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Gail Dines on 'porn'. Rather than addressing her sweeping generalisation of the broad diversity of tastes catered for in the real world of porn, I will refer you here to show you exactly what kind of bunk is created when some ignoramus takes a position based on some stupid stereotype of porn. Hereafter just assume that every time Dines writes the word 'porn' she is referring to something hardcore featuring a generic blonde with anus lipstick and silicone boobs being roughly penetrated by 'any number' of well-equipped, ungentlemanly brutes.
"The men they date, have sex with and marry are increasingly being brought up on a steady diet of porn, and the more they watch, the less capable they are of forming connected, intimate relationships."
• Proof? Cite studies?
"The porn these men consume looks nothing like your father's Playboy."
• Really? The same Playboy that 'women's studies' professors spent years railing against as sexist and harmful? I own a Playboy collection ranging through vintage and modern issues spanning nearly 50 years, and the old ones, while being incredibly tame in terms of the visual depictions of women (and extraordinarily literary in their content), are written with a now quaint, old-fashioned sexist bent, despite being reasonably progressive and liberal for their time in terms of women's sexuality.
• It might not 'look like' your father's Playboy, but that's because the content in dear old Dad's Playboy is now pretty much PG rated in the wider context of the amount of flesh it's permissible to display in any visual media in this day and age. Why *should* porn look like your father's Playboy? Playboy never called itself porn anyway, it was nutbag feminists and religious extremists (who have a lot more in common than either group would care to admit) who labelled it such.
"Consumers are catapulted into a world of cruel and brutal sex acts designed to dehumanise women"
- What Dines is saying is that porn is a vast, anti-woman conspiracy. It's not as simple as people wanting to get off, oh no! No, it's a James Bond-style plot hatched by people (i.e. men) who HATE WOMEN and want to victimise them. How can something so preposterous get published in a mainstream newspaper? How? How can someone who spews such tripe, with a blatantly sexist, anti-male bent, be employed at an institution of higher learning?
This is what really gets my goat about anti-porn campaigners. Sheila Jeffries, Dines, they are all highly paid 'academics' who aren't subject to the kind of rigorous review and standards that academics in other fields are subject to. Their extremism is rewarded because they are in a field characterised by nutbaggery and populated by nutbags. It doesn't matter to what extent their work is based on crazed and unfounded claims, because the more it is, the more it is rewarded. Alternate views don't get a look in- women who aren't in complete lockstep (which is most of them, I'll wager), are ostracised and pilloried as brainwashed victims of the invented conspiracy that these overpaid academic feminists spend their careers railing against. They might be respected in their field, but that's because the field is populated not with scientists, who are compelled to adhere to certain standards of objectivity, but with fellow extremists. Universities employ these feminist nutbags because they're big in their field, but in doing so they do themselves a disservice and undermine the very standards in research and education that they purport to uphold. It's a disgrace.
"In the vast majority of porn today, sex is not about making love... connection, empathy, tenderness, caring, affection- are missing, and in their place are those we normally associate with hate- fear, disgust, anger, loathing and contempt".
• Outright bullshit. Porn was never meant to be about portraying sex as being about making love. Sex itself is primarily not about connection, empathy, tenderness etc. etc. It's a biological urge. It can be done in that context, sure, but the other- feeling sexual pleasure just for pleasure's sake- is no less legitimate. There is such a massive, mind-boggling variety of porn out there, and I am 100% certain that Professor (ugh) Dines pulled that grand, sweeping generalisation out of her arse. It's a popular misconception, and it's only popular because people like Dines get published and people like me, who actually watch porn, don't.
"In the vast majority of porn today... as [the female performer] is being roughly penetrated by any number of men, she is being called vile names such as whore, slut, and worse."
• Proof? In the vast majority of porn? How many men? Called names? If you're going to imply that you've studied the stuff and looked at the numbers, cough up some data, woman. Where was that published, exactly?
• Also, the insinuation is that somehow sex that might be characterised as rough, a quickie, fast-and-furious, is somehow non-consensual and degrading to women. Lots of women like rough sex! I like rough sex! If I was a 'professor of women's studies' I might be tempted to pull a sweeping, unfounded pseudo-statistical generalisation out of my arse, such as "a majority of women like rough sex", but I'm not, so I won't. I am confident in saying, however, that it is likely that in the vast majority of porn depicting rough sex, whether with multiple partners or not, the sex is 100% consensual.
"We often hear that porn is all about fun and fantasy, so it has no real effect. My interviews with university-age men tell a very different story."
• See, if this woman's work and any of the journals that published it had even a modicum of scientific credibility, any reviewer would be screaming "SELECTION BIAS, you idiot, SELECTION BIAS!!". What kind of 'university-aged' man would volunteer to speak to some anti-porn-campaigner women's studies professor about their own porn habits? No sane person would believe that their confessional would be treated objectively by an anti-porn 'researcher' (who has already decided what she would like the outcome of her 'research' to be, thankyouverymuch). Her 'research' is likely to consist of interviews with young men who believe that porn is a problem for them, not a broad spectrum of young men in the community. Dines doesn't acknowledge this, of course. What matters to her is not the credibility of her data, just that it backs up her preconceived notions.
"Unlike previous generations, these boys and men have unlimited access to hard-core images 24 hours a day".
• Does that conjure up an image of some dishevelled male, frazzled by hours of self-abuse, in a darkened room lit only by a computer screen displaying pornographic imagery? You betcha! Men, given a computer, will do nothing but access hard-core porn 24 hours a day! They can't help themselves! It's there, so they just keep chugging it down, like an addictive mixture of red cordial and heroin.
"Many of the men I talk to believe that porn sex is what women want, and they become upset and angry when their sex partner, perhaps their wife, girlfriend, or a one night hook-up, refuses to look or behave like their favourite porn star."
• Oh. My. Goodness. So much wrong with this claim it's hard to know where to start. I'll start from the end and work backwards.
• 1. Let's spell this out. Guy gets lucky and convinces a girl to hook up with him. Alright!! Sex is on the menu! Now choose the most likely option:
- a) Guy can't believe his luck, starts tearing off his clothes in a hurry so he can get some action in case he's about to wake up and finds it's all a dream.
- b) Guy sits random hook-up down and says "Ok, go to the bathroom, put on these heels and bung on a bit more eyeliner. By the way I'm going to call you Jenna while we're doing it, I hope you won't mind." Then, when the woman in question laughs in his face, he flies into a rage.
• 2. Let's tease apart the rest of what Dines has said...
- A man can believe that 'porn sex is what women want' (let's ignore the fact that 'porn sex' in fact encompasses every kind of sex known to humankind and keep it within the narrow-minded spirit that the author intended this passage to be read in, shall we?).
- A man can be affronted and angry when his wife or girlfriend (let's ignore the preposterous idea that a one-night hook-up would be subjected to this one, shall we?) refuses to 'look or behave like [the man's] favourite porn star.'
- I think a reasonable person would agree that a reasonable man who somehow convinced himself that 'porn sex is what women want' (haha) would, when confronted with information to the contrary, adjust his view in light of this new information.
- I think a reasonable person would agree that a man who not only convinced himself that 'porn sex is what women want' but then got angry when confronted with the fact that his wife or girlfriend did not, in fact, want this so-called 'porn sex', could quite reasonably be labelled deranged.
Q.E.D. Dines has admitted that many of the men she has talked to are deranged. Now, is she saying that a substantial proportion of men in the population at large are thus deranged?
"Next to the screaming orgasms and sexual gymnastics of porn sex (again, we must ignore reality and adhere to the Dines Dictionary definition of 'porn sex' to comprehend this statement), real sex with real women starts to feel boring and bland."
• Given that Dines has admitted, albeit unwittingly, that her sample is subject to the worst kind of selection bias and her subjects are, in fact, deranged, this statement actually makes sense. In that context.
• I feel confident in saying, however, that contrary to Dines' implication that all men who view pornography (and thus pretty much all men) are wont to view real sex with indifference and instead prefer porn... ROFLMAO!!!!!! What kind of idiot would seriously suggest something like that???!!
"These men have become so accustomed to porn sex (refer to Dines Dictionary) that some are disappointed by their own sexual performance."
• Wait, only some? Not 'many'? So, while 'many' men in Dines' sample held women to a (stereotypical) porn standard, only 'some' held themselves to the same standard. This again confirms the fucked-up-ness of the sort of guy who would talk to a confirmed anti-porn feminist about their porn habits. Again, I say, NOT representative of the male population as a whole.
"They need to pull up the porn images in their head in order to have an orgasm with their partner."
• Do I need to spell it out? The sort of men who talk to this woman are sufferers of serious sexual disorders! That there is some diagnostic criteria for severely dysfunctional sexual behaviour. If not mental disorders in general, going by some of the other things she has said about these men.
• How, then, is it not extremely offensive and sexist to extrapolate this data obtained by interviewing a subset of the male population who suffer from mental and sexual dysfunction across the male population as a whole? WHY is this tripe being published?
"I had been somewhat sceptical of the addiction model, thinking that it was a way for men to avoid taking responsibility for their porn use. However... sex and relationship therapists Wendy Maltz and Larry Maltz discuss in their book The Porn Trap ..."
• Hang on right there. You're an academic and your reference for this pile of crap you're writing is a couple of sex therapists who wrote a sensationalist, anti-porn book. Honestly! This speaks volumes about the field of women's studies and the universities that pay fat salaries to a select group of women whose profession is spouting unfounded crap.
"While men may share their favourite porn stories, they don't tend to talk to each other about their addictive behaviour..."
• I'm sorry, men what? 'Porn stories'?! I can't say that men don't have special men-only gatherings where they swap their 'favourite porn stories'. Whilst I suspect this is a figment of Dines' imagination, if 'men' did engage in this particular activity I suppose that as a woman I wouldn't be included. From what I've seen of porn, which is probably more than Dines, porn that does have a story is the exception these days. What does that leave to swap? "So then this chick walks into a room where there's a couch, and there's this guy and pretty soon most of their clothes are off and they're doing it". "Awesome! That sounds just like the one I saw last week, except it had two chicks!". "Well the last one I saw didn't even have a guy, there was just this one chick, and a vibrator..."
"If we are really going to tackle porn, however, we... need to build a long-term, multi-pronged movement that involves building coalitions, grassroots education programs, and media strategies that eventually lead to cultural change."
• What, like the current media strategy of printing only anti-porn screeds, typically written by overpaid academic feminists with a tenuous grasp on reality?
• And why do we need to 'tackle porn'? Porn is not the problem! A minority of people have the kind of problem with porn that Dines describes, and the solution is not to obliterate pornography. Mental problems and sexual disorders require appropriate treatment, but we don't need to put the rest of the world in a straitjacket to treat the problems of a small number of people.
• As is typical of anti-porn screeds published in the mainstream media, all porn is lumped in the same basket with no acknowledgement of the diversity of tastes that it caters to. Porn is easily more reflective of human diversity than any other mainstream visual entertainment medium and I'll wager that any real research would back that up. We won't see anything approaching real research from the likes of Dines, however.
"As long as we have porn, women will never be seen as full human beings deserving of all the rights that men have... There is no room for porn in a just society"
• Oh what a crock. As Gam likes to point out, anti-porn campaigners like Dines exhibit a massive blind spot when it comes to gay porn, because it undermines bullshit arguments such as the one above. It's a stupid statement, an unfounded one, and underscores the fact that the academic credentials of anyone in the field of 'women's studies' are immediately suspect. Dines' views are rightly relegated to the opinion pages, but she's masquerading as some sort of social scientist when she really has no more credibility in this field than the average religious nutbag who might pen a similar anti-porn screed. Professor my arse. How can someone get paid to come up with such crap?
