become a feminist superhero

http://www.oneangrygirl.net/pornmyths.html

male privilege

“I am simply saying that much of the pornography in the United States records scenes of women being hurt and humiliated; that men masturbate to orgasm to those images; and that those men are not deviants but are acting on the cultural norms that are widely taught. And I am suggesting that these facts should matter to us; they should scare us.”

“In these scenes, all three women at some point clearly appeared to a viewer to be in pain...Given the ease with which video can be edited, why did the producers not edit out those expressions?

There are two possible answers. One, they may view these kinds of expressions of pain by the women as of no consequence to the viewers’ interest… The second possibility is that the producers have reason to believe that viewers like the expressions of pain; women’s pain helps sales.“

BTW, the author (male) is discussing mainstream
porn.

http://www.hollabacknyc.blogspot.com/

Nature produced the fundamental inequality – half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them – which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men. Reproduction of the species cost women dearly, not only emotionally, psychologically, culturally, but even in strictly material (physical) terms: before recent methods of contraception, continuous childbirth led to constant ‘female trouble’, early ageing and death. Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world.

Excerpts from John Berger, Ways of Seeing

p.46: To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women is developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

The disciplinary practices I have described are part of the process by which the ideal body of femininity -and hence the feminine body-subject- is constructed; in doing this, they produce a ‘practice and subjected; body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed. A woman’s face must be made-up, that is to say, made-over, and so must her body; she is ten pounds overweight; her lips must be made more kissable, her complexion dewier, her eyes more mysterious. The ‘art’ of makeup is the art of disguise, but this presupposes that a woman’s face, unpainted, is defective…. The technologies of femininity are taken up and practices by women against the background of a pervasive sense of bodily deficiency: this accounts for what is often their compulsive or even ritualistic character….

The Sexual Politics of Interpersonal Behavior by Nancy Henley and Jo Freeman

...”Even if a woman encounters no one else directly in her day, visual status reminders permeate her environment. As she moves through the day, she absorbs many variations of the same status theme, whether or not she is aware of it. Male bosses dictate while female secretaries bend over their steno pads. Male doctors operate while female nurses assist. At lunchtime, restaurants are populated with female table servers who wait on men. Magazine and billboard ads remind the woman that home maintenance and child care are her foremost responsibilities and that being a sex object for male voyeurs is her greatest asset. If she is married, her mail reminds her that she is a mere “Mrs.” appended to her husband’s name. When she is introduced to others or fills out a written form, the first thing she must do is divulge her marital status, acknowledging the social rule that the most important information anyone can know about her is her legal relationship to a man.“

Legalization and/or regulation of prostitution led to:

A dramatic increase in all facets of the sex industry

A dramatic increase in the involvement of organized crime  in the sex industry,

A dramatic increase in child prostitution,

An explosion in the number of foreign women and girls trafficked into the region, and

Indications of an increase in violence against women.