(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

Chris Wilson of Lakeland, Florida, said in an interview that he created the site in 2004 as a simple Internet pornography venture: Users post amateur pictures--supposedly of their wives or girlfriends--and for a $10 registration fee, others can take a look. He claims there are about 150,000 registered users on the site, 45,000 of whom are military personnel. Of the 130,000 unique visitors who come to the site daily, Wilson estimates that 30 percent of the traffic, or 39,000 unique users, are US military personnel.

Early on in his Internet venture, Wilson said, he encountered a problem--potential military customers in Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't pay for membership, because credit card companies were blocking charges from "high-risk" countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not wanting to shortchange US troops, Wilson established a rule that if users posted an authentic picture proving they were stationed overseas, they would be granted unlimited access to the site's pornography. The posting began, sometimes of benign images of troops leaning against their tanks, but graphic combat images also began to appear. As of September 20, there were 244 graphic battlefield images and videos available to members.

...The website has become a stomach-churning showcase for the pornography of war--close-up shots of Iraqi insurgents and civilians with heads blown off, or with intestines spilling from open wounds. Sometimes photographs of mangled body parts are displayed: Part of the game is for users to guess what appendage or organ is on display.

from The Porn of War (some foul language, so perhaps NWS), cited in The Heart of Darkness, linked by antiwar_dot_com

Is the link between sex and violence in pornography, which keeps coming up in myriad ways, an inevitable side effect of the medium? Or does this link form when pornography is produced and consumed in a society rife with imperialism and oppression? I lean towards the latter, and i still hold on to the idea that non-exploitative, non-sexist pornography can be a good thing.

A while ago i wrote about the suggested link between pornography and the Abu Ghraib photos. In that discussion i pondered the ways in which militaristic culture would twist the medium of pornography to the purpose of mischanneling pleasure as part of the culture's efforts to produce a class of soldiers.

If my thesis is right, then woman-positive porn should have some effect towards calming sexism, racism, and militarism -- that is, *if* consumers bottle-fed on high-impact thrill porn can develop a taste for kinder, gentler woman-positive porn.

Unfortunately, exploitation remains profitable, even (perhaps especially) in an industry like pornography. It is as if the archontic forces are aligned against the success of such a project: capitalism, militarism, desensitization, misogyny, racism, addiction, and... i don't know a term for "compulsively seeking prurient thrills in the depiction of violence."

Postscript. I recall having a discussion in my journal at some point, though going back through memories now i can't find it, about the prurient-violent depictions of Hell sometimes given by Bible-thumping preachers, in which it is clear that pleasure is being taken in the thought of sinners suffering in Hell. I think that style of religion plays a role in this too, as part-and-parcel of the cultural pattern of what militarism has done to American culture.

Comments

[thesecondcircle.livejournal.com]

If my thesis is right, then woman-positive porn should have some effect towards calming sexism, racism, and militarism -- that is, *if* consumers bottle-fed on high-impact thrill porn can develop a taste for kinder, gentler woman-positive porn.

The question, in this context, is whether porn is the "illness" or the "symptom." Will changing the porn improve our society or is it rather that improving our society will, very naturally, change the type of porn we crave? When you take porn out of the center, the issues of victim blaming, non-consensual fantasies, and other "deviant" sexuality go away (please note I'm not condoning actual non-consensual porn or behavior of any type).

If we can transform our world into a healing and functional place where people can develop their sexuality in an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance -- without guilt, shame, and abuse*, then we would be able to see the true and full spectrum of healthy human sexuality. Healthy porn would naturally follow.

* How do we do this? I wish I knew.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I think it is primarily symptom, though it is part of a feedback loop. Porn is a way of helping people to define their sexuality, and if that definition comes along with captions like, "these brazen sluts are hungry for your cum," that can't help but affect the way that male consumers of porn relate to women around them.

So i think there is a healing role that non-misogynistic porn can play in the sexual healing of our society. It would not be a "strong" catalyst for a change, in that we'd be able to see its effects rapidly, but i think that the more of it we have available, the better.