|
|
|
Pornography
Is Pornography Harmless Fun Even if You Are Not Addicted?
Vickie Burress
AFA State Director, Indiana
January 3, 2001
Is pornography harmless speech? For pornography to be harmless, the people who are depicted in its images would have to be unreal - mere symbols of something philosophical and intangible. However, the women violated in pornography are human beings. Beyond the glossy pages, the naked and used women are real, as real as all other women who work and live side-by-side with men who sustain a regular diet of pornography.
Pornography makes women chattel, and all women have reason to fear that the attitudes of the men with whom they live and work are transformed by the images of pornography. Pornography operates in a subliminal way, as a manifestation of the inequality of the sexes and a rationale for sex discrimination and sexual harassment. Depicting women as anonymous, ever-wanting/waiting, empty sex toys for men, stripping and exposing their bodies for monetary gain and entertainment cannot possibly translate into a message that can exist in harmony with equality, dignity and humanity.
Pornography "educates" its consumers with information that is not only highly inaccurate, but also misleading and dangerous. It portrays unhealthy and antisocial kinds of sexual activity, such as sadomasochism, abuse, and humiliation of females, involvement of children, incest, group sex, voyeurism, sexual degradation, bestiality, necrophilia, torture, objectification, and sanction of "the rape myth."
Consumers (including children) learn and will more easily accept the idea of forced sex as reasonable and justified, and could very easily become desensitized to extremely dangerous antisocial behavior. As such, the dulling of the moral senses can affect the safety of women. It also creates a culture that trivializes rape and other sex crimes. Moreover, even non-violent pornography seriously undermines the value of women in real life.
In the porn world, a woman's value is directly linked to her sexual desirability, according to pornography's artificial, glossy, airbrushed pictures. Without regard to her as woman of dignity, intelligence, political autonomy, wisdom, and personality, pornography reinforces sexual stereotypes and sends a demeaning message about the role of women in society.
The addictive nature of pornography creates a self-perpetuating cycle; magnified by the fact that exposure to pornography lessens the ability to stay away from pornography and desensitizes its consumers of its harms. Properly evaluated, pornography looses its definition as "thought" or "speech" but rather becomes an action, in and of it. "Whether it incites harm is not the issue - it is the harm."
|
|
|
E-mail this page to a friend
