Below is an excerpt from an op-ed by Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas. You can read the entire piece here:
“Pornography’s business has always been the exposure of women’s bodies for the pleasure of men, and that was readily evident at the annual Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last month.
“But also exposed at the sex-industry gathering was the paradox of the pornography business at this particular moment: At the same time that the pornography industry and its products are more normalized than ever in the United States, the images they produce are more brutal and degrading toward women than ever. How can it be that a once-underground industry that lived at the margins of society has become mainstream, at precisely the same time that its sexual cruelty toward women is most pronounced?” …
“Pornography — though still resisted by some, from either a conservative/religious position or, on very different grounds, from a feminist point of view — has become just one more form of mass entertainment in a culture obsessively dedicated to the pleasure-without-thought-about-the-consequences principle. Not everyone likes it, but few see it as worth debating.
“But the paradox remains: At the same time that it is more accepted, pornography’s content is becoming steadily more extreme. In the”gonzo”style (those films with no plot or characters, just straightforward sex on tape) that dominates the market, directors continue to push the edge, filming increasingly rougher sexual practices involving multiple penetrations of women by two or three men at a time, or oral sex designed to make a woman gag, while the language used to insult women during sex grows harsher. Since legal controls on pornography began loosening in the 1970s, pornographers have pushed the limits of sexualizing the denigration of women.
“Though the pornography industry loves to talk about growing sales to women and the so-called”couples market,”men are still the vast majority of pornography consumers in the United States. Producers and distributors I interviewed at the convention all estimated their clientele was 80 to 90 percent men.
“What do these men want to watch? It turns out they like viewing sexual acts that the majority of women do not want to perform in their lives. While there is no survey data about women’s preferences regarding multiple penetrations or gag-inducing sex, informal investigation suggests such things are not common in the day-to-day lives of most people and not sought after by most women.”
“So, how can we explain the paradox? People typically do not openly endorse cruelty or the degradation of women. Yet just as those features of pornography are more extensive and intense than ever, graphic sexually explicit material is more widely accepted than ever. How can a culture embrace images that violate its stated values? Wouldn’t a society that purports to be civilized reject sexual material that becomes evermore dismissive of the humanity of women? There are two potential explanations.
“First, because of the way pornography works, most of the consumers don’t see the material as being saturated with cruelty or degradation; the sexual pleasure that pornography produces tends to derail critical viewing and thinking. When consumers are focused on the pleasure, the politics drop out of view. So, when fans I interviewed said they didn’t think the material they watched embodied male domination and female subordination, they likely were being honest. They don’t see it, because they are too absorbed in feeling the sexual pleasure to be thinking about such issues.
“But some men are quite clear about the gender politics in pornography, and they like it. Most of the advertising for the gonzo style highlights the subordination of women — one company brags it is in the business of”degrading whores for your viewing pleasure”– which suggests that’s exactly what some men are looking for.” …
