Tales of Wonderlost

First, the women who are used in the making of pornography are a big deal. They are people, human beings, just like you and me.

They don’t tend to come from wealthy families. They are more likely than other women to have been sexually abused as children. And they experience high rates of drug and alcohol abuse. Yes, women in pornography choose to perform, and they are paid. But we all recognize that choices are made in the real world under a variety of constraints; not everyone chooses from the same range of options. When you are using pornography, you are using those women.

Second, the stories that men tell in pornography are a big deal. Let’s think about the prevalence of multiple penetration scenes in pornography. Or gagging scenes, where men penetrate a woman’s throat so roughly that the woman gags. Or ATM, industry jargon for ass-to-mouth. That’s one of the stories that pornographers tell: A woman wants to take into her mouth a penis that was just removed from her anus or the anus of another woman.

Pornography is not just sex on film. It’s a particular type of sex based on a particular set of ideas. Sex in pornography is sex based on domination and submission — male domination and female submission. Pornography is the sexualizing of domination and submission. It’s about making male dominance sexy.

Even if pornography is, in some sense, a fantasy, we might ask: Why these fantasies? What do these fantasies tell us about us?

~Robert Jensen

(the whole thing is worth the read)