Pornography: Men Possessing Women

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Sade’s importance, finally, is not as dissident or deviant: it is as Everyman, a designation the power-crazed aristocrat would have found repugnant, but one that women on examination, will find true. In Sade, the authentic equation is revealed: the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist/batterer is the power of the man.” Dworkin analyzes (and extensively cites examples drawn from) contemporary and historical pornography as an industry that hates and dehumanizes women. Dworkin argues that the industry is implicated in violence against women, both in its production (through the abuse of the women that are used to star in it) and in the social consequences of its consumption by encouraging men to eroticize the domination, humiliation and abuse of women. [3] [4]

Because you don't have time for intimacy; you have to get up and go to work so you can buy shit and you're too tired to care about people when you get home at night. So they're entertainment now, like your TV and your internet. Freedom.Dworkin spends a whole chapter looking at De Sade. She shows he is still much admired by all sorts of thinkers, male and female. Dworkin portrays him as an Everyman type: One of the things I wanted from Andrea Dworkin's Pornography (as opposed to Andrea Dworkin's pornography, which is something else entirely) was an elaboration of these anti-porn arguments. So I was disappointed to see that she spends really very little time on either of those lines, instead using the bulk of the book to describe what she sees as the male psychological context from which pornography arises. Its somewhat of a vicious circle. You, a man, hitting puberty and start to get your knowledge abt yourself and women as sexual beings only through the hyper real and male centered and misogynistic medium of pornography. You start to think this is normal, that this is what boys and girls are made of, that they-women- are all whores, who want it to take deep inside every hole. She wants it. She likes it. She is a slut, bitch, whore. Or to put it more simply:she is a cunt. Through the course of human history, women have always been objectified and subjected to a certain form of control and humiliation. However, with the advent of capitalism, pornography turned things upside down, canonised and brought to the surface every kind of perversion imaginable. The constant, unchanging element is the debasing and humiliation of women. Objectification in it's ultimate forms. It is an industry created by men, for men. Even in our "sex positive" and pro sex work empowerment "feminism", this constant never had changed. Males are the highest consumers of pornography in all its forms even in the pseudo "safe" medium and faux liberation of the only fans camgirling. This is one aspect of the porn industry that has changed a lot even since McElroy was writing in 1995. As porn has become more mainstream, especially in the US, the route into the business has shifted; in the past, actresses mainly drifted into it from other kinds of sex work like dancing or modelling. Though this still happens, they've been supplemented by a growing number of women who set their sights on the business from the beginning. I think perhaps Jennas Jameson and Haze were a turning-point (though I'm no expert); certainly more modern stars like Asia Carrera and later Sasha Grey or Stoya have been very vocal about how much they enjoyed, and wanted to work in, the industry.

Porn (very very different from erotica) is defined as sexually-explicit material that is destructive to women. Erotica is that material which isn't harmful. Another duality- porn is power over/ erotica is power with. I wish the discussion could ever reach that subject, erotica is good and should exist freely. Porn - very much not. The most cynical use of women has been on the Left—cynical because the word freedom is used to capture the loyalties of women who want, more than anything, to be free and who are then valued and used as left-wing whores: collectivized cunts" Dworkin manages to draw from literature and art in this analysis. Here is a quote from D H Lawrence:And so Mr. Penis and Mr. Self-Righteous have a little internal battle within the non-self of the not-hideous male. Then again, you often see people defend it on free-speech grounds while, as it were, holding their own nose: ‘Censorship is bad – though of course I would never look at that stuff.’ I find these arguments unsatisfactory, so if I begin now by saying that I really like porn, it's not to make everyone uncomfortable but to connect cards with table and also to establish my own set of dubious credentials in this area.