Does 'rape culture' accurately describe (many) societies?

[dirtywick]

Those are very fair points.

I could go to great lengths about my personal perspective on the entire hookup culture and the kinds of dysfunctions we're seeing, as well as what I think influences them... but that's beyond the scope here, and I've already put my soap box away, I don't want to drag it back out unless I really really have to.

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[Emily's Cat]

This I tend to agree with and is the main reason I do have issues with kids getting access to pornography prior to learning about sex.

After this thread started I had a look at heterosexual Pornhub and there was a lot of sex that seemed to be just 2 people having sex, although of course it will be the fantasy version of sex that is shown in porn.

Why did you put the word romantic in there?

Trying to draw a distinction between sex within a relationship where you actually give a **** about your partner, and hook-up ******* where your partner is effectively a one-time use sex toy that happens to breathe.

I would agree there seems a lot - but is there any study that has actually looked at the relative proportions?

That aside - wouldn't we expect porn to be the more fantastical sex? Just like we don't go to see a movie about a couple who get up in the morning, go to work, come home, have their dinner, do the chores and go to bed. Entertainment is never the same as real life, it would not be entertainment if it was.

Again, I'm going to point to the difference between professionally produced porn and amateur/user-created porn. One is depicted as you describe it - fantastical in nature. The other, however, is depicted as being real sex between normal people, not a scripted fantasy.

This I again agree with, but I recognise my opinion may be a perception not a reality so do we have statistics on the increase in sexual harm? I could see that we might now have an increase in reporting since we have been thankfully breaking down the barriers that have kept sex from being something normal.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318231153984
https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-snapshots/effects-pornography-children-and-young-people
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9853222/

Examples - and please not the odd extremism but representative of the usual.

Can't see anything wrong with teaching about anal sex - apparently a large proportion of people do practice it - this was discovered decades ago. As to the rest, again do you have examples - and again I don't want the odd example of extremism - in a world so full there are extremes in everything, I would like to see what is usually taught? Even if you can only provide it for your country.

There's info out there, but based on what you've said above, I have doubts that you would accept it as being representative.

There's nothing wrong with teaching safety with respect to anal sex... but on the other hand, the fact that MOST females do NOT get sexual pleasure from it has been overlooked. Where in the past anal sex was predominantly associated with gay males, it's become a lot more common - and expected - of teenage females. And no, I don't have robust clinical studies. What I have is a whole lot of young female friends and relatives, as well as the children and family of many other people my age, who have almost all expressed that they feel pressured to have anal sex, because it's considered "normal", they don't like it, but they feel like they should do it anyway because it's considered "weird" if they don't want to.

Males can get a fair bit of pleasure from anal sex, because the prostate is a rather sensitive organ. Females don't have a prostate. Having engaged in anal sex at the request of my spouse a few times... I can attest that it wasn't particularly great. With sufficient lube it's not really painful, but mostly it just felt like I had to poop over and over and over and over...

 

[Poem]

I have never been interested in rape or child porn, I have never looked for rape or child porn. But I have looked for porn. And I have never come across rape or child porn while looking for ordinary porn. Can it happen by accident? Probably. Is it the typical experience of most porn watchers? I don't think it is.

You know because of what?

 

[Darat]

I think the complaint at the moment is that Pornhub was hosting a bunch of it. And that is definitely a problem and isn't OK, I don't think anyone here is against forcing that stuff off the platform. But the framing, particularly by some of the links posted earlier, seemed like it was advocating that pornography in general should be blocked because some of it is this really bad stuff. And that conflation in framing I think caused some pushback which got interpreted as indifference to the problematic stuff, when I don't think it really is.

Anyone reading this thread without a preconceived opinion will see everyone is strongly against any form of non-consensual porn, never mind anything such as child porn.

 

[Emily's Cat]

If "rape culture" is defined as "the culture prevalent in a place where rape occurs" then is there now and has there ever been a culture that wasn't a "rape culture"? If the US is a "rape culture" because of the 1 in 6 statistic, then what's the cutoff number between "rape culture" and "not rape culture"? If we reduced it to 1 in 7 is that sufficient to flip? What's the limit? 1 in 10? 1 in 50? 1 in 100?

How about just getting it to a point where the rate of rapes is the same for male and female victims? I'd really prefer that the rate of offenses be the same for male and female perpetrators, but I'd settle for the victimization being within spitting distance of each other. It doesn't seem like it should be too much to ask for.

I don't think there's a sufficient connection between "rape occurs in this culture" and "porn occurs in this culture" to declare they are causally linked and reducing the latter will reduce the former.

I don't know that they're causal. On the other hand, I do think that the casual acceptance of porn that depicts females as objects, combined with violence and brutality involved, is reasonably viewed as indicative of the overall view toward females when it comes to sex.

I might be biased.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That's dishonest of you. The comment at its worse was about the link between pornography and rape, not that any level of rape is acceptable or an OK price to pay.

It's hyperbolic of me, not dishonest.

I also don't think that's what novaphile was trying to say, but it's some of what can be reasonably inferred as a result of the "other parts of the world execute the victims of rape" comment being thrown in there.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Load of crap - and let's be honest "romance novels" are porn - mostly soft porn but they are porn, we are being snobby because it's in "book" form.

You really need to branch out and see what is self-published these days, the day of Mills & Boon romance are long gone. (And even they publish stuff they will label "erotica". And the difference between erotica and romance is simple the difference between hardcore porn and softcore porn.)

A female character watching the "alpha" man slowly abuse and then rape a "beta" man ain't thinking it's about what is going on in their minds.
And to the highlighted part - I doubt that the fantasy rape in porn is ".... generally the same kind of rape that happens in real life".

WTAF? That's horrid.

 

[Darat]

All true. And Canada should get PH to clean up their act if it hasn't been done already. And just because its "going to be hosted somewhere else" (ETA: and due to the nature of the internet, accessible in the USA) does not mean I think within our jurisdiction we shouldn't enforce laws against the manufacture and hosting of illegal stuff. Only that its gonna be in other jurisdictions where we have no control and there is nothing effective beyond very extreme measures that we can do about it.

I do believe that EC is arguing against the legalization of porn in general though.

Pornhub is for all extents illegal in several USA states because they can’t or won’t agree to the regulations they’d have to follow to provide their site to folk in those states. Has anyone done any research into what has happened to viewing porn in those states?

 

[Darat]

You know because of what?

What a strange question. You really think you wouldn’t recognise videos of a 5 year old being sexually assaulted by an adult?

 

[Ziggurat]

You know because of what?

I'm not going to provide blow-by-blow details of the porn I've watched, but it's professionally produced, the participants are regulars, and it's clearly consensual. It's really not ambiguous.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That would most certainly fall afoul of 1A protections. It was never illegal AFAIK to produce or share porn you made of yourself federally. Mailing it or the public display was however.

It would would probably be constitutional to require any commercial enterprises to require age verification in hosting user created porn. But I don't think you could for a couple just opening port 80 on their router and running a webserver with video of themselves.

So do you have any suggestions on how to prevent the publication of child pornography, abuse, rape, and revenge porn? Or is it just too difficult and it will get in the way of access to porn so let's not do it even if it means that there are no reasonable safeguards to prevent such things?

 

[Emily's Cat]

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I'm curious what you think the "woman point of view" on OF is, and how widespread you think that view is.

 

[Poem]

What a strange question. You really think you wouldn’t recognise videos of a 5 year old being sexually assaulted by an adult?

Generally the UNCRC defines 'child' as < 18 and Ziggurat's assertion was also about rape.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Anyone reading this thread without a preconceived opinion will see everyone is strongly against any form of non-consensual porn, never mind anything such as child porn.

Mmm... they're against it on principle, sure. But there's a whole lot of arguments being put forth that oppose doing anything to make sure such content cannot be shared. There's more opposition to putting meaningful safeguarding measures in place than I would expect from a group where everyone is opposed to it.

 

[lobosrul5]

Pornhub is for all extents illegal in several USA states because they can’t or won’t agree to the regulations they’d have to follow to provide their site to folk in those states. Has anyone done any research into what has happened to viewing porn in those states?

Actually.... no PH is not technically illegal in any US states. HB 1181 mandates that any porn sites have an age verification system. Therefore if PH was itself hosted in Texas it would be illegal. I also cannot find any language in HB 1181 that makes it illegal for a user in TX to visit PH's URL. PH is making a political statement by region locking access to Texas and Utah.

I'd be curious to know the data too. But it is again impossible to know for sure. How many people in Texas now access it thru a VPN, TOR, or similar, went to another provider, or stopped viewing porn all together? Its impossible to know unless you queried a significant amount of Texans and you were sure they were all telling the truth.

 

[Darat]

WTAF? That's horrid.

Came across it a few months ago. They were werewolves, so the physical injury is magically undone, truly sickening stuff, to me but really nothing unusual in the “reverse harem” subgenre.

 

[Poem]

I'm not going to provide blow-by-blow details of the porn I've watched, but it's professionally produced, the participants are regulars, and it's clearly consensual. It's really not ambiguous.

OK. But you accept that going on Pornhub will probably result in seeing someone being raped and or someone who is underage?

Assuming you consume a fair amount, of course.

 

[Emily's Cat]

What a strange question. You really think you wouldn’t recognise videos of a 5 year old being sexually assaulted by an adult?

Now Darat, that's hyperbolic of you. Of course most people would recognize a 5 year old. But what about a 14 year old or a 16 year old? Hell, how many people out there are wildly in support of Belle Delphine - who goes to great lengths to make sure that they look like a 12 year old child? If so many people are all in for Delphine's sex while intentionally looking like a child, how certain are you that they'll be able to recognize an actual child and won't just assume that it's an adult dressed like a kid?

And when it's user-uploaded content, how do you know that it's a consensual depiction of faked brutality with good acting, as opposed to actual brutality of a non-consenting victim?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Came across it a few months ago. They were werewolves, so the physical injury is magically undone, truly sickening stuff, to me but really nothing unusual in the “reverse harem” subgenre.

I don't feel any obligation to pretend to kindness on this - that's some horrifically depraved and sick ****. That's not even remotely okay, and we as a society should NOT tolerate it. It's just plain ****** up.

 

[Ziggurat]

OK. But you accept that going on Pornhub will probably result in seeing someone being raped and or someone who is underage?

I accept that it's a possibility. I don't accept that it's probable. I would want actual evidence presented for such a claim before accepting it. It doesn't seem reasonable on its face.