I don’t think there is a person among us who can honestly say we’ve never looked at internet porn. Sure, some (guys) may have scheduled porn breaks in between doing their con law and torts reading, but most of us (girls) are, at best, casual observers. Like maybe when we accidentally opened a bad email forward to us.
There’s even porn out now geared at women. And some women actually enjoy watching it. But just as we were starting to feel like we, too, could be part of the porn world, a new breed of porn has come along to say, no, us boys are still in charge.
Some call it “gonzo” porn, but I prefer to call it degradation porn. Don’t ask me how I know about it. I have four older brothers and a good number of male friends, so the topic is pretty much unavoidable. This recent article in the Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/living/article/296391) gives us a nice breakdown. It is, for the most part, porn that shows women being completely dominated, abused and forced into acts of violent sex. The acts are seemingly consensual, but in looking at these images one has to wonder.
It seems that porn viewers, mostly men, have gone the way of anyone with any sort of addiction. Naked women won’t do it for the addicted men anymore and neither will just plain old sex. Or even untraditional sex. No, now it has to be different, crazy, and pushing the limits.
Now with a few clicks one can watch women choking on their own vomit as they perform oral sex. Or being gagged and slapped and degraded verbally as they are, as the author of the Star piece put it, “Impaled by multiple swords.” Some women, I suppose, are into this. But I am going to go out on a limb and say the majority are not.
We all know that pornography is considered protected speech. But at what point does it begin to become socially irresponsible? At what point do we say “This is going to incite violence against women and it should not be allowed for public consumption?”Granted, on the internet it is hard to stop anyone form showing anything, but we have criminalized looking at pornographic images of children and we do prosecute it. So why should we not say that pornographic images that depict violence are illegal? That perversion may be just as dangerous as looking at children, and may be more widespread.
This is a complicated first amendment issue, but at some point it is going to need to be addressed. A few years ago we never saw women being beaten in mainstream porn, so who’s to say simulated snuff films aren’t next? We need to draw the line somewhere before our social norms start to change. The question, of course, is where?
It's interesting to contemplate the extent to which the digital era has made porn more accessible and brought it into our lives, into the light. In some ways, perhaps, this is good -- at least in the sense that those previously in denial are compelled to acknowledge its existence, its prevalence. On the other hand, I find disturbing the way porn "pops up" everywhere now -- including in classrooms, on students' laptops. I was making the rounds in my undergrad classroom the other day, circulating among working groups, when I sat down behind a student who had a porn screen saver. As I glanced down and saw it, I was momentarily paralyzed. It really catches me off guard to see naked women that way and to know that he is looking at this image of a semi-clad woman frequently through the day; it has become incidental to him; he need not seek it out. It is ever present. I can't help think that having that screen saver influences how he sees all women, the value or lack thereof he places in women. And that's really upsetting.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the consequences of the increased accessibility of pornography is that for some young men and woman it has become a substitute for sex education. It seems problematic to me that young men may take away from pornography real world expectation of what sex should be like. Pornography is not real sex, it's entertainment. In the same was that i don't really believe my love like is going to be like a Sandra Bullock movie men shouldn't believe their sex life is going to be like a porn.
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