Even a harrowing condition like breast cancer is now pornified. Credit: YouTube
During the Super Bowl, some 127 million viewers witnessed an up-close parade of gleamy-creamy jiggling breasts covered in cantaloupe-coloured spandex as part of an advertisement for . . . breast-cancer awareness, sponsored by pharmaceutical company Novartis. The message was that we’re looking at breasts all the time, yet neglecting the regular medical screening they need. It also underscored the fact that no frontier of human experience, not even breast cancer, is safe from the aesthetics of pornography.
The commercial attempted to tone down the porny aspects by also showing a woman on a park bench breastfeeding, or a woman lifting weights, but those moments were overwhelmed by the titillating nipple-probing, the barrage of boobs stuffed into tight, low-cut tops. Overall, the effect was striking: love porn or hate it, the total pornification of culture is complete.
This is only partially a story about the adult-entertainment industry, which is huge and growing, with an estimated $71 billion in revenue expected in 2025. Nor is it a story about porn serving as the true means for sex education, though the average boy or girl encounters pornography at age 13, according to the UK Children’s Commissioner. What does seem to be new is a cultural takeover that goes beyond adult entertainment.
We no longer lustfully and happily tit-stare, as has been the human way since time immemorial. Nor do we fantasise about breasts as something we might like to catch a glimpse of. Instead, they’re all dolled up and shoved in our faces, aesthetically sexualized but contextually neutered, no more or less an object of desire than a can of Bud Light. Keep your pharmaceutical company off our porn, please. There’s sexy, and then there’s breast cancer, and the two are not the same.
There are signs of this everywhere, in high culture and low, perhaps starting with the fact that the one of our most popular social-media platforms is now called X for no apparent reason. Beauty trends for young women on an even bigger platform, TikTok, are a driving force. Heavy makeup, exaggerated lips, breasts and butts, and long plastic nails that used to read “stripper” or “porn star” are now for everyone. The latex or leather dress paired with over-the-knee platforms and (of course) jet-black acrylic claws, the regalia of the high-end dominatrix, is now part of the Upper East Side mom’s humdrum repertoire, divested of erotic meaning.
“Clean girl”, one of the dominant makeup trends, might appear at first glance as a countervailing tendency. It’s “clean” in the sense that its adherents wear light eye makeup and a natural lip and cheek palate and dress classy or preppy. But the look relies on thick layers of “natural looking” foundation and is mixed up with porn tropes like huge puffy lips and perfect fake nails. Clean-girl influencer Frida Aasen Chiabra has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and got her start as Victoria’s Secret model. Her feed shows her spraying perfume on herself, frolicking on tropical islands, and routinely going about her “real life” in lingerie or offering a butt-shot. Porn users have taken notice. The No. 1 trending porn search term for 2024, according to statistics released by Pornhub was “demure”, up 133% year-on-year, along with “modesty” (up 77%) and “traditional clothes” (34%).
It’s perhaps no surprise that two actresses from the television show Euphoria, which depicted teens in hard-core sex situations as a matter of course, are also social-media influencers of this type, known for their assets. With Sidney Sweeney (23.5 million Instagram followers), it’s breasts; with Chloe Cherry, who had a role on the show’s second season, it’s lips. Sweeney, fresh-scrubbed and collegiate-looking in a turtleneck sweater, made a cameo on the Super Bowl’s When Harry Met Sally reunion ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise — and delivered the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Chloe Cherry (1.1 million followers), whose lips are silicone-injected to alarming proportions, was a porn actress before her role on the show, and made a pornographic parody of the show with Jenna Foxx in 2023. The two actresses have notably different public profiles — to have surgery and implants versus “natural” attributes telegraphs variations in social class to some extent. But both are defined by a body part — in the way porn-searches reduce our desires to a single anatomical feature or piece of apparel: “fake lips”, “big tits”, “high heels”.
The porn is unstoppable. Tradwife influencer? You wear a corset over your frills and also have enormous breasts. Trendy? You’re wearing cheetah-print and have an “aura” pattern on your dagger acrylics. Sally Rooney heroine? You make your money on OnlyFans. French bad-boy writer anguished about your country’s relationship with its Muslim inhabitants? You make a porn tape. Married to Kanye West? You drop your coat on the Grammys red carpet, naked except for a transparent slip. Ye himself? You share videos of your favorite porn stars during the Super Bowl (and deactivate from X afterwards, after a flurry of anti-Semitic posting).
Female reader of mass-market fiction? You’re reading Romantasy, a genre that slips into graphic descriptions of penetrations and orgasms every few chapters. American teen? You routinely refer to glazing, which now means paying too much attention to someone, but whose etymology is the porn term for having someone ejaculate on your face.
The young-man version of TikTok is probably rap music, where a similar dynamic unfolds: everything is sexualized, and none of it means a thing. The graphic description of sex acts in rap has been happening since at least the 1990s. The direct pipeline to young children, however, is a Zoomer phenomenon, and the normalization may be newer yet. My 13-year-old son, three seconds after the Netspend lyric “shut up, bitch, I need some spit” comes out of his phone, assures me that “all rappers respect women” and that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise, because it would damage their careers.
To take Kendrick Lamar and Drake — he’s right. Both say they respect women, and have made extensive public comments on it. Another example that’s currently popular and apropos is the rapper J. Cole’s song “Wet Dreamz”. The song has more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and describes the rapper’s desire to lose his virginity: “hadn’t been in pussy since the day I came out.” When the song’s narrator and the girl he likes get into bed, Cole says, “And most of all I’m praying, ‘God, don’t let me bust quick’ / I’m watching pornos, tryna see just how to stroke right / Practice putting condoms on, how it go, right?” The song endorses porn as sex ed, comes from a person who “respects women”, and bows to convention and popular morality with contraception. All good!
The logical endgame of the sexual revolution has been to turn sex into a recreational activity whose only meaning is defined by the people experiencing it, and whose only moral issues center around consent. By these standards, there is scarcely any reason for consenting adults not to make porn, if that’s their choice, and it’s equally OK for other consenting adults not to enjoy their solitary pleasures while watching it. Equally, it makes sense to export porn’s tropes into the mainstream and enjoy them, if that’s what we’re doing. Most of us have certain squicky feelings when it comes to kids viewing porn, but large-scale cultural pushback against these images entering our homes is only just beginning. The age requirements for porn access currently being enacted by 19 states will be an interesting test case.
There are cracks in the façade: a loneliness epidemic, statistics that this generation of oversexualized teens is having less sex, an increasing prevalence of porn-addiction and erectile dysfunction in younger and younger men. Also, the acts seem to grow more extreme and less desirable the more we get used to them.
The great and much maligned anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin has been having a bit of a renaissance lately. She has received some semi-positive tributes in the press, including on the right, and Picador is reissuing three of her books on this month, including Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Dworkin was a brilliant extremist and a wonderful writer, and though most of her conclusions are utterly wrong, she’s fun to read. Some lines from her fiery, man-hating pen will go down in eternity. And oddly, despite how wrong she was on almost everything, it has turned out the way she thought it would with porn and mass culture — they’ve become one.
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SubscribeHigh Fructose Porn Syrup. I think the damage is starting to be seen and hopefully society starts to wake up. I am betting in 10 years having parental control on your kid’s phone is going to be like seat belts. I like to give my teens autonomy, but after listening and reading some reports recentlg about what kids are seeing and doing to each other I am putting some controls in this weekend. Talking isn’t enough unfortunately. Web porn isn’t equivalent to finding your uncle’s porn magazine stash.
Well said.
The New Scientist, February 27, 2009 reported on a survey of porn users that found that those states with the highest porn consumption “tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption”.The biggest porn consuming state was Utah. Many people felt that when Trump was recorded as saying that as a celebrity he was free to grab a woman by her…, that his chances to be elected were nil. Actually, I believe it was just the opposite, he was then partially propelled to victory by the porn vote. I would love to have more data on this including data on how child molesters and abusers tend to vote.
If only we could get an accurate tally of all such people who retain their voting rights! Hard to account for those who haven’t been caught or are “exploring their sexuality” under fear of prison retribution. Adding a wrinkle to these speculations, more porn is produced in ultra-permissive strongholds like LA. Weakholds, if you will. But of course it can be shot and promoted from anywhere there’s enough signal strength and willing—or, too often, coerced—participation. Like unrestrained gambling, getting a better societal handle on it will demand more control from individuals and each household. Even so, we could have more regulation and community resistance before we found ourselves flirting with medieval theocracy or whatnot.
Has it got worse? I was under the impression that over the last 10 years or so porn had been reigned in – at least in mainstream circles and pushed into a different arena – although maybe I’m just not reading the right stuff?
How so? Aside from individual discipline and dissent, porn and its cultural influence seem more rampant than ever. The last ten-plus years also show a massive rise in the number of children under 16 who have unrestricted or inadequately curtailed access to hardcore material at a click, throughout the day.
It’s way, way, way worse.
Reined in?
It’s morphed, and grown, The rise of OnlyFans has increased the participation of women in porn creation dramatically (women who would never have gotten near the traditional porn industry to a large degree), and this has furthered “adjacent” sub-industries like online “financial domination aka ‘findom'”, online “bespoke” (very high end/expensive) prostitution and the like. In all cases these things are not new in themselves, but the scope of them, and who is participating in them, is very new and expanded to include many kinds of women who would never participate in these activities prior to the rie of OnlyFans.
OnlyFans was a revolution. It put the money in the hands of porn performers for the first time and removed the middle man of the sleazy porn industry. And it showed women just how much money was to be made by this activity when “doing it yourself”. People often point out that only a handful of women make USD 1m per year on OnlyFans, but it’s also the case that a good number of women make 50k, 75k, 100k per year, which is, for many a lucrative side gig that, if it gets big enough, becomes the main one. This drives up participation, tremendouosly, over the old slezy porn industry that paid its performance a pittance.
And once OnlyFans showed that, in fact, men were willing to pay for their porn (something everyone would have laughed at in 2015), other related businesses also began to see growing participation (and especially a very different demographic participating), simply because there is money to be had, and more than anyone thought there was before OnlyFans demonstrated just how much money men were willing to spend on what it provides. And if they were willing to spend that kind of money on OnlyFans pictures and videos and chats and so on, what would they be willing spend on an in person experience with the same caliber women … and so that grew as well, apace.
So, no, it hasn’t gone away. The old “official porn” industry has stagnated a bit since the rise of OnlyFans because OnlyFans is more lucrative for most. But OnlyFans and the other side businesses that have grown in its wake have more than compensated for the stagnation in production company porn. In fact, it’s gone through the roof and mainstreamed it like nothing else, simply due to the increased participation rates among women, across social/educational classes.
Why is Unherd ignoring what’s going on in UK and churning out articles about porn and Only Fans?
What a turnoff. Stivers is right that pornification is not a danger or trend but a done deal. Junk food for the body and mind, whether in calories, images, chemical escape, or cheap thrills is not new, of course. But matters of degree matter. The ubiquitousness and easy access for young children ought to raise worries even in a “chill bro, don’t judge my enjoyment” culture. Even a broken Dworkin alarm clock rings the correct bell twice a day.
When we overcomsume nasty material, however tasty in the moment, we dishonor ourselves (news flash!). This hurts the young and old, and won’t ever go away. But we are doing a huge disservice to our kids in failing to protect them from all this digital overstimulation—porn included—before they are even 16. It might be fair to say that most children born this century are (or were) raised, in part, by the internet. I hope we’ll find the energy to make corrective efforts on behalf of those who are still children, and those who will follow soon. To do so, we’ll have to look away from our screens more often ourselves.
I myself am too far gone. Interacting with the screens has always felt more natural to me than interacting with human beings, but it’s probably my disorder. They’ve actually done studies that autistic babies don’t have the same preference for engaging with human faces vs. other interesting objects, like the patterns of lights and colors on television and computer screens. The Internet and digital media are a godsend to those of us born with poor to no social skills. I can appear to be more functional than I really am when interacting through this medium.
I get what you mean and even sympathize quite a bit, since I’m more fond of solitude than most. But I suspect you still pay attention to what you “ingest” through screens, and how much.
By the way, I’m an uncle and have a large extended family with dozens of first cousins, but I’m not a parent. So, it’s pretty easy for me to advocate better controls and modeled behavior by parents.
I’d say many of us need to get outside and meet other people IRL more, but generalizations have built-in failures-to-apply to everyone. And I don’t suppose you lack fresh air or friendly contact in small-town/rural Kentucky.
Indeed. Plenty of fresh air, plenty of nature. The area I live in never has been all that suitable for commercial farming due to the bad soil and the dominating geographical features are the rivers, one of which is more of a swamp than a river half the year and the flood plains, where the soil is marginally better but it’s not a matter of if but when it will flood. The people here were basically dirt poor sustenance farmers/ranchers until TVA brought some industry back in the 40’s and 50’s. There are still a lot of undeveloped wild lands. Plenty of fresh air. It’s the sort of place where you can get into a conversation with a stranger and its not considered particularly weird or automatically suspicious. I’m not sure if that was better or worse for me growing up but at this point I’m used to it and it’s hard for me to get used to different social environments. Part of the reason I occasionally defend Trump’s policies even though I can’t stand the man personally is because at the end of the day, most of the people I’m around are Trump supporters and a lot of the policy he favors is basic common sense here, though not all of it. If he gets too much in bed with Elon and the tech bros, they might turn on him and find another vehicle for their frustration. These are my people. I probably never will understand, appreciate, or feel that the way they do, but I am aware of the fact that these connections exist and are important.
AJ, do not forget how we protected kids in the past, eg, by telling them that masturbation causes insanity, by tying kids hands while sleeping so they could not masturbate, by censoring to the nth degree literature of all sorts, eg Lady Chatterly’s Lover, to name just one, to calling women who had sex fallen women, by calling women who engage in non-marital sex sluts and whores and on and on. And by allowing men to institutionalize their wives who deviated from their norms. With or without screens, children were often not protected from predatory adults.
That’s quite true. I’m not advocating that we return to an idealized past, which as you justly note was in reality fraught with repression, silence, and ostracism. Can’t there be a middle path? Between 19th-century paternalism—whether of the hypocritical or naive-repressed kind—and a wild free-for-all that renders the innocence of childhood so brief, or nonexistent?
I understand that the world of even 1965 meant hideous silence for many violated children and exile for cast-off women “in trouble”. But children remain vulnerable to pedophiles who can now access an underground marketplace of sick materials. And having a ten-year-old “explore” his or her nascent sexuality makes no sense to me.
There was also a prevailing respect for childhood innocence and decency among many circa 1950. We must strike a better balance between theocratic secrecy and total exposure.
This is the Internet-driven sexually libertarian marketplace which now has total dominance in American culture and tends to filter down to the trash or reality TV culture in the UK. Europe is perhaps a different arena where the contemporary focus is more on increasing liberalisation of prostitution. When you see American culture on tour, you get Kanye West and the treatment of his new girlfriend – highly emblematic of these cultural economic trends.
In junk culture exports it’s been “USA # 1!” for a long time. But we’re really outdoing ourselves now.
Prostitution isn’t better, it’s just the end game of going this route. Sex totally separate from personal feeling. Studding animals. Europe is ahead in that, just as they’re less bothered by religion or morality, anything other than humans as the measure of all things. Of course, the result of that idea is Stalin and Mao and Hitler.
Good article until the last paragraph, in which an unfortunate example of double standards emerges.
No male philosopher who exposed himself as a misogynist would ever benefit from an affectionate and forgiving recognition of his errors in the manner Andrea Dworkin has here (and in many other places too). She was a bigot, it’s that simple.
And I might add, by the way, that the dispensation made available to allegedly-oppressed classes of people that permits them to display towards the majority the self-same prejudice that they claim they have experienced themselves – that’s how such people remain socially subordinate. A primary prerequisite of equality is accountability. If a person rejects this accountability on the basis of claims of minority resentment, they are also surrendering an essential component of their right to equality.
Possitively exults her ‘man-hating, fiery pen’ …I observe a pattern wherein it is de riguer in these articles to signal your radical (read: misandrist) bonefides to your rad and lib fem sisters. This even though I would argue porn has an equally damaging impact on men, its core consumers/addicts.
Andrea Dworkin was NOT wrong. 5,000 American women are murdered every year by husbands and boyfriends. 1 in 4 American women are raped. 1 in 5 are sexually abused as children.
Porn presents women as objects to be violated. As orifices to be penetrated. It fuels rape culture. Much of it is violent and degrading.
“Porn is the theory; rape is the practice” Robin Morgan (1980). Now “Violent porn is the theory; strangulation and murder are the practice.”
Porn is evil, and the normalization of it, more evil, and the normalization of children watching it, most evil.
I agree with you 100%. The response to opinions like ours has always been that they are motivated by prudery and/or repressive morality. However, that’s usually not the case. You correctly point out the practical reasons for objecting to porn, namely it’s real-world physical effects on women. The other objection is its ‘spiritual’ effects, if you will. The ‘discovery’ of sex, including its intersection with love, is something that porn steals from children. So much of modern life takes childhood away from children earlier and earlier, and exposure to porn is perhaps the most glaring example. Beauty matters, and there is little beauty in women being objectified or objectifying themselves (as much as OnlyFans participants and consumers would like to call it empowerment). Here’s a question for people who think porn is fine, and especially for those unconcerned about how easily available it is to kids. “Do you have a young daughter (and if you don’t, imagine a sister, or a niece, or a cousin) whose first date you’d like to be with a boy whose idea of that first date is to slap her, choke her, and ejaculate on her face?”
Andrea Dworkin’s book ‘Mercy’ is brilliant, and painful to read. It begins with her experience in a picture theatre where a man sexually touches her, something her mother dismisses as ‘Nothing happened”. That is the beginning of her life lessons in sexual predation and the ways in which girls and women are supposed to respond. Her description of a woman walking down the street being careful not to make a sound with the bag she is carrying, lest she draw to herself the attention of men, is something I would think any woman would appreciate.
It is a man who has done more to elevate porn into cultural acceptability than anyone else and that man is Donald Trump. He has done so by cavorting with a porn actress, by passing off his degradation of women as just locker room talk, as systematically dismissing women who profess publicly that they have been sexually abused, including being sexually abused by him. I have little or no doubt that Trump got the porn vote which swept him into the White House. Unfortunately, the political pundits and analysts hardly ever talk about this, and refuse to give us data as to what percentage of the porn vote goes to what candidate. Trump will never come out publicly to suppress porn for adults since I am sure he knows where many of his votes come from.
I tried responding earlier. Maybe it will post this time.
I agree with you 100 percent. Opinions like ours are often dismissed as arising from prudery or a repressive morality, but they arise from two main things. One is what you cite—the real-world physical effects on women. The other is what can be considered psychic and spiritual damage, not just to girls, but to boys as well.
The ‘discovery’ of sex, and—if they’re lucky—its intersection with love (romance, if you will) is stolen from young people by porn, if you consider that most of them are consuming it, or at least exposed to it, long before they’ve had their first date. And speaking of first dates, a good question for anyone who thinks porn consumption is fine, and not harmful for increasingly younger kids, is ‘think of your small daughter (and if you don’t have one, think of a sister or niece, cousin or granddaughter) and ask yourself if you’re fine with her first date being with a boy who has learned to think it can acceptably include slapping her, choking her, or ejaculating on her face? And would you really be sanguine about her turning out to be the next Lily Philips?
Assuming she’s dating boys her own age, the outcome is more like to be premature ejaculation, impotence due to nerves, or generally messing things up through lack of experience. He’ll also likely be worried he isn’t big enough. If it does actually work he’ll probably feel bad because he came too soon and she didn’t come at all.
Indeed, the song the author quotes seems to be about just this kind of insecurity and anxiety on the part of young men.
Teenage boys really are not porn addled super predators, as a tiny bit of realism and empathy would tell you.
Many teen boys are absolutely porn addled these days.
Thank you for this important perspective, which in a larger sense is largely missing from UnHerd BTL. I hope this site won’t shout down or “scare away” the experience and insights of subscribers who happen to be women. The “dude energy” here could stand to be reined in, and schooled at times.
Responding to misandry is simply rational discourse, which doesn’t need to be dismissed as ‘dude energy’, whatever that is.
What Dworkin and others got completely wrong about the future sex industry is that it would be increasingly female led, and normalised by women. It would be going too far to describe men as its victims – but they are rather like drug addicts handing over money, to the women pushing sex on only fans, for their next fix.
They’re both the addicts I think, though perhaps addicted to differernt elements. It’s not regular men and women who are really gaining from porn.
References for numbers please.
[Tried posting this several days ago…on multiple occasions. We’ll see if this works this time.]
Well, actually, it’s not nearly that clear….nor are the stats you quote accurate.
If we look specifically at 2023, what we discover is a total of approximately 18K murders, split 14K male and about 4K female. Men are killed at a rate approximately 350% higher that of women.
Of the 4K females murdered in ’23, approximately 1300 or 34% were killed by ‘intimate partners’. This is far different from your guesstimated 5K killed by husbands and boyfriends.
In 2023 approximately 127K women were raped in the U.S. (according to the FBI’s redefinition of same in 2013). That would be a rape rate of .08% not 25%, as you indicated. If we include sexual assaults in that total (sexual assault being defined as ‘non-consensual sexual contact’…e.g. receiving an unwanted kiss) that ‘victim’ count climbs to about 481K (which gives us a ‘sexual assault’ rate of .3%).
If we extend that chance of being raped (.08%) across a 60 yr. timeframe (let’s say from age 14 to 74) the chances that any given woman will be raped sometime in those 60 years is about 4.5% (again, not 25%). If we broaden the analysis to include reported instances of unwanted sexual contact, the the odds that any given woman might experience a sexual ‘non-consensuality’ in that same 60 years rises to only about 16%.
As for sexual abuse of women as children. RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) estimates an abuse rate of 11% (not 20%)… but this is, as I’m sure you know, a notoriously unreported crime (or even unknown crime), so the data is equally notoriously unreliable.
And Porn? Heck, we’d really have to begin a definition — to make sure we’re not throwing any number of ‘babies’ out with all that bathwater. But given a general sense of what most of us mean by ‘porn’ (explicitly sexual material designed and intended to stimulate arousal…though how we distinguish that from ‘Ulysses’, ‘Portnoy’s Complaint, or Courbet’s ‘The Sleepers’ is anyone’s guess) … most porn (by most measures) does not present women as objects to be violated. Estimates as to the prevalence of ‘violent/violating’ porn range only from 2-36%. But Porn, by its very nature, does indeed objectify women (just as it objectifies males) because the focus of pornography is the sexual act itself. The ‘humanity’ of the characters is of peripheral concern at best.
As for whether or not Porn is evil? Once again, you’d need to define it. And then you’d need to establish a Porn Council to separate the annual wheat from all that evil chaff.
Given the millions of works created every single year by artists, photographers, directors, sculptors, writers, et al… that would be one heck of a council facing what would be an impossible job. In the end, it’s entirely undoable, if only because the creation and consumption of ‘sexually arousing content’ is, indeed, entirely normal. It has been as long as humans have been creating content.
[Please note, this does not mean that children should have access to same. They shouldn’t. Just as they shouldn’t have free & unfettered access to booze, cars, weapons, voting, military service, cosmetic surgeries…the list is long.]
Samantha Steven’s did not state that those frequencies were yearly (those it was left unclear/implied). Over the course of a lifetime, those fractions would have to be at least closer to the truth. Numbers shouldn’t be inflated, but I think we can agree that even the adjusted, estimated figures are appallingly high.
And the disproportion in women who commit murder is even steeper.
You’re too generous.
What she said was, “5,000 American women are murdered every year by husbands and boyfriends. 1 in 4 American women are raped.” The implication, quite clearly, is that 5000 are murdered and 25% raped annually. Both numbers are significantly wrong.
She may not have meant to imply all that….if so, it would have have been good if she had far more specific…but she wasn’t. As it stands what she’s stating is that 1 in 4 men are rapists.
But — to your point — that’s exactly why I went on to extrapolate the actual annual %’s across a 60 year window. But even then the ‘lifetime’ probability of rape is only 4.5% NOT 25%. Her assertion is still nowhere near accurate…nor is her implicit condemnation of 25% of the male population as rapists.
Unfortunately when we indulge in such groundless & dangerous hyperbole, we cast doubt on all the numbers….and that would be an insult to all the women who suffer these monstrous crimes.
The other problem is the redefinition of both rape & sexual assault to broaden (and weaken) the criminal category itself.
Prior to the 2013 lexical shift (I think that was the year) rape was the ‘carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly, against her will’. After, it became the much more loosey-goosey: “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or a**s with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” By this new definition, I would suspect that almost every woman in the world….who’s been with her teenaged boyfriend.. parked in a car … making-out in some dorm room… has been groped / felt-up ‘without consent’. Not forcibly…not against her will…but without any kind of provable, explicit consent. (See the idiocy of ‘Affirmative Consent’)
Sexual Assault definitions are equally ridiculous, including as an ‘assault’ – anything of a sexual nature which is or was or will be unwanted. (This would include, of course, overhearing a particularly gross X-rated joke).
In the end, yes, absolutely: we both agree (all civilized people agree) even one rape is one rape too many….even one murder, one murder too many. But in a harsh & violent world, both rapes and murders do occur. (though the rates of both have been dropping for years) They just don’t occur at the insane rates declared by Samantha.
As for what is Porn and is it evil…that’s a whole different discussion
I don’t agree that’s what she meant. That’s why they are separate sentences. No one would assert that one-fourth of the billions of women in the world were raped each year. Your readiness to read it that way makes your motive suspect, at least to me. A high percentage of women have been forcibly sexually assaulted; too high. Up to and including rape. A quick and admittedly non-scientific search shows that about one-third of the 5,000 murders of women were by “intimate partners. Is that trivial? And do you accept that rape very often goes unreported?
You’re right that her numbers are wrong. Yet you seem far more upset by inaccuracies or even number inflation than the numbers who are actually wronged. I’ve had enough female “pals”, some of whom were also partners, to know that real abuse is widespread. Too widespread. Clarification is fair, but please guard against dismissiveness. Don’t meet inflation with minimization.
You are being too ungenerous*.
*For me, your valid points would be more effective if they didn’t seem couched in Men’s Rights talking points or propaganda. Unless you only intend to energize those who already share your perspective.
The 1/4 number is commonly repeated on countless American websites devoted to such things (occasionally it becomes 1/5…sometimes 1/3). They all make the same mistake (CDC being one of them). All were used constantly during the Title IX ‘Dear Colleague’ surge a few years back, driven by the Obama White House and the OCR.
RE: murder…as I noted, “of the 4K (not 5K) females murdered in ’23, approximately 1300 or 34% were killed by ‘intimate partners’.
Is that trivial? What on earth does that question even mean?
Do you truly need a recitation of ‘moral goodness’? Do I need to say, again: ‘Gosh, even one murder is one murder too many!’
But equally we need to be adult enough to recognize that, in the U.S. the 1300 represent about 7% of the total. Not trivial — in a statistical sense, but not anywhere near a major part of the total. Surely you recognize that?
As I said: “In the end, yes, absolutely: we both agree (all civilized people agree) even one rape is one rape too many….even one murder, one murder too many. But in a harsh & violent world, both rapes and murders do occur. (though the rates of both have been dropping for years) They just don’t occur at the insane rates declared by Samantha.
And equally I would expect that you recognize that 1/4 men are not rapists….and find the casual accusation of cruelty and violence leveled at millions of innocents absolutely unacceptable.
Do I need to note that your readiness to read it otherwise makes your motives suspect?
As for the Original Poster, yes, her valid points (when she makes them) would be more effective if they didn’t seem couched in Dworkin Dogma or 4th Wave Feminist Silliness. Unless, of course, she only intended to energize those who already share her radically misandric perspective. (Actually I’m surprised ‘toxic masculinity’ didn’t end-up in there somewhere. ‘Rape Culture’ did, of course. That’s a given)
What an absolutely excellent response. I take my hat off to you.
I’ve tapped out of society. Seeing women who believe their only asset is their body just makes me sad, and it’s become more prevalent than less. The overdone false lashes, 20-year-old girls with injections in their lips and cheek implants, it all speaks to insecurity of self. They think they are not good enough, and when those men who “respect women” look no further than artificial women, they’re right. The trans movement, too, objectifies women, suggesting that all it means to be a woman is to crawl into her skin and wear her clothes, often exaggerating it to great extremes. Where is friendship? Where is romance? Where is love so deep you’d give it all up to be in your partner’s arms? Real sex doesn’t leave you fearful and watching porn to learn about it. It’s a language all its own by the two people at its core. It’s so beautiful, and yet that kind of sexual attraction and love fulfillment gets no attention. It’s just sad.
I think your take on this is subtly wrong. They don’t believe their only asset is their body, they simply act as if it is. In fact women have probably never had such a high opinion of themselves. Men simply aren’t good enough for them, not just physically but, in their eyes, intellectually, spiritually and financially as well.
The view that they are shallow, insecure, self sexualising etc is a view from the outside. To themselves they are strong, smart, independent and living their best life. It’s men who are failing to keep up.
I’m amazed that you find any of this generally true enough to make confident general statements about.
As polemical or rhetorical pushback, I get it.
Carissa and David both engage in gross generalizing.
Of course they are….
Or, said differently, they’re offering their own personal opinions about the phenomenon the essay addresses.
But why is this a problem? Isn’t that what comments columns are all about? Would you expect a list of footnotes here?
As for the truth of the generalizations both Carissa & David offer, re: ‘women who believe their only asset is their body…who suffer from an ‘insecurity of self’…. they do seem to be generally accurate. How would you characterize those who ‘overdo’ the fake eyelashes, the 20 yr. olds with injections in lips, and cheek implants?
But you raise an interesting point, actually.
We all recognize (David and Carissa, too, I imagine) that people are fundamentally ‘mysteries’ containing a complex, manytimes, unknown collection of fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams, motivations, ambitions all surrounded by highly variable amounts of understanding and insight. The real reasons why anyone does pretty much anything remain, for the most part unknown (beyond the very basic: we eat when we’re hungry, etc.)
So when we consider any given individual, let’s call her Suzie, and we ask ourselves why Suzie, at the age of 24 underwent surgery to enlarge her breasts, fatten her lips, and put implants in her cheeks…. we would all agree that we can only guess at Suzie’s motivations. But when we consider a ‘mass’ of Suzie’s, all doing similar things…we all begin to recognize this as a social trend and equally begin to speculate as to what the ‘grossly general’ motivations might be.
Just as we all her discuss ‘pornography’ here without bothering to define it or parse it in any way whatsoever. We — the author included — engage in, as you say ‘gross generalization’. At the level of essay / call & response — what else is there?
Crikey! Maybe the Taliban have it about right?
“There are cracks in the façade: a loneliness epidemic…the acts seem to grow more extreme and less desirable the more we get used to them.” Surprise surprise. The more one acts like an animal, the less that sex is enjoyable because it doesn’t bring with it intimacy. Modesty isn’t a pose. It’s a way of living and relating to others that keeps sex where it should be. This is a very old idea that we will have to discover again to be truly happy and fulfilled.
We struggle, it seems, with the truth that children are not adults, nor adults children. We struggle with the fact that the world should be two different things in two different ways for these two different groups….with the wall between these two worlds well built and consistently maintained.
We see this, most of the time, when it comes to alcohol… with age limits, arrests, prosecutions and even incarcerations when the line between who is & who is not age-enabled is crossed & violated.
We see this with automobiles and recognize that 12 year olds cannot be given the keys and told to go to the store to get a quart of milk.
We understand the separation between child & adult when it comes to war. 16 yr. olds are not given M16’s.
We draw a hard line about about who is capable of sexual consent.
The list of what grown-ups can do and kids cannot is long… but it is not complete….and it is only erratically enforced.
Can a 12 year old girl, on her own, request and receive breast implants? No, but with the consent of her mother she can. Does that make it right?
Can a 10 year old boy request hormone treatments because he’s come to think of himself, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a ‘girl’ (albeit one with a p***s)? Probably not….but it depends on the particular judiciary…and whether or not the boy’s parents, again, concur.
Can they drink; can they smoke; can they have sex? Well no…but of course they do….at younger and younger ages.
So what about Porn?
Pre-internet, we’d have to walk into a ‘dubious’ place …and speak to a dubious clerk…who kept it behind the dubiously grungy counter…and who then, most typically, send you away. We’d be reduced to searching for it among a pile of your best friend’s dad’s boxes of old magazines and newspapers. Maybe you’d get lucky.
But even then, for most of us, that luck consisted in stumbling across an old Playboy, with a gloriously bare-bosomed beauty with a big smile standing in a meadow, leaning against a tree, playing a record or something equally innocuous. Yes she was half-naked and air-brushed, but clearly that nudity was not being displayed within any kind of explicitly sexual context. (It took decades before that changed). And if you couldn’t find a Playboy, there was always the Sears catalog and National Geo.
Today the only barrier between the adult world of explicit everything and the child’s world of sugar and spice and everything nice… is a computer, and a few minutes of uninterrupted, access to Google.
Should we not find that seriously disturbing? Disturbing enough to build the kind of age-limit laws that surround most everything else of adult interest?
It’s really not that difficult.
And it’s not even all that inconvenient for the millions upon millions of adults who have a desire to wander in those X-rated ‘meadows’ of the 21st century.
But in order to make this happen we need to be able to embrace the truth that began this whole thing: children and adults are not and never will be the same… and children require — absolutely — protections and insulations from the hard surfaces and sharp & painful truths of adult life in a sometimes cruel and merciless world.
My concern is that it’s easy for people to find what they’re looking for. If you’re looking for influences from pornography in advertising or entertainment or everyday life, you’re bound to see them everywhere because culture is all around us. We are immersed in culture and everything in our culture, including pornography, is bound to share certain characteristics. That’s what culture is. Culture is many things all at once. It is ideas, art, philosophy, style, aesthetics, gender roles, norms, morals, and much more, and these things are not static. There is an interplay and interaction between these abstract concepts and ideas and the people within a culture. They are all constantly interacting and influencing one another changing and evolving in a way that is difficult to predict and impossible to control.
The author is making a lot of direct connections that I’m not sure anyone else would easily make without being intimately familiar with the topic. Are the people who make these fashion, style, and entertainment choices being subconsciously affected by pornography tropes, images, and practices? Perhaps, but the dilemma is in teasing out what is cause and what is effect. Is porn used to define standards of beauty, or do standards of beauty influence what porn people want to watch? Is the porn creating the standards or reflecting what people are actually doing in the culture. It’s long been said that art imitates life and life also imitates art. Is advertising with buxom women drawing from pornographic imagery, or is it simply taking advantage of the documented psychological tendency of men to notice attractive women. The first task of advertisers is, after all, to gain someone’s attention. Is porn the bigger social problem at play, or is the tendency to discard moral, ethical, or any other standards for the sake of pursuing profits? The idea that sex sells comes from an era where pornography was limited to Playboy, Hustler, and the sparsely populated back rooms of video rental stores. This author is drawing a lot of lines directly from A to B and I just don’t see it as being quite that simple.
The Internet has led to a troubling explosion in pornographic content, but then again, the Internet has led to an explosion in everything else content as well. There are encyclopedias, web comics, shopping sites, music, fan art, movie reviews, handmade crafts, instructional videos, pimple popping, dogs chasing roombas, ear cleaning, hoof trimming, fat guys singing Swedish pop songs, drain unclogging, cats fighting bears and alligators, sneezing pandas and on and on. Everything under the sun is now on the Internet, and there’s more of it than ever before. Those familiar with the digital culture might be familiar with rule 34, which simply states, if it exists, there is porn of it. Anybody and everybody can make images and write stories or whatever and put it on the internet, and as sex is one of the major drivers of human activity in general and a primary motivating factor, it is not surprising that sex would be a common theme. It is perhaps shocking and unpleasant to many of us to learn the true breadth and depth of sexual perversion that exists, but is the perversion really broader and deeper than it used to be, or are we simply more aware of it now? As with many other things concerning culture, it’s likely both, because culture is always being continually shaped and reshaped by the interplay between human beings and their reactions to the world and to each other. This goes well beyond sex and pornography. The Internet has been a boon to any professional or amateur student of human psychology insofar as it has broadened our understanding of the true diversity of human thought and behavior. I can’t speak for others but I genuinely appreciate that sort of diversity.
I can’t give your thought-provoking post the response it warrants at the moment, so for now let me say: I partly agree. Planning to follow up within 24 hours.My attempts at replying keep disappearing, so I’ll make a list of brief comments as a reply:
1) Yes, the internet is an Everything All the Time store, for good and ill.
2) Previous advancements, including the advent of writing (“it will ruin memory, which is the the mother of the muses [Mnemosyne]”) and the printing press (“it will enable rogues and sow more division!”), were greeted with similar worry and dismay.
3) In both of the above cases the conservatives/traditionalists had a point, but not “all the points”.
4) I think the World Wide Web is a net positive, if only barely. It seems to accelerate what is good, bad, and indifferent in us, at the same time—more than a little faster than we can adjust to well.
5) Information has ballooned, without a corresponding increase in actual knowledge, let alone wisdom.
6) Greater caution with this immense Connectivity should be exercised by all of us, and taught to children by non-partisan, non-dogmatic, non-ideological groups (easily said!).
7) At the same time you appreciate the digital version of Diversity, you value the familiarity and commonly shared qualities of the place where you live. Have you read anything by your fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry? (If not, I recommend Life is a Miracle).
8) We should all strive to greet and face the places we find ourselves, by choice or accident. Whether the faces mostly look like ours (rural Kentucky) or not so much (Silicon Valley, where I live). An abstract embrace of togetherness or the Universe that never greets its neighbor or speaks up against gross mistreatment of the stranger is…total bullshit.
9) That’s all from me for now. Have a great day, Steve.
Yes – the whole thing is confirmation bias.
The WHOLE thing? C’mon.
[I tried posting this 5 days ago…will try again]
Nicely said.
The truth is, humans are sexual creatures….and our sexual drive is fundamental to our lives and our existence as a species. We can’t have one without the other.
Equally we must recognize that our interest in sex, our fascination (especially the strongly visual male fascination) with beauty & sex (sex and beauty…. beauty & truth!) is a human constant.
Now what we have made of sex in these early, post-sexual revolutionary years of the 21st century is another thing entirely.
To your point, our culture is multi-variate and our sexual behaviors have historically been significantly moderated (mediated) by a Judeo-Christian culture which valued any number of ‘civilized’, sacred virtues which insulated us from our Dionysian hungers, our Maenad passions. Not so much anymore in a world in which ‘consent’ seems to be the primary moral hurdle.
you were doing well until the final paragraph- Andrea Dworkin wasnt great in any way, just a morbidly obese delusional blimp.
All the culture you’ve mentioned is incredibly low-brow US garbage and Euphoria might’ve been one of the worst TV shows ever
Every generation thinks that they invented sex so it’s not unreasonable for every generation to think that they redefined sex. Yet for all the tedious, prurient commentary of Valerie Stivers there’s a lot to be said for the glorification of gleamy-creamy jiggling breasts.
Like other forms of digitization online porn is cheapening sex. Porn offers the visual benefit of promiscuity without the physical risk. It’s a saccharine high that leaves you depleted. At some point, it’s just another internet scam.
It will be obvious to any man who remembers his youth why this song is a hit. Clearly it’s about the desperate insecurity young men feel when first attempting sex, or even thinking about attempting it. Young men will identify with it. But all the obsessive author sees is “the porn”.
What would you prefer, the prancing pornified lyrical drivel of bands of yesteryear like Led Zeppelin: “gonna give you every inch of my love”?
Good point here, David. Stivers takes a reductive and uncompassionate view in certain respects. Lewdness has been around in song and poetry since at least the Middle Ages (and of course much longer by any realistic measure). But matters of degree and kind still matter. Do you honestly think pornification is little more than a myth or hyperreaction of the delicate and prissy?
As AJ notes, lewdness, the sly implication, the double-entendre, the ribald, the bawdy — these have all been part of art (literature, poetry, lyrics, film, photography, et al) since forever.
But just as we can distinguish a child’s crayon scrawl vs. the Sistine Chapel, or my own crude attempt at ‘Chopsticks’ and Beethoven’s 5th… so too can we distinguish “As Time Goes By” (from 93 years ago, when a ‘kiss was just a kiss’)…from the 56 year old, barely disguised double-meaning of Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ … from the in-your-face crudity of ‘Wet Dreamz’.
We all remember our youth; we all remember that feeling of ‘desperate insecurity’ & broken hearts & endless yearning…but most of us have not a clue as to why that kind of guttural obscenity… which reduces “moonlight & love songs” to “I’m thinking how she rides on it, if she sits on it, if she licks on it” becomes popular with anyone.
There are undoubtedly many who do identify with that kind of crudity…who have come to see ‘love’ as nothing more than an itch, baby, that needs scratchin’….but that is both pathetic and tragic.
So yes, give me Cole Porter, Dooley Wilson, Etta James, Elton John, Elvis, John & Paul… give me ‘Wild Horses’, ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘Coming Back to Me’, ‘Today’…give me Simon & Garfunkel, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Cockburn, Bob Dylan (the list, thank God, is massive): and keep the J.Cole and his pornographic slop as far away as possible.
We are better than that. He should be, too.
Sex can be gentle or sex can be violent. Porn however favours the latter because it is easier to film. It is very difficult to show what’s happening when two people are locked together and barely moving, just enjoying the intimacy of penetration. Women with experience know that sex doesn’t have to be the way it is portrayed in porn. Girls with no experience don’t. It is understandable why more and more young girls and women are choosing not to have sex. And that’s even without considering how porn is influencing young men.
This is the 3rd time I’ve posted this. We’ll see if it works!
We struggle, it seems, with the truth that children are not adults, nor adults children. We struggle with the fact that the world should be two different things in two different ways for these two different groups….with the wall between these two worlds well built and consistently maintained.
We see this, most of the time, when it comes to alcohol… with age limits, arrests, prosecutions and even incarcerations when the line between who is & who is not age-enabled is crossed & violated.
We see this with automobiles and recognize that 12 year olds cannot be given the keys and told to go to the store to get a quart of milk.
We understand the separation between child & adult when it comes to war. 16 yr. olds are not given M16’s.
We draw a hard line about about who is capable of sexual consent.
The list of what grown-ups can do and kids cannot is long… but it is not complete….and it is only erratically enforced.
Can a 12 year old girl, on her own, request and receive breast implants? No, but with the consent of her mother she can. Does that make it right?
Can a 10 year old boy request hormone treatments because he’s come to think of himself, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a ‘girl’ (albeit one with a p***s)? Probably not….but it depends on the particular judiciary…and whether or not the boy’s parents, again, concur.
Can they drink; can they smoke; can they have sex? Well no…but of course they do….at younger and younger ages.
So what about Porn?
Pre-internet, we’d have to walk into a ‘dubious’ place …and speak to a dubious clerk…who kept it behind the dubiously grungy counter…and who then, most typically, send you away. We’d be reduced to searching for it among a pile of your best friend’s dad’s boxes of old magazines and newspapers. Maybe you’d get lucky.
But even then, for most of us, that luck consisted in stumbling across an old Playboy, with a gloriously bare-bosomed beauty with a big smile standing in a meadow, leaning against a tree, playing a record or something equally innocuous. Yes she was half-naked and air-brushed, but clearly that nudity was not being displayed within any kind of explicitly sexual context. (It took decades before that changed). And if you couldn’t find a Playboy, there was always the Sears catalog and National Geo.
Today the only barrier between the adult world of explicit everything and the child’s world of sugar and spice and everything nice… is a computer, and a few minutes of uninterrupted, access to Google.
Should we not find that seriously disturbing? Disturbing enough to build the kind of age-limit laws that surround most everything else of adult interest?
It’s really not that difficult.
And it’s not even all that inconvenient for the millions upon millions of adults who have a desire to wander in those X-rated ‘meadows’ of the 21st century.
But in order to make this happen we need to be able to embrace the truth that began this whole thing: children and adults are not and never will be the same… and children require — absolutely — protections and insulations from the hard surfaces and sharp & painful truths of adult life in a sometimes cruel and merciless world.
I disagree that it wasn’t “explicitly sexual” when a buxom Playboy babe flashed her come hither smile and showed her curves to advantage. Not graphic or over-the-top lewd, granted. By the early 70s, Penthouse and Hustler went in a much lewder and cruder direction, ahem—or so I’ve heard. Just a semantic quibble. Excellent reflections overall, B.
You’re right. Clumsy wording on my part. What I meant to say was that it wasn’t sexually explicit. Clearly it was explicitly sexual.
And yes, I too have … heard… that Hustler & Penthouse competed with PBoy by becoming much more explicit. Though, in comparison to what a casual Google Search can now reveal, Penthouse in ’74 was pretty darned innocent.
Agreed.
Twitter was rebranded X so that it had more of a universal application than an obscure, though charming, english name. Nothing to do with s*x or porn.
I find Ms. Stivers’ writing to be fevered, overwrought. I wonder if she leaves her first draft untouched on principle. For example, “There are signs of this everywhere, in high culture and low, perhaps starting with the fact that the one of our most popular social-media platforms is now called X for no apparent reason.” This is a reach. To start with, it’s not clear what the “this” refers to. Next, it’s apparently called “X” because Musk has a fixation on it. So what?
This piece could’ve been condensed into a sentence or two: “Sex has been cheapened, it’s in our face everywhere we turn, and this is bad”. I notice Ms. Stivers describes herself this way on X:
“Catholic sensualist. Hostessing fundamentalist. Culture for all.” Well, wipe my brow!
More Valerie, less Poppy.