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6. Porn: it's all about men

People are led to believe porn is a synonym for sex, therefore porn is healthy and stands for the right to express our sexuality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Porn is generic, poor, industrialized sex. It's about business as usual. Yet the multibillion-dollar porn industry wants us to embrace the notion that porn and real sex are the same, and if you don't support porn, you're an ignorant prude.

Paraphrasing sociologist Gail Dines, if I'm not pro pornography, it doesn't mean I'm against sex. If I tell you about the health risks of consuming fast-food, it doesn't mean I'm against eating. Now, if the fast-food industry can shape eating behavior, if the fashion industry can shape dressing behavior, why wouldn't porn shape sexual behavior?

In his article "The Real Problem with Porn: It's Bad for Sex," journalist and sex expert Michael Castleman says: porn is the leading sex educator of men, but it teaches sex all wrong. He lists the many sex myths in porn— every man is huge and comes on cue, all women are exhibitionists, everyone is always eager, sex is 95% fellatio and intercourse, etc. etc.—and quotes Marie Silva, a pornstar married to her colleague Jack: "There's a wonderful playfulness to our personal sex. I don't come from intercourse, so he massages my clitoris by hand. After sex at work, it's so nice to come home to the real thing."

Besides not being the real thing, porn has a negative component in the very root of its name. In her lecture (https://youtu.be/ZGpZ5_xtsq0 ) at the Eastern Connecticut State University, writer and speaker Maya S. goes back to the origin of the word: porne refers to the lowest class of whores in Ancient Greece, regarded as human trash, and graphos means sketching. So pornography means either "drawings of filthy whores" or "women depicted as filthy whores." In porn, women are reduced to body parts such as the vagina, breasts, anus and mouth. There's no human connection to them, therefore there's no accountability and they can be used for anything: their well-being, preferences and desires become irrelevant.

Nobody wants to watch a girl enjoying anal

Women are presented in positions of submission, servility or display and offered to the viewer as sexual objects that enjoy humiliation or pain, experiencing pleasure in scenes of rape, torture, pedophilia and incest. It's all aimed at making the abuse of a woman look sexy. In her lecture, Maya shows the cover of an adult video entitled Filthy Office Sluts and also the still photo of a scene with a tied-up woman grimacing as a man holds her head back and pees into her mouth.

The pornographers' language is very clear about how they depict women: filthy, whores, sluts, meatholes, cum-buckets that are not regular, "human" women but rather insatiable nymphomaniacs who enjoy all forms of rough sex—so it's okay to abuse them because that's what they want.

Take the "money shot," for example, which is the ejaculation on the face. Maya shares an interesting insider glimpse when she gives us a quote from porn director Bill Margold: "I'd like to really show what I believe men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that because they get even with the women they can't have." And thus gonorrhea of the eye was born to women.

The multibillion-dollar porn industry as we know today started in the 1950s and, interestingly enough, is rooted in misogyny. In the very conservative America of that era, many men were coming back home from the war to find out that in the meantime lots of women had taken their place in the workplace to support their homes. Men were not happy with the situation, as women not only became competition in the job market but also had retreated from their traditional housewife roles. Maya shares some ads from that era. One Van Hausen tie ad depicts a woman kneeling on the floor while serving her husband breakfast in bed. The accompanying text goes like this: "Show her it's a man's world."