What Porn Taught a Generation of Women

> “Porn trains.” For the past few decades, it has trained men to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize. But it has trained women, too. In 2013, the social psychologist Rachel M. Calogero found that the more women were prone to self‐objectification—the defining message of porn and aughts mass media—the less inclined they were toward gender-based activism and the pursuit of social justice. This, to me, goes a long way toward explaining what happened to women and power in the early 21st century. For decades, male supremacy was being coded into our culture, in ways that were both outlandish and so subtle, they were hard to question

I find that to be a highly suspect claim that it's porn of the last century or past few decades that's been both objectifying women and encoded "male supremacy" into our culture.

That just seems like a wilful desire to ignore history and makes it really hard for me take these generalizations that "porn is bad" and "male sexual desires are bad" discussions seriously.

My wife was raped by her grandfather repeatedly from age 8 until age 13. I learned this when she was 40 - she had never told anyone before. She then went into therapy for many years while I commenced years of research into sexual abuse.

I learned there have been 100 years of studies all with consistent results confirming the same basic statistic: one of every three girls silently suffer with having been subjected to serious sexual abuse by the age of 18. I thought about that as I attended each of my four daughters high school graduations... looking at my daughter and their girlfriends as they stood on the stage, saddened by the realization that one third of them had been subjected to long term sexual rape. One third of them who would suffer silently for most of their life (that's the other thing I learned: these studies are forced to rely upon anonymous responses from women - who rarely tell anyone about their abuse - they are so full of shame).

What outraged me then - and still outrages me today - is how such information could have been hidden from a highly educated trial attorney such as myself. As it continues to be to this current day.

That is what I thought about as I read this article. A female author writing a story of female objectification and not once mentioning the widespread ongoing raping of female children right under our noses.

As aside, one out of six boys is likewise subjected to serious sexual abuse. Unlike girls, whose sexual abusers are overwhelmingly (95+%) male, the abusers of boys are 'only' 66+% male.

Is the suggestion that Porn creates this dominant male patriarchal society through its influence? That's kinda cart before the horse IMO. I think it hard to think of objectification without the fashion that is often the wrapper in the transaction where the woman is objectified. If Porn is advertising for the patriarchy, we can't forget fashion. High heels, red lipstick, garter belts and so on go part and parcel with Porn. All things created from the patriarchal machine do not exist in a vacuum. They work together to reinforce the system. If the real problem is smoking, it's the cigarette not the billboard that is the problem.

Don't get me wrong, Porn is not worthy of a defense. As an industry, it often mistreats and abuses it's subjects. Aesthetically most of it is bankrupt -- a documentation of depravity. However, provided it is legal, it is an expression of free speech featuring consenting adults. We may want to ban it, but, as we are discovering in the authoritarian times we live in, censorship is a slippery slope. We ask to take down pornhub today, it's vox tomorrow...

Gender politics are a complex topic that our society has been ignoring for a long time and though many on the right are conditioned to tune it out, we really need to find a way to have these conversations without superficial finger pointing.