This is an expression of the dominant masculinity in the United States today. It is the masculinity of a mob, ready to rape.
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I don't hold out my experience as completely typical, my path as a model, or my answers as universally applicable. But I'm pretty sure that the questions I have are important. I am sure that no matter how difficult it is to look at what pornography tells us about ourselves, we have to look.
Can we bear to look? Can we afford not to?
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If pornography is increasingly cruel and degrading, why is it increasingly commonplace instead of more marginalized? In a society that purports to be civilized, wouldn't we expect most people to reject sexual material that becomes ever more dismissive of the humanity of women? How do we explain the simultaneous appearance of more, and increasingly more intense, ways to humiliate women sexually and the rising popularity of the films that present those activities?
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The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values: the logic of domination and subordination that is central to patriarchy, hyper-patriotic nationalism, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism.
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Beyond the category of “sex” (the biological differences between males and females) is “gender” (the non-biological meaning societies create out of sex differences). Gender plays out in a variety of ways, including gender roles (assigning males and females to different social, political, or economic roles); gender norms (expecting males and females to comply with different norms of behavior and appearance); gendered traits and virtues (assuming that males and females will be psychologically or morally different from each other); gender identity (a person’s internal sense of gender — of masculinity, femininity, or something in between — which may not be how others perceive the person); and gender symbolism (using gender in the description of animals, inanimate objects, or ideas).
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Pornography knows men's weakness.
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Women are objectified and women's sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate; power is eroticized.
The predictable result of this state of affairs is a world in which violence, sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common that it must be considered to be normal—that is, an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of the norms. That doesn't mean the culture openly endorses rape, but it does endorse a vision of masculinity that makes rape inviting.
The result is a world in which more than half of college women interviewed in one study reported being victims of some level of sexual aggression. More disturbing, only 27 percent of women whose experience met the legal definition of rape labeled themselves as rape victims. And perhaps even more disturbing, 47 percent of the men who had committed rape said they expected to engage in a similar assault in the future, and 88 percent of men who reported having committed an assault that met the legal definition of rape were adamant that they had not committed rape. We live in a culture in which the sex domination nexus is so tight that victim and victimizer alike often do not recognize the violence in acts that the society has deemed violent enough to be illegal. That's a rape culture.
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