Dunbar
I used to do a lot of news and political blogging, back when I was in an abusive relationship. Flint was all about politics, so it was a safe place to channel all my fear and hope and need for intellectual stimulation. It was also a really easy way to deflect questions about why I looked so fucked-up today: “Oh, I’m just really upset about Valerie Plame, you know. You mean you’re not losing sleep over it, too?”
About the time I started this blog, when it was just a wee thing on MySpace, fucking up Flint’s style, I dropped the political stuff for really personal stuff. Which, you know, the personal is political and all, and I’ve really come to understand that better during this time of massive self-focus. Gotta fix your own backyard before you go about fixing anybody else’s.
So, in general, I don’t comment on current news stories. I may end up writing a post about thoughts that have been triggered by a recent news story, but I don’t do any kind of political or news analysis anymore. I don’t have a rule about it or anything; I just usually feel like other people are handling that end of it quite well, and I handle my end of things, which is dealing with myself.
But there’s a thing I want to post today. Before this blog got popular, I probably wouldn’t have. But now there are people who are reading, and I feel like I’ve got some ability to make a difference here. Some ability to raise awareness on something that probably isn’t getting a lot of mainstream play. I don’t have any savvy commentary to add. No analysis. This is just what happens when you don’t value people. This is what happens when there are some people that can be abused for free and some that can’t.
You get Dunbar.
Trigger warning. Trigger warning times infinity.
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I find it funny that you posted this this weekend, because it is your blog in general that actually made me think twice about the public’s insane reaction to the otherwise yawn-inducing stupidity at the Video Music Awards last Sunday (Black peril? In 2009? Really?)
In short, you have my permission – and we all know how much that counts for – to skip news and politics because you make your readers look carefully and differently at these things anyway.
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Good God…
Well, at least I’m sure those rapists hadn’t seen any of the current type of hard-core porn there is online! I mean, none of THAT would ever support, suggest, or condone vicious gang rapes or any type of sexual assault! Right..?
Probably been spooning online porn into their heads since they were kids. I don’t suggest this is the only thing that turns a rapist into a rapist, but I don’t think it gives any counter argument. I used to work in a facility with teenage, convicted sex offenders. Porn was totally prohibited, even for the young men over 18. Why? Because, those boys reported using lots of porn, and that it stimulated them and taught them that it was okay to use others (women and children) for sex. I really, really worry about the crop of 9-11 year olds growing up right now who are being introduced to porn at that age, which is about the average for first using/viewing porn. I worry about all of us.
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Google “porn up, rape down”. It’s pretty debatable that porn actually has any effect on rape. (Penn & Teller: Bullshit has a good episode on the War On Porn.)
I really think that the only people who would get that kind of message from porn are people who would believe it anyway regardless. People who are just messed up in the head and society reinforces it. Virtually /everyone/ looks at porn and yet virtually everyone doesn’t rape.
Then again, I *could* just be defensive about porn because I like it, damnit.
(18 year old girl, btw.)
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I’m a 42 year old woman (don’t know how this is relevant, but you felt a need to mention age/gender) and I’ve been through the porn wars in the 80′s and 90′s. Thanks for trying to educate me. In today’s world, there are plenty of rapes that go unreported. Plenty are “unfounded” by the police. There seems to be an upsurge in sexism noted by many, an upsurge in lack of respect for women, lack of understanding of the effects of rape on women by the police and those in the legal professions. The rough treatment many girls and women are getting in courtrooms most likely scares girls and women out of even reporting their rapes. So how does one know how many rapes there really are? That said, over the summer a report came out that rapes are actually increasing in number.
No, virtually “everyone” doesn’t use porn. But your argument also falls flat when you consider the effect of orgasm (lots of wonderful chemical reactions) on retention of the message. I’m not saying porn causes rape, but the message that is being absorbed when people are orgasming to a woman being abused is pretty intense. If advertizers spend millions on advertizing, you know it’s because putting out messages on TV, the internet, radios, billboards works! Add an orgasm to the message being advertized (that women enjoy being objectified, that they enjoy being abused and disrespected), and you’re likely to get a very strong response.
Way back in my undergrad years I did a years’ research on how porn affects attitudes. You know some of it, I suppose. That viewing porn causes a coarsening of attitudes towards rape victims. That’s just part of it. Porn has a very influence on attitudes, because along with the incredible reward of an orgasm, one is imprinting in their minds the image and the attitude towards women projected by the porn. So perhaps there is no absolute “porn causes rape,” but there absolutely is a “porn lowers the threshold of what is seen as being abusive towards women.” So while it may not directly cause rape, it does appear that porn affects the ability of users to empathize with a woman in pain.
That said, porn is a blueprint for rape. These guys probably had lowered inhibitions about hurting someone, lowered empathy, and while this does not cause rape, it appears that it absolutely lays a foundation for abusiveness towards women and with opportunity, some will respond to that lessening of empathy by actually abusing a woman.
My argument today is a bit “off,” because I have a baby fussing here in her little jumperoo and it’s a bit hard to concentrate! : ) But this is a general outline of what I’m trying to say.
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I thought it was relevant to mention that I was female and not the normal male porn demographic?
I would be interested to see those studies.
I should probably write something more in-depth but there’s too much other bad stuff currently in my head to think very hard about this sorry.
I’ve seen the argument that if people can masturbate to jsut the fantasy of something they actually want to do they don’t need to go out and do it as much?
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I’m with RadFemPornBshr. Porn – or at least much of the porn on the market, mainstream porn does normalise the abuse and degradation of women. It does, therefore, lead to a lack of respect for and a lack of empathy towards/with women. It does contribute towards women being seen as objects
While the majority of guys who watch violent or degrading porn may not actually abduct a women who they don’t know and violently rape her they will possibly, probably hassle their wives and girlfriends to perform, or have performed upon them, some of the acts seen in those films. Or force these acts upon their partners. Most rapes, after all occur between people who know each other.
As a woman, it freaks me out that so much of this hardcore porn is being normalised. Especially because sex and orgasm are so powerful.
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: What do you make of women who enjoy porn, not only porn but violent porn that includes violence towards women in the form of rape/bondage/S&M, etc? There is a large component of woman who enjoy rape fantasies or cum watching this kind of porn, but these same woman still find rape utterly disgusting and possibly one of the worst things that could ever happen to any woman.
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While I disagree with RadFem on a lot of her post, no, that argument is nonsense.
Think about it: when people leave the theater after watching, oh, Kung Fu Lightsaber Hero Butt-Kickers Part III, are they quiet and spent? Relaxed? Or are they jumping around doing fake kung fu and talking about how awesome the lightsaber duel at the end was?
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“I’ve seen the argument that if people can masturbate to jsut the fantasy of something they actually want to do they don’t need to go out and do it as much? ”
I’m an 18 year old girl too, btw
Sorry to use this blog to respond to something in the comments, but I would just like to point out that nobody needs to “go out and do [their fantasy]” and that research has shown that with the introduction of porn shops (and strip clubs) into towns the figures for rape increase. In a recent high-profile case we had here in the UK an 18 year old girl was raped and strangled. Investigations revealed the murderer had been visiting online chat forums to discuss and exchange his rape fantasies for the past 8 years, getting more and more confident that his fantasies were normal, and enjoying a sense of community with those he met online. He also watched more and more violent porn that was shared on this site. The very accessible porn he was watching- coupled with this sense of normalisation of his rape fantasies- was said to have been a major factor in his decision to commit this crime.
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Seeing as we are part of a subordinate sex class we internalise the connection between pleasure and our own degradation from an early age – that’s why porn has this effect on us. We also get dudely approval for being into porn.
When we’ve been raped, rape fantasies are pretty common – because in the fantasy WE are the ones in control.
Just because there is no direct link between porn and rape doesn’t mean there is no link at all. The normalisation of sexual violence and the degradation of women absolutely does effect men’s attitudes to us, to all of us. Even as far back as the late 70s psych studies were showing this.
I know I wouldn’t want to say be interviewed for a job by a guy who has last night watched “Anally-Ripped Whores” or “Cum-Drinking Sluts”, let alone be trying to report my rape to a male cop who was also watching that stuff.
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Linda–your point re: the job interview is well-taken. But I have to disagree with the idea that sexual interest in control or submission fantasies is always tied to social conditioning. Everyone, male and female, has serious chemical responses to pain, to peril and to combat, and for some it kicks right into the part of the brain associated with sexual pleasure. My first experience with sexual arousal was when I was four, playing some game with another little girl, and was “captured”. Peril–real and fantasy–has always held a sexual component for me, and that’s just not something that is culturally conditioned or will ever go away, any more than a pyromaniac’s fascination with flame will.
I think one of the biggest problems with porn is that it normalizes the link between violence and sex. Which is not to say that the bdsm community ought not be accepted–just that the larger community shouldn’t superimpose the violence/arousal connection on human sexuality in general. I suppose the analogy with foot fetishism is a good one: some people naturally have that interest, and that’s fine. But when it becomes a cultural expectation that results in harm to a group of people (cf foot-binding, a case of foot-fetishism run amok), there’s something very wrong. When the porn-rape-culture tells men that women get off on force, that refusal is part of sex play, or that Real Men don’t take no for an answer, that’s a deadly serious problem.
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**trigger warning**
Also wanted to add a second example re: porn and normalization of rape. The recent event at Hofstra was a rather horrifying example of what can happen when violent sexual behaviors are mainstreamed.
There are certainly women who enthusiastically participate in group sex with five men. Yet that particular sex act is rooted in a fantasy of gang rape and it is definitely in the category of sexual play that requires trust, preplanning, rules, boundaries, safe words and possibly a referee to ensure that it does not, in fact, become rape. Because the sexual power balance is so clearly in favor of the men, there must be a mechanism in place whereby the woman can safely refuse to continue and be certain she her wishes are respected. It is NOT the sort of sex that can be performed safely by a bunch of drunk teenagers at a party.
Yet five drunk college students who’ve seen this sort of thing in porn might not be experienced enough to think, “Hey, might there be an element of coercion in the number of men and the isolated location?” The woman might feel she’s unable to stop what’s happening and that she’s at risk if she does. She might freeze up. She might do her best to accommodate the men out of fear. She might be raped, while the drunk men involved are under the impression that everyone has just lived out a cool sexual fantasy. That doesn’t change what happened: if the woman is having sex because she fears what will happen if she doesn’t, she’s being raped. Yet the rape might not have occurred if the men involved weren’t basically conditioned to think that this sort of thing was okay, common, what happens at frat parties (girls gone wild), and welcomed.
(I should add that I am using the Hofstra incident as a jumping-off point for my own thoughts on the matter, not making a statement about what happened, since I have no specific information about that.)
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Wait, this happened in 2007?
I am struck by a blow of ‘what the fuck?’ since I had never heard of this before.
Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
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