Objectification isn’t as complicated as the extract at the top purports it to be. Hopefully with the coffee table analogy we can see that this isn’t anything like appreciating a person’s mind or spirituality. “Women are as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls,” the author writes. However this is not true: a body is still a body when it is dead. The other two cease to exist because they, truly, are the essence of life.That's a pretty poor argument against A Feminist Defense of Pornography, which they have quoted. In fact, it's a bit troubling that these anti-Porn Men have chosen to define objectification by tearing apart a feminist examination of pornography.
In fact, it's a bit troubling that these anti-Porn Men have chosen to define objectification by tearing apart a feminist examination of pornography.Yeah. If these guys really wanted to do something about misogyny and objectification in porno, they should advocate for porno without those things. It certainly exists.
Hopefully with the coffee table analogy we can see that this isn’t anything like appreciating a person’s mind or spirituality. “Women are as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls,” the author writes. However this is not true: a body is still a body when it is dead. The other two cease to exist because they, truly, are the essence of life.There's an uncomfortable subtext there. These men actually don't differentiate between a live body and a dead body. They believe the "essence" of life is mind and soul (which I think is reductive). That women aren't "as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls" - which I think completely devalues their argument.
No pornography anywhere is just a stack of bodies.Fantastic, you just Rule 34'd "Stacking."
Blazecock Pileon, that is a good point, and it brings up the question of why this porn is so prevalent. Why is female demeaning porn the most widespread? Is it more profitable than other types of porn? Why does it turn guys on to see a girl get called names and pushed around?There are a lot of tangled questions involved in this. On the one hand, you have the implicit assumption that the majority of mainstream porn is fundamentally demeaning. If by 'demeaning' you're talking specifically about porn where humiliation and domination of women is part of the experience, then yeah -- it's problematic and there's a lot more buy-in around it. But if you come to it with a Male Gaze view of things, what constitutes "demeaning" grows considerably. The fact that someone voluntarily participated in the creation of pornography for money doesn't, in that view, make it non-degrading, it just makes it "compensated."
I could stay clear of accepting responsibility for the harm I have caused by supporting an industry that degrades, depersonalizes, humiliates and abuses its female performers.I would agree that the "injurious spirit" of pornography (especially to self-image and personal relationships) might be an interesting topic of discussion. This blog has done an absolutely shitty job of that so far.
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I've only seen three seconds of pornography. I clicked on a thumbnail on a particular site having read of its popularity in a weekend newspaper. I watched a woman, naked, crouching in front of a man as he thrust his penis in and out of her throat more or less furiously. After they both paused for a rest, he proceeded to slap her many times, with some force across the face, forehand and backhand. After another rest, he repeated the thrusting. At the next break the woman looked at the camera for no more than three seconds and began to cry.
If you look, you’ll see there is a variety of different definitions of pornography. The ‘porn’ in the ‘Anti Porn Men Project’ is -generally speaking- sexually explicit material that is characterised in some way by cruelty, humiliation, or degredation of women.I don't want to rag on men for thinking critically about the production and consumption of misogynistic, degrading, or otherwise exploitative sexually explicit material. I do want to rag on them for not thinking critically enough (or, alternatively, being intentionally vague about) this thing they're calling pornography.
No, but how often do couples say, "Let's try that thing from 'Left 4 Dead', that looked like fun"? Porn influences what turns you on.I'm serious, people, if you don't stop Rule 34'ing in this thread someone will get hurt.
Porn is not human nature. I'm always shocked when people assert or imply that looking at pornography is natural or something that we should take for granted because that's "just how men are". Men in our particular time and place? Possibly. Men, in general? Not if you have perspective beyond the last 100 years.Not to put too fine a point on it, but you might be ignoring a bit of history when you make a statement like that. The current concept of a media-creation-and-distribution oriented pornography industry is certainly a relatively modern innovation, just like music or commercial distribution of the written word. But the history of making pictures of people doing the nasty or creating representations of sexualized humans is not exactly new. In fact it could be argued that denying the historical existence of porn is in fact a relatively recent development.
And it is exactly not the Cheney doctrine. It is in the FIRST PERSON, not the third person. I can't prove that the worst case scenario isn't happening, so my conscience doesn't allow me to do X / consume Y. You may disagree.krilli, I apologize if I've misread your comments. You and I are both welcome to not consume porn, but the phrasing of your question was indeed in the third person: "How big does the chance of exploitation have to be? How much of a hunch that something is wrong can you sit on?"
the young rope-rider: I am not particularly anti-pornography. I'm not particularly pro-pornography, either. But the arguments and assertions you all are making are really weak.That's what I said in response to your earlier comment, too. I agree that "Porn is less likely to result in exploitation than prostitution!" and other arguments are not terribly convincing; they're basically assertions based on a lot of premises that anyone who is arguing from 'the other side' is unlikely to share. Remember, too, that you kicked off a side discussion by suggesting that pornography was a new development, that we have no way of judging how it affects people because it's so new, and that consumption of pornography isn't "human nature." All of those are counterfactual arguments, unless you're trying to split hairs so finely that 'porn is bad' is tautology. Call the acceptable stuff 'Erotica' if you like, but the discussion will continue -- it clearly has for millennia.
I can't properly articulate why, but this feels a little like trying to bridge Newtonian and quantum physics. Few methods exist that more strongly influence one's actions than having a good long staredown with your conscience, and losing. I'm sure that large-scale change can come from many, doing so individually.I agree with you, and this is one of the reasons that I think it's complicated. Here is a statement, for example, that I can applaud:
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It does? (Genuine question, I have literally no idea.)
posted by robself at 2:36 AM on September 17, 2010 [1 favorite]