Gail Dines and MTR on Phillip Adams Late Night Live

Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How porn has hijacked out sexuality – just published in Australia by Spinifex Press- and I were guests on ABC RN Late Night Live last night (repeated this afternoon). We  discussed the harms of the global porn industry with well known ABC radio host and the man who coined the term ‘Corporate Paedophilia’, Phillip Adams. You can listen to it here: (Interview begins at the 15:00 minute mark)

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I attended the Stop Porn Culture conference Gail organised in Boston in June.  Her welcome introduction to attendees was published on my site here: ‘Opposed to porn sex: debased, dehumanised, formulaic and generic’.  Professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Gail’s new book, Pornland, has attracted significant media attention in Australia. You can find links on the Spinifex Press site.

Passive acceptance of the sexual oppression of women

Ginger shared her poignant experience of the men in her life using porn – including her 11-year-old son, on the ABC Late Line page  last night.

I was raped twice in my youth. Can you imagine my horror when I found that my 11 year old son has been looking at porn? To find that he had been looking at rape sites was devastating. Yet his father looks at porn; his older brother (by ten years)asserts that it is a normal part of culture, that my arguments are those of an old fashioned prude.

I have tried to raise my sons with humanitarian values, where we respect the rights of others, are able to empathise and defend those who are less fortunate than us. Yet modelling my value system has come a poor second to the power of the media, of peer pressure and passive acceptance of the sexual oppression of women by a multi million business which is stripping us of deep intimacy, of meaningful relationships. I fear for future generations when ‘intelligent’ men are slaves to the need for ever increasing degrees of excitement rather than deepening intimate connection. 

Men Who Hate Porn

Fortunately there is a new movement of men speaking out against porn. It is so encouraging to know there are men who recognise porn’s destructive agenda for their lives. The Age ran this piece today, reprinted from The Guardian:

…While an enormous amount has been written about how pornography affects women, less has been written about how it affects men, which seems odd given that, as McCormack Evans says, pornography is a product predominantly ”made by men, marketed by men and consumed by a massive male majority”.

One obvious problem for many porn users is the conflict between their stated belief in equality and respect for women, and the material they’re watching in private. McCormack Evans says he used to exist in a ”kind of double consciousness. For that half hour when I was watching porn I thought, ‘This is separate from my life, it won’t affect how I view the world.’ But then I realised it did.” Read full story here.

More men asking questions

How did porn get to be so cool?

Also in The Age this week, Adam Cary asks how it happened that porn became cool. “Maybe porn is the new black, and we should all wear it”, he writes.

Who needs porn when you’ve got MTV?

And Steve Kryger writes in The Punch about routine unintentional exposure to porn:

 

Three times a week I watch porn. I’m a man of routine, so the days are always the same – Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

It’s nothing too explicit – just stocking-clad women stripping off their clothes and shaking their breasts in my face as they rub up against other women, men, poles, or whatever else they can find nearby.

When it’s not lingerie models, it’s women in a nightclub, lying on the top of the bar, near naked, while groups of men pour alcohol over their glistening bodies, to the beat of the latest dance music sensation.

Then there’s the classic pool party scenario – groups of women in bikinis striking provocative poses as they splash and play in the pool – to an audience of men on poolside – and me.

This is the content of the MTV video clips that are playing on the television screens when I visit my local gym each week. It’s nothing short of soft-core pornography, and I’m over it. Read full story here

See also a piece I wrote on pornography for ABC The Drum Unleashed a couple of years ago (still entirely relevant, unfortunately).