It Is Going To Take Us Decades To Comprehend The Damage Pornography Has Done To Our Mental Development

It is going to take us decades to comprehend the damage pornography has done to our mental development and societal views surrounding women and sex.

As somebody with weird/gross kinks, I can say with authority that having/indulging in those kinks does not lead directly to sexualizing those things in a non-sexual context.

I find it so depressing to know that as soon as men invent or gain access to a new communication technology, they immediately use it to increase tenfold their production and consumption of porn. In the book I’m reading about feminism and technology, the author spends a while explaining how revolutionary the telephone has been for women, allowing them to escape the isolation & confinement of their nuclear households and increasing their access to the outside world and to other women (friends, relatives) in a way that was harder for men to supervise (which is of course why the industry men who developed it spent decades loudly condemning women’s use of the telephone for “trivial gossip”.)

But then she has to concede that this new technology, like most others, also affected women negatively because men immediately started using it for porn (& to harm women, since that is the main purpose of porn). “The diffusion of the telephone facilitated the intrusion of pornography into the home, not only through intrusive and abusive telephone calls made by men to women, but also through the development of sexual services over the phone.” The same thing happened with the internet of course, but before the internet there was also the French Minitel service, which was a kind of small TV screen linked to your telephone that allowed for proto-emailing and instant messaging—and a study by the French government found that the Minitel “vastly contributed to the propagation of hardcore pornography”, notably the sale and purchase of paedophilic content.

I saw a post once where a feminist said she almost wished the Internet had never been invented, because of the explosion in porn it facilitated, and I understand the sentiment, but it’s not limited to the internet, it’s a recurring and pretty much inevitable phenomenon, since porn seems to be men’s primordial interest. It happened with the printing press, with the daguerreotype, the invention of movies of course, now virtual reality… Dworkin called pornography the propaganda tool of woman-hatred, so of course it makes sense that every new information & communication technology men develop always translates to them as better access to ever-increasing amounts of porn.

Source: Gender Stereotypes In Movies & School

(Don’t forget that in all of the above situations, once you get old enough that your beauty fades the guy can just toss you out for a different young woman– since it’s beauty and youth that are the defining traits here in what makes her special– but he can be as old as he wants, because that’s “attractive” in a male, right? Only in a male though). Also, I think that in almost every one of those cases, as usual the woman has left everything in her life behind to move to where the guy is, and she goes on to shape her life around what the guy is doing. 

She did a good job pinpointing the aspects of a lot of these that have bugged me from the get-go. I really dislike Disney in general, there’s a wholesome, God-fearing corporation. It’s a corporation. It’s not some loving and nostalgic bit of your dearest memories. A corporation knows it had done a good job when people refuse to see it as such a thing and instead think it’s some loving old friend. 

It’s always been sickening to me that around the late ‘90s Disney basically repackaged a bunch of their old films that no one really cared for as the “Princess Collection,” because at the time it was trendy to wear stuff that said “princess” on it. Fascinating how the masses just ate it up, and suddenly they cared for these movies no one was really interested in anymore like Snow White and Cinderella. I know, you will now say “I have always loved Snow White/Cinderella!” (which are extremely sexist stories in the first place, you want a medal?) - but if you did, then you were probably a kid after the “Princess Collection” garbage already came out, so saying that you were into it at that time doesn’t take away from my point. I remember when I was a kid in the mid/early-’80s and Snow White was re-released and it just seemed really dated and uninteresting to us as kids. We were bummed that we had to see it instead of the Garbage Pail Kids movie. But call it part of the “Princess Collection” and suddenly everyone is begging Disney to take their money again. 

pornography has probably just irreparably damaged human sexuality

Having sex with someone actually is a big deal and involves a ton of vulnerability and I think it’s extremely troubling and gross and unhealthy and actually exceptionally dangerous that we pretend otherwise and encourage people to “be mature” by compartmentalizing/completely eliminating their deeper human emotions from their sexuality and that any other view is dismissed as prudish and invalid and unenlightened and childish and restrictive. I can’t think about this too much because it makes me rage but I hate how much porn and capitalism have destroyed how we understand and experience sexuality and intimate connections with one another so much.