Heterosexual Guy Gives Jensen's Anti-Porn Book Great Review!

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Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity



September 13 2007


This book by Robert Jensen is one of those books that are difficult to describe, you simply have to read it. But since that would be much too easy as a review comment, I will attempt to articulate how I understand the book's message.

As a White, heterosexual man living in the US I could related to much of what Jensen had to say, both about his own personal struggles with pornography and the fact that pornography as an industry has moved from the margins of society and become quite mainstream. Another aspect of Jensen's book that is very important is his insistence on not just critiquing pornography, but male consumption of pornography and how that influences men and our ability, or inability, to have healthy relationships with women.

The author begins the book by discussing how he understands both masculinity and a working definition of pornography. With masculinity Jensen tries to look at how men are socialized to embrace behaviors and attitudes of domination and control. Men are taught from and very early age that to be masculine means to be in control and always assume that what we do is more important than what women do. This notion of superiority is not only taught, it is nurtured and rewarded by other men, social institutions, and in cultural entities like entertainment media.

Jensen then tried to present a much more comprehensive explanation of what pornography is. Many people in debating pornography want to discuss it as a free speech issue or as just another form of eroticism. Jensen looks at pornography through a feminist lens and presents it as a form of men's cruelty towards women and how men often derive pleasure from this cruelty. To support this argument Jensen critiques the current and most popular videos and websites that men consume. His critique of these videos and websites has three areas of research: textual analysis - what is the ideology conveyed by the product; the political economy - the production, financing and profiting of pornography: and reception studies - how do people use the product and what effect does it have on their lives?

At some level Jensen should be saluted for engaging in the difficult task of having to look at all this pornography and provide some analysis, so that the rest of us don't have to do it. One important aspect of what the author points out is that the evolution of pornography and how it is produced and consumed will ultimately lead to more violent and degrading forms. This is one of the consequences of living in the digital age. With the Internet, both images and streamed video provide the pornography industry the capacity to provide consumers of pornography and endless stream of images of women being degraded by men. Media researchers have argued for years that the constant exposure to images and messages of violence has serious consequences, such as the normalizing of violence, which means that seeing people murdered, brutalized, even decapitated is no big deal.


This normalizing of increasingly graphic violence has meant that consumers of media violence are willing to look at even more graphic depictions of murder and rape. The evolution of pornography is doing the same thing according to Jensen, with more stark representation of sexualized violence. This is an important aspect of the research that Jensen conducted because he did not select "movies from the sadomasochism or bondage categories, or from fringe sub-genres such as urination or defecation movies." He chose material that is seen as "mainstream" in the pornography world.

In addition to the author's critique of the most popular, mainstream pornography, he cites firsthand sources, both producers and those who "perform" in the films. He quotes porn director Jules Jordan as saying:



"One of the things about today's porn and the extreme market, so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I'm always trying to figure out ways to do something differently. But it seems everybody wants to see a girl doing double penetration now or a gang-bang. For certain girls, that's great, and I like to see that for certain people, but a lot of fans are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff. It's definitely brought porn somewhere, but I don't know where it's headed from there."



Even those in the industry acknowledge the extreme nature of the production and reflect some sense of confusion about where it all leads.
There are plenty of examples from the pornography Jensen looked at in his study that he references in the book, but his emphasis is primarily on trying to understand the men who consume pornography. The author argues that since men who consume pornography have no frame of reference, no contextual understanding of the production of pornography, they assume that what is happening to women in pornography is what they want. Consumers of pornography are likely to believe that women want violent sex, want multiple partners at the same time, and want to be dominated and degraded. This unfortunately is how more and more men view "sex" and the role of women in their lives. When women challenge or won't conform to the role that pornography presents them, they are seen as cold or as "bitches."


So how do men overcome these dynamics and how do we all come to terms with the power of pornography in our lives. Jensen says that some people, particularly those who take a moralist approach to pornography advocate that it is not "manly to consume pornography." We see this notion coming from the Christian community and groups like the Promise Keepers. What Jensen argues is significantly different. Jensen believes that the task of men is to try to be more human. "Our goal should not be to redefine masculinity, but to abolish it.


Attempts to identify and valorize alternative masculine traits add to, rather than detract from, men's capacity to move away from a position of domination." This is a similar position taken by John Stoltenberg in his book Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. While some men may not agree with Jensen's conclusion about masculinity, they will have a difficult time defending the production and consumption of pornography if they dare to pick this book up and read it.

Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, (South End Press, 2007).

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[fullhumanity]

This was a great review by a heterosexual guy of Robert Jensen's great important book,Getting Off:Pornography & The End Of Masculinity it's a real shame nobody read this post and commented all this time!