Absolute Porn Corrupts Absolutely

...and read down for a debate (i will make the mass debate 'joke' before anyone else can) about porn.

Am I right? Does porn 'damage the social environment'? Or is that idea 'ridiculous' as Calum says? How omnipresent is porn, anyway? There were complaints on the other thread that we were interrupting the ILXors right to look at hott indie chix so I'm moving it here...

Then why not walk into a shop that doesn't stock three shelves of porn and buy your groceries elsewhere?

Sorry, I just can't be bothered arguing this. I consider myself pretty liberal and very well informed about what sort of material is out there (I'm involved in the cult film genre firsthand for a start and you meet some admitedly dodgy characters on web sites) but I have to say: 'Each to their own'

I draw the line when people or animals are injured or hurt in a film for real, and anything that features women or men in a position whereupon they seem to be not enjoying the sex (whether acted out or not)... yup, I'd draw the line there. But if it's consentual shagging between two people, or a woman or man nude in front of a camera I could really care less.

sadly, i think i'm too "normalized" to full appreciate this

(It's not really about individual preferences, anyway.)

i flucuate between what fritz/george are saying and worrying about the way pron may surreptiously impact my attitudes towards women

too tall.

(ie. it would require throwing up.)

It is precisely bcz porn leads to such extremes that I object to it.

Well, yeah, wouldn't it be? Doesn't the fact that we have (as a society, I guess you could say) labelled fatty foods as "damanging" and "destructive" mean something even though we haven't outright banned them?

And yeah it is fruitful - disagreement with cultural content is always potentially fruitful. I mean if you have a radio spectrum of right-wing talk show hosts and you say "this stuff is really destructive" you're not implying it should be banned, you're just trying to find an audience of your own who might say "well yeah actually it might be", and if that opinion gains enough force or credibility then the station owners are more likely to change.

(Or what Chris said in one sentence, doh.)

By non-consensual sex I mean stuff like Max Hardcore and the notorious seventies film 'Forced Entry' which is notorious enough to have been referenced in 'Boogie Nights'. You cannot possibly object to all porn Julio, that's preposterous. Associating, say, Playboy or even 'Men Only' with the extremes I've mentioned is something that only a Tory MP would attempt.

Besides, you wipe out porn you create a massive blackmarket (c.f. Singapore).

Actually it has happened to me with porn to an extent - the first time I saw 3-way sex in a mag it really shocked me and last week I was relatively unfazed by tubgirl.com :(

I am on a massive "take responsibility for yourself and stop whining" kick today.

(I'm pretty sure I know what "relative porn" would be.)

Dan the problem with porn is that it's somewhere between fatty foods which everyone agrees only harm the consumer and smoking which everyone agrees doesn't. It's much nearer the former, I think but not identical to it. The idea used to be that i) porn was bad and should be banned and following that ii) public spaces should basically be smut-free. And now people think the first half of that is wrong (and I do too) but the upshot is the second half is sliding too.

yeah, I've consumed music like that too but yeah thanks for tom for articulating this the way I'd like to.

but music doesn't damage other individuals (unless it's a noise gig that can damage yr hearing heh). can't compare to porn really.

but as calum sez, a ban would lead to black market stuff.

''The mainstream porn studios and performers are 100% against anything that, for instance, a fuckwitt like Max Hardcore (notorious abuser of women featured on a very disturbing Channel 4 documentary called 'Hardcore') produces''

yeah I was thinking of this when i wrote my first comment on the thread since i saw that doc (which is the only porn related thing i've evah seen).

That documentary would give you the notion the business is full of potential rapists. Porn of that kind should be burnt to a cinder and put in the bin. It's for real sick minds. But that's not representative of all porn at all.

anyway. porn is a gap between basic pre-evoltionary impulse and how things work now. porn is for the runt of the litter. though is still quite appealing to others besides, cos it's got fucking in it.

incidentally, i don't think many men really like the approach of most porn. too badly acted, too glossy. most men won't get off on the less pleasant aspects, but there's a thread running through. people get used to things which they barely notice, cos they like to watch the fucking.

sex doesn't satisfy the desire for sex.

If you put a sign on a bridge that says "Jump off here" and walk 100 people past it, and 10 out of those 100 jump, is it the fault of the sign or the fault of the people?

:-(

Is a pornographic scene where multiple men are having sex with one woman inherently degrading to the woman?

Also, why are you cheering Martin as if he's doing something that the rest of us aren't doing?

I agree completely that it depends entirely on what is involved in the scene, which is why I thought it was odd that Mark painted all such scenes as power imbalances.

I'm an ethical porn consumer in that I won't seek out or financially support anything I don't feel comfortable about. I'm a freeloading swine in that I won't financially support any of the other stuff either, though.

(First off: Dan, I'm going to assume that you didn't intend to furtively imply that I'm an idiot simply because I don't happen to share your views.)

In my mind, labelling that type of logic as "dangerous" is a step away from saying that the people who follow the link to the porn are Neanderthal morons, and as low as my opinion of humanity is, I don't think EVERYONE who looks at porn is a Neanderthal moron.

It's not logic - it's rhetoric; you don't have to see a lot of porn to pick up on the fact that there's a preferred set of language used throughout. It's a trend that you yourself identified upthread by (presumably) fabricating the title of an average spam e-mail: "NAKED HORNY SLUTS". That ugly word is right there -> 'sluts'. That you chose it out of thin air for your example illustrates how bound those nasty words (and by extension, IDEAS) are to pornography. That's what I was saying.

As for those words being dangerous, I think we're operating on different assessments of 'danger' here. You argue that any intelligent person should be able to see this stuff at face value and make value judgements accordingly. Agreed - nobody here is suggesting that merely being exposed to naked horny sluts is going to instantly alter the way that one views women. But I AM wondering how much of the damage done by the marriage of these ideas to these images can surreptitiously seep through into the subconscious even after one has actively chosen NOT to receive them.

The obvious analogy here is advertising, which is similar insofar as that it also involves a steady barrage of ideas existing within a certain value set. Just because you consciously choose NOT to receive them doesn't mean you still won't. Or at least fragments of them.

Removing the delusional fantasy element from pornography turns it into pictures of anonymous people having sex with no attempt at building a narrative.

Dan, I dare suggest there are ways to build a narrative that DON'T make the female character seem like a hapless fuck toy. Surprise: porn directed by females is typically much better at accomplishing this. A lot of porn directed by males tends to tow a misogynic line in this regard. To wit: the girls (never 'women') are hyper-compressed into one-dimensional "sluts" who "need c*ck".

Granted, I think some of this psychology is enacted in the interest of alleviating male anxiety (the easier or needier a women is, the likelier she will fuck you), but I do get uncomfortable when the rhetoric crosses over into words like "bitches" or "sluts". Those aren't picked out of thin air - to argue that they're just there and you should ignore them if you can is to reject an awful lot of subtext.

Casting group sex as "lopsided power relations" and focusing only on the multiple guys/one girl angle shows more of a hang-up about the idea of sex being between more than one person than it does about the actual scenario.

To assume that I've got some sort of hang-up about group sex because I'm typically uncomfortable watching four guys and one girl is to make a gross assumption about all sorts of things that you're neither qualified nor informed enough to assume anything about. See Oops' post for the best example of the scenario I was referring to here.

Obviously there's going to be exceptions to every rule: I've seen the odd female porn star talk about feeling empowered when they're the only female in the bunch, and I get that. But too often the context of these scenes is that of a bread line, the men paid customers (with their gender as their currency) and the woman as duty-bound receptacles.

Full exposure (haha): I don't look at that much porn. I would never even have known about the B*ngb*s phenom has it not been for ILX. It doesn't make a huge impact upon my life and I have no conception of it being the main mode of modern pornography.

Also, I didn't choose "NAKED HORNY SLUTS" out of thin air; that's an actual email I've received. My point isn't that "slut" isn't a nice word as much as it is that it gets flung about willy-nilly in this context to the point where I think it's lost potency in that context (see also the use of the word "nigga" in hip-hop).

There are certainly ways of building narrative that don't make the woman seem like a hapless fucktoy. There are also ways of expressing that the woman DOES really, really want to get fucked without it meaning that she must be a hapless fucktoy, which is the implication I got from your original post.

Everything I've written about in this thread I have based on posts in this thread. I don't see Oops describing any group scenarios in this thread and you gave no wider context than "four guys and one girl". I freely admit that you aren't going to find a tender, emotionally-charged love scene with four guys and one girl in most pornography, but I think it's equally demeaning to everyone in the scene to automatically cast it as four men oppressing a woman; it's demeaning to the men because it goes right back to the "brutish Neanderthal" thing and it's demeaning to the woman because it projects the assumption that there is no way any woman could ever derive pleasure from being in that situation.

(Speaking of power imablances, where does BDSM fit into all of this?)

if a word is flung about willy-nilly, i don't think that means it has lost its potency at all. often its potency is in the fact that its barely noticed. and the n-word in hiphop is different, unless theres some culture i'm unaware of where pornchicks CONSTANTLY AND ROUTINELY refer to themselves and other women as sluts.

The obvious problem with this comparison = women aren't the ones re-appropriating "slut" in the porn industry.

And - major apologies to Oops - I actually meant to refer you to Eyeball Kicks' post.

I think perhaps we're butting heads because I don't see the types of you're talking about EVER and I've watched so many episodes of Real Sex that I have no problem believing that many people (men AND women) doing the more twisted things actually do get off on it, taking it out of the realm where I feel comfortable passing judgement.

Also, my perspective is warped because WAY BACK in high school I knew a group of girls who called themselves "The Nubby Crew" and had a running competition to see who could fuck the most guys in a school year. These girls affectionately called themselves and each other sluts. That is not the porn industry, but having seen that certainly shades how I view women who work in adult entertainment in situations/scenes where they are referred to as "sluts"; namely, it is not outside the realm of possibility that they don't find that offensive.

tee-hee.

The most I did was put up a pic of Belinda Carlisle in the nude.

P.S. By the way - just to make this point... I'm not infringing on anyone's right to WATCH five guys take one woman up the butt. Presuming she agreed to the act in question and all that of course (Calum now hears some ILM postees saying: 'But what if she was only doing it for the money' to which I reply: 'I'm tired and I'm going to bed').

(a) The ILM thread appeared to be mostly harmless who-do-you-fancy stuff.
(b) Talk of legislative "banning" is sort of irrelevant in that no one here has suggested any changes on that level.
(c) There is such a thing as a "social environment" and some contributions to it are positive while others are not.
(d) Saying "each to his own" is fine on a legal level but it's important to take personal stands on what you think contributes positively or negatively to the social environment -- which is why we don't say "each to his own" about neo-Nazis, we say "that's awful."
(e) Porn, as a whole, as it currently exists, makes certain contributions to the social environment that are negative. Not all porn, but significant portions of it.
(f) This doesn't make it demonically wrong to get off on these negative things -- people get off on the "negative" all the time. But if we honestly feel they offer something negative, we should do our best to avoid them and register our disapproval when appropriate. Again, this means not porn in general but the bits we believe are making truly negative contributions to our social environment.

I find it interesting that Calum, despite his "each to his own" and his emphasis on consent, suddenly drew a massive line and was willing to openly condemn someone like Max Hardcore. I mean, Calum, I don't know a lot of details about this guy, but I imagine that the women in his films are there consensually and are compensated: what you're making is a moral judgment about the content and whether it contributes to a positive environment or a negative one. This is all other people are trying to do about other portions of porn. (And if I had to make a call from what I know of this stuff, I'd say that the material coming from people like M.H. and others who "everybody agrees" has crossed the line is really only an extreme exaggeration of content that's already latent in a great deal of "mainstream" porn.)

I also said I think pornography where the woman is raped as part of a screenplay (although she is consenting) bothers me and that I would not argue against the censorship of such material.

Wow, I stumble on to this thread, and it reads like a first semester ethics class! We've got some pseudo-theory, lots of descriptions of graphic acts that my lilly-ass had never even though possible, and then lill-Nick's nit-picking reply to controversial CR.

I think what CR was talking about was the intent of the material in question. Our hypothetical, dysfunctional porn aficionado, who is used to watching films like "just turned eighteen years old pussy-life-support-machine slag with a huge dirt-bag takes on Dad, Grandad, and nineteen hillbilly half-brothers with a huge gang-rape finale" isn't exactly going to get off on "The Accused" is he (or she?) I mean, if they are used to beating their meat over this shit, then the profoundly anti-rape film isn't exactly going to play into their mental power (or fill in whatever cod-philosophy/pop-psychology reading here) games.

Or maybe I'm totally wrong.

Anyway, if I was a total sadist, than I may even be getting turned on by the conversation here, and some of the more explicit discussions, and I might even, I don't know, go and stab the dog or something.

But, before my feminist friends club me to death, I do agree that Loaded, FHM, GQ and the like should go on the top shelf. I mean, Front magazine is basically out and out porn.

And I have met some very attractive feminists, although none of them wanted to shag me. But I suppose the attractiveness or uglyness is besides the point.

Alright, I digress... I can't see any positive purpose in someone beating off to this (which IS its purpose, hence the hardcore nature of it). I do consider myself a liberal, but when rape is portrayed with the primary intent of someone wanking off to it, I do draw a line.

I've made my line. Now make yours.

Randy cinemagoers in India were given a punishment of public humiliation after being caught with their pants down watching a porn movie.

The 200 or so culprits, some of whom were teenagers younger than 17, were forced to do ten sit ups outside the cinema, some in front of their parents, reports the Hindustan Times.

They also had to vow never to watch a pornographic film again, an activity that is outlawed in India.

Sanjeev Panda, police chief in the Balasore district, said: "Earlier we acted against the [cinema] hall owners and their staff but it failed to effectively check screening of obscene movies, so we decided to crack down on the audience."

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