Sunday, September 10, 2017

On Pornography And Misogyny: Questions.


The UK Guardian interviews two film-makers, David Simon and George Pelecanos,  who have created a new TV drama on the impact of porn in the US.  A few snippets:

Simon continues: “There was always a market for prostitution, and even pornography existed below the counter in a brown paper bag, but there wasn’t an industry; that had yet to find its full breadth in terms of the American culture and economy, but we all know what was coming.
“It’s now a multibillion dollar industry and it affects the way we sell everything from beer to cars to blue jeans. The vernacular of pornography is now embedded in our culture. Even if you’re not consuming pornography, you’re consuming its logic. Madison Avenue has seen to that.”

...

Pornography “affected the way men and women look at each other, the way we address each other culturally, sexually,” he says. “I don’t think you can look at the misogyny that’s been evident in this election cycle, and what any female commentator or essayist or public speaker endured on the internet or any social media setting, and not realise that pornography has changed the demeanour of men. Just the way that women are addressed for their intellectual output, the aggression that’s delivered to women I think is informed by 50 years of the culturalisation of the pornographic.”
The bolds are mine.

An interesting hypothesis, and one which I would dearly love to see properly studied*.

I have earlier written about one of my great fears:

That many teenagers get their "sex education" from porn which may be contemptuous of women, which may be violent or even outright misogynistic.  Even at its most innocent level, porn is not meant to be the depiction of real human relationships.  It's fluff candy for its consumers, intended for masturbation, and since the majority of its consumers are heterosexual men, the women acting in porn naturally pretend to ultimately like everything the men in porn do to them, however much they initially resist. 

Now I have been given a second possible fear about the false lessons that can be learned from misogynistic porn, sigh.**

Pelecanos, the second film-maker that was interviewed in the piece,  suggest that the way men talk to each other about women has changed in ways which don't seem completely random:

Pelecanos, 60, thinks about the two sons he raised and the conversations he overheard when their friends came to the family home. “The way they talk about girls and women is a little horrifying. It’s different from when I was coming up. It’s one thing what was described as locker-room talk, like, ‘Man, look at her legs. I’d love to…’ – that kind of thing. But when you get into this other thing, calling girls tricks and talking about doing violence to them and all that stuff, I’d never heard that growing up, man. I just didn’t.

Is that change because of pornography, or because others say similar things online and it then becomes acceptable, perhaps even a male bonding device?  These explanations don't have to be mutually exclusive, of course.  Those who consume the most misogynistic pornography may go online and menace women, and then that infection spreads to others.

I never enjoy writing about this topic, because the debate that usually follows tends to veer to all sorts of pornography, not just the clearly misogynistic type, and because it seldom distinguishes between private consumption choices and possible negative externalities.  Also because I get called a prude and told that I can rip the porn out of someone's cold hands only after they are dead and so on.

Yet it is only the possible harmful externalities (effects on third parties, other than the producer and consumer of a particular piece of porn) of woman-hating pornography that I want to address in this post, the possibility that   

"Even if you’re not consuming pornography, you’re consuming its logic. Madison Avenue has seen to that.”  
We need more studies of those possible externalities, because if they exist and if they are large, well, then we women are f**ked.


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*  That would be a difficult endeavor, but not impossible.  We could, for instance, collect data on people's pornography consumption, on their online trolling behavior and its contents and on their general views about women.  There's a chicken-and-egg problem that needs to be solved, though.  See ** for more on that.

**  There are several possible theories, in addition to any direct impact of violent, misogynistic or demeaning porn on cultural views about women.  For instance:

1.  It could be that those who view misogynistic pornography do so, because they already hate women and get turned on by seeing violence done on women, say. 

That misogynistic online speech seems to be a growth industry does not have to mean that the levels of misogyny in the society are rising because of the widespread consumption of online pornography. After all, those consumers who choose to consume it have chosen a particular type of pornography, presumable because it excites them.

Thus, there might have been a large pool of hidden misogyny which is now breaking out on the surface, given that online opinions are mostly anonymous and usually don't result in social sanctions.  In short, we may be inadvertently validating the expression of misogynistic views by letting them go unchallenged.

2.  Something else may have changed during the most recent decades, and that "something else" may be the reason why we observe more open misogyny.  One possible candidate for that "something else" is the considerably improved position of women in the society and the general backlash which has resulted (the MRA movement etc.).  In that sense the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the advances women have made in politics could trigger dormant fears of women "taking over everything!" and also  desires to re-define women's roles as less powerful.  Sexual objectification is one way to get there.

3.  Finally, there might be no connection between the consumption of misogynistic pornography and the extent of expressed misogyny.  It's hard to measure how common the latter is, in any case, because just a small group of very busy trolls can leave their scat on several online sites.  A good study might be able to help us here.