Pornography and Its Effects

Pornography's Impact on Students

• Students raised on internet pornography have different perspectives on sex.
• Pornography can shape expectations and behaviors in real-life sexual encounters.

Anti-Porn Feminists and Pornography

• Anti-porn feminists argue pornography leads to negative treatment of women.
• MacKinnon: Pornography consumers may become epistemically incapable of seeing women as their potential equals.
• Dworkin (1993): Porn wasn't pervasive enough to have widespread negative effects.

Studies on Pornography Consumption

• 2010 meta-analysis: Significant relationship between pornography consumption and attitudes supporting violence against women.
• Men who watch porn frequently are less likely to support affirmative action for women and empathize with rape victims.
• Critics argue correlation isn't causation; those predisposed to violence are more likely to watch porn.

Pornography as an Authority

• Porn functions as a normative standard of sex.
• Boys treat porn as an authority on how to have sex.
• Girls recognize porn's influence on boys' perceptions and expectations of sex.
• Anti-porn feminists: Pornography performs the speech act of licensing the subordination of women.

Power and Authority in the Internet Age

• The internet has blurred the distinction between power and authority.
• Platforms for speech are now overabundant, infinitely available, and practically free.
• Authority porn has is granted by those who watch it: by the boys and men who trust porn to tell them what’s doing’.
• The porn star Stoya acknowledge responsibility of shaping young minds because of nonfunctional sex education.

Sex Education and Pornography

• Students propose battling bad speech with better speech.
• They blame inadequate sex education for the authority pornography wields.
• British mandatory curriculum broadened to include same-sex relationships, sexual assault, and ‘porn literacy’.
• Girls who have abstinence education are more likely to have sex for the !rst time with a signi!cantly older partner, and more likely to describe their !rst time having sex as unwanted.

The Power of Film

• Filmed pornography trains the psyche, forming powerful associations between arousal and selected stimuli.
• Filmed pornography reinforces and reproduces the social meaning assigned by patriarchy to sexual difference.
• Mainstream pornography offers the pleasures of ego-identification.
• Pornography doesn't linger on the man's face, camera's positioned to replicate his point of view.

Feminist and Indie Pornography

• Feminist and indie pornography resist hegemonic understandings of which bodies and acts are arousing and whose pleasure matters.
• Erika Lust's films are beautiful to look at, narratively and emotionally complex and driven by an egalitarian ethos of pleasure seeking.
• Shine Louise Houston is a black queer porn director.
• Houston's actors decide what it is they want to do together instead of following a script.

Conclusion

• The demand for better representation leaves in place the logic of the screen, according to which sex must be mediated.
• Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only a programmed tape loop repeating in the narcoleptic mind.
• Sex education would seek to endow young people with an emboldened sexual imagination with the capacity to bring forth new meanings and new forms.
• Sex can remain violent, selfish, and unequal or can be something more joyful, more equal, freer.