Porn Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing

Those who have followed this blog are aware that I have a fondness for naked women; in fact I rather feel the more, the better. I would even go further and say the more sexually explicit the better as well. Put more simply, I like porn.

Kind of.

I like porn because it is sexually arousing to me. I don't like the increased violence and degredation of the participants of porn that I percieve to be accelerating and getting worse. There are a host of issues wrapped up together in this and I'd like to simply lay them out and look at them:

Porn is very sex negative; the marketing is based on the premise that sex is bad, naughty and forbidden.

If the above is true, then women who participate in porn are "bad women."

In my perception violence in porn in increasing in many ways. Themes of rape, rape of drugged/intoxicated women, women blackmailed into sexual acts are more common and are evidently popular and profitable. These things are starting to appear in mainstream pornography in the form of choking and slapping the women.

Porn is very corporate and as with all commercial enterprise there is a race to see how cheaply the product can be made for the largest return. Cheap labor for porn can easily be found in poorer nations; if an American actress won't do it, maybe a Russian one will and for less money.

Interestingly enough, I heard an ad for a porn store ("New Fine Arts" is the name of it) on Air America Radio here in Dallas. That did not bother me, I hear that all the time on rock stations. What was interesting though was that the spin of the ad was that liberals and progressives are allied with the adult industry in support of free speech and what they called "creative sexual expression."

The same day I came across this book review by Eric Alterman (it is towards the bottom of his post). The book is called Pornified and is by Pamela Paul and it attacks the assumption that to be liberal, you must be pro-porn. Here is a excerpt of that review:

Were pornography actually so sexually liberating, there would be little outré or taboo about it all. Hypocrisy and guilt still dominate sexuality in many ways, and pornography isn’t the cure for Puritanism or the sign of its defeat – it’s an emblem of its ongoing power to isolate and stigmatize sexuality. A truly liberated society would be one in which there were no need to “rebel” via commercialized images of sex. Moreover, pornography is hardly revolutionary. Indeed, pornography may be the ultimate capitalist enterprise: low costs, large profit margins; a cheap labor force, readily available abroad if the home supply ever fails to satisfy; a broad-based market with easily identifiable target niches; multiple channels of distribution. Pornography is big business... Pornographers distort pornography into an issue of progressivism and civil liberties precisely because they have millions of dollars of profit on the line...

But there’s more to the pro-porn “rebellion.” The latest wave of pornography crusaders is not only railing against moralizing on the part of the government and organized religion, the argument that dominated the family values-obsessed Eighties. Today, pornography advocates are also and perhaps equally rebelling against what it views as the excesses of liberalism and feminism of the early 1990s...

...it’s hard to find anything more retrograde, repressive, or closed-minded than the sexual clichés peddled by pornographers. Rather than a mark of escape from the past, the dominant morality of pornography reeks of Puritan and Victorian prudery; it creates a world populated by virgins and whores, by women who are used and then shamed for being sexually voracious. Their degradation is deserved, according to the prim sexual vision of the pornographer.

This looks like a book I might need to squeeze onto my reading list. It is a debate worth having because while I am not exactly and advocate for a return to the puritian mold, I think there has to be a better, healthier, more positive way for us as a society to express our sexuality... a way that does not depend on the humiliation or punishment of women.

Just one more thing to think about.