Porn and the Art of Rape

[peruvianskys]

And what was stopping her from getting therapy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there rape victims and abuse victims who aren't insane, hateful bigots?

She is not an insane, hateful bigot. She's someone you disagree with - I disagree with her too - but I understand where she's coming from. Just because you didn't suffer through the kind of abuse that millions and millions of women endure, doesn't give you the right to decide that someone who turned that violence into a respected scholarly career as a brilliant anthropologist with some unfortunate ideas is a crazy *****.

 

[TitanAura]

They are not feminists. They are control freaks. They want to control us. They are not interested in women, they are not interested in equality, they just want to own us like we're their pets or something.

 

[Durgiun]

And what was stopping her from getting therapy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there rape victims and abuse victims who aren't insane, hateful bigots?

She is not an insane, hateful bigot. She's someone you disagree with - I disagree with her too - but I understand where she's coming from. Just because you didn't suffer through the kind of abuse that millions and millions of women endure, doesn't give you the right to decide that someone who turned that violence into a respected scholarly career as a brilliant anthropologist with some unfortunate ideas is a crazy *****.

*snicker* Brilliant. I have an adjective for her that starts with a B, but it ain't ''brilliant''.
Did you listen to some of her speeches? Her sanity may be up for debate, but her hate and biggotry sure aren't.
I don't give a damn, she suffered, unfortunate, but she's still an expeletive for saying stupid, hateful opinion and outright LIES.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I don't know if you have read some of the other posts here, but I mentioned earlier that women with bruised arms or legs and scars on their wrists turn me on, so the guilt I felt upon becoming aroused at the site of her self-harm caused scars was pretty much the worst thing ever.

It's actually pretty normal for people to sexualize things that have traumatized them. It's some kind of screwy self-defense mechanism the brain likes to engage in from time to time. You'll get rape victims with rape fantasies, or guys whose wives cheated on them with cuckolding fantasies. It's almost like by making it erotic for ourselves, we take away its ability to hurt us.

Long story short, you don't have anything to feel guilty about, unless you're the one putting the bruises and scars there.

Is pornography sexist in nature? Does explicit material encourage or condone a social norm of female objectification and submission? I'm interested to hear (read) your opinions on anything you may feel after reading this.

The porn industry isn't in very good shape right now. There's little to no pretense towards artistry, it's about churning out quick and dirty productions for maximum profit, and pushing the envelope further and further in terms of taboos. Now, I'm not an advocate of censorship so there's not much to be done about it, but I can definitely see why eyebrows are raised as to whether or not this is healthy. It's a seedy, seamy business.

The real dilemma comes over whether or not you consider violent or outrageous porn as a form of cathartic release that allows people to excise their unpleasant fantasies in a harmless fashion, or as an insidious flame that stokes prejudices and fantasies that would otherwise have lain dormant. The sad thing is it probably varies from individual to individual.

Interesting topic. Sadly, it'll likely just become another casualty of the Escapist gender war.

 

[Clearing the Eye]

I don't know if you have read some of the other posts here, but I mentioned earlier that women with bruised arms or legs and scars on their wrists turn me on, so the guilt I felt upon becoming aroused at the site of her self-harm caused scars was pretty much the worst thing ever.

It's actually pretty normal for people to sexualize things that have traumatized them. It's some kind of screwy self-defense mechanism the brain likes to engage in from time to time. You'll get rape victims with rape fantasies, or guys whose wives cheated on them with cuckolding fantasies. It's almost like by making it erotic for ourselves, we take away its ability to hurt us.

Long story short, you don't have anything to feel guilty about, unless you're the one putting the bruises and scars there.

That all makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you ^^

 

[Clearing the Eye]

Yeah, porn does objectify women, but who cares? Why is it a problem? Self-objectification is a choice these models make, and have every right to make. If someone bases their real life standards on what they see in pornography, chances are you don't want to be in a relationship with such a person anyway, so what does it matter?

The doctor ninja has spoken.

Or is a ninja doctor...

 

[Sovereignty]

I mean, I guess I am glad this stuff is discussed... Having the microscope on it probably ensures some of that illegal crap gets caught, but....

Am I really the only person who misses days when Sex wasn't talked about so often by so many people? From the workplace to the news, I remember a time when mentioning something sexual as apart of a good natured joke would get you written up and reprimanded, or have people upset at a TV station.

Now it's just like talking about rising gas prices, or finances. Always thought we called em privates to keep em private.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I should stay the fuck away away from these threads..

Well, seeing as how she considered women to be poor, naive, ignorant little children who couldn't fend for themselves, and men to be evil, sadistic, psychopathic raping monsters, I think it's only fair I treat HER like shit as well, even if it's post-mortem.

I'm not going to call myself a huge expert on the anti-pornography movement, but I know a tiny bit about Andrea Dworkin, so let me correct you a little here.

Firstly, Dworkin did not hate men. That's fucking ludicrous thing to say if you have the most basic grasp of her life story. She married a man named John Stoltenberg and described herself as "loving him with all her heart and soul" and stayed with him until she died. This ridiculous idea that she was some ferocious man-hater is fucking stupid.

It's not even clear-cut whether she's a "radical" feminist. Generally, the term "radical feminist" ties in very closely with "difference feminist", and Dworkin isn't a difference feminist. She doesn't view relationships or interactions between men and women as fixed or predetermined.

What she has doubts about is whether in our society it will ever be possible to separate things like pornography and the passive female role during intercourse from its connotations of male social dominance and sexual violence. She's not just saying that sex = rape because women can't possibly consent to anything because they're too stupid, she's saying that she isn't sure it will ever be really possible to ever adequately separate sex and rape because our society has made the two things indeterminate. That's a hugely different point.

If this is all it takes to make you insult a dead person, then I am drawn to the conclusion that you may well be overcompensating for something. What are you trying to defend? What do you imagine is under attack here that you can't even form a legitimate response without insulting someone.

If you want to be treated exactly like men, with no difference between the two, then you have to be willing to take a punch.

Is that honestly what equality means to you? The right to get beaten up and have noone care or imagine that you might actually be affected by it because you're a big stwong man with no emotions. Because taking a punch is somehow a good thing all of a sudden, something we should all aspire to as a mark that we're a proper human beings.

Why is your gender role any less bullshit than the one which says that women should stay in the kitchen and bake cookies? Are you really that incapable of imagining an alternative?

ffs compare one of the worst thing you can do to a human with friggin porn?!

Social ostracism, depression, dissociation (resulting in co-morbid conditions like alcoholism and drug-use) intimacy phobia, sexual dysfunction, suicide, and that's without the risks of surgery or injury from extreme sexual practices.

Of course, none of this is actually relevant to the argument because Dworkin is not even talking about the actual people involved except that at one point she suggests that they might be at risk of effective sexual violence in the course of their work. But one of the key arguments here, the actual arguments which has resulted in legal change is the repeated evidence that sex workers are prone to exactly the same symptoms as sexual abuse victims.

Maybe you have a somewhat melodramatic view of what rape actually means, but rape is simply the act of having sex with someone who doesn't consent. It doesn't matter if there's a threat of violence or death, it doesn't matter how painful it is or how much you struggle.

Now, imagine someone offers you £1000 to fuck you anally. That doesn't mean you suddenly want to have sex with them, it doesn't mean you will suddenly enjoy it. It means you are enduring having sex with them for the promise of financial reward. I don't know if you imagine that women are wildly turned on by the thought of earning money, but the fact is that while porn doesn't violate consent and is therefore legally acceptable, it still necessitates sticking a dick in someone who doesn't necessarily want to have a dick stuck in them. The tolerance of the person having the dick stuck in them depends entirely on their own ability to psychologically deal with being fucked when they don't want to be, is it really surprising that some people break down?

Ugh..

I can't even bring myself to tackle the original topic. This whole heap of bullshit is just so depressing.

 

[Clearing the Eye]

It's a seedy, seamy business.

There's a few companies who aren't. I used to subscribe to a website called

Spoiler: Spoiler, don't click if you don't want to see the name of an adult site.

Abby Winters.

It's an Australian website dedicated to real female sexuality, where undoctored, genuine women (friends of the site's host, mostly) masturbate, talk to the camera, have sex with other women or just behave sexy. You can subscribe to the entire site, or to the individual sections. There's Solo, where a single girl talks to the camera and the cameraman (a girl, actually) and does whatever she wants--there's no script or time limit, just a woman having fun. Then there's Intimate Moments, which involves a camera in a room with the star and no one else. She masturbates and pleasures herself as she sees fit and the video ends usually after she has orgasmed a few times and rested a bit. Really amazing stuff. There's one other section, but I forget it's name. It's basically a solo, but with two or more girls, lol.

Despite how it seems, that wasn't an ad for the site, lol. But I thought it deserved mentioning, as it is one of those really amazing sites that celebrates genuine female sexuality and beauty.

EDIT: Oh and I forget to mention, the stars actually chat in the forum every day, interacting with their viewers and such, but not on a cheesy level, in a really fun and relaxed way. It reaffirms how human and real they are, ya know?

 

[IamQ]

To manipulate a common quote to my advantage: If watching porn is wrong, I don't want to be right!

 

[theSteamSupported]

Porn is one of those thing I feel uncomfortable even looking for. Scanning though the catalogues, I very rarely stumble upon something that doesn't treat women as objects and men as complete dicks.

What I want, is something that contains nothing but genuine pleasure and pure joy. Sadly, most porn seem to be about a phallic object delivering a head-shot/groin-shot/back-stab upon a phallus-receiving object. Ugh.

That is unless you look harder, then you'll find the gems. But I don't want to waste time and effort looking for pornography, that could be spent on something else.

So, no, porn isn't sexist by nature. It is the frontpaged stuff that I wish could just go away.

 

[Clearing the Eye]

Porn is one of those thing I feel uncomfortable even looking for. Scanning though the catalogues, I very rarely stumble upon something that doesn't treat women as objects and men as complete dicks.

What I want, is something that contains nothing but genuine pleasure and pure joy. Sadly, most porn seem to be about a phallic object delivering a head-shot/groin-shot/back-stab upon a phallus-receiving object. Ugh.

That is unless you look harder, then you'll find the gems. But I don't want to waste time and effort looking for pornography, that could be spent on something else.

So, no, porn isn't sexist by nature. It is the frontpaged stuff that I wish could just go away.

I'm going to quote myself because I think you'd find the information valuable.

I used to subscribe to a website called

Spoiler: Spoiler, don't click if you don't want to see the name of an adult site.

Abby Winters.

It's an Australian website dedicated to real female sexuality, where undoctored, genuine women (friends of the site's host, mostly) masturbate, talk to the camera, have sex with other women or just behave sexy. You can subscribe to the entire site, or to the individual sections. There's Solo, where a single girl talks to the camera and the cameraman (a girl, actually) and does whatever she wants--there's no script or time limit, just a woman having fun. Then there's Intimate Moments, which involves a camera in a room with the star and no one else. She masturbates and pleasures herself as she sees fit and the video ends usually after she has orgasmed a few times and rested a bit. Really amazing stuff. There's one other section, but I forget it's name. It's basically a solo, but with two or more girls, lol.

Despite how it seems, that wasn't an ad for the site, lol. But I thought it deserved mentioning, as it is one of those really amazing sites that celebrates genuine female sexuality and beauty.

EDIT: Oh and I forget to mention, the stars actually chat in the forum every day, interacting with their viewers and such, but not on a cheesy level, in a really fun and relaxed way. It reaffirms how human and real they are, ya know?

 

[Byere]

This is a product made to serve an audience with sexual arousal for 2 and a half minutes. It's made for you to jack off to when you don't have access to the real thing. Nobody pays attention to anything other than the physical attributes of the performers. No one analyses it, no one tries to get into whatever god awful story they've come up with, the viewer is just there to see some tits.

You've obviously never been directed toward Brad Jones' Cinema Snob or The Big Box reviews

More seriously, I personally see it as what it is. People who have gone into the business either on their own accord/by choice or have made some wrong career decisions and have ended up in the business but stayed there nonetheless.
Yes, it probably demeans women AND men in one way or the other. However, no matter how demeaning the "story" may be to any specific gender or person/character, you have to remember that it's all catered to a specific part of the audience. If you're there for straight sex, you watch straight porn. If gay or lesbian stuff is your little clincher, then you watch that. If you like watching animal porn, you watch animal porn... You cannot assume that all of it is the same. Hell, I remember when I was just getting into puberty, I watched a tonne of softcore porn, most of which involved stories that involved the passion and love of the relationship of the characters over the actual screwing. It's not all violence and demeaning of anyone. You cannot insist it's sexist over minor points.

 

[Durgiun]

I should stay the fuck away away from these threads..

Well, seeing as how she considered women to be poor, naive, ignorant little children who couldn't fend for themselves, and men to be evil, sadistic, psychopathic raping monsters, I think it's only fair I treat HER like shit as well, even if it's post-mortem.

I'm not going to call myself a huge expert on the anti-pornography movement, but I know a tiny bit about Andrea Dworkin, so let me correct you a little here.

Firstly, Dworkin did not hate men. That's fucking ludicrous thing to say if you have the most basic grasp of her life story. She married a man named John Stoltenberg and described herself as "loving him with all her heart and soul" and stayed with him until she died. This ridiculous idea that she was some ferocious man-hater is fucking stupid.

It's not even clear-cut whether she's a "radical" feminist. Generally, the term "radical feminist" ties in very closely with "difference feminist", and Dworkin isn't a difference feminist. She doesn't view relationships or interactions between men and women as fixed or predetermined.

What she has doubts about is whether in our society it will ever be possible to separate things like pornography and the passive female role during intercourse from its connotations of male social dominance and sexual violence. She's not just saying that sex = rape because women can't possibly consent to anything because they're too stupid, she's saying that she isn't sure it will ever be really possible to ever adequately separate sex and rape because our society has made the two things indeterminate. That's a hugely different point.

If this is all it takes to make you insult a dead person, then I am drawn to the conclusion that you may well be overcompensating for something. What are you trying to defend? What do you imagine is under attack here that you can't even form a legitimate response without insulting someone.

Considering that she spoke of women as the victims and men as the victimizers almost all the damn time, what was I supposed to take away from that?
And about her marrying Stoltenberg, I dislike Creationists. I think they're dorks, yet I'm friends with one and I respect him. Your opinion on a group does not necessarily carry over to the individual.

Her views were radical (well, batshit insane IMHO, but that's beside the point), she was a feminist, oh and yeah, she outright called herself a radical feminist. Just google ''andrea dworkin i'm a radical feminist'' and you'll see what I mean.

Femdom porn, clothed female nude male.
And yet, despite what you say, the way she's saying all of these things, the subtext, is that males are rapists, period, and that carries the connotation that she thinks males are evil.

I'm trying to defend sanity, what little of it is left. And the reason why I'm insulting Dworkin is... I hate her. I hate the fact that she uses emotional manipulation, I hate the fact that she talks about porn being equal to rape as fact when she doesn't present any sources one could check and I just hate her trying to take away the freedo to record two people fucking.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

snip

well, you obviously either took me completely wrong or don't understand what i was trying to say, and i have no interest in correcting that right now.

EDIT: especially since you boiled my whole long statement down to the most brutal execution of what i was saying. it was more nuanced than you made me seem.

 

[DoPo]

Yeah, porn does objectify women, but who cares? Why is it a problem? Self-objectification is a choice these models make, and have every right to make. If someone bases their real life standards on what they see in pornography, chances are you don't want to be in a relationship with such a person anyway, so what does it matter?

The doctor ninja has spoken.

Or is a ninja doctor...

It's Doctor McNinja, actually. That's his actual last name. If you're interested, his adventures [http://drmcninja.com/] would be exactly what you'd expect from somebody with that name.

 

[violinist1129]

So I didn't read through the entire thread *gasp* but I thought this may be a perspective from a few prominent modern "feminists" that may temper the views some people have about what a feminist activist really is. Newsom has at other times talked about the objectification of men in media, but the idea really is that women have it worse. Men as a whole tend to value women based on looks to much greater magnitudes than women do for men.

 

[violinist1129]

For the moviephiles and anyone else interested in hearing the other side of the matter, here is a very good documentary on the subject. http://www.missrepresentation.org/

 

[Wicky_42]

Hmm, I wonder, if someone showed them some femdom clips (female controlled BDSM, basically), would they then say it was rape of a man? And so pornography as a whole is the rape of both genders? Or is there some sexist bias in there? Just wondering.

Heh heh, this. Extreme acts in porn can be pretty brutal and shocking, no matter who is giving or receiving - if one of these 'feminists' can't admit that then they're just hypocritical and their opinion worthless.

That sort of extreme stuff is not my cuppa tea, and I might worry about someone who needs those sort of images to get their rocks off. I would probably even go as far as agreeing with the 'feminists' that pornography in general is objectifying - I mean, it's not like the actors and actresses are there for their personalities or to discus enlightening subjects, it's just about the sex. It may even encourage cultural trends, in the same way that women's magazines use skinny digitally airbrushed models to manipulate their readers. Possibly it may even have adverse effects on the behaviour of vulnerable or unstable individuals...

But all of these things are true of all the media we consume. Films portray the impossibly witty, the impossibly macho, the impossibly cool or sexy. Books can be full of ideas and concepts that have caused governments to tremble and revolutionised the world. Research has indicated that even the internet has affected how peoples' minds process tasks. Just as with gaming, a healthy human can handle the difference between fantasy and reality and is responsible for their own actions.