pornography and violence

This blog is not about pornography. However, I came across some recent research about pornography and violence that I would like to share with you. It is Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Can Meta-Analysis Find a Link? The main conclusion is that "evidence did not suggest that nonviolent pornography was associated with sexual aggression". They found a weak link with violent pornography, but didn't know if this is just because violent people select violent pornography. This is especially interesting: "Population studies suggested that increased availability of pornography is associated with reduced sexual aggression at the population level".

So what journalist Libby Purves wrote recently in The Times is untrue. She wrote "Yet research across the world makes it clear that selling sex is not only an immediate risk but reduces the safety of all women. Men who buy it, whether online or physically, are significantly more likely than other men to rape or commit other violence against women." I'm not sure what she means by 'online' as opposed to 'physically', but it seems she is talking about pornography.

She doesn't give a reference for this 'research across the world' but it seems that she means the research done by Melissa Farley. I have dealt with this in a previous post. I am offended by the false allegation that someone like me 'reduces the safety of all women'. It is prudish journalists with their false statistics who endanger the safety of women: you can't have good laws based on fabricated statistics.

I have blogged about Sara Pascoe's book Sex Power Money. What I wrote is that I feel she has been very fair on the subject of pornography but unfair on the subject of prostitution. People might say why are you quoting a comedian, what would she know, but she has looked at the research.

page 198. "Some heartening statistics: if porn encouraged rape, then we'd expect rape rates to rise along with the availability of the internet. The 'Porn Up, Rape Down' study conducted at Northwestern University School of Law found that the incidence of reported rape declined by 85 per cent in the United States after technology made porn freely available."

page 200. "For comparison, twenty-eight thousand people completed the University of Chicago's General Social Survey between 1974 and 2010, and they found no connection between porn and sexism."

page 202. "The truth is that while there are plenty of hairless pussies, there is a rainforest of unshavens and anyone who is watching porn regularly has seen everything. Some interesting evidence against the influence of porn on young people is that all recent surveys have reported that up to 90 per cent of men prefer their partner to have pubic hair."

page 204. "The received wisdom is that porn is becoming alarmingly aggressive because easily bored consumers are demanding it. If this concerns you, the study 'Harder and Harder' published by the Journal of Sex Research in 2018 might put your mind at rest. Sociologists from McGill University in Canada studied the most popular videos on Pornhub, assessed the aggressive content in a random selection and found it wasn't true that viewers preferred aggressive content, or that the content was becoming more aggressive over time. They actually found, when measuring the length of time spent on visible aggression (biting, slapping, choking etc.) in these videos, that violence was a declining trend. And films where the female performer seemed to be enjoying herself were far more popular (in views and 'likes') than any in which women simulated or experienced distress."

page 224. "All I've found in my own research is middle ground. And that's reassuring - there is loads of middle ground, with extremes at either end."

page 227. "Hollywood releases about six hundred films per annum, so if you wanted to find out how many of those are violent (answer: loads) at least you could watch them all."

These are real researchers, not like biased Radical Feminist Melissa Farley. Real journalists (not Libby Purves) would look at real researchers (not Melissa Farley).

Since posting the above I have listened to a radio programme about Mary Whitehouse. Many decades ago she campaigned against pornography. She was a Christian. What she didn't realise was that a fellow campaigner and fellow Christian was a very sick criminal sadist who was a preacher for many years. His name was John Smyth.

It just goes to show that violence can come from sexual repression. Celibacy should not be encouraged as an ideal. This is what worries me about both Christianity and Radical Feminism. Mary Whitehouse was worried about violence but she was looking in the wrong places. She was also a great fan of Jimmy Savile (although you wouldn't know that from reading what Louise Perry has written about Whitehouse and Savile: Whitehouse was an enabler of Savile and Smyth).

I couldn't help liking Mary Whitehouse. At least she was honest. Not like the Christians and Radical Feminists now who use false statistics and tell lies about the lives of sex workers. She would not have pretended that she has the interests of sex workers at heart. There was no hidden agenda with her.

Unlike Julie Bindel. She has recently said that Pornhub have a new porn category called 'Ukrainian girls and war rape videos'. Except they haven't. Somebody just made that up. It isn't true.

It looks like the originator of this belief was trafficking activist Tom Farr. He tweeted something that was later put onto a page on the Exodus Cry site. According to Wikipedia "Exodus Cry is a Christian non-profit advocacy organization seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs, and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. It has been described by the New York Daily News, TheWrap, and others as anti-LGBT, with ties to the anti-abortion movement". I have stated many times on this blog that Radical Feminists share false statistics with Evangelical Christians.

my porn experiment

In my last post I wrote that Sara Pascoe is very fair on the subject of pornography but not so much on the subject of prostitution. The Oxford Professor Amia Srinivasan is the opposite though. She has written that internet porn sites control what people see, 'bringing their sexual tastes into conformity'.

"As Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry, observes: 'If you are interested in something like double oral, and you put that into a browser, you're going to get two women giving one guy a blowjob ... you're not likely to get two men or two people giving a woman oral sex' She adds: 'Online-porn users don't necessarily realize that their porn-use patterns are largely moulded by a corporation.'"

People who are anti porn will just believe this, as Amia seems to have done. I though decided to see for myself, and the results were quite interesting. I typed 'double oral' into Google and was presented with twenty images. I chose to look at images rather than videos because my wifi doesn't allow me to look at PornHub or the main video sites. I could have seen a tiny picture of each video in Google search but in my experience it's not so easy to assess the content of the videos from just a tiny pic or even from the title.

By the way, I have managed to circumvent this censorship. I have found a site which not only can I look at with my wifi but I can download videos from. It is called porntrex.com. You can't download from PornHub now, as I reported a few posts back. I have downloaded lots of videos featuring beautiful Japanese women. I don't have a thing for East Asian women, I have a thing for beautiful women: for some reason the most beautiful women appear in Japanese porn. I would love to interview Kotomi Asakura and ask her about her life.

Getting back to my porn experiment, eight out of the twenty pictures that I saw when I Googled 'double oral' were of two women and one man. Seven showed two men with one woman. Two of them were indistinct. One of them showed two gay men. One of them showed two men and a 'shemale'. One of them was two women giving oral sex to another woman.

And if you don't believe me, try it for yourself. You probably won't get exactly the same results but you can see that what porn critic Shira Tarrant wrote is nonsense. It isn't true that it's all the same. There is enormous diversity. Men's sexual desires aren't being 'moulded by a corporation'. What is presented has been moulded by people's desires. Heterosexual, homosexual, trans, cis.

They say that porn is ubiquitous in modern society. In one way it is, although I can't access PornHub. In another way it isn't, because it seems that so many people haven't looked at it. If they had, they wouldn't say the stupidest things about it. They are convinced that it is all violent. Society has become sexualized, so they say.

I wish I could show you all of the pictures but I don't want this blog to show pornographic images. I will show you the one where the two women give oral sex to another woman. You can't see anyone's genitals or breasts. You can see pubic hair though, some people believe that it's never seen in porn - people who have never seen it. Some people will be disgusted and horrified but I think it's quite sweet.

There's a film, Cinema Paradiso, where at the end a compilation of censored bits of films are shown. They are of people kissing and so on. It shows life, it shows joy, it shows passion.

hatred of clients

One thing that surprised me when I read Sara Pascoe's book is her hatred of men like me. She thinks that we are psychopaths, antisocial and unsympathetic.

I have read a new book that sheds some light on this attitude. The book is The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, a professor at Oxford.

There are six chapters in the book, each on a different aspect of sex. The two chapters that were of interest to me were the last one (Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism - about prostitution) and the second one (Talking to My Students About Porn - about pornography).

In some ways this mirrors two of the three sections in Sara's book. The third section is about prostitution and the second is about pornography. Sara and Amia's approaches to these subjects are very different though.

This is what Amia writes (on page 151)

"At the level of the symbol, prostitution is seen as a distillation of women's condition under patriarchy. The prostitute is the perfected figure of women's subordinate status, just as the john is the perfected figure of male domination. Their sexual transaction, defined by inequality and often accompanied by violence, stands in for the state of sexual relations between women and men more generally. Seen in this way, the prostitute calls out to be saved, the john to be punished, and their transactional sex to be stopped - for the good of all women."

She is using the word 'john' to mean the clients of sex workers. It's a common term in America. Amia writes that the criminalisation of men doesn't help sex workers. So why do some feminists want it? They want to punish men. That is more important to them than helping women.

There are two points I can make about that. First, these feminists believe that prostitution can be reduced even if it can't be eliminated. They have a statistic which says that the proportion of Swedish men who bought sex decreased after the law was introduced that criminalises men. That is a false statistic, as I have explained in detail here. Second, the law doesn't harm men. In most Nordic model countries very few men are convicted: it seems easy to avoid prosecution for an intelligent sane sober man.

Amia quotes from the book Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. "The client thus becomes the symbol of all violent men: he is the avatar of unadulterated violence against women, the archetypal predator." This all seems very odd to me. I can understand antipathy towards drug dealers and pimps (if the person accused is really a pimp: lots of people are convicted of pimping offences who aren't pimps).

Amia, Molly and Juno aren't saying that they believe the clients of sex workers are predators, they are saying some feminists believe that. Some sex workers work alone and never have a violent client. There may be gangs who want to take her money. There may be vigilantes who want to harm her.

Some women would like to work with other women to avoid potential violence but that's not allowed. Some brothels were well run and never had any violence but the police have closed them down. If sex workers were allowed to keep themselves safe they would probably be just as safe as estate agents, nurses and social workers.

Perhaps they think that men like me exploit the supposed power imbalance. In the quotation from Revolting Prostitutes there is this: "prostitution as a deeply unequal transaction - one scarred by patriarchy as well as white supremacy, poverty and colonialism. It seems intuitively right to criminalise men who are, in many ways, the living embodiments of these huge power differentials".

Today both sex workers and their clients come from many different backgrounds. The idea that clients are affluent white men and sex workers are poor black women is rarely true. It is more often true of employers and their servants or even employers and their cleaners, but nobody seems to be bothered by that. I do not consider women or non-Europeans to be inferior to me or only there to serve me. I pay women and not men for sex because I am heterosexual. Mostly English women because that is my preference. They have probably got more money than me. Lots of sex workers today are highly educated. Lots of clients are working class.

A clue to one possible reason for the hatred of clients comes from Sara's book. She writes about a gig where a man called Stefan came over to talk to her. On the subject of early internet pornography, he said that the pictures took so long to download that he wished they would do so upside down. He was trying to make a joke, the idea being that he was impatient to see the woman's genitals (the 'good bits') and not so much her face.

Sara took great offense at this. Two pages later there's a note about Alexa, the cloud-based voice service. Sara writes "Stefan wouldn't like her, she's all brain and no good bits." This is very unfair on Stefan. She is assuming that any man who has a strong sexual attraction to a woman's body is incapable of appreciating her personality or her mind. That he thinks women are only good for one thing.

That's a common prejudice, and it's wrong. Where does it come from? Sara writes about millions of years of evolution that reinforce certain attitudes. I think it comes from cultural conditioning and in our culture that comes from thousands of years of Christianity with its disgust and fear of basic human sexuality. Lust reduces us to the level of beasts, so they say.

So some people hate men like me because we are supposedly violent, we've got more money than most and we are incapable of appreciating women's personalities or minds. There is no evidence for any of this. It seems to come from a lurid imagination or an outdated ideology. Or the female equivalent of misogyny. Perhaps I should feel guilty: after all, I am a Living Embodiment. Another word for that could be scapegoat.

You would think that the Radical Feminists would hate men like Jim Wells. Or Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers. But they like Jim Wells. Julie Bindel and Kat Banyard have quoted him (as 'Mr Wells') in recent books despite the fact that he is an Evangelical Christian who doesn't believe in abortion or gay rights. They like him because he wants to stamp out pornography and prostitution.

Amia Srinivasan in her book The Right to Sex comes out unequivocally in favour of decriminalisation. As do Molly Smith, Juno Mac and Emily Kenway in their books. I wish that Sara Pascoe had done the same in her book (see previous post). Even so there seems to be more and more support for decriminalisation and less for the Nordic model. I know which side I'm on, and it's not with Jim Wells.

In 1991, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an abolitionist group that [Kathleen] Barry founded, took its case of 'prostitution as slavery' to the United Nations. 'To be a prostitute was to be unconditionally sexually available to any male who bought the right to use a woman's body in whatever manner he chose,' CATW told the working group on contemporary forms of slavery. This unconditional availability and the man's right to do whatever he wanted was tantamount to ownership and slavery.

The paragraph above is from Nine Degrees of Justice by Bishakha Datta.

They didn't get anywhere. Sex workers choose their clients. They can and do deny their services to any man they choose. They tell the man what they will accept and what they won't. If a man wants anal sex without a condom he won't get it. There are no 'survivors' who say that he will. In Rachel Moran's book, for example, she states that she didn't have anal sex once.

So the whole basis of Barry's argument is false. The whole basis of the Radical Feminist argument is false. They don't know what they are talking about. Their hatred of men like me is based more on victim porn than reality.

I have never bought a woman's body. Trying to link it to slavery doesn't make any sense. I don't believe that women are only good for sex - only worth 'what some man will pay for her'. This explains more about why punters are hated - people are being told that we buy women and that we think that women have no value apart from sex. This kind of hatred can only come from a repressed sexuality.

review of Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

The popular comedian has a lot to say about pornography and prostitution. There is no index for this book, I would have liked to look up 'Nordic model' and 'decriminalisation' to see what her position is. You have to read the whole book but even then you're not sure what she believes.

She doesn't mention the Nordic model, where men are criminalised for paying for sex. She mentions decriminalisation once, on page 310 of the hardback edition.

"I am listening to the people who want to sell sex - I think the law should respect their wishes and they should be decriminalised and supported. I think all human beings should be free to use their body how they want ... unless that involves buying access to another person. Then I think they should have a wank and shut up."

That sounds as if she believes in decriminalisation as in New Zealand instead of the Nordic model as in Sweden. However, people who believe in the Nordic model usually think that it is about decrimalising sex workers as well as criminalising their clients. That is not the reality though, as I have detailed elsewhere on this blog.

Her position is unclear. That could be because she doesn't understand what she is talking about. Or it could be deliberate. By coming down on one side or the other she risks alienating a lot of people.

On page 2 she wrote this.

"I went on PunterNet when I got home. It was mostly men discussing the parking restrictions around sex workers' houses. These men are breaking the law by paying for sex, but they're only worried about traffic wardens."

That is false. Men who pay for sex are not breaking the law in Britain. How could she make such a basic error? When I read that I felt that she doesn't know what she is talking about, but I persevered. What she is writing other people will be thinking. Whatever she writes will influence many young people.

Is it possible that she is not calling for men who pay for sex to be criminalised because she thinks they already are?

You might think that she is the sort of person who tells it like it is. However, finding out what she believes and why can take a long time. The most irritating example of this is where at the end of a chapter and section she writes.

"I also can't simply sign off on 'sex work is work', even if for some people it is. It is not so simple as sex for money, because of the imbalance of power."

I have heard this phrase many times before, 'imbalance of power' or 'power imbalance'. I have never heard it explained. Sara does explain it, but you have to wait till the end of the next three chapters. She takes three whole chapters to make a convoluted argument that no prostitute has a choice to do what they do. They hate it but they have no other option to get money to live or to eat.

Punters are delusional, thinking that sex workers have a choice, or that they enjoy it.

"And it's the 'choice' that means real-life Stewart and all the other real-life Johns can defend their behaviour because the people they pay for sex are doing so of their own volition. 'If they didn't want to do it they wouldn't,' they rationalise. 'No one is making them.'"

This suggests that prostitutes are poor, uneducated and have limited employment opportunities. Considering that in the rest of the book she quotes academic studies frequently to support her arguments, it is interesting that she offers no evidence for what she says.

Has she looked for academic studies that throw light on this belief? She wouldn't have to go far to find one. In the further reading section at the end of the book she suggests Brooke Magnanti's book Sex, Lies and Statistics. Her other non-fiction book is The Sex Myth, which covers a lot of the same ground.

In The Sex Myth Dr Magnanti quotes a 2009 study called Beyond Gender: An examination of exploitation in sex work by Suzanne Jenkins of Keele University. It comes from detailed interviews with 440 sex workers of many different types. This is what Dr Magnanti writes.

"Sex work is frequently assumed to be a choice suitable only for the uneducated. But 35.3 per cent of the men and 32.9 per cent of the women had degrees, and over 18 per cent of the total held post-graduate qualifications. Only 6.5 per cent had no formal educational qualifications."

Even the examples that Sara uses in the three chapters don't back up what she writes. In the film Indecent Proposal the alternative to being paid for sex is driving a cab and waiting tables. That's what millions of people in America do. Not the worse thing that can happen to anyone. Not something that must be avoided at all costs. She speculates that the men who are paid for sex by her friend Stewart might be facing eviction, but she doesn't know that.

In the three boring chapters she gives a number of scenarios. Someone eats in a restaurant but can't pay. The manager could force her to wash dishes or he could force her to have sex.

"I think it is reasonable to consider a forced sex act as something that will hurt and harm someone, while washing dishes or stacking shelves for a few hours will not. Is that fair?"

There is another scenario, one that she doesn't present us with. One that is more in accordance with reality. Imagine a group of women who eat in a restaurant but can't pay. They are all told by the manager that they have to wash dishes or stack shelves. One of the women says "Can't I just give you a blow job instead?". She is the one who knows she will not be hurt or harmed by it because her attitude to sex is different from the others. Nobody is telling any of them they have to have sex.

Some women don't want to work for a minimum wage and just get by. They could do that, or they could train to be a professional, which brings its own problems, like burnout. Or she could do sex work. Or she could do the kind of work she likes even though it doesn't pay much and top up her income through sex work. That way she could get her National Insurance contributions paid which is always a good idea for the future. Or she could do sex work while she trains to be a professional, instead of something like waitressing or bar work. More time for study and more time for fun. Or maybe she just responds to having clients which is always more demanding and to some people more rewarding than working in a factory.

That's for her to decide. She can decide if she will be hurt or harmed by it. Don't say they don't have options when it is you who is taking away their options.

So Sara says that they have no choice, but then she contradicts herself. On page 318 she writes about a disabled sex worker called Jane.

"She performs as a dominatrix, which gives her the power to refuse things she doesn't want to do, and is adamant that she enjoys her job sometimes."

All sex workers have the power to refuse things they don't want to do. They don't have to do anal sex, for example. Yes, some of them do enjoy it some of the time. Sara told Jane about a exit strategy scheme.

"When I excitedly told her about an exit strategy scheme I've heard of, where sex workers in northern Europe are given jobs in old people's homes and they're 'really good at it because they are not grossed out by the human body', Jane replies, 'I find that very patronising.' She says, 'I can earn £200 an hour - I don't want to earn minimum wage in an old people's home.'

When I started writing this book I assumed that anyone in sex work or prostitution would want to get out of it at any cost. And that is not true. There are people who have options and choices, who opt and choose to sell sex. It is possible to be well-meaning and wrong. This is where feminism has not supported sex workers properly. When some of them have told us, 'This is my choice - please help me to earn my money safely,' our own feelings get in the way - 'I don't want you to do that'; 'you will always be a victim to me.' Kind feelings can create more problems."

Very sensible, but it won't earn you many brownie points with the Julie Bindels of the world. It's as if this book is written by two different people. Perhaps her reason and emotions are saying different things. She needs to realise that not everyone has the same emotions as she does, especially the hate.

So does she still believe that punters are 'psychopaths'? This is what she writes at the beginning of the book. They are delusional, thinking that sex workers enjoy having sex with them. Or the opposite. 'Pain, discomfort or unwillingness turns them on. It makes them feel more powerful.'

Perhaps there are a few punters who are delusional and a few who want to inflict discomfort. Most punters though will realise that sex work is like other jobs. Sometimes good, sometimes bad but mostly neutral. A cab driver loves the occasional trip out into the country and hates being stuck in traffic. When bored he or she may think about what they are going to have for dinner tonight, but it doesn't make sense to call that dissociation.

Some people would refuse to drive a cab even if it meant having to live on benefits. The ones who do it and stick at it are glad that option is available to them. Legally and safely. You can say that they don't want to drive you somewhere, the fact that you have to pay them means they don't want to do it. But of course they do want it - they want your custom. And they don't have to take you south of the river if they really don't want to.

I have put more about her book on this page.

another false statistic from a feminist

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