PORNOGRAPHY SUCKS

Since human time immemorial, since the very genesis of human communication. Sex has long been apart of our art. And naturally so, art is expression. Our expression is who we are. And sex is a huge part of that. In fact it’s quite the reason we’re all here, isn’t it? But in comparatively recent times, we have been not only denying mainstream expression of sex, but any of it depiction all together. A rejection of the substance and subject matter of some of man’s greatest artistic works: Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)”, Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”, the statue of the Greek God Apollo, representative of wisdom and skill. What do all of the famous artworks have in common?

They are all Pornographic.

Pornography is something that has of course evolved over time. We now see sex not in mahogany carvings on castle walls but hidden in links to virus-ridden websites, taken from marble sculptures to the screens of IPhones. However, it’s not just the mediums that has changed, but also our attitudes. A multitude of things have influenced us to treat our sexuality and any expression of this, as dirty and bad. Be it religion, individual ideology or something ignorant your mother said to you about you private parts. As a western culture we not only hide sexuality, but also condemn it. And this negative connotation is enforced upon every facet of the sex industry and it’s workers. We see it not only in the limited legislation and regulation of the sex industry, our limited discussion of the issues surrounding it. We see sex workers and porn actors as sub-human, something immune too feeling and humility. As objects. And this attitude is only re-enforced in the context and the actual pornography we consume, And the bottom line is nearly all of us consume it, with pornographic websites making up more that 12% of all Internet domains.

Pornography, weather it be in print or on screen, as it exists it fails to address it’s own problems: the fact that the people in it are just that: people. Real, thinking, feeling, people. Who deserve to be imagined with the same complexity as anyone else who appears on our screens. And it the rere distinction between reality and fantasy, that much of what is portrayed is falsified and very extreme, that re-enforces this. Think of a Hollywood movie, where someone jumps off of a building onto the ground and keeps running, we understand that is not real life. We can rationalize “How ridiculous, they would have been in too much pain to do much of anything, let alone run”. However, we don’t often apply the school of thought into our perception of unrealistic pornography. We often forget that pornography is something carried out in a professional context, something often so glamorized and unrealistic that it would make many real life participants quite uncomfortable, and even put the participants in danger. Something that is frequently just as removed from reality as a Hollywood blockbuster, yet something we often try to imitate.

We start trying to explore our sexuality at a very early age, an age before the impute of guidance or education and we often start this exploration by watching porn. And because traditional sex education in schools all too often avoids the very topic of pornography, and parents generally underestimate the age of which their children begin seeing it, (the first exposure to pornography among men is 12 years old, on average). And as such, many children start engaging with pornography before they know anything about it. And this needs to be addressed, if not first in education, then touched on in the material itself. It should be made explicitly clear that the personalities within a scene are paid actors and it is not a depiction of real life. There is currently a disconnection between reality that is not acknowledged, which creates a belief that pornography is real, normal and a healthy example of sex. It also desensitizes the audience to sexual abuse and forgets to reinforce the necessity of consent.

We are rarely ever shown depictions of consent and this does the exact, worse thing that any piece of sexual media could do: implementing the societal acceptance of rape culture. There is a frequent, pervasive division in power that each partner holds in a scene; there is almost always a dominant (nearly always male) and a submissive figure (nearly always female), And this continues throughout all types of heterosexual porn, setting unrealistic roles for both males and females. And as if to cement its irresponsibility, pornography generally depicts one partner persuading or forcing sex on another partner.

This is acceptable if it happens in the context of role-playing and with prior consent. But this is something rarely shown to the audience. Consent in pornography is not something that should not just happen behind the scenes. It should be shown to the audience. This would be beneficial in any format, but particularly in a quick Q and A before the scene begins, asking for the participant’s consent, a long with a clarification that they are of legal age and their preferences and boundaries about what they are doing in the scene.

Additionally the use of contraception is a rarity within pornography, the very tool that could help spread its popularity. Of course, would be ridiculous to expect it in every situation, but the practice of using a male condom in even half the porn we consume, would encourage so many more men to see it as a healthy, even hot thing to use during sex. This would be the ultimate weapon in decreasing the prevalence of STIs Of course, one of the great things about sexuality is its variation, and this is an extra great thing to explore through pornography. If it is safe and consensual, there is no right and wrong way to enjoy sex.

There is also "Porn-star" bodys that dominate most ponographic content most of which are extremely unobtainable and warp the audiences idea of what is normal for genitals and bodies. this will be explored further in future blog posts.

These flaws in pornography exist because of the negative connotations surrounding the entire sex industry. When we are afraid to talk about something in the open, we can’t really try to solve it. Every part of our media has a degree of social responsibility, and that includes pornography. We need to enforce responsibility on porn. Because like any type of media, like and type of art, it can act as the foundation on which we build our lives.

Avalon Hope & Grace Campbell

(Athena and Aprodite haha)

xx