Men Against Pornography

Ok, we've been here before, another article pointing out the range of deeply questionable aspects of pornography and specifically focusing on male feminist objections and reservations about the sex industry. However a couple of things that hadn't occured to me before needs highlighting:

Kimmel remains open-minded about pornography – what's needed is a much broader conversation about it, he says – but the picture he paints in Guyland is nonetheless troubling. "Pornotopia is the place where [young men] can get even," he writes, "where women get what they 'deserve' and the guys never have to be tested, or face rejection. And so the pornographic universe becomes a place of homosocial solace, a refuge from the harsh reality of a more gender equitable world than has ever existed. It's about anger at the loss of privilege – and an effort to restore men's unchallenged authority. And, it turns out, that anger is worse among younger men."

Which is, in hindsight really obvious but for some reason just hadn't clicked. Privilege is hella addictive and as women slowly gain more rights young men who exist in a culture largely shaped by total male dominance are feeling deeply short changed by the deficit between the extremely easy and privileged life society leads them to expect and the merely quite easy and privileged life they receive. They're angry and want to see those awful bitches punished.

Secondly:

The anti-sexist educator and activist Jackson Katz, author of the 2006 book The Macho Paradox, suggests the porn industry has an obvious interest in undermining intimacy between men and women – if couples were to find sexual fulfillment together, the market would plummet. And this opposition to intimacy, says Jensen, helps explain why porn has become so cruel, degrading and humiliating – why, to quote Martin Amis, it has become "a parody of love" addressing itself "to love's opposites, which are hate and death".

Which pretty mind blowing and hard to deny. Pornographers do not want their audience to be happy or content in any way or they'll stop buying. So as with all Patriarchy while women suffer most men suffer too with the exception of the tiny elite who actually benefit from the deeply unfair system we exist in.

Does this mean pornography in all cases is unacceptable? Maybe I'm not sure but as long as porn exists both in the mainstream and and unquestioned and simultaneously a "dirty" but glamorised production process that not nearly enough attention is paid to and not enough scepticism is used against it will have no hope to be anything other than a bad thing.

Then again in a world where chocolate is made from cocoa picked by child slaves and fashionable clothes are made in 3rd world sweatshops focusing on the negative aspects of one specific capitalist product is probably myopic. Pornography is a deeply unpleasant business but it is a business and not that different from many others in its' methods.