Comments Elsewhere

Re-reading, I’d just like to note that by “pornographic display” I was slipping into jargon. I don’t mean the (circular) claim that pornography is bad (including “mainstream” pornography) because it involves the kind of display that you see in pornography. I meant to pick out display based on the presupposition that you were discussing, Amp, when you said “For instance, a lot of porn (such as Playboy-style naked posing) endorses not only very traditional ideas of what is or isn’t attractive, but also implicitly endorses the idea that sexuality is something possessed by women, which men must pry out of women.”

Also, here’s an attempt to say it more concisely. The special role that pornography plays in sexual fantasy and masturbation for most men, from our teen years onward, means that the sort of experiences we associate with the reactionary stuff in pornography is different in at least two important respects from the reactionary stuff that we see in other media. (1) The pleasures we associate with it are more intimate and intense, and (2) the use of it has a much more direct relationship to the sort of sexual person that each of us chooses to become. I have trouble buying the line that “it doesn’t make sense to single out porn in general for this critique, since these flaws are evident in virtually all of pop culture” because it papers over an essential difference between the role that pornography and other forms of pop culture plays in men’s sexual lives, and thus an essential difference in the effects that its content has.