By Vexen Crabtree 2005 Jul 22
This page is about pornography. Conservatives say that porn is unhealthy, damaging and causes crime, rape and misogyny. Liberals say that unnatural suppression of natural desires causes all those things. Feminists pour scorn strongly on the sexual objectification of women that occurs in porn and say the result is misogyny and deep sexual confusion of males and females. This page looks at some of these points of view.
Soft porn is photography or imagery of semi-naked or fully naked voluptuous women who are there to be looked at and admired in a mostly shallow fashion, but who are otherwise striking natural poses, and not purely sexual poses.
Hardcore porn is photography or videos of naked women performing sex acts, with no other characterisation needed or involved.
Fetish porn is special-interest porn for those who have crystallized specific acts as ultimate sexual acts. Such special-interest areas include watersports and scat, racial, S & M, blood and dominance porn.
In the media, soft porn has become much more prevalent. Young men's magazines have proliferated in the last five years in Britain, so much so that teenagers of all ages prize the latest easily-obtainable soft-porn magazines such as Zoo, the latest hot-seller that features naked and near-naked amateur models and professional models on every page combined with a complete sexual objectification of all women.
“The once-concealed symbols and attitudes of hardcore porn are now flooding mainstream culture. While the internet and mobile-phone services were pivotal in offering easy access, sex-trade terminology is standard even on primetime TV (Pimp my Ride, Wife Swap, Faking It), pop videos show rappers groping near-naked girls, and even shampoo ads address the product's orgasmic potential. All this is voraciously consumed by boys, and girls, who have only just graduated from the Beano. [...] My 12-year-old [...] like almost every other kid in his class, [watches] TV, he likes rap and when a mate sneaks a copy of Nuts into school he is ordinary enough to want a look. Consequently, they are all heading to an adulthood of deeply confused - and, potentially, deeply misogynistic - attitudes to women.”Flic Everett, 2005
The year 2006 has seen a backlash against the increasingly explicit soft-porn magazine and trash newspaper industry. The Salvation Army has stopped stocking The Sun and various lads' mags (citing their religious principles)2, and the National Union of Students has make moves towards banning/obscuring them (based on their being demeaning to women), the same way as some supermarkets now do (for the same reasons). MPs have called "for them to be consigned to the top shelf", including magazines such as Zoo and Nuts. "MP Claire Curtis-Thomas introduced a bill to the House of Commons in July calling for magazines such as Nuts, Zoo, FHM and Arena, along with publications such as the Daily Sport, to be consigned to the top shelf.".1
Females seek out porn on a massively reduced scale compared to males. The female porn market is tiny compared to the male porn market. Males find use of simple, shallow sex imagery much more than females do. The roots of this may be biological or cultural. Males and females in the West appear to have an innate difference of attitude towards porn, and as a result basic miscommunication and misunderstandings occur that can escalate into severe personal problems.
By metaphor, know that even if one person always cooks food for the other in a relationship, that it is healthy for the person to explore their own tastes and like in food independently, sometimes. By learning on their own, they learn how to appreciate the others' cooking even better and even to learn to ask for what they want to be cooked. Even talking about cooking becomes more worthwhile if both partners have played with it in their own time. Of course, in this metaphor, learning to cook with someone else would probably be cheating though!
Males use visual porn to masturbate; it is a simple pragmatic solution to a healthy male habit. To suppress such a strong impulse only invites dishonesty and secrecy. Understanding and communication are required in order for males and females to talk about their differing drives. Anything less, and a minor difference can turn into a serious problem in a relationship, as mistrust and closed doors breeds contempt and insecurity.
The Effects of Visual Porn on Relationships
“Attraction is not all hard-wired. What's attractive to you also depends on your comparison standards. [...] To men who have recently been gazing at centerfolds, average women - or even their own wives - seem less attractive (Kenrick & others, 1989). Viewing pornographic films simulating passionate sex similarly decreases satisfaction with one's own partner (Zillmann, 1989). Being sexually aroused may temporarily make a person of the other sex seem more attractive. But the lingering effect of exposure to perfect "10s,", or of unrealistic sexual depictions, is to make one's own partner seem less appealing - more like a "6" than a "8." It works the same way with our self-perceptions. After viewing a superattractive person of the same sex, people feel less attractive than after viewing a homely person (Brown & others, 1992; Thornton & Moore, 1993).”"Social Psychology" by David Myers, p441
Male Misogyny
The sexual objectification of women leads to young adults judging women almost purely by physical, shallow standards. Women are come to be seen as bodies, sexual bodies, not personalities or people with achievements, desires, feelings like they think of fellow males. A continual social talk of women purely as sex objects reinforces an abusive mentality towards women. The process is slow, and give the intense peer pressure, sometimes all-encompassing and the only education a male gets about women arises from the soft porn industries! This leads to young adults who are deeply confused and incapable sexual partners, with their aims and desire completely skewed from what they should realistically be looking for in a relationship.
Males end up needing to unlearn the behaviours they learned as a child in order to even start the journey towards being a satisfying partner; it delays sexual maturity and relationship maturity and some men never really grow out of the misguided habits and opinions taught to them whilst young. The ethos of much of the soft porn industry is a social travesty causing potentially long-lasting psychological damage. Even if the images themselves are harmless, the culture surrounding them is not.
Female Misogyny
Women, too, suffer as a result of the objectification of women in the mass media.
“Girls at school bear no resemblance to these full-bodied, wet-lipped, Photoshopped images. But a recent survey discovered that the profession of choice for teenage girls is glamour model. In their short lives, they have learned that the greatest female achievement lies in allowing men to judge their breasts [...] while they writhe round a pole. [...] The old argument that no one's being exploited - we're all adults - no longer works, chiefly because we're not all adults. Most consumers of pop culture are children.”Flic Everett, 2005
The body-image of a female, important to female psychology, is damaged and harmed by the prevalence of soft porn in popular culture. Where cultural options do provide more holistic and sensible depictions of women in film and elsewhere, these are rarely the forms chosen by the young who become addicted to the simpler and more shallow women that the soft porn industry supplies us with.
It isn't appropriate or healthy to try and eradicate porn; nor is it appropriate to allow teenagers to immerse themselves in it before they learn how to treat people in a more complex way. Boys need to learn to treat women as they are, not as soft-porn potential, and girls need to know that the models they see lusted after are only shallow, semi-unacceptable caricatures of what it means to be a woman. The liberalisation of the soft porn ethos has gone too far, so that a mass re-education of boys and girls is required. Trash culture has infringed to the point that mainstream culture is no longer sensible, or balanced, and a redress needs to be found.
By Vexen Crabtree 2005 Jul 22
Links
Everett, Flic
2005 Jul 22 article in The Guardian broadsheet newspaper, article "Page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 girl"
Myers, David
"Social Psychology". 1999 sixth 'international' edition. First edition 1983. Published by McGraw Hill.