Last week I attended Generation XXX, a symposium on internet porn organised by Eleanor Mills, Associate Editor of the Sunday Times, and featuring Gail Dines, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College Boston, who delivered an impassioned and hard-hitting keynote speech about the spread of the multi-billion dollar porn industry into our lives and the lives of our children.
The following day Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton and Hove, ran a debate in the House of Commons on the subject of media sexism, and with an impressive presentation of evidence, hard facts and anecdote pointed out the harm that normalised ‘Page 3’ style sexism does to our society.
The two issues are connected along the same continuum, from root cause to inevitable result: the publicly visible spread of casual porn throughout the media over the last few decades, to the easy accessibility of abusive porn throughout the new ‘public space’ of the internet today.
Gail Dines called internet porn a great ‘cultural experiment’ in the sense that our young people are the first generation for which the world of violent and degrading porn is so easily accessible. The real great British porn experiment actually began much earlier than that though, in 1970 when an image previously described as ‘porn’, available only within age-restricted publications on the top shelf, was first placed in a mass circulation non age-restricted daily newspaper.
It was the generation who came of age in the Seventies who were first conditioned into the message of porn and it started when the Sun, with the introduction of Page 3, gave explicit permission to the general public, young and old, to view women as sexually available commodities. Read more
2 Responses
‘Ed Vaizey responded to Caroline Lucas last week with a protestation about the importance of ‘freedom of expression’. Perhaps we should decide, as a society, whether we are happy to allow two groups – media moguls and the multi-billion dollar porn industry, to have all the ‘freedom’ and dictate that freedom to the rest of us.’
As usual men cite that over-used male created ideology ‘freedom of expression’ as justification for continuation of the pornography industry. Ed Vaizey is correct in that ‘importance of freedom of expression is crucial to men because men are the ones who dictate what they are entitled to view and enact, which is consumption of images/films of male sexual violence against women and girls.’
Freedom of expression does not mean men have the right to subject women and girls to male sexual violence and neither does it mean men have the right to view such images/films. What about women’s right not to be constantly reduced to mens’ disposable dehumanised sexual service stations?
I wonder if Ed Vaizey would accept that white men have the right to view images/films portraying non-white males as dehumanised disposable objects? I don’t think so but then issue is all about mens right irrespective of their ethnicity/race/class to continue viewing/portraying women as mens’ dehumanised disposable masturbatory objects.
Reason why mens’ pornography is now global is because in the 1970s women began to collaborate to resist and attempt to overthrow mens’ domination/control of women and the tiny gains women made had to be rebutted. This is why pornography became malestream because now no longer do men just dominate/control women within mens’ private spheres now males control/dominate women within the public sphere.
Pornography is everywhere and it is ‘invisible’ – it is saturated within fashion industry, malestream media, advertising, films, popular culture. Not only does it give men their regular ‘fixes’ of sexual gratification, it also reinforces mens’ misogynistic view that women and girls aren’t human – but merely exist for men’s sexual exploitation. For women these images remind them they aren’t human and only exist for men. This is how men succeeded in regaining male domination over all women through pornography.
Remember men are the ones overwhelmingly viewing/accessing pornography and men are the ones creating/profiting from pornography not women.
Pornography tells lies about women but tells the truth about men and their misogynistic claims concerning women and girls. I didn’t create this fact rather Andrea Dworkin astutely stated it and for that men demonised her because Dworkin spoke the truth.
If pornography doesn’t influence and justify mens’ belief they alone are default human and hence entitled to rape/sexually exploit/have 24/7 sexual access to female bodies then why oh why is the advertising industry an industry? Surely advertising doesn’t influence viewers/ attitudes/perceptions? Of course not – everyone is making an informed choice based on the lies advertising industry tells them! This is why propaganda is so successful because keep repeating mens’ lies about women not being human and it swiftly becomes the truth which is ‘natural and hence cannot be rebutted or even horrors -eliminated.
White men once denied racism existed because powerful white men claimed science proved non-white men were naturally inferior and closer to ‘nature’ than the default white human male. Now white men don’t publicly make these claims but white men continue to believe non-white males and all women are not human, because whilst non-white men have been accorded right to dominate and control ‘women within their ethnic group’ ; real socio-economic power continues to be held by white powerful men.
This is why it is white men who continue to claim ‘we know what is and is not obscene (sic) because pornography is just mens’ sexualised fantasies’ – yes and moon is made of green cheese because I say so! So we can forget it is real women and girls that real males are subjecting to male sexualised violence and these acts are filmed and then sold to other males so that they too can gain sexual pleasure and sexual power at watching other men rape and sexually torture those supposedly ‘non-existent females because they are ‘just mens’ sexualised fantasies!’
Incidentally that male created pornographic pseudo newspaper ‘The Sun’ is sold within the male created UK’s House of Commons and this is another reason why those male MPs hysterically refuse to accept The Sun is mens’ pornography because ‘men must have right of freedom of expression!’ Note depicting women as ‘dehumanised masturbatory objects’ is aimed at the male viewer/consumer because he is always the default ‘viewer/consumer’ and hence no need to name who or what ‘comprises the general public.’ ‘General public’ is code for men because men continue to be default humans and it is their myopic views/experiences which are supposedly objective and definitive! Women don’t exist in their own right according to men because women were created to serve men 24/7.
I saw a boy on the Tube the other day with a copy of The Sun, he couldn’t have been older than 11. I felt sick.