Porn and rape

[flexibeast]

Discussions around the regulation of porn¹ (not to mention the regulation of sex work, and gun control) so often seem to fail to frame the discussion in the context of the society and culture in which such regulation is proposed. To me, such a discussion is necessary when we consider statistics which show that, despite more liberal attitudes towards porn, the Netherlands and Denmark actually have a third the number of rapes per capita than the US, and roughly an eighth of the number of rapes per capita than Australia. If porn is a primary cause of rape, how are we to explain such statistics? Perhaps the number of rapes is more determined by a given society's overall attitudes towards women - whether, for example, it regards only the "three Ks" - Kirche, Küche, Kinder, i.e. "Church, Kitchen, Children" - as the only 'proper' domains of women? Or maybe a determining factor is a given society's overall level of aggressiveness, which may perhaps be indicated by its military spending per capita? Perhaps it's only one of these things; perhaps it's both; perhaps it's neither, and the determining factor(s) is/are something else entirely. It's also worth keeping in mind recent Australian research regarding the extent to which porn objectifies women.

Given the above, some feminists' emphasis on fighting porn in general - rather than fighting sexism in porn, and fighting exploitation and coercion in the porn industry, campaigns which i wholeheartedly agree with - reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, by Leonore Tiefer (which i may have quoted here before):

"If the target of the feminist campaign is violence against women, the question must be asked whether pornography is really the best place to try to make some headway against violence. Mainstream movies and TV are notorious for their violent imagery, and the claim that sexuality is the prime locus for violence against women ignores these genres entirely. As feminists we might ask why sexuality and pornography need to be included at all. If what we are interested in eliminating is the subordination of women, why does it have to be sexually explicit material that we target? Servility, injury, enjoying pain - why do they get banned only if they involve sex? The honest political answer is that no one is about to ban violent images in this country [i.e. the US] - they are too mainstream. Only sexual images are sufficiently offensive to large diverse groups, and targeting seemingly violent sexual images would be the only way for feminists to get widespread public support. But the consequence of picking on sexual images is that sexuality itself becomes the target. This result is a major setback for those groups within the women's movement whose goal is to de-repress women's sexuality.

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1. By 'porn', i here mean "graphic descriptions or depictions of sexual activity involving adults". To me, 'porn' does not by definition involve violent behaviour (some anti-porn activists think it does, which makes those of us who defend porn look pretty unpleasant), although i certainly acknowledge that there is porn with such content. And as for porn involving underage people - that's just wrong, and i refuse to defend and/or condone it.
 

Comments

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

*nod* Indeed. And it's pretty disturbing that the same people who have a problem with nudity on prime-time tv apparently don't have a problem with the high level of violence . . . . i seriously can't comprehend a worldview in which observing human nudity is worse than observing human violence.