by MaggieH » Wed Aug 15, 2007 4:21 am
Here are some of the many quotes I like:
"I expected long drawn-out multiple orgasms with women babbling deliriously, thanking you as they fainted or died in blissful exhaustion... These expectations didn't come from conversations with the guys. Porn taught me everything I "knew" and taught me how to make it real. The woman I was chatting with had no idea at first she had to measure up to the dozens of pets, playmates, bunnies, pieces of tail I had pored over and fantasized about this past week. They are called "fantasies" but they sure become real and sink deep when you orgasm to them day in and day out for years. Nobody acknowledges the jerking off. Hefner, Guccione and Flynt are supposed to be such "liberators". . . What a joke! They merely built empires on men's envy and hatred of women, building up these feelings for added profits. They would never dare admit that the Average Playboy Reader spends his evenings choking the chicken, giving up on a love life. Their sexual scenarios pick up on the guilt and envy, offering violence and cynicism as solutions. As in rape, penises become weapons to punish women with, sperm is something filthy to soil their too-perfect bodies. I really believe that porn turns men into fetishists, hooked on overpriced media, with knee-jerk reactions to any woman."
--Martin Dufresne, in "Getting Off on Sexploitation" (1989) in Diana Russell Ed., Making Violence Sexy; 1993.
"The problem is not only that a high percentage of women in porn are sexual abuse survivors... It is not only the reduction of women to what University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, writing in the Sexual Assault Report, painfully describes as "three holes and two hands." It is the way the pornography industry helps to define heterosexual men's sexuality. Every time a video portrays a scene where a woman asks to be penetrated by a succession of men who ejaculate all over her face as they contemptuously call her a "cum-guzzling whore", it also portrays men getting pleasure from the sight of that "cum-guzzling whore" getting what she wants, and deserves. It normalizes the men's pleasure-taking as it sexualizes the woman's degradation. The idea that consumers of porn can masturbate and have orgasms to that kind of treatment of women and not have it affect their attitudes toward the women and girls in their lives is more a fantasy than anything the most creative porn writers can conjure up."
-- Jackson Katz, in The Macho Paradox; 2006.
"Pornography EROTICIZES male supremacy. It makes dominance and subordination feel like sex; it makes hierarchy feel like sex; it makes force and violence feel like sex; it makes hate and terrorism feel like sex; it makes inequality feel like sex. Pornography keeps sexism sexy. It keeps sexism NECESSARY for some people to have sexual feelings. It makes reciprocity make you go limp. It makes mutuality leave you cold. It makes tenderness and intimacy and caring make you feel like you're going to disappear into a void. It makes justice the opposite of erotic; it makes injustice a sexual thrill... Pornography exploits every experience in people's lives that IMPRISONS sexual feelings -- pain, terrorism, punishment, dread, shame, powerlessness, self-hate -- and would have you believe that it FREES sexual feelings. In fact the sexual freedom represented by pornography is the freedom of men to act sexually in ways that keep sex a basis for inequality... You can't have authentic sexual freedom without sexual justice."
-- John Stoltenberg, in "Pornography and Freedom", in Michael S. Kimmel Ed., Men Confront Pornography; 1990.
And after reading quotes like these knee-jerk pro-porn people are still gonna tell you that pornography is not harmful and has no effect... What a bunch of horseshit those porn apologists talk!!!