Gail Dines

An unflinching and intimate look at porn-its hardcore and racist content, its unchecked profits, and how it distorts our identity.Expert Gail Dines has been writing and researching the porn industry for over two decades. She attends porn industry conferences, interviews porn producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of young people each year about their experience with porn. Astonishingly, the average age of the first downloading of porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and studies show that young men are consuming more of it than ever before.

How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

Pornland

Emma Hak-Kovacs

This cultural shift toward sexualizing girls from an early age is bound to have real social consequences. Not only does it affect the way girls see themselves, it also chips away at the norms that define children as off-limits to male sexual use. The more we undermine such cultural norms, the more we drag girls into the category of “woman,” and in a porn-saturated world, to be woman is often to be a sexual object deserving of male contempt, use, and abuse.

…desensitization eventually leads to boredom and the need for harder-core and more extreme porn.

The connection between porn and rape is without a doubt the most debated and most controversial question of porn’s effects. Some argue that porn causes men to rape, while others counter that sexually aggressive men seek out more violent pornography and would rape with or without the visual stimuli. Studies, however, suggest that there is a link between porn consumption and violence against women.

By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence.

In porn, sex is the vehicle by which men are rendered all powerful and women all powerless; and for a short time a man gets to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands.

Pornland How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

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