These are comments by Archy and Zek J. Evets on the post “Are Porn and Video Games Hurting Young Men?“.
Archy said:
“But we all know that porn is primarily made and consumed for male pleasure first. What does that say about female sexuality too? It’s a very jumbled up confusing issue.”
You’re not giving much agency to these women who willingly look at porn, in fact it’s quite insulting. Ever think that maybe they don’t see it ALL as degrading and they consume porn of a decent nature (that is infact quite plentiful). Who’s to say they are buying into their own sexual objectification? You do realize many adults do see women as more than just sexual beings, and many of those also look at porn?
I fear there are women who are so focused on one aspect of porn that they conflate it to being representative of most/all porn, who feel so objectified and degraded by it that it is biasing their judgment of an absolutely massive medium that can’t be defined by one genre or type. I find it as silly as those who want to ban video games because of the existence of GTA.
I see quite a few of these women who seem to think when men say they look at porn, that pretty much every one of those men is looking at porn that is degrading, violent, and misogynist. But it’s an assumption that judges these men without having a clue as to what they look at. How is that at all helpful?
Zek J. Evets said:
Co-sign Archy.
The anti-porn tone here is extremely discomforting. Porn is not equivalent to addictive substances, nor is it inherently bad. Views of it as such seem to come from places of personal fears and sex negativism than from actual critical analysis of porn and its place in society. Notably, porn has existed FOREVER. And access hasn’t exactly been “restricted” over the greater period of human history, or in most cultures.
Shoot, Romans were drawing explicit sexual organs and acts since at least Pompeii. Many indigenous African societies have families living under the same roof in a single room, thus children will learn about sex by happening upon their parents having sex right next to them. I could go on, but the point is: there’s a lot of talk about the negatives of porn, and very little about the positives.
Maybe we could start with some right now? Like how porn Teaches men (and women) that it’s okay to have sexual fantasies, to look at naked bodies, to masturbate, explore one’s sexuality, be kinky, and to be a sexual being on a regular basis as part of a healthy, normal lifestyle.
These positives stand in stark contrast to the tone I’m noticing in some of the comments regarding porn, tone that sounds almost repressive, almost condemning, as if a 60+ year old man who’s just now opening up his sexuality because he has greater access now is somehow addicted or perverted. Such projections are dangerous throwbacks to the times when people were actually punished for embracing their own sex life, whether it was gay, straight, queer, or what have you.
Photo credit: Flickr / Baddog_
About the Editors
I agree, especially with Zek’s point about new technology.
The printing press was often accused of posing a threat to the morality of an entire generation wherever it appeared in Renaissance Europe. It was giving common people (who were all “children,” of course) all sorts of controversial ideas that undermined the proper social order and threatened to destroy proper moral sensibilities. Pornography was one of the first genres of the underground printing presses in Europe during the Reformation. (Some of the most widely circulated anti-pope and propaganda was pornographic in appearance. Shame that we assume that religious works and pornographic works are always distinct from each other. Shows a lack of imagination on our parts.) Some of the more conservative Muslim religious leaders in the Ottoman Empire shut down the printing presses at one point as a way to maintain proper moral values. (And besides, the next generation would be missing out on the beauty of handwritten books. Don’t you care about your children enough to make sure they’re exposed to handwritten books?) One of the first governors of the colony of Virginia banned the printing press in the colony, because it tended to make the lower classes uppity. Teachers were alarmed that people would stop caring about educators, because they could just look up the information in a book.
The telegraph was supposed to destroy the beauty of the English language. Kids would no longer know how to write a complete sentence. Texting was going to destroy all poetry, novels, essays, etc.
The invention of recorded music in the late nineteenth century was of course going to destroy music forever. Once you have a phonograph, you will never bother listening to live music ever again.
In the 1980′s, the porn boogeyman was a whole lot scarier. In the eighties, porn was supposedly so out of control that the porn industry was turning more and more to making “snuff films” in which women are raped and killed on camera. Women by the thousands were supposedly being kidnapped right off the sidewalks, killed, and the footage sold on the black market to thousands of men who were all clever enough to destroy all copies. All thanks to that horrible exploiter of women, the VHS player.
In 1990, the experts were convinced that the CD-ROM was going to shut down higher education. Every college instructor was going to be replaced by a CD-ROM library, and probably books would totally disappear, too.
As far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on the pernicious effects of video games and porn. Sorry, been down this road before. But the internet is totally NEW and DIFFERENT and is way more revolutionary than any of those other technologies! It just isn’t the same! We’ve heard all that before, too.
Perhaps there really is a wolf this time, but I’ve heard “wolf” cried too many times in false alarm to take this one seriously.
I just wish it was easier to find porn and video games made for women. (Not that it’s stopped me from playing games, I even played GTA as a kid.) That’s my biggest problem with those industries. I don’t believe I’m asexual but when discussing porn with my boyfriend I feel like it is much easier for him to find stuff that turns him on than it is for me to find the same. I don’t know if it is because most porn is made more for male audiences or if I just have weird tastes, probably a little of both. At any rate, I do think that our culture’s sex negative attitudes are largely to blame for anti-porn sentiments (and sex negativity probably results in lower-quality porn or so I would imagine).
I do love to paint and draw, I suppose that if I want porn that I like I might just have to make it myself.
Well there’d have to be women to pay for it, or women willing to make it. There is probably quite a lot out there but there is so much porn that it might be like looking for 1 fishy in the sea.
I don’t mind some of the objections to porn IF the people focus in on the right target, I actually agree with some of them but I just dislike the major generalizations that go unchecked. The “men who like more n more brutal porn” instead of “it seems some men like more n more brutal porn”, it’s an easy way to try act like men as a group are into more n more degrading porn against women. All that will do is cause resentment in the men and women that like porn and make it harder for both sides to get their point across, if they focused their wording better they’re probably realize many of the porn viewers dislike the same kind of porn they do.