Lecture 17 - Pornography Flashcards
What is pornography?
Refers to depictions of people or behaviours that are intended to be sexually arousing.
Porn is estimated to be a 12billion a year industryin US alone.
Commonly in text, drawings, paintings, photos and films.
It has been around for centuries - In Pompeii (79AD) in artwork in the baths and may have indicated prostitue services. Incan pottery. Italian renaissance porn artwork. South asia Hindu art 9-13th century. In Japanese shunga prints, 1603-1868, where genitals are very enlarged and known as a second face.
What is rule 34?
That if you can imagine it, there is porn of it. It may be true. But the vast majority of our desires are shared by crowds of other people. Men seek out penises almost as often as they seek out vaginas. Women virtually never pay for online porn. Men search for overweight women three times more than underweight women. Women around the world enjoy romantic and erotic stories about two men.
Name five facts about porn
Male porn stars inject drugs right into their penises to stay erect.
A new port movie is produced every 39 minutes.
Women earn 600-1000 dollars a scene, men 150.
12% of al content on the internet is pornographic.
$3000 are spent on porn every second.
Discuss romance vs porn
A porn video has almost as many climaxes as it does scences, but a romance novel has one climax, the moment when the hero and heroine declare their mutual love for each other. The romance novel has been described as porn for women. The comparison is apt in that porn revelas the sexual cues that activate male desire, similarly how romance novels reveal the sexual cues that activate female desire.
Discuss facts of romance novel sales
Estimated annual total salves of romance in 2013 = $1.08 billion.
Romance novel share of US fiction market is 34%.
84% of buyers are female, and 16% are male.
Age of romance book buyer is between 30 and 44 typically.
Discuss romance novels and hypergamy
Hypergamy is a term used in social science for the act or practice of a person marrying another of higher caste or social status than themselves. Hypogamy refers to the inverse (marrying a person of lower social class or status). Hyerpgamy is what seems to be most common is romance novels with the hero usually being a doctor, cowboy, boss or prince.
Heros undergo noteworthy changes within the books, such that they often start as cads who are rude, independent and aggressive, but by the end they are loyal devoted men who are in love with the heroine. But the heroine goes through minimal transformation.
Discuss the difference between pornotopia and romantotopia
In pornopia, sex is all about lust and physical gratification, totally lacking in courtship, commitment, durable relationships, or mating effort. It is a world in which women are eager to have sex with strangers, easily aroused and always orgasmic. Porn videos contain minimal plot development, focusing instead on the sex acts and emphasising the display of the female body, especially close up of faces, breasts and genitals. The majority focus on sex.
Although the romance novel has sometimes been called pornography for women, it is really the opposite of male orientated porn. The goal of the novels heroine is never sex for its own sake. The core of a romance novel plot is a love stroy in which the heroine overcomes all obstacles to find and win the heart of one man. Romances vary dramatically in the extent to which sexual activity is depicted, from not at all to highly explicit. When sex is descrived, it serves the plot rather than replacing it. THe hero discovers in the heroine a focus for his passion, ensuring his fidelity. Sex scenes depict the heroines control of the hero, and sexual activity is described subjectively, primarily through the heroines emotions and responses, rather than through visual imagery.
Discuss porn and violence
There is a small positive correlation between porn consumption and attitudes supporting violence against women (r-.18, Hald, 2010).
Violent porn is more likely to have an association with attitudes supporting violence against women (r-.24), than nonviolent porn (r=.13).
However, statistical analyses showed moderating variables. A minority of men (7%) become more likely to harm women after exposure to porn, but these are men with preexisting hostility towards women or violence-prone personalities.
One study of several hundred scenes from recent videos showed nearly 90% included violent behaviour.
Does porn decrease crime against women
When porn consumption increases, sex crime rates decrease or stay the same. Between 1972-1995 when porn availability increased, the annual number of reported rapes in Japan fell from 4677 to 1500. US data showed similar trends.
Along with increse in porn, there is an increase in liberal social attitudes and increase availability of sexual acitvity.
Discuss differences between gay and straight porn
If porn is specifically degrading to women, we should see gay porn would differ dramatically from heterosexual porn.
Only significant differences were in anal sex (gay), ejaculation on body (gay), ejaculation on face (straight), external ejactualtion in total (gay), face to face positioning (straight).
Does porn lead to objectification of women?
The hypothesis is that porn makes men see women as less like human beings and more like objects.
A study - within each condition, participants were asked to judge the degree to which she was capable of self control, planning and acting morally, and also about the degree to which she was capable of feeling fear, feeling desire and feeling pleasure. One plausable hypothesis would be that as the omwans body was made every more salient, people would be ever more inclined to treat her as a mere object and would therefore be less inclined to attribute psychological states to her across the board. But that did not occur ..
When the body was more salient, people decreased their ascriptions of agency but they actually increased their ascrptions of experiences. It doesn’t look like porn is leading men to treat women as mere objects, we seem to be getting something that might be called animalification - treating a woman as though she lacks the capacity for complex thinking and reasoning, but at the same time, treating her as though she was even more capable of having strong feeling and emotional repsonses.
