Then there are the young girls who have a ‘friend with benefits’ or a ‘f**k buddy’ – a boy they like as a friend, with whom they have no-strings-attached sex. Others are attracted to, or peer pressured into, more risky situations, such as ‘randoming’, where they see a guy they like the look of but have never met, and make a beeline for him in the expectation they’ll have casual sex.
“Rainbow kiss is an oral sex party game” explains Slight, on the Net. “All the girls put on a different shade of colorful lipstick and the guy with the most colors on his dick by the end of the night usually wins a drink or something along those lines” (Slight, 2006). There are no prizes for the girls it seems.
When
Girlfriend
magazine conducted an online survey into girls and sex, it revealed that 1 in 4 participants had had sex before they were 14. Twenty-eight per cent of these girls had caught sexually transmitted diseases; 58 per cent had regretted their last sexual encounter (
Girlfriend
, February 2007, pp. 124–130). Journalist, Caitlin Flanagan, says “[w]hat’s most worrisome about this age of blasé blowjobs isn’t what the girl may catch, it’s what the girls are most certainly losing: a healthy emotional connection to their sexuality and their own desire” (Flanagan, 2006).
With the ready access young children have to porn we’re seeing an increase in sexual predators who are the same age as their victims (Hamilton, 2010, p. 64). It’s sobering to talk with professionals counselling sexual assault victims, who are now dealing with ever more incidents amongst primary school-age children. For decades, research literature has indicated that children act out behaviours they have viewed or experienced. Sexual assault units also report that girls are presenting who have been subject to the kinds of sexual assaults previously only
seen with adult women. Australian psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg, sums up the situation when he says:
One of the greatest problems we face is that many adults lack the skills, knowledge or strategies to critically analyse and understand the longer term impacts that sexualisation/pornification have on the behaviour of boys towards girls and, eventually, men towards women. The evidence is potentially one of the most toxic elements in society and it is time that those responsible for propagating this material be held accountable. When the history of public health is written, I am sure that this battle will sit alongside the struggle against the tobacco industry, infant food formula manufacturers and elements of the alcohol industry, in significance (correspondence with Hamilton, January, 2010).
One of the many outcomes of the regular consumption of porn is that often users no longer gain the satisfaction they once did with run-of-the-mill material. In a quest to experience continued arousal they begin to seek out more deviant and violent pornographic material. Gemma, a senior clinical psychologist who heads a sexual assault support team at a major hospital, spoke of her concerns about this new climate.
We see a lot of 12-to-14 year-olds, targeted by boys 17 to 18 years. These are young girls wanting to be grown up, who’re still very young and trusting, who fall prey to pre-planned situations. They’re plied with alcohol, and possibly drugs, and often raped anally. In the past it was rape by one boy, but now it’s 2 or 3 boys, and often filmed. The severity of assaults is also growing (Hamilton, interview September, 2008).
Neuroscience pulls few punches when examining the effects of porn. As medical researcher, Norman Doidge, reminds us, “[s]oftcore pornography’s influence is now most profound because, now that it is no longer hidden, it influences young people with little sexual experience and especially plastic minds, in the process of forming their sexual tastes and desires” (Doidge, 2007, p. 103).
We have to act. As writer, TV and radio host, and former presidential speechwriter, Colleen Caroll Campbell reminds us,
[i]n a society where pornography is so pervasive, it’s intimidating to face the truth about how it endangers our children, destabilizes our families and distorts our views of sex and one another. It’s easier to shout down the occasional unexpected criticism of pornography than to ponder its validity and change behaviour accordingly (Campbell, 2010).
Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, describes pornography as “sexual obesity – the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery” (Eberstadt, 2010).
Surely the measure of a healthy society is the level to which it nurtures and protects its young? The current climate is abusive to boys and girls. If we don’t speak out against the corporate sexualisation of our children and teens, and fight
the pornification of our communities, what will the landscape be like for our children’s children? How will this new generation fare as adults and parents? How will
their
relationships fare?
We need to reclaim the hearts and minds of our children, our public spaces, and control over the products, games and clothing marketed to them, so children can have healthy, stress-free childhoods, and develop a positive sense of their sexuality as teenagers. Perhaps this issue is best summed up by British philosopher and academic, Roger Scruton: “This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness (Scruton, 2007).
Bibliography
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The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph form the Frontiers of Brain Science
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Robert Jensen
Stories of a Rape Culture: Pornography as Propaganda
1
We live in a pornography-saturated culture in which women are routinely targets of sexual violence and intrusion. We live in a rape culture that is increasingly pornified. Pornography is a form of propaganda for a rape culture.
But wait – we can hear voices rising up immediately to object that pornography does not cause rape.
In simplistic terms, pornography does not cause rape. There are men who use pornography and don’t rape. There are men who rape and don’t use pornography. There was rape before pornography was widely available, and there would be rape if pornography magically disappeared tomorrow.
Pornography doesn’t cause rape, if by ‘cause’ we mean that a specific man’s specific act of sexual violence can be established as the direct result of pornography use and would not have happened if he had not used pornography.
However, a rigorous analysis of the nature and effects of human communication, including propagandistic communication, does not begin and end with simplistic assertions about mechanistic notions of cause-and-effect. In the study of propaganda, we do not ask whether one specific message, or series of messages, was the sole cause of one specific person committing one specific act. Instead we investigate the way in which the style of human communication labelled ‘propaganda’ encourages certain ways of thinking about the world and makes inviting certain behaviors that flow from those ways of thinking.
An examination of
pornography as propaganda for a rape culture
leads to more complex and productive questions. For example, how are gender, power, and sexuality typically constructed in the contemporary industrial pornography that is widely available? How do these themes support or undermine the ideology of a rape culture? By whom and how is that pornography typically used? When such material is readily available to young people, what is the effect on their sexual development? What are the effects of the habitual use of pornography on
people’s intimate experiences? Is there a relationship between those constructions and the levels of sexual intrusion and violence in contemporary culture? How is pornography racialized? And how does pornography train us to understand who we are in an industrial capitalist society?
In addressing such questions, I offer the following assumptions to situate a study of propaganda in general, and pornography as propaganda in particular:
(1) Human beings are storytelling animals; stories are a primary way we communicate what it means to be a person in the world. When we tell stories, we not only report on our experiences in the world but also contribute to a collective understanding of that world, which will influence the experiences and understandings of others. Stories matter. In any culture, the stories that people tell will reveal things about how they collectively make sense of the world, and that sense of the world will shape how people act. Stories shape attitudes, and attitudes affect behavior.
(2) In flourishing societies with a relatively egalitarian distribution of power, storytelling tends to be dialogic and creative, a way for people to engage each other with respect and explore ways of understanding the world. In contrast, in societies marked by inequality and concentrations of power, storytelling can be a vehicle to control and dominate, a way for people to shut down that dialogic and creative process in the service of maintaining or taking power. This type of human communication is called propaganda.
Special attention to propaganda is especially crucial in societies with concentrations of power that undermine the dialogic and creative aspects of human communication. In heavily mass-mediated societies such as the USA, Canada, Australia and European countries, this inquiry is vital.
Again, a comparison to make this point: when critics speak of commercial advertising as propaganda for capitalism, we are not asserting that a specific advertisement viewed by a person is the direct cause of that person’s decision to purchase a good or service. Even advertisers recognize this, reflected in the common quip, ‘We know half our ads don’t work, but we don’t know which half’. Critics cannot explain exactly how a specific advertisement or series of advertisements cause people to think of themselves as consumption machines rather than human beings. Instead, we recognize that in a larger culture which encourages that sense of self, the endless barrage of commercial advertising carrying the same message plays a role in that process.
This is the sense in which we can see pornography as propaganda for a rape culture.
Pornography
The term ‘pornography’ is used by many people to describe all sexually explicit books, magazines, movies, and Internet sites, often with a distinction made between softcore (nudity with limited sexual activity not including penetration) and hardcore (graphic images of actual, not simulated, sexual activity including penetration). Pornography also is often distinguished from erotica, with pornography used to describe material that presents sex in the context of hierarchical relationships. Laboratory studies often construct categories of pornography according to their degree of violence and degradation.
The associated terms ‘indecency’ and ‘obscenity’ have specific legal meanings. In the United States, for example, indecency concerns only broadcast television and radio, while the case of
Miller v. California
(1973) established a three-part test for obscenity in any media – material that appeals to the prurient interest (an unhealthy interest in sex); portrays sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value – and identified contemporary community standards as the measure. Pornography using children is a separate category that is banned.
In this essay, I focus on the heterosexual commercial pornography industry which produces a significant portion of the pornography available and whose codes and conventions have shaped much of the pornography produced by others.
Rape Culture
My analysis is rooted in feminist critiques of male dominance and hierarchy. By feminist, I simply mean an analysis of the ways in which women are oppressed as a class in this society – the ways in which men as a class hold more power, and how those differences in power systematically disadvantage women. Gender oppression plays out in different ways depending on social location which makes it crucial to understand the oppression of women in connection with other systems of oppression such as heterosexism, racism, class privilege, and histories of colonial and postcolonial domination.
In patriarchy, men are trained through a variety of cultural institutions to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see themselves as ‘naturally’ dominant and women as ‘naturally’ passive. Women are objectified and women’s sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate. Power is eroticized.
The predictable result of this state of affairs is a world in which violence, sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common that it
must be considered to be normal – an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of the norms. A recent review of the data by well-respected researchers concluded that in the United States, at least 1 of every 6 women has been raped at some time in her life, a figure that is now widely accepted (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2006).
The term ‘rape culture’ describes ideas and practices beyond those legally defined as rape. As one researcher suggests, we should “ … broaden the definition of violence against women to include not just violent acts, such as physical assault, sexual assault, and threats of physical and sexual assault, but also nonviolent acts, such as stalking and psychological and emotional abuse” (Tjaden, 2004, p. 1246).
I use the term ‘sexual intrusion’ to describe the range of unwanted sexual acts that women experience in contemporary society – obscene phone calls, sexual taunting on the streets, sexual harassment in schools and workplaces, coercive sexual pressure in dating, sexual assault, and violence with a sexual theme. In public lectures on these issues, I often tell the audience that I have completed an extensive scientific study on the subject and determined that the percentage of women in the United States who have experienced sexual intrusion is exactly 100%. Women understand the dark humor; no study is necessary to describe their routine collective experience.
The Ideology of Hierarchy and the Role of Propaganda
No society would let happen what happens to women, and children, if at some level it did not have contempt for them. A rape culture is a woman-hating culture. But most people’s stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in ideas of justice, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people. So, how do we explain all the violence, exploitation, and oppression? Only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths, those incapable of empathy who engage in cruel and oppressive behavior openly and with relish.
Maintaining a claim to naturalness is essential for the maintenance of unjust hierarchies, and the illegitimate authority that is exercised in them. Oppressive systems work hard to make it appear that the hierarchies – and the disparities in power and resources that flow from hierarchies – are natural and, therefore, beyond change. If men are naturally smarter and stronger than women, then patriarchy is inevitable and justifiable. If white people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than people of color, then white supremacy is inevitable and justifiable. If rich people are naturally smarter and harder working than poor people, then economic injustice is inevitable and justifiable.
One of the key functions of propaganda is the naturalizing of hierarchy and authority in the minds of people at all places in the hierarchy. For elites at the top of the hierarchy, propaganda reinforces a sense of natural superiority and justifies a sense of entitlement. For those in the middle, propaganda promotes identification with the goals of elites above and discourages solidarity with oppressed people below. And propaganda also tries to persuade those on the bottom of the hierarchies that they deserve their fate, which can create a sense of futility about the prospects for change.
The Ideology of Pornography
Pornography is one of the dominant sexual-exploitation industries in the contemporary world, along with prostitution and stripping. These are the primary ways in which objectified female bodies are presented to men for sexual pleasure, typically for profit. The vast majority of people used in these industries are girls and women.
While women in prostitution and stripping tell stories in the course of their interactions with men, it is in pornography – the mass-mediated sexual-exploitation industry – that we see the ideology of sexual exploitation most fully developed. My analysis is that pornography (used to describe the genre of sexually explicit mass media) is routinely pornographic (used in a feminist sense, to describe the naturalizing of the social subordination of women).
Any discussion of the ideology of pornography should start with a sketch of the industry. The 2 main categories in today’s pornographic movie industry (whatever its form or outlet) are ‘features’ and ‘wall-to-wall/gonzo’. Features most resemble a Hollywood movie, with plot and characters. Wall-to-wall movies are all-sex productions with no pretense of plot or dialogue. Many of these movies are shot gonzo style, in which performers acknowledge the camera and often speak directly to the audience. In addition, there are specialty titles – movies that feature sadomasochism and bondage, fetish material, transsexuals – that fill niche markets. Heterosexual material dominates the pornography industry, with a thriving gay male pornography market and a smaller lesbian pornography market (much of it for a heterosexual male audience).
The majority of hardcore movies include oral, vaginal, and anal sex, almost always ending with ejaculation on the woman. A 1993 study of pornographic heterosexual videotapes (Brosius et al., 1993) found that the tapes typically presented a world in which women were younger, more sexually active, and more expressive than men; women were frequently depicted in subordinate positions (e.g. kneeling down in front of a partner); and sexual contact was usually between
strangers. A 2007 content analysis of 50 best-selling adult videos (Wosnitzer and Bridges, 2007) revealed a similar pattern of inequality and violence. Nearly half of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression (for example, name calling or verbal threats), while over 88% showed physical aggression (including hair pulling, open-hand slapping or spanking, choking, and whipping). Seventy percent of aggressive acts were perpetrated by men and 87% of acts were committed against women. Fewer than 5% of the aggressive acts provoked a negative response from the target, such as requests to stop. This pornographic ‘reality’ was further highlighted by the relative infrequency of more positive behaviors (verbal compliments, embracing, kissing, or laughter), portrayed in fewer than 10% of the scenes.
As pornography depicting conventional sexual acts has become commonplace, gonzo producers have pushed the limits of social norms and women’s bodies with painful and body-punishing pornsex (Dines, 2010). Nearly every scene ends with the ‘cum shot’ or ‘money shot’ – male ejaculation into a woman’s mouth or on her face or body. As one pornography director put it, “it’s like a dog marking its territory” (Sun and Picker, 2008). Another veteran pornographic director and actor put it more bluntly: “I’d like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women … [but] the most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they can’t have” (Stoller and Levine, 1993, p. 22).
Combining such quantitative studies with qualitative analyses using more interpretive methods (Dworkin, 1979; Jensen, 2007), the main propagandist messages of pornographic films can be summarized as: