Pornland by Gail Dines

Author:Gail Dines
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2011-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Not every man who uses porn will swallow these rape myths whole. To argue such a point does not account for the variations that exist among users and would reduce the effects debate to one effect—rape. But what anti-porn feminists are saying is that such myths promote a culture that will affect men in myriad ways: some will rape but many more will beg, nag, and cajole their partners into sex or certain sex acts, and more still will lose interest in sex with other human beings. Some will use women and disregard them when done, some will be critical of their partner’s looks and performance, and many will see women as one-dimensional sex objects who are less deserving of respect and dignity than men, both in and out of the bedroom. Whatever the effect, men cannot walk away from these images unchanged.

One way to think about effects is to turn the question around; rather than asking how porn affects users, we could ask, Under what conditions would the images in porn not have an effect? In other words, what do men need to be exposed to in order to counter the stories in porn? In media studies we ask similar questions when discussing how to immunize people to the constant flow of consumerist ideology that is paired with capitalism. Often the answer lies in providing people with a counter-ideology that both reveals the fabricated nature of consumer ideology and offers an alternative vision of the world. A counter-ideology to porn would similarly need to disrupt and interrupt its messages, and it would have to be as powerful and as pleasurable as porn, telling men that porn’s image of women is a lie, fabricated to sell a particular version of sex. This alternative ideology would also need to present a different vision of heterosexual sex, one built on gender equality and justice. Few men are exposed to such a feminist ideology; rather, most men (and women) are fed the dominant sexist ideology on a daily basis to such a degree that gender inequality seems a natural and biologically determined reality. Porn not only milks this ideology for all its worth, it also wraps it up and hands it back to men in a highly sexualized form. In the absence of a counter-ideology, this pleasurable sexist ideology becomes the dominant way of thinking and making sense of the world. While porn is by no means the only socializing agent, thanks to its intense imagery and effect on the body, it is a powerful persuader that erodes men’s ability to see women as equal and as deserving of the same human rights that they themselves take for granted.

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