In the early 1980s, I was in a small men’s group that focussed on challenging pornography. We spray-painted anti-pornography messages on walls and buildings, and put anti-pornography stickers on ads in bus shelters or on the London Underground that objectified women, and on the top shelves in newsagents that stocked pornographic magazines. We also interacted with cinema-goers who were about to see films that objectified women in a particularly blatant way or which glorified male violence against women. One of us would sit through a film on general release, and analyse its content. We’d discuss this, and produce a leaflet, one side of which was a general statement against pornography and how it impacted women, while on the other side we asked men to question what they were seeing in the particular film. This is an extract from one of those leaflets:
“Pornography is produced by men for men. It isn’t just in sex shops or blue films. Images which violate and degrade women can be found in pictures, books, adverts, films, television, video, newspapers…and in our own fantasies. It’s not a joke, it’s not harmless fun. It’s not part of sex education or ‘freedom’. It frequently shows women being beaten, tortured, and even, as in this film, murdered. Pornography is male violence against women. It encourages men to treat women as objects and commit further acts of violence against them.Try looking at pornography from a woman’s standpoint for a change!
Pornography presents men as having no choice but to abuse women.This is a lie. We do not have to batter or rape, nor do we have to condone this in other men. We do not have to consume pornography, nor do we have to tolerate it.”
(Men’s Action Against Pornography, 1982)
Discussing the film’s content and how it affected us was consciousness-raising for ourselves, but our main aim was to leaflet men going to see the film, to try and persuade them not to go in and watch it, or if they did, to question what they saw.
I don’t remember many being dissuaded from going in, but we were encouraged by the number of men (and women) who said they would read the leaflet and think about it in relation to the film.
Workshop discussion
That same year, 1982, I attended an ‘Anti-Sexist Men’s Weekend’. My main involvement was organising, with two other men, a workshop to explore how anti-sexist men could be accountable to women and the Women’s Liberation Movement, as had been requested by a feminist group. But I did go to other workshops, including one on pornography. I took along some of the Men’s Action Against Pornography leaflets, hoping to recruit new members to our group.
Few of the attendees seemed interested in this, or indeed in taking any public action against pornography. Instead, most of the men who were present seemed to prefer to confess how they used pornographic images as an aid to masturbation, and how ashamed they were of this. Shame seemed to be mainly about having succumbed to an addiction, or about giving financial support to the Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione media empires. Some of the men in heterosexual relationships were aware that continually objectifying young women whose images they consumed was distorting their own sexuality and sexual relationships. Few of them, though, expressed any concern for the young women whose images they were using, how these women might have experienced being degraded in the photo shoot, and what they might have felt knowing how men would be using photographs of their naked bodies.
The sort of pornography these men were accessing four decades ago might seem, from a present day perspective, relatively mild. Naked women in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse were often posed in such a way as to suggest that they wanted to be used by the men viewing them. Maybe men consuming these images believed this manufactured delusion, or maybe they just didn’t think about it or didn’t care. But, either way, it was clear that, even with men who considered themselves to be anti-sexist, regular consumption of pornography was common, and it was addictive. Already, it was encouraging men to dissociate from any authentic sexuality, and to objectify not only the women whose images they were ejaculating over, but the women they related to as well. Users of gay pornography seemed more aware than users of heterosexual pornography that their consumption encouraged objectification and dissociation, but they seemed just as unconcerned by it.
Pornography on the internet
“Men develop a strong loyalty to violence. Men must come to terms with violence because it is the prime component of male identity”.
(Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: men possessing women, 1981)
Much of the pornography that Dworkin analysed in her 1981 book was literary (and much of it had been lauded by intellectuals who were committed to ’sexual liberation’). The sexual violence in this pornographic literature was extremely sadistic. Indeed Dworkin devoted a whole chapter of her book to assessing the significance of the life and writings of the Marquis de Sade.
Visual pornography of the sort that heterosexual UK men consumed in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was just as objectifying as the pornography analysed by Dworkin. But, apart from video material that could only be obtained from ’sex shops’, it was less explicitly sadistic. This has changed, massively.
Since the advent of internet technology, easily accessible pornographic films objectify women in much more degrading and violent ways than did the soft core photographs which entered the mainstream in the 1960s . Gail Dines has meticulously documented the change. What has concerned her most is the widespread consumption nowadays of so called ‘gonzo porn’ - violent, body punishing films that take degradation of women to unimaginable depths. Images which, she suggests, make the soft-focus pictures of naked women in Playboy and Penthouse seem quaint in comparison, and have even darker implications for the men who view them and for the women they relate to.
“Rather than sporadic trips into a world of coy smiles, provocative poses, and glimpses of semi-shaved female genitals, youth today, especially boys, are catapulted into a never-ending universe of ravaged anuses, distended vaginas, and semen-smeared faces.”
(Gail Dines, Pornland: how porn has highjacked our sexuality, 2010)
Dines highlighted the way men’s magazines like Playboy and Penthouse (and, in the US, Hustler) created a culture that had been “well groomed to accept pornography as a part of everyday life rather than as an industry that produces a system of images that debases and dehumanises women and men”. The business opportunities for this industry, she noted, were greatly magnified by the advent of the internet.
The internet has normalised and expanded the consumption of porn by making the transaction a private one, that can be carried out anywhere, on a laptop or mobile phone. Pornography has become very big business, and the providers go to great lengths to assess and respond to changing market trends. The market has become segmented, with different categories of porn being sold to different sub groups of men (and some women, too). In all the market segments, market saturation can become problematic, and the threat to the producers is that consumer interest will wane. To prevent this, they diversify their product, offering increasingly hard core content, which is a big part of why brutality and and extreme degradation have become so commonplace.
The immediate casualties of this turn towards extreme violence and degradation are the women performers, who are pressured to reassure us that it is just a job, that ‘sex work is work’. The testimonies of women who have left the industry tell a very different story, that continuing to get work depends on publicly lying that they enjoy being degraded and abused.
There are casualties on the consumption as well as the production side of this business. Men and women alike are persuaded to ignore their gut feelings and believe that what women really want is sex that degrades them. So, what is portrayed in pornography comes to be replicated by its consumers. We are, Dines suggests, “in the midst of a massive social experiment, only the laboratory here is our world and the effects will be played out on people who never agreed to participate.”.
A particular concern of Dines, expressed in her 2015 TEDx talk on Growing up in a pornified culture, is how access to pornography impacts children, even if they don’t actively seek it out. She explains how easy it is for a 12 year old to access hard core pornography, within seconds, on a mobile phone. How girls learn that they have “two choices, either fuckability or invisibility”. How boys are taught that being a man means being cruel and dominant, and how the younger a boy is exposed to pornography, the less is his capacity for intimacy and empathy.
“Maybe we have all been hijacked by the sudden flooding of porn into the phones and laptops of men and boys, corrupting and poisoning their attitudes toward both masculinity and femininity. Maybe without watching ubiquitous images of sexual violence against women, men would have adjusted their ideas of their roles in the world, of their ‘masculinity.’”
(felicia rembrandt, Do we still need to ‘Smash the Patriarchy’?, Gender Dissent, Jan 2023)
Suzzan Blac has documented the misogyny in the content on Pornhub, the most-viewed mainstream porn site. She describes much of this content as “not sex videos. These were crime-scene videos” - videos that normalised and eroticised sexual violence against women. She found a huge contrast between the way women and men were treated on the channel - degradation and sadism were absent from the gay male porn she accessed.
When pornography is becoming a significant source of sex education for children, particularly boys, it is not surprising that, as a 2016 NSPCC survey of 11-16 year olds in the UK discovered, a substantial minority of them want to try things out that they have seen in pornography.
I had intended to include a paragraph about how ‘gender identity’ is encouraged by pornography, but then I came across a substack post by Dennis Kavanagh, here, that gives this connection the fuller attention it needs. As Kavanagh explains, “A life first forged in porn, which then bleeds into social performance on onlyfans is highly susceptible to the drug of gender.”
Male initiation
In an earlier post I described Robert Bly’s dubious suggestion that for a boy to become a healthy adult male he needs to go through an initiation rite that breaks his tie with his mother. It seems amazing that, writing in 1990, Bly made no reference to how pornography had already broken the mother-child bond, and how this widespread initiation rite had helped to create distinctly unhealthy adult males.
The break with the mother that porn consumption brings about has become hugely more significant in the age of the internet. Each year, Pornhub’s statisticians review how each of its market segments has performed. In 2022, MILF (Mothers I’d Like to Fuck) was the term most searched for by its UK customers, and their second most viewed category. Preference for MILF porn was particularly common among consumers aged between 25 and 54. This gives some indication of how deep rooted, and toxic, the denigration of mothers, so central to patriarchy, has become. It is telling, too, that Pornhub meticulously collects, analyses and publishes data about its customers, yet it employs less than10 moderators per shift to monitor the user-generated content, much of it illegal, that is continually being uploaded for mass distribution.
A growing body of neuroscience research suggests that the persistent novel stimuli of internet porn, reinforced by orgasm, over-excite the brain’s reward system, creating an addiction, The consequences are particularly damaging for the young - “Starting internet porn at age 11-12 is perhaps the worst scenario for our limbic brains.” It appears that the effects can be reversed, but only after a period of complete abstinence from any artificial sexual stimulation (which, particularly for young people, would probably require avoiding social media, where such stimulation may be unsolicited).
Unlike Robert Bly, John Stoltenberg, whose 1989 book I examined here (and to whom Andrea Dworkin’s 1981 book was dedicated), was very aware of the harms of pornography. He campaigned actively against it, and was clear about the solution that was required of individual men - “One must change the core of one’s being. The core of one’s being must love justice more than manhood.”
This individual change will be harder for a man who has been addicted to internet porn since the age of 12 than it would have been for one who consumed soft-core porn in the 1980s. But being addicted to pornography does not take away individual responsibility for it. Giving up the addiction may be more difficult, but it is not impossible.
It will take more than individual action, though, to counter the societal damage caused by pornography. Reversing this damage will require collective political action, and not just by women.
“A movement that resists the porn culture needs to include men, as they, too, are being dehumanised and diminished by the images they consume. Men’s refusal to collaborate with the pornographers will not only undermine the legitimacy of the industry, it will also drain it of its profits.”
(Gail Dines, Pornland: how porn has hijacked our sexuality, 2010)
My next post looks at the work of sociologist Stanley Cohen, and how his understanding of moral panic and states of denial has been misused to discredit anti-pornography campaigns and to undermine child protection.