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

I did do a little more digging. I was eventually able to find my way to the Research section and investigated the top listed paper using Google Scholar. The lead author appears to have published dozens of papers in low-impact journals about the harms of pornography, so that totally doesn't look like someone with an agenda.
 
arthwollipot said:
I did do a little more digging. I was eventually able to find my way to the Research section and investigated the top listed paper using Google Scholar. The lead author appears to have published dozens of papers in low-impact journals about the harms of pornography, so that totally doesn't look like someone with an agenda.
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They also cite bona fide studies such as Clare McGlynn's - you know, the one that found 1 in 8 videos describe violence (on landing pages).
 
Poem said:
Are they (FTND) religious?
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If they are, they don't say so openly on their website as far as I could see. But I'd like to know where you get the impression that I think you have to be religious to campaign against porn. All I've said is that anti-porn sentiment, like anti-sex outside marriage, anti-gay, and anti-abortion sentiment, has a basis in religion.
 
Poem said:
They also cite bona fide studies such as Clare McGlynn's - you know, the one that found 1 in 8 videos describe violence (on landing pages).
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Well, for a start, I didn't suggest that this particular lead author's papers were not bona fide. And I didn't delve into any of the papers to check their methodology. I'm not qualified for that sort of deep dive and I don't have a subscription to the journals in which they're published. I suggest only that this one particular researcher had chosen a very specific topic to spend 20 years publishing papers on, and that looks like an agenda to me.

But okay, let's take a look at that particular paper, since it happens not to be paywalled. For a start it is talking about the word count in titles, and not the content. Even on YouTube it's common for the title of a video to not accurately represent its content, and in porn it's worse. Ask me how I know that. No wait don't bother it's because I've actually watched some porn, which Prof. McGlynn et al. do not appear to have done.

Secondly, it appears to have a very broad view on what terms constitute descriptions of violence, giving terms like "plow" and "spank" identical weight to "torture" and "rape". They also acknowledge that the frequency of misspellings and grammatical errors makes this kind of analysis difficult, but they choose to try and address this problem by including what they call "common misspellings" like "upskyrt", which I can assure you is a new one on me. Maybe it's common in the nonconsensual dark porn web, but as we all know, that's already illegal.

Finally, 1 in 8. 12.5%. As a proportion, that's not very high. The paper states that the most common thing they found in titles is references to sex between family members, which they automatically classify as violence, even when the sex depicted is anything but. They know and acknowledge that there is no actual incest going on in these videos, but for some reason it's necessarily violence because it's all about the titles and not about the content.

So I don't think this paper is the slam dunk you seem to think it is. The authors seem to be searching for, and of course finding, everything that they can to make their case that porn is violent. Again, there is an agenda here.

And another, unrelated thing that happened to occur to me in the shower. Pretty much every source you cite seems to repeat a particular claim - that the average age at which people accidentally encounter porn is 13. That's extremely specific, which suggests to me that every single source is drawing from the same original singular claim. There's no variation to suggest that they are drawing the statistic from different places. One study makes the claim and then everybody in the anti-porn community is uncritically repeating it.

I don't know about you, but to me that's a red flag, even if I didn't already have problems with the claim. I've already gone into the reasons why I think the claim is prima facie dubious, so I think that everybody is repeating it only because it is intended to be shocking.
 
The likes of "MILF" and "daddy" used in porn is not usually describing a biological relationship between the participants therefore any research that for instance only used a key word approach to determine whether the content is "violent" based on the use of such words would be giving inaccurate results.
 
What about the positives of porn? Doesn't it to a certain degree, teach sex education? How to make sex more enjoyable? As opposed to stumbling one's way through a new experience? I realize that the value is somewhat limited. But it doesn't seem to me that adults teach their children the nuances of sex. As that is usually uncomfortable for both.
 
Mainstream porn is pretty terrible at teaching sex education - it doesn't actually teach you anything you really need to know except perhaps where to put it - but you can find sex ed films that would be considered pornographic.
 
Yeah, what Arth said. Similarly I'd say written erotica is not great for that, but, resources for writing erotica are really very good for that. The resources will tell you all about possibilities, preferences, health and safety, and plausability. The actual storytelling will often go on to leave a lot of that on the table.
 
acbytesla said:
What about the positives of porn? Doesn't it to a certain degree, teach sex education?
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Not really.

acbytesla said:
How to make sex more enjoyable? As opposed to stumbling one's way through a new experience?
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Nothing about porn teaches enjoyable sex.

acbytesla said:
I realize that the value is somewhat limited. But it doesn't seem to me that adults teach their children the nuances of sex. As that is usually uncomfortable for both.
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Try having buttsex based on what porn shows you, rather than what actually is pleasurable.
 
Darat said:
The likes of "MILF" and "daddy" used in porn is not usually describing a biological relationship between the participants therefore any research that for instance only used a key word approach to determine whether the content is "violent" based on the use of such words would be giving inaccurate results.
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Nevertheless you describe porn that portrays adults in such a way as to suggest sex with a child as abhorrent. Why is such barely legal content disgusting but the 'incest' porn seemingly just fine?

Why do content producers think using 'daddy' in the title will be beneficial? What does clicking on such a video say about the consumer?
 
acbytesla said:
And why do you keep attacking nihilism? It has nothing to do with this subject. I generally agree with nihilist philosophy. So what? It has nothing to with whether porn is harmful to the viewer.
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Someone might deem underage porn as perfectly moral, but no nihilist could deny them such a view.
 
arthwollipot said:
Mainstream porn is pretty terrible at teaching sex education - it doesn't actually teach you anything you really need to know except perhaps where to put it - but you can find sex ed films that would be considered pornographic.
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Why? A child can look up to see what a barely legal gangbang might look like and whether they find it arousing or not. They can do that right now. They might then go on to live that out in the real world. Why wouldn't they? Their elders have normalised it after all.
 
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