History of Feminism
In reply to the discussion: Porn & Pop Culture: A deadly Combination [View all]Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)While it may be true that masturbation does not require porn, the purpose of porn is to cause arousal. So porn (or at least what I would call porn) is generally used by those who are masturbating, or couples who are having sex. The end result is the same. If you define Sports Illustrated as porn as the OP does, you may reach a different conclusion. And BTW, I never claimed porn was required for masturbation. If you want a better example of conflation, note how the author conflates consensual with non-consensual sex, legal with illegal activities, and sports magazines and lingerie retailers with porn.
As far as I'm concerned, there is little difference between what you are calling "character-driven, story-driven, sexually explicit material", and porn. The purpose of those things is the same. Only the media is different. Furthermore I'm not sure how many romance novels you've bothered reading. Many contain token resistance (or even sincere resistance) as a central theme or in other words they are stories where the woman says no, and the couple winds up having sex anyway. Some include rape fantasies and actual rape where the victim falls in love with her rapist. These aren't niche romance novels. They are very much mainstream, published by big name publishers, and widely available at 'respectable' stores and retail outlets. I don't know of any mainstream porn that uses actual rape as a central story line. These are novels which are quite often written by women, for women, and have clearly more extreme content in some cases as compared to mainstream porn yet the sex-negative feminist crowd is silent on the subject near as I can tell. I can only suppose they've figured out it's not a good idea to shit where you eat, but perhaps there's a better explanation.