OH, BTW, one reason we have tentacle porn is people side stepping porn laws. Who knows what bizarre shit will erupt from a porn ban.
“No, there are two flower aliens doing a friendship dance, it just happens to look like human sex.”
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Seeing what you did there
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I’ve read that young people are having less sex now. The article hypothesized two reasons - unconfidence in their future, and easy access to porn.
IIRC a more likely explanation is that kids spend more time online these days and less hanging out with friends and getting in trouble. People are happy about the dropoff in teenage pregnancies, but IMHO this is a harbinger of falling marriage and birthrates. In a decade we could look like Japan with a stagnant population and people in a near panic that the kids aren’t getting married and moving out and starting a family.
I will say that the theory that easy access to porn will turn kids into insatiable sex fiends seems to be disproven.
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I think it’s more to do with uncertainty than to do with porn. I say this because most folks I know that are far younger than me on Twitter (most are trans like me so this might be a major factor in the amount of sexual activity they have) seem to just not want or have much interest in sex or even porn. It seems other issues get more attention and their anxieties seem to prevent them from having much in a way of stable relationships or friendships that would lead to sexual activity.
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From what I can see the overall goal of the author appears to be to establish porn as a scapegoat for toxic masculinity and male entitlement. That’s both incorrect, and lazy. I say lazy not just for the obvious reason, but also because, and I suspect the author knows this, it means they don’t have to do anything. The author suggests banning porn, but knows that is not only impossible, but the methods of even attempting it would infringe on a lot of people’s rights and privacy and would give the government sweeping abilities to indirectly (and eventually probably directly) enforce sexual norms as they see fit.
It can’t happen, it won’t happen, and I suspect that is exactly how the author wants things. Their superficial line of reasoning is basically that “if we blame this kind of behavior on a thing that superficially resembles it, and which we can do practically nothing about, then, inductively, there’s also nothing we can do about the behavior.”
There are a few things that the author refuses to acknowledge. Chief among them is the false notion that porn in any way predates or causes the sorts of behavior that Weinstein, or even Asari have demonstrated. That’s just foolish to the point of absurdity. Just look at the 1950’s–access to pornography was basically zero for the majority of people, and yet women were treated even worse than they are now, rape was far more common (but it was reported much less frequently, and the police gave even less of a shit than they do now, unless it was a pretty young white girl that got raped by a poor non-white, I guess that part hasn’t changed much.) That alone more or less sinks the author’s battleship since things in the present can’t be the cause of things in the past, but that’s arguably not even the weakest part of the argument. Another thing the author chooses to ignore is where the idolization and exaltation of degrading and preying upon women as objects of sexual conquest comes from, and unless the author has consumed almost zero popular media in the last ever, they’re being very dishonest.
Pick a random video on a porn tube site, just spin the big proverbial wheel-of-porn and chances are the video that plays will go one of two ways, the first is the most probable which is “people immediately start, or are already in the process of sexual behavior” and the other is, “a very thin pretext for sexual behavior is established, followed by sexual behavior.” Since this hypothetical situation is purely random, there’s a chance that you would get something that didn’t follow that formula, but those are the formulae that the vast majority of pornography follows regardless of flavor. What about that is telling young men to force themselves on women? What about that is telling them that women are less valuable than men? Where is the cue that tells them that they deserve more money, privilege, and power? Where are they being told that women are intellectually and physically inferior, that their wants or needs don’t matter, and that they are basically property? I’m certain given the vast amount of pornography that exists that there are some specific subgenres that reinforce those ideas, but for the most part porn just ends up being fucking with very little or no context. For the demographic that the author is talking about, this is even more the case. 15 year old people don’t generally have the ability to buy pornography, so they either pirate it (which is risky because their parents could more easily find it) or, more likely, watch clips on tube sites that are short cuts of longer videos that are too short to establish or communicate any meaningful context, even if the source material had one.
As what young men take away from pornography, it’s less “oppress women” and more “really poor techniques.” Sex on film is generally meant to be entertaining, not instructional, and things that look good on film don’t always end up being pleasurable for one or both parties in real life because the overall goal was to show people stuff that will arouse them, not on how to properly perform cunnilingus or what have you.
So we have here on the one hand porn, of which some is genuinely vile, but most is ultimately harmless, if not a net positive because increased access to pornography thus far seems to have a causal relationship with the reduction of sexual violence. Most of it is just sex without context, and that which has it has very little, and it’s generally so campy, and so bad that even a hormone addled teenage boy would be incredulous.
On the other hand we have popular media. We have books, movies, and television shows full of female characters that exist solely to fulfill the wishes, needs, destiny, or whatever of the male characters. Countless hours of media pumped out every day whose creators spitefully think of the Bechdel test as a stupid joke, shows like Mad Men that openly glorify the increased sexism of previous eras, and breathless, disingenuous op-eds about how it’s not that we live in a culture that ubiquitously oozes fundamentally broken lessons about how men and women should interact from its every pore.
The author would much rather throw his hands up and cast blame upon something that can, at most, be called a symptom of the problem than deal with the unpleasant reality that humans have been teaching men to behave in fundamentally bad ways for a very, very, long time. Their “solution” is impossible, they knew it to be impossible when they suggested it, and their goal wasn’t sexual egalitarianism, but an attempt to redirect momentum against the morbid reality that women face every day toward their own pet enemy. It’s dishonest, cowardly, and flat-out wrong.
One last thing, and I realize that this is a single anecdotal data point, but all the same: I “discovered” pornography well before puberty, about the age of six or seven at the oldest. I really had no idea what it was or what it was for, but I did know that it sure seemed pretty neat and I’d sneak peeks at magazines my dad had hidden away from time to time just for the novelty factor until I got old enough to realize what it was for, but lucky for me, the Internet was becoming a big deal right as I was hitting puberty so I had access to all the porn I could possibly consume, and being a hormone-fueled teenager I definitely tried to find that limit on more than one occasion.
What has effectively an entire lifetime of unfettered access to pornography “taught” me? That porn is fake. It’s entertainment that’s obviously less “real” than what was on television, and it sometimes enjoyable to watch. It didn’t set any sexual expectations, realistic or otherwise, it didn’t make me think of women as objects of sexual conquest, and the only thing it taught me about sex was that masturbation was somewhat more pleasurable when it’s accompanied by visual stimulation. That’s it. Perhaps I’m an exception, perhaps NT folks experience it much differently than I do, but from my perspective the idea that pornography is in any way responsible for the horrendous treatment that women have endured for time immemorial is patently absurd.
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The reason that some adults fear that teenagers will not be able to separate fantasy and reality is because those same adults are unable to do so themselves. They believe all sorts of false things and it feeds their fears.
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Uhm… there are many. Google BBC porn channel.
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It sounds like something that BB would feature in their Valentine’s Gift Guide, if they’d had one this year. (If they did, I missed it)
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It’s probably more Eurotrash than actual porn though
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Well, no. Speaking for myself, I had no porn of my own, so I raided the paternal stash.
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Well, there certainly would be less whingeing about the licence fee.
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Well said. I completely agree that the author is entirely disingenuous about addressing the “me too” movement or any other feminist goals… He’s merely seizing on a zeitgeist to harp on a pre-existing bias against sexually explicit material. He has no meaningful evidence that porn is related to the societal concerns he claims are rampant and destructive (casual sex, the so-called breakdown of monogamy), nor any evidence that they are even destructive in the first place. It’s an ultra-traditionalist position gas-lighting as 3rd wave feminism.
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I wish I could have said what I did in this few words. Very well said.
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