(ix) Introduction

"And we are thankful that our children will grow up in an atmosphere of sexual freedom that will spare them most of the ignorance, hypocrisy, and repression of earlier times. If guilt is disappearing from sensuality and sex, along with shame about the human body, we happily wave goodbye to all that. But what is coming in its place?"(ix)

"What has in fact already arrived is a culture increasingly being shaped by the dominant influence: porn. Porn has so thoroughly been absorbed into every aspect of our everyday lives — language, fashion, advertisements, movies, the Internet, music, magazines, television, video games — that it has almost ceased to exist as something separate from the mainstream culture, something “out there.” That is, we no longer have to go to porn in order to get it. It is filtered to us, in some form, regardless of whether we want it or are even aware of it." [mijn nadruk] (x)

Allerlei voorbeelden zoals de Bratzpop.

"Bratz dolls fundamentally redefine girlhood — and lead many parents to feel as if porn is hunting their daughters."(xi)

"For all the minuses that exist, then, there is clearly a positive side to porn as well. But it’s difficult to make an overall, blanket judgment about porn because the word itself is so imprecise, so vague, that two people arguing on opposite sides of the question might in fact not even be talking about the same thing. "(xiii)

"Porn is not, to put it this way, a single color but rather a whole spectrum. Therefore, its influences on the culture are similarly varied and complex. Some porn is clearly, unequivocally damaging, such as child pornography." [mijn nadruk] (xiii)

[Vreemd. Eerst terecht zeggen dat betekenissen van woorden vaag zijn en dan meteen vergeten dat dat ook geldt voor 'kinderpornografie' en weer eens gemakkelijke oordelen vellen.]

"In the 1960s and 1970s the word porn began to replace pornography. Nowadays, one hears and sees porn far more often than pornography. The words differ not only in that porn refers to a much larger body of material that is far less homogeneous than what was covered by pornography, but also in that porn is much less stigmatized than its forerunner.
Pornography applied almost exclusively to visual images, either still photos or movies, and only occasionally to writing. On the other hand, porn is used loosely, especially by those under forty, to label a great variety of material, including movies, photos, and writing, as well as anime, video games, peep shows, sex toys, and X-rated lingerie — all without the judgmental sense of “bad.” The word porn even feels more casual and familiar than pornography, like the nickname of a pal. "(xv-xvi)

"Being wholeheartedly pro-sex, then, we have to say that porn is often not pro-sex, and sometimes even anti-sex. Women’s porn (produced and directed by women and intended for a female audience), and true amateur porn, consisting mostly of video clips posted on host sites by ordinary men and women, are the most pro-sex porn we have seen." [mijn nadruk] (xviii)

"Early in our final chapter we present a critique of porn. An important part of our critique consists of considering alternatives to the anti-sex porn, exploring directions that would remove from porn its — surprising, perhaps — vestiges of Puritanism. " [mijn nadruk] (xix)

"In thinking about where we go from here, we identify sexualization — which is rampant in our culture — as the root problem underlying the damaging and dangerous practice of turning individuals, especially girls and young women, into sexual objects. Through sexualization individuals are seen as having no value beyond their sexuality." [mijn nadruk] (xix)

(1) 1 - Normalizing the Marginal

"We are then asking not how porn has become mainstream but, much more important, how the mainstream has become porned. A host of further questions then arise: How has porn changed the way we see one another and our- selves? How has it altered our personal relationships and our sexual behavior? How has it changed the social order? How has it shaped our individual identities, and our national identity? To begin to answer these questions, we need to have some understanding of the development of pornography in America."(3)

"Those who today look to legislation, or to a moral crusade, as the best means to limit if not eliminate pornography, would do well to recall Comstock’s relentless, but ultimately futile, efforts."(8)

"If Hollywood had been transformed by porn (a character like Sera could not have existed in a movie of the 1950s, 1960s, or even the 1970s), so had the audience. Only an audience in a sense made ready by the kind of porn films that Deep Throat pioneered would accept such language and images in a Hollywood movie."(19)

"In much the same way that Hugh Hefner glamorized soft-core pornography through the sophistication of Playboy as a physical artifact, Louis Malle took on a subject that had only been dealt with in the most taboo kinds of hard-core pornography — child pornography and child prostitution — and made his treatment not only acceptable but admirable."(20)

"So Pretty Baby, in 1978, after the era of Deep Throat and other Hollywood-like porn movies, could present the topic of child-as- sex-object in candid and graphic ways that, by contrast, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita could not dare in 1962. In Kubrick’s movie, a nude scene of Sue Lyon as Lolita was so unthinkable it was never even proposed by Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote the screenplay, or Stanley Kubrick, who directed. Lolita and Humbert Humbert (James Mason) were not allowed even to kiss, let alone display any kind of sexuality — as later they would in the 1997 remake of Lolita starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. Two years after Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields was back on the screen in The Blue Lagoon, again nude, now as an early teen (both fictionally and in fact). Just as Deep Throat opened a door for other porn movies to crowd through, so Pretty Baby opened a farther door for the unabashed portrayal of children as sex objects, frequently partnered with adults." [mijn nadruk] (21)

"The contours of the taboo had been sufficiently softened that, by the 1990s, children as sex objects had become culturally familiar in movies, on television, and in advertisements — with all sorts of offshoots. For instance, beauty pageants for very little girls — five or six, and even younger — swelled into a multimillion-dollar industry of local, regional, and national competitions involving highly paid consultants and coaches, clothing designers, makeup specialists, and so on. Arguably, the winner of these pageants is the child who most successfully combines adult sexuality with childlike innocence. (The most well known of such child beauty queens, of course, is JonBenét Ramsey, who was murdered in 1996.)" [mijn nadruk] (22-23)

[Waarom die term 'children as sex objects'? Wat betekent dat in feite? ]

"By the 1990s, not only had children become thoroughly sexualized in movies, advertisements, and marketing, but something more general had begun to occur: the sexualization of just about everyone, regardless of age or status in society."(29)

(31) 2 - A Nation of Porn Stars

"In 1982 Neil Postman published one of the most provocative and insightful cultural studies of our times, The Disappearance of Childhood."(31)

[Nou, dat is wel erg veel lof voor iemand die er conservatieve en reactionaire opvattingen over kinderen op na houdt. Is dit nu dat typische Amerikaanse chauvinisme? ]

"Once children were so grouped, the concept of childhood could develop into what has become familiar to us today. Essential to the concept of childhood is innocence: it is widely accepted that children must be protected from knowledge and information that they are simply not developmentally ready to handle."(32)

[Is dit nu de weergave van Postman of is dat een stelling die ze zelf ook onderschrijven. Als dat laatste het geval is, ben ik snel klaar met dit boek.]

"In that same year, Connery starred with Catherine Zeta- Jones as his love interest in a film called Entrapment. Connery was almost seventy and Zeta-Jones thirty. We could make a long list of such film couplings. In True Crime (1999), Clint Eastwood, also almost seventy, played an over-the-hill journalist whose girlfriend, at the beginning of the movie, was a college student in her early twenties. Mary-Kate Olsen, twenty-one, whose development we traced, along with her twin sister’s, in Chapter 1, and Ben Kingsley, sixty-three, star as love interests in The Wackness, which, the New York Post reported, will include a “full make out session.” (The film was still in production as this book went to press, scheduled for release in early 2008.) For about two decades Americans have been watching television shows and movies dealing, in one way or another, with the sexualization of the elderly (usually elderly men) as well as children, along with the phenomenon of pairings that reach very wide across the generations."(36)

[Ik vind de term seksualisering hier toch maar vaag: neergezet worden als een seksueel wezen? wat is dat? dat zijn we toch ook? En wat is er mis met leeftijdverschillen?
In de film Entrapment is Gin met name gefascineerd door Mac omdat hij als inbreker zo briljant is en hem nodig heeft voor haar ultieme klus. Hij is ook gefascineerd door haar inbreekvaardigheden. Hij zegt meteen dat regel een is: geen intieme zaken want dat leidt af. En als hij haar in Kuala Lumpur half naakt ziet slapen trekt hij heel vaderlijk het laken over haar blote lijf heen. En dat raakt haar, zoals ook eerder dat hij een mooie jurk voor haar kocht voor de maskerklus. Het zijn dochtergevoelens, als het al iets is. Als ze later bijna aan het vrijen slaan - haar initiatief - zegt hij al gauw dat het hem spijt maar dat het te ingewikkeld is voor hem (waarom horen we niet). Zij vlijt zich dan lekker tegen hem aan. Pas in de allerlaatste scène lijken ze elkaar te gaan kussen, maar dan rijdt de trein ervoor. Zeker, hij is erg onder de indruk geraakt van haar, maar ook dat kon een dochterlijke kus zijn, we zullen het nooit weten. Dus 'love interest?' Hij vindt haar vast op allerlei manieren aantrekkelijk. Is dat raar dan? Mag dat niet? Maar van seks is in de film in ieder geval geen sprake.]

"Now, we don’t mean to suggest that the elderly should not be considered sexual beings, and we aren’t making a judgment about intergenerational romance; we’re simply pointing out that previously recognized barriers or distinctions between the groups at either end of the age continuum are increasingly eroding."(36-37)

[Nou .... Vooruit dan.]

"When hierarchical distinctions are blurred in a mass of social equals — a sibling society, in Bly’s term — then all ages are sexualized. So we have beauty queens at the age of six. And male sex symbols, real and cinematic, at seventy. And pairings can occur across the spectrum of age. So it is in the world of porn. In porn, everyone is sexualized regardless not only of age but of social position. "(38)

"In the real world of America in the early years of the twenty-first century, everyone — from professional athletes to teachers to the president of the United States — is seen in sexual terms."(38)

[Ja, maar wat zeg je daar dan mee met die term.]

Er worden hier na allerlei voorbeelden gegeven die duidelijk moeten maken dat seks overal is tegenwoordig. Hooking-up is er een van.

"The sexual practice, widespread among the young (high school and college age), called hooking up involves two people, usually total strangers, making eye contact at a party — or in a club, a school dance, or even at a mall — and then slipping into a room or hallway nearby for sex."(44)

"A related, apparently widespread, phenomenon, which Wolfe does not mention, involves relationships in which the partners are “fuck buddies” or “friends with benefits.” Whereas the hookup is typically a onetime occurrence, friends with benefits are pals or associates who have an ongoing no-strings, nonromantic sexual relationship."(44)

"Hooking up perfectly mirrors the sex that is typical in a porn movie. It is anonymous, or nearly so, impersonal, and undertaken without commitment. Those who hook up simply recognize the mutual sexual need of the moment, and then proceed as partners to satisfy their lust."(44-45)

[Het wachten is nog steeds op goede conclusies. Dit is een weergave van feiten, maar het blijft nog onduidelijk waar de auteurs staan in dit geheel.]

(49) 3 - Popping Rosie’s Rivets - Porn in the Good Old Days

"And so we need to bring some skepticism to one of the most powerful of the stories we tell ourselves about the postwar years: that the era was a paradigm of sexual conservatism. This story is in many ways true, but woefully incomplete."(50)

"The Rosie the Riveter phenomenon — the influx of women during the war into defense jobs and other occupations, such as ship- building, traditionally filled by men — grew out of the marriage of economic need and women’s desire for self-sufficiency, with marketing officiating."(51)

"She is portrayed by Rockwell as a powerful woman and a source of America’s economic and military strength — but also as a woman who never forgets to look good for her man."(52)

" In the end, overwhelmingly, women who wanted to keep their high-paying positions could not do so and were forced back either into the kind of lower-paying jobs they had before the war or out of the workforce altogether."(53)

"Pornography was hardly new to American culture. Along with France, the United States was the biggest producer of stag films, which evolved very little from the 1910s to the 1960s. These were brazenly hard-core, and generally infused with locker-room humor, sporting production credits such as A. Wise Guy, A. Prick, and Ima Cunt. Shown for audiences almost entirely of men, they presented men as dominant and assertive and the more passive women as constantly available and ready — though they too enjoyed the act. Violence, real or suggested, was nearly nonexistent. Stags, however, generally illegal and produced secretly, were usually shown in back rooms, in brothels, or screened in traveling carnivals and other marginalized venues. A young American man could easily live his entire life without the opportunity to see one. During and after World War II, however, porn in several new forms increasingly showed its face in public."(57)

"The striptease was what its name suggests, a tease. The dancers certainly presented themselves as sexual beings, but not as sex objects. Their distinctly individual names and their signature dances gave their acts an air of performance rather than prostitution, and there was never any question about who was in control of the act." [mijn nadruk] (58)

[Opnieuw vaag wat dan precies het verschil is.]

"It might seem strange that comic books could bear more responsibility than, say, stag films, for violent porn, but what matters in that assessment is not so much the appearance of bare breasts or genitalia as the way many comics reveled in scenes of arcane, brutal, and extremely sexualized torture of women."(60)

"In an attempt to appease the growing public outcry over comic book content and to avoid government interference, the industry instituted its own version of the Hays Code, ending what most historians call the golden age of comics. The Comics Code Authority, established in 1954, attempted to excise all sex, violence, gore, sadism, crime, and horror from the industry, and as a result, within one year, more than half of all comic book titles had disappeared. Superhero comics, which had been in decline since the end of the war, made a comeback, but the industry had lost the sophistication and wit that had earned the medium a large adult audience in its heyday." [mijn nadruk] (61-62)

"By the last years of the war, many comics — though seldom the marquee superhero titles — depended on what has come to be called “good girl” art, hypersexualized female characters who faced peril that usually emphasized their bodies and their vulnerability."(63)

"Given the adult readership of comics and the social changes overtaking America — scarred servicemen returning home and ex-Rosies returning to the workplace after their forced retirements — the growing anger and sexual violence of the comics suggests a response to women in which violent sexuality negotiates the new order." [mijn nadruk] (66)

"... horror comics gave the industry a ghastly new face — which now became the target on which every foe of comics could draw a bead."(68)

"While men earn punishments for cruelty and bigotry, women, on the other hand, earn their grisly rewards for infidelity, for promiscuity, for bad mothering, and for placing their careers ahead of their husbands." [mijn nadruk] (69)

"In story after story, EC encourages its readers to take satisfaction — and to learn from — the consequences of female moral failure. Women should understand their role, these comics said, by accepting their subordinate marital status and their nature as mothers. We don’t wish to argue here that EC comics encouraged actual violence toward women, but in the context of a perceived American masculinity crisis, the tales identify nontraditional women as the primary cause of trouble for both men and society. And their punishment for threatening the social dominance of men is violent and highly sexualized." [mijn nadruk] (69)

[Waarom zo aardig? Natúúrlijk stimuleert dat soort inhoud geweld tegen vrouwen.]

"After the Comics Code Authority put an end, in 1954, to the work that made EC and Fiction House profitable, adult readers, and men in particular, largely abandoned comic books. They turned instead to men’s adventure magazines (MAMs), where, over the next fifteen years, they could find pictorials of voluptuous women in bikinis and lingerie, as well as increasingly explicit illustrations of their torture fully dramatized in the stories."(70)

"Publishers did, however, have to contend with groups like the GFWC (General Federation of Women’s Clubs) and the Catholic National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL), which felt that they had battled the comics successfully and often included MAMs on their banned books list (along with the work of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and others). Local NODL groups, sometimes with the help of the police, would pressure drugstores and newsstands not to stock books and magazines they found unacceptable. Because such groups faced pressure in return not to appear to be banning everything, adventure magazine publishers could walk a tightrope, remaining as lurid as possible while still taking care not to become the first to appear on the conservative groups’ hit lists." [mijn nadruk] (71)

"The resonant message of the MAMs was that American men, many of them former combat soldiers, triumphed through the power of guns and clenched fists. If “they” want to steal your masculinity, the MAMs implied, you’ll have to keep it through violence and the sheer force of your will."(72)

"If there was a dormant misogyny in the comic book industry before 1954, with the MAMs it had awakened, hungry and lustful."(74)

"These are, then, immensely angry images that act out the sexual and social frustrations working-class men felt as their world shifted underneath them. The countless scenes of torture offered men the vicarious thrill of reasserting the control and dominance they felt they deserved but were losing."(76)

"But the lion’s share of video porn is rooted in anger and resentment directed against women, and so looks more like the men’s adventure magazines of an earlier era than like Playboy."(79)

[Dit hoofdstuk geeft een aardig historisch overzicht van de media vlak voor en verder na WOII die een steeds groter rol begonnen te spelen in de acceptatie van vrouwvijandige erotisch getinte verhalen, vooral voor mannen, waarbij de traditionele rolverdeling op de achtergrond altijd aanwezig was.]

(81) 4 - Porn Exemplars - Advancing the Front Lines of Porn

"The figures responsible for the porning of a culture are legion. We present here just a sampling, not a comprehensive catalog, of a half-dozen on America’s A-list.(...) Discussed here, then, are Russ Meyer, Al Goldstein, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, Jenna Jameson, and Paris Hilton."(81)

[Weer allemaal feitjes en verhaaltjes zonder conclusies.]

"Reviewing the exemplars of porn, we observe a distinctive characteristic of the entertainment culture that is also driven by porn: from one exemplar to the next, the shock bar, so to speak, must always be raised. For Russ Meyer, the nudie-cutie raised that bar enough to garner widespread attention. By the time we come to Snoop Dogg, however, the bar is all the way up to hard-core porn."(113)

"Porn, too (which can be defined imperfectly but not altogether incorrectly as “sex as entertainment”), is subject to this imperative to exceed itself. It has arguably responded to this imperative by becoming increasingly dark: that is, more and more marked by humiliation and real violence."(114)

(117) 5 - Would You Like Porn with That Burger?

"Of course, sex has always been used in American advertising. But in the past few decades the sex in such advertising increasingly de- rives from hard-core porn."(119)

"Advertising works, but in unintended as well as intended ways: every ad that uses porn to sell a product is also, at the same time, an ad for porn."(123)

"If the popularity of the slut look surprises you, consider the advertising climate in which young women have grown up."(125)

"Suffice it to say that teens and twentysomethings have grown up in a culture saturated with porned advertisements, relentlessly promoting the notion that their bodies and their sexuality are marketable commodities. Such commodification is everywhere evident in our culture, ranging from the relatively benign to the highly porned." [mijn nadruk] (126)

"College students, then, in significant numbers are comfortable in highly sexualized situations: posing nude, masturbating, and having partnered sex (in the case of Boink) on camera, writing erotic fantasies as well as reviews of vibrators and other sex toys, giving explicit advice on sexual techniques, and so on."(133)

" In a 2006 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, author Ariel Levy chronicles the ease with which camera operators for Mantra Films, the production company, find young women who — for no more compensation than a T-shirt or a hat with the GGW logo — are willing to flash their breasts, their bottoms, deep kiss one another, and engage in other sexual activities (with girl-on-girl action a specialty)."(133-134)

(137) 6. The Nexus of Porn and Violence - Abu Ghraib and Beyond

"In the days following the graphic revelations, some discussions of Abu Ghraib became de facto conversations about porn in general and Internet porn in particular. Dozens of print, television, and online news reports and commentaries covering the scandal described the photographs in terms of pornography. Indeed, pornography and America’s porn-infused culture became the most common targets of a feverish effort to find someone, or something, to blame."(138)

"Was pornography responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib? Surely this is not the whole story. Rather, lousy training, poor leadership, bad orders, and a variety of other systemic flaws created a situation in which soldiers — several of whom astonished their family, friends, and previous commanders with their actions — could indulge the kind of dark impulses that find full expression in violent pornography. Porn was not the cause of abuse but rather the language of abuse at Abu Ghraib — a language in which these young soldiers were fluent."(143-144)

"Built into the military mindset, then, is a more general process that scholars call “othering.” This refers to the social and psychological processes by which a group in power defines, usually in opposition to itself, a less powerful group. In the specific case of the military, the less powerful group would typically consist of the defeated enemy, the vanquished. Othering serves simultaneous purposes: first, it justifies whatever actions the dominant group feels it needs to use to control “them,” the weaker group, and second, it reaffirms the superiority of the dominant group. Othering is on full display in the Abu Ghraib photos, as it is in all violent pornography. To their tormentors, the detainees at Abu Ghraib prison are clearly nonentities." [mijn nadruk] (145)

"It is worth repeating that our goal in this book is to investigate the growing dominance of porn in our culture without, as much as possible, passing judgment on the morality of its production or consumption. It is difficult, however, to delve into the subindustry of violent porn without coming away disturbed. Given the presence of porn in their lives, it seems likely that the guards perpetrating the abuse at Abu Ghraib deliberately imitated the violent porn that now thrives on the Internet." [mijn nadruk] (153)

"In the past several years, however, hard-core pornography, especially on the Internet, has gravitated toward humiliation and degradation that cannot be defined as acting or “performance” in any sense. "(157)

"Anti-pornography activists have for decades described porn as angry and hateful toward women, a claim we don’t think is true of all porn. Over the past decade or so, however, violent porn has advertised and sold anger and hate in increasingly actual — that is, not pretended or scripted — ways. It is as if the resentful anger underlying the men’s adventure magazines discussed in Chapter 3, with misogynistic Nazis bayoneting bound and bleeding women, has returned to the surface of American popular culture in a new form. The male audience for violent pornography seeks literally to injure, through physical violence and humiliation, the flesh and spirit of American women." [mijn nadruk] (159)

"Violent porn implicitly accepts power as the male trait. Further, it views male power in only one way: dominating others through sexual violence. This is precisely the dynamic on display at Abu Ghraib." [mijn nadruk] (160)

(169) 7 - Women and Porn

"But is it true? Does pornography taint us? Does a dirty picture, once seen, skulk about deep in our consciousness and lay back trails connecting our polluted libidos to our feelings toward people in general? Or toward our lovers, or even our spouses? Comstock certainly thought so. (...) Even in his own day, however, many critics hooted at the prudery of Comstock and his allies."(169)

"Yet Comstock’s belief that porn taints the soul remains relevant today. In fact, the arguments over pornography all have, at their core, one position or another on this supposed defilement. For Comstock, the taint was fundamentally moral. Over the last several decades, however, not only moral crusaders but groups with social and political allegiances have lobbied against pornography. Of all these groups, women, the putative victims of pornography, have overwhelmingly dominated the public discourse on the subject since the 1950s. And since the growth of women’s liberation as a powerful social movement in the 1970s, feminism has set the terms of the debate." [mijn nadruk] (170)

"The first modern anti-pornography campaigns, then, spearheaded by the Kefauver panel along with antidelinquency groups, sprang from deeply conservative roots, promoting the father-led nuclear family and strong patriotic values."(171)

"Working from the same premises of male vulnerability and the consequent danger men posed to society, the feminists of the 1970s saw porn’s frightening potential to dehumanize and subjugate women."(171)

"All that changed in 1975. In that year, Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Rape, she argued, functioned as a social mechanism of control by which men maintained sexual supremacy over women. As a result, all men, even nonrapists, enjoyed the benefit of rape. (...) Its very existence, then, constituted a de facto harm against women. Identified in this way as a crucial part of male oppression, porn became an urgent and compelling feminist issue."(173)

" Dworkin and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon would become the voices of the feminist anti-porn movement. Over the next fifteen years or so, Dworkin and MacKinnon, whose work together permanently linked their names, gave the anti- pornography movement a coherence and public prominence unequaled before or since."(175)

" The odd bedfellows — anti-porn feminists and the Reagan administration, along with much of the religious right — eventually created more long-term trouble for the feminists than short-term benefit."(175)

"In regarding porn as a violation of the civil rights of women, they were proposing nothing less than a systemic legal change in the way society handled pornography and other images of violence against women."(176)

"Free speech, sacred to liberalism, does come into play, but in an unexpected way. Dworkin and MacKinnon argued that porn, by participating in a social system that perpetuates the inferiority of women, dehumanizes them and thus robs them of their own right to free speech."(177)

"Dworkin and MacKinnon succeeded in mounting a compelling case against porn not on moral grounds, but rather as a crucial part of the oppression of women and a violation of their civil rights. Feminists and others would continue this approach in the fight against porn. And, most of all, the two anti-porn feminists had succeeded glowingly in bringing porn to the forefront of feminism’s principal struggle for social advancement in the face of male oppression." [mijn nadruk] (178)

[Toch begrijp ik nog steeds niet waarom je geweld en zo verder tegen vrouwen in pornografie niet op morele gronden zou kunnen verwerpen. Niet alles is relatief of vrijheid van meningsuiting.]

"Right from the beginning, some feminists worried about Dworkin and MacKinnon’s type of activism. Even Gloria Steinem, who participated in the anti-pornography civil rights approach, had identified a “clear and present” difference between pornography and erotica as early as 1978. Steinem wanted to keep feminists from being labeled as neo-Puritans and prudes. Anti-porn too often bordered on anti-sex, and seemed to quash any possibility of an active and healthy sexual life for women."(179)

"Further, many feminists were dismayed, especially during the Indianapolis hearings, that self-described “militant feminists” were standing shoulder to shoulder with conservative religious figures who were foursquare against pornography — but also foursquare against abortion and the ERA." [mijn nadruk] (179)

[Ja, dat was een erg kortzichtige, zelfs domme manoeuvre.]

"Pro-sex feminists wanted to reverse that. A few, such as journalist and author Wendy McElroy, attacked the core idea of the anti-pornography movement — the notion of harm (or we might say, after Comstock, the damage caused by “tainted” men). The real harm, they argued, would come from censoring pornography, and such censorship itself would stifle the growth of women’s equality. The debate, often called the sex wars or the porn wars, grew bigger and more heated throughout the 1980s. By the decade’s end, the porn wars had seriously damaged feminism as a coherent national and international movement."(180)

"A shrinking number of anti-pornography feminists continue to fight on. Scholars such as Gail Dines and Robert Jensen have expanded the anti-pornography arguments, pointing out, for instance, the racism common in the products and rampant in the industry itself. In their view, pornography shares in the oppression and imperialism that underlie Western thought. Further, it’s a toxic expression of a much larger problem: our capitalist, media-saturated society."(181)

"Anti-pornography scholars and activists resent the third-wave feminists’ description of themselves as pro-sex, implying, as it does, their own status as anti-sex. To many surviving second-wavers, the third-wavers offer “fuck-me feminism,” a retrogression in which women confirm old gender stereotypes either by claiming to “choose” traditional roles, or by finding female power through adopting male behaviors, such as casual sex. Feminist defenses of pornography fall into this second category, they argue. Some third-wavers, such as Naomi Wolf, also find pornography troubling, but not because of the supposed harm inflicted by tainted males. Rather, pornography connects good sex exclusively with the Barbie-like bodies of porn stars, and so interferes with ordinary women’s enjoyment of sex — something that is very important to the third-wavers." [mijn nadruk] (182)

"Recent statistics oƒer no evidence that porn has spurred violence against women."(183)

"But the same change occurs when men watch films that are simply violent, without the element of porn, suggesting that the problem is with the violence rather than the explicit sex."(184)

"In summation, pornography will not transform a psychologically healthy man into a violent sexual abuser. But porn does play a disturbing, if uncertain, role in the lives of men predisposed toward sexual violence."(185)

[Dat het niet om expliciete seks gaat is duidelijk. Maar eindoloos veel mannen zijn gewelddadig en dan speelt de doorsnee porno voor mannen een veel groter rol dan hier uitgewerkt. Als je de hele tijd seks ziet in combinatie met typische mannen- en vrouwenrollen, met vrouwen die vernederd worden of agressief en denigrerend benaderd worden door zich superieur wanende mannen dan gaat die beeldvorming toch een grote rol spelen. Het gaat dus niet om porno op zich, maar om wat de porno afbeeldt.]

"What kind of porn do women watch? Well, lots of diƒerent kinds. But much of the most popular porn for men is decidedly not on the women’s list."(187)

"Also, the expanding market for degradation porn compromises defenses of pornography as a healthy career choice. In degradation porn, “harm” doesn’t happen secondarily, it’s the specific point of it all. Harm to women is the very reason men buy such DVDs. The violence in Janet Romano’s Forced Entry is a mixture of acting and reality. But the women in degradation porn movies are not paid to act at all. All the pain and humiliation is real." [mijn nadruk] (192)

[Dat bedoel ik. ]

"Without repeating here the history of the feminist arguments about porn, suffice it to say that we feel women have had good reason to feel personally oppressed by the direct effect pornography has on their lives, or by porn’s general power in the culture."(193)

"But research, cultural analysis, and common sense lead to one indisputable conclusion. It is simple, glaring, and impossible to avoid: we have created a culture that puts our daughters in grave danger and leaves them there to fend for themselves."(194)

[Dat is wel een goede conclusie, maar tegelijkertijd een die niks zegt over wat er moet gebeuren. Missschien in het laatste hoofdstuk over de toekomst.]

(195) 8 - Where We Go from Here

"When conservatives praise the good old days of sexual innocence and restraint, they describe a fantasized and sentimentalized past in which the real suffering caused by ignorance and bigotry are conveniently forgotten."(197)

"Porn today is no longer, as it was in the past, the dirty secret men think they are keeping from the good girls. The secret is out. In becoming mainstream, porn has stepped out from the back rooms of men’s smokers and into the light of day. Before this outing, we could look away, culturally speaking, and pretend not only that porn didn’t exist, but that the universality of sexual desire, the reduction of women and men to body parts, the no-strings ideal of uncommitted sex — none of this existed. Now we have to face porn, and all that porn carries in tow. We have to deal with what is liberating about porn as well as what is limiting, even damaging."(198)

[Tjonge jonge, wat een gedraai. Trek nu eens conclusies. ]

"Sexualized, as we have shown, does not mean hypersexed. It means, rather, that a person, female or male, young or old, is divested of all other qualities he or she may be said to possess — intelligence, spirituality, sense of humor, athleticism, compassion, talent — and reduced to an outward husk, utterly empty but for a single potential, the ability to satisfy someone else’s sexual needs." [mijn nadruk] (198-199)

"These negative aspects of a porned America must be addressed, but, frankly, it is not clear to us in many cases how to proceed. For, without some kind of censorship (which we would oppose), how can the sheer volume of porn on the Internet — which in itself trivializes sex — be reduced? How (again without resorting to censorship) can the porn of humiliation and torture be kept from slowly seeping into more mainstream porn (as seems already to be happening), and from there into the culture at large?" [mijn nadruk] (199)

[Wat is er tegen bepaalde vormen van censuur, van het verbieden van bepaalde zaken? Er wordt zoveel verboden. Het hangt er van af vanuit welke motieven en normatieve achtergrond je dat doet.]

"We reject the oft-posited “innocence” of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century America because this conception relies on a puritanical denial of the body and of all things sexual."(199)

[Dat is in ieder geval iets.]

"Rather, we cite tantra as one specific example of what is more generally possible, and much to be desired, in human sexuality: an indulgence in complete sensuality, an abandonment of inhibition, with neither the wallowing in guilt and shame of Puritanism and its modern derivatives nor, in the case of porn, the rebellious sexual transgression that depends on — and thereby holds firmly in place — that same guilt and shame. And tantra models other positive sexual possibilities that ought to be achievable even outside of this formal tradition: an emphasis on giving as well as receiving pleasure, along with an aƒectionate and playful respect for one’s partner." [mijn nadruk] (200)

"In imitating porn, Goldstein said, people are imitating “the worst possible kind of sex.”"(200)

[Dat vind ik ook.]

"With the exceptions of true amateur porn and some women’s porn, it is certainly true, as Goldstein observes, that Internet porn especially reduces sex to what is called in the industry “mechanics”: close-ups of genitals in action, culminating in visible ejaculation. The sex is impersonal, and one bit of evidence that ordinary people, especially the young, are indeed imitating porn is found in the postcoital question of the typical hookup: “What did you say your name was again?”"(202)

"The most disturbing trend in contemporary porn is the growth of porn focusing on abuse, humiliation, and torture. Dark porn is of a piece with a more general media devaluation of human life that has leeched into the populace and seems to be spreading." [mijn nadruk] (202-203)

Nu meer over de oorzaken ervan:

"The first is the cultural breakdown of the wall between public and private, or perhaps we should say the wall shielding private events. Everything about a person’s life has become public to us, or potentially so." [mijn nadruk] (203)

"No topic was “too personal.” Confessions and revelations in intimate detail were made to studio and television audiences, which is to say, to complete strangers."(204)

"As discussed in Chapter 5, there are some decidedly positive aspects to true amateur porn. But there is no question that when ordinary people, many in committed relationships, post video clips on the Internet of themselves having sex, the ideas of “privacy” and “personal life” have significantly eroded."(205)

"At the heart of the human objectification that dark porn depends on is the sexualization of girls and young women, and, more generally, the sexualization of all members of our society, or what we have called in these pages universal sexualization. It is difficult to argue against sexualization and the trappings of sexualization — such as slutwear — without sounding prudish or anti-sex. The distinction, however, between sexuality and sexualization is crucial and must be understood clearly. One can enjoy sexuality without being sexualized. One can be sexualized and not enjoy one’s sexuality. (In fact, we would argue that the sexualized person likely does not enjoy her or his own sexuality, since that sexuality is so much in the service of others — the perceptions of others, the judgments of others, the enjoyment of others, the approval of others.)"(208)

[Is dit nu de tweede oorzaak? Ik vind het toch wel erg aan de oppervlakkige kant allemaal.]

"These females are, to understate it, not shrinking violets. It is not surprising, then, that in significant numbers, these young women have responded to the culture of porn by rolling up their sleeves, so to speak, and jumping in. Porn is one more item girls have lined out of the “boys only” playbook.(...) And yet, many of the young women that Ariel Levy talked with in connection with her book Female Chauvinist Pig, as well as some college women that Laura Sessions Stepp interviewed for her book Unhooked, seem to revel in rather than suffer from their own sexualization. They flash their breasts for Girls Gone Wild cameras, for instance, because, as the girls themselves put it, they have such beautiful breasts to flash. Far from feeling exploited or victimized, they say, they positively enjoy putting themselves on display in skimpy clothes at bars and clubs. On first consideration, such reveling in the reduction of oneself to an attractive body might seem like the healthy exercise of a newfound freedom, sexualization as empowerment." [mijn nadruk] (209-210)

"In any case, the progression from hottie to skank, from virgin to hag, is just a hop, skip, and a jump if one accepts what sexualization stipulates: that the most important thing about a person — in fact, the only important thing — is sexual attractiveness."(212)

"Any path to a healthy, worthwhile sexual future, then, must avoid the desert of sexualization, for males as well as females. Putting aside the problems men face from their own sexualization (as boytoys and studs) they too struggle in many ways with the sexualization of women."(213-214)

"Given the universal sexualization that exists in a porned America, we need to think beyond the sexualization of females. What are the eƒects on all groups — on males and females, children and the elderly — of being treated as if sexuality is the exclusive value of a person? What happens to the very idea of childhood when children are sexualized? What happens to our views of the elderly when they, too, are sexualized but necessarily consigned, since they are the furthest from the nineteen-year-old ideal, to the bottom rung of the ladder of social status?" [mijn nadruk] (216)

"It’s to be expected that, as educators, we believe in the power of ideas and rational discussion. But our belief is solidly grounded in empirical evidence that destructive, unhealthy attitudes and values can be reshaped in positive ways."(216)

[Nou, dat zal helpen bij de meeste mensen als het om die zaken gaat.]

"Along formal and informal educational lines, the problems of sexualization can similarly be confronted. For example, parents need to watch television shows with their kids and comment on, let’s say, ads for Bratz dolls, and other examples of sexualization, whether in ads or in the shows themselves. Even very little girls, three, four, or five years old, can be guided in ways to countervail the messages of such ads."(217)

"Through formal instruction in the classroom as well, girls and boys need to gain what the APA report on sexualization calls “media literacy.” The report focuses on girls, but boys as well need to develop skills enabling them not merely to view ads passively and naively, but to see through them — to see the underlying assumptions, the implicit and encoded messages, in commercials on television as well as in Internet and magazine ads."(218)

[Uiteraard zonder enige kritiek op het kapitalisme te uiten. ]