Campus organizations facilitated a discussion about the effects
of frequent porn visitation on perception of sex.
On the evening of Oct. 16, SAVE, TITAN and TU Panhellenic sponsored an event called “Pop Culture and Trauma: The Implications of Pornography,” in which Kelsey Hancock and Dr. Jennifer Airey facilitated a discussion about the benefits and ramifications of pornography usage.
Dr. Airey kicked off the lecture with a story. She had spoken with a prominent IT worker for TU, and he commented that at any given time, 40 percent of the campus was watching porn. How true that is, Dr. Airey remarked, she had no idea. But, obviously, a discussion about pornography usage would be beneficial to the student population at TU.
First, Airey and Hancock discussed Pornhub’s Insights webpage: a review of statistics about use frequency and the most-searched terms for 2018. According to the website, there were 33.5 billion visits to Pornhub over the year. Pornhub Insights also states that the “92 million average daily visits [is equivalent to] the populations of Canada, Poland and Australia every day.”
As the event flyer advertised, we next “discuss[ed] ways to balance sex positivity with concerns about consent and violence in porn saturated culture.” The faculty facilitators opened up the discussion to the student audience. The conversation that followed outlined social issues that are perpetuated by the pornography industry such as discrimination, objectification, interpersonal violence and skewed perceptions and expectations surrounding intercourse.
Students and facilitators alike expressed discomfort with the fetishization of races and sexualities in pornography, recognizing how the industry is primarily white, cisgender and heterosexual. Anything deviating from those identity traits is seen as against the norm and is categorized and labeled as something different from the norm.
Further discrimination occurs to the actors, themselves. There are so many disadvantages for female sex workers: they comprise most of the actors in porn, while most of the producers are men. Women are also more likely to get paid less as they keep performing; for each video they star in, their asking rate goes down. This classification of people based on race, sexuality or gender leads to the fixation on and fetishization of these people; it is inherently objectifying and dehumanizing.
The conversation then shifted towards the roles that men and women traditionally play in explicit videos. Airey explained the juxtaposition of important characteristics in casting. She stated, “Girls are there for their looks, men are there for their ability to maintain an erection for a long time, under weird circumstances.” The dichotomy between genders within the porn industry is further summarized by Hancock’s comment: “We don’t think of women as sexual beings; we think of them as sexual objects.”
The porn industry relies on the objectification of and violent actions against women. Airey mentioned that since the invention of the internet, everyone has access to free porn; she said that the only way to make people continue to pay was to produce more extreme and violent content. Thus, unrealistic and dangerous sexual acts continue to become more normalized in the porn industry. These videos support violence against women and may influence viewers (whether consciously or subconsciously) to perpetuate these same, problematic actions.
Porn is inherently an inaccurate representation of sex. And when boys, on average, are exposed to porn for the first time at age eight and girls at age eleven, according to Airey, their perceptions of sex can become very skewed.
The lecture certainly encouraged students to carefully examine the content that they are consuming to recognize how it could influence their perception of sex, but it did not, by any means, discourage porn usage. The lecture was a fantastic mix of respectful discussion and honest evaluation. As Airey asked at the end, “What are the ideologies we are being taught as we watch this, and what are the resources we need to think about these things from a literate perspective?”
Kelsey Hancock compiled a list of references for further research, which I have listed below.
Utulsa statistics https://utulsa.edu/sexual-violence-prevention-education/campus-climate/
Further Reading:
Levy, A. (2010). Female chauvinist pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture. Black Inc..
Orenstein, P. (2016). Girls & sex: Navigating the complicated new landscape. Oneworld Publications. (Orenstein also has another book out now called Boys & Sex)
Williams, L. (1999). Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the” frenzy of the Visible”. Univ of California Press.
Williams, L. (Ed.). (2004). Porn studies. Duke University Press.
Gunter, J. (2019). The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine. Citadel Press.
Taormino, T., Penley, C., Shimizu, C., & Miller-Young, M. (Eds.). (2013). The feminist porn book: The politics of producing pleasure. The Feminist Press at CUNY.
Durham, M. G. (2009). The Lolita effect: The media sexualization of young girls and what we can do about it. Abrams.
Muscio, I. (2009). Cunt: A declaration of independence. Seal Press.
Documentaries:
“Hot Girls Wanted”
“After Porn Ends”
