The biological functions of sex in biology is for reproduction and for pair bonding. The production of oxytocin of touch and nurture. The sex acts here seem to be more about self gratification rather than relationship. I am deliberately not saying which is better although I am biased towards the mutual comfort version. I just think that biology has more to say about behaviours than we think and that moral choice is not just about mindset.
Is this a non-fiction article about whether porn should be banned, or a movie review?
The headline and subhead (which I suppose the author may not have written) and the first couple of paragraphs suggest the author is going to deal with the reality of porn, at least as the author sees it. But the only evidence presented is the contents of a movie about the porn industry, a work of fiction.
“Bella’s” *fictional* experiences are no proper basis for real-world policy changes. Real world evidence is required. And it’s not good enough to claim, without evidence, that a work of fiction accurately depicts the reality. Not in a policy article.
If you want to make the case for banning something, you need to do better than this.
I think Bella’s fictional example is explicitly representative in mainstream porn. The film could have easily swapped the artistic representation for a real one in a snap.
Yeah, I was a little confused as to whether the movie was a fiction or perhaps a documentary about an actual performer. It does rather make a difference if you are going to talk policy responses. I am quite prepared to believe that the porn industry is awful as is often said, but there does need to be some clarity about sources (I am sure Julie Bindel could provide a veritable library if asked).
Which is probably why she’s Julie Bindel, librarian, and the rest of the world is not
Sharon Overy
1 year ago
There could be some effort to persuade girls and women to make better choices. Stop telling them that they can do anything they want, and that they should expect to be shielded from any negative consequences of their own actions.
I’ve also noticed a distinct inability to tell the difference between attention and admiration in too many women.
Porn will continue as long as there are people willing to be in it.
B Davis
1 year ago
Is it the film which is disliked? The director’s treatment of the material? The short from which the movie was derived/extended? The subject of the film? The vulgarity? The nudity? The grotesque nature of the story and the explicit crudity of this particular cinematic experience?
Is it the presumed connection between this fictional ‘depiction’ of a pornographic film and what Thyberg implies is an actual pornographic film which may or may not treat its actors and actresses in the same mechanistic & exploitive manner that Thyberg treated hers?
We have no real idea, of course. But that is not surprising because we equally have no real idea as to what is real, what is imagined, what is mirror, and what is perverted fantasy in the construction and selling of Pleasure itself.
The ‘nod & a wink’ nature of so-called porno exposés is that the expose itself exists and is consumed as porno (albeit a self-aware porno) by the very audience who would find the porno so ‘cinematized’ as cheap & exploitive in its original form, but not when looking at it in an ‘artistic’ mirror. Perhaps it’s OK, now, to be cheap & exploitive if by doing so we end-up at Cannes & Sundance?
In the end it probably doesn’t matter.
Based on the description and what is revealed by a quick, unfiltered Googling there is nothing here of value or interest. And that is too bad. it’s too bad because, as the author first hints and then abandons — there is substance in a careful & reasoned consideration of what is and is not pornographic / erotic (and how we humans negotiate same). There is substance in the consideration of the extent to which voluntary participation in so-called exploitation (of any sort) truly is or is not exploitive.
Do we ‘exploit’ LeBron when we fill our coliseums to watch him play? Or does LeBron exploit us, by selling us his BBall talent at insanely exorbitant rates. Is a beautiful women exploited when she agrees to share some portion of her self, her beauty, her form, her sensuality (real? Memorex?) for buckets of dollars? Or is it the size of the bucket which determines the degree of exploitation?
Like the old joke whose punchline ends, “we’re just negotiating price!”
There is much which could have been done here with a subject ripe with potential and interest — maybe next time.
We have been in this drama for a very, very long time using whatever media was available. One might imagine that today’s teens find it boring. By making the act so common place, it subtracts from the reality of humanity itself.
William Shaw
1 year ago
If there is actually a central message in this article, other than porn is bad and feminists shouldn’t support it, I’ve been unable to find it.
I can’t find a reason to watch the production. PornHub has already saturated the market with home made stuff.
Don Lightband
1 year ago
What i object to is the apparently basic premise made here that in going, moving, shifting herself all the way from Sweden to California, the protagonist can yet have no desires of her “own”. All admissions of mimesis at play aside, may i ask how such non-motivation is even possible?
Hugh Marcus
1 year ago
Although this article doesn’t really deal with it, I’d have thought that feminists main complaint about the porn industry is that it’s misogyny at its worst. The women are all ‘bitches who need a good seeing to’ & they all apparently enjoy being treated as such. Those of us who are adults know this isn’t reality. I do worry for a generation of teenage boys for whom this has become normalised.
George Kushner
1 year ago
How about self-produced porn, OnlyFans etc? Where’s a coercive structure there?
A lot of young ‘performers’ with great hopes that eventually get squashed by reality. A very few seem to do well because they really do have an edge. That leads to a lot of people trying and likely losing money along the way. Still some persist because they enjoy the thrill of exposure. Takes all kinds to make our world.
David Giles
1 year ago
“But the days when feminists were largely against porn are a distant memory. With the rise of the Christian Right in the Eighties — and the rise of home video — so-called “sex-positive feminism” won the day”
I’m sorry, but is she really trying to say that the Christian Right in America is pro-porn? And trying to say it in an article accusing others of not speakimg the truth?
I understood her to be saying – indirectly – that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Feminists dislike and oppose the Christian Right; the Christian Right wishes to ban pornography; therefore feminists will support it. The mention of home videos confuses the issue, of course, and shouldn’t have been shoe-horned into the main point as a parenthesis.
N T
1 year ago
Perhaps some statistics go to with the lurid claims would be helpful.
The Gries
1 year ago
porn is probably not going anywhere but more mainstream….look at my fans popularity……sex drives most everything in life….the puritans have no chance on this issue…
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
yes.. ” ban” everything…Define ” ban”?
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
The “rise of the Christian Right in the 80s”. Weird article attempts to make some sort of point. Fails.
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
An attractive woman such as the one photographed could get as much sex as she wants with whichever attractive partners she chooses. If free to choose, she would only do porn – doing whatever sex act with whoever the director chooses – for the money. The exceptions to this rule are those women who enjoy BDSM.
Steve Jolly
1 year ago
I’m sure the porn industry is quite awful. So is the textile industry, though we rarely hear about that in the west because those jobs left decades ago. If workers are being exploited, that’s bad, whether it’s in a porn studio or a steel mill. We’ve largely solved the latter through workplace safety laws and the creation of labor unions. It’s unclear to me why these remedies wouldn’t work for the porn industry. Consider the situation with Amazon, also accused of exploiting their workers and unfair labor conditions. Activists are trying to unionize the workers, not ban online shopping. The author is using the sad stories of workers to justify the same old dead horse ‘sex is sacred’ argument. We’ve heard all this before, but moral outrage is not sufficient grounds to ban anything, and it never works anyway. See prohibition, drugs, prostitution, etc.
They do not need to watch other people kill each other either. Are we banning war movies? For that matter, people do not need smart phones. What point are you making?
Ask yourself why it’s the women and not the men who feel exploited and degraded by porn… anatomical differences perhaps?
Sex is sacred. What a callous, cynical, and commodified view to say otherwise.
“Performers are rampantly abused, and women mostly age out by their twenties.” Hence why that industry has the highest suicide rate of any industry.
More than the military?
This is an *excellent* comparison.
The biological functions of sex in biology is for reproduction and for pair bonding. The production of oxytocin of touch and nurture. The sex acts here seem to be more about self gratification rather than relationship. I am deliberately not saying which is better although I am biased towards the mutual comfort version. I just think that biology has more to say about behaviours than we think and that moral choice is not just about mindset.
Well, yes. But that depends on you having someone in your life – porn is primarily for those without such a person.
I think there are lots of men who have partners who are addicted to porn.
Stilettos? In an inflatable dinghy? Madness.
YOU TRIGGERED ME AND I AM HERE TO LET YOU KNOW
Is this a non-fiction article about whether porn should be banned, or a movie review?
The headline and subhead (which I suppose the author may not have written) and the first couple of paragraphs suggest the author is going to deal with the reality of porn, at least as the author sees it. But the only evidence presented is the contents of a movie about the porn industry, a work of fiction.
“Bella’s” *fictional* experiences are no proper basis for real-world policy changes. Real world evidence is required. And it’s not good enough to claim, without evidence, that a work of fiction accurately depicts the reality. Not in a policy article.
If you want to make the case for banning something, you need to do better than this.
I think Bella’s fictional example is explicitly representative in mainstream porn. The film could have easily swapped the artistic representation for a real one in a snap.
Yeah, I was a little confused as to whether the movie was a fiction or perhaps a documentary about an actual performer. It does rather make a difference if you are going to talk policy responses. I am quite prepared to believe that the porn industry is awful as is often said, but there does need to be some clarity about sources (I am sure Julie Bindel could provide a veritable library if asked).
Which is probably why she’s Julie Bindel, librarian, and the rest of the world is not
There could be some effort to persuade girls and women to make better choices. Stop telling them that they can do anything they want, and that they should expect to be shielded from any negative consequences of their own actions.
I’ve also noticed a distinct inability to tell the difference between attention and admiration in too many women.
Porn will continue as long as there are people willing to be in it.
Is it the film which is disliked? The director’s treatment of the material? The short from which the movie was derived/extended? The subject of the film? The vulgarity? The nudity? The grotesque nature of the story and the explicit crudity of this particular cinematic experience?
Is it the presumed connection between this fictional ‘depiction’ of a pornographic film and what Thyberg implies is an actual pornographic film which may or may not treat its actors and actresses in the same mechanistic & exploitive manner that Thyberg treated hers?
We have no real idea, of course. But that is not surprising because we equally have no real idea as to what is real, what is imagined, what is mirror, and what is perverted fantasy in the construction and selling of Pleasure itself.
The ‘nod & a wink’ nature of so-called porno exposés is that the expose itself exists and is consumed as porno (albeit a self-aware porno) by the very audience who would find the porno so ‘cinematized’ as cheap & exploitive in its original form, but not when looking at it in an ‘artistic’ mirror. Perhaps it’s OK, now, to be cheap & exploitive if by doing so we end-up at Cannes & Sundance?
In the end it probably doesn’t matter.
Based on the description and what is revealed by a quick, unfiltered Googling there is nothing here of value or interest. And that is too bad. it’s too bad because, as the author first hints and then abandons — there is substance in a careful & reasoned consideration of what is and is not pornographic / erotic (and how we humans negotiate same). There is substance in the consideration of the extent to which voluntary participation in so-called exploitation (of any sort) truly is or is not exploitive.
Do we ‘exploit’ LeBron when we fill our coliseums to watch him play? Or does LeBron exploit us, by selling us his BBall talent at insanely exorbitant rates. Is a beautiful women exploited when she agrees to share some portion of her self, her beauty, her form, her sensuality (real? Memorex?) for buckets of dollars? Or is it the size of the bucket which determines the degree of exploitation?
Like the old joke whose punchline ends, “we’re just negotiating price!”
There is much which could have been done here with a subject ripe with potential and interest — maybe next time.
We have been in this drama for a very, very long time using whatever media was available. One might imagine that today’s teens find it boring. By making the act so common place, it subtracts from the reality of humanity itself.
If there is actually a central message in this article, other than porn is bad and feminists shouldn’t support it, I’ve been unable to find it.
I can’t find a reason to watch the production. PornHub has already saturated the market with home made stuff.
What i object to is the apparently basic premise made here that in going, moving, shifting herself all the way from Sweden to California, the protagonist can yet have no desires of her “own”. All admissions of mimesis at play aside, may i ask how such non-motivation is even possible?
Although this article doesn’t really deal with it, I’d have thought that feminists main complaint about the porn industry is that it’s misogyny at its worst. The women are all ‘bitches who need a good seeing to’ & they all apparently enjoy being treated as such. Those of us who are adults know this isn’t reality. I do worry for a generation of teenage boys for whom this has become normalised.
How about self-produced porn, OnlyFans etc? Where’s a coercive structure there?
A lot of young ‘performers’ with great hopes that eventually get squashed by reality. A very few seem to do well because they really do have an edge. That leads to a lot of people trying and likely losing money along the way. Still some persist because they enjoy the thrill of exposure. Takes all kinds to make our world.
“But the days when feminists were largely against porn are a distant memory. With the rise of the Christian Right in the Eighties — and the rise of home video — so-called “sex-positive feminism” won the day”
I’m sorry, but is she really trying to say that the Christian Right in America is pro-porn? And trying to say it in an article accusing others of not speakimg the truth?
Does ‘history’ now completely trump reality?
I understood her to be saying – indirectly – that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Feminists dislike and oppose the Christian Right; the Christian Right wishes to ban pornography; therefore feminists will support it. The mention of home videos confuses the issue, of course, and shouldn’t have been shoe-horned into the main point as a parenthesis.
Perhaps some statistics go to with the lurid claims would be helpful.
porn is probably not going anywhere but more mainstream….look at my fans popularity……sex drives most everything in life….the puritans have no chance on this issue…
yes.. ” ban” everything…Define ” ban”?
The “rise of the Christian Right in the 80s”. Weird article attempts to make some sort of point. Fails.
An attractive woman such as the one photographed could get as much sex as she wants with whichever attractive partners she chooses. If free to choose, she would only do porn – doing whatever sex act with whoever the director chooses – for the money. The exceptions to this rule are those women who enjoy BDSM.
I’m sure the porn industry is quite awful. So is the textile industry, though we rarely hear about that in the west because those jobs left decades ago. If workers are being exploited, that’s bad, whether it’s in a porn studio or a steel mill. We’ve largely solved the latter through workplace safety laws and the creation of labor unions. It’s unclear to me why these remedies wouldn’t work for the porn industry. Consider the situation with Amazon, also accused of exploiting their workers and unfair labor conditions. Activists are trying to unionize the workers, not ban online shopping. The author is using the sad stories of workers to justify the same old dead horse ‘sex is sacred’ argument. We’ve heard all this before, but moral outrage is not sufficient grounds to ban anything, and it never works anyway. See prohibition, drugs, prostitution, etc.
People need to wear clothes, they do not need to watch other people have sex.
They do not need to watch other people kill each other either. Are we banning war movies? For that matter, people do not need smart phones. What point are you making?
Of course people need to have sex. What are you talking about?
The textile workers are selling their labour. Porn is women selling their bodies. Big difference.
No more than any attractive actors are selling their bodies.
Ask yourself why it’s the women and not the men who feel exploited and degraded by porn… anatomical differences perhaps?
Sex is sacred. What a callous, cynical, and commodified view to say otherwise.