Porn is Inherently Evil (Why? How? Read here)

Bex’s Fight Against Porn (former sex worker & former pro-porner) Conversation noted... Bex: Millennial men are actually more misogynist than previous generations, a fact has been borne out in numerous studies. The idea that we live in some kind of post-feminist nirvana is laughable. To break down a very complex issue into a few sentences-it’s porn. Most people don’t realize the kind of porn that is now mainstream-it is extremely violent and degrading. Google facial abuse if you have a strong stomach. Boys start watching it at a very young age-around 12, and it is shaping the way they see women. It is also the way that porn saturated mainstream culture, and became normalized. So girls grow up in a pornified culture learning that their entire existence has to revolve around being sexually desirable. They self objectify and they internalize misogyny, and that affirms boys attitudes, and because it starts so young those attitudes are very fixed and hard to change. The idea that women and girls are nothing but objects to be abused is basically baked in to their psyches. And they don’t form relationships because of it (see the rise of hook up culture) which is just about the only thing that might have a mitigating affect.

High: You are right when it comes to not knowing porn culture, at least with me. I have avoided it for years because it has always had its elements of abuse and as a survivor of abuse I can’t take it.

Bex: No problem, it is definitely a necessary conversation. Unfortunately porn is a multi million dollar industry and it has such deep ties with the media giants now, they have a vested interest in shutting down this dialogue. Largely they have succeeded.

I do realize it’s incredibly triggering. I have had a resurgence in PTSD symptoms since I started learning about this, but I’m pushing through it because it’s so important and raising a daughter I feel like I have to do whatever I can. If you want to know more though I would highly recommend reading “Pornland” by Gail Dines-or really any lecture by her, there are many on Youtube. She has been studying the industry for years and she is amazing. Chris Hedges has done some great writing about it as well-here are a couple of his recent pieces:

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20091011_the_victims_of_pornography

https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pornography_is_what_the_end_of_the_world_looks_like_20150215 mrules: I’ve been reading so much about this lately...and it ties into the violence against women with video games. I have a teen daughter and two young sons. I sometimes feel like I need a PHD in gender studies to navigate parenting them!

HumanBeing: Video games don’t cause violence against women or anybody else. You don’t need a PhD in anything but B.S detection to figure that out. Make sure they both are fair to everyone regardless of who they are and stay far from prejudice against any innate identity.

There are too many out there preaching equality who instead seek out excuses to prejudge people based on their identity. Demagoguery is nothing new.

Bex: Since you bring up video games, do you know that Grand Theft Auto rewards players by letting them rape and murder prostitutes, and are you seriously suggesting this is harmless and inconsequential?

Do you have any concept of how many woman and girls are destroyed by this industry every day?

Do you have any understanding of how porn and porn culture has destroyed girls self image and esteem, and the epidemic of body dysmorphic disorder and gender dysphoria it has left in its wake?

Do you realize that most women in this industry were sexually abused from the time they were little girls?

Do you know how porn and porn culture has normalized rape and pedophilia, and provided potential offenders with a helpful blueprint on to commit these crimes?

Did you know how often porn is used as a grooming tool for CSA victims, and how often porn is made of us?

Do you know that we are now dealing with an explosion of child porn and child porn rings, and that child porn consumption often leads to child sexual abuse?

Did you know there is emerging consensus that porn is addictive, that addicts escalate, and that for a considerable percentage of these addicts escalation eventually leads to committing sexual offenses, often against their own children?

Do you have the slightest idea what it is like to grow up as a girl in this culture? Because I do. I have personal experience, I have empirical research, I have books you can read, lectures you can watch, survivor testimonies you can listen to if you decide to give a shit- I have motherfucking receipts, to put it bluntly.

It’s okay if you did not know these things, by the way. Most people don’t. And I’m sorry to be harsh but the excuses are getting old, and the arguments are tired. If you are going to justify the practice of rape for entertainment, you need to come up with something a bit more compelling than that post-modernist word salad.

Missquested: Thank You a million times for declaring the societal destruction of pornography which is not about sex but degradation and dominance. Owlseye: THANK YOU! I hate when people hide this obvious violence/abuse against women behind “First Amendment rights” or “well that’s YOUR opinion.” No, studies bear out that the ubiquity and violence of porn is bad for everyone….men, women, children, society in general. But I can’t even get my husband to see it, and with a daughter that scares me. Wish our milennial generation would understand that these thing cannot be divorced from the rest of one’s life. What men view in porn bleeds out into the rest of their lives and interactions with women. It’s sick and depressing and I wish something could be done. Anyways, Thank you so much for calling it out!

Bex: I wish I could respond more in depth but for now, I just want to assure you that something CAN be done and it is going to be done. It is being done and you can help. We are fighting an uphill battle but more and more people are waking up, because it is getting to the point where it’s hard to find a single person who hasn’t been personally affected in some way-whether it’s medical professionals noticing that all of the sudden swaths of teenage girls are seeking medical treatment for rectal prolapse and other injuries related to abusive, porn inspired sex, millennial women who start wondering why the men they date think it’s acceptable to ejaculate on their faces without permission, wives who become technology widows as their husbands replace intimacy with a computer screen and ask them to do increasingly degrading things...women are noticing. They don’t need convincing. And when they learn of the alarming implications it has for their daughters, they are outraged.

It is harder to get men on board, admittedly. It is so ingrained into their psyches that women are just trying to take away their sexual pleasure and we are all just sexually repressed if we resist (this is a very popular trope in porn-we all have a hidden freak inside of us or something) I feel very lucky to be married to a man who was never a big porn user, so it was not difficult for him to see it. He has always understood that porn was inherently degrading to women and sent dangerous messages to those who watched it.

But my husband was similar to many men on the left, in seeing this as an issue of free speech and freedom generally. Civil liberties and a mistrust of corporate hegemony are a defining feature of the male left, so I framed my argument accordingly (please ask your husband to read this):

Porn is not art. Porn is not expression. Porn has nothing to do with sex or sexuality and it is not speech.

Porn is an industry-a multi billion dollar industry of its own right, and when you consider the interdependent relationships it has with the credit card companies, internet providers, hotel chains and cable companies (and that isn’t even touching on the increasing overlap between mainstream media and porn) any leftist worth his salt understands that we are not talking about freedom, we are talking about capitalism. In fact we are talking about a corporate monopoly. So when we talk of freedom and “agency”, we are actually embracing the philosophy of neoliberalism. The only beneficiaries of this “agency” and “freedom” are a small swath very, very privileged mostly white women who become “sex workers” in the gap year before grad school, with ambitions of making a name for themselves in the burgeoning market of handmaiden for hire. These women will get on TV and say they got into porn and/or prostitution to “explore” their sexuality, and they are committed to making people believe that myth-because that’s how they get paid. IN reality most women in “Sex work” don’t know these spokespeople even exist, let alone that they claim to speak on their behalf-but once it’s brought to their attention, they laugh. They know more than anyone that these women are full of shit. They are pretty open about their pasts (sexual abuse, pretty much all of them), and how they were groomed for this industry over the course of years. They will explain, in devastating detail, how similar the industry is to their abuse-how their abusers used the same methods to groom them, the same arbitrary system of punishment and reward to control them, and the same language of shame to remind them that they are worthless whores who deserve this treatment.They will talk about the horrible pain they endure, the injuries, the painkillers they have to take, the STI’s they inevitably get, the tears in the walls of their orifices that sometimes require reconstructive surgery to fix , the beatings and almost weekly rapes they endure, and they will tell you about the other “sex workers” they know who lost their lives in this “business”, and their resigned acceptance of the fact that they probably will too. They will also tell you that in a way, it’s worse-because their abuse and rape is captured on film, and sold for a profit. Long after the paltry sum they are paid for a scene (if they are paid at all, sometimes they are not) runs out, their rape is replayed for men who get off on it, and their rapists make a profit from their brutalization. They know that it will continue long after they leave this earth, and that hurts them more than anything really. It is difficult to wrap your head around that kind of trauma. It is enough to make you despair. And again, this makes it very, very difficult to argue with anyone-especially a woman who claims to be a feminist-who is spouting nonsense about “agency” and “choice” and “empowerment”.

So going back to my first point-these neoliberal capitalists are not commodifying sex, they are commodifying violence. They are making a living off of the women who I described above-sexually traumatized, economically oppressed, desperate and robbed of any self esteem (forget about “agency”) But under these circumstances, one would have you believe, no abuses take place and everyone is just making their own choices.

I use this as a metaphor-many on the left are opposed to globalism, and they have no problem understanding that cheap labor is the result of economic inequality, weak regulation, and the natural tendency for large capitalist institutions to behave like sociopaths. We make no excuses for abusive labor practices, and we recognize that people do not work under such conditions willingly-they are compelled to do it as a means of survival. And in many cases they are compelled because they are victims of human trafficking and literally do not have a choice.

So when you have a company like Apple, imagine this argument-”Who are you to shame sweat shop laborers? They have agency, they choose to do that for a living. Criticizing Apple means stigmatizing those factory workers. The labor force is not oppressed, they are empowered! They enjoy doing menial labor, and would do it for free anyways but they are lucky enough to get paid for it!”

We would not do that, because it’s bullshit. But Porn is just as big as Apple, and they are corporations just like Apple is. And yet we are supposed to believe that the hundreds of thousands of women who appear in porn, getting “forced oral/throat fucked”, spit on, ejaculated on and in, slapped and choked, just...unspeakable things, and again it’s mainstream, and btw, posters husband, 93% of the women who are in these “movies” were sexually abused as little girls, many of them started prostituting in their teens (average age of entry for prostitution 15) so think about that for a moment, and think about your daughter, because but for the grace of god it could be her in that position. I really need to emphasize how fucked up it is that we have an entire industry built off of eroticizing sexually traumatized girls. We should be rioting in the streets over this shit, but you apparently find this acceptable. Why?

I digress, sorry. This subject is infuriating to me.

My point is, we talk about Apple, we talk about the exploitation of labor, we talk about the devastating effects of Neoliberalsm and how it almost destroyed the world economy-we talk about these things, and they are progressive dogma. For good reason, because they are true. We know damn well that corporate interests have a stranglehold on every industry and they are all committing horrible human rights abuses, and they get away with it because they are backed by powerful PR firms who influence public opinion. We acknowledge that this happens, and we oppose it.

But porn is somehow different. Because when it comes to an industry that makes its money off of not just economic inequality, but taking the victims of inequality and then degrading them, violating them, getting it on film and then distributing it to the world-this is an industry that is inherently capable of self policing. Clearly. Nevermind that we are monetizing the exploitation of sexually traumatized girls and eroticizing violence and degradation of their already violated and degraded bodies, we expect this multi billion dollar industry to act humanely. Because, free speech. Or something.

Bullshit. It’s bullshit. I dare any one of the people defending this to debate me one on one. In fact I will pay them to let me film it, and put it on the internet. I will not ejaculate on their faces, because I’m not a monster (and because I don’t have a penis, lol) I’ve made this offer before, and I’ve never had a taker. That’s because when it comes down to it they really can’t defend it, because there is no defense for this shit.

Anyways, I apologize for going on a rant (I’m angry if you can’t tell!) Chris Hedges is a good read and a good resource because he does an excellent job of showing how porn is connected to capitalism. Fight the New Drug and other organizations are focused on how porn affects men and their self-perception (spoiler alert-its’ incredibly damaging to them too) causes sexual dysfunction and destroys intimacy. I am admittedly tired of hand holding and trying to explain this to men in a way that doesn’t hurt their feelings-when you finally grasp the full horror of this, when you have met the women who have survived and heard their stories, when you realize how many young women are getting recruited with no idea what their getting themselves into-and you think about the impact this is having on the generation growing up surrounded by all of this, you want to scream and you want to riot, and the last thing you want to do is argue with some smug upper middle class liberal arts major telling you everything you don’t know about “sex work”, while you have read numerous books on the subject and they have read a Jezebel column at best. When you understand the effect it has on self concept, sexual identity, intimacy, and the perception of women and girls- it is very, very difficult to stay level headed and tolerate excuses. Especially when we are only starting to understand the impact. I frankly lack the patience at this point to argue with porn defenders. Especially those who try to lecture me about “choice” and “sex workers rights”-because I actually was a “sex worker” when I was 18, but I sure as fuck never had much of a choice in it, and if there was some labor movement fighting for my rights they were curiously silent on the numerous occasions I was sexually assaulted. Then again I didn’t have a grad degree and I didn’t get into that line of work because I was “empowered” so I guess don’t count. I honestly do not waste time with defenders anymore-they are a minority, and they are stuck on stupid, and they are probably mostly porn addicts trying to justify their own behavior. The general public understands what’s going on, and they recognize that it’s a problem-working class women in particular really get it, and they get it in a way that can’t be taught by a grad degree. So I try to focus on them, and I let them know there IS a movement they can join-it’s called feminism, and we can’t wait for them to join us :) Northwatch: Just out of curiosity, would you call this a primarily North American thing? Would other countries in say, Europe, be more equitable in terms of sexism? Bex: It’s not primarily North American by any means-it’s global. There are some differences between cultures and countries however and I’ll try to explain why that may be.

But before I do that I need to clarify that I’m not talking about sexism. Sexism exists, of course, and it’s bad, but we are so far beyond sexism that sexism seems downright romantic these days. What we are dealing with is something much more brutal than garden variety sexism-it’s misogyny. Actually it’s misogyny on steroids, with a cheering squad in the background and a camera rolling, eager for misogyny to defile that worthless bitch and put her in her place. A bit of subversive humor there but I am really not exaggerating-we are talking about absolute unbridled hatred of women and girls, repackaged as sex, and commodified for a profit without any consideration of the consequences.

Increasingly when you study porn and porn culture you are seeing objectification, which has always been part of it, but you are seeing that objectification partnered with escalating levels of violence and degradation. I’ll have to be explicit here, sorry-skip over if you need to- but aggressive oral sex (throat fucking, gagging), anal, slapping, spitting, verbal humiliation-these are all now mainstream in “normal” porn while they used to be extremely taboo. This is now the entry point. So you can imagine what that means for other genres. And since porn is so ubiquitous and it’s influence is so deeply ingrained in pop culture, violence and degradation are becoming normalized as well.

By way of example when looking at different cultures and countries-with the increasing availability of the internet we are seeing men in every country using porn, but in countries where women are already very oppressed it is having a markedly devastating impact. These women (and children) were already getting raped, but they are getting raped more now than they were before and they are increasingly being gang raped and subjected to a level of violence that really didn’t exist previously. Porn is in large part what has fueled the rape epidemic in India, and if you have followed that at all you know the kind of horror I am talking about. If not, read about Jyoti Singh and go from there...just know it will break your heart into a thousand pieces and probably destroy your faith in humanity.

But what is happening in India is really important to understand- Rape has always existed, and it has always been an issue, but this is something new. This epidemic of gang rapes coincides with the introduction of porn into that culture, and I cannot believe it’s a coincidence. Women were raped before, but they were not brutalized in this way-not by groups of otherwise normal working class men, not this violently, not to the point of losing their lives, and not at this rate. This is socialized behavior. Men are not this violent in a natural setting, not even close, and they do not work in packs like this under normal conditions. But if they grow up learning that women are inferior to begin with, and then they start watching porn together as a social activity (which a lot of boys do in every culture), and the porn they watch showcases the violent degradation of women by multiple men (which is extremely common, mainstream at this point) and makes it into something, if not sexy than at least entertaining-it’s not difficult to see how that could normalize some seriously fucked up behavior. And within a culture where men are already at the brink of despair because of endemic poverty and the absence of social mobility, among men who have no hope for the future to begin with and have nothing to lose, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire. As unimaginable as the crimes they commit may be to the average person, for anyone who has an understanding of the conditions they live under, the porn are watching, and how those conditions are interconnected, it really isn’t. Again, I apologize for being graphic-but in an industry where rectal prolapse is an occupational hazard, and is actually a popular “fetish” (it’s called “rosebudding”), does it surprise me that consumers of this shit might penetrated a woman so violently she was disemboweled and died of sepsis? Not at all, unfortunately. Does it surprise me that there are so many gang rapes? Honestly, why would it? That’s what they see. That’s their representation of masculinity.

As far as what happens to the women when they are done with them? In porn the closing shot is called the “money shot”, and increasingly the money shot means a close up of the woman-ironically this is usually the first time the focus is on her unobstructed face. But her face-her hair, her eyelashes, her upper body-are covered in semen. Her makeup is melting off because of very real tears she has shed, because she has endured hours of relentless physical abuse and it is starting to sink in, what happened to her. So she’s covered in semen and spit, her hair will be a mess (sometimes they make it a point to rip off hair weaves especially in racialized porn), her body will be trembling (in pain, but it’s understood and portrayed as pleasure), and she will be very different than the woman who first was interviewed on the set (these interviews are part of porn for a reason-they make for a good contrast) Sometimes she’s smiling and saying how much she loved it (protip-she didn’t love it and that is called a script). Other times she seems to be too stunned and broken to speak. In all cases the men pretty much do the speaking for her in the end- in closing they remind her she’s a dirty little whore, a nasty slut, and that she will come back for more. As an aside, she often does. She has no choice. Increasingly these “porn stars” are prostituted women, and their pimps make them do these scenes for wider exposure. There is no choice involved.

But to get back to my point- Think about the story being told and think about the conclusion. The story that is being told is that a woman starts off on a couch wearing at least some clothing. She is then defiled in horrific ways, and at the end she is visibly damaged goods, appearing to be irreparably broken. The unspoken conclusion is what happens to damaged good-damaged goods are garbage, and they are discarded. Many of these sites play up this theme in their video descriptions-they will say things like Name: Jane PornName, Age: 18, Status: Unknown, missing, presumed dead etc.

So does it surprise me that women and girls are typically murdered after they are raped in such a manner? Honestly, it would surprise me if they weren’t. What else would they do with them?

Looking at Europe, I’ll use Germany as an example. German men have the highest porn consumption in the world. Prostitution is legal in Germany-they have brothels, and it’s a big business. One of my friends actually works at a German brothel and has for many years, and she has talked about how it’s changed. Increasingly the clientele is younger men. She’s seeing an increase in “sex tourists” from India and the middle east especially, but they are streaming in from the U.S. and Canada as well. She is increasingly expected to do degrading and violent acts and is often physically injured. She believes that its because these johns are watching porn, and decide to go to prostitutes so they can try out the acts they see portrayed. I have no reason to not believe her, and I think she might no what she’s talking about. She has to take heavy doses of painkillers daily to cope with it.

This sentiment is being echoed by prostituted women worldwide. It is also being echoed by women who are not even in the industry-they are seeing it with the men they date. There is an unspoken expectation that they will, for example, do anal and allow them to ejaculate on their faces. They aren’t asking for permission, they just do this without any thought. Why should they ask? Porn teaches them that this is commonplace, and that women enjoy it. These men probably don’t know WHY they enjoy it, or why it’s supposed to be hot, or what the hell it even signifies, they have just watched so much porn and get the idea that sex is relentless anal pounding followed by a “facial”.

The only place where it doesn’t seem to be as endemic is in Nordic countries. But it’s still not all that encouraging, because even their marriage rates are declining and intimacy is at an all time low. Nordic men watch porn at roughly the same rate as their compatriots, it’s just that in a country where there is something approaching equality, women aren’t economically dependent on them and have decided they are better off alone.

So to summarize best I can-it’s ubiquitous, but it’s worst in countries with autocratic leaders, where women are already marginalized and where there are high levels of inequality and poor social support to begin with. It is best in countries where women have a higher level of equality. In countries that have a strong safety net and where less women (and by extension children) are poor, there is still porn, but there is less porn culture, less sexism, less rape and less violence in general. But in these countries, men still watch porn, and it shapes their attitudes and sexuality in the same way it does anywhere else. The difference is that Nordic women are not dependent on men for economic security, and they live in a society that regards them as equals. That seems to make all the difference.

Extra comments from Bex:

Closing thought for the night-We do this for free while third wave feminists get paid to be handmaidens. Fuck every single thing about this system. Sorry, minor correction-when I said feminists in reference to third wavers I actually meant pornographers. Hard to tell the difference these days.

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/comments/1575763/63650247#comment_63650247 ~*~ I'm a "strong woman" not because I want to be; I was never strong to begin with. I'm a "strong woman" because this society that degrades, disrespects, hyper-sexualizes, heavily pressures with unrealistic porn-influenced physical + sexual expectations, and sexually objectifies those born female such as myself leaves me no choice but to be strong. Porn is inherently evil and few reasons why is because for one it destroys innocence—leads to sexual immorality and defiles children, for two it's an evil sin based on God's words within religious scriptures that derived back from ancient days (doesn't matter whether or not you're a believer because God has a point that porn is evil and even sh**loads of empirical evidence as well as scientific evidence are backing that up), and for three it inherently degrades females. As a female-born millennial, I strongly feel it is a part of my duty to educate other millennials as well as the other generations on the devastating impacts of porn including the destructive human behaviours it leads to, the misogyny (female hate), and reinforcement of rape culture—thus, putting all kids and females in greater danger—which is something I want to prevent for their safety and my own. -Cynthia T.

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