“I’ve always been amazed at how many men write urgent and impassioned defenses of pornography. Aren’t they embarrassed? How do they do it without feeling like wankers? I mean, when you get down to it, these men are using language like “lovers of freedom” and “sexual liberationists” and “supporters of sexual freedom” to describe themselves, but we’re not talking about them defending something important like their community and its access to food, clothing, and shelter. They’re not defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They’re not even defending sex. They’re calling themselves lovers of freedom because they’re passionately defending their right to use masturbation aids. They’re passionately defending the right of members of an oppressor class to use photos of naked women, who are members of an oppressed class, for the purpose of more easily jerking off. Let’s do a little risk/reward analysis. The risk is that these men are contributing to the systematic eroticized domination of women that has been going on in patriarchy for the last several thousand years. The risk is that they’re contributing to the objectification of women through their perception of women as sex objects rather than as full beings. The risk is that when we live in a rape culture where women are constant targets of sexual harassment and assault, and when this culture has a several thousand year history of rape and other forms of sexual terrorism and enslavement, the creation and consumption of pornography at the very least runs the risk of acting as propaganda for, continuing, facilitating, and exacerbating these ongoing patterns of perceiving women as sexual objects. That’s the risk. The reward? Guilt-free use of masturbation tools. The men who defend pornography aren’t even defending masturbation; no anti-porn activists I know say no one should masturbate. At the very least, the risk/reward ratio in the pornography debate is extremely high, with a primary risk being that lives of those in the less powerful class are harmed and a secondary risk being the continuation of some of the worst parts of patriarchy; and the primary reward being tools to be used by those in the more powerful class to masturbate. That’s the essence of oppression. That’s the essence of rape culture. That’s the essence of patriarchy. That’s the mindset that’s killing the planet. That is the essence of this culture: comforts or elegancies for an oppressor class at the expense of an oppressed class.”
origamiaround
snowghoul
germansingergirl
