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Why Ban Porn?

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Ever since the beginning of feminism's downfall--marked by the 1970 publication of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics--there has been a concerted effort by certain quarters of the movement to ban pornography.  The charge was led by two radical feminists: Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who, have proven quite influential on the movement today (in my home town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, MacKinnon encourages censorship on the University of Michigan's campus, and Dworkin's Take Back the Night rallies are a feminist rite of passage/group therapy).  Now, Dworkin and MacKinnon's poisonous ideas have inspired many Internet feminists to rail against a boogeyman that they know next to nothing about.  It is my personal belief that not only are the anti-porn feminists' efforts misguided, they are also counter-productive.  Here, I will outline each of the reasons I have heard given by feminists in support of banning pornography, and I will attempt to show why they are wrong.

Pornography is degrading to women.

This is a huge generalization, and it is not always true.  There certainly are videos out there in which the man is rough with the woman, calling her a whore or slapping her, but these are not in every video.  Besides, the women in those videos are consenting to such treatment.  They have the right to object at any time.

And I'm rather curious as to how women are being exploited in gay male pornography.

Pornography teaches men to sexually objectify women.

No, it doesn't.  Men already objectify women's bodies.  It's how their brains are wired.  A look at art through the ages is all the proof needed.  There is relatively little protest over the way that Ancient Greek men objectified boys.

Also, if it's objectification we're talking about, women aren't entirely innocent.  Many heterosexual women look at a man's wallet the same way a man looks at a woman's body.  When sizing up a woman, a man wonders what she'd be willing to do in bed with him.  On the same token, when many woman sizes up a men, they wonder what he'd be willing to do for her with his money.  Women are offended when a man says "I just met this awesome chick with great tits," and rightfully so.  But who speaks out when a woman says "I just met this great lawyer/banker/doctor/Ferrari owner/guy with great hair"?

Women are exploited in the porn industry.

Yes, abuses do happen in the porn industry.  But this is only to be expected.  Abuses happen in every industry.

Is it the universal case that women are abused in the porn industry?  No.  Women such as Nina Hartley and Sasha Grey have experience as porn actresses, and they have told about their experiences in the industry.  They do not feel exploited; quite the contrary, many of them enjoy their "work" immensely, and in some ways, feel empowered by it.  Is it really that hard to believe that there are women who enjoy being treated roughly by men?  After all, Scott Peterson, who is currently on Death Row for murdering his wife, has received dozens of letters from women asking him to marry them—all of them after his incarceration.  Granted, those women are most likely not representative of the average woman, but the fact that so many of them exist should be telling.  

If anything, it's male porn stars who feel exploited.  A man can only do so much sexually, especially when compared to a woman.  Men do not experience multiple orgasms.  Not to mention, it's extremely difficult for a man to maintain an erection when he's got three cameras and ten people watching him.  On top of all of that, male porn stars are paid significantly less than female porn stars, mainly because their work is in much lower demand.  Also, women in the porn industry have far more choice than men do.  Jenna Jameson has total control over what is done in every scene, who does what, and whether she is doing it with a man or a woman.

Pornography causes child abuse.

While it certainly is true that a vast majority of child abusers are regular consumers of pornography, not all consumers of pornography are child abusers.  In fact, a majority are not.  Blaming pornography for child abuse is, to quote Alan Dershowitz, "like blaming oxygen for pyromania."

Pornographers take advantage of women's economic situations to force them into doing such work.

While some of the work done in pornography may be quite unpleasant for the woman involved, this argument hardly stands on its own when applied to the other half of society.  Where is the sympathy for men who, in fulfilling their societally-enforced duties, take on jobs as garbage collectors, construction workers, firemen, and miners?  Where is the concern for the well-being of men who on a daily basis risk contact with cyanide, battery acid, radiation, and hot ashes?  Where is the concern for the safety of men who, with the smallest misstep, could plummet eighty feet to their deaths?  Where is the concern for the safety of men who run into burning buildings to save the lives of other people?  Where is the concern for the health of men who descend into the bowels of the earth into tunnels that could collapse at any second while inhaling coal dust for twelve hours a day?  

Sadly, such men have no special interest groups looking out for them.  It's really a shame that so much fuss is made about an alleged pay gap when 94% of on-the-job fatalities are men.  Yet these men are putting themselves into such dangerous and degrading situations not for themselves, but for others, such as women and children.

Pornography teaches contempt for women.

Whether this is true or not is debatable.  But is it grounds for enacting a ban on something?  When anti-porn feminists use this reason, they should keep an old Chinese proverb in mind: "The fire you light for your enemy often burns you more than him."  

Even going as far back as the First Wave, feminist doctrine has been seething with contempt for men.  All that has differed about this fact is the volume of misandry and the degree to which it was expressed.  Carry Nation, the leader of the Temperance Movement and one of the primary supporters of Prohibition, would often walk into bars and smash bottles of liquor with a hatchet.  If destroying other people's property weren't enough, she declared that "Men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils."  One of her sisters in the movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, likewise stated "We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men."

Despite its leader Betty Friedan's stating "If I were a man, I would soundly object to the very implication that women were morally superior to men," the Second Wave was likewise hostile to men.  In fact, in this era, the most extremist anti-male diatribe of all time was written: Valerie Solanas' SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto.  The manifesto is just what the title suggests: a proposal to eradicate men entirely and establish an all-female society.  Whether Solanas was serious when she wrote it or not is debatable (as she later claimed she was not), but what is not debatable is the impact it had on the feminist movement.  Shortly after she published the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas was arrested for the attempted murder of Andy Warhol (the incident haunted Warhol for years to come, and he was forced to wear a truss every day for the rest of his life due to the bullet wound).  The evidence proving her guilt was overwhelming, and yet Robin Morgan, the Global Editor of the Feminist magazine Ms., issued a petition demanding Solanas' release from prison.  Ti-Grace Atkinson, the head of the New York City chapter of NOW (the National Organization for Women), the United States' largest feminist organization, called Solanas "the first outstanding champion of women's rights."  Solanas' lawyer (and likewise a member of NOW), Florynce Kennedy, declared Solanas to be "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."  What could be more degrading to men than celebrating somebody who proposed killing all of them?

Solanas was properly denounced by many as a radical later on, but man-hatred every bit as vitriolic lived on in feminism's Third Wave, which made misandry so prevalent in society, it was accepted as a normal part of life.  One of the books that launched the Third Wave was Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, in which the author attacked the fashion industry, deriding it as a new form of male oppression.  Putting aside her dubious statistics (such as her baseless claim that 140,000 teenage girls in the U.S. die each year from anorexia), her conclusion for the reason is nothing short of bilious: "When one sees all these women starved not by poverty, but by men, one must notice a certain resemblance."  The implication there is quite obvious: she's comparing men to Nazis, just as Virginia Woolf did many years before (though in all fairness to Mrs. Woolf, she only said such a thing about male-only clubs, and not men as a whole).

The Third Wave also saw the rise of Dworkin, a woman who, while just as vitriolic as Solanas, was not decried for the radical she was.  Dworkin's writing was seething with contempt for men, and her view of human sexuality was anything but unbiased.  According to her, "Heterosexual intercourse is pure, formalized contempt for women's bodies."  Her greatest wish was "to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp, with a high heel stuffed in his mouth like an apple in the mouth of a pig."  Indeed, herein lies the rub: if pornography were banned on the grounds of "teaching contempt for women", feminist literature would likewise have to be banned on the grounds of "teaching contempt for men."

Feminist literature is not the only medium that is being used to teach contempt for men.  Popular culture is so full of misandry, it's hardly even noticed anymore.  Nearly every one of Beyoncé Knowles' songs is a complaint about men in some form or another; in particular, "If I Were a Boy" specifically endorses the idea that women are superior to men.  In television, shows like Family Guy, The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond, and The King of Queens portray men as bumbling buffoons who are regularly belittled by their smarter, more competent wives.  In Hollywood, women slapping men is practically a staple.  When a man receives a blow to the groin, it is almost invariably treated as a humorous event.  Should we be banning shows like this?  I should hope not; despite my desire for men nowadays to be treated with the same amount of respect as women are given, I still find The Simpsons and Family Guy to be pretty funny.

Pornography forces women to conform to unrealistic standards in order to impress men.

Many feminists claim that, from watching pornography, women will feel inclined to starve themselves, and to get plastic surgery.  This is the same argument that provides the basis for Wolf's ideas in The Beauty Myth.  Much like Wolf's assertion, it is incorrect to blame men for this.  Numerous surveys (as well as the recently-seen surge in Christina Hendricks' popularity) have revealed that the average man's definition of thin is quite different from that of the average woman.  Men in general prefer women with well-rounded bodies, as opposed to skinny women.

Also, if forcing unrealistic expectations about one sex on the other is grounds for banning, then there are plenty of candidates for such a restriction other than pornography.  For instance, romantic comedies.  Men often view romantic comedies with the same air of disgust and disdain that many women view pornography with (though many members of both sexes will confide to close friends that they secretly enjoy those things which they pretend to hate), yet the two are more similar than most people realize in terms of their effects on the sexes.  Both draw upon fundamental needs that are hardwired into the respective male and female brains.  That men desire sex more than women (an assertion which, despite many protests by feminists, does NOT mean that women don't have libidos) is a fact of biology: homosexual men have sex more often than heterosexual couples, and lesbians have sex less often than heterosexual couples.  For men, sex is primarily a physical act, whereas for women, sex is primarily an emotional act.  When asked what they usually fantasize about during masturbation, men usually name the body parts of their desired partner.  Women, on the other hand, usually fantasize about their desired partner's touch and the emotional connection that comes from their bodies being united.  A man who watches pornography, then, is fantasizing about whatever sexual acts he finds pleasing, whether they involve a woman with large breasts, a woman of a particular race, or even, in rare cases, a woman to whom a penis is attached.  On the other side of the coin, a woman who watches a romantic comedy is fantasizing about her perfect future, about getting a (usually) promiscuous man to love her, and her alone.  

What constitutes an ideal man in a romantic comedy?  Illustrating him has little effect without illustrating the woman he's usually with, so I shall use one of the best-known romantic comedies from Hollywood.  In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts' character is a struggling prostitute who one day happens upon a wealthy, affluent businessman played by Richard Gere.  After engaging her "services" for one night, he decides, after little thought, to ask her to be his wife for a week.  She accepts, and he "reforms" her much like Professor Higgins trying to reform Eliza in My Fair Lady.  During this time, he spends what he calls "obscene amounts of money" on her.  We hardly ever see him at the job that affords him these obscene amounts of money; a common complaint of the wives of business executives is that their husbands rarely spend time with them, yet he takes her around the city, to fancy meals, and to operas, all in one week.  At the end of the film, after the two feature characters have quarreled, he decides to win her back by fulfilling one of her lifelong fantasies: he comes for her while she's in her apartment (the highest room of the tallest tower) with a bouquet (his sword) in his hand, while riding in the back of his limo (horse), declaring his love for the former prostitute (damsel in distress).

These ridiculous fantasies of the perfect man falling for some downtrodden woman with low self esteem are also the norm in novels published by authoresses such as Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, and Stephanie Meyer (three of the richest women in the country), and by the Harlequin firm.  Where are these "perfect men"?  Short answer: they do not exist.  Many of the women portrayed in pornography (by which I mean bisexual women with extraordinary bodies and unquenchable libidos) do indeed exist, but they are in extremely short supply.  Any man or woman who spends all their time searching for the one person of their fantasies will spend all of their lives searching in vain.  However, most men and plenty of women are able to see reality, and as such are willing to make concessions in choosing a mate.  Despite my parents' marriage being so full of bitterness, abuse, and resentment (and ending in a divorce), I have seen many happy marriages in which couples, barring minor mutual corrections, are able to accept one another as they are.  So, despite the fact that pornography and romance novels may portray the sexes unrealistically, most men and women are able to see them for what they are: pure fantasy.  Provided that people can keep their fantasies in their heads (which a vast majority of us can), what good does it do to rob men and women of their fantasies by banning, respectively, pornography and romance novels/films?  None.

The porn industry regularly abuses women, as evidenced by the fact that a vast majority of women who appear in porn were sexually abused, and are reliving their old cycles.

For this point, I cannot claim any sort of my own expertise, since my investigations of the industry have been limited to viewing of videos and reading of interviews.  So, I will defer to Susannah Breslin, a freelance journalist who has been researching the industry firsthand for the past thirteen years.

In one of her columns, Breslin answered a question by one of her readers asking where porn stars come from.  She identified five different basic backgrounds for them:

1. They were sexually abused. While making it clear that this was not the norm, or even a majority of cases, Breslin concedes that "stories of abuse were not uncommon."  Jenna Jameson, the most successful porn star in the United States, has confessed that as a teenager, she was gang-raped.
2. They experienced some form of childhood trauma.  One of the actresses that Breslin interviewed witnessed her father murdering her mother at the age of four.
3. They grew up in authoritarian households.   One of the actresses Breslin interviewed was forbidden to watch TV as a child due to her parents' religious restrictions.  A male porn star had a father who was a police officer.
4. They were overly sexual, even from an early age.  Some of the women Breslin spoke to said that they had fantasized about modeling for Playboy as early as age six.
5. They had relatively normal upbringings.  This, Breslin says, is far more common than most people think.  

Breslin's overall conclusion?  She says (and I fully agree) that what exactly it is that motivates people to act in pornography is not clear, and that to pretend that it's something simple is a grave mistake on the part of anti-porn advocates.

Pornography ruins the lives of its consumers.  Banning it would therefore make everybody affected by it happier.

Sure, this could happen.  There are plenty of cases of men wasting away in front of a computer monitor, completely indifferent to the world around them.  One man in Connecticut even spent in excess of $3,000/month on memberships to pornographic websites, much to the chagrin of his sexually-frustrated wife.  But this isn't grounds for banning it.

Suppose, for instance, that alcohol were banned.  This has happened before in the United States, and was called "The Noble Experiment" in some quarters.  Between the years of 1920 and 1933, the sale, manufacture, consumption, and distribution of alcohol throughout the United States was strictly prohibited, with hefty fines and jail time for violators.  Much like today's anti-pornography movement, Prohibition was pushed by an alliance of Christian radicals (including the Ku Klux Klan) and feminists (the Temperance Movement) on the grounds that alcohol, much like pornography, was responsible for nearly all the evils of society, from child abuse to rape to murder.  Despite being vetoed by President Woodrow Wilson, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on January 17, 1919, and a year later, it came into effect.  In addition to having supported its ratification, the Klan (which was at its greatest power during the Roaring Twenties) helped enforce Prohibition.

But this period in American history was by no means peaceful.  When the law does not take human nature into account, the results are tragic.  Alcohol was of course illegal, but that didn't stop people from craving it.  A whole new section of the Black Market opened; it very well may have been here that the term "bootlegging" was coined, as a favored method of smuggling alcohol was to carry bottles in the leg of one's boot.  This business was certainly lucrative, as many gangsters took on the practice of bootlegging to help their finances.  Al Capone built his entire empire--which stretched all the way from Canada to Florida--on bootlegging, and became so rich, he effectively had the entire government of Chicago in his pocket.  It was even rumored that some police officers saluted him when he drove by.  Crime had never been higher.

Mob wars related to bootlegging were not the only danger that arose as a result of Prohibition.  Unable to purchase alcohol for themselves, and wary of forming ties with gangsters, many Americans brewed their own liquor.  Not all of them were experienced distillers, and without the government performing regular inspections of manufacturing facilities and performing random tests of beverages, it was often difficult to tell the alcohol content of homemade brews.  This made for many unsafe drinks, which led to numerous deaths.  Deaths by alcohol didn't just occur due to unsafe mixtures; the taboo on liquor made the appeal even stronger, and people drank even more heavily.  When it was clear that Prohibition had not only failed to reduce crime, but had actually greatly increased it, many former advocates (including, most prominently, John Rockefeller) called for repeal of the law.  The Noble Experiment had failed.

What can we learn from Prohibition?  First, that human nature cannot be bound by law.  The Law is meaningless without force backing it, and human minds cannot be altered by force.  They can only be altered by their respective owners.  Second, we were reminded of Freud's statement that taboo increases desire.  Third, we were given a rather nasty reminder of Adam Smith's Law of Supply and Demand.  With many legitimate brewing companies put out of business, demand for alcohol increased exponentially, while the supply decreased; that combination of variables makes for a very volatile market.  Fourth, we learned that small amounts of government intervention are necessary for a healthy market.  Applying these lessons to pornography should be self-evident:  In the early Nineties, a rag-tag team of Evangelical Christians, aided by anti-porn feminists, successfully banned gas stations and convenience stores from putting pornographic magazines on their shelves.  Shortly after this, there was a surge in the production of pornographic videos, a medium in which there is a much higher potential for abuses.  If pornography were completely banned, the industry wouldn't disappear; it would go underground, and without government oversight, abuses wouldn't be rare, as they are today; they would become the norm.

Pornography gives men unhealthy sexual appetites.

The basic premise of this argument is that men who see a pornographic film will want to re-enact what they see in real life.  For example, if a man sees a woman being raped in a video (or at least pretending to be), he may want to go out and rape a real woman. While this may follow common sense, it is not consistent with available data.  Ever since the advent of the Internet (a vast majority of which contains pornography), the rate of sexual assaults against women has steadily declined.  

Why does this phenomenon exist?  A much better writer than myself--Stephen King--has a good explanation.  King wrote an essay exploring the popularity of horror films.  In it, he likened the human mind to a gigantic sewer system full of alligators.  They're always swimming around, not visible unless you look, but you know they're there.  Every time we see a horror film, we are picking up a basket of meat and throwing it into the sewer.  In essence, horror films keep the gators fed.  But why feed them?  "Because it keeps them from getting out, man," King cautions.  You can probably guess what trouble would be caused by alligators running loose in the streets.  "Horror films," King says, "Appeal to the worst in us."  And we all have our own alligators, and our own ways of feeding them.  Whether it's satisfying bodily urges to pornography, watching a horror film, or playing Grand Theft Auto, humans have ways of keeping their ugly sides in check.  Trying to starve the alligators would be disastrous.

As usual, when it comes to causing particular problems in the realm of human sexuality, pornography is not the only offender.  One of the most popular women's magazines in the United States, Cosmopolitan, publishes a new issue every month.  Many American women read it as devoutly as the Bible, and some follow it just as closely.  One of Cosmo's features that makes it so famous is its monthly collection of sex tips, which are always to be performed on a man by a woman.  But these tips are usually written by women (and what are quite clearly women posing as men), and as such are usually not very pleasurable for men (surprise, surprise).  In fact, some are downright dangerous to both parties; for instance, women are advised to shake their man's testicles like they would a pair of dice.  A viewing of just one episode of America's Funniest Home Videos should illustrate well enough why this is a bad idea.  Cosmo readers have also been advised to do such things as bite a man's scrotum, yank the hair of his crotch, and even to perform an Indian Burn on his penis.  While the first two might merely be painful, the last one could very well land a man in the hospital.  In terms of sexual pain, there's a difference between pornography and Cosmo: while pornography merely depicts it, Cosmo explicitly encourages it.  What's causing the real danger there?

And last, but not least:

Pornography is offensive.

Offensiveness is a subjective concept.  It varies greatly from person to person.  I know plenty of Christians who are not offended by the film Monty Python and the Life of Brian, and many who find it utterly offensive.  They just happen to have their own opinions, and interpret the intentions behind the same thing in different lights.

It would be dishonest of me to deny that there are many pornographic films with scenes that would offend the sensibilities of most women.  I myself have come across pornography that disgusts and offends me, and guess what?  I deal with it by simply not watching it.  Although I am offended by the bulk of feminist literature, I do not support banning it, either, as I believe that people have the right to say what they want, short of slander and libel.

What can this tell us about the attitudes of anti-porn feminists?  I have gleaned three things: 1) They believe that human nature can and should be regulated by law, and that the State has the right to interfere with people's ideas.  The last group that I encountered, real or fictional, who held those assertions were in George Orwell's novel 1984.  They called themselves the Thought Police.  2) Anti-porn feminists are only concerned about things that they think harm women.  This shows that anti-porn feminists are not really interested in female empowerment, as they support robbing women of choices.  Nor are they interested, as most feminists claim to be, in liberating both men and women from archaic gender roles--just women. 3) Anti-porn feminists are no better than the 'patriarchal males' they condemn.  Their refusal to believe that female porn stars are actually enjoying themselves is quite akin to the Victorian Era-esque denial that women were even capable of having orgasms.  Also, their desire to abolish pornography would take away women's choices.  And for what?  To take away one of the few remaining outlets men have left in which to enjoy themselves.  In a bigger picture, this suggests that the women's movement as it exists today is not about empowering women, but about retribution against men, even at the detriment of other women.  Is that feminism?
This has been sitting on my hard drive for a couple weeks, and now all my reservations about publishing it are gone.

Just to make it clear, I am NOT defending pornography. I think that a vast majority of today's porn is, quite frankly, a joke.
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Pornography is not bad in nutshell but its spread availability is. Human is a creature that tends to get a joy simpliest way possible. That's nature. If human stick on simple joys, thee can't develop more complex things up to thees potential.