Well, that will surely get your attention. Great article on the abc website “NOTHING RADICAL ABOUT MASS-MARKET MASTURBATION” by Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray:
The pornification of culture is leading to a form of hypersexism that entails an increase in physical, sexual, mental, economic and emotional cruelty towards women and children. This radical cultural shift is shaping the way we understand ourselves and others, both personally and politically.
Our goal is to present a powerful challenge to libertarian conceits that pornography is simply about pleasure, self-empowerment and freedom of choice.
Challenges to the pornography industry that call attention to evidence of harm and the destruction of human dignity and rights are frequently derided as “moral panic,” a term designed to silence and humiliate political critics who threaten vested financial, political and ideological interests.
Those who use the term “moral panic” as an insult set up a reactionary conflict between “wowser” types who have “issues with sex” as against the more relaxed fun-loving sexual sophisticates. But challenging the sexist and racist pornographic industrialisation of intimacy is not an anti-sex position. Pornography is a distortion of respect-based sexuality.
It is, of course, one of the great ironies of the current debate that defenders of pornography who claim to be in favour of freedom of speech often engage with critiques of the pornography industry by means of personal attacks. Speaking out in opposition to pornography seems to invite a deluge of online bile and e-hate.
The pro-pornography assumption that the production of pornography does not harm women, or that it is merely their “choice” if they are harmed, is as callous as the indifference to the rapid rise of women's sexual degradation within new pornography cultures.
Want to know more? Might be worth getting their book, Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Porn Industry
