Category Archives: feminism
Why Are Men Surprised by Breakups?
Over the years I’ve dated men who’ve ogled other women. Actually, only four men behaved that way, most weren’t so rude. When I told them their behavior bothered me, it had no effect. One responded, “Someday you’ll have a breakthrough and get over it.”
Instead of breakthroughs, I broke up with each of them. They all were shocked.
Sometimes the surprise happens differently, as when men “hear” me say that I like what I don’t.
When I was in college at BYU some of the students believed that although Mormons no longer practice polygamy (only “Mormon Fundamentalists” do) polygamy was the way of Heaven. (A religious instructor told me this was folklore and not theology. I haven’t been to church in years and don’t know what the common view is now.)
Still, I heard men say they couldn’t wait to have many wives up in Heaven. Put off, I asked men how they felt about polygamy. I told one man that it pissed me off. But projecting his own interest onto me, he was certain that I was as intrigued by the idea of heavenly threesomes as he was. Perhaps he got his sex ed from porn? I was mystified. He was surprised when I broke off our relationship.
Breakups can be harder on men than on women. Partly because men are more likely to be surprised.
Why are they so often surprised?
The male role seems to be in play. Men are less relationship-oriented, so they are less likely to monitor their relationships. Men learn that they’re not supposed to listen to women. Not helpful! Taught to constrain their emotions, men are less able to read the emotions of others.
Women are commonly objectified, too. When men see women as objects, sex toys that exist for their pleasure, men don’t experience women as having feelings. They lack empathy and can’t feel women’s pain.
Additionally, men often have more power in society and in relationships. How could this hurt them?
The Wall Street Journal recently reported studies showing that power decreases empathy.
People moving up the ladder of success are typically considerate, outgoing, agreeable and extroverted. Nice “guys” do finish first.
But once in power, things change.
One researcher compared the effect to brain damage, saying that people who hold a lot of authority can behave like neurological patients with damaged orbitofrontal lobes, an area of the brain that’s crucial for empathy.
I’m not saying all men behave this way, but it’s an interesting observation.
Still, the scales of power are tipped in men’s favor, often because it feels natural and normal to many men and women. So it’s interesting that even limited experiments, like asking people to describe a time when they felt powerful, could make them more egocentric.
Power keeps people from hearing points of view that differ from their own. So when a woman says she’s unhappy, and her partner feels she shouldn’t be, he may not sense her suffering even as she tells him about it.
Power diminishes empathy. Lacking empathy, some misread their partner’s feelings.
Then its surprise! Bye, bye baby.
Women, if you’re having issues, perhaps this will help you to understand what’s going on. Maybe you can have a conversation (if he’ll make an effort to talk to you.)
Men, if you want to keep your relationships strong, recognize women as full partners. Be attuned and listen to them. And be empathetic and alert to your partner’s emotions.
Georgia Platts
Sources:
Elizabeth Rider. Our Voices. Wadsworth. 2000
Jonah Lehrer. The Power Trip.” Wall Street Journal. August 14-15, 2010
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Sources of Power in Relationships
There are many sources of power in relationships, but a few stand out:
1. Higher education, income, and occupational status, especially in marriage relationships when men make more money. Both partners tend to feel that a man should have more say since he contributes greater resources to the family.
When wives are economically dependent and fear they can’t support themselves, husbands can become especially powerful. Some abusive men purposely get their wives pregnant (by destroying their birth control) to increase their wives’ dependency – and their control over their partners.
Women are less likely to become more powerful when they make more money because they generally don’t want to diminish their partners.
2. Relationship options. Perhaps a woman is economically dependent, but she is beautiful and she knows it. She also knows that if she leaves the relationship, she can quickly find someone else. This gives her a lot of clout.
3. Traditional gender roles. People who hold traditional notions about gender are more likely to accept male authority. While our society has achieved greater equality, men still typically have a bit more power in relationships.
Interestingly, young men today more often say they prefer equal partnerships.
4. Strong personalities. Even among the traditional-minded, some women just have stronger personalities. The couple will often deem the man, “head of home” when really, the woman is in charge.
5. Whoever cares least about the relationship has more power because the partner who cares more is more likely to cave in.
There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand it may simply be a sad, but true, fact of life.
Yet there may be some poetic justice. If one person is poorly treated, he or she will be more likely to leave. And this can create an incentive to change. If the relationship moves back into a better balance of happiness, equality can be regained.
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Why Don’t Women Like Sex As Much As Men?
What’s the difference between a slut and a bitch? If you are an American university student you probably know the punch line:
“A bitch has sex with everyone but me.”
So how do men view women’s sexuality? And what is the reality?
Sociologist, Michael Kimmel says that many men get their sex education from two primary sources: friends and porn. And their friends learn a lot from porn, too.
So how are women portrayed on the pornography front?
Women meet strangers and become immediately aroused, sexual activity quickly ensues, and they come swiftly to orgasm. And by the way, women love threesomes and orgies. Really, the more the merrier!
In porn women’s sexuality looks more like men’s than women’s.
Pornography leads single men to believe that other men are getting an awful lot of sex. And they wonder why they aren’t. “Why do babes (aka sluts) have sex with everyone but me? Those bitches!”
In the U.S. women’s sexuality is far different from how it is portrayed in porn. Typically, women are much more interested in romance and relationship than in casual intercourse. And while some women love sex (sometimes more than their partners) surveys show that they typically enjoy sex less than men do, and want far fewer partners.
Biology does not seem to be the main reason for the difference. While twice as much space is devoted to sexuality in the male brain, women and men have matched up far more evenly in other times and places in terms of sexual pleasure and interest.
I will be posting an ongoing series (interspersed with other topics) to discuss these questions, among others:
- How do men and women experience sex differently?
- What affects sexual experience and why do American women typically enjoy sex less than men?
- How do differences and misunderstandings affect relationships between women and men?
- What are the benefits and costs of the so-called male and female ways of sexuality?
- What can women learn from men and what can men learn from women?
To understand all this, we will need to explore sources of repression. Women get far more messages than men that sex is bad, which can repress their sexuality. Too often women are still punished for not controlling men’s sexuality. Calling women sluts rarely heightens their sexual interest. Quite the opposite. Yet men seem to be unaware of this — given how often they call women sluts and whores. Or they don’t care. Odd, since they say they want sex so much! But there is more on the repression front.
We will also discuss things you might not expect, like how objectification can dampen a woman’s sexual experience, even as it heightens a man’s. So focused on how she looks (whether pleased with her look or worried about it), she can’t get into sex. Meanwhile, men aren’t sexualized, so she has less to get so excited about.
Or, we still rank men above women in our society, and this ends up diminishing women’s sexual interest in ways that are not immediately obvious – though they should be. For example, when men see women as objects and not human beings, they may force sex. A past history of sexual violence often diminishes a woman’s interest.
Meanwhile, men, if you’re not getting a lot of sex, don’t take it personally. And don’t take it out on women. Calling them sluts and bitches will probably backfire!
Related posts on BroadBlogs:
“Cock” vs “Down There”
Sex Lessons from Mom and Dad
Sex: Who Gets Screwed?
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The Burqa and Individual Rights: It’s Complicated
“Burqa bans” are arising throughout Europe, with France voting their approval this past Tuesday. But many are concerned that the prohibitions limit the individual rights of Muslims.
It’s complicated.
First, the garment itself limits individual rights – women’s. Second, to what extent is the burqa wearer exercising actual choice? Finally, is a ban the best way to go?
Let’s start with the question of women’s choice.
When a society’s way of seeing becomes our own – even when it harms us – the belief is “internalized.” My interest in this phenomenon was sparked by my upbringing. In the early years of the feminist movement women from my church were bused to various conventions to vote down things like equal pay for equal work. I spent afternoons listening to women in my church talk about keeping battered women’s shelters from opening. They were against women receiving priesthood authority, and they were for male leadership in the home.
I didn’t understand why they worked so hard to disempower themselves, their daughters, and other women. But people don’t tend to question the taken-for-granted notions of their culture. It’s simply what you do. So choice disappears.
The same phenomenon arises in other settings. Saudi women say they don’t want to vote or drive. Many 19th Century American women didn’t want the vote, either. In North Africa women defend the genital mutilations that kill and cripple them.
Burqas limit women’s autonomy and power. Yet some women voluntarily don them, keeping with their culture.
Burqas – or niqabs (face coverings) – prevent wearers from gaining driver’s licenses when they are strictly worn, since identity can’t be confirmed via picture ID. When a city or village lacks public transportation it is hard to get around without a car. That makes it tough to get a job.
Even with transportation it’s not easy finding work in a facemask. The mask seems dehumanizing and eerie, as does the subjugation it represents.
But ethnocentrism is thought weightier than sexism. “Isms” that affect men seem more important than those that affect women – even when women are harmed, as when a female German judge denied a Muslim woman’s appeal for divorce, claiming that being beaten was part of her culture.
Did women have equal power to create the cultures that harm them?
Some women do resist, but feel pressured, as one of my Muslim students told me when we discussed the matter of covering.
But bans may not be the best way to deal with burqas or niqabs. Bans can backfire since people cling more tightly to their groups when they feel persecuted. As restrictions go into effect more women might actually embrace the burqas that limit them.
A better way may lie in creating conversation so that different cultures can consider a variety of perspectives. I am sure that Westerners and Muslims can learn from each other and our different ways of seeing.
Georgia Platts
Also see: Early Islam’s Feminist Air Did Women Create Burqa Culture? Cultural Relativism: Must We Be Nazis to Criticize Them? Why Are We More Offended By Racism Than Sexism?
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Rape Victims Condemned and Dismissed: Then and Now
In 1970 Jerry Plotkin and three others gang raped an acquaintance. Plotkin pleaded not guilty: He was a sexual libertine; he did what he wanted without limits. Through innuendo he implied that his victim was a libertine, too. Proof: she’d had sex without marriage.
The jury acquitted: A woman who’d had sex outside of wedlock could not be raped.
A rape victim condemned, her suffering dismissed.
Turning back 20 years earlier, an article from the 1952-53 Yale Law Journal explained why rape was illegal: “Women’s power to withhold or grant sexual access is an important bargaining weapon… it fosters, and is in turn bolstered by, a masculine pride in the exclusive possession of the sexual object… whose value is enhanced by sole ownership.”
The victim’s pain dismissed.
Discounting rape reaches far into history – at least when women are prey. In the Old Testament (Judges 19:22-29) we find depraved men pounding at the door of a Levite’s home, demanding a male guest be turned out to be raped. The Levite refuses, sending out his virgin daughter and his guest’s concubine, instead:
23 No, my friends, don’t be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don’t do this disgraceful thing. 24 Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But to this man, don’t do such a disgraceful thing.
25: So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. 26 At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight. 27 When her master got up in the morning … 28 He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer.
No distress arises as the concubine’s “husband” turns her out to be raped or finds her dead. If anyone has been harmed it is him, his property defiled.
If you think we’re past these attitudes, think again.
A lack of compassion continues in the Middle East. Instead of nurturing a victim through her trauma, she faces an honor killing as punishment for the sin of being attacked.
In today’s India, female rape victims can be subjected to a “finger exam” to see if her hymen is intact, or whether her vagina is “narrow” or “roomy.” A focus on virginity leaves her suffering of no import.
In the U.S., things are better. But problems remain. Helena Lazaro was raped at knifepoint at a car wash. She has spent 13 years trying to get her case properly investigated. But her attacker remains loose while authorities fail to test her rape kit. Currently, 180,000 rape kits are left untested nationwide, creating more rape victims.
Meanwhile, too many women are blamed for a crime that is committed against them.
Rape victims undergo depression, anxiety, and even post-traumatic stress disorder. Many become sexually dysfunctional.
Rape is the crime women most fear outside of murder. But you wouldn’t know it by the way victims are ignored and condemned.
Georgia Platts
Source:
Susan Griffin. “Politics: 1971.” The Power of Consciousness. HarperCollins. 1979
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Did Women Create Burqa Culture?
The upcoming French vote on the burqa ban has got me thinking. We hear talk of how women should keep their culture. But did women have equal power to create the burqa? And who benefits from this garment?
Meanwhile, some charge that rejecting the burqa comes from fear of the other, or ethnocentrism. I’m in sync with cultural relativism, so long as no one is being hurt. But buqas and “burqa cultures” don’t give women equal power. And women certainly did not have equal sway in creating the customs of these societies.
Think about the laws that exist in places where women are required to cover up in garments like burqas or niqabs (facemasks).
Is it likely that women decided that men could easily demand a divorce, but women could get one only with difficulty?
Is it likely that women created the notion that sharing a husband with other women might be nice?
Did women create the idea that an adulterous man be punished by burial up to his waist before being stoned, while a woman must be buried to her breasts – and the one who escapes, escapes the stoning?
In these cultures, when a woman is raped it is her fault. She obviously let some hair fall from her covering, or she allowed an ankle to show. Everyone knows that no man could resist such things. Did women decide that women, and not men, are responsible for men’s sexuality?
Did women originate the notion that after rape, the victim must be killed to restore the family honor?
Did women clamor for a burqa that limits their power and autonomy – keeping them from driving and getting jobs that are far from home? Did women design this garment that prevents small pleasures like seeing clearly or feeling the sun and the wind?
And who benefits?
Men benefit from easily obtaining a divorce, but not allowing their wives the same privilege. Men benefit from the sexual variety of having many wives, while women are left to share one man. Men benefit by more easily escaping a stoning. And men can rape with impunity since women fear reporting sexual assault, lest their families kill them. Men gain power when women are incapable of getting jobs and income. How much easier is it to beat women for the infraction of straying outside the home, or letting a wrist show, when they are black and blue blobs, and not human beings?
It is common to make accusations of ethnocentrism when one culture rejects the practices of another. Often the fears are valid.
But if a powerful group creates a culture that benefits themselves to the detriment of others, the critique is not about ethnocentrism. It is about human rights.
Georgia Platts
Also see: Early Islam’s Feminist Air
Don’t Reject Your Culture, Even When It Mutilates You
The Burqa and Individual Rights: It’s Complicated
Cultural Relativism: Must We Be Nazis to Criticize Them?
Why Are We More Offended By Racism Than Sexism?
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“Why I Left the KKK”: One Man’s Revelation
In The Republic, Socrates asked whether we should be good and just, and why.
A listener suggested that if we are trusted we’ll do better in our business and personal relationships.
But what if no one knows you are a good person?
“The gods will know, and reward us,” observed another.
But what if the gods don’t know that we’re good? Socrates pressed.
Later, I read Emerson on the same topic. His Minister had lectured that while the wicked are often successful, and while the righteous can be miserable, at least compensation would be made in the next life.
Emerson felt that the fallacy lay in conceding that the base estimate of the market constitutes success, and assuming that justice is not done now.
What REALLY makes us happy? Doing ill to others? Stepping on others so we can get ahead?
What Emerson and Socrates were getting at was made more real to me when I heard a man talk about why he had left the KKK.
He and his wife had become so filled with hatred in that organization that misery had overtaken their lives. They left because acting hatefully, hurting others, had ended up mostly hurting themselves.
As it turns out, when we work to harm others we harm ourselves.
Georgia Platts
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Ways of Seeing: Ravaged or Ravishing?
We are bombarded with thousands if not tens of thousands of images every day. Occasionally, two images come into such sharp contrast that they can’t be ignored. Such was the case when I opened the New York Times on Sunday, May 2. On page ten of that issue is a color photo of a 23 year old Congolese woman. The caption says her lips and right ear have been cut off by rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Her shorn head, the blackness of her face, the swollen pink oval around her mouth where her lips had once been (like the exaggerated lips of “Sambo” or minstrel characters once popular in American culture), and the sideway glance of her eyes as someone (perhaps her mother) touches her remaining ear with what seems tenderness. It is an image so heartbreaking as to make one weep.
In Ways of Seeing John Berger says, “The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it. Such authority as it retains is distributed over the whole context in which it appears.” Thus . . .
Immediately across the page from this photo is a full page Lord & Taylor ad of a beautiful white woman with long flowing dark hair, green eyes, perfect lips and two ears from which dangle long bejeweled earrings. She is arrayed in such opulence—necklace, pendant, bracelets, a giant opaline or turquoise ring, that the contrast with the Congolese woman is shocking. The juxtaposition of the two images is heightened by the fact that the Congolese woman wears a simple hand-crafted red and black blouse whereas the model wears what looks like an expensive hand-knitted ivory-colored chemise over a pink lace skirt. She holds in each hand a knitted handbag (“only $89”), each covered with roses and each holding a small dog, so laden that she seems barely able to hold them up. This cornucopia of luxury, this picture of desire would never be found in the Congo, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The ad’s caption—“We all have our creature comforts. . . Some of us more than others”—is so ironic as to be almost beyond irony. The motto compounds the irony: “Shop more. Guilt less.”
Again, John Berger, “A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste—indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. . . . To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.”
The Congolese woman, like the Greek Princess Philomela whose husband Terus cut out her tongue so she could not reveal that he had raped her, has likewise likely been raped and brutally silenced. The severing of her left ear compounds the violation. She will be so disfigured that probably no man will ever touch her again and no compassionate god will turn her into a nightingale.
The woman in the Lord and Taylor ad will be ravaged by the eyes of a million men who will yet never touch her skin except in their imaginations. And yet in her wildest imagination this white goddess could never see herself in the place of the black tongueless Congolese woman, nor the Congolese woman ever imagine herself in such a space as the woman in the ad inhabits.
Both of these images are part of the world we live in, although we tend to keep them in separate compartments of our consciousness. The one is horribly real, the other an unreal arrangement by Madison Avenue designers. On another day when they are not juxtaposed, we might consider each separately, but when they are thrust before us in such stark relief, we can turn from neither–only ponder what they tell us about how some of us have more creature comforts than others and how we can remain “guilt less”—and that we are somehow complicit in both.
Robert A. Rees teaches at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
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Early Islam’s Feminist Air
The founders of three great religions, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed (in order of appearance) were remarkably feminist in their leanings. In the month of Ramadan I would like to explore the feminist air of early Islam.
For centuries Muslim women enjoyed greater rights than most women in the world. The Koran gives women the right to work and to own property. Mohammed abolished female infanticide, slavery, and a widow’s obligation to marry her husband’s brother. Indeed, women were given the right to give their consent to marry.
Some things that look sexist today were a great step forward at the time. Women could become heir to one third of what a male inherited. (Since men’s role was to support women they were given extra help.) Muslim women were able to inherit much sooner than their Western sisters.
Islamic men are also allowed to marry up to four wives, and each wife must be treated equally. Doesn’t sound too heavenly to our ears, but this was progress from a time when men could marry as many women as they wanted.
Even the most problematic scripture in the Koran was an improvement. Chapter 4 verse 34 reads, “As for those women whose rebellion you justly fear, admonish them first; then leave their beds; then beat them.” This scripture actually gave women some protection against abuse in that men were cautioned against battering as the first response.
Some Islamic feminists note that there are other definitions for the word “daraba,” than “to beat,” one of which is “to go away.” Something to think about.
With early feminist beginnings it is not surprising that one of the largest, most egalitarian and peaceful societies is West Sumatra, Indonesia.
Yet over time the religion has become increasingly patriarchal in most corners of the world.
In what is claimed “countering Westernization,” Islamic states have kept busy restricting women’s rights, sometimes going against the Koran, as when the Taliban took away women’s right to work, or when the right to consent to marriage is ignored.
As one Islamic feminist put it, “Islam needs to go back to its progressive 7th century roots if it is to move forward into the 21st century.”
Sources:
Asra Q. Nomani. “A Gender Jihad for Islam’s Future.” The Washington Post. November 6, 2005
Neil MacFarquhar. “Translation of Koran Verse Spurs Debate.” San Jose Mercury News. March 25, 2007. (Originally published in the New York Times.)
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Readers Discuss: Porn, Pro and Con
This discussion comes mostly from the post I made to the blog, FreeMeNow. Also see Porn: Pro and Con and reposted Porn: Pro and Con on BroadBlogs.
Love most things pornographic. Not thrilled with Snuff flicks and underage porn at all!!
Pornography destroys men. They get hooked on it and cannot be satisfied by normal sex. Unless you have seen what porno has become – You cannot possibly know just how degrading, demeaning and humiliating it is to women.
Porn is not what it was 50 years ago, it is now not enough to have sex and look at the women’s parts — now the woman must be hurt, urinated on defecated on and humiliated in every way imaginable all while smiling and seeming to love it and beg for more.
I agree! Equal rights do not mean equal absurdity, equal stupidity or equal degradation. We don’t stoop down to reach their level and call that equal do we?
Instead of asking for more money, more representation in government and the highest job in the nation we are asking for PORN? We are asking for the right to be used as urinals to be jacked off into and onto? We are asking for the freedom to screw all over the place and be hog tied like swine so we can squeal like pigs for the pleasure of perverts.
God help us and then we wonder why we are murdered at the rate of 4 a day and our little girls are yanked out of their sleeping beds and raped then buried alive after he has had his fill. Porn leads to more porn which leads to kidde porn.
Women are women’s worse enemies. And I agree we don’t need laws to stop PORN – we need women to stop porn – the animals who use it won’t. If we elevate ourselves and unite- as a majority we will have the power to get for ALL women exactly what we want and need and will never again have to be used like this.
I think the porn that is available today is gross and should go the way of the dinosaur. Having said that, if porn were more female friendly (i.e. consensual sex with a partner, foreplay etc) it could be a good thing for society.
A recent content analysis of the 50 best-selling adult videos revealed that across all scenes, a total of 3,376 verbal and/or physically aggressive acts were observed. On average, scenes had 11.52 acts of either verbal or physical aggression, ranging from none to 128. Forty-eight percent of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression, while more than 88% showed physical aggression.
Seventy-two percent of aggressive acts were perpetrated by men; 94% of aggressive acts were committed against women.
The most common responses victims expressed when aggressed were either pleasure or neutrality. Fewer than 5% of the aggressive acts provoked a negative response from the female victims, including flinching and requests to stop the action. This pornographic “reality” was further highlighted by the infrequency of more positive behaviors, such as verbal compliments, embracing, kissing, or laughter.
I think when we outlaw anything it increases the desire to have it.
That being said, porn is an estimated $13 billion industry. While I do not think that it should be celebrated I also do not think that porn of the 2000’s is as objectifying a porn of say the 70’s. It is also a plus that more women in the industry are getting behind the camera and creating a woman’s version of porn.
Men view sex differently than women. Porn just shows that difference on a mass level. The majority of porn is done with consenting adults. No matter the loose subject matter. On the other hand kiddie porn and snuff films deserve the attitude some have towards all porn. Some S&M gets way beyond what some people can watch comfortably, but again, done with consenting adults and fairly well paid adults
As to the question of whether or not porn decreases rape. I would say of those that have overactive sex drives, yes it does. However, there are many out there that feed off what they view on the screen. It can lead to needing harder core porn on an increasing level. But that is the name of the game with anything and American’s as a whole, suffer from that notion in all aspects of life, not just sexually speaking.
But, the question is how much of that need is driven by societies “distaste” of the subject. Some get off on knowing that if they watch porn they are now one of the sinners of this world. It is very titillating to sneak through a painted door with age warnings and walk into an expanse that is hidden from the world and is a playground of possibilities and beautiful girls and guys. Very heady stuff.
Perhaps the better question is this…If we embraced sex in all its forms….would there be less rape in this country? If we started treated women as equal to man would there be less objectification of women as a whole? Both are very big “ifs” but I would sure like to try it.
As to the law….when we can not or will not self govern….this is when the law steps in. If American truly wants to keep “big brother government” out of their lives…perhaps they had better start talking – and listening – and solving issues on their own. Signing something into law is a cop-out. The lazy way to address issues. Even if there becomes a law that forbids porn of any kind….what manpower will be there to enforce it? And in the bigger picture of things is porn worthy of law enforcement at the level of catching a murderer? Pick your poison.
I feel porn is degrading and dehumanizing for women. The female becomes an object; males view them as an object, a piece of trash, especially if females submit to the degradation.
The video games Grand Theft Auto; the musical lyrics of the Rapper Two Live Crew were so filthy; disgusting that a Florida attorney was so repulsed he sued them, to prevent the public airing during normal day hours… and won.
I absolutely agree with that stand …our children should not have the smut forced upon them under the guise that freedom of speech allows it! What about decency laws??? Parents shouldn’t feel compelled to keep their children under continual surveillance either. Sadly that atty after 30 yrs of clean honest practice of law suffered the wrath of Hollywood’s enormous power to force the smut …he was disbarred by the state of Florida and has fought a valiant fight but even the feds are submissive to the powers of the Hollywood elite at the detriment of the people ….and I want to know why Hilary Clinton won’t take a stand on that??? She had supported the lawyer during the initial battle but abandoned him in his time of need, as did the US Supreme Court; the so called justice system.
Back to the issue of porn…..I think a poll of HS and college students would also be very revealing; I’d bet the findings would speak loud & clear that porn is dehumanizing for women …and beauty has nothing to do in the equation …it’s a tool to exploit the female!
Exposure to X-rated films among 522 black females aged 14 to 18, was associated with being 2.0 times more likely to have multiple sex partners, 1.8 times more likely to have sex more frequently, 1.5 times more likely to have not used contraception during the last intercourse, 2.2 times as likely to have not used contraception in the past 6 months, more than twice as likely to have a strong desire to conceive, and 1.7 times more likely to test positive for Chlamydia.
Wingood, G., DiClemente, R., Harrington, K., Davies, S., Hook, E., & Oh, M. (2001). Exposure to X-rated movies and adolescents’ sexual and contraceptive-related attitudes and behaviors, Pediatrics, 107(5), 1116-1119.
We live in a male dominated society, and throughout history, woman who are celebrated are valued as a care takers, as lovers. As creatures to try and put effort to gain their attention. That’s a great thing! Prostitution is the oldest profession. If it wasn’t for prostitutes, the women who were sexually powerful, they wouldn’t have known what pleases a woman and what doesn’t. And that’s what encouraged loosening restrictions on females, and so that changed so much in sex with men and their wives. Women just need to take charge of their sexuality, and recognize their bodies are amaz-ng, especially in this society. So if they by whatever reason, enjoys to have sex on camera, you can’t criticize them for doing so. Its erotica and expressional and sexy if its done in a positive aspect. But when it crosses the line, with anything in life, it has its potential to be dangerous. But porn can be healthy. And normal. Fantasy. And nice done in small amounts. Fair.
Porn is a sickness …a cancer that breeds cancer!!! What a repulsive excuse for behaviors even lower than the animal kingdom!!
We think we have a civilized society but is it really??? Pretty lowlife when even our children cannot be safe.
That pretty much says it all. And keep in mind this shit gets to our young boys and shapes their impressionable minds, then our young girls go walking down the street half naked…
You know — it doesn’t take a genius to figure this out ladies. Either you have been brainwashed to think this is ok or there is something seriously wrong and help needs to be found.
Most girls have been abused in one form or another from birth either verbally, visually or physically and this is the result!
It is not equality that allows us to have our bodies mistreated – it is pure stupidity and to think that you like it is sick and requires attention!
Some people cut themselves, take drugs, drink themselves to death too. That doesn’t make it normal- Get help!
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