talked about Australia getting more and more conservative here. But to suggest that the closing down of porn shops is due to people watching less porn is clearly incorrect – people are just getting porn from the internet now because it’s free, discrete and anonymous. For the same reason, Australia’s (and any country for that matter) censorship laws are irrelevant – people are getting it off the world wide web.
I remember when the film Ken Park was banned – I know I just downloaded it because it was the only way I could obtain it.
I’m certainly not suggesting that Porn is the be all and end all in how men learn and view relationships with women. I also thing the worst thing we could do is ban porn – you rarely get anywhere banning something.
So your final point is what it is all about for me – education and having the debate. In the Socialist Utopia I sometimes like to imagine, there is no demand for porn because we have all had such a robust and constructive sexual education that we all find it awfully passé. Obviously that’s simply never going to happen but I fear that Australia’s growing conservatism is part of the reason we’re seeing a growth in the use of Porn but because of a lack of sex ed and as a retaliation against this conservatism.