In true FDS fashion, I’m not about playing it safe or saying things that make people feel good. I’m tired of all the posts bemoaning the world porn has ruined. I see FAR too many posts waxing poetic about how guys would be these wonderful people and value and love us and treat us like princesses if it wasn’t for porn. STOP IT. That is a lie and a delusion. Furthermore, believing that will only keep you stuck in a mentality that won’t serve you when it comes to men. You will always conflate lack of porn use with an HVM and that’s a false correlation.
I want to be 100% clear. Porn is awful. It definitely is responsible for the exploitation and abuse of untold women and children. It exacerbates the sexual deviance of men. It is absolutely responsible for the trends of abusive sexual assault we see masquerading as kink. *But it did not CREATE these things.* The term sadomasochism was named after the Marquis de Sade, who practiced what we would think of as BDSM back in the 1700s! He literally wrote the book on sexual violence and in it advocated everything from orgies, to rough anal sex, to rape and torture, and public brothels. Sound familiar? He was all about the domination and sexual degradation of women. And that’s just one of the more famous examples. History is littered with these practices. As far back as Ancient Rome and Greece these practices were not only accepted, they were common, along with the sexual abuse of children! I think modern technology spreads certain practices faster, but it’s not giving men ideas they never had.
Let me be frank. Too often, when women wax poetic about the past, it is tone-deaf and sounds ignorant as hell. Yes, men seemed less “deviant” in the past-because spousal rape wasn’t against the law and the police didn’t bother prosecuting ‘date rape’ or sexual harassment in the office, not because men respected us more. But yes, even allowing for that, there were fewer white men raping white women. You know why? They were outsourcing all their violence to disenfranchised minority women who couldn’t fight back! I have to say, as a black woman, it has been a real irritation to me to listen to non-WOC go on and on about the good old days before porn. Yeah, those men who were so “respectful” of you were just taking their violence out on black women and other WOC. Read some papers on how many black housemaids in the 50s were raped by their bosses regularly. How many black women civil rights activists were arrested, then beaten and raped. And don’t even get me started on the stats during reconstruction and slavery. And it’s not just black women. We see the same behavior towards any disenfranchised population. Read up about ‘comfort women’ aka Korean, Chinese, and Filipino women forced into sex slavery during WWII, hundreds of thousands of them! Japanese women were raped indiscriminately after World War II when the country was under American occupation (also in Japanese internment camps in the US). American and other soldiers raped ‘enemy’ women rampantly and without mercy. And it happened again in Korea. And Vietnam. And Afghanistan. And Iraq. And we see the same attitude today with “sexual tourism” of poor Global South countries like Thailand and Cambodia. Married fathers who live perfectly respectable lives in the US and probably don’t even have parking tickets pay to go there and rape children. How come it’s only a problem when they engage in the same behavior here?
It just feels like when women romanticize men of former periods what they’re saying is, “why can’t these men hide their vices, their penchant for rape and violent sexual abuse, like their fathers and grandfathers did? Why do *I* have to deal with this?” WOC have never had the luxury of not dealing with this reality. This is not to say MOC aren’t just as horrible as white men, because they totally are, worse in some ways. But I’m talking about porn and culture right now, and that market was created by w.hite men like Hugh Hefner and became the cultural landscape because of the dissemination of porn by other powerful w.hite men like Larry Flynt. If you want to say you wish men were better, that’s fine. Don’t we all. But don’t wish we could “go back.” That means, “I wish I could buy a happier life at someone else’s expense. I wish I had the fantasy of a picture-perfect marriage sustained by my husband raping powerless women who can never complain.”
Porn is not the issue. Porn isn’t making these men into monsters. They were already monsters. They were monsters when the “father of modern gynecology” practiced by torturing, experimenting on, and cutting up living enslaved black women who were not even sick with no anesthesia. They were monsters when mass rape was used as a weapon of war in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and all over Africa during colonization. They were monsters when they were raping Native women all over the Trail of Tears. And they’re monsters still now that they go onto reservations to rape defenseless women because those are sovereign lands and they can’t be prosecuted by American law on them. Just like they were monsters when they made a legal loophole that said enslaved black women were “unrapeable” because they couldn’t consent as property, then used the loophole to rape them. There wasn’t widespread digital porn then, yet these men spent their resources thinking of and creating the means to facilitate widespread rape for hundreds of years. Porn is a mirror. It reflects the nature of men who use it, it doesn’t transform them.
I want to be 100% clear. Porn is awful. It definitely is responsible for the exploitation and abuse of untold women and children. It exacerbates the sexual deviance of men. It is absolutely responsible for the trends of abusive sexual assault we see masquerading as kink. *But it did not CREATE these things.* The term sadomasochism was named after the Marquis de Sade, who practiced what we would think of as BDSM back in the 1700s! He literally wrote the book on sexual violence and in it advocated everything from orgies, to rough anal sex, to rape and torture, and public brothels. Sound familiar? He was all about the domination and sexual degradation of women. And that’s just one of the more famous examples. History is littered with these practices. As far back as Ancient Rome and Greece these practices were not only accepted, they were common, along with the sexual abuse of children! I think modern technology spreads certain practices faster, but it’s not giving men ideas they never had.
Let me be frank. Too often, when women wax poetic about the past, it is tone-deaf and sounds ignorant as hell. Yes, men seemed less “deviant” in the past-because spousal rape wasn’t against the law and the police didn’t bother prosecuting ‘date rape’ or sexual harassment in the office, not because men respected us more. But yes, even allowing for that, there were fewer white men raping white women. You know why? They were outsourcing all their violence to disenfranchised minority women who couldn’t fight back! I have to say, as a black woman, it has been a real irritation to me to listen to non-WOC go on and on about the good old days before porn. Yeah, those men who were so “respectful” of you were just taking their violence out on black women and other WOC. Read some papers on how many black housemaids in the 50s were raped by their bosses regularly. How many black women civil rights activists were arrested, then beaten and raped. And don’t even get me started on the stats during reconstruction and slavery. And it’s not just black women. We see the same behavior towards any disenfranchised population. Read up about ‘comfort women’ aka Korean, Chinese, and Filipino women forced into sex slavery during WWII, hundreds of thousands of them! Japanese women were raped indiscriminately after World War II when the country was under American occupation (also in Japanese internment camps in the US). American and other soldiers raped ‘enemy’ women rampantly and without mercy. And it happened again in Korea. And Vietnam. And Afghanistan. And Iraq. And we see the same attitude today with “sexual tourism” of poor Global South countries like Thailand and Cambodia. Married fathers who live perfectly respectable lives in the US and probably don’t even have parking tickets pay to go there and rape children. How come it’s only a problem when they engage in the same behavior here?
It just feels like when women romanticize men of former periods what they’re saying is, “why can’t these men hide their vices, their penchant for rape and violent sexual abuse, like their fathers and grandfathers did? Why do *I* have to deal with this?” WOC have never had the luxury of not dealing with this reality. This is not to say MOC aren’t just as horrible as white men, because they totally are, worse in some ways. But I’m talking about porn and culture right now, and that market was created by w.hite men like Hugh Hefner and became the cultural landscape because of the dissemination of porn by other powerful w.hite men like Larry Flynt. If you want to say you wish men were better, that’s fine. Don’t we all. But don’t wish we could “go back.” That means, “I wish I could buy a happier life at someone else’s expense. I wish I had the fantasy of a picture-perfect marriage sustained by my husband raping powerless women who can never complain.”
Porn is not the issue. Porn isn’t making these men into monsters. They were already monsters. They were monsters when the “father of modern gynecology” practiced by torturing, experimenting on, and cutting up living enslaved black women who were not even sick with no anesthesia. They were monsters when mass rape was used as a weapon of war in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and all over Africa during colonization. They were monsters when they were raping Native women all over the Trail of Tears. And they’re monsters still now that they go onto reservations to rape defenseless women because those are sovereign lands and they can’t be prosecuted by American law on them. Just like they were monsters when they made a legal loophole that said enslaved black women were “unrapeable” because they couldn’t consent as property, then used the loophole to rape them. There wasn’t widespread digital porn then, yet these men spent their resources thinking of and creating the means to facilitate widespread rape for hundreds of years. Porn is a mirror. It reflects the nature of men who use it, it doesn’t transform them.