Draft
Last Edit: 28 March 2013
Draft
I often hear that women actively seek “body-punishing sex,” talk about liking it and desiring it, and write about it in nonpornographic, sex-related blogs, periodicals, and other forms of media. Sometimes I hear people say that degrading acts of sex can be intimate. Why is this perception wrong, and how has pornography made people think this way? Why is this an unhealthy perception of sex? Because it distorts what women want, who they are, and the kind of sex they want to have. I don‘t want to say there‘s nobody who wants that kind of sex. In any society, you‘re going to have variations on what people want. The problem with pornography is that it normalizes that which is a minority preference for many women. That‘s all you see in pornography. You never see anybody say, ―Let‘s hold, let‘s kiss, let‘s do all of these things.‖ Everyone in pornography wants it as hard and fast as possible. So what they do is they normalize something very unusual in the culture. The more men look at pornography, the more they actually think that this is what women want, especially because they have no counterbalance to it. There is very little sex education today in this country outside of pornography that really speaks to boys and young men. I’m sure you’ve heard the common response that “no one is forcing a gun on women to perform these acts, and they are doing it by choice.” Why is that a common justification for porn, and what is wrong with that argument? I think that‘s a very apolitical and de-contextualized understanding of choice. The majority of women in pornography—and it‘s true in prostitution as well—are not women who have medical and law degrees, and they‘re not choosing between practicing medicine or going into pornography. The women are usually working class women who are looking at minimum-wage jobs and who have been sold an image of pornography, that it‘s glamorous. They see people like Jenna Jameson or Sasha Grey with all of their pop culture celebrity status. Recently, Jameson was on Oprah Winfrey, and there was no real analysis of what happens to women in pornography. What they did is glamorize it by showing the wealth Jameson accumulated. What they don‘t show is that for every Jameson there are tens of thousands of women who end up poor, drug-addicted, incur bodily problems and diseases. And often a lot of the women are there for only a short time. They have a very short shelf life, and many of them end up in brothels of Nevada. They don‘t end up in a huge mansion with lots of fancy cars and beautiful clothes. Another common attitude or belief boys and men have toward pornography is “Well, that’s just a fantasy and I wouldn’t act that