Not buying it. She just states “porn shaped society” without anything to prove it.<p>Seems absurd to me on the face of it.<p>Are men objectifying women? Yes. Have they done this since the dawn of mankind? Yes.<p>I could easily claim the reverse. Society shapes porn. It’s a reflection, not the other way around.
This reads like a discussion form the 90's when the porn industry, and most media, were tightly controlled by small number of dominant players that set the norms (whether we liked it or not). I know a lot of people who have created porn in the 2010's and onward and none of them have any connection whatsoever to that porn industry of yesteryear. This feels like a strained attempt to stain the independent porn of today with the worst aspects of studio porn.
The article claims porn, and sure, that's a part.<p>The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired. All these things have popped up with all these pretty terrible results.<p>Sexuality is 'tittalting' so it helps sell. Those interactions aren't genuine, but transactional. Transactions themselves aren't the problem, but when people crave genuine sexuality and get faced with '$5 for next hour of OF', yeah. Takes advantage of people.<p>Advertisements also been going on for a while, always pushing harder to see what sells but still legal and norm enough. Like the hot rod magazines - does anybody really think if they buy a red mustang, they'll also get the 44dd blone bimbo?<p>And really, everybody should at least try a sex party (Bacchanal) once. Have to do some std checks ahead of time, but its just so liberating and freeing for everyone. It gets money, possessiveness, prudishness, and all those distorting things out of the way. And puts sex into perspective. And well, its fun.
> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people... And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty.<p>Besides being a complete stretch, has anyone even showed that men generally watch porn with cruelty? It's never on the front page, and it's kind of aberrant when hyper-enthusiastic "partners" are on offer.
Right out of the gate the interview has a pretty extreme claim -- that porn is somehow responsible for societal cruelty, not just towards women, but towards a rainbow coalition of progressive causes. No explanation or justification is given; it's just a sound bite. Is the rest of this worth reading?<p>Edit: I ended up reading the rest of it, and... there's just nothing there? If you're interested in a short interview with Sophie Gilbert, maybe this is appealing, but if you've never heard of her, I don't see the draw.
I should be very clear here that I am a gay man, so I don't really have exposure to much of what is talked about here even if I have heard about it.<p>What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route.<p>Personally I feel like much of the issues with Porn, particularly in the US, stem from being uncomfortable talking about sex. Instead of feeling like we need to hide and be ashamed that we watch porn, it should be talked about so from a younger age we know its fantasy. We know that these positions, angles, noises, the perfection, isn't normal.<p>Sex is messy.<p>This shame about sex, our bodies, leads to many of these problems with how we view porn.<p>I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with consuming porn, casually, with your partner(s), regularly, whatever. It is just another way to explore your sexuality and we should not demonize that. We should however address the problems with the industry, but without demonizing its existence.
This interview makes no sense. Maybe she actually had some arguments in her book but she didn't express them in this article.<p>Paradoxically, I'd have a more sound argument if I wanted to argue for the opposite (or, more precisely, the disappearance of sexual intercourse form Hollywood moves - it was omnipresent in the 80s and even 90s).
How many incidents involving sex affected the american perception on its institutions?<p>Of course, declaring that in an interview would be impossible. However, it is obvious. Anyone should be able to make that connection.<p>Is porn to blame? If it is, then any other kind of sexualization platform also is (you can think of it, I don't need to name it). It's hard to trace a line that doesn't leave you in a place of hypocrisy.<p>American culture adopted porn as a word, outside its original realm. The expression "action porn", for example, puts the practice into a everyday word, normalizing it. This kind of expression has gone through many entertainment industries and iterations.<p>The combination of sexual repression and porn is dangerous, the dangerous part being the sexual repression. That repression has also became part of the american culture, and in much higher doses than porn.
It's relatively trivial to avoid porn IRL. I legit dont even know if they have magazines anymore. It's perhaps less difficult online, but still easy to avoid.<p>So how exactly can it mold the world?<p>Providing 3 examples of things you actively have to seek online; admittedly i dont know instragram but given they have to then redirect you to onlyfans is just yet another hoop to jump through? Not many are actually doing this.<p>>mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people.<p>Then this absurd jump to this? Porn that's not particularly available is somehow impacting immigrant men?<p>This article is really about politics; but they put a sock puppet in front with unbacked up ideas they just leap over.
The claims about the 2000s is not really how I remember it. What exactly changed in the 2000s. I was a teen male on the internet then, i feel like I would be clued in a little...<p>Hasn't American society been hating women since its inception? For a majority of its history they couldn't vote.<p>My not researched take and intuition is if you feel like the world is regressing on treating women well, its because of religion. Like abortion rights being taken back is a religious thing. Ireland did something similar, is Irish culture overly affected by porn too?
I am not sure I get it. It starts with this:<p>> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people.<p>So before porn in the 2000s, women, immigrants, gay and trans people were all respected in the human history? Is that the point the author is trying to make?<p>I mean, "black lives matter", "me too", and generally the wokisme came after that, right?<p>I am not defending porn, just trying to find where the causation is. What if I said "the world we live in has been molded by the violent video games from the 2000s ("obviously"), and probably that is the reason why we started having wars after 2000"? Wouldn't someone be quick to tell me that we had wars long before the 2000s?<p>Like this, I wouldn't immediately think that women's rights have become worse after the 2000s in general. I don't need to go back very far to find the time where women were not even allowed to vote.
Yet another crappy article about sex from an otherwise respectable publication. Why does this keep happening? The article assumes a negative definition of “porn” without ever seriously examining it. As usual, sexual depiction is assumed as inherently harmful, isolating, or degrading without any good argument as to why. Then, it makes a leap implying that the rise of pornography explains social problems like loneliness or political alienation. Also, American discomfort with public sexual expression is not intrinsic or universal reality.<p>What distinguishes porn from other depictions of sex? Could it be that porn and social atomization are symptoms of deeper technological or cultural trends, rather than assuming one causes the other?
Edited: Please read and reply if you disagree with my view that <i>porn reflects the greater social contract of society</i>.<p>An apathetic vacuum. (American? Capitalist? Global 'Elite'?) Society does not care about the people, actively seeking to use and exploit.<p>When things go badly who gets the pain? The common person, the modern serf. When things go well who takes the rewards? Their boss's boss's boss.<p>Porn is just a scapegoat, a symptom of the larger issues. Of the broken social contract for being part of a larger whole and everyone being better off for that collective work.<p>Though perhaps it's also a symptom of the failed liberation of society from outdated gender roles. <i>Movements towards equality made some progress on empowering women, but didn't finish the job of shattering the yolk of stereotypical roles entirely to reshape the social contract for equality, inclusion, and freedom from old stereotypes. Echos of those old stereotypes, and new flawed ones, can be seen as the basis of the roles explored through exaggerated fiction even if it's erotic in nature.</i>
I recognized its pernicious effects on me and gave it up after getting married and before having a kid. This was after being exposed to it for decades from a young age through unrestricted access to the internet. I think that’s an all too common story. It’s crazy how normalized it becomes once it worms its way into your life, but having been off of it for some time now, I see clearly what a terrible influence it was on me. It’s also made me aware of the extreme perversions and predatory behaviors out in the world which I’ll use as context to make sure my kids never fall victim to.
I've been helping young men escape the clutches of porn for over a decade now (leading what you might call recovery groups). Never once have I found a single story that ended well (but that's more or less expected given the groups I run). It all starts with an introduction to porn and ends with an addiction that seems to slowly transforms their brains in unpleasant ways, objectification of women being the primary one.<p>One of the best tools that I continue to employ is deprogramming that objectification. Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again. It's incredible how most porn can turn from enticing to absolutely repulsive once you adopt this mindset.
It would probably be way healthier to ban porn and legalize prostitution, than ban prostitution and legalize porn. Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person.<p>The interview repeats the common aphorism "sex sells", but it should follow it up "sex sells other things". Sublimated desires into other categories this way doesn't seem good either.