Today's SMH also contains a much more sensible piece on porn from someone called Kath Albury. Compare with Adele Horin's groundless hysteria over the weekend, and it's a breath of fresh air to see some common sense injected into the mainstream discussion of pornography.
Some excerpts:
These are valid questions, but they seem to me to be based in a moral framework that seeks to define pornography as either "all good" or "all bad".My research suggests that, like other forms of popular media, pornography is made up of genres. Some are cheap and nasty in every sense of the term, others conform to high standards of ethics and aesthetics. Some pornography workplaces are unsafe and exploitative, others safeguard performers' physical and emotional health and safety. Some pornography sets are not workplaces at all, but the domestic bedrooms and lounge rooms of amateur exhibitionists.
[...]
Brutal images of "extreme" coerced or nonconsensual sex may exist online, but the majority of images feature consensual interactions. Pornography consumers get what they are willing to pay for, and it seems few want to see abuse, rape or bestiality.
My suggestion to men who are worried about pornography is that they consider whether the images they choose are produced under ethical conditions. Does the web page or video suggest that sexually active women are stupid or naive? Does it imply that it's OK to trick or manipulate women into acts they don't want to perform, because, after all, they're "just dumb sluts"? Does the plot-line or image suggest a disregard for the performer's health and safety? Does it place performers at clear risk of sexually transmissible infections? Are condoms used?
[...]
There is plenty of amateur and commercial pornography produced by men and women who genuinely enjoy sex, and seek audiences who enjoy it, too.
4 comments:
That's the way! Yay P0rn! That was the ethics lady right?
Of course not all porn is good porn - which she noted - but it's nice to know most of it is the good clean fun kind. Even if the really nasty stuff can be enticing at times.
Hey ... I live in Canberra.
Yep, I think she put it very well.
And 'nasty' might be just a matter of perspective!
I hope so. You can feel pretty freaky for finding it that way.
(scrubs sel with wire brush)
Well, there's good nasty and there's bad nasty... but people might disagree with me as to what fits into what category.
I'm not a fan of anything that refers to women as 'whores', for instance, and while I'd be wary of anyone who enjoyed porn that degraded women, the most important thing is that those attitudes don't spill over into real life.
There's plenty of people who don't watch porn (and are probably against all porn, publicly at least) who don't respect women.
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