Pornography and Violence
There are a lot of Facebook posts and blogs going around that demonize pornography. Critics respond to these posts by blaming ultra conservative, right-wing religions for imposing their brand of morality on the rest of the world. "Stay out of our bedrooms," they demand. To which I reply, gladly.
Here is where I have a problem with the porn industry. Most people's conceptualization of mainstream pornography is silicone injected women posing nude or being filmed performing sex acts (which, despite being extremely objectifying, is seen as relatively tame or harmless by most people). The truth is, 88% of the most viewed pornography depicts violent acts (Bridges, A. J., Wosnitzer, R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C., & Liberman, R. (2010). We are not talking about steamy skin flicks that little Johnny might stumble across randomly. Online pornography provides instant and free access to any deviant or violent sexual act you could dream of.
Young people these days are growing up in a world where Mom or Dad are too embarrassed to talk to them about sex and sexual health nurses and teachers aren't allowed to. Meanwhile, pornography is there whenever they want it. So instead of learning about the excitement of crushes and dating and first kisses our kids are learning about facials, BDSM, and deep-throating. By the way I'm not talking about our 18 years olds, this is our 12 year olds. Most of the boys and many of the girls. To make things worse, the women who are recipients of acts of violence in most of today's popular porn react POSITIVELY 91% of the time! What message does this send to our young people about sex and intimacy?
One message is that women secretly want to be raped and although you may scoff and that, in a round about way, many people hold these beliefs (incidentally the more sexually conservative one is the more likely they are to believe in rape myths). How many times have we seen on the news that a young girl was sexually assaulted and your first response is something like, "Well what was she wearing?" or "She shouldn't have been at that party." or "I bet she was drinking." or "I'm sure she did something to bring that kind of attention to her."
Statements like this are in essence saying that men are not accountable for their actions, they are just horny monsters who have uncontrollable desires to rape a woman if her bra is showing or if she is drunk.
Watching porn, especially violent porn, leads to greater rape myth acceptance (Oddone-Paolucci, Genuis, & Violato, 2000). How could it not?
If you hold some of these rape myths you are at greater risk to commit a sexually violent act which is scary enough but in any incident of sexual assault there is more than just the victim and the perpetrator... there was an absence of a witness who was willing to help.
I'm not saying everyone who watches porn is going to rape somebody. In fact most will not. But at a societal level we are all bystanders to violence against women, (virtually all of which is perpetrated by men).
By not supporting the pornography industry and taking a look at how you view victims of sexual assault you can make a shift so that there will be one less person who covertly condones sexual assault.
It happens far too often.
Far too many perpetrators get away with it.
Far too many people blame victims
and far too many victims never say a word because they are afraid of YOU and what you are going to say about them. So they don't go to the police and the guy goes on to do it again.
Am I imposing my morality? Guilty. But if I can help one person while on my soapbox to change the way they look at sexual violence and how the porn industry feeds it, then on my soapbox I will stay.
Here is where I have a problem with the porn industry. Most people's conceptualization of mainstream pornography is silicone injected women posing nude or being filmed performing sex acts (which, despite being extremely objectifying, is seen as relatively tame or harmless by most people). The truth is, 88% of the most viewed pornography depicts violent acts (Bridges, A. J., Wosnitzer, R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C., & Liberman, R. (2010). We are not talking about steamy skin flicks that little Johnny might stumble across randomly. Online pornography provides instant and free access to any deviant or violent sexual act you could dream of.
Young people these days are growing up in a world where Mom or Dad are too embarrassed to talk to them about sex and sexual health nurses and teachers aren't allowed to. Meanwhile, pornography is there whenever they want it. So instead of learning about the excitement of crushes and dating and first kisses our kids are learning about facials, BDSM, and deep-throating. By the way I'm not talking about our 18 years olds, this is our 12 year olds. Most of the boys and many of the girls. To make things worse, the women who are recipients of acts of violence in most of today's popular porn react POSITIVELY 91% of the time! What message does this send to our young people about sex and intimacy?
One message is that women secretly want to be raped and although you may scoff and that, in a round about way, many people hold these beliefs (incidentally the more sexually conservative one is the more likely they are to believe in rape myths). How many times have we seen on the news that a young girl was sexually assaulted and your first response is something like, "Well what was she wearing?" or "She shouldn't have been at that party." or "I bet she was drinking." or "I'm sure she did something to bring that kind of attention to her."
Statements like this are in essence saying that men are not accountable for their actions, they are just horny monsters who have uncontrollable desires to rape a woman if her bra is showing or if she is drunk.
Watching porn, especially violent porn, leads to greater rape myth acceptance (Oddone-Paolucci, Genuis, & Violato, 2000). How could it not?
If you hold some of these rape myths you are at greater risk to commit a sexually violent act which is scary enough but in any incident of sexual assault there is more than just the victim and the perpetrator... there was an absence of a witness who was willing to help.
I'm not saying everyone who watches porn is going to rape somebody. In fact most will not. But at a societal level we are all bystanders to violence against women, (virtually all of which is perpetrated by men).
By not supporting the pornography industry and taking a look at how you view victims of sexual assault you can make a shift so that there will be one less person who covertly condones sexual assault.
It happens far too often.
Far too many perpetrators get away with it.
Far too many people blame victims
and far too many victims never say a word because they are afraid of YOU and what you are going to say about them. So they don't go to the police and the guy goes on to do it again.
Am I imposing my morality? Guilty. But if I can help one person while on my soapbox to change the way they look at sexual violence and how the porn industry feeds it, then on my soapbox I will stay.
I like your post, but I have a couple of questions. First, where do you get your statistic that "88% of mainstream pornography depicts violent acts?" I am pretty skeptical of that number. The closest thing I could find was at internetsafety101.org, but it only referred to "A recent content analysis of the 50 best-selling adult videos revealed that across all scenes...48 percent of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression, while more than 88 percent showed physical aggression... (Bridges, A., Wosnitzer, R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C., & Liberman, R. (in press). Aggression and sexual behavior in best-selling pornography: A content analysis update. Violence Against Women.) but this study is only of 50 videos, and does not purport to represent all pornography on the internet.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I'm curious how you'd square your point that consuming pornography leads to greater acceptance of the rape myth and thus (presumably) leads to increased rape with the rather large decrease in all violent crime rates in the last 30 years, including rape. (see here: http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/RunCrimeStatebyState.cfm) I didn't bother to further hash the numbers, but that table indicates that forcible rape (which I know is not all rape, and is almost certainly underreported in any event) peaked in about 1992, and is down significantly since then (although there was a small bump from 2011-2012). I agree the rape myth is toxic and needs to be eradicated, but I'm not sure there's any evidence that pornography perpetuates it.
Thanks for your reply. To your first point I have to stand corrected. I should have said that 88% the most popular pornography is violent, not all of it. Although the purpose of that study was to take a representative sample of the most viewed videos in order to extrapolate globally. The Bridges et al. study was my source.
DeleteTo your second point, the most recent meta-analysis on pornography and rape myth acceptance was done by Hald, G., Malamuth, N., & Yuen, C. (2010). They concluded that pornography viewing was a significant factor. By accepting more rape myths it makes one more of a threat but I certainly want to point out that in my opinion watching pornography in itself does not cause sexual violence but it certainly supports it. I run groups for pornography addicts and out of the 40 odd men I meet with every week I would feel quite comfortable introducing my wife to all of them. To me this conversation is the same as blaming McDonalds for obesity. Ultimately it's up to the individual but I argue that the pornography industry plays a significant role in perpetuating sexual violence (even if sexual violence is declining).
What's more important to me though is the fact that we are all bystanders to violence that happens and from the literature of read and some that I have cited, the evidence is strong that consuming pornography makes people less likely to help or stand up for a victim of violence.