Empowering Black Boys to Challenge Rape Culture by Gordon Braxton

Author:Gordon Braxton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

How Does Pornography Affect Boys? A Conversation with Dr. Gail Dines

Dr. Gail Dines is one of the most passionate people I’ve ever met. And she’s passionate about something that most people don’t think about although they should. As one of the world’s leading anti-porn activists, she is one of the people who led me to scrutinize the pornography industry. She is the founder of Culture Reframed, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “solving the public health crisis of the digital age.”

Q:Many people think of pornography as a harmless rite of passage for boys. If you could give one reason why parents and mentors of boys should care about the messaging in pornography, what would it be?

A:Well, I can’t give one. There’s tons. We need to worry about pornography in a way that we never had to before since the domestication of the internet. It used to be you had to go out and find pornography. As sexist as it was, it’s very different from what the rite of passage into pornography is today, which is via mainstream hardcore pornography on free sites. What is mainstream today would’ve been considered hardcore pre-internet. It would have been hard to find even in a porn shop.

The first age of using porn is between eight and 11, depending on what study you are looking at. So what happens is a boy who has no experience and who nobody has probably spoken to about this, finds his way onto Pornhub and he’s catapulted into a world of sexual violence. This is not what he expected. He did not expect to see women being strangled, being choked with a penis, being called cunts and whores. He’s introduced to a world of violence at a very specific age in his development. His brain is not fully developed. At that age, it’s wired for novelty and risk-taking. And his sexual template is being formed at that moment. He’s got no way to disagree with the images. He doesn’t know this isn’t what happens in the world because he can’t bring any experience to bear on it. And then the text that comes with a lot of scenes are things like, “We know you want it” and “Are you man enough for this?” like he’s some vile creep that wants to watch women being tortured. He’s not. They’re giving him an identity that is not his, but he’s got nobody to talk to.

We know that the earlier that boys get to pornography, the more likely they are to become sexual aggressors, to lose capacity for intimacy in relationships, to engage in risky sexual behavior, to experience erectile dysfunction, and on and on. If you want your boy to be the author of his own sexuality—one that is about connection, intimacy, and love—know that pornography is coming in and hijacking that capacity.

Q:To follow up on the link between sexual aggression and pornography, the connection between boys consuming violent media and boys committing actual violence is heavily debated. Do you have reason to believe that such a linkage actually exists?

A:It’s not hard to make that link at all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.