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HeatherMcLeather -> RE: Lesbian Sex Wars (6/3/2011 3:07:54 PM)
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As promised I have done some thinking (and the dishes are clean and the laundry all folded) and a bit of research to clarify my ideas. Here's the results.
The basic premise of the anti-porn group is that porn, particularly violent porn, causes sexual objectification of women which in turn leads to violence against women. I don’t subscribe to this view.
First I’ll look at the idea that porn leads to women being viewed as sexual objects. I think it’s more the other way round. I think it is the view that women are primarily sexual objects that leads to porn. We all do it, even in a non visual text-based medium like this one, we find ourselves liking some posters because they have a sexy avatar, or because they are flirty, or because they talk openly about fucking and other risqué topics in an open and raunchy manner. We may not agree with their views, but we like them. I’m as guilty of it as any man on here, perhaps that’s due to being a lesbian, but I don’t really think so. In the Avatar thread, several straight women made flirty comments about other women’s avatars. So we make and use objectifying porn, because we, as a culture, objectify women. Even vanilla advertising and mainstream television does this. In most ads and sitcoms, couples are presented as slim, sexy women, partnered with buffoonish men, often out of shape. The men are presented as caricatures, true, but caricatures of real people. The women are not, they are not representative of real women in the slightest. It also extends to film. There are many male actors who are not attractive (Ernest Borgnine), and the physical variety among male actors is enormous, ranging from skinny girlish, through muscle bound he-men, to the fat and even verging on obese. Female actors, on the other hand are almost all of a particular “type”. They are almost all slim, sexy, and at least to a degree large breasted. As well, male actors continue to work well into their 60s, 70s, and even beyond, while female actors rarely do, most of them vanishing somewhere in their 40s.
From this I get that the sexualization of women is something built into in our culture. And I don’t just mean modern western culture. Porn has been around from the very beginning of human history, with “dirty” rock paintings appearing alongside depictions of hunting. It may be that these were actually some sort of fertility ritual, but given the fact that such depictions continue and grow ever more prevalent as “civilization” develops, I find that idea far fetched. It seems pretty clear that men all over the world have been thinking about women as walking, talking vaginas all along, and drawing/writing/painting/photographing them in a way that reflects that view. Even the Vatican at one time had pornographic frescoes on its walls.
Now to the idea that violent porn leads to or causes violence against women. I also disagree with this. If this were the case, then why would Japan, which has a long tradition of violent rape porn (particularly of the schoolgirl type) and bondage porn have such a low rate of rape and sexual assaults (1.5/100,000), while South Africa, which bans all forms of violent porn has one of the highest sexual assault and rape rates (113.5/100,000) in the world. This alone would in my mind at least disprove the connection between violent porn and sexual violence against women. Again, I think it’s a cultural thing. Japan is famously law-abiding, while South Africa has a more wild-west damn-the-law tradition.
Well, that’s my thinking on it at this point.
The rape statistics come from this site: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap-crime-rapes
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