If there's no such thing as porn addiction then there's a recent, baffling epidemic of male erectile dysfunction to be explained, people.
1999 was the year the U.S. crossed the threshold whereafter the majority now had internet access and pornography has become fairly ubiquitous since then and has indeed become the understood default sex education of today's youth. The social consequences have ranged from mundane to quite serious. In the mundane category, girls and women today achieve orgasm less often in the course of heterosexual intimacy and are more often subjected to obviously porn-inspired practices like involuntary strangulation, so the quality of their sex lives has generally deteriorated. Also, today's younger generations are having actual sex less often, mainly because relationships are being formed less often; those being the main context in which sex takes place. Realities like these make a joke of the notion that pornography is "sex-positive" or healthy.
Pornographic portrayals (invariably by heterosexual women), I might add, are also the main form of media representation that lesbians have had, and it's just a reality that this leads people to think of lesbians in particular, more so than other girls and women, as a kind of fetish and not so much as multi-dimensional human beings who ought to be treated as such.
On the more serious side, industry advocates used to proclaim to me that porn also makes rape less common for the same sorts of reasons that it makes sex in general less common. One rarely sees this argument anymore, have you noticed? You know why that is? Because rape has, in fact, generally become more common here in the U.S., and in much of the world for that matter, over the last decade as pornography consumption has reached new heights. The circumstantial correlations used to make this argument in the past no longer exist today.
None of this though really lies at the heart and soul of why I hate pornography, and indeed the sex industry in general.
When I was a kid, the most controversial feminist in America was a woman named Andrea Dworkin. She passed away in 2005. In the riot grrl scene I was part of, we were divided over her work. What made her so controversial was her anti-pornogrpahy activism. Namely, she advocated for the enactment of a civil ordinance that would allow women who claimed damages from pornography to sue the producers and distributors thereof in court for compensation. (Talk about puritanical tyranny!) I was recently watching a (supportive) film about her activism that was originally released in 1991 for the occasion of its 30th anniversary anew. (Yeah, I do stuff like that.) What struck me the most about it on my new viewing was that it has scarcely aged a day. Some semantics have changed in the interim, but the core arguments you'll hear about porn not only stand the test of time, but are actually more pertinent today, if anything. The crux of her argument wasn't simply that porn causes rape, but that rape and battery are leading causes of pornography; that the sex industry could hardly exist in a world without relatively female-specific PTSD. And you hear from survivors at length. The vast majority of women in pornography were sexually abused and/or battered as children. Thus when we normalize porn, what are we really normalizing? That is the most important issue here as far as I'm concerned and the main, underlying reason why I've got nothing good to say about this business.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 24 August 2021
