>> I wonder, though, setting the issue of 'causal link' (which seems
>> a bit simplistic to me) aside, whether it would matter to you if
>> porn were found to be a *contributing* or even *exacerbating*
>> factor in sexual violence? Would that be sufficent to consider
>> social policy against it?
dennis> Anything can be a "contributing" or "exacerbating" factor in
dennis> sexual violence, or violence of any kind.
Nonsense. As Miles Jackson pointed out, there is *good* evidence correlating violent or aggressive erotic material and propensity to commit violence.
So, surely, you'd agree to social policy at least against *that* kind of porn? You say below it's not mainstream, but how is that remotely relevant? It has to be the *dominant* form of porn before it's worth regulating?
I also suspect, given the massive proliferation of pornography production due to the camcorder explosion, that of the *total* amount of "moving picture" porn produced every year, the violent or aggressive stuff is more than merely a sideline.
I mean, do the
dennis> hundreds upon hundreds of action/slasher/horror films and
dennis> video games help to desensitize its steady consumers? I'm
dennis> sure they do, to some.
I agree. However, these, unlike porn, do not exclusively target (excepting gay porn, which is rather a small percentage of the total industry) an already oppressed class of citizens. That's at least one crucial difference.
The fact that in nearly all violent porn it's *women* who are targeted for violence, and that this material has an effect exclusively (as far as I know) on *men*, matters. Surely it matters that even in non-violent porn, it is women's bodies which are objectified, that is, it is women who are reduced to their body parts. And *that* happens in a larger social context in which women are second-class citizens. (And in which lots of other kinds of media *also* objectify women... Does *any* media systematically objectify men in this way? Not that I know of. Male athletes are *never* reduced to their body (parts).)
Porn doesn't happen in a social and political vacuum.
One can also cite the Bible or any
dennis> other "extreme" or "titillating" forms of literature on this
dennis> front.
Are there studies showing that reading the Bible causes people to be more violent (or prone to violence)? I suspect not.
Do we need a social policy for every form of
dennis> expression lest the weaker among us become unhinged upon
dennis> mere exposure? Or is it just porn that you're hot to
dennis> legislate against?
I suspect if there were some other, very obvious, easily opposable factor that contributed to sexual violence against women, I'd be more "hot" to support social policy against it.
I think it's relevant -- especially to these really pathetic slanders about the 'censorious mentality' of 'censorious prudes' -- that, unlike the religious right, feminists oppose porn as a *tactic* to reduce the epidemical sexual violence against women. And, further, the legal tests which M&D's anti-porn *civil* ordinance proposed were very specific and limited to a particular class of material, unlike the truly prudish religious right which, if John Ashcroft is any representative, wants to cover up nippled-breasts on heroic statues.
Very few feminists I know of oppose porn for its own sake; after all, in Dworkin's first book, she recommends (or proposes experimentally) a range of sexual practices that make the slanders about censoriousness and prudishness clearly absurd. They oppose it because doing so seems a way to reduce sexual violence against women.
>> Me: ". . . and porn itself does not push a man who is not
>> violent or abusive into becoming so."
>> You : I don't know whether that is true or false; as an empirical
dennis> question,
>> I'd have to look at studies. I'm certainly not going to assume
>> that it's true.
dennis> Really? You think that watching a film of a man getting a
dennis> blowjob from a bleached blonde with fake tits is gonna
dennis> suddenly make a guy become violent or want to rape the first
dennis> woman he sees?
Wow, talk about a strawman. I said I didn't know whether porn could "push a man who is not violent or abusive into becoming so". There is epidemiological evidence to suggest that it can. But, again, it's an empirical question vis-a-vis large populations, and I won't presume it doesn't happen.
I don't find it prima facie implausible that watching regular, steady diet of aggressive, violent, sadomasochistic, and 'mainstream' porn over a course of years might be the primary (or sole) causative factor in a man's acquiring a predilection for violent, abusive, or humiliating sexual practices or subsequently acting our that acquired predilection.
I don't know how much porn you've actually
dennis> seen, but take it from an old timer: the vast majority of
dennis> porn is people fucking, sucking and coming.
You mean *men* coming, right? I've seen enough porn to know that male orgasm is a *required* feature of form, and female orgasm is or seems to be quite rare. At least, if you listen to ex-porn performers, and even the candid current ones, they seem to suggest regularly that being orgasmic is not part of their experience. Which stands to reason.
That's it -- no
dennis> beatings, rape (though some fantasy sequences exist in some
dennis> films, this is not a mainstream taste), or violence of any
dennis> kind, unless you consider anal sex violent.
*None*? That's ludicrous.
I guess it's true if you consider only non-violent porn to be porn. That leaves S&M and violent stuff as what? Children's videos? The studies that Miles Jackson refers to are getting the violent porn they screen for test subjects from *somewhere*.
One of the last porn clips I viewed, which was definitely not depicting a "fantasy sequence", featured a male-dominated act of "fellatio" (it really defies that label, but it's the best I could come up with outside of "a man very aggressively fucking an immobilized woman's mouth") so strenuous and violent that the very young girl -- it was one of the countless "I just turned 18 and this is my first porn video" vidoes -- upon whom it was being performed was pinned against a wall, with her arms held down by another man; she visibly was having trouble breathing, turned bright red, and ended up gagging, choking, and then vomiting. Which she'd barely finished before her head was wrenched back up, penis crammed into her face and mouth, for the "money shot". And this was from a so-called "mainstream" producer (as if that matters).
As for mainstream taste, it doesn't take much time researching the porn Usenet groups (rec.alt.movies.erotica being the most active) to discover that among the most popular male performers are the ones who are the *most* aggressive, degrading, and demeaning -- and these are the precise factors cited by male consumers *for* their popularity -- to the women they "perform" with -- including putting a women's head into a toilet during sex, spitting on a woman's face during sex, and other kinds of humiliation that may or may not be considered violent.
I won't even get into the racism rampant throughout lots of mainstream porn in which the ethnicity or race of asian women and african american men and women is very often sexualized in a very demeaning, numbing fashion. Sexualizing race, ethnicity, stereotypical "ethnic" features and body types strikes me as a *paradigmatic* example of explicit racism.
Free speech and civil liberties notwithstanding, I can't seem to reconcile defending this kind of material with any of the political or moral values I cherish. Surely if it's not *obviously* insane to consider policy that limits political adverts (as a form of free speech), it's legitimate to consider policy that limits porn, especially if in doing so we can have a reasonable expectation of improving the politial status of women.
Kendall Clark -- In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. --Oscar Wilde