Porn Is Here To Stay

You can debate its pleasures and its perils to your heart’s content, but no one knows the social effect of porn. So you’re going to have to decide what you like all by yourself…

Anne Sexton, 11 Nov 2011

Julia’s boyfriend asked if he could ejaculate on her face. She said no. He asked a second time and she refused once more. Perhaps thinking that the third time’s a charm, he tried again. This time, Julia fed up with being pressured, dumped him.

The fact that he had asked in the first place was already a bit of a problem, Julia said. She reckoned that it meant he saw her not as a sexual partner but as a sex object. To make matters worse, she had clearly laid out the reasons for her refusal, the most important of which was that she felt it would be humiliating. His repeated requests meant that he wasn’t listening or simply didn’t care.

Telling us the sorry tale over a bottle of wine, Julia suggested that the problem was pornography, that watching sexually explicit material was giving men ideas and not all of these were positive.

Julia certainly isn’t the only one who thinks so. In the last few years I’ve had a number of friends voice similar concerns that the men in their lives seem influenced by porn in ways they find troubling. Is what was once the exclusive preserve of the screen migrating into the bedroom?

That is exactly what is happening, claims Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies. In her book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Dines argues that sexually explicit content has shifted in recent years and that extreme and ‘violent’ porn has become mainstream. According to Dines, it is this kind of material that is particularly harmful and is reshaping the way men think about sex, relationships and intimacy. Unfortunately this seems to ignore the fact that a lot of women produce, watch and like porn too.

In the last few years the professional porn industry has been suffering. The proliferation of free and amateur content, peer-to-peer sharing and the recession means that even established producers are finding it hard to make money. What’s more, given the sheer amount of porn out there, it is increasingly difficult to attract customers without sufficiently differentiating your product. The producers interviewed by Dines apparently told her that in an adverse marketplace, making extreme adult content is one way to ensure repeat business and that even they are shocked by the current appetite for violent porn.

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