{"id":74468,"date":"2016-06-06T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=74468"},"modified":"2016-06-06T13:14:48","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T12:14:48","slug":"pornography-is-more-than-just-sexual-fantasy-its-cultural-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/06\/pornography-is-more-than-just-sexual-fantasy-its-cultural-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Pornography Is More Than Just Sexual Fantasy: It\u2019s Cultural Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"porno\"<\/a><\/p>\n

27 May 2016 – <\/em>In March 2016, the U.K. government published its second National Strategy to End Volence Against Women and Girls<\/a>. This is an extremely important lever for U.K. campaigners against pornography and its harms, as it recognizes that young people in particular have unprecedented access to online content and that some of that content may of course be harmful. A current government inquiry into sexual harassment in schools<\/a> and a new cross-party campaign to tackle misogynist abuse online<\/a> have all highlighted the ways in which pornography contributes to and legitimizes negative attitudes with very real impacts on the lives of women and girls.<\/p>\n

It is crucial to understand pornography as a form of violence against women. Overwhelmingly, content is produced and consumed by men, with strikingly consistent themes. The content categories of two of the most popular tube sites \u2014 XHamster and Pornhub \u2014 reveal a dismal pattern of endless scenarios of male dominance and female subordination, categorized by specific acts, female body parts, race and age.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a great awareness of cultural theory to grasp the social meaning of images of women being repeatedly penetrated in every orifice to a chorus of \u201cslut,\u201d \u201cbitch\u201d and \u201cwhore.\u201d It does, however, require a willingness to think beyond the rhetoric of \u201cchoice,\u201d \u201cempowerment\u201d and \u201cfree speech\u201d that is invariably used by industry representatives to justify such content. This rhetoric attempts to distract attention from the nature of mainstream pornography and to frame those who object to its harms as censorious, illiberal and, of course, the old favorite \u2014 \u201cprudish.\u201d However, an examination of mainstream content reveals these arguments as little more than a defense of vested economic interests.<\/p>\n

First and foremost, mainstream pornography consists of socially sanctioned acts of direct violence against women. What would be seen as sexual violence and brutality in other contexts is par for the course in pornography, as female survivors will confirm<\/a>. However, pornography does not simply function as an arena in which direct violence is sanctioned and routinized. It also functions as a form of what sociologist Johan Galtung terms \u201dcultural violence.\u201d<\/a> Exercised in the stories a culture tells itself \u2014 its texts, its images \u2014 it is \u201can aspect of the symbolic sphere that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.\u201d One of the things that pornography does extremely efficiently is provide an endless flow of narratives of women being treated as objects, violated or \u201cdone to.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a growing body of evidence implicating the consumption of extreme pornography in some of the most heinous cases of sexual violence, rape and murder<\/a>. But the cultural violence of pornography is usually far more mundane. Porn narratives are not simply those accessed by users; they also find their way into mainstream cultural images: the jeans advertisement<\/a> that replicates a gang bang scenario; the perfume advertisement<\/a> mimicking the penetration of a woman\u2019s shaved vulva; the underwear advertisement<\/a> that utilizes an \u201cup-skirting\u201d image. What these kinds of images do \u2014 and there is certainly no shortage of them, on billboards, in magazines, online \u2014 is cumulatively to tell us what women are about: that the defining feature of women\u2019s bodies is that they are available and violable. Not only does pornography entail very direct forms of violence in its production; it also, in a world where violence against women is endemic<\/a>, serves to naturalize and normalize such violence. As Galtung says, \u201cCultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right \u2014 or at least not wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who claim that pornography is simply \u201cfantasy\u201d with no bearing on reality will have a hard time explaining the prevalence of pubic hair removal<\/a> among young women in Western cultures; the dramatic increase in the demand for labiaplasty<\/a>; or the fact that anal sex has increasingly become part of the heterosexual repertoire, despite both young men and women expecting it to be painful and unpleasant<\/a> for the woman. It is singularly unconvincing to argue that pornography is not influencing current sexual norms, and that those sexual norms do not primarily involve the objectification and violation of women\u2019s bodies. Given the prevalence of pornography and pornified images in our image-saturated culture, one may as soon argue that being raised in an English-speaking country has no bearing on whether or not one grows up speaking English.<\/p>\n

So, what do we do about it? In the U.K., it is vital that we use current anti-female violence policy approaches to lobby for far more action on pornography\u2019s prevalence and accessibility. The National Strategy is an important start, but its current proposals are far from adequate: For example, they only aim to build \u201cresilience\u201d among young people through improving sex and relationships education in schools, rather than to curtail or regulate the industry in any serious way. And they do not address the porn consumption of adult men as problematic. Campaign groups need to participate in consultations on sexual violence and highlight the ways in which the cultural violence of pornography is harming all women and girls.<\/p>\n

In the end though, policy approaches and technical solutions can only go so far. Fascinatingly, there is evidence here in the U.K. of a growing, revitalized radical feminist movement and distinctly more revolutionary responses to porn culture. A small but discernible minority of young women are now fed up with negotiating sexual harassment,\u00a0\u201clad culture\u201d<\/a> and relationships with men who see nothing wrong with masturbating to images of women\u2019s degradation. They are, in fact, beginning to reject relationships with men altogether, in favor of relationships with women. Perhaps the re-ignition of a lesbian feminist movement will prove to be the pathway to liberation from porn culture for a new generation of women.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Other Perspectives:<\/em><\/p>\n

Mireille Miller-Young: Porn isn\u2019t a public health hazard. It\u2019s a scapegoat.<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew Schmitz:\u00a0The case for banning pornography<\/a><\/p>\n

Jillian C. York:\u00a0Who defines pornography? These days, it\u2019s Facebook.<\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Jensen:\u00a0How porn makes inequality sexually arousing<\/a><\/p>\n

Alexander Rhodes:\u00a0The conversation we\u2019re not having about porn<\/a><\/p>\n

Haley Halverson:\u00a0The anti-porn movement is growing. The public is just catching up.<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr. Julia Long teaches Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is a feminist activist and campaigner, and the author of \u201c<\/em>Anti-Porn: The Resurgence of Anti-Pornography Feminism<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 washingtonpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pornography does not simply function as an arena in which direct violence is sanctioned and routinized. It also functions as a form of what sociologist Johan Galtung terms \u201dcultural violence.\u201d As he says, \u201cCultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right \u2014 or at least not wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sexualities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}