Porn

the more porn you consume - the less you can connect with women [during masturbation ]

I think the idea that readily available pornography can affect desire for real sex is an interesting one, although I'd largely disagree with the article. I'd certainly agree with this part:

but I think the problem is that the article again treats pornography as something dangerous. And that pornography has lead to a sort of loss of innocence. When she talks about pavlovian 'training' or about strng families she is again coming back to the same monogamous long-term view of relationships, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, it's pretty much how I view relationships myself, but it does signify that Wolf has a view of a specific framework within which sex takes place, again not necessarily bad, but it is binding and affects her perception of what is good and bad. I'd be interested to see her views on casual sex.

To be blunt it's not where you put it but how you put it. Oral and anal sex do not necessarily require more submission than vaginal sex. It's almost getting back to the Old Testament, where it is the act itself that is wrong, not the intent or the effect.

.
Firstly, why do they want to "hold a guy" do they expect marriage once they've 'given it up'? secondly what does porn offer? if we are talking about the facility of porn, then a real person is never going to be as easy a source of orgasms, but sexual partners are always going to face that problem (both male and female) masturbation requires that you satisfy yourself, sex generally requires that you satisfy someone else at the same time.
If Wolf is talking about the actual things that pornstars do then we're back to the idea of 'good' and 'bad' acts again.

Victorian pornography has pretty much everything that you can think of that exists in modern pornography, you can find erotic carvings of all sorts of things going back thousands of years. While we may be able, due to contraception, to be more experimental and free on some levels than in the past I don't think we can argue that the widespread availability of pornography is the equivlent of letting the genie out of the bottle.

yawn.

alcohol is illegal in saudi arabia and they still oppress women, therefore there cannot be a link between alcohol consumption and domestic violence.

So you agree with the quoted article that porn desensitizes, but you disagree with radical feminists that porn desensitizes? Is there a difference between the argument "women are dehumanised in pornography and the desensitization of porn users to womens humanity leads to an increase in rape and other violent crimes against women" and the argument "watching porn will make you into a rapist "?

Also - comments about "sexual depravity" are far more likely to be used by misogynists against women than by radical feminists.

While this is true, in mainstream porn both oral and anal sex are promoted and applauded as being submissive and degrading. Any quick read through the bestseller list titles and synopses will show that. The fact that oral and anal do not necessarily have to be in themselves submissive doesnt change the fact that in porn they are mostly portrayed that way.

is there a difference between our reactions to an erotic carving and porn that features real people? also - erotic carvings do not rely on a steady supply of women who were sexually abused as children, they do not take advantage of women in poverty, and id take a guess that no woman was ever raped, drugged, coerced, etc, to make an erotic carving.

There may be a link Arf, but your statistics don't prove it. At the very least there would have to be a similar study on the phones of teenagers who didn't get detained for harassing girls. If it were at the same level, the statistic you quoted would then prove nothing except that lots of Saudi boys have porn on their phones, and some of them harass girls.

Devrim

There isn't, as it happens. There's a link between advertising and what brands people buy. Maybe.

On a sidenote, even if it could be established that people who sexually harrass women watch more pornography, it wouldn't prove that porn causes sexual harrassment. The whole idea is fucking rediculous. Where do you think the dehumanising attitudes shown towards women in some pornography come from in the first place?

To me, the first argument is about the way a lot of porn normalizes violence and degredation of women. The second argument takes men's own agency out of the equation. I don't like porn encouraging men to view women as objects, but to say that men are not completely and totally responsible for their actions, even if they are informed by porn, is oversimplifying the issue. Honestly, the idea that men are just one dimensional lust driven dogs who will do whatever media tells them is insulting.

Yet another disservice porn has done in the depiction of sex. Sigh...

Do you not see how this argument could be applied to pretty much anything? Should it be down to the capitalist video game industry to prove that Counterstrike doesn't cause school shootings? Should it be down to the capitalist ice cream industry to prove that mint choc chip isn't carcinogenic?

No, because it's practically impossible to conclusively prove that something doesn't cause something else, you can only point to the lack of evidence that something does cause something else.

Your analogies dont compare!

If school shootings were as common as rape and there was a major computer games industry built around violence in schools then hell yeh id be thinking, hmm maybe theres a link.

i mean seriously its not as if the incidence of school shootings was even remotely comparable to the incidence of rape. and as for the ice cream - well when we choose to eat ice cream the only health we risk is our own. it's not a comparable situation.

and the fact is, there has been evidence for years that watching porn that is dehumanising to women does cause the viewer to become desensitized to womens humanity. but like any study anywhere people can choose to believe this or not, and in this case people have chosen to shrug it off, just like when studies show that a ridiculous proportion of women have been subjected to rape or attempted rape, people say "oh well the study must be wrong, it wasnt large enough, etc". people choose what they want to believe depending on their bias. also, institutions choose which studies to fund based on their own interests, and the absolutely rolling in it porn industry has a lot of influence. theres plenty of feminists about who would love to do bigger studies on this stuff but the funding is not available to do so.

Yeah but you can be sure they would have done if they needed to. Slight shortage of video cameras in those days. Still represents some of the same attitudes. Anyway we all know that porn is shite.

btw the arf some people are quite capable of getting off on being submissive, "degraded" without it feeding into the rest of their life, otherwise high powered conservative politicians would be living in council houses.

Is a feminist who enjoys being spanked reproducing patriarchy? Do women with rape fantasies bear some responsibility for rape? As an anarchist the next time a lover asks me to slap them should i tell them no and then go about disecting their whole psyche to prove to them the only reason they could have such desires is because they are 'broken' by patriarchy? Would such cod psychoanalysis empower my lover or keep them trapped in a swamp of victimhood, guilt and repression?

Are Radical Feminists responsible for erasing consentual (overlooking the economic coercion element which we all wish to see abolished as communists!) power relations and images of sexuality only to reproduce them on a more concrete political level, setting themselves up as the judge, jury and executioners of everyone elses sexuality?

No doubt. Luckily enough, a lack of sensitivity to humanity is alright. I find it quite an attractive trait. Indeed, it’s one’s sensitivity to humanity that makes degrading sex so thrilling.

doubly emasculaing revol. his penis must terrify you

I would have thought it'd be easy enough for you to at least name a few of those studies you're on about, if they're so copious. Why the fuck should other people do your work for you?

It's almost as if you actually have fuck all evidence to back up your assertions.