The Problem With Porn: Culture and Context

Another article on the great porn debate, this time from the Guardian. And yet another superficial analysis. The article begins with a male student fantasizing about a female librarian.

There was the librarian moment; a flash of how porn might shift the way he responded to women in the real world.

This is one of those ‘der’ moments of stating the bleeding obvious whilst missing the deeper point. Well guess what? Young male students have been fantasizing about female librarians for a long time and young males have been objectifying women since the beginning of time: long, long before internet porn.

The fact is that our culture shapes the way we all view each other. If young men objectify women in particular ways, it is because they have been raised with a particular set of narrative stereotypes. Just as women have been raised with stereotypes of men.

Porn merely reflects the stereotypes that already exist. Porn is a product of our culture. So if we want to change some of the misogynist imagery in porn we need to tackle the deep rooted problem of misogyny in general.

The real problem lies in the way we raise our children, in the narrow gender scripts we give them. If boys believe that women are one-dimensional sex objects, it is because they have not been taught to view women as multi-dimensional ‘subjects’.

But the problem of objectification is not well understood anyway. In some senses it is inevitable. The only way we can get to know a person as a complex subject, is to spend time with them. And as much as ‘feminism’ is critical of objectification, as an ideology it must necessarily objectify and condense complex subjects into stereotypes. This is the problem with all ideologies.

Thus feminism reduces women in the sex industry to simplified ‘victim’ stereotypes and men into stereotypical ‘abusers’.

For that half an 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.