This is more than just a tantalizing strip tease whose slow, seductive motions easily excite its viewer. This is more than just a resulting hard-on from flips through a glossy Playboy. This is more than just even Deepthroat’s “lesson” on pleasuring men through a Linda Lovelace allure–and technique. This is the porn industry in the United States and its relatively recent revolution due to the Internet. The rapid technological development of the 21st century has allowed porn to become readily available and accessible, specifically as new forms have been introduced via webcams according to a Forbes article titled “How Much of the Internet is Actually Porn.” Prior to being able to stream porn at any time, people would have to wait weeks to rent or even buy videos through mail order and ambitiously face society’s created humiliation of buying porn videos at related stores. Quite simply, the Internet has allowed people to access porn easily, inexpensively and discreetly, which in turn is causing serious problems for our society.
It seems worthless to even state that today our lives revolve around the Internet as you are currently reading this article on none other than the Internet. But beyond the average college readership of this online magazine, those younger than us are also defined by their devices and world wide web explorations no matter their age or their need for Moodle or Her Campus Bucknell. Children grow up on tablets and smartphones and their access to the Internet is unlike that of any prior generation. According to “Internet Users,” today, 40% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. The number of users has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2014, as it reached one billion users in 2005, two billion in 2010 and is predicted to arrive at three billion by the end of 2014. Putting these stats into play, it is evident that males, especially boys, with increasing access to the Internet are able to easily watch porn at younger and younger ages. To sum it up in numbers, statistics on pornography state that 51% of male students first viewed porn before their teenage years, considered 12 years and younger. That means more than half of the men recorded are catching the dirty deets of the dirty before they are even in high school. That also means that most of these boys are having their first encounters with sex through porn, not necessarily through the physical action.
When 304 online porn scenes were analyzed by Juniper Research, 88.2% contained physical aggression such as spanking, gagging and slapping while 48.7% of scenes contained verbal aggression, specifically name-calling. Perpetrators of such, dare we say it again, aggression were usually male while targets were overwhelmingly female. There is a power differential in contemporary pornography between people that can be sexualized and exploited: the age-old set up of domination and subordination is now eroticized through gender. As such mainstream porn, of which the majority focuses on heterosexual intercourse, is becoming increasingly more violent and therefore, more degrading towards women. In an effort to stay relevant, porn is relying on extremes: extreme standards of beauty, of violence and of the actual sexual act as a whole. Women in porn are primarily Caucasian, young, skinny, hairless and have huge breasts. Such traits are unrealistic and usually unattainable for most women, considering the rudimentary anatomical history of hips, hair, and not to mention the difficulty that is perfectly permanent hair removal, perennial dieting, etc. Once you move past the discrepancies of these details, although not minute, the actual action of sex, that is the biological insertion of a penis into a vagina, is portrayed as body punishment. Men refer to the women in the videos as “sluts” and “whores.” Women are sometimes penetrated by multiple men and often forced into uncomfortable positions. Legs don’t go like that, hips cannot be spread that wide, and no, as a female, we do not want to be labeled just as much as we fought our respective nicknames in kindergarten. Frequently, women are depicted as teenagers and dressed as stereotypical Halloween-themed schoolgirls or babysitters. This isn’t a Mean Girls “one night of the year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” This is every minute of every day of every year and these youthful get-ups gallivanting within pornography allow men to fantasize and want to have sex with younger women. Now, we aren’t talking about an Ashton Kutcher-Demi Moore reversal age gap. We are talking pedophilia, related sexual assault cases, and, simply, female degradingness (VAWnet).
Imagine video chatting with an old high school friend and you tell her to throw on that dress you want to borrow for formals so you can get an idea of how it looks. Now imagine that you’re video chatting with a stranger and you tell her to take off that dress because you want to see how it looks…off. Welcome to the world of webcam pornography, more popular than the infamous PornHub.com. It’s the 21st century strip tease of early 1900 pornography but this time men are making demands, which enables them to manipulate the sexual actions of women. One such site is LiveJasmin, considered the most popular adult site on the Internet with about 32 million visitors a month. On this website men watch women strip live over webcam. The men are able to talk to the women while they strip and tell them what they want they want. The men get to be completely in control of what they want to see and what these women do. And there you have it, another way in which Internet porn allows for the dominant and subordinate role play through gender, without any of the 50 Shades of Grey gaiety. Furthering the conception of female subordination by males, webcam porn taints sexual attitudes of the men, and boys, participating in (and no longer just watching) them.
It is exceedingly problematic that young boys are watching porn so easily on the Internet and learning about sex through these videos. These highly violent depictions in no way teach values of equality, intimacy or mutual enjoyment in sexual relations, moreover the physical learning experience that is interaction with another human body. Instead, boys are conditioned to view sex as a power struggle between the genders in which they, the dominant, are entitled to degrade and oppress women who appear to willingly accept such a subversive position while performing and giving pleasure. As a whole, the growing presence of Internet porn through varied accessibilities and alternate options such as webcams is propelling the teaching of women as inferior and that sexual relations only exist for male pleasure and power. Thus, this cultivates sexist attitudes that normalize sexual violence which should be more than simply concerning to us as members of the society.
Sources:Lindsey Ruff, SpeakUp Peer Educator, Leader of Sorority Ally Training, Member of Professor Flack’s Research Team on Sexual Assault
http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/http://www.forbes.com/sites/julieruvolo/2011/09/07/how-much-of-the-internet-is-actually-for-porn/http://www.covenanteyes.com/pornstats/http://www.internetsafety101.org/Pornographystatistics.htmhttp://www.vawnet.org/sexual-violence/print-document.php?doc_id=418&find_type=web_desc_AR