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

Poem said:
What figure do you think is more realistic?
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You tell us. It's your thesis. What figure do you think is realistic, for the % of porn that depicts sex by coercion?

For avoidance of doubt: I'm referring to sex scenes that depict or imply coercion in the scene itself. I'm not referring to sex scenes that appear to be consensual, but where one or more of the participants are alleged to have been coerced into sex work.
 
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I realise this thread has evolved into a discussion of porn, but I was reminded of the thread title when I saw a headline in the Daily Telegraph yesterday. It related to the horrific story you may have read about already of a woman in France who was surreptitiously drugged by her husband repeatedly over several years, so a succession of random men could rape her while she was unconscious. The Telegraph's take on the trial?


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/02/dominique-plicot-on-trial-drugging-wife-latest/

The Telegraph seem to have changed the headline, presumably as a result of public criticism, but the whole story is an example of rape culture, if you ask me.
 
Trausti said:
This is probably true. Read somewhere that some high-status (read: attractive) guys go through many different women. The women thinking he'll stick around. Yeah, no.
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Ron Obvious said:
Fixed that for you.
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Women are attracted to high status. That can be wealth, fame, power, or physical appearance, doesn't really matter. The point is that biological reality creates an asymmetry in mate selection. Women prefer to "date up" but men are willing to "sleep down", because women can only bear one child at a time but men can father multiple children at a time. Monogamy helps symmetrize that, which leaves fewer people out of the sexual marketplace, but when you do away with that, then you get chimp world. And **** falls apart.
 
Darat said:
Meant to post this about a week ago. I stiffened my resolve and went to Pornhub and noted the name/description of the first 20 videos I came across. Not one of them was titled or described as violent.

ETA: I used the duckduckgo browser and entered at www.pornhub.com, I had to click that I was over 18 and accepted essential cookies only.
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I admire your unflinching dedication. I know from experience how completely loathsome sites like those are, and how completely horrible is the experience of watching them. I too have sometimes watched them, very reluctantly, usually when my gf is away, and very occasionally along with her. And I agree, these very disagreeable experiences do usually correlate with a stiffening of one’s resolve. Except, unlike you, in my case the stiffening usually happens after I’ve watched some of what they’ve got.
 
If you're serious, and that portion of your post, that I responded to, wasn't a deliberate tongue-in-cheek setup: well then sure, of course, if you say so. Heh, my interest wasn't, and isn't! And I've zero hangups openly saying that. Unlike Poem I don't think porn per se is wrong, on the contrary. (Bar specifics, like coercion when that's the case, like effects on specific demographics like underage inexperienced kids if that's conclusively proved etc. Obviously. Such specifics do deserve to be addressed, certainly. But overall I think the availability of diverse kinds of porn today is a good thing, just like the availability of diverse kind of fiction today is a good thing, and the availability of diverse kinds of information/knowledge-based matter, even as each of these comes with specific issues that do need addressing.)
 
I was serious the vanilla entry point for Pornhub holds no interest for me (but I'm British and a definition of British that doesn't include a mention of compulsively slipping in innuendos would be inaccurate).

I am surprised that Poem hasn't at least gone to Pornhub to see if the "90%" figure is true, for me finding none out of the 20 I looked at was enough to make that claim very suspect - as far as I am concerned.
 
Chanakya said:
If you're serious, and that portion of your post, that I responded to, wasn't a deliberate tongue-in-cheek setup: well then sure, of course, if you say so. Heh, my interest wasn't, and isn't! And I've zero hangups openly saying that. Unlike Poem I don't think porn per se is wrong, on the contrary. (Bar specifics, like coercion when that's the case, like effects on specific demographics like underage inexperienced kids if that's conclusively proved etc. Obviously. Such specifics do deserve to be addressed, certainly. But overall I think the availability of diverse kinds of porn today is a good thing, just like the availability of diverse kind of fiction today is a good thing, and the availability of diverse kinds of information/knowledge-based matter, even as each of these comes with specific issues that do need addressing.)
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Child experts and charities have been describing the harm done to children exposed to porn as 'severe'; what do you have that throws doubt on that?
 
Poem said:
Child experts and charities have been describing the harm done to children exposed to porn as 'severe'; what do you have that throws doubt on that?
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People whose living depends on thing happening have claimed that thing is happening more.


You really, really don't see why this should be treated with at least a little scepticism?
 
Poem said:
Child experts and charities have been describing the harm done to children exposed to porn as 'severe'; what do you have that throws doubt on that?
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Where do you get that from, that I might have anything to throw doubt on something like that? I think you may have misunderstood my post, and derived from it the exact opposite of what I was saying. See again the portion from my post that you quoted, and indeed highlighted yourself with bold font. I agree that specific ills associated with porn are ...well, not good; and that such specifics need to be addressed, absolutely. And I particularly mentioned the impact on underage kids --- that I think you and I discussed in this thread some days back --- as one specific instance.

(Where I expect we disagree as far as that, although that was not part of my post, is what to do about that harm to kids. I'd suggest taking measures to: one, ensure as far as possible that these don't reach underage kids; and, two, build up their defenses to this sort of thing through better sex education, and indeed clear discussion about porn itself ---- by making clear to them that this is fiction, and just like seeing movie stars jump out of buildings might be fun (for some), but only an idiot jumps from tall buildings IRL, likewise porn also is fiction, to be enjoyed by adults who are so inclined, but strictly as fiction. ...You, on the other hand, clearly favor more draconian measures: I think you've actually suggested getting rid of porn altogether. And that's a measure I disagree with completely. (But again, that's separate from what you seem to have read into my post, and what you're talking about here.)
 
Darat said:
I was serious the vanilla entry point for Pornhub holds no interest for me (but I'm British and a definition of British that doesn't include a mention of compulsively slipping in innuendos would be inaccurate).

I am surprised that Poem hasn't at least gone to Pornhub to see if the "90%" figure is true, for me finding none out of the 20 I looked at was enough to make that claim very suspect - as far as I am concerned.
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It's kinda funnier than that. Remember when we used to say that those most complaining about gays, were gay? Or some other version of "you're actually just telling me about your mind"?

"AI" or at least some form of statistics is now used almost everywhere on the web. It's not just YouTube that does it. I haven't studied PornHub specifically, but on a lot of other sites, they can remember what you've looked at recently even if you didn't actually log in, just by using a cookie. So if you've watched a lot of <insert category> lately, you might find a lot of it recommended to you.

Plus, some other statistics might be involved. I know for example that PornHub specifically makes statistics of most watched stuff and most searched terms by geographic location. Not just because they actually have "popular in Germany" (or whatever your country is) on the front page, but they even published such statistics before. So, yeah, how things are ordered for you in the UK might not be the same as how they're ordered for someone in the US. And it quite often just tells you what the other guy (or a family member using the computer) has been watching a lot.

Basically, it's hard. The days when you could check something like search results by just going in and typing the same query, are long gone. Or as Jaskier put it, "I hate to break it to you but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean."
 
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HansMustermann said:
Basically, it's hard. The days when you could check something like search results by just going in and typing the same query, are long gone. Or as Jaskier put it, "I hate to break it to you but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean."
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Unfortunate phrasing there, I think... :)
 
HansMustermann said:
It's kinda funnier than that. Remember when we used to say that those most complaining about gays, were gay? Or some other version of "you're actually just telling me about your mind"?

...snip...

Basically, it's hard. The days when you could check something like search results by just going in and typing the same query, are long gone. Or as Jaskier put it, "I hate to break it to you but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean."
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Using Duckduckgo helps to avoid a lot of that, each session starts from a blank page, adding in my VPN as well as far as Pornhub was concerned I was a "new" browser, so what I got was the default. My VPN would have been set for the UK.
 
Darat said:
Using Duckduckgo helps to avoid a lot of that, each session starts from a blank page, adding in my VPN as well as far as Pornhub was concerned I was a "new" browser, so what I got was the default. My VPN would have been set for the UK.
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I didn't mean YOU, since you've already mentioned that. It was more about the people producing those "90%" numbers. On most major adult sites, if they went there and 90% of what they're shown is violent movies, they simply answered the question "tell me what you've been watching lately" :p

Mind you, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's their kink. It could also be that they searched it as part of their 'investigation' a lot, and weren't computer literate enough to understand why then they keep being shown that.

But yes, basically all I'm saying is why some people are seeing something different than a new user default.
 
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HansMustermann said:
I didn't mean YOU, since you've already mentioned that. It was more about the people producing those "90%" numbers. On most major adult sites, if they went there and 90% of what they're shown is violent movies, they simply answered the question "tell me what you've been watching lately" :p

Mind you, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's their kink. It could also be that they searched it as part of their 'investigation' a lot, and weren't computer literate enough to understand why then they keep being shown that.

But yes, basically all I'm saying is why some people are seeing something different than a new user default.
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You'd almost need a QA engineer, painstakingly recording every click and keystroke, to do this kind of study. Can't really trust any claim about internet research that doesn't thoroughly explain its methodology, controls, and replication results.
 
HansMustermann said:
I didn't mean YOU, since you've already mentioned that. It was more about the people producing those "90%" numbers. On most major adult sites, if they went there and 90% of what they're shown is violent movies, they simply answered the question "tell me what you've been watching lately" :p

Mind you, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's their kink. It could also be that they searched it as part of their 'investigation' a lot, and weren't computer literate enough to understand why then they keep being shown that.

But yes, basically all I'm saying is why some people are seeing something different than a new user default.
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:thumbsup:
 
theprestige said:
You'd almost need a QA engineer, painstakingly recording every click and keystroke, to do this kind of study. Can't really trust any claim about internet research that doesn't thoroughly explain its methodology, controls, and replication results.
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Pretty much, yes.
 
I'd also like to add that when it comes to pretty much anything sex, there is a subset of people who think that being the loudest against it, somehow makes up for their doing it. As I was saying, some of the loudest homophobes turned out to be gay.

Or a long time ago, in a galaxy f... err... just long time ago, on one particular site there were a couple of users who'd seem to be in the comments of pretty much every video in one category, leaving the most rabid unsolicited reviews about what's wrong with the category and people watching it. But then in at least half of them it turned out they'd watched enough to know what happened around minute 40 and complain about that specifically :p

I know, I know, reading porn comments can be bad for one's sanity. But if it's any defense, comments were always shown right under the video, and at least for newer movies there were almost none... except for at least one of these guys complaining, and maybe one or two people telling them to not watch this stuff if they don't like it. One's eyes tend to wander.

So yeah, one more reason to ask what's their methodology, I guess :p
 
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HansMustermann said:
I'd also like to add that when it comes to pretty much anything sex, there is a subset of people who think that being the loudest against it, somehow makes up for their doing it. As I was saying, some of the loudest homophobes turned out to be gay.

Or a long time ago, in a galaxy f... err... just long time ago, on one particular site there were a couple of users who'd seem to be in the comments of pretty much every video in one category, leaving the most rabid unsolicited reviews about what's wrong with the category and people watching it. But then in at least half of them it turned out they'd watched enough to know what happened around minute 40 and complain about that specifically :p

I know, I know, reading porn comments can be bad for one's sanity. But if it's any defense, comments were always shown right under the video, and at least for newer movies there were almost none... except for at least one of these guys complaining, and maybe one or two people telling them to not watch this stuff if they don't like it. One's eyes tend to wander.

So yeah, one more reason to ask what's their methodology, I guess :p
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Equally we might speculate about those that speak the loudest in support of porn.
 
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