I always get a couple of spam comments that drive me up the wall. Today I had one telling me that watching pornography has no ties to rape, in fact, pornography actually decreases incidents of rape!
According to this statement, men, if they are not provided with imagery of women being sexualized in some way or another, will be more likely to rape women! Apparently, if men are shown pornography, they will relieve themselves of their prodding inner rapist. This statement not only categorizes all men as hateful, misogynistic and selfish but it also perpetuates ideas about women's lack of sexual agency.
To suggest that one's pornography use has no effect on one's behavior is just silly. Everything we view has an impact on some emotion or thought that crosses our mind at some point or another. When someone is viewing pornography, they are deliberately watching it; it's not as though they glimpsed at a television ad earlier in the day and subconsciously took in a message. Watching pornography effects one's emotions by targeting their sexual responses and providing physical arousal. Physical arousal is a central component in creating sexual pleasure and pleasure often helps create behaviors. For example, if you eat a very tasty cake, you want to eat it again because it gave you sensual pleasure of some kind. Or take another example, you start taking yoga classes and the yoga makes you feel good because of the chemicals that get released, so you keep going back to the yoga classes. This is a direct behavioral effect produced by an emotion caused by physical pleasure. This is basic classic learning theory, we're not making it up!
Most brains are affected by orgasm, sexual arousal and sexual desire. Most people who take part in watching pornography do so because they enjoy the sexual release they experience while watching it. Something in the material turns them on, they are not repulsed by it. The images of a woman being gagged with a penis or called a bitch or whore are not repulsive to most viewers of pornography. Some think their pleasure overrides the message that the image or video sends out - that dominating women is good. Pornography attempts to offer people unattainable and fantasy-like sexual experiences without actually having to be sexual with another person. This influences people's ideas about their own bodies, sexualities and relationships because it lends the idea that women and men are always in power struggles and always perpetuating harmful gender roles. Pornography limits free sexuality by producing a packaged, corporate version of human intimacy. Pornography is capitalism gone wild. It sells one idea of human sexuality to the masses, one based on inequality, degradation, dehumanization and violence. It sells the idea that women are always sexually available; unable to get enough of pleasing men. The images shown in pornography illustrate unequal power dynamics, archaic gender roles and violence against women. Pornography normalizes these dangerous issues.
Yet some tell me that pornography has no impact on behavior?
Sexual arousal that leads to orgasm can often lead to conditioning behaviors. It is so bloody simple to see the connection between viewing violent, rape-promoting material and then attempting to act out the same sexual scenarios with other people, consensual or not. Since pornography shows women being called "whores" and "sluts", makes "rape porn" genre films and shows men gagging women with their penises, it teaches viewers, with the power of conditioning, that a woman's consent is secondary and she is not fully human.
To finish, I would like to leave a link to Dr. Diana Russell's paper "Pornography As a Cause of Rape." It includes various studies from psychiatrists and researchers that draws links between pornography and rape.
I get so mad every time I read or hear that the consuming of hard-core porn does not lead to increase in sexual violence. Even if that was true, which is highly unlikely - it only means there is only there is no sexual violence to women and girls outside the sex trade, that is the so-called real and good women.
ReplyDeleteWomen who inside hard-core are raped so often that they lose the language of rape and abused. The sexual violence done to them is torture, destruction of their humans rights to safety, human rights to a life of dignity, they are often made suicidal or even murdered, many only survived the hell by having addictions, most get internal injuries and or STDs, there is massive demand for non-condom violent sex.
All this is dismissed and made invisible by the claim that porn decreases sexual violence.
It makes me so full of rage - as someone who been in the middle of making their wank-material. I know in every cell of my body and mind, that I was sexually tortured. But I was a whore then, so my rights don't count.
If pornography had no influence on human behaviour, websites and manufactures like Fucked Toys (who I did my latest why I hate porn post on) would not exist.
ReplyDeleteI don't need studies and shit for me to know that many of my rapes were attempted replications of pornographic scenes.
The men and the token torturer women who support and defend the graphic depiction of pay-per-rape are so desensitised to humanity because of it. I only stopped consuming pornography just over a year ago, and I am still trying to de-condition my mind from the damage that it has done.
rmott,
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you mean. I totally agree. People think if watching violent material that uses and abuses women, it will have no impact? hell no. It will have SOME impact. It is brutal that so many people use women's bodies being brutalized as wanking material.
Aileen,
Your post kind of inspired me, to be honest. After I saw that, i started to think about how such "fucked toys" could be influential on some people's perception of women and women's bodies. The site you presented was a perfect example of the dissection and objectification that goes into pornography.
I have heard from people who watched it, that it stays in your mind and constantly will pop in at the wrong time. I know from the research I have done in the past, even seeing the photos, really hurt me. It hurt to see women being called whores and bitches while men exercised dominance. It was heartbreaking. I can't imagine how much work it takes to get those images to leave your brain.
I have written a post about my anger about the excuses that some of the Left and so-called feminists make for consuming porn. See what you and your readers think - my blog is rmott62.wordpress.
ReplyDeleteEven just from video games you can feel a difference. If I sit around doing nothing but playing Left for Dead for a day or so, I notice I get more aggressive and violent. And that's killing zombies, something *I KNOW* is not real.
ReplyDeleteGetting the porny conditioning out of your mind is so hard, but I just think of how much harder it is for those girls and womyn who are pay-per-raped for some arsehole's boner and realise I'd rather help them than not.
It's been as close to proven as is possible in science that sexual media (any media really), pornography, advertisements, etc... have a profound influence on the way people think. The disconnect between realizing the media has influence and realizing the media has influence on you is something known as the third-party effect. In the case of sexual media, over 3/4 of people though sexual media influenced others either a lot (50%) or somewhat (~25%) with only 6% thinking not at all. In contrast, the numbers about flipped for how much people thought sexual media affected them with over 3/4 thinking either not at all or very little. Only 6% thought it influenced them a lot. People can be very, very thick. It took me years to realize that coke ads were the reason I preferred coke to pepsi but noticing these sorts of things are important.
ReplyDeleteI just posted about my own experiment with how pornography influenced my own thinking and it was frightening.