Mmm - this sounds a bit dubious:

As part of the study, they measured sexual aggression, sexual promiscuity, hostility towards women, and self-perceived masculinity. They then combined the the sexual promiscuity variable with the hostile masculinity variable, which they called the “confluence risk” variable because other research suggested that these factors combine to create a risk factor for aggression. And of course, they also asked them about their porn habits.

It doesn’t sound like they were directly measuring or even defining “sexual aggression”, and there’s a clear problem with correlation and causation with porn and sexual promiscuity.

I’ve noted in the past that I think the outsized role that misogyny plays in porn probably has to do with the fact that a small percentage of heavy duty porn users dictate the market.

Without commenting on misogyny in porn (which I agree with), you may be wrong on that “dictate the market” bit.  There’s a book called “Sex, Bombs and Burgers” which looks at (in part) the economics of the pornography market.

Which is why, to quote a friend of mine, in a lot of porn videos there seems to be a need to have a winner and a loser of the sexual encounter, and the woman is the loser.

Could you elaborate on this point please.

PIATOR, I see no evidence that suggests the researchers didn’t define “sexual aggression.”  Unfortunately, the full text of the study is behind a subscription wall, so I can’t tell what definitions they were working with.

One of the problems with talking about the market in something like porn, which is available in so many forms through so many outlets, is that you’re not talking just about consumption of product but about consumption of new product. If someone is watching the same dozen DVDs or hundred clips time and again, they don’t have the same effect on the market as someone who constantly needs new, um, stimulation.  And it’s fairly typical in many fields, not just porn, for people who keep needing new content to consume also keep needing a higher level of intensity in that content.

But I think that in a market that’s (in some ways) as thin as porn (not an enormous number of producers, even with “amateur” sites) you also have to look at the people who are getting into the business and why. And as long as you have guys with issues getting into porn to work out those issues on the bodies of women who have relatively much less power, you’re going to get enough misogyny that the non-misogynists wanting to get into the field will be about as common as the non-greedheads wanting to get into investment banking.

I’m not sure I follow you. According to that study a few months ago I think it was 5 or 6% of men rape. If of that 6%, 2% watch a little porn and 4% watch a lot of porn I’m not sure what if anything porn use can tell us about the 6% like what makes them dangerous and what can get them to quit with the raping. This isn’t like an argument that porn isn’t misogynist, rape culture etc.

Sort of a different point, isn’t porn use likely to be related to the amount of free time you have. Like if you were unemployed you would have a lot of free time that you should spend writing the great american novel but short term thinking is short term thinking.

There’s a book called “Sex, Bombs and Burgers” which looks at (in part) the economics of the pornography market.

If its not in the library would you mind summarizing a little bit? If that’s possible.

Could you elaborate on this point please.

really, have you like never seen a porn film? If not are you old enough to vote?

I suspect that men who look at porn well beyond the basic “get on, get off, get on with some other activity” amount are way more likely to be in it to see women hurt and degraded, on top of just wanting to get off.  And since they look at it way more and spend way more money on it, the industry caters to their demands.

And furthering this (I would guess) is the fact that the men who make porn are likely in this camp - either as a matter of competitive selection (the ones who don’t want to make misogynistic porn drop out of the market), social pressures (the nonmisogynists really can’t stand to be in the same room as the misogynists and go into other things) or just default (who else gets into that business?)

On a side note, if anyone listens to Q on CBC Radio with Jian Ghomeshi, he had a guest on who talked about the lives of men in the porn industry who are performers, rather than producers, and the abusive and abused lives they lead.  It’s almost a microcosm of patriarchy-hurts-men-too:  the guys at the top are benefiting, the guys on the bottom do the legwork but suffer consequences along with women.

Just looked over my post, I phrased that very badly. The way I posted originally it looked like I was talking about a tiny percentage of rapists.  It was clearer in my head. Of the 6% who rape, if 1\3 of them watch little to no porn and 2\3 watch a lot of porn I don’t know what if anything porn use can tell us much about the 6% who are different to the rest of the population.

Until Amanda hinted at it at the end, I was going to bring up the point that without noting what kind of porn they watch this study doesn’t really tell us a whole lot, and also the correlation/causation thing PITTOF mentioned.

Still, I’m guessing that won’t stop anti-porn activists from using the study as evidence in their arguments.

There’s a book called “Sex, Bombs and Burgers” which looks at (in part) the economics of the pornography market.

If its not in the library would you mind summarizing a little bit? If that’s possible.

The book (Amazon, supporting blog, Globe and Mail review) looks at pornography, the military and fast food as engines of technological development.

The characteristics of the pornography market (easy entry, no way to capture a rentier position through government intervention, diverse and fickle consumers) place producers in the “early adopter” position; they need to innovate to survive.  From what I can recall, the customer base was (with the use of payment over the net) pretty damned large and spread out - Amanda’s comment about being driven by a few heavy consumers doesn’t seem to gibe with that.  This suggests that perceived misogony in porn is:

i, a product of the observer effect - feminists preferentially notice the misogynistic porn
ii, a product of the lowest common denominator - porn users who are not *drawn* by M.P. do not *reject* it either AND/OR
iii, something that “resonates” with a large number of men. This does not mean that they are that way inclined normally - porn may be sought to meet only an unfilled portion of a person’s sexual desires.

(Genders above chosen carefully).

I was going to make a comment about which of those I felt most important, but I realised that I’d just be working from my own opinion, which is uninformed and changes, and therefore just about useless.

Thanks for that, I read the review in the Globe and Mail and I will have a look through some of the blog posts.

PIATOR, I see no evidence that suggests the researchers didn’t define “sexual aggression.”

They then combined the the sexual promiscuity variable with the hostile masculinity variable, which they called the “confluence risk” variable because other research suggested that these factors combine to create a risk factor for aggression.

That’s what they seem to be using as a metric for the X axis on the graph above, “risk for aggression”. The conclusion might well be that “men who seek out multiple partners have an active interest in porn as well” - which is not really astounding.  You’d need to define and show actual aggression as being correlated with porn use.  Maybe the study does that?

It came up on Pandagon a few times but I didn’t see it in the first 3 pages when I searched rape to find it again. I did find it on http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/

“So without quibbling over the precise statutory definition, this equates to rape or attempted rape. 120 men admitted to raping to attempting to rape. This is actually a relatively slim proportion of the survey population — just over 6% — and might be an underreport, though for part of the sample, the survey team did interviews to confirm the self-reports, which tends to show if there is an undercount in the self-reports, and found the responses consistent. But the more interesting part of the findings were how those rapists and their offenses broke down.

Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.”

Also worth noting - “men” as defined in the studies above seems to break down again into “male undergraduates on US campuses”.  In a course on research techniques I just did, this was listed right up there with defining those with penises as “people” and those of pasty hue as “the population”.

Chet’s got it.  From what my friend said, she read that porn directors are explicitly told that a standard porn narrative should have a winner and loser—-conqueror and conquered—-by the end, and the loser should be female.  The facial is a quick way to establish who “lost” the interaction.  We may not like it, but a lot of popcorn heterosexuality is constructed that way.  Think of the PUA community, who sees having sex with a woman as getting one over on her.  Much of porn simply makes this explicit; they know their audience.

“If a woman has a about a 1 in 4 chance of being raped in her lifetime, I suspect the number if much higher than 6%.”

Certain types of rapists tend to rape with some frequency until they’re rendered physically incapable of raping, through whatever means (apprehension, catastrophic disability, separation from potential victims) applicable, and they tend to start fairly early.  Consider the victim counts associated with many serial rapists, for instance—and those tend to be the recognized and reported victims, as opposed to victims of serial rapists operating under the color of authority and/or targeting populations who are highly unlikely to report.  I think the operational number is likely higher than 6%, but there’s no particular reason to assume it’s as high as 20% solely based on the rate at which women are victimized.

I’d be inclined to think, barring further evidence, that there’s no more causal connection between porn and violence then there is with Dungeons and Dragons or video games. To the extent there’s a correlation, perhaps violent people prefer more degrading porn; that wouldn’t surprise me much at all. But correlation does not imply causation.

Amanda @16:

That explains a lot… including why a lot of people are thoroughly turned off by mainstream porn.

Yes, it takes a real effort of digging through the titles at the porn store to find the stuff that isn’t hateful.  Which is unfortunate, since in our house, it’s the more that everyone looks like they’re having fun, the better.  But, there’s plenty of it still available, just can’t reach out and grab a random movie without at least glancing at how it’s advertising itself.  Porn boxes lie worse than regular movies, but usually it’s possible to weed out the really hateful stuff.  I know that the people who write the blurbs often don’t even see the movie in question, but it seems like they usually have at least a basic grasp of the general product line of that particular producer.

My main problem with men who are WAY to into porn is that some of them don’t seem to understand that it’s fiction.  It’s a movie.  The resemblance to real sex that actual people have and enjoy is about as close as Titanic was to the actual experience of the people on that voyage.  I’m sure it feeds into itself, the super misogynists and the really hateful stuff, but in my experience, the super misogynists start out that way and pick up the porn that matches, but regular guys eventually do get it into their concept of standard sex that a facial is something normal.  Ah, for the good old days, when the money shot seemed to be more often on the boobs or pelvis - then it’s just messy, and not so much humiliating.

The rape statistics cannot be extracted from the sociological model. Most people want to justify their actions and motivations, after all. You’re probably going to be hard pressed to get a rapist to admit that they are a rapist unless they fit into that hardcore percentage who sees no reason to apologize for their behavior and avidly consume the worst of the worst of pornography. Amidst the remainders, you are going to have a number of men who do not consider themselves rapists but believe that they had extenuating circumstances for committing sexual assault (she was asking for it, one or both of them was drunk, etc) and whose pornographic habits is simply an extension of their inability to see women as anything more than a means of fulfilling their desires, and finally you’re going to have that percentage of men whose rapist nature is so tightly bound up in their need to control their sexuality that they will swear up and down that pornography is a dirty, sinful thing, just like those sluts who totally got what was coming to them for being such goddamn whores.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are more or less crossfire. We have to sit here on the internet and read flimsy justifications of porn use because the fact that the objectification of women in mainstream pornography is SO pronounced and SO difficult to avoid (I remember reading flea’s travails of trying to stock feminist- and WOC-friendly porn back in the days of the Honeysuckle Shop) that those of us who do feel a legitimate turn-on from watching people fucking have to spend more mental energy getting over the use of facials and other increasingly painful and humiliating tropes of pornography, the “black jungle sluts,” the fact that the pivotal “plotline” for porn cannot seem to escape the need to “bring the woman down a peg or five,” (usually by forcing/tricking her into having sex with someone she doesn’t want to fuck) and of course background creepiness like the completely hairless 8-year-old-girl-with-implants look, among other things.

I can see how sexual aggression might lead to more porn watching (as the researchers consider).  If you’re a guy with really aggressive sexual desires, you might be worse at finding a partner for a stable relationship, and then your sole sexual outlet might be porn, so you watch it a lot.

Is the only reason why this matter isn’t settled because some feminists still have the knee-jerk reaction that porn can’t possibly be good?
Violence in video games, movies and comics. Violence in porn. Seriously, this is so cliché. Psychopaths play Grand Theft Auto. Rapists watch rape porn. D’uh!

And really, the Middle-East doesn’t need porn to treat women like shit. That’s a correlation I find much more interesting.

i, a product of the observer effect - feminists preferentially notice the misogynistic porn
ii, a product of the lowest common denominator - porn users who are not *drawn* by M.P. do not *reject* it either AND/OR
iii, something that “resonates” with a large number of men. This does not mean that they are that way inclined normally - porn may be sought to meet only an unfilled portion of a person’s sexual desires.

This!

Since there is so very much free porn at this point, the industry has to be driven by people who are in a bad place in some way.

Sirkowski, no one on this thread or in either of the linked posts is claiming that violent porn causes rape.  Try paying better attention to what you read.

As a male sub, I can say that there are plenty of folks in the BDSM community who enjoy degrading porn but still maintain a healthy respect for both genders.  The problem is that a lot of the guys on the right end of that graph have started infiltrating our spaces, talking about how ALL women deserve to be treated like the most degraded subs in the extremest of stories, pictures, etc.  A lot of us are still coming to grips with this aspect of ourselves, and having these jerks come in and stomp all over people’s fledgling self-esteem is just sickening.

Really, the gals in our community get the short end of the stick.  The subs have to filter out all the “back in the kitchen” bullshit from trolls AND always have to be on their guard when meeting new partners, because there’s a much higher incidence of predator guys trying to trick unwary subs.  And I can’t tell you how many times femsubs have been compelled to defend being feminists who also enjoy being dominated - as if what we do in the bedroom is also our road map for the country!  Then the dommes have to fight a lifetime of indoctrination, telling them that “good girls” are docile and sexless.  Meanwhile, we still have folks in the feminist community that think of porn as a monolithic blob of female oppression…

I wish our society could have a more frank and open discussion about sex and porn, I think we might be able to iron out some of this stuff if people weren’t so bashful about the whole thing.

(btw sorry if this post was too long, I tried to keep it short but failed miserably)

PIATOR, I think you read that wrong. They measured sexual aggression explicitly, while using the other measures to build a risk-factor for sexual violence.
Though I downloaded the actual article and will check later.

#22

I can see how sexual aggression might lead to more porn watching (as the researchers consider).  If you’re a guy with really aggressive sexual desires, you might be worse at finding a partner for a stable relationship, and then your sole sexual outlet might be porn, so you watch it a lot.

This described my sex life for years.

#27

Actually copper thanks for the long post because you bring up how this graph integrates with BDSM, which while not the mainstream is influential to the rest of the sexual culture.

#21

the objectification of women in mainstream pornography is SO pronounced and SO difficult to avoid ...
those of us who do feel a legitimate turn-on from watching people fucking have to spend more mental energy getting over the use of facials and other increasingly painful and humiliating tropes of pornography, the “black jungle sluts,” the fact that the pivotal “plotline” for porn cannot seem to escape the need to “bring the woman down a peg or five,” (usually by forcing/tricking her into having sex with someone she doesn’t want to fuck)...

Mighty Ponygirl, I’ve been frustrated with this aspect of porn for some time. I get angry at how misogynistic and disturbed some porn really is, when you look at it objectively. It is like some kind of crazy psychic tax levied against people who watch porn, “OK we will let you watch sex, but you have to accept insult degradation and misogyny”.

One thing I sort of wonder, the graph focusses on male aggression vis a vis porn use. And I think that makes sense because men are much more likely to act aggressively in society, with harassment or rape. But I still wonder what a graph of female response to porn, vis a vis female aggression, might look like. I also wonder how one might measure female aggression, since men are encouraged to be straightforwardly aggressive, while women are usually not.

On percentages of rape and rapists—-the percentage of women that have been successfully raped isn’t 25%—-that’s the number of women who’ve had someone attempt to rape or rape them.  12-13% of women have been successfully raped.  Of course, some estimates go higher and lower.  Your average rapist is a repeat offender, so it’s perfectly easy to see how 5% of men can do basically all the raping.  They just rape more than one woman.  Which is why it is a huge deal to create consequences.  This is about more than justice; it’s also about keeping them from doing it again.

The rape statistics cannot be extracted from the sociological model. Most people want to justify their actions and motivations, after all. You’re probably going to be hard pressed to get a rapist to admit that they are a rapist unless they fit into that hardcore percentage who sees no reason to apologize for their behavior and avidly consume the worst of the worst of pornography.

Actually, I highly recommend paying attention to the people who do study rapists.  David Lisak said it was super easy to get rapists to open up to him.  They are committed to the belief of male superiority, and so they tend to think any man they speak to is sympathetic.  They exploit the homosocial unwillingness to stand up to sexism.  Lisak exploits this by not dissuading his subjects from retaining the belief that he’s impressed with their “conquests” where they showed *that* bitch, and he gets them to admit to all sorts of shit.

Never overestimate the intelligence of criminals.

I think that maybe “non-aggressive” men and most women would be willing to watch more porn if the stuff that was available was actually appealing to us.  Everyone says “women aren’t visual” and that’s a load of B.S. but still, nobody bothers to make porn that we would like.  But then the lack of porn for us is used to justify the belief that we just wouldn’t like it even if it existed.  It’s probably a similar thing with porn for “non-aggressive” guys.  Porn producers simply assume that nobody would like non-misogynistic porn so they just don’t make it, and they use the lack of that “product” to justify their belief that there’s no market for it.

You’re probably going to be hard pressed to get a rapist to admit that they are a rapist

Actually, rapists are quite willing to admit to rape as long as you don’t use the dreaded R-word.  If you frame it in technical terms of “having sex with someone who didn’t want to” or “using violence, drugs, or threats to persuade a woman to have sex with you”, they’ll often admit to it because they only think of rape as a strange old man jumping out of the bushes to kidnap a random woman.

Yes, but in regards to what I was trying to say, I was thinking more about this quote:

If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.

To get a rapist to admit that they “forced a woman to have sexual intercourse using threat of violence” plays into the notion that he had extenuating circumstances. He’s not actually copping to being a rapist, and he would shy away from the notion of calling it “rape” because they were at a party, she was digging his action, and the fact that he needed to apply a little extra persuasion to get her to stop being so coy etc etc etc. The fact that he’s done this 14 times before does not change the fact that he’s “not a rapist,” just someone who needs a little extra something to seal the deal.

I don’t think that the small percentage of men who lurk in the bushes spend a lot of time kidding themselves about who they are, and consequently, their pornography consumption reflects a sort of unapologetic take on this mentality. But for the bro-mans who think Family Guy is just hi-larious when they joke about raping Meg, the douches who make up the vast majority of the rapist population, I think their pornography simply has to reflect their prevailing opinion of women as worthless and capable of being coerced and bullied into being sexually humiliated.

This study reminds me of my children and media classes.  You know how everyone carries on about how watching TV is horrible for children?  I watched an ungodly amount of TV and still managed to be tops in my class, so anecdatally I figured something was off.

Turns out that if you live in a “high print” household: i.e., your parents read a daily newspaper, get magazines, read books, etc., the amount of TV watching you do has no correlation with your grades at school at all.

It’s kids from “low print” households—who never see any adults reading anything—who show a marked correlation between lower grades and increased TV.

TV, of course, was simply defined by hours watched in this study (which was pre-cable and part of research into Sesame Street) and content should really affect the results in both cases, but it seems the same thing is going on here.

It’s not porn or TV that causes or even correlates with rape/bad grades.  It’s that more rapists watch porn/low print kids watch more TV for different reasons and to different effect than the ‘general’ population.  These studies point to bigger and better questions that need to be asked and answered, and don’t really provide much of value on their own.

#33

Everyone says “women aren’t visual” and that’s a load of B.S. but still, nobody bothers to make porn that we would like.  But then the lack of porn for us is used to justify the belief that we just wouldn’t like it even if it existed.

And even if someone does make porn that’s non-humiliating to women, it has to be specially “branded” as “porn for the women” (warning NSFW link), even though actually it works for men too. Or, at least, it works for me.

Racism is only racism if the perpetrator wears a Klan robe and burns crosses and actually physically harms an innocent black person.

Class warfare is only class warfare if a red or black flag is waved at the rally and the rich are scared.

And rape is only rape if the man jumps out of bushes and is a creepy guy and acts crazy and doesn’t have a wife and kids and a job.

It’s almost a microcosm of patriarchy-hurts-men-too:  the guys at the top are benefiting, the guys on the bottom do the legwork but suffer consequences along with women.

That’s not porn, that’s capitalism.

  These studies point to bigger and better questions that need to be asked and answered, and don’t really provide much of value on their own.

This, from Caren, pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter better than I could.

copper—you’re pretty much talking apples and oranges. Having a self-aware kink that happens to coincide with the prevailing tropes of pornography (setting aside the obvious question of where that kink generates from) is not the same thing and it shouldn’t even be argued. Porn that explores particular kinks will always be around and it’s not like if porn got over its need to degrade and humiliate women suddenly the poor fem subs will not have anything to turn them on anymore. There will always be different kinds of porn to cater to different kinks.

But let’s say that 99% of mainstream porn (stuff that is readily available and not illegal) involved scenes where the woman squatted over the man’s chest and taking a big smelly poop on him, no doubt there is going to be a market of men and women who see absolutely no problem with that and enjoy it. And maybe it would be so normalized that most women, even if they themselves would never take a big smelly fiber-filled poop over their partners, don’t particularly object to the poop-shot. But most men feel at least a vague sense of unease scaling up to outright disgust at the poop-shot. Do we really have to make sure that when we discuss how degrading and obnoxious the normalization of the poop-shot is, that we go out of our way to acknowledge the minority of people who have a legitimate, examined kink for being shit on? Seriously?

he facial is a quick way to establish who “lost” the interaction.

Because it’s demeaning?  I never thought of it that way, but it does make sense.  I suppose ass-to-mouth would be the same way.  yuck.

@copper: As a fellow kinkster, the idea that these people are ‘invading’ our spaces is naive and assumes that it’s a force that is purely external and that these people weren’t already in our spaces to begin with. There’s a serious lack of self-examination in the scene because people are too busy circling the wagons whenever there’s a wiff of the Normals having an issue with us, which works right into the hands of abusers within it. If the scene was unfriendly to abusers it would shun doms who put forward misogynistic attitudes like “truly feminine women can’t really be doms” or “dommes will only be accepted as one of us if they get the approval of a male dom” or “all women are subs” or “it sickens me that all the sub women in the local scene are fat”. And when a dom harrassed my gf for weeks telling her online he’d “make her submit and understand her real place” if she ever showed her face at a play party or when that same dom assaulted a sub at a play party and got shown the door by the woman dom who ran the house, he would have been shunned by the community and not the woman whose house the party was in. Instead these attitudes are tolerated because the men who have them have important skills to teach the community or are charismatic, and people don’t want to make a fuss or are easily swayed by the “we have non-mainstream values, they have non-mainstream values, we need to stick with them in solidarity” bullshit that flows freely in the scene.

Sirkowski, no one on this thread or in either of the linked posts is claiming that violent porn causes rape.  Try paying better attention to what you read.

I didn’t say such a thing. So perhaps YOU should pay better attention, uh?

#30

One thing I sort of wonder, the graph focusses on male aggression vis a vis porn use. And I think that makes sense because men are much more likely to act aggressively in society, with harassment or rape. But I still wonder what a graph of female response to porn, vis a vis female aggression, might look like. I also wonder how one might measure female aggression, since men are encouraged to be straightforwardly aggressive, while women are usually not.

If you’re talking about how porn might affect women, I think you’ve got it backwards. Watching the woman always be the ‘loser’, get facials and being demeaned, is much more likely to normalize being demeaned in real life, not being aggressive, if the women watching identify with the woman on-screen and not the male aggressors (and I’d assume this is more common than vice versa).

Hell, since there’s people complaining there’s no appealing porn for women, I’ll pimp my employer, Slipshine.net. We concentrate on positive porn, nearly half of our membership and artists are female and we even have some gay porn now.

Sure, Mighty.  Rapists are highly tuned in to rape apologism, which is why I always worry about the men on the internet that are a little *too* invested in the “she had it coming/she’s a liar” narratives.

sirkowski—here’s the problem with your argument:

The link between violent videogames and violent behavior has been disproven with empirical studies. People who play violent videogames are no more or less likely to be violent themselves. People who are violent are no more or less likely to play violent videogames than people who are not violent. That link has been disproven in study after study.

The study Amanda is pointing to (a study, btw, that is not a first-of-its-kind and does in fact square with previous studies) DOES show a very important link between rapists and pornography. It is not a two-way thing, it is a one-way thing. That graph is not saying “people who watch porn are rapists,” it’s saying “rapists have a very intense relationship with pornography.” A square is a rectangle, a rectangle is not necessarily a square. But there is evidence. There it is.  Scroll up and look for the picture.

I mean, stick your fingers in your ears and yell “LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” some more, whydontcha?

Because it’s demeaning?  I never thought of it that way, but it does make sense.  I suppose ass-to-mouth would be the same way.  yuck.

The facial is, biologically speaking, the same ending as if you took the woman and rubbed a jalapeno across her eyes.  And then accused anyone who recoiled of hating sex, which requires juicing someone’s eyes with jalapenos.

Amanda, which is why I think so much of the pornographic narrative in mainstream pornography follows an arc of a woman being tricked/bullied into having sex and then actually liking it and being glad in the end. It feeds that apologia model that women secretly want to have sex, that no means yes, etc.

Agreeing with atheist about the tax we have to pay to watch porn. I’ve long felt that if rape is a hate crime against women, most porn qualifies as hate speech. Even if it’s not violent rape-porn of the sort that glorifies jump-out-of-the-bushes rape, most of it is at least subtly winking at acquaintance and date-rape as something that women either deserve or secretly want but just need the man to take control of the situation.

There is positive porn out there.  I really do doubt that men who are into rape or assault are really interested in digging around looking for it.  What’s doubly sad is that most porn out there isn’t that kind; you really have to look for non-demeaning porn.

#45

If you’re talking about how porn might affect women, I think you’ve got it backwards. Watching the woman always be the ‘loser’, get facials and being demeaned, is much more likely to normalize being demeaned in real life, not being aggressive, if the women watching identify with the woman on-screen and not the male aggressors (and I’d assume this is more common than vice versa).

lijakaca, your theory sounds quite plausible. I really would like to see it be studied, though. I think part of the reason some people don’t accept female sexual desire as being “real” is simply that not much is known about female desire by the general public.

No doubt—but the inherent problem is that the line isn’t standardized. Even if you can get a quorum of feminists to agree that facials = demeaning, tricking women into fucking = rape apologia, there are a whole slew of scenarios that we’re going to disagree on. BJs without reciprocating cunnilingus? Anal? Warm-up lesbianism? High woman-man ratio? Lack of condoms? Each of us will probably categorize those things as different shades of greys with the potential for deal-breaking.

As a Database Developer, my natural inclination would be to have a website that allows you to literally plug in yes/no preferences for a whole slew of that stuff and then recommend titles. But I suspect that it would be a lot of work for a little benefit—men who buy porn don’t particularly care because they’re not the ones being demeaned.

Watching the woman always be the ‘loser’, get facials and being demeaned, is much more likely to normalize being demeaned in real life, not being aggressive

Becoming a doormat because everybody tells you you’re a doormat works better with robots than with humans.  In real life, for every woman who comes to accept degradation because there’s nothing better on offer, there’s another woman who fills up with violent hatred and resentment.  Of course it doesn’t all come out at once in a burst of violence for most of us, because most of us fear retaliation and prison, but yeah, misogynist cultural materials, especially including pornography, leads to a great deal of aggression for many women, despite the fact that our aggression is suppressed and channeled into covert and quiet expression.

Amanda, thanks for all these links to “Yes Means Yes”, Amanda Hess & Charlie Glickman. This kind of material is really interesting to me.

soph, I’m not sure I agree with you on your numbers. I don’t think that it’s a 1:1 exchange for normalization/rejection. Unless you are arguing that the way that women sabotage and henpeck each other is some sort of sublimated form of rejection (which I think is a bit of a stretch).

atheist, IMO it’s part and parcel of how women are portrayed in patriarchal mass media already, just more extreme and obvious. I also would love to see this studied in more detail though, then I could point to them as proof when I rant to friends and family about how femininity and gender relations as currently portrayed in mass media hurt women’s self esteem (and have them questioning their own sexual desires, that’s really messed up). At least in porn, it’s usually so obvious even the most sexism-blind person can see the dynamic once it’s pointed out.

And thanks to everyone who has links to non-misogynistic porn, it’s so hard to wade through all the crap that’s out there.

Just as an FYI since I do have access to the article through my university database—the kind of porn they were asking about is in fact NOT the meanest, nastiest shit they can find.  I don’t know what the implications of that are, but this is their single-item measure (which they acknowledge is not ideal) of porn use:

Participants were asked to respond to the following question, which inquired about their usage of the leading men-oriented sexually explicit magazines: “How often do you read any of the following magazines: Playboy, Penthouse, Chic, Club, Forum, Gallery, Genesis, Oui, or Hustler (Check one).” This question was followed by a 4-point scale: Never (1), Seldom (2), Somewhat frequently (3), Very frequently (4).

If you follow the line that says very high use of porn it has n27 and n31 being in the moderate to high risk level. So 58 people people. Then you have people in the low risk category who number 13, 17, 16, 5 which adds to 51. So about half of people who use porn a lot are at moderate to high risk. Then again you have 61 and 119 who use porn frequently and every so often and 11 who don’t watch porn at all at high risk. I don’t know why they don’t score higher on mean sexual aggression. Surely it makes sense that men who score high on hostile masculinity are likely to be high on sexual aggression.

Just taking the people who are at high risk and saying for the sake of argument these guys are all rapists you have a total of 218 rapists. Of that the 27 rapists who watch a lot porn are only about 12% of the total group. The rapists who somewhat frequently use porn make up about 28% of the group. That means about 60% of rapists don’t watch a lot of porn.

What i see is if you watch a lot of porn, and that’s probably quite a lot, there is a 50/50 chance you might be some kind of predator. But then there aren’t a whole lot of people who watch that much porn so you are probably already in the creepy category if you are watching that much porn. Out of 3000 guys 27 scored high on mean sexual aggression and were deemed high risk and watched a lot of porn. I would be astonished if these aren’t the guys who end up on the news. Of course then not watching a lot of porn doesn’t mean you aren’t a rapist. I’m more concerned about the large percentage of predators who aren’t obviously going to be doing time.

Anyhow its kind of a funky graph to read. It would be clearer if they had porn use plotted against confluence risk (which was “the sexual promiscuity variable with the hostile masculinity variable”) rather than against mean sexual aggression where you would be surprised if there wasn’t a correlation.

I just refreshed and saw CalliopeJane’s post. That’s an awful measure of porn use. They may as well have not bothered. I would put myself in the seldom category and i’ve never read any of those.

Sirkowski, you entered a feminist discussion of porn by setting up a strawman, i.e., hysterical feminists who think all porn is evil. That’s douchey.

the kind of porn they were asking about is in fact NOT the meanest, nastiest shit they can find.

Did anyone here claim that it was?  The point that most people are making is that even most main-stream “mild” porn is still fairly misogynistic.

Deja Vu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

Deja Vu how.

Oh right, Deja Vu because no online discussion about the problematic aspects of pornography can happen without some idiot jumping out to wave their hands and make some incoherent argument (or lazy link) to CENSORSHIP!!! Even though absolutely no one in this discussion (or, for that matter, most discussions of pornography) has brought up the idea of regulating and censoring pornography.

Momento Mori, congratulations, you’re the Grandpa Simpson of Porn. Every time you turn around, you point to another thing next to you and breathlessly scream “CENSORSHIP!”

When the porno bell is rung, Memento Mori drools.

I did a quick ctrl + f search and there wasn’t a single mention of censorship or banning until our troll brought it up at #63.  It’s clearly a (poorly done) straw man and can be safely ignored.

I’ve long felt that if rape is a hate crime against women, most porn qualifies as hate speech

Quoting the most retarded hyperbolic comment in this thread.

Americans, even when the lefties are puritans…

sirkowski, you are an inveterate cock whose reading for comprehension skills could probably be outdone by a 4th grader with a head wound and a shock collar.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are more or less crossfire. [...]Those of us who do feel a legitimate turn-on from watching people fucking
-Mighty Ponygirl, this thread

my natural inclination would be to have a website that allows you to literally plug in yes/no preferences for a whole slew of that stuff and then recommend titles
-Mighty Ponygirl, this thread

Fixing the quote you pulled in context with helpful emphasis.

Agreeing with atheist about the tax we have to pay to watch porn. I’ve long felt that if rape is a hate crime against women, most porn qualifies as hate speech. Even if it’s not violent rape-porn of the sort that glorifies jump-out-of-the-bushes rape, most of it is at least subtly winking at acquaintance and date-rape as something that women either deserve or secretly want but just need the man to take control of the situation.
-Mighty Ponygirl, this thread

So where, in anything that I’ve written, have I made the argument that porn is inherently (and I do mean inherently) bad, evil hate-speech. And I’m certainly not attempting to distance myself from people who enjoy pornography, even as I point out that there are serious problematic elements in it.

But by all means, don’t let the facts get in the way of your righteous indignation that someone has something less than glowing to say about your favorite way to pass the time.

sirkowski, you are an inveterate cock whose reading for comprehension skills could probably be outdone by a 4th grader with a head wound and a shock collar.

Probably the 4th grader would be using both hands type their arguments, too, so there’s another advantage. :D

the objectification of women in mainstream pornography is SO pronounced and SO difficult to avoid ...

Yeah, as a woman who doesn’t particularly identify as a lesbian, I occasionally find myself watching lesbian porn because (even though it’s often targeted at straight men) at least there isn’t some guy slamming his dick/fluids into various female body parts in a disturbing way. It can be mind-numbingly stupid and stereotypical but at least it doesn’t usually look actively painful for the women involved.

#68 -  bigotted language, poor reading comprehension and logical fallacies.

#71

It’s the opposite for me.  I’m not a lesbian so naked women just don’t do anything for me.  It’s like looking at a completely neutral picture.  I don’t like mainstream, male-centered porn because it is marketed to men and therefore the focus is mostly on the women, and the men in it are usually mediocre at best.  So I settle for porn that is targeted for gay men, preferably the kind that is just pictures of a solo man.

I would recommend Gail Dines’ book “Pornland” an Robert Jensens’ book “Getting Off: Pornography and The End of Masculinity” for a detailed, well researched and disturbing analysis of the mainstream porn industry today. Also check out the documentary “The Price of Pleasure”.

Blackbloc@43 Thank you.  The “no true Scotsmen” attitude of many kinksters bugs the hell out of me.

asily swayed by the “we have non-mainstream values, they have non-mainstream values, we need to stick with them in solidarity” bullshit that flows freely in the scene.

*rage*

Yeah, I’ve been very hesitant to seek out the Mtl scene now that I’m back for some of these reasons.

Porn producers simply assume that nobody would like non-misogynistic porn so they just don’t make it, and they use the lack of that “product” to justify their belief that there’s no market for it.

Again, don’t buy it.  The economics of porn are such that there’s ruthless competition and every niche gets filled (pun not intended).

I’d take it as a working assumption that the market for specifically non-misogynistic porn is being supplied.  If there’s not a lot of it supplied, then there’s not a lot of demand for it as a distinct seperate category from misogynist porn.

@LC: I’ve been inactive for 1-2 years so I’m not sure I could recommend any good spots in the city now. I’m probably hopelessly out of date (not to mention I was active in the francophone scene, which like everything in Quebec is mostly split from the anglo scene). But if you’re in need of a friendly face since you’re new in our fair city, I wouldn’t mind meeting a fellow kinkster who’s not a complete cock.

In case it’s not clear, tinaballerina @ 74 is recommending the work of hard-core anti-porn activists. Take it with a grain of salt.

As a Database Developer, my natural inclination would be to have a website that allows you to literally plug in yes/no preferences for a whole slew of that stuff and then recommend titles.

Think outside the square - interactive porn.

Imagine a DVD of a m/f pair getting down to it.  The male props himself up on his elbows, looks down and says “Babe, I’d really like to -”

And the legend pops up:

” A, “Go down on you”
” B, “Unload on your face”

I mean, hell, if video games can do this, why not porn?

Again, don’t buy it.  The economics of porn are such that there’s ruthless competition and every niche gets filled (pun not intended).

It’s more than a little ridiculous to assume that the supply accurately reflects the proportions of demand.  This is sort of sounding like the conservative worship of the almighty invisible hand of the free market.  Simply consider clothing size.  There are a lot more fat people than thin people, yet there are far more styles of clothes that are made for the thin people, especially in women’s fashion.  It’s nearly impossible to find certain things in non-ideal sizes, even if there is a huge demand.  For example, I need wide-width shoes and I know that tons of people need them, but there are very few to choose from.  I have very large breasts and it has been literally impossible to find any underwire bra in my size in any color besides black, white, or beige.  And I know tons of women who are as big as me or bigger and would like to have pretty bras, but the market simply doesn’t fill our need.  The same goes for porn.  Producers aren’t perfectly rational, and so they’ll give people what they assume people want (or what the “people who count” want), without necessarily reflecting the actual demand.  It’s very hard to find porn that is marketed to women because it’s assumed that we’re “not visual”, and then people use the lack of good porn as further proof that we don’t want it because if we really did want something then some rational entrepreneur would supply it to us, amirite?

And producers of all kinds of products are just people, often very privileged ones.  I remember several years ago there was a study to determine how much “sex sells” (with sex defined as sexually attractive women), and they were actually surprised that men respond more to half-naked women than other women do.  Clearly there are some people who don’t really care or understand what hetero women like.

In case it’s not clear, tinaballerina @ 74 is recommending the work of hard-core anti-porn activists. Take it with a grain of salt.

Comment #79: Nobody in Particular on 06/22 at 05:03 PM

Gosh thanks! I wouldn’t want to read something that wasn’t unconditional support of pornography!

Yeah those “hard-core anti-porn activists”.  They think a little misogyny is too much!  They think one woman or girl harmed in the production of wank material is too many!  So irrational.

Clearly there are some people who don’t really care or understand what hetero women like.

And, often, the people who don’t care what women want are the very people designing products for a female demographic.  You hear people in the fashion industry defend themselves all the time by saying that women only want to see extremely thin models, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Because, you know, capitalists don’t create and reinforce values at all; they just slavishly obey the whims of the consumer!

@BlackBloc - I was more involved 3-4 years ago before I left for the States. And yeah, language politics is inescapable in this town.

I’d be happy to meet up, for similar reasons (plus I’ve usually enjoyed reading you here so that’s a good reason to meet now that I’m in town on its own merits). 

My fairly inconsistent livejournal is linked to my name here, so you could pop over there and send me a contact ping since this obviously doesn’t need to bother the other Pandagonians.

I should probably address the actual post at some point. I do want to read the whole study (thanks lemmy caution, for making that possible) but I’m not overly shocked at the result. As others have pointed out, there seems to be growing evidence that a lot of these social effects are multi-factorial to a strong degree and aren’t simple linear responses. There are strange bi-modal distributions, J-curves, S-Curves, what have you.

It’s one of those things that actually seems quite intuitive if you stop and think about it. We have all kinds of experiences and baggage that feeds into how we respond to these things. Advertising works by and large, but it doesn’t work the same on everyone. Comfort food and smells are inconsistent across cultures. Look at something as common as rape triggers. We put trigger warnings up as a courtesy to the public as large because it is extremely hard to tell who is responsive to a given trigger and who isn’t.  It isn’t even as simple as whether or not someone has been assaulted. The range of responses is enormous and varied.  Why wouldn’t it be something similar with porn? Or violent media? Or anything else? 

Might there be general dose-response patterns? i.e. does a highly-pornified world shift the curve as a whole, even if there is still a varied response? Very possible, on a gut level I certainly think so, but I’m not sure we have any proof. (Same for violence, I suspect.)  What’s the threshold where it makes sense to ban or more stringently control something?  Hell if I know.

But I think Amanda’s basic point, that the effect of porn may have a hell of a lot to do with what you already bring to the porn, is more or less correct.

(It occurs to me that “exposure shifts the curve” probably does have some proof, since I think there are studies showing encountering more diverse cultures, ethnicities and the like tends to shift attitudes towards other cultures over time. So there probably is a case to be made for “overall exposure does have an effect” even if it isn’t a simple linear one.)

Phoenecians—text-based interactive porn? Really? It’s dark in here. You may be eaten out by a grue.

#41 Honestly my only thought was “I have experiences and background with this, maybe if I share that people will find it interesting/helpful.”  The penultimate paragraph of Amanda’s post got me thinking about misogyny in mainstream porn, which got me thinking about kinky porn about female submission, and from there I just started typing.  I wasn’t trying to correct anyone or demand acknowledgment of my peer group, and I’m very sorry if my post was a derail.

#43, #75: Shit, you’re right, I’m Scotsmanning all over the place aren’t I?  That’s so embarrassing… Thanks for giving me a wake-up call.

Mighty Ponygirl@87

<3 <3 <3 for the Zork reference.

Mind you, I’m pretty sure they have DVDs already that are “choose the position you have sex with the woman in”, so I suspect they could do interactive videos like Phoenecians describes. (I don’t see why not, other than the cost of having to shoot scenes multiple times.)

copper@88 - You’re welcome. We all get these calls from time to time. I’ve gotten my share in the past and expect more in the future.

the kind of porn they were asking about is in fact NOT the meanest, nastiest shit they can find.
<blockquote>Did anyone here claim that it was?  The point that most people are making is that even most main-stream “mild” porn is still fairly misogynistic.

</blockquote>
Oh, no, you misunderstood my point. Amanda said she bets that guys who rape especially like the meanest nastiest shit, and I was just pointing out that they didn’t even ask about that.  I imagine the relationship would be even stronger and clearer if use of that sort of porn were examined. 

And as a couple comments had expressed an interest in knowing how they operationalized “porn,” I thought I’d use my database access to get and provide that info.  that is all.

ah, can’t stack the tags that way.  oops.

#87

It’s dark in here. You may be eaten out by a grue.

This made me smile wistfully, then laugh.

Phoenecians—text-based interactive porn? Really? It’s dark in here. You may be eaten out by a grue.

It’s doubtful.  I’ve figured out my way around the twisty maze of passageways quite well, thank you.  Was complimented on it recently too…

That’s “twisty maze of passageways, all alike”. Which is infinitly more funny.

That’s “twisty maze of passageways, all alike”

you don’t date much, do you?

you don’t date much, do you?

It’s hard to date much when you’re in a stable (though mildly non-monogamous) relationship for 7 years.

you don’t date much, do you?

OUCH dude

Hey! Don’t let the Zork references get mean!!! ^_^

I have to admit, I was hoping someone would fall for that hook 8-)

Counting down to the weekend, and I’m nauseatingly happy. La la la-la-la-la la la la la.

Hm. A Penis, an orifice. But how to tie it all together without my “insert penis into orifice” spell?