> Maybe I missed something about those paragraphs, Mr. Berlet, but they certainly sound quite puritanical and anti-sex to me. Does Professor Jensen ever think about the fact that women who willingly perform in the sex industry -- or who happen to be erotic entertainers -- happen to have minds and choices of their own, and may choose for themselves to have sex for their own purposes and pleasures??? And what about the genre of gay male and lesbian porn, which represents a large portion of the commercially made porn in the US; how is that genre promote "female passivity" and "male dominance"??? I won't even begin to consider Mr. Jensen's emotionally loaded overgeneralization of men (and women) who actually view the material and still manage to respect women as full human beings. I could go on ad infinitum, but there are people far more qualified than me that could give a proper response to his article.
From my experience, when most leftists go off on tirades about pornography, they quickly reveal how totally ignorant they are of the subject. It's possible that some of the anti-porn leftists have some familiarity with porn, but they typically rely on arguments that suggests that they are clueless.
One typical argument is to throw out alarming numbers about the "$10 billion a year" industry, which ignores the fact that pornography has undergone many changes since the Internet became an easy way to distro porn. I have to wonder if the companies that used to dominate the porn industry, such as Playboy, Inc, Hustler Enterprises, and the various adult movies companies, have taken a big hit from the DIY explosion of Internet porn.
This shift to do-it-yourself pornography has beeen very interesting and hasn't been talked about very much. You have more and more women running their own websites and you see lots of average people running small video companies and websites. I would argue that this democratization of porn has been a good thing for men and women, especially in a country that is so straight-laced about sex. To what extent has DIY porn allowed men and women to become more aware of their own sexuality, instead of buying into Hugh Heffner's vaste wasteland of thin, blonde buxom 18-year-olds?
It becomes extremely tiring to hear the thread-bare argument that pornography is about turning women into sex objects. Porn is about getting you off sexually. Sex and love always involve some amount of objectification of the other person, so why is porn singled out in this respect? Has anybody stopped to ask if romance novels objecify men as sex objects? I don't see any normal looking guys on the covers of the average supermarket bodice-ripper.
Of course, it would be unfair for me to suggest that men like porn and women prefer Halrequin Temptations. What's interesting is that more and more women are enjoying porn and the largest market for adult videos is couples.
I think of all of this has been extremlely hard on the religious right, who have been totally routed on this issue. There have been some attempts to protest hotel chains that provide porn on their TVs, but this is too little, too late for the puritans. It always amused me when I heard of some protest by the right-wing puritans of some adult video store. Of course, before the Internet, the number one conduit of porn into every community was the neighborhood post office.
Chuck0
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