View: https://medium.com/the-random-nerdiness-collective/if-you-watch-porn-you-hate-women-84e5f9c84333
If You Watch Porn, You Hate Women
The
Wilhelm O' SheaFollow
The Creative Collective
a11y-light~4 min read·January 4, 2025 (Updated: January 4, 2025)·Free: No
The skin market
There is an honesty we must confront about ourselves. We are what we consume. A man eats bread, drinks wine, and becomes full of bread and wine. He lives that way, too. Therefore, a person who watches pornography is not untouched by it, no more than a swimmer emerges from the sea dry.I am a German man. Let me be frank: pornography is violence and degradation, and that clings to a woman like her soft skin. The thin veneer of liberal cultured moderates and poster boys for sophistication would like to think otherwise, or at least pretend. We are human and have been degrading our fellow sapiens under the guise of culture and freedom since time began.
The Skin Market
David J. Ley, writer of The Pornography Trap, describes porn as "a marketplace of intimacy," but this intimacy is not tender but transactional. The days of women on a set, perfectly lit, surrounded by boom mikes and countless professional cameras, are long gone. Yes, back then, their bodies were bartered and choreographed for pleasure, but access to these "delights" at least had a gatekeeper and was difficult for young minds to access.Now, searching for something more "real," we are treated to timid amateurs and grotesque scenarios that play to our deepest fantasies of Rebecca from HR or Natalie, the young temp. The hitchhiker girl has no money to get home. The industry thrives on a simple equation: supply meets demand. And the demand from the scrolling damned becomes darker by the day.
Statistics from the nonprofit organization Fight the New Drug reveal that 79% of pornographic scenes depict acts of aggression, overwhelmingly directed toward women. Bruised skin, submissions, and bondage are the online Viagra for the elite. This is not a gatekept affair but a click away for any man, woman, or child.
To watch such content or to even be indifferent to it is an act unto itself that helps to normalize violence towards women.
You the viewer
The viewer may say, "It is just a film. It's all just a scene. She is an actor. She chose this." Choice? Why is it even an option in the first place? Choice is a loaded and foul word that screams, "I wash my hands of others' consequences and my role in it." Coercion and abuse are not choices.Studies provided in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation suggest that many women in the porn industry have histories of being abused, economic struggles, or addiction. Their "choice" is more of survival than agency.
Watching is participating—having fun, encouraging, and perpetuating. Women being used for ten-second Kleenex pleasure is not real 21st-century culture but a collective collapse of our minds and decency.
Do we hate women?
Hate does not always pop its head from beneath the soil. Sometimes it softly rumbles until the fault lines crack. Hate can be internal whispers of "It's not my problem." To watch pornography is to buy into indifference. It says, "Her degradation is worth my momentary pleasure." Until she becomes less than a memory, nothing more than a deleted history on our communication device we use to push our slogans of love and peace or else.Before, hate held banners. Now, it hides behind closed doors, glowing screens, and confused minds. Yet hate is hate, and if it's so normal, why do we 'clear our histories?'
I suppose it's what good little white boys do, and girls do.
The Otherside
The more enlightened among us may argue that I am being too binary. To every issue, there is a nuance. A different story. People who truly want to be in the industry.I disagree.
If you have a plane out of a thousand planes that have one faulty screw, and tragically it crashes. Even if the wings, the windows, and the engines worked, you recall every plane.
If you have a CEO of a company with 100 employees but three are being sexually abused, you do not say, "The other 97 are doing fine."
I do not care if 99% of the people in pornography are loving their lives. If even 1%, and we know this figure is gigantically higher, are being abused and filmed, then the industry must die.
What Can Be Done?
We are all part of this biosphere of culture, flesh, air, and communication. We have a collective responsibility to clean our channels, the ones on which future generations will communicate.We can start by supporting organizations that help people who have been sexually abused, harmed, or coerced. We must get closer to victims so we can see the results of our momentary pleasures. We as people are great at turning a blind eye, but if we open them, I promise we will think twice before we click on the next slide of some father's child, whose only sin was that she made a bad "choice."
Maybe they did choose it. Maybe they did have a choice.
But, God damn it, so do we.
