My main concern with this is with younger guys, teenagers. Sure, they might get some info from school or parents, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Couple that with a high libido-- desire-- and the reinforcement that woman "like" being forced, or that it is appropriate and normal for a real man to do so, and it becomes that much easier to sweep away the fuddy-duddy, dorky teachings of good ole dad or Mr. Finkel at school.
I hear you, I really do. But to me, it seems like the issue really isn't porn, it's the upbringing and home education.
I won't lie: when I was that age, I looked at a lot of porn, quite regularly (although, I confess, not rape porn). But I also had the benefit of a home with some good relationship modeling, and a lot of education not only about sexuality but about respecting women and treating all people as equals. The result seems to have been that I have successful relationships, I respect women and consider myself a feminist, but I am pretty liberal and free about sexuality as a philosophical choice, and on the sexually adventurous end of vanilla in terms of personal sexual practice. Which, perhaps unsurprisingly, I consider fairly healthy.
I think that what makes the difference is not any social or governmental attempts to control porn, but the choice of good parents to give their kids decent sex education, decent media literacy education, and some good education and modeling about gender relations and healthy relationships.
Dworkin wasn't puritanical she was a prostitute, bisexual and an atheist.
She believed pornography was part of the patriarchy and male sexual dominance. Under the laws that Dworkin and Mackinnon wanted to pass only sexually explicit material that depicted and promoted sexual violence and dominance against women or to the women in the porn could be prosecuted or banned.
She also said that she doesn't need to argue that pornography causes violence against women when pornography is violence against women.
And she said if women want to make feminist sexually explicit material that's their business.
Dworkin was not a prostitute by aesthetic choice or sexual preference: by her own account, she fell into prostitution because of her unresolved psychological issues derived from abuse and sexual orientation confusion.
Her bisexuality makes little differ. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with how freely or rigidly one perceives and experiences sexuality, and she was deeply rigid about her sexuality. And atheism (or theism, for that matter) has nothing to do with how one perceives and experiences sexuality.
The point I was making is that she was puritanical about sexuality, not in the sense of a religious point of view, but in the sense of being rigidly and repressively ascetic and limited in her views of what constitutes healthy and appropriate sexual expression versus what sexual expression is unhealthy or inappropriate. The idea that any and all pornography constitutes violence against women is comparatively indefensible, considering that some pornography is made by women for women-- including some lesbian porn-- some is made by women for reasons of pure sexual enjoyment, and some portrays women specifically in roles dominant over men. Dworkin's beliefs about porn were hard enough to defend in the days when nearly all porn was professionally produced exclusively by men, harder to defend when women began taking production roles in the porn industry, and completely impossible to defend in this era of amateur internet porn.
Dworkin seems to have had enormous personal problems with sexuality, and she universalized and externalized those problems into a radical feminist school of thought.
All flapping tongues and random poking, and over in a minute or two.
