The Porn Myth

[ThomCat]

A good article that discusses Andrea Dworkin's views on porn, and attempts to see if her predictions were right now that porn is immediately available to anyone online.

I'm still forming an opinion of the article. I think the author is taking one effect, one outcome, and I think she is generalizing it too far. I think she's making the mistake of thinking that the general effect on middle class college students is the only effect. But despite that, I think this article is a good starting point.

I'm going to cross post this in GD for everyone to see, but I would like to see a discussion here too that won't be a messy riot.

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http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/

The Porn Myth
In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.
By Naomi Wolf

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.