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In reply to the discussion: I'm The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I'm Telling The Story In My Words [View all]marions ghost
(19,841 posts)I appreciate your comments. I have no problem accepting that BDSM has been around for centuries. I accept your comment that there is a large and perhaps growing audience for porn. But these days, is BDSM fetish porn somehow different from "mainstream" porn --if mainstream now has come to mean degradation and abuse of women?--seems like splitting hairs awfully fine there...
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The following Sydney Morning Herald article from 2011 says that violent acts and degradation of women in porn is now the norm. And so that's good, wonderful, fine?? If true, yeah, I have to work to get my head around that. Does not compute, seems like some utopian Libertarian Idiocracy...
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excerpt:
"Recent research shows that acts of aggression against women are a commonplace indeed expected part of the porn narrative. In defending their industry, many accuse the anti-porn brigade of focusing only on particularly violent examples of pornography. A recent study published in the journal Violence Against Women, however, has analyzed the best-selling porn videos to see just how widespread and routine the degradation of women in pornography has become.
"The research found that physical aggression was present in 88 per cent of scenes. Of these, there was an average of 12 aggressive acts per scene. In addition, name-calling occurred in about half of all scenes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the perpetrators of violent acts were most commonly men, while the targets of their violence were nearly always women. In almost every case, women were shown reacting to aggressive acts with pleasure or neutrality, enforcing the idea that women enjoy being dominated or degraded during sex.
Sexual acts that women would typically find painful or degrading were common in the videos analyzed. Boston sociology professor Gail Dines has previously reflected on this particular sequence and noted that it often comes with a joke about the woman being made to eat shit. Professor Dines further points out that the brutality of the industry has become such that most porn actresses have a shelf life of three months because their bodies are so physically damaged by the job.
Even defenders of the industry would have a hard time arguing against the unequivocal finding in this research that there has been a sharp increase in the levels of aggression shown in films over the past two decades. They commonly contest, however, that the degree and frequency of violence towards women doesnt matter because porn is just fantasy.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/why-the-new-porn-norm-is-hurting-women-20110302-1be54.html#ixzz2uSlQgVvb