I find it so depressing to know that as soon as men invent or gain access to a new communication technology, they immediately use it to increase tenfold their production and consumption of porn. In the book I’m reading about feminism and technology, the author spends a while explaining how revolutionary the telephone has been for women, allowing them to escape the isolation & confinement of their nuclear households and increasing their access to the outside world and to other women (friends, relatives) in a way that was harder for men to supervise (which is of course why the industry men who developed it spent decades loudly condemning women’s use of the telephone for “trivial gossip”.)
But then she has to concede that this new technology, like most others, also affected women negatively because men immediately started using it for porn (& to harm women, since that is the main purpose of porn). “The diffusion of the telephone facilitated the intrusion of pornography into the home, not only through intrusive and abusive telephone calls made by men to women, but also through the development of sexual services over the phone.” The same thing happened with the internet of course, but before the internet there was also the French Minitel service, which was a kind of small TV screen linked to your telephone that allowed for proto-emailing and instant messaging—and a study by the French government found that the Minitel “vastly contributed to the propagation of hardcore pornography”, notably the sale and purchase of paedophilic content.
I saw a post once where a feminist said she almost wished the Internet had never been invented, because of the explosion in porn it facilitated, and I understand the sentiment, but it’s not limited to the internet, it’s a recurring and pretty much inevitable phenomenon, since porn seems to be men’s primordial interest. It happened with the printing press, with the daguerreotype, the invention of movies of course, now virtual reality… Dworkin called pornography the propaganda tool of woman-hatred, so of course it makes sense that every new information & communication technology men develop always translates to them as better access to ever-increasing amounts of porn.
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